One year ago today:May 31, 2013, a chatty day.
Five years ago today: May 31, 2009, pure reminiscing & conjecture.
MORNING
Today I feel like typing. Look out. Always start with food but throw in a twist. To keep things interesting. As local food cascades in price and declines in quality, people are discovering what I did long ago. For the same prices, you can get premium imported European food. Where food is grown, not manufactured. Finally, a source of paprika paste has been located and on the left you can see how low I was getting. On the right, the new import is labeled only in Magyar. Don’t buy the wrong thing.
I’m okay with what [food] I buy because if I don’t like it, I always know somebody who does. I’m not a picky eater, but I’m definitely a cautious eater. I’m not the type that gains weight without plenty of help. I splurge on Friday’s and last evening I went to my new favorite fries joint, Five Guys. When you enter, there are big vats of peanuts and you can help youself to a small dish for free. Keeps you busy while they cook, which is nice as they make nothing up in advance. Their motto is “Not a freezer in the place”
Testing a new spreadsheet algorithm, I decided to calculate the number of geniuses in the world today as predicted by the ratio of patents in the USA. A bell curve shows too many, I know there are not that many geniuses out there. It would seem genius is hereditary to an extent. Even Darwin’s father was part of the Lunar Society, sketching steam engines a hundred years before they were invented. Anyway, I came up with 4,660 real geniuses, not the Internet whiz-kid kind. And their average age is 56.6. Knowledge may be expanding, maybe even exploding--but mankind’s capacity to interpret that knowledge has not changed since the cave man days.
Another statistic is silver. It is slipping and nobody knows why so don’t listen to them. There is manipulation, for instance if India allowed easy importation of gold, demand would cause a huge spike in prices. The one predictable is supply and demand, but nobody can calculate that either. My best theory is that silver mines open and close at certain price levels. The mines that worked full blast when silver was $40 have shut down when it is at $20. That reduces supply. So those who got in at the top of the market don't dismay, hold on a while yet. Banking conditions now are worse than 2008. If silver drops to the low teens, that’s a buy opportunity so keep some cash at the ready.
And just back in January, I wondered about that vacant building that used to house the pub full of people who stared at a stranger. It just got sold and there is a heap big fence around it. No more cutting over to the donut shop via their driveway. I hope they open a country music bar, but it looks more like a pending demolition.
Got time for a video? I like this one, Why there are no women in the Russian army. Got time for Name statistics. For you math buffs, how about this one: take any prime number larger than 3. If you add or subtract 1 to that prime, one of the results in that pair will be evenly divisible by 6. Or just go to Virgin Galactic and book your flight. The fare is $250,000. I got a hunch everyone will insist on a window seat.
AFTERNOON
For those who have never seen code before, like Patsie, this is what that last paragraph looks like before it is posted to the blog. Not really code, but it is actually a simpler type of instruction called a script. The funny looking parts are called HTML tags.
For those with the time, go back to the Virgin Galactic site and watch some of their videos. The space plane and launcher are highly reminiscent of those strange late WWII German hybrid airplane contraptions. While the Germans called their combinations “Father and son”, Virgin is very careful to avoid any such association by calling the tug aircraft the “Mothership”. We see what you did there, Virgin.
THE FOLLOWING ARE TAG TESTS, NOT PART OF THE BLOG.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club is my favorite album.
The microblogging site Twitter is boring.
LATER: These tags have proven popular. Test them yourself by hovering your mouse over the words "Sgt.", and "Twitter". I doubt I'll use them much, as they don't give the reader any indication of their presence. At least not on my monitor.
EVENING
By late afternoon, I ran the scooter downtown and checked out the reputably best clubs. Most of the quality entertainment runs though agencies, so I can’t pick any band as being the best fit. The band at Whisky Tango sounded great, but came across like they had taken far too many lessons. At the Barney Irish something, the band was loud and punchy, but lacked a single stage personality. There is a pseudo-country pub on the circle, “Moonshine”, and the band there kicked butt. But it was my butt, you see, in that short time I returned from the west, my failure to find a single good country guitarist means that opportunity is lost. I identified the demand six months ago, but in that time, the eastern and northern bands moved in and I have to start all over again.
ADDENDUM
The deeper I study these parts, the more I realize how bad my formal education was concerning what is needed here. At the surface level, I passed all the same tests as you did and I was a straight A student. Nothing prepared me for this because it was taught wrong. If I had learned about ring counters instead of English history, things like this card would have made sense considerably earlier. This has cost me money, too. There were several lectures I attended where I could not follow the professor. I see now that he assumed the class knew the basics. Bad assumption, bad professor.
The photo? Oh, that’s just a sexy Russian pin-up and her rocket launcher. Tovarish!
