One year ago today: October 15, 2014, celestial figure eight.
Five years ago today: October 15, 2010, Stork’s coffee house.
Six years ago today: October 15, 2009, her highness.
MORNING
First, this blurry picture. It is intentional. Amtrak is now encouraging passengers to take these “blur photos”, even giving instructions on how to take them with a digital camera. This is the best I could come up with, so I’m not sending it in to the contest. But heck, I’ve been taking these kind of pictures for decades. However, I don’t know if I’ll be riding the Amtrak for much more. I’ll tell you why. They’ve changed the ride format and the trips now have price competition. First, the ride.
I refused to sit next to a social reject who was causing a rowdy disturbance on the station platform, acting like he just got out of jail. He spent the wait continually telling his social worker he would “never go back to the old ways”, that he was fine now. You sit next to him, I ain’t.
When pressed for an explanation why I cannot have a window seat, Amtrak fed me that rehearsed nonsense that “in case” a family group gets on, they want to seat them together. Ah, instant loggerheads with me. This was the second trip where the car was half empty and there were no family groups in evidence. “In case” is not good enough for me. Having one kid or fifty does not make anyone better or more deserving than the next guy. The nuclear family has not been a fact of American life at any point during my lifespan. When is the last time you saw a “family” on public transport.
If that offends anyone, I ask just who they think they are? Excuse me, I’ve got five kids, you go sit by the drunk. Well, it isn’t that bad, but it is heading that direction. The solution is simple. If you want special seating arrangements, then pay a fee for reserved seats. I will say once more that the only inherently unfair criteria that Americas will normally accept is first-come-first serve. You don’t mess with that. It is unfair because it does not allow for different levels of involvement, but I just said, it is the one Americans will tolerate.
Here’s another blurry picture, but this time I had to move fast. By insisting, I got a window seat. I don’t know if you can see it, but the car is almost empty. For the record, I like a window seat precisely because I am traveling alone. I want the scenery for comfort and if I doze, a wall to flop against. And people only on one side. Face it, the inside seat is [potentially] stuck between restless aisle-walkers and cell phone addicts.
I’ll write a letter to Amtrak advising them the dangers of starting down that sordid path of favoring one group over another. It can only lead to social quicksand at the end and winds up costing them dearly in the long run. No favoritism to any special group of any stripe. Let them ask for my seat, not Amtrak.
NOON
Did I mention price competition? Notwithstanding the above disappointment with Amtrak, today was enough to schedule a review of my entire holiday policy. The summer of ’15 was unusual in the number of trips that I made in Florida. Five. And four of them were times JZ came along. These trips always turn into great adventures because, well, JZ is normally cheap and I know how to spend a dollar. So Amtrak has now reached the price levels where it cannot compete for my money or my time. I’ll go on to explain.
You see, he is not fussy enough and I am too fussy. You’d think when we team up, it would balance out, like half and half. Wrong! How many times I gotta tell you, together we get all the best women in the place. This is not once in a while, we get them every time we head out. The exceptions are when there are simply no “best women” in the vicinity.
That’s the relevance of this picture. That’s the stretch of highway between Palm Beach, well, actually West Palm Beach, and Okeechobee. It parallels the Amtrak rails most of the way and has become a familiar stretch to JZ and I. Um, it is only four-lane part of the path. Anyway, this is the road normally taken to the Florida interior. And between the women and the low cost, I think Amtrak is now a distant cousin for holiday travel in this regard. I still want to cross the continent by train soon. As in before I croak.
Let’s put some sample numbers to my priorities here. The trip today was the standard Winter Haven, coffee and pie, and back again before dark. The prices were $65 for the train, $10 for the meal (at Nell’s), $2 for batteries, $1 for a local paper, and sundries totaling $81.80. This was fun in prior years when JZ and I hit Marco Island annually, but it cannot compare with the four trips last summer. Oh, and that total includes a $2 cup of tea in the “café car”.
Here is the spot to mention that Amtrak is also cutting services without notice. While the full menu is posted in the stations, the little old ladies next to me said only “light dining” was available in the dining car. That meant microwaved burgers (re-wrapped Big Macs) and some form of pseudo-food they’d heard of but I haven’t. Ah, I caught it on the recorder, it is “Jimmy Dean sausage”. What the hell is that? Train food is too expensive for me, but what if you had planned on it? It’s not like the old days when the stations had a cafeteria. Amtrak is sinking by the stern.
Back to prices. The average trip to Arcadia, not counting entertainment, costs JZ and I $57. That’s total trip costs of gas and munchies on the road. Once we get there, it is up to each to pay his own, since it is comparable to what would be spend staying in Miami. Sometimes I’ll insist on something super and pay the difference, but entertainment and sleeping is not included, because the guy that gets a girl first has to get his own room, even after having paid for the first one. Um, that’s usually me, since JZ never gets one before I do. What? Oh, well the last batch had their own homes and I stayed there. With the money saved, I took them anywhere they wanted for breakfast. But I’ve said too much already.
EVENING
Back home by 6:00PM and I had a heck of a time starting the scooter, even with the solar charger. But the real disappointment was the trip today. Amtrak cannot match the intense pace, great conversation, and antics of JZ and I on the trail. Sure, we can squabble like cats and dogs, but when we are out there, things happen. Remember the pickle incident in Deland, the boobie show in Naples, the cabaret in Arcadia. I would gladly have paid for the entire trip if JZ had the day off.
In Winter Haven, it is the south-west end, and Nell’s is just on the fringe of that. As for pie and coffee, I had the noon meal instead. Pork chop with mashed and boiled cabbage. I happen to like boiled cabbage, with just salt. And see now that Nell’s cannot keep good help and I could hear the waitresses crabbing about not being paid some days. I tipped heavily. She had blue eyes. Not as blue as mine.
Nor can I walk that far. If JZ was along, we tend to drive around a whole town, particularly if I have a pre-printed map with sample properties. I think I already regret not buying the place in Arcadia full price, but that’s another tale from the trailer court. I’m saying, I’ve never really seen all of Winter Haven. Or Lakeland. I’m phoning JZ tomorrow. I can easily afford another trip this month.
The photo is another train window special. These are the interminable orange orchards around Sebring. I don’t really know that town. But I do know only fat women get off the train there. I occasionally see a small orchard for sale. Working my teens away in Washington State taught me that orchards are high maintenance. If I bought one, it would rapidly fall into decay. And I don’t want that because I also like orchards.
So, as far as a day trip on the Amtrak to Winter Haven, both events have the polish wearing off.
ADDENDUM
Peering at Wochit (say “watch it”), I instantly shy away from their policy not to allow anything to be created anonymously. This is consistent with my findings that the entire publishing industry is completely sewn up in that regard. You must reveal your true taxable identity before you get a dollar. This is the opposite of most “self-employment” startups, where you operate a while under the table before going legit.
It is difficult to get information from them because they are heavy users of jargon. Most non-industy people do not know what a white-label product is. It’s where the user creates something and sells it to another concern that slaps its own logo on the box. Like your no-name supermarket brands. The creator does care who sells it, the seller does care who creates it.
They have an interesting “knowledge base”, another bit of hipster jargon that I have not heard since I studied expert systems back in the 1980s. These are supposed to be links to information that culls the best experts in each field, handing you the benefit of their collective intelligence. Right, there, I’m suspicious. The phone company taught me a lot about collective anything.
Wochit seems to work by taking original stories and cutting them into new patterns, then adding a voice-over. I’m trying to find samples but am beginning to think I’ve found something that is too new for that. The goal of these “video” websites is making money, or in hipsterese to “monetize” your output. Anyone who has had those annoying in-your-face overlays on youTube will know where all this is going. The ads will get progressively harder to avoid and will hopefully spawn other anti-ad countermeasures.
You will also get cryptic referrals to “CMS”. This is various attempts at making sense out of the chaos created by magnificent idiots like Tim Berners-Lee. He could not type and did not understand the most basic concepts of typesetting. To this day, programming and maintaining a web site suffers from his ignorance of visual display requirements. That’s why you get these “Content Management System” attempts at streamlining web content. The trade-off is the boring redundancy of most sites.
My first glance tells me this Israeli product is a boon to amateur plagarists of the Internet. It will attract all kinds of social video attention, but since that is shallow, it will quickly degenerate into check-out grade spectacularism. What I cannot find is videos made with this that show intellectual content. Maybe it isn’t there. But folks, this is all about my declining blog readership. If you dig deeply into Wochit, you will find the blog video section that explains all the research I’m up to.
The concept is to let people talk over redacted material, not that original, or does that promote originality. You see, the software can clearly be used backwards. Couple that with with underactive imaginations who can load random media and they can crank out schlock without limits. Kind of like Fox News.
Last for now, the how-to videos that accompany the site are typical of what kind of results to expect. Very unprofessional and not user-level. The videos become “assets”, a total misuse of the word, and the final product still looks like those blocky 1990s “frames” web pages. I don’t like software that forces a new vocabulary on you. Teaser? Graphics package? Closer? But with my readership now regularly dropping to less than 100 per day, I’ll consider anything.
Yeah, I know. Bitch, bitch. When I began, my readership was six people a day for nearly a year.
Last Laugh
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