April 13, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: April 13, 2013, Savannah showboat.
Five years ago today: April 13, 2009.

           Anywhere you want to go. Anywhere at all for breakfast. I want scrambled eggs and coffee. And I won’t talk about how bingo went because you have probably guessed that by now. Bingo has been so good to me that if this big band takes off, I’m going to miss bingo. Sort of. Read on to see if I found ways to relax for the rest of the day.

           That didn’t take long. Here is the special at Senor Café, the success story over on Wiley Street. Although their prices have more than doubled in a few years, they have again come back into vogue as a bargain compared to others. This is my idea of Sunday morning. Toast, coffee, eggs, and fries. They always run out of hash browns. And the service is Cuban slow, so I read a few chapters in Prof. Oz’s book.
           From Chapter 23 onward, it reads like a different author, although it remains unmistakably Prof. Oz. Geez, Oz, it is possible to write an entire chapter of a book without mentioning booze, gambling, and sleazy sex. Maybe it sells books, but it does not sell books to me. Has anyone besides me noticed that men who see nothing wrong with consorting with prostitutes have other things in common?
           Like what? For openers, they all have the same rationalization for it. They think every other man is as preoccupied with hooker sex as they are. But I don’t even know any prostitutes and never have. They also presume all other men would like nothing better than to have a conversation comparing hooker prices and such. I think it goes to show that once men cross that line, their vocabulary and brain cells get re-wired for the worse and there is no possibility of recovery.
           These men all have the same mind set, arguing that “you pay for it one way or the other” and they ardently believe there is such a thing as good hookers and bad hookers, like it makes a big difference. Now get this: as in Prof. Oz’s book, they all believe that there are secret "Shangri-Las" around the world where super-high-class educated hookers lounge about, talking philosophy with lonely men who pay them extravagantly only for company. But such locations are never advertised, you see. Their addresses are, like herpes B, spread only by mouth via an exclusive fraternity of men who, themselves, are self-appointed connoisseurs of hooker-dom.
           It’s a funny thing, these “palaces of prostitution” all have the same décor. Apparently you enter by a side street always so grungy you think you’re about to be mugged. The butler opens a slot in the door and tells you to get lost before he recognizes the “friend” who brought you, whence he instantly invites you inside while falling over himself in apology. You always step into a big room painted pink with sparking chandeliers. The air is perfumed and the music classical.
           Sooner or later, you go into a room with a selection of women too sexy for words. Mind you, they can only talk philosophy, none can talk mathematics or physics. These girls all come from good families and only do this as a service to the world’s lonesome men whose other women, like wives and girlfriends, don’t understand them, see? Money is never mentioned, you pay what you think it is worth when you leave.
           Alas, it makes for exasperating reading. It’s like talking to Wallace. No matter where the topic of the conversation begins, you know within five minutes he’s going to return to the same old theme of hookers and booze, hookers and booze, hookers and booze. Even if you warn them in advance you will leave it they bring up these subjects, they have a mental block that you are only that way because you never met as fine a hooker as they did back in lah-dee-dah. These men are decidedly strange but they are an effective majority—the ones who never scored much when they were young. My brothers are like that. Mention sex. Where I think of the happy years with my ex-wife, these guys automatically think of a whorehouse.
           Even meeting women is different for such men. Where I might wonder if she is a nice person, they wonder how much she charges. But even stranger is meeting women who have only ever met such men--and there are countless such women in the world. Talk about messed up in the head. They think they can manipulate all men with the same tactics they’ve learned dealing exclusively with the bad ones. That’s where the word “slut” comes from, I suppose.

           The first spring rainstorm caught me on my bike ride, so I made four miles instead of seven. But I ran across a BMW with ammo box saddlebags. He found these at $20 each and showed me the way it was mounted on regular BMW brackets. His bike was an antique, a 1975. Like my GL (Honda Goldwing), the only upgrade he’s installed is electronic ignition. He reports less gas mileage that I do driving in the city. The mounts are simply ordinary bolts welded to the ammo box casing.
           Upon review, I can state that playing in a band requires almost eight hours per week. This doesn’t include travel time, just the time devoted to the mechanics of association. What prompted this was the suggestion that playing in a band was a “one-man fly-by-night operation”, akin to operating a booth at the flea market. No, no, good people. A five-piece orchestra is a major undertaking involving tens of thousands of dollars and many vehicles. A band is, in many ways, the most highly organized and disciplined business you can find.

ADDENDUM
           I was looking for a property advertised on-line in Boynton, but when I arrived at the web page, they wanted personally identifiable information before they would quote the price. I hate it when that happens and so should you. This information is sensitive and you should not give it to strangers who think they have a right to it because they have a web page. The usual gambit is to demand a credit card number, claiming they only want to verify if you are over 18. Funny, their advertising didn’t state that was a requirement.
           Thus, I will tell you how to defeat these sites with a fake credit card number. You can’t purchase anything, don’t even try, but this will get you past the nosy log-on screen. Remember to give other fake information as well. Everybody was born 12-17-1985, MMN is Daphne, grandfather’s occupation is “gravedigger”, SSN is 567-68-0515 (Richard Nixon’s) and now that credit card number.
           The computer uses a checksum to “validate” the number, it is known as the MOD10 algorithm. Rather than give you some complicated formulas, I’ll just tell you where to find the formula. The idea is to enter an expression in the *required field that will evaluate to “TRUE”. There are certain other rules, such as Visa numbers always must begin with a 4.
           Take any of the first 15 digits of any 16 digit credit card number and apply the Luhn algorithm. The trickiest part of the Luhn formula is starting from the right. Some may say, why not start from the left and just take every other number? Because the Luhn formula does not take into account whether your original number has as an odd or even number of digits. That’s why.
           Yes, you could just use any 15 digits and keep trying the last digit until you pass, but that is why the web designer only gives you three tries, then locks you out. Now you know how smart they really are not.