One year ago today: April 22, 2014, outstanding!
Five years ago today: April 22, 2010, on Karaoke.
Six years ago today: April 22, 2009, happier days.
MORNING
The batbike is in the shop until late this afternoon. The decision has been made that if the starting electrical problem turns out to be only, repeat only, the alternator/generator piece, I’m going to replace it. This is the “fateful” decision referred to earlier, an adjective applied because this will likely affect the way I travel for the remainder of my life.
In other news, silver has dropped below $16, but my buy point is $14. Silver, the worst investment is the best speculation. Speaking of metal and points, look closely at this picture. On the right is a standard hollow point .45 caliber bullet. On the left is a custom .50 caliber with an explosive point. Can you see the tiny dot of eraser-colored plastic explosive in the copper tip?
On impact, this explodes, throwing the copper slug out into a “starfish shaped pattern”. Basically it penetrates body armor. How is this suddenly top story? The vacuum cleaner shop. I know the lady because I get her the newspaper. The husband, it turns out is an ex-military armory expert and he holds 15 patents on the silver bullet with the copper tip. They don’t make a .50 caliber pistol, so he replaces the bolt and barrel on a Glock.
Where this comes in is that to make this bullet, he has a fully equipped ammunition factory, and one of the items of equipment is a CNC machine. We got to talking this morning. But we’ll have to take this up another time. For now, I’m going to pick up some wood. The city finally came along and cut down that dead tree in front of the bakery. I’m going to salvage a few pieces to see how well they turn out with the band saw. So there, it was a great morning after all.
NOON
“Pick your furniture like you pick a wife; it should make you feel comfortable and look nice, but not so nice that if somebody walks past it they want to steal it.” --Sam Halpern
We now have a compressor. First time in 30 years. Good, because the scooter tire went flat again. I cannot find the leak but let’s see what difference a compressor makes. It sure cleaned all the gunk and dust out of my computer fans and keyboards. My electric bass sparkles like new. Here’s the photo, with my coupon, it was $39 plus tax. It’s a bit of a toy, but that tank on the bottom was the selling feature. The small compressors with no tank won’t inflate a flat if the tire bead is broken.
The diagnosis on the Honda is the generator and it carries a price tag of $220. I talked the installation down to $500, so I’m out $1150 in vehicle repairs this month. It only takes a couple of trips to pay it off, so I’m going ahead. Installing that new part, which takes about a week at the shop, means also putting in an expensive new battery. Old batteries can be hard on the system.
It’s a conspiracy mystery how Broward Transit works. Seriously, this morning when there was no time constraint, the bus system worked perfectly. But when the shop called to pick up the bike at 12:50, I did not get home until 4:20. Start with the first bus being 1-1/4 hour late. When he finally showed, it was raining, and the city decided to tear up Pembroke Road. The curb lane was blocked, so the bus was stuck in the single line westbound.
Coming back, I zipped up to Taft to get around the traffic snarl. But that takes one into EFRL territory, called Hollywood, Florida. EFRL = “Every Red Light”. The lights at rush hour are timed so you hit every one for the maximum. I hit all ten four-minute lights. Note, these lights may NOT be listed on the site that follows these things because they are not permanently four minutes. Only during rush hour.
AFTERNOON
This means I need the evening off. Wednesday, how about the Caribbean coffeehouse? I’ll think on that. Nobody really showed up until 9:30 last time. And they charged me $4 for that coffee. That’s heftier than Starbucks, but it was also better coffee. I’ll see, as I’ve got to finish the murder mystery novel tonight. I’m getting weary of her mental addiction to the slavery thing. But for that, it would have been a fairly neat tale. Since that makes it not worth reading, I’ll tell you the plot, minus the slavery neurosis.
Secluded archeologist finds human remains on an island where she lives in an abandoned mansion by illegally selling artifacts to a black museum. She discovers it is a girl murdered forty years ago and all the people around her knew the family. Next day, two student archeologists are murdered and the human remains disappear. She lives platonically with a “Creek Indian” who apparently looks like Charles Atlas, but she is getting hot and friendly with the state senator.
To make it short, the facts put the blame on the Creek Indian and the museum curator are suspect, until more bones are found. The senator. His father killed his younger brother and mother, so he killed the father and assumed the younger brother’s identity. He also killed the girl and the two students who began digging too close to the burial site. But everybody is fine now and there are two chapters left. Let me guess, she discovers that she owns the mansion and finds a million dollars behind the hidden trapdoor. She did great for the first five chapters, after that she wore out.
EVENING
Stand back, I’m in another grumpy mood. As I’m about to point out, unlike some people, I don’t think the world is to blame for my moods, but the world is not exactly helping, either. You know what I did this evening? I put a cleat on my battery booster for the recharging cable. And listened to public radio. That made me even crabbier. See addendum.
I declined the Caribbean place and went to the dreaded Starbucks. Where I read a medical text for an hour, having nothing else challenging handy. There were a couple of women who looked my way, but they didn’t smile back. I read the chapter on depression and it pretty much confirms my pre-conceived notions. The wording was nice and the examples were sympathetic, but the bottom line is most of these people spend all day feeling sorry for themselves. We’ve all failed at something so these people need a huge dose of getting over themselves. Other than that, I would have made a great doctor.
The extreme cases, okay. For the most part, they should give it a rest. I’m already the type who views with suspicion anybody who gets the same disease twice. Take a guess what I think when I read the most common trait amongst depressed sorts is the inability to enjoy a sunset. Poor, poor babies. They need to walk a mile in my work boots. It’s just when I read the list of symptoms, I’m not buying most of it. How much comfort do these people want?
Here’s an item a military historian, such as myself, finds revealing. During the opening years of Barbarossa, the German army captured vast quantities of Soviet equipment. Except for the 76.2mm artillery, they used very little of it. Much has been said of the superiority of the T-34, so why did the Germans use so few captured examples? A possible answer is in the logs of the repair shops.
The Russian tanks were a headache to repair. They were designed for rapid production, not field serviceability. Well, if they were so hard to fix, why did the Russians keep using them? Ah, think about the war after 1943. The Soviets were advancing. The recovery of disabled vehicles makes fast repair less of a problem than the retreating army that may have to leave them behind.
ADDENDUM
It’s well known I used to be a dance instructor. Scored with a lot of ladies, I did. Five or six if I recall. Not the students, but the other instructors, dance studios always have a surplus of female instructors. Those were the days. But there was an older guy on staff I did not like at all. Can’t place his name, but he was already in his mid-twenties. The rest of us were teenagers, I was the only one in university. I made better money selling dance lessons than slinging hash. Let me tell you about this jerk because that’s the mood I’m in.
Leonard, or some name like that. Receding hairline, figured he knew it all. I was the analyst, that is, the top selling agent, so I was above the instructors and got a commission of their sales. He had that against me from the day he started, felt I didn’t deserve it, that I was stealing from him. A total jerk. Anyway, the staff often socialized after work and he’d continue to show up at our private parties long after he got his ass fired.
Anyway, he gets this job at a government radio station. They send him on a three week orientation and he comes back convinced that government radio is “so advanced that people don’t believe it”. So we listened to his station and it was mostly jazz. Now, you can say a lot of things, but I don’t buy the nonsense that jazz is a superior form of music, or that it is highbrow. If it was, explain how somebody like Leonard can go from a gronk to aficionado in 21 days. It takes longer than that to learn the alphabet.
Now, when I hear really bad jazz, like NPR tonight, I recall that bozo. Jazz is like chess and glass-blowing. There will always be a small group who insist there is something special about it and anybody who doesn’t think the same has no culture whatsoever. I’ve even met some who can’t play a musical instrument who think jazz is “more advanced” than what I play.
My theory is that rich kids go to university to mingle and because it is a great place to fool around. Poor kids at university tend toward the courses that will pay well, but the rich kids dominate faculties like Arts and Social Studies. They have nothing to gain or lose. But the professors of faculties selling these courses will stop at nothing to convince them that certain offbeat forms of music and art are “superior”. And you can guess which ones they latched onto.
Last Laugh
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