One year ago today: February 28, 2014, an inspiring read.
Five years ago today: February 28, 2010, on Internet sex.
Nine years ago today: February 28, 2006, missing post.
MORNING
This is my ancient recipe for cocktail sauce. Mix 70/30 ketchup to prepared horseradish sauce. The secret ingredient is to avoid adding anything. It’s extraordinary how few people can manage that. At the other farthest bound, I have heard arguments over what is in such sauce. I was checking to ensure no pseudo-food in the ingredients, since shrimp is now off my menu. This checks okay, even the ketchup is organic. Seriously, if you are spending twice as much on prepared sauce, try this once. Except for the spicy hot, this is identical.
What exactly is a “music publishing and distribution company”? I came away this morning unable to find the answer. Since I don’t record much, I have never learned how the music operates at the factory level. My perception is you send a demo to a “record company” and if they like it, they hire you to make a professional recording. Then, if it’s a hit, you sit back and enjoy the royalties and fame for life.
Well, I know that it is big business, so it naturally is far more complicated than that, and the rule is extinction. So I read up on these distributors. They want to know if I have a “label”. Yes, I have several, “No chlorine bleach”, “shake well before using”, and here’s one, “Made in Bangladesh”.
My interest is to find out what is out there by way of selling a piece of music. Right now, it looks hopeless. Even the places that will play your material for free are swamped with unsolicited material. It's a numbers game, quantity over quality.
I think the logic is that once your song proves marketable, they will send it out (electronically) to their members and send you any money that’s left over. None of them give straight answers, but it works along these lines: a dollar comes in, they take 99 cents as expenses, and the penny is your royalty. Hence they claim you get 100% of your royalty. But I will say that the world needs another Beatles. Fast. American capitalism works, but more due to greed than talent.
NOON
“There’s no present. There is only the immediate future and the recent past.” --George Carlin
It is not letting up out there. Such rain is rarely seen except during a hurricane and there haven’t been any in ten years. All the adjectives are used up, it is bad. But not inside here with the teapot. The famous phone camera has not yet showed up. Agt. M’s “right away” is similar to my ex-wife’s “priority”. It means eventually they’ll get around to it. Thusforth, I took a closer look at battery usage. In no time at all it was clear the batteries were still good, just not 100%. Ah, that means switch to rechargeables.
[Author's note: Whoa, that last paragraph is not clear. What I'm saying is the rain was so bad, I stayed inside drinking tea and delving into the problem of my cameras going through so many batteries. Older cameras would just not take a photo, these newer ones tend to take bad or dark photos. They also generally seem to need more light anyway. I noticed batteries too dead to run the camera have juice to operate a flashlight. I have plenty of rechargeable batteries that I will see if that works before buying more cameras.]
So I measure the batteries to discover that in my vast tool kit, I still lack a 9/16ths drill. That’s the diameter of an AA cell. But I have the other gear necessary to make any size battery holder from wood. There are other tricks I’ve picked up, like cutting the pieces at an angle so they cannot be mismatched or placed backwards. It takes time, but this can eventually be done with the scroll saw. The best wood seems to be the ¾” thick 1x4”, best because I happen to have seven feet of it on hand.
I continued with a prototype, shown in the photo. The batteries slip into the drill holes and form contact along the metal bar. These are connected in parallel with the device batteries to give them the full boost of power. This is a non-working mockup to test the idea. The build requires very careful measurement and drill work.
Once more, it proves more fun to fashion new items like this than to build things to spec. The good news is that when you go back to building a pattern, it comes out far nicer than if you tried to learn from scratch. The reason I'm looking at the is object is to see what went wrong, an inevitable part of fabricating anything new. I could have made the batteries closer, even touching. Can I drill something like that? Probably, remember how much I put into learning pilot holes. Is that round metal (a bicycle spoke) the best shape?
One also learns the non-obvious, which I happen to like a lot. In this case, the batteries are in parallel, but if you look at as many devices as I, you see that the off-on contacts are buried deep inside and the lid you close on the battery clip is just a conducting bridge. This is probably wise and safe, but it makes an add-on battery pack quite difficult to design. This is also the first object I've built that combines wood and metal. That forced me into a lot of unfamiliar thinking. I mean, don't laugh if it's easy for you.
Yes, that is a flutophone in the background. That’s how I take a break. I only know the easy parts of four songs. What? You want to know the songs? Sure. “Oh When The Saints”, “Aura Lee”, “Song of Joy”, and “You Are My Sunshine”. That’s four more than any guitar player I ever met. Ah, you want to know what the other blocks are at the bottom. Maybe later, after I check how that got past the censors.
NIGHT
Okay, I'll tell you about the blocks (shown below). They are my first stab at making a simple robot arm. I quickly found I don’t have the skill level or the tools, but I’ll share what I learned. I tried to save wood by cutting the notches into each piece. Wrong. Too much work and too sharp the corners for the scroll saw when the wood is this thick. What’s needed is a bandsaw, you know, maybe I should look to see if they make a decent small one.
The joints resemble single dovetails. This was my attempt to follow the pattern on the Caterpillar toy. Ifound out loads about why tank treads must be expensive technology. Yet, with the right equipment, building these objects yourself is a savings. Robot parts can be frightfully expensive.
It took a while for computers to go through a similar development phase. Until the I remember when disk drives cost as twice as much as the computer. Even today, there is more money to be made selling computers than from using them. Robotics is similar. All the hardware has been out there for forty years. But the spark of genius that gets things rolling hasn’t happened in fifty years. The world is still busy polishing up 1950s inventions.
It was also time to check on Dubai. I still have to laugh that when these third-worlders want any semblance of comfort or luxury, they have to completely abandon their “culture” and adopt our ways. Palm Jameirah looks more like Ft. Lauderdale than any traditional Arabic palaces. I laugh, but I also find it totally hypocritical. The reason to watch Dubai is in what, nine more years, the money runs out. I can’t recall the schedule, but before long, the oil is all gone.
I get a kick out of watching news reports from the area. The bottom line is it is a Muslim country and I would not live there. Also, every man looks like a crook and every woman looks like a call girl. The entire atmosphere is “old movie set”. Like that hotel with the $12,000 rooms. When you get rich, do you suddenly think a mirror on the ceiling is luxurious? Sounds more like a boy scout brag-fest. I’m reminded of my few years of first class travel in my late twenties and early thirties.
The people, the hotels, the lifestyle was so plastic and phony that I found it degrading to “fit in”. I’ve stayed the Bangkok Miramar, the Chugusi Nikko, the Chiang Rai, and the Torrey Pines. I was disappointed that I never met any educated people in these places, only “successful” businessmen. And what a sorry wife-cheating lot they were. All they do is play golf and talk money and sniff butts. You rarely saw their wives. I repeatedly found myself dipping out to some small café or honky tonk to roll up my sleeves and chat with women who could pay their own way.
And you know, the most luxurious hotels I’ve stayed in were no-stars. Old world places that are not there anymore. Like the Hacienda in Merida, Mexico. And the Colonial, in Cuidad Bolivar, Venezuela. These are the places I’ve told you about where the wood grain of the doors matched the door frame because they were hand-carved from the same solid piece of wood. I saw the world at the last moment before the Internet made it flat again.
Now, if I won millions in the lottery, it is unlikely I would even go back to those places for a second look. But so what, I know I got more than my fair share without ever cheating or gambling or stealing. It’s all about attitude. The only missing ingredient was a decent woman, but lots of guys can tell you the same. What’s marriage? According to the movie last night, it’s “Three months of bliss and thirty years of hell.”
ADDENDUM
Oh boy, more research. We love research, especially on cold, rainy mornings. I still need a lady with a yacht and a lively interest in sextants. For my part, I have arithmetically fixed the problem with the vernier readings. And have become keen on the idea that navigation is one of those undertakings where one person is not enough but two is too many. I have not yet attempted to use the programmable calculator, as the pundits recommend, because it is possible to use a calculator without understanding what one is doing. Right, Patsie?
I had documentaries running since dawn. Isn’t that neat how people like me say we don’t watch TV, but have the Internet connection up sometimes six hours a day? I owe you an explanation on that. Superficially, the two activities are similar, but “watching TV” carries with it the well-founded connotation of the couch potato, endlessly—and mindlessly—staring at the tube. Even my worst heckler would recognize the difference between that and carefully picking out select programs at least a day in advance, chosen for knowledge content on a narrow topic of pre-declared interest. Such as military history.
And this month, I’ve been watching preparation for war. If anyone thinks Britain was not looking for a for war until Hitler attacked, wrong. We’ve been fed the line that England had fewer tanks and airplanes [than the Germans], but that was the Brit war philosophy. They knew from running an empire that a small, highly trained professional army was better and cheaper than a huge standing army of conscripts. All they needed was a big navy to move that small army anywhere in the world. It was called the British Expeditionary Force. Get it, “expeditionary”?
So look for evidence of the English armaments and you’ll find they were looking for a war—any war—long before Hitler came along. They were even preparing to fight the Americans. Really, for the Limey’s, any opponent will do. Even Dutch farmers in South Africa. When constantly picking fights fell out of vogue, the British Empire fell within five years. And the French.
While the Americans took over. First with dollars, then with guns.
Last Laugh
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