Having said all that, what do you suppose tipped the authorities off when these people sailed into Port Everglades on a spanking new 37-footer riding low in the water? Come on, take a wild guess. Even I rejected the “Shortest Book In The World” joke “Blacks I’ve Met While Yachting” by Bill Cosby.
Back to top story of the day. The Miami Herald, the newspaper I value solely for the puzzle page, has changed in some mysterious way. I can’t quite pin it down but there is a subtle change for the better in both the choice of articles and the reporting. What do you suppose that is all about? New Year’s resolutions? We know how long those last.
I read today’s issue cover to cover (except the ads). What has changed? Hmmm, give me some time on this one. But I had to smile at their coverage of that ten year old opera singer (thirteen years now). They try to present her as a self-made success story but the entire interview reads like she’s been coached by a team of lawyers and psychologists. She doesn’t play with her brothers and sisters, rather she “spends quality time with her siblings”. Thirteen, my eye. This is the girl that “America’s Got Talent” had perform a request to prove she wasn’t lip-synching. Jackie Evancho, and I’m NOT buying the hype she learned all this on her own.
The next exciting item is that I was actually able to rid my computer of that nasty Google update rootkit virus. How? Well, part of the reason the files can’t be deleted is because the path can’t be followed by ordinary anti-viral software. But if you dig deep enough into the apparently blank folders, you will notice one directory has a file name written in Arabic script. Sneaky. Unless you know any white guy who speaks Egyptian. I had to look twice as the word spells what would be the English pronunciation of the Spanish name “Cisco”. It will be a miracle if it is permanently gone, but check back with me later. If so, it took over a year to unearth this discovery.
The job of music. I’ll fill you in a bit. Jag was not the first or only person I offered to pay to do things my way. My phone has been ringing since New Year’s, but the position is filled. Twice, actually. By coincidence, Guitar Eddie called and he is on his way into town. He is passing Palm Beach about now and he nearly doubled over laughing when I told him about this new guitar-for-hire arrangement.
The humor is that he himself never worked out as my guitarist, but he is well aware of how opinionated to the point of fanaticism that local guitarists are about their song lists. Nothing like dedicated and uncorruptable principles, hey, Eddie? In the end, all it took was the faint aroma of money for them to abandon their enshrined values. Ha! So much for the guitar player committed to his lofty visions. Double ha!
Still looking for pretty girls? Too bad, the premise of this blog is the unusual events of ordinary life. By ordinary I mean in the sense that I’m not the president or a billionaire. I write hopefully for the reader to experience and learn new things at around the same time and pace as I do. So who recollects how I ruined my best trousers and jeans from that oil shower at the Alamo? Not prepared to convert $400 of my wardrobe into work clothes, I kept experimenting to remove those stains.
Last, we have enough parts from Rick to build the, what would you call it, the Rick-Motor I guess. As soon as I determine how to get myself a small flywheel around three or four inches in radius, I’ll show you how to make it spin using only the simplest electrical principles. This would be for show only, the actual engine would be so inefficient I could not afford to run it more than a minute at a time. But that is why we keep coming back for more.
I’m very alert to how difficult it is to publish videos in blogspot. The workaround is to upload them to youTube and insert a link. If the Rick-Motor works, I’ll take it upon myself to see about adding the video. I mean, how else can one show that a motor is really working?
ADDENDUM
Did I ever tell you about my first time on the Internet? Metaphorically, that is. That was in 1982. Ah, you say, the Internet didn’t come along until 1991. Not so, it was the first browsers that happened in 1992. Prior to that, communication was in monochrome and I had a newfangled invention RofR had sent me from Hong Kong, called a “modem”. I could not figure the thing out, but a neighbor of mine had worked at the airlines and he got it to “say hello”.
This modem was bulky and connected to an Apple ][e, which he had reprogrammed at the airport. To this day, I don’t know where or how Greg had learned all these things in 1982. I had a programming degree but did not have a clue about the mechanics of a computer other than schematic drawings. There was no world wide web yet, just telephone dial-up lines, subject to long-distance charges if you were not careful.
Back then, the only entertaining aspect of the system, which was called the “Ethernet”, was bulletin boards. Everything else was technical communications and, similar to CB radio enthusiasts, men bragging about their speed and power. Greg had acquired a list of bulletin boards and I visited most of the forty or so available at that time. Like chat lines, they claimed to have a theme, but were in fact dominated by a small group that in each case considered themselves an elite. The rot had already begun.
Yes, there was a sex chat bulletin board. It was text only and appeared to be around fifteen boys and one girl. I call them that to emphasize the immaturity of the conversations. Sex at 9600 baud. One line would appear asking her some provocative question and she would instantly fire off a too-obvious answer. How big are your hooters? Why 38DDD of course. How could they be anything else?
I finally typed in that as far as I was concerned, they were all a bunch of voyeuristic chronic masturbators, which back then drew a lot of flak. For the only instance I ever saw, the bulletin board modulator got on-line and claims to have seen or met the broad. But he failed to answer the first couple of verification questions, saying only that she was “actually not that bad”.
The entire system before browsers was too cumbersome for popularity. But I should have noticed even back then how it was drawing in the non-scientific crowd.
Well, I didn’t and really missed an opportunity to cash in. When I look back on the experience, I see all the elements of the sheer ignorance that engulfs the Internet today. It was all there, but now as then, I still regard much of what that masses put on-line as hogwash written on the washroom wall.
But yes, I first communicated on-line twenty-five years before Wallace got his first laptop. Don’t underestimate the guy. It only took him two weeks became an expert and telling me how the Internet worked.
