October 3, 2014

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 3, 2013, run by steam.
Five years ago today: October 3, 2009, Findiit
fails to market this blog.
Ten years ago today: temporarily suspended, I will notify you.

MORNING
           It’s the third anniversary of the bakery and I’m heading there in about five minutes. “I give them six months,” said the original reviewer. That same week I said this was the best business that ever opened in the area recently. It is also eleven years since I quit smoking, but in case anyone asks, still no perceptible difference except food tastes better. Mind you, I’m probably $20,000 richer if you looked into it. Smoking plus trips to the store add up. Anyway, finish your grits and come along for coffee. It’s on me.

           Next, I pour out my precious and diminishing hoard of adaptors mostly from the 80s. This is but a portion of my collection, the pieces of which now cost an average of $14 to replace. These have saved my bacon through 35 years of moronic engineering and incompatible product changes. This time, it’s to get the Karaoke machine to work tonight on my standard PA system.
           I was there past midnight rigging up a small mixer. Listen up, I won’t dwell long on the mechanics of Karaoke. You need a mixer to control the balance between the two microphones, the CD player, and some other music machine to play between singers. The second microphone is yours, to announce who is up next. Biggest problem is normalization. Some CDs play louder than others. Do not ask me how the bastards even allowed that to happen. And some singers are quiet or hold the microphone funny.
           Bottom line: if I make money at this, it is something I wanted to try long ago but would not spring for the equipment. Now I’m using Lee-Anne’s, but over time, some of it has gone missing. Her mixer, the invitation lists, the book light (to read the labels), cables, patch cords, pig tails, and all the extension cords, octopi, and splitters. Here’s my chance to see how I do, since Lee-Anne must work the bar. Yes, she wants to do it herself. But she got a first-hand exhibition of exhibition of the problems involved even with her “matching set” of equipment. And she knows it was pure experience that pulled this together on short notice.
           Later, I find out the Nova blob did not just dislike me, he hated my guts. Yeah, well I’ve gotten that before from undisciplined dorks. He didn’t like the way I kept the room on topic, damn, and how I kept directing the conversations back to robots. He didn’t like the way I quickly formed teams to get things done. But apparently, he mostly didn’t like the way I put everything to the vote. Says I only voted when I knew it would be in my favor. That’s not true, every decision was majority rule, in many cases unanimous. Not my fault if the whole room agrees 100% of the time with me and not him, is it now?
           And before I forget, I updated the bakery’s yelp (Yellow Pages) review. And noticed that yelp now places two “you may also likes” above the link you were searching for. It strains my brain to even imagine how insipid-minded people have to be to even come up with bullshit like that. And it is sickening to realize these are the businesses that dominate the field. I did find out that my old job at the phone company (different location) is again empty. I found it only pays $32 per hour, less than I was making in 1996 (after all the conversions are done.) I should call them up and tell them I’ll do it for $80 per hour.

NOON
           What is this? It is page two of the Ukrainian national anthem. I don’t speak the language, but I hear you are supposed to sing that the Ukraine is not dead yet because freedom cannot die. And that those who enslave the Ukraine will wither and die like dew in the sun. I have not verified any of this, so there is your kid’s school project, titled “Analyze the Anthem”.

           I nipped into the library for a couple hours, the summer heat hasn’t left the afternoons alone yet. Here’s your trivia. Did you know the Moon rocks are all high in aluminum? Too bad the stuff is so hard to refine, or I’d join the 100,000 applicants who have already volunteered for the one-way trip to Mars. Sadly, instead of just picking the winners, Mars One is staging “contests” which will ensure a watered down type of colonist gets first pick.
           Or as some put it, the finalists will be “techno-listening Eurotrash with unreasonable demands for prompt health care and a propensity for labor unrest”. The trip is (simulated) 520 days (are we there yet?) and it has already been suggested they select six hot lesbians and install webcams. Why not make a profit? The opposite take is that the last thing Mars needs is women.
           Then Ray-B calls, he’s back in town to take care of paperwork. Then off on the cruise ships for another few months. He reports having to rent a room for big bucks to stay ashore one month. I told him I may be able to do something about that. Cosign a loan and we’ll have a place tomorrow, up in Boynton or someplace nice. Now that he is single again, he reports all the things I told him about society and women are true. In months on the cruises, he has not met a woman worth keeping. Tell me about it.
           What strikes a chord is that I also predict these things in the right order. At first, it is freedom, but you soon realize these women are either not suitable girlfriend material or have a hidden agenda. And what you really want and need is a girlfriend, a friend with benefits. Some lady stable enough to realize she is not going to find some six-two movie star, she is not going to have the romantic life of her teen fantasies, and that commitments is for those who can't hold a relationship together any other way.
           Your commitment is live together, have as good a time as you can, and your every tomorrow depends on today. Everything else is manipulation. And he is also finding out the truth about women and money. All the women who understand they have to carry their own weight are both very slim and very taken. My, that's very clever. Did I just say that? Well, it's a gem and that's why this blog endures.

NIGHT
           Jesus H. Christ did Karaoke go well this evening!
           I could leave that solitary sentence as the entire report, but I like to write. Karaoke is a job compared to real music. But I suppose trying to entertain without talent certainly would be like that, is what I'm sayin'. And tonight was on-the-job training. Songs that will not play, the “four” and “nine” buttons are broken on the player, many of the disks are mismarked or misfiled, dead microphone batteries. Deal with it. I did.

           And boy, did I ever. Say what you will, I have been telling any clubs that would listen for years now that this town needs a country music bar. Well, to keep things moving while swapping disks, I took along the only recorded music I had handy: the bingo backing tracks. I’ve emphatically declared before that my country music selection is geared to a female audience. The men spend the money, but it is the women dragging them out for the evening.
           How quickly I noted that during the “breaks”, more people were singing to the country music than were dancing or paying attention to the Karaoke. To test the notion, I took two 15 minute breaks (it was a 5-1/2 hour show, I just couldn’t let them down) and did my old trick of handing the wireless mics out to women in the audience so the whole room could sing along.
           Not a dry eye in the place. What am I onto here? I will think about that over breakfast at Tiffany’s tomorrow. Four thin-cut pork chops, breaded with pepper and nutmeg, pan-fried in olive oil, with roast potatoes and a big side dish of radishes. Just radishes. $29.95. What? You want to know how I did? Okay, by second set, I had the single women begging (no, that’s not a metaphor) me to sing again and I spent the rest of the evening with a spritely gal from Macon, Georgia, who really, I mean really did justice to a pair of Levis.
           I heeeeear that loooooonesome whiiiiiiiiiippoorwill.