One year ago today: February 27, 2014, programming, food, & oil.
Five years ago today: February 27, 2010, read the update there.
MORNING
My day off. I’m going to look deeper into celestial navigation and pick up supplies. And check to see if I’m still blacklisted off Craigslist by attempting to set up a new account. If you don’t know, I am the guy that hacked their original system. I taught thousands how to auto-flag and exposed the identities of countless flaggers. I reset Craigslist internal links so everybody who flagged me was sending my posts to the “best of” category.
Yep, I’m in. I see nothing has changed, the same pack of illiterates. I see CK has tightened up the system. Somebody must have sued them. And MicroSoft is still going after your identity with an obsession. Alas, all my interrelated accounts were set up long before in anticipation of that nonsense. My viewpoint is that unless the business is extending you credit or something, they have no right to your information.
That's a little precaution that only the smart people insist upon. Hint to beginners, the MicroSoft email links can’t automatically follow more than four layers deep. And always link to non-MicroSoft email account anyway. If they bother to chase you beyond that, trust me, you are up to something and they know it. And quit giving your phone number at the checkout if you know what's good for you.
The picture? That’s what the shelf above my work desk looks like. You’ve seen it before. Every self-respecting bachelor has a spot like this within arm’s reach of his coffee maker. You never know when you will need some Goo-Gone and rubber cement in the same session.
NOON
“Cleaning your house while your children are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.” –Phyllis Diller
Now you do what you want on your day off and I took great pains to examine this toy at the thrift. The wooden joints were intriguing, as when I try to design the same thing, I manage to get the “knuckles” facing 90° wrong. Maybe if I make some joints, I’ll smarten up. Further, because of the plastic “finger” I made last year, I was over-concerned with the pieces being round.
Take a closer look. The center yellow piece has two notches, the other piece have mating prongs. The paint covered the axles, but they are small dowels. The clearances allow for swivel of very simple square cuts. I see they are a drill hole that is then cut out with a straight saw. I must have a go at building something like this.
I then put some intense study into why my sextant readings from last day were so bad. Yes, it was my backwards reading of the micrometer. Allow me to get out to the beach and try a less obvious technique, which I will describe if you promise to follow along. Ready?
Up till now, and I don’t know why, I would take the sextant and use the micrometer dial to place the sun on the horizon. I suspect this comes from still pictures which make it look like that is what the navigator is doing. But after four books on the topic, I see that it is more promising to set the sextant to a known reading a few tenths of a minute “below” the sun, then to “let it rise” until the sun is on the mark, at which point you quickly look at your chronometer and record the GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).
I plan to try that. A couple things to pay attention to is that navigation has the same “engineer” problem of lack of imagination. A “minute” here is a distance, not a time interval. Also, “angle” as the term is used, is also a distance, not where two lines meet. There are two such “angles” needed to fix one’s position. The GHA is the distance from Greenwich to the Sun’s geographic position, and the LHA is the distance from where you are to that same position. Hence, Greenwich Hour Angle and Local Hour angle are often measured in minutes—which represent nautical miles. Confused? Blame them engineers.
Oh, and I’ve already been flagged on Craigslist. I suggested all the bass players who suddenly showed up looking for work was a result of a layoff at a certain local factory known for hiring ex-cons at low wages. That they should all get together and have a “circle audition”. And bill it as the “largest collection of limp wrists north of the Julia Tuttle”. Well, I had to test the water, did I not? (The Tuttle is the causeway that separates queerland from the rest of Miami.)
And real bass players use a pick (plectrum). The guitar-tard who came up with that limp-wrist style must have really hated bassists. It looks funny, it is definitely not cool, and does not produce a better bassist. Also, I’ve seen those who play this style often struggle to change to a different bass. The bottom line is limp-wrist playing is was some toked-up pot-head’s idea of what looked cool in 1972. And he was wrong.
AFTERNOON
Sometimes in my studies, I run across things that turn my stomach. This is not to say they are inherently bad, rather that like most people, I find some things revolting. And that would apply to “farm raised shrimp”. Simply put, shrimp used to be expensive until they found out, in Asia, shrimp can be grown in dirty, contaminated, sewage. They are kept alive by dumping in antibiotics which work by being absorbed into the shrimp and passed on up the food chain.
Shown here is a female shrimp with one eye “ablated”. With a knife or scissors, they didn’t say. But it helps with “gonadal maturation”. Insert half-blind single mother joke here. The available information says that the conditions for growing the shrimp are so complicated that American operations can only produce one batch per year. You should watch the farms in Viet Nam, where there are no standards. The workers actually wade into the stuff.
So you’ll know, the Vietnamese hate Americans. They have museums of American atrocities like the newsreels we show of barbarous concentration camps. Except their movies are authenticated. The smiling Viets you see on the travel posters is a cover-up for a deep and permanent loathing of anything American. And if you think they are exporting the best and healthiest shrimp over here, or that they care a damn about our health standards, maybe you should visit one of those museums.
EVENING
At the last moment I dropped all plans and headed for the foreign cinema. It was a feature about a lady who takes dance classes. Called “Six Lessons In Six Weeks”, it is familiar territory. No, not because I taught dancing, but because this was filmed in over here in Clearwater. An older lady and her instructor don’t much get along at first before establishing a mutual tolerance and spend a lot of time talking about their pasts. Between them they seem to know a lot of people who died.
The scenery is great, but of course, what is a modern art movie without including the queer issue? A good 25% of the movie is wasted listening to another self-absorbed faggot crying the blues. It adds nothing to the plot, it’s there because queers actually think they are going to convince the world that what they do is normal. He blames everything on people's stereotyping gays, yet expects the same people to “ just know” he’s gay because he’s an unmarried dance instructor. Typical Florida ass-clown hypocrite.
Other than that aspect, the movie was well-made and the actors type-cast. No surprises but it does touch on the seamy underbelly of the dance industry. They are not selling lessons, they are selling a dream, usually to make you young again. They must hate guys like me who never grow old. However, I do not denigrate dancing, for I have personally seen it completely change people from wallpaper into men-about-town. I could write an expose on the industry, but I won’t.
Then again, the things I could tell you about playing in a band. All the glamor has to happen before you are 24, or it never will. After that age, I’ve seen a lot of musicians nose-dive because they won’t admit they missed the youth part. The drugs and booze then become almost an expected phase—to everyone except them, who think they are entering a new plateau of creativity. These type of deadbeats largely explain why I did not play in a band for almost ten years in the 1990s. Too many losers.
ADDENDUM
It is well known that when I became unable to work, I had $28,000 in cash hidden away. This, it turned out, was the only money the credit system did not have on file somewhere. In the end, it was the only stash they could not get their hands on while I was flat on my back. I stress that these people had no business whatsoever keeping that information on me. I did not borrow a penny from them.
Nor did I pledge any assets. I had signed a form saying they could check my credit rating. And since I had never had a thing to do with them, there they should have found nothing. Wrong. The vultures got all my assets, including my houses and cars. The bastard credit bureaus had the type, value, and location of all my possessions in their data files. You gotta ask yourself, do you think I should ever trust the system again? I lived on that $28,000 until I got back on my feet.
The question remains, why did I have so much cash? It was a fluke. Last day I mentioned how in 2003, I was going to save up $50,000 and wave it under some desperate homebuyer’s nose up in Los Olas. It was the amount I had saved in 56 weeks toward that goal. Again, a fluke.
I remind the reader the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in America has always been medical bills. Remember, I had the best insurance available at the time, and they still got me.
Last Laugh
My impression of Greece and Germany.
And Togla not watching where he's going. Neither is the driver.
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