One year ago today: August 10, 2014, I need a robot guitar.
Five years ago today: August 10, 2010, the “deposit mistake” again . . .
Six years ago today: August 10, 2009, beware of fake agencies.
MORNING
Trump is not backing down from that Megyn witch who tried to bait him with irrelevant feminist questions. What was that you said six years ago, she asks? His insinuation that she is a less than reputable person might put a cork on her attitude that she is the real start of the show. I appreciate Trump telling her off, her face is so frozen from Botox that only her lower jaw moves when she talks.
I lashed the rear tire to the scooter and headed to the shop. The new tire costs $160, which I paid but balked. See addenedum. Otherwise, I went to Starbucks, which I mainly do not like. I had to count out a few rolls of coins. Some nearby obvious pedestrians asked when I was done what it “worked out to”. I told them, “Barely enough.”
That’s Florida. Watch a guy counting some money and ask him afterward how much it was. Hoo-rah! Anyway, the worthwhile part of the day was deciding to invest in that motorcycle trailer with the aluminum loading ramps. One thing for me is the desire to never again be caught in that last flat tire situation. Waiting half a day for a $140 tow. (I was expecting to pay $90.) The obvious answer is to buy my own trailer for $240. And make friends with the shop, because I know he does not tow, and I only need the trailer occasionally. I’ll tow you for $90, but only to that shop.
But getting put out of commission by that flat tire, well, that can never be allowed to happen again.
NOON
The same real estate lady gave me some pointers on how to check if there are things like prisons or other undesirable operations. The site is called myFlorida.com, which I knew. But I always overlook that site because it is associated mainly with welfare and food stamps. We’ll take another look. Like I did at this place, a beauty for $35,000. All property I look at includes the land. However, this one is in Bartow, a place I drove through and got lost in 2012. It is so far away, three hours at least.
But what a nice place. Everything I look at is much nicer than what I was raised in. And I have that running bet with myself that I will retire in a swell place without having sweated my life away for it. This place is an hour north of Arcadia, 15 minutes from Winter Haven. Which I happen to like.
Two cups of coffee and an hour of deep thought gets me ready to take on the system. Not the whole system, but the part that has to do with these “auctions”. Every last person you talk to can tell you they are phony. And you know, I have respect for “majority opinion”, but not always majority rule. The results of this concept, listening to the masses, are rarely optimal, but by listening, you avoid being eaten alive.
This might be a good time to remind all that we are neither naturally confrontational nor antagonistic individuals. We do not seek difficulty. We are actually quite nice people, but at the same time, you will always be hated by people when they know you can see right through their bullshit. With these auctions we are up against a collective gang who think they are somehow above such interpretation of their conduct. Their problem is they think we don’t know they are smiling while they put the screws to us.
EVENING
What the hell, I headed over to the weekend club. Expecting a quiet corner, instead the place was full of women. Not my type, but still. I’m just not much into the attitudes and expectations of third-hand females. But I sure can politely listen to their fairytales. What, he left you because you only cheated on him once. What a cad! Why, the last guy, bless his heart, let it happen twenty-thirty times before he, like the prick he always was, finally stopped paying the bills. Had to ditch him after that, she says.
I’m doing my best to listen to their music, but that is another change. In my day, you had to actually break new territory to make a hit record. These guys sound like elevator music. I mean in general. In my day, there were the bad ones, too. Like the Poppy Family and Grateful Dead, cranking out schlock.
Next, I ran into that young guitarist who states, all other things aside, that he would rather play in a band than not play in a band. He gave me a song list which included this band “Maroon Five”. I dunno, it sounds an awful lot like the half-jazz, half-Michael Jackson, almost-singing style of the big bands that never made it in the 70s. I listen to it, but don’t hear anything distinctive. Nothing original, just a studio-trained band playing a studio-standard pseudo-jazz tune. I am familiar with songs that were pushed into hits during musically slow weeks, that will never change.
But, I will give it a whirl. That’s the kind of music best looked up on Songsterr, who now want money and it takes time to back out of that mode if you hit it by mistake. The bass line, except for a few obvious-borrowed finger-muffled guitar riffs, seems to consist of four or five notes. I’ll treat it as a chance to learn the tune, but point out on stage how little appeal it has to the crowd that is our intended audience. Careful what I just said there.
How utterly sensational it seems to an old-timer like me that such a song registers 73 million hits. Mind you, I come from an era when hearing a hit song involved substantially more participation than a mouse click. I’m further somewhat less than impressed by the way these musicians look, since photogenics was also a factor back in my day. I’m not talking style or fashion. I’m saying I have always known plain boring people the moment I lay eyes on them. This whole semi-hipster look doesn’t make the grade. Seriously, the song sounds like a chintzy cover of a 1965 Boston mainstream b-side cranked out to fill the space. Or maybe 1865?
ADDENDUM
After discovering the ease that the rear tire can be removed, I doubt I will ever spend $80 for a tire change again. In fact, my thinking is that since I carried the whole tire and rim into the shop with one hand this morning, it may be wise to invest in a whole new assembly. Why not purchase a complete tire and rim and carry that as a spare? If I get even one more flat ever, it will have paid for itself.
Hc is the calculated height, d is a factor to determine offset and Z is your azimuth, but not your azimuth angle. This sample is only for latitude 36° with two declinations shown, 10° and 11°. The set for any latitude I am likely to travel is 15 columns wide and 245 pages long.
That volume of Sight Reduction Tables (HO 249) I bought last weekend turns out to be for air navigation. I did not know that, I only recognized the number. But it turns out to be lighter and cheaper and very accurate. I suppose that makes sense when you are flying a few hundred miles an hour. It is overkill for boat travel. The majority would find a book like this nothing but page after page of tedious columns of tiny numbers. Yet if you can spot the pattern, there is a beauty to it. So yes, I admit to reading several pages of mysterious-looking numbers.
The book does nothing to alleviate the rather insufficient way the calculations are taught. Most of the work occurs before you look up the final coordinates. That might explain the strange title. I can already see these tables are considerably more accurate than most people need and the numbers can be rounded off, but I’m a stickler for numerical precision.
For those without the foggiest about celestial navigation, it uses the sun more than the stars. And it amounts to finding the direction and distance to a calculated but estimated point nearby to where you really are. The tables are incomplete and it would only be chance if you were actually at the estimated point. The principle here is that the further away you are from that point, the “lower” your sextant reading.
I find a convenient way to visualize the process is to imagine the sun stopped overhead at noon. If you were were any place else at noon, the sun would not be overhead. It would appear “lower” in the sky. And much of navigation is calculating where you are based on that lower angle. It can only be directly over one spot at a time and that spot races westward at 900 mph. Guess what, that spot is listed in the Almanac for every hour of the day for each year.
FYI, although it takes intense study, everything you need to know about celestial navigation, including the tables, is available free on-line. Whether you do it or not is a type of character trait.
Author’s note: I do not have any experience with navigation at sea. Other than a trip to the beach, all of my navigation exercises have been on dry land. And mainly armchair. The few times I have been on a boat more than 36 hours, I suffered woefully. Mind you, the principles of navigation on the featureless sea make for incredibly accurate land measurements. I will never be lost on land anywhere in the world. Not for more than five minutes, anyway.]
Last Laugh
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