But I got help from the following places, though they did not have the product. MacDonald’s Hardware, American RV, Hillmans, Lewis Marine, All-American Tools, and Sailor Man. Most impressive was MacDonald’s, with better prices than Home Depot on small hardware. I used the batbike to get around Ft. Lauderdale, making a few friends in the process. Several people snapped my photo, including some important looking guy who gave me the thumbs up.
It’s not like I bought a $35,000 Harley to pull up at the local bar. I am behind schedule on the camper. When it is done, that will be without a lick of carpentry or other construction experience, meaning it was mainly built by accumulated years of common sense. For example, for ventilation I examined dozens of designs, but all had the defect that they would be weak points in the hull. That is, someone who busted the vent would have an opening large enough to put a hand through. So I opted for several small “soffit” vents, which I lined with mosquito mesh and plugs made from those green pot-scrubber pads.
In a similar vein, the monthly newsletter arrived from my “exclusive” dating club. It is now clear to me, if not the club management, that most of the ads are written to spec. Worse, despite the club emphasis on academic achievments, there is too much borderline exaggeration going on. I flip past the articles (always about attracting new people) to the section that lists the dropped memberships. They are asked to give a reason and that’s what attracts me. It should come as no surprise that most of the women were sitting on their haunches waiting for replies that never came.
The majority of droppers were in the 45 to 60 age range, complaining that the number of men “in their [geographic] area” was too limited. Er, madams, when are there ever enough educated men to go around? The Internet makes their area the size of North America, so what are they really whining about? Not only do they want the perfect man, he must also live next door. Ah, read between the lines. Nobody is clicking. (The way the site works is there is a selection of buttons you can click ranging from indicating an interest in their profile to full-fledged sending them an e-mail for contact.)
I got twenty bucks says not one of those “newly inactive” members ever clicked on a man’s profile. I shy away from saying the best, but my profile is by far the most dynamic on the site. I’ve long since cracked the posting codes and my profile includes embedded photos of my travels, music, and lifestyle. It suffers not a lack of perfect grammar and a style of balanced sentences. For all the PhDs in the club, mine is still the only one that contains photos of a man with a pencil and notepad. A man with a pencil and notepad cannot be all bad.
I’m considering pasting my profile here to prove my point. I don’t just say I like something, I verify it with recent pictures of myself there. Ladies, that word is “recent”. Put another way, my profile is instantly distinguishable as a flowing narrative compared to the others with their sentence fragments that read like a newspaper column. (Mine is the only dating profile in the world with indented paragraphs.)
Yet I get an average of one click per month. One. Nothing gets these women off their tushes, so what do they expect? I’m considering an experiment. I’ve given up on these lackadaisical women, so I might just click on every profile to watch what transpires. My membership is about half used up without any results, so why not go for broke? If I get no nibbles, I can always manipulate the then useless dating site to direct these boring women to this blog. Where, if I’m doing it right, should make their blood boil.
And another thing I don’t like is that oft-repeated statistic that blacks get longer jail sentences than whites when charged with similar crimes. Very carefully left out is the fact that for most of the white guys, it was a first offense.
ADDENDUM
Last, I have not mentioned my studies of diatoms in a while. I can explain. I still do not have a microscope. Thus, I mostly keep current by reading articles. Something new I learned, which I will try to follow up, is that disease-causing organisms tend to have a thicker cell coating. Remember, I have never studied living cells, just the diatom silicates, so if this is kindergarten knowledge elsewhere, it is still new to me. Apparently this coating is what protects the cells from the body’s defenses.
And when I say I have no microscope, it is not like I could just go buy one. I also lack the extensive and expensive slide prep gear. That runs into real money, and again, there are no Florida suppliers of the small scale batches I need. But I certainly did not pay attention to cell coverings before and now that is something I must see for myself. This topic, so you’ll know, came up when I noticed there are very few women on the dating club in the field of biology.
