One year ago today: August 22, 2014, a city song?
Five years ago today: August 22, 2010, the autorun virus.
Six years ago today: August 22, 2009, the great raid of 2009.
MORNING
This one, I had to laugh at. I heard somebody say that some presidential candidate (whom I'd never heard of) was “handsome”. The guy said his wife thought Martin O’Malley(?) was handsome, so I looked at his picture. You can too, here it is. You see, at first I thought I may have gotten the name of O’Reilly, that triangle-headed newsboy, mixed up, which is entirely possible for me when I encounter people I think are idiots. But here is the real O’Malley, and I’m thinking, “Handsome?”.
Ha, when I saw this picture I was reminded of a kid we went to school with in seventh grade, named Darrel G. This is what Darrel G. kind of looked like already back then. Thin lips, receding hairline, expressionless most of the time, beady-eyed, bony knobs on his forehead. I shouldn’t tell you this, but behind Darrel’s back, we used to call him “the skull-faced fiend”. I think he became a building inspector. Or, like, you know, something similar.
But no, I would not have called Darrel "handsome". And I would automatically suspect any woman who did. Actually, he looks a bit like my old guitar player. Plain-looking with no stage presence. Is stage presence important? Buddy, it is everything.
My computer is acting up so [I] did some routine maintenance. Face it, there is no longer any such thing as a decent operating system on the market. Apple is okay but expensive, Linux was designed by an anti-social egghead, and MicroSoft will eventually clog up and slow down any computer with massive overhead. That last one is the problem on my desktop. I keep no files on this computer, yet the number of files since my last clean install has ballooned [on its own] from 65,000 to 874,000 in two years.
And none [of the offending files] can be deleted because they are “registry files”, so you don’t dare delete anything. The first time I saw an IBM/MicroSoft computer in 1984, I predicted that is precisely the stunt they would pull on the American public. The scam is to get you to buy a new computer and operating system every four years. Those computers are designed to go bad through ordinary usage, and if they are not used, then MS will cease supporting the operating system. Crookery, pure and simple.
I got all my letter writing done and that includes e-mails to buddies of mine who always ask about the women in Florida. Guys, there are lots of women here, provided you like the losers. I never complained about lack of women, what I said was lack of decent women. If you are into bar-bunnies and aging hookers, south Florida is your Garden of Eden.
Trivia. Most prehistoric human and humanoid skeletal remains going back to the Neanderthals all show most injuries to the head and shoulders. In fact, these injuries count for 40% of the total and the closest type of modern occupation, almost an exact match, is rodeo riders. I always said that bunch had head injuries. Or been kicked by a mule.
NOON
What luck, Agt. M gave me a Mercedez relay circuit a year back, said if I could get it to work, I was welcome to it. It’s worth about $400 and I may have done just that. It had no power connections, and the instructions did not explain how it worked. Don’t you hate instructions that show a connection that is not physically there on the board? Somebody had tried to rig up 12 volts to the circuit not realizing it had to be wired like a switch to an external source. I simply repainted the burnt out segment with silver paint.
To give you an idea of how hard it is to find any activity in this town, I almost went over to the coffee house at the Unitarian Church. But it turned out tonight was one of the few times they charge admission and I decided a guitar player reading poetry is just not worth the $20.
However, I did check on my old band now that it has been a year since I pulled the pin. They have played only two gigs. So I was right. That is a hell of a lot of work for very little return. Even then, some of the places we played lacked a lot in the fun crowd department. I’m used to a roaring good crowd that loves to sing along. You know, there is a Karaoke show up at the old Buddy’s Place. Let me think on that.
NIGHT
I just found out that a sextant is also used by astronauts to navigate in space. While it is all computerized, the fundamentals are the same. The sighting is the angle between a start and a planet at a precisely known time. This also produces the familiar circular line of position. The calculation also involves dead reckoning and the insection of more than one sighting. I wonder if it is required to have somebody on board who can do the math if the computer breaks down. And I wonder what they use for an Almanac.
Near Earth locations are, I’m informed, handled by ground-based computers. That gets ever more inaccurate as distance increases. Like the 12 minutes it takes for radio waves to reach Mars. To compensate, time is measured to the ten-billionth of a second. And, just as by Captain Cook, it takes three readings to establish one’s exact position.
And the Earth orbits the sun at 66,000 mph. The only way a spacecraft can change its destination is by speeding up or slowing down—and all space travel to date has been on the ecliptic, the same plane where all the planets orbit. Good, now explain Pluto. (They timed it so the probe arrived when it was crossing the ecliptic.)
In the end, I stayed home and customized some bass lines to old Neil Diamond songs, some Trick Pony, and Gretchen Wilson's "Red Neck Woman". That's a picture of Wilson, who is "slightly younger than my ex-wife".
Hell, yaw.
Last Laugh
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