One year ago today: September 21, 2013, solar panel progress.
Five years ago today: September 21, 2009, bass-fest.
Ten years ago today: September 21, 2004, WIP
And a quiet day at home it was, so relaxing compared to most Sundays lately. There is nobody to hang out with in this town. I look forward to a humble good book compared to dealing with the ranting complexity of most people’s conversation. The simplicity of navigation tables is better entertainment than most people in this town, you know. I have a theory, you know, about stupid people. See addendum.
That’s one aspect of corporate work I miss. Inside the office environment, you occasionally meet a women with some real brains. The ratio is still pitiful, but it is at least possible. Office gossip still dominates, but you often get some real input and of course, an endless stream of new plans and ideas. Some of which eventually do work out pretty fine. LizJohn and I went out countless times through dozens of other partners we dated over the decades. There is nothing on the scale of a gal like that in Florida. Life gave her lemons and she made Tequila shooters.
Her radically different background than mine means conversation was always lively. She could do arts and crafts, that’s the gal who made the Tiffany lamps if you look back far enough. I was thinking about her all morning because going for Sunday brunch when our off-shifts coincided was a given for longer than ten years. And boring women don’t last a week around me.
Then again, the concept of conversation as an exchange of information instead of idle entertainment has not yet made inroads into this part of the world. I read the weekend paper. The state has fired 32 prison guards for cruelty. Isn’t that like firing ten random garbage men because they smell funny? Some airplanes bombed Syria, but they were clearly French Rafales.
There is a 3D printer on the space station, though how it works without gravity needs explaining. (Maybe centrifugal force?) The Miami Herald writes about a cell phone robbery and a home invasion murder without actually stating in each case that the perpetrator was a black attack on a white victim. I think the public has a right to know all the facts and let them decide what is important.
I spent the remainder of the day deep-reading my navigational books. Then I made a pot of Russian tea to celebrate. You’ll have to read through this entry to find out what I’m so happy about. What is Alokozay? Maybe a brand name, but it said Earl Grey and that was good enough for me. It also says hand-picked. I thought that was the only possible way to harvest tea. That’s a nice picture on the package. But I make it by the pot. I’ve grown to like tea more as I get older.
I further read [in the Herald] the upcoming season’s offerings in dance, art, and music. Here is a list of performers in this years lineup that I have never heard of:
Barbara Cook Vocals
Benny Golson Music
Billy Porter Vocals
Conner McPherson Theater
Dennis Koshukhin Music
Dianna Krall Music
Eddie Plamieri Music
Estelle Parsons Theater
Lauren Gunderson Theater
Linda Eder Vocals
Margarita Canos Arts
Megan Hilty Music
Michael McKeever Theater
Omar Sosa Music
Vanessa Garcia Theater
[Author's note: Megan Hilty gets linked because we once went to the same high school, but different generations. How she ever became an actress is beyond my comprehension. I never heard of her, but of the family only.]
These are [they type of] events I rarely attend alone, or if the prices are out of line. I’ll maybe look into their reviews but what I found even more entertaining was the [newspaper] profiles on the “women who run South Florida’s Arts scene”. Not one of them is single. The average number [they have] of children seems to be two, with adoptions and stepchildren way over the statistical mean. We need more single women in the Arts, and I don’t mean pole dancers, Ken.
I would not blame any woman for becoming an entertainer for the same motives as me. To meet a better class of partner. This isn’t an obvious statement. It is too easily forgotten that I am a lounge musician, not a rock bar jam artist. I’ve never gone out with a woman I met in a bar. But lounges were always my favorite.
The higher prices used to mean a generally better clientele, though that is open to discussion. I learned quite young that women who slum it, or stop for a cocktail after work, generally hit the type of places my music works the best. Take that to mean the pseudo-country type light dance music that I both listen to and play on my own.
My second choice is coffeehouses, but the ones east of the Mississippi just don’t draw the same crowd. They don’t seems as cerebral or as happy, and they never read or study like the old days. I used to drink coffee until dark every day and write. When I could not find a coffeehouse, I used the counter at Denny’s. The atmosphere is missing out here. I blame Starbucks for the most part. They attract a more plastic clientele and crowd out the market.
No such venues in this part of town, so I stayed in and watched Snipes in “The Art Of War”. How does the guy do it? Even when he is on the run, he has a safe house beyond luxury and a spare bedroom from the Palace of Versailles just waiting for fugitive actresses who need but an opportunity to practice their deep-sighing and insomnia.
Last, at 10:30PM, just before bedtime around here, I finally obtained respectable results on a my first complete navigational calculation. That’s correct, all the previous calculations have been segments of the process. There seems to be no other way to do it except in stages and those can be difficult. I finally resorted to my oldest method of learning, from my college days. Work through the examples without worrying about accuracy. Then take a nap. It worked an I understood every step. Acceptable readings are less than 30 miles and I got one down to 9 miles. And that explains the Russian tea.
ADDENDUM
My theory of Internet stupidity doesn’t have a name yet. At least not unless some high-falootin’ shrink has a medical term for it. Here’s the deal. I tell you how my theory works and you see if you can come up with a descriptive title. Don’t worry if it puts down the stupid, for they need it to realize who they are, said Confucius one way or the other. Okay, first of all, the Internet, with its reputation for equality, has bred a huge user-base of below average societies who buy into the movieland “balancing” mentality.
You’ve seen this constant theme in the movies: that Mother Nature compensates by making stupid people correspondingly more creative, or some other such nonsense. Now that could be left alone, but this is where the trouble begins. Stupid people are no longer going to leave it alone. The Internet has given them a collective forum, the power of numbers. Don’t believe me? Check out most dating sites, chat lines, the Bing home page, or 95% of your e-mail. You can filter porn, but you can’t filter stupid.
So when these nobodies finally meet a bona fide intelligent person, they initially try to compete, but when that does not work, they start looking for faults or shortcomings. Anything they can use to put down the other guy. Most of us got this from our parents saying although we were poor, our family was “rich in other ways”. We quickly learned that was pure horse hockie, but then along came the Internet.
On-line anonymity breathed new life to the hoards of the useless proles and trolls. Together, they can find fault with anything and everybody—and now thanks to the Internet, they have plenty of company. Don’t confuse this with ordinary jealousy. For example, I am often jealous of my peers who had parents who bought them an education I could only dream of. My theory here does not involve peers, rather it applies to those of considerably different capacity, that is, between the sincerely intelligent and the sincerely stupid.
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