MORNING
Trent found this radio station in Texas, called Country Legends frequency 97.1. That link may not work, but if you are a traditional country fan, that’s the station you want to hear. Nothing like it in Florida.
I got the recorder working and cut another no-hit on it. Titled “The Sunny Isles of Walgreen”, it is a walking tour of the pharmacy in the people’s key, E. A twelve-bar blues number. As usual, the directions that came with the machine get woefully inadequate near the end chapters, right when you need the most help. For instance the manual casually mentions that you “can” modify your track files into WAV format but not that you absolutely must do so or a computer can’t see them.
While tackling this device, I watched “Resident Evil” on youTube. It starts okay but breaks into a predictable zombie movie at around 40 minutes. In all, it is cliché after that. You know, the memory loss thing that affects movie actors infinitely more often than the general populace. I’ve got it figured out. The special effects colleges all over the country taught no make-up artistry classes except zombies from 1985 onward. Around the same time, there was a bankruptcy at the fake blood factory and two million gallons of the stuff went to auction in Mendocino county.
Couple this with the fact that it is plain hard work to invent new and scary monsters. So it is not that the make-up artists are just plain stupid and unimaginative, but that they honestly don’t know any better. They can be hired by the dozen and any actor in the DiCapprio mold knows he can get work hobbling around stiff-legged and chanting “Imhotep”. And that’s your scary movies from your Class of 91. The nothing-new generation.
NOON
Here is Agt. M back from the cruise. The monster bike is ready to go, though it is no longer a convenient vehicle for the average rider. Shown here is dismantling the battery casing because we fried the controller. That’s $400 down the drain. This is a progressing field so that loss is worse than it seems if you factor in that right after the money was spent, a new model came out that uses Bluetooth programming from an iPhone. The replacement is just $160. We will soon have a $10,000 prototype on our hands.
For those people who complain the new rush of pirated videos on youTube look funny, I will for free tell you what to attempt first. See what a great guy I am? Okay, the red blocks are not some new anti-copy mechanism. What’s happened is your view is set in 3D and you should turn that off. Secondly, these movies are uploaded by idiots and sometimes you see the top half of your movie is cut off. That means it was uploaded in Windows 7 using the Google Chrome browser thing, sometimes called “the Walmart” setting.
What’s happening is your regular setting uses different drivers. You have two basic choices. Log on using the Walmart settings, which means allowing Google Chrome to take over your computer and snoop into your files, or download the drivers that work, which can be a daunting task. There may be other ways to work around this aspect ratio problem, but I don’t know what they are. I’m just trying to help as best I can here. While I don’t advocate piracy, I don’t advocate movie producers and browser companies fucking with your computer even worse.
NIGHT
Here is the club meeting adjourned over to the donut shop, which is why I’m late today. I had to get out of the house. This is Agt. M researching flashlights, the only thing that has come down appreciably in price. We use these flashlights as headlamps on the electric bicycles, as they are the only models powerful enough that don’t gulp expensive batteries whole. Now, I have a tale from the trailer court for you, because the club, now years old and established, has plenty of cash for these outings, so we got to talking about his cruise.
The passengers on the ship were about 50/50 in age and gender. Naturally, the only really single women, as opposed to the ones who lie about it, are in the predictable 18 to 22 range. That narrows things down to less than ten women on a cruise with 3,200 passengers. I know about these things.
He did not take my advice and move in for the kill instantly. Why? Because he still believes in being the nice guy. Those few women are quickly going to find each other and start talking. Trust me, being on board a ship is akin to living in a small Texas town, or really any small town. You might as well marry the first gal you talk to, because that will be a barrier to every woman you ask out after that. “Oh, I thought you were seeing Sally. You broke up? What’s wrong with you?”
Sure enough, and although nobody likes to admit I’m right, he ran into the second problem of trying to find a date while on vacation: Parents. To every parent, a man more than two years older than the daughter is the enemy, at least until the daughter is 22 and mom is chewing her fingernails down to the first knuckle. You must never allow a young woman you just met an interval to talk to her mother. I hate to state things that some may consider brutal, but I learned the hard way. Come on, Sally, admit I’m right.
Bottom line? He hesitated and lost. By the second time he ran into these individual women, on the second night of the cruise, they had formed a group. A “bevy of broads” as my childhood pal, Graham Smith, used to say. Agt. M no longer stood a chance. Basically, he spent the remainder of the cruise chatting with them. And that is why, in my day, we would say he never scored. As with most men, he stubbornly resists admitting the problem is precisely, including choice of words, is as I've described. Worse, the one or two female exceptions you will meet after age 32, if you are lucky, are not anywhere near enough to tip the scales.
Age 32, as I’ve described for men, is the crucial year. There was nobody around to tell me this, of course. While I was 32, I believed everything I told myself. (Hey, I like that last sentence. What a neat philosophy.) Because there were no respected or respectable older people around who could be trusted to give good advice. That’s as true today as it was every day of my life. Like my family, most people will never give you advice you can use, instead they will say whatever they vainly think will make themselves look or sound good. The working class version of political correctness.
We even had a term for my family doing this: “getting elected”. It has become the preferred method for manipulating the Nobel Prize committee (not that anybody I'm related to ever got that far with it). Today it is called being politically correct. There is no limit to the suffering a liberal can imagine you should endure. The major problem with all liberal systems is that eventually the money runs out.
ADDENDUM
This topic is purposely buried in an addendum, but today is the effective second anniversary of my warning letter to seven different magazine editors in America. That’s the letters where I advised them a least somebody on each of their staffs were plagiarizing this blog. You can look back to see if I named the magazines, but I have no reason to list them today. Reason? Because although I could not and did not prove a thing, the plagiarism stopped almost instantly and has not recurred.
What I had hoped for was credit. I suggested that I would not mind my work being cited. Not one of them took me up on that offer. They smelled a rat. But again, since the badness stopped practically the day after, I’ve had no cause to go further. They were nice enough about it to not demand proof or examples. But they must have held the meeting.
It was not merely a word or two here and there in as expected during plausible research, but entire paragraphs and concepts of my original material were being wholesale looted from these pages. Often not even reworded, and yes, that made me angry. There is no credible claim of fair usage at that level. These magazines were major players and I had to put a stop to it.
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