One year ago today: October 1, 2013, bye-bye satisfries.
Five years ago today: October 1, 2009, bad Karaoke?
Ten years ago today: October 1, 2004, WIP.
MORNING
It should not take 90 minutes to put money on one’s cell phone. Then along came Virgin Mobile. This gave me time to read text messages, which I do maybe once a month. If somebody has something important to say, press one button and talk to me. Text messaging, my foot. Here is a photo of the typical fancy building the Nova robot meet-up was held in. Now don’t tell me it isn’t an impressive joint to look at.
Figure that out. My wristwatch was late by 59 minutes. Inexplicable, because the previous the previous evening Trent and I met up by that watch and we know what time he gets off work. Plus, Tuesday morning, I picked my prescription on time. And left the bakery at precisely 11:20AM. New watch (a month old) and new batteries. No explanation.
While mentioning Nova, I feel it is unfair for certain sources to declare that if I had “doggedly pursued” my suspicions, the fake robot meet would have been exposed sooner. Unfair for three reasons:
A) I am not the watchdog and I was not upon any crusade to find fault or fraud.
B) I didn’t want to make waves and I’m as subject to peer pressure as the next guy.
C) I wrote off his incompetence to the general decline of academic standards.
Besides, I wasn’t suspicious, I was disappointed. And it is a further consideration that I am a right-of-middle libertarian. You want me to be the natural leader, you pay me to be the natural leader. My group within the group got some things accomplished and it is enough the record shows I was skeptical and wrote it down. And even more besides, I’ve worked with Canadians and consider it a perfectly natural situation [for me] to be in a room of fifteen where I am the only one who has a clue.
NOON
I now have the five string bass. It needs dressing and I’ll need time to get used to the string spacings. But, I will. There is no such thing as the perfect bass as each player has his own subtle preferences. I draw the line at whether or not the thing is “easy” to play. My days of holding up a war club on stage were over by age 20. Return this evening for a report on my impressions.
What is worse than watching a two-faced politician say there is no "proof" additives are bad and that a law preventing it would increase production costs. Talking like provided safe food is an added burden or something.
You are not supposed to eat more than nine teaspoons of sugar a day. A can of soda has 18 teaspoons. Before sugar was invented, man ate the equivalent of 20 teaspoons of it per year. Now, because it is in so many products, including your tomato soup, Americans eat 140 pounds per year. One person a hundred used to have sugar diabetes. Now look at it and tell me there is no connection.
HFCS is now present in 80% of the products on the average grocery store shelves. If you eat beef, pork, or fish, you are eating corn. Yes, they are now raising fish on corn. By limiting domestic production of cane sugar, placing high tariffs on importing it, and subsidizing corn, Washington DC is poisoning you and the world. Exporting subsidized HFCS has forced most Mexican corn farmers out of business. I believe my condition is the result of food factories injected foreign substances into what was once nutricious. That chemically modified corn was later introduced into most of the foods we learned to like when young. I remember when a burger and fries were good food.
On the health issue, our honorable and trustworthy newspapers up and down the entire ladder refuse to name the person who brought a case of ebola back from Africa to Texas. I’ll tell you what they won’t. He is black, male, and named something like Abdullah. Am I wrong? Let’s see your money or shut up. I’m criticizing the papers, not the man. Now I’ll criticize the man. For what purpose, I ask the media, does a black man from Texas spend the money to fly to Liberia for three days, then turn around and come back? Or is that an inconvenient question?
The mini-fiasco at Nova brings a club 3D printer back into focus. Let’s not confound Nova robot meet-up with my established Robot Club. Two different animals, they be. But no 3D printer means a roadblock for us as well as Nova. The cheap printers, under $1,000, have been discussed here but the 80% failure or breakdown rate up at the Ft. Loddy library trounces all other considerations. It means that the cheap 3D printers, like cheap ordinary printers, are not worth the cost of repairs. If the library lets them sit broken, what would mere mortals like us do?
Ray-B called. He’s in town, got a room up in Cooper City. That’s his old stomping grounds. Expect news of his adventures soon. He’s living out the dream I wanted. Gonna buy the hippie van and tour around the country, signing for his supper. And I can’t play guitar.
EVENING
Five-string bass? I love it. It’s one of the times I’d almost say I’m excited. But it is not an easy instrument off the bat. It introduces a new dynamic but once I got some of my older basslines translated, things warmed up. However, those extra five notes are below the rage people expect to hear, so I tend to use them sparingly. I’m not that sure how to describe it, though I will try.
Musically, it is very interesting. It makes tunes more dancealbe where one must “stagger” the bass notes on a regular electric, but not necessarily more "listenable". This break is between the notes D and E. More than once I’ve had band members squawk when I had no choice but to play higher notes, which clash with the lower guitar parts. The reason is certain bass patterns walk up or down and it is not okay to split them in the middle as they pass the E and D. See, I told you it was not easy to describe.
On the other hand, if I latch onto this, look out guitar players. Other than a different tension with five strings, which makes the notes harder to “push”, I took only a couple hours to find the sweet spots. The extra octave opens the option to play a complete scale two octaves apart. Think of those neat songs where some alto lady sings while a deep male voice does not harmony or unison, but a complementary melody way low.
For example, the a cappella in Ronstadt’ s “Let Me Be There”. Listen to the two vocal parts. I can now simulate that to guitar parts because there is enough separation. It’s no wonder I love it already. I hope you can still hear the bass over the sound of me giggling and rubbing my hands together.
ADDENDUM
I support any cause that gets people off the system, off the grid. It’s that I am automatically on the side of those who want to lead their own lives—insofar as they are as self-supporting as possible. The government has also allowed the grid to start collecting and abusing private information on the users, which never leads to good. Plus, I am against any type of government doled welfare. So I watch documentaries on back-to-nature movements from a distance. Why a distance? Because I don’t care for the tribal aspects these groups adopt.
You know, the chanting and communal events where attendance is required (think jury duty and voter’s lists, you don't have to attend, but if you don't. . .). They got your name and want to know where you were last Tuesday instead of at the prayer meeting. I don’t care for tribal behavior because it quickly degenerates to a ritual for everything you do. As I said when I was 18, right down to what you do and wear on your wedding day. And that is wrong.
This got me thinking what kind of “nature” village would be acceptable to me. I know it would be a community where each person is a private individual who participates in group activities to the minimal amount that he desires and partakes of community rewards in proportion to that behavior. I’m aware of the “free rider syndrome”, but feel most such situations can be supported by a user-pay system.
That means just because you live next to a beautiful park, you should not have to pay a penny unless you actually enter and use the park, which should pay its own way by those who do. This is not 100% fair, but it is more fair than any other method, and yes you are free to figure out the cost on your own before you say that is wrong. But tribal dictates are not for me.
If I live in a commune, I should still be allowed to own my own place, and by own I mean everything about it belongs to me—again insofar as this does not prevent anyone else from doing the same. But to have the tribe decree we must all live in tepees or tents is out of the question. Can you just see a commune of people like me? Nice, private houses with libraries, a robot or two playing in the yard, a telescope on the roof. Nobody is allowed to enter, but I’ll pay my share to maintain the roadways by paying the toll. The more I use community property, the more I pay.
But I pay nothing for the beliefs or projects of others by command. If you want to help the lazy, you do so with your own resources, but you cannot clamor that others must also. That is out of line. I’m just saying there are circumstances under which I’d live in a collective, but they don’t involve beating sticks on a hollow log and dancing around the campfire. I don’t understand why every cooperative I find insists others comply with such primitive behavior.
However, my research is leading ever more into the sources of food. All communities need food and there is a minimal acreage needed per person that these groups do not have. Something in that department has most definitely changed since the hippie communes of the sixties.
[Author's note: MicroSoft has locked me out of one of my email accounts. They demand a cross-referencing e-mail to send a “confirmation code” or a telephone number for a text. This folks, is how you get roped into the big net of things. Each little piece ties together a profile of your existence until it is no longer yours. It will be curious how I work around this feature they claim is “for my own protection”.
But who is protecting you from MicroSoft? Time. I think, to completely drop my ancient Hotmail addresses. Where it is one account, it will soon be them all. MicroSoft and Google can’t help but have noticed how Apple demanded and got “one account” from 90% of its users. Hint: MicroSoft waits until you mis-enter a password, then link you to the demand screen hoping you will think they’ve detected a security breach and are out to help you. Nonsense, they want your identity to keep on file, so they can “protect” that for you, too.
The bottom line is, do you trust MicroSoft with anything? That's the corporation that set up my friend and sued him for $5 million. Remember that? They sent in a shill just before Xmas with four computers and only three copies of Windows. The guy, in his late 50s, begged us to load the fourth computer because he had lost his job and needed it to make money for his kids. It was a MicroSoft lawyer. You might say that is different, I say it isn't. "Just doing your job" does not excuse one to do wrong.]
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