One year ago today: May 9, 2014, bicycles & Amtrak.
Five years ago today: May 9, 2010, me & food service.
Six years ago today: May 9, 2009, obsolete ships & software.
MORNING
Nothing happening and food make top stories this morning. I think the bakery is about to be sold. You can kiss authenticity goodbye, the prospective buyers would not know how to find Hungary on a map. It will soon just be another “fake” Latino joint, ordering their specialties from GFS up on 441. (Gordon’s Food Supply, the outfit that took over Smart & Final, on Highway 441.) Another instance of the “browning” of America and yet another minimum wage employer that nobody wants.
Yes, I like “assimilation” when the status quo gets to pick and choose which aspects of a different culture they care to adopt. But not when “culture” is forced upon the neighborhood by droves of illegal immigrants who form ghettos. Of course, the Liberals see no connection whatsoever between our current economic woes and the influx of 40 million illegal immigrants. Liberals would rather sell out than chance being called names.
There. How’s that for a wake-up scenario? Damn rights I’m grumpy that bakery is on the way out. I’ve been a daily patron for over four years. This town doesn’t need another empanada joint. If I did not mention, Nicky’s has long since re-opened up the street, but it isn’t the same. The new operation has unbundled the prices, resulting in the cost of meals nearly doubling.
What? Not sure what “unbundling” is. Look at your phone bill. You used to get a simple statement which contained one total. That was the amount you paid for monthly service. In the old days, when you ordered a “meal” or a “special” at a restaurant, everything was included. The bread, the gravy, the coffee, and desert. Now it is unbundled. They still [falsely] call it a special, but everything that once made it special is now extra.
Other examples of unbundling? When you pay extra to check baggage. Extra for mileage on a rental car. Extra taxes on your electric bill for the bus you never ride. When first unbundled, the total is the same, but then the rot sets in. A little extra here and there while ostensibly holding the same price for the basic service.
Prime Florida example? While your electric bill has climbed 16% on the past year, the power company is running a huge ad campaign on how the cost of service is going down. Actually, they were ordered to do this because of an increase granted for rising oil prices which never happened. So by recategorizing, your "power" bill goes down while your total goes up. So clever, but it never ends with those people.
NOON
“People who find good advice is hard to give are the same who find it even harder to follow.” --Farm wisdom
I looked at the place over on Plunkett, asking $103,000. They are nuts. The place needs at least $60-80k worth of work immediately. It has so many code violations I’m surprised it has not been condemned. The worst aspect of the place is that it is near the encroaching bad part of town. The seedy neighborhood in that area has no place to go but north. And guess what is directly in that path?
There are many such places left in the city cores of south Florida. These were built prior to 1960 when lack of widespread air conditioning made Florida uninhabitable during the summers. Nor were there any town councils or annoyances like safety standards. This place is a dump and a fire trap and the chances of making a profit on it are not worthy of considering.
A substantial omission in all real estate articles in Florida is the effect of rising sea levels. Stay away from that entire beachfront condo market. One good storm and you will be swimming. There is nothing along that entire Atlantic coast that was constructed with the realization that sandbars and barrier islands are the most temporary of landforms. Popular thinking in those developments is that if you can’t see the water rise, everything will be okay.
May I point out that there have been no major hurricanes, or the more dangerous hurricane surges, in Florida since the middle of 2004. So nobody should act surprised if I laugh when the whole waterfront gets walloped any season now. I’m a mile inland, so feel sorry if my place is hit. But not those beach bums who do the condo thing forty feet from high tide and sit in the donut shop all day. Loudly talking race forms. And staring at whoever walks in the door.
AFTERNOON
For the nth time in my life, I learned that Temptations’ tune “My Girl”. That was already an old song when I was a kid and I admit, I was over forty before I learned they were not an all-girl band. I often like to point out that my style of bass playing has not changed in thirty years although this is not to say I have not worked a lot at improving that style. This song has a bass line that can be added to and added to, so I keep coming back to it. So, I found a “mistake” in the song.
Here’s a picture of what I think is the Temptations. To this day, I cannot imagine a band who would do anything to look or act alike, much less band uniforms. When I started my first band at age 12 (we did not actually play out until I was 13, so both ages are correct), I met people who thought band uniforms were the most important aspect of playing music.
Come to think of it, I still know some people like that to this day. For me, uniforms were a non-starter, as I barely had enough money for instruments. Without parental support, I was reduced to begging around town for rides to my own gigs. Fortunately, there was an older fellow, I think he was 17, a farm kid dropout who had a pickup truck. He wanted so badly to be in my band that he gave us rides, but the fact is, he never fit in. For some reason, I remember his name. Billy Reuther, pronounced “Roother”.
He was also the first older person I knew who had been jilted by a girlfriend. I could never figure out why he didn’t just move on, instead he would rewrite the lyrics to popular songs with her as the star. He’d sing his own version to the truck radio. Don’t worry, when I turned 38, I learned exactly why sometimes you cannot just move on. There’s nothing left that even comes close to what’s already gone. See, now I understand.
EVENING
Here’s another odd bicycle picture.
Just you try to find the location of the few remaining post off ice boxes. For openers, they don’t call them post office boxes, they are “Public Collection Boxes”. For those who, instead of mailing a letter, want to collect publics. Not that a map would do any good, as the post office likes to randomly move these around or remove some of them altogether. What maps there are seem to be listed by zip code, another example of corporate-think. If you want to mail a letter or postcard from a strange town, like Deland, you may be out of luck.
.
There was once a box located near the bakery but it was removed or disuse. Since it was right on the main boulevard, nobody could pull over to use it. I thought about this while relearning my classic custom bass line to Margaritaville. The one Zack could not follow, which bent him out of shape because he didn’t know it but refused to follow someone who did. Me. His attitude was that a good bass player can follow even wild mistakes and wrong chords. I wonder whatever happened to him after that bar was seized for not submitting their sales taxes.
Why the going over old tunes? There is a jam session tomorrow, which although I have not been invited, is likely to play that music. Hmmm, that sounds funny. I don’t mean that I’m not invited because everyone is invited. I mean that I don’t usually go to jams unless I am personally invited and that did not happen this time. I’ll show of my own volition. I’ll go over the ulterior motive tomorrow.
I went a step further and sent the guitar player that very rare video of my solo act back in Denver in 2012. Few have seen the clip, almost nobody has seen the full edition. The angle on that one is many guitar players find bassists hard to work with because you wind up dragging them along. I needed to prove that I was an expert at playing bass in a small band. After all, you can’t get much smaller than one.
Last, I watched a documentary on overfishing in which the commentator said the ocean “provides us with the oxygen for every two breathes we take”. Now, if that isn’t Millenial-talk, I don’t know what is. What? Well obviously he meant to say every second breathe, but it sounds like he doesn't even know the difference. No, I'm not going to explain it further. This blog is for people much smarter than Millenials.
ADDENDUM
Insomnia. To me it means an opportunity to stay up all night and think. I’ve had it since birth, same as my siblings, but I early learned to turn the time into the highest productivity activity I know—thinking. This time I pondered the evolution of human communication. I’ve read the easy books on it and long developed my own theory as to why and how this happens the way it does. So I look only at language, mainly, but not exclusively, in the context of conversation. Talking is how most people go about using language.
My goal was speculation about the next major breakthrough in the way humans utilize words. I learned a new language after age 40 and noticed others who attempted this still “thought in English” or whatever their native language was. I seem to have learned it by imitating what I heard. The evidence was that shortly after I learned around 200 words, I realized I was doing something others found impossible—I was telling jokes in the new language.
More personal experience told me that the less educated a person, the more proportion of their use of language was social, or gossip as it were. I suspect that is because of a dual influence. Being unread, they have, to begin with, less knowledge to share and they lack any other ability to grasp what happens when they are not physically present. That’s not a petty observation. Myself, I devote a significant proportion of my life to reading because I have no alternative method to learning when I can’t be there.
What is read is also important, but not as important as the fact that most adults do not read for educational purposes. I contemplated this for a long time but could not see a pattern. But I definitely noticed that, depending on my own use of language, things have a definite order in new situations. For some, I tend to write very exact words, in others, I start drawing diagrams. Neither of these involves talking until after the thinking part is done.
This realization made me grab my notebook and look at what I usually write. And none of it is gossip, which is most of what the human race does. Most of my writing is lists. Song lists, parts lists, to do lists. The drawings range from musical symbols to circuits to maps. Well, no wonder I’m not rich and famous. I’m not utilizing gossip anywhere near as effectively as the bulk of mankind.
Around an hour later, I’m thinking how “gossip” must be evolutionarily successful because stupid people so vastly outnumber the smart ones. I’m amazed there have been significant inventions and milestones against such odds. In my mind, those [discoveries] were, in order, when mankind began to use symbols, then began to draw pictures of those symbols. That led to writing. It does not surprise me that tens of thousands of years passed between these inventions. Gossip is not a creative process, so I looked for what happened to language rather than how language itself is used.
I concluded the next significant event was the mass production of writing, or, the printing press. But printing bibles is a form of gossip. It took hundreds of years before printing spurred the next improvement, which was to increase the speed of writing to the speed of light. Fine, until you realize humankind is still saddled with that bulk majority of stupid people who use language only for gossip. What are Twitter and Facebook but warp-speed gossip? Ha, that's a classic: warp-speed gossip.
Hence, it is now 4:22 AM and my brain is asking, what is the next breakthrough? What event or invention is now the logical or required next step to enhancing human language? Well, for that, my perspective has been influenced by robots and databases. Even with the Internet, knowledge is still hard to find. One is obliged to spend time and effort that is often worth more than what is gained. Anybody who has a student loan knows what I’m talking about.
My conclusion is the breakthrough will be the instant dissemination of collective knowledge. An invention, on the scale of the printing press, that allows in a robot-like fashion, all new information to be shared instantly. Categorization is still a problem and so is decision-making. How will this take place? I don’t know, because it is 5:00 AM and I am finally sleepy.
Last Laugh
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