MORNING
I have not featured food in a bit, and even then it is health food. How about something totally unhealthy? Here are pancake tacos. Yes, that is peanut butter and jelly. It makes sense on some levels, you know, if breakfast is the most important meal of the day, why not make it the most fattening. But the granddaddy of non-meat bad food has to be poutine, a French-Canadien slang word for “mess”. Some consider it traditional but in reality it was invented in Quebec in the 1950s. And this year’s poutine-eating championsip was won by “Megatoad” Stonie, an American.
A damn doctor! The bastard was in Africa and did not possess the moral principle to quarantine himself. Some good may come of this in that hopefully it will be mainly liberals who die by trying to probe how "tolerant" they are. The solution was to seal off Africa until ebola burned itself out. Now look. The only vector worse than contact has got to be human stupidity.
The motorcycle electrical problem remains, as not only did I miss my trip, but this is the soggiest weather of the year. Technically, hurricane season lasts until November 30 and we haven’t even had many bad storms this summer. Now the disturbance over Mexico is dumping it by the bucket, Accuweather rates the odds of precipitation at an uncommon 100%. This is not going away easily, the water is standing three inches deep all around my little Florida island.
Trivia. Who remembers the barometer problem? This is the one where the professor gives an exam where the students have to measure the height of a building using a barometer. One student suggested tying the barometer to a string and lowering it, then measuring the string. Or dropping the barometer and measuring the time. Maybe measure the shadows of both objects and triangulate. How about swinging it on a pendulum and timing the period, or walking down the stairs and marking the wall in “barometer units”. My favorite? Find the superintendent and offer him a shiny new barometer if he can tell you how tall the building is. By the say, this has all been done. The student was Neils Bohr.
Meanwhile, here are three of my favorite metaphors:
They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.
Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
NOON
What did I learn in school today? That that “military” compass I bought so long ago is a piece of junk. That’s the compass I kept saying I could not find directions on how to use it. When I finally did, I realize it had no needle lock, no damping mechanism and no external ring. My computer monitor has a bearing of 276.5°, but at this stage, I hardly needed instructions.
Still, it was a sighting. That’s where you see the user holding the compass up to his eye and looking through the sights. My model is a cheap knock-off. No finger grips, no lanyard ring and a weird scale marking that goes from 1 to 64. I’m learning.
So I hauled out my map compass (see photo) to discover I got taken on that, too. Not much, but now that I know what all the markings are for, I realize I have to start over from scratch and buy good compasses. The ones that have what you need are not cheap. Easiest rule of thumb? Turn the company upside down and look at the ring. There should be a scale there to set your magnetic deflection. Without that, your compass is a toy. But any compass is better than no compass.
Time for an inventory of my place, I’m missing two scribblers full of notes. They are old notes, but I keep such things for posterity. They are around here someplace. Trent, I think, gets a kick out of my messy place. Because it is not old Xmas trees, newspapers, and beer cans. Actually, there are some beer cans, the thick aluminum Bud cans being recycled or the aluminum. But I mean otherwise. My place is a mess of computers, robot parts, sextants, charts, maps, guitars, electronics, you know, that kind of stuff. I prefer to call the Florida room “my study”.
Drama. Do you like drama? There’s lots in the music trade—and right where you’d least expect it, too. I got a call to please, please run the Karaoke tonight. Ah, but didn’t I turn that over to the other guy just last Friday? Yep, and now the drama. His laptop got stolen, putting him out of business. Why doesn’t that affect Lee-Anne and I? Because we prudently learned to use the old disk system, which is still set up there, kind of. I hear some of you thinking, big deal, that’s not drama.
Wait, I’m not finished yet. The laptop was taken from his truck at work. The boss had recently installed a security camera. You bet, they got the perp removing the laptop from the vehicle. Just let me check with the censor to make sure I’m not stepping on any toes here. Nope. The culprit? His sister. Say, didn't I just buy her a drink last Tuesday?
And that is why I don't do business with family. You just watch, she'll say it was her laptop, that he was the one who misappropriated it, and she was merely taking it back.
AFTERNOON
The drizzle kept me indoors giving the drill press a workout. I’ve drilled out a series of large “washers” to reinforce the old saddlebag destined to contain the new motorcycle electronics. Call me the Captain of the pilot holes, you should see the quality workmanship now. Here’s a whatzit picture, rings of plasticene, or modeling clay. What gives? The clue is the injector near the top. It contains drilling oil and the rings are placed around the plate to keep the oil puddled.
Where was it? I’ve told you how so many Florida business force the sales receipt on you by handing it to you with your change. Which you fold over and put it away. As I went to update my weekly budget, I unfolded everything, and thar she be! Between that and Karaoke tonight, I might just invest in that Harbor Freight pocket hole jig. And a cordless jig saw. Always wanted a cordless. And a titanium step drill set.
Spencer, that’s the name of the “doctor” who brought ebola back to New York. The consensus at the coffee shop is that he should be arrested, charged with reckless endangerment, then taken to the middle of nowhere and allowed to die while pondering the risk he posed to humanity. So what if he locked himself inside his apartment, the apartment was in the middle of a city. He was playing hero with lives other than his own, and this is unforgiveable.. His medical degree should be permanently revoked. No mercy, for that is what he has really shown mankind.
I found another Arduino quirk not in the textbook. The dot.h “libraries” represent a type of programming I have always been against. This is where any programmer, no matter what he has been smoking for far too long, can create a file that is needed by the program code, but that file can be anywhere and be called anything. I believe all files should be attached to the main program as data. The discovery is that there is a circumstance where some dot.h libraries must be uploaded to the Arduino memory, not left in the special libraries folder of the main application.
This may be a bit deep for non-programmers, but this blog is the place I write things down so they won’t be forgotten. You can tell the dot.h library is required if you see it as a second tab in your sketch. I can hear the caterwaul, “NOW YOU TELL ME”. But hey, it’s not like Santa’s elves and the tooth fairy gave me any help on this one. Another reason to hate C programming and the people who support it.
EVENING
This is a small jar of cashews in honey. And beside it you see the $17 price tag. I was tempted but decided I'd rather spend the cash on breakfast at JZ's tomorrow. At the deli near him, actually. I get the feeling he is going to cancel our plans for a trip this month. More accurately, he does not cancel as much as postpone. I like to get out of town once a month, so this trip to Dadeland might be it for October. Interesting, though. Cashews in honey. From the Russian market.
ADDENDUM
Occasionally I pull some bass videos off the Internet to see what I’m missing if anything. I’m not so sure music has improved from the proliferation of indie recordings. I get mixed signals from most contemporary bass lines, by which I mean Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Muse, Blink 182, Weezer, Tool, Jet, etc. It’s almost as though the wise guy that decided bass lessons were good business was a Pastorius fan. I’m on the other side of the street, the school that says the best bass player is the one who can play incredibly fast riffs—but doesn’t.
This is partially why I don’t like “finger bass”. It encourages beginners to play rapid-fire instead of mastering the more solid techniques used in live bands. I don’t buy recorded music either, I might add. To me, recorded music should be the free version. Again, I see the heavy guitar teacher influence on the bass lines in these bands. Droning octaves and chords and pedals for their own sake rather than like I play, as a solid accompaniment when there are vocals, as a fill in artist when there are not, and always a sharp background to any instrumentals.
When a beginner asks me if he should use fingers, I can only tell him not if you want to play in a band instead of a studio, at least in any reasonable time frame. I’m also convinced if I had to learn finger bass, it would be easier than one of them trying to use a pick. I will always play bass with a pick as a single note instrument, although I use double-stops when they are in the original.
If you would like to see what I mean about idiot guitar players with disgusting attitudes toward the bass, do a search “country bass” and see how many sites offer to teach you to play it in five minutes or less. No real bass player would ever make such a claim. Real bass takes around four years to learn properly and another ten or fifteen to bring to a pitch. There are already too many “perfect” bass players out there.
It was Dave Barry who said there is a fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness”. And he speaks with authority.
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