One year ago today: October 16, 2014, planning a failed trip.
Five years ago today: October 16, 2010, guitar mind-set.
Six years ago today: October 16, 2009, video work.
MORNING
Since I knew you’d ask, I put a couple of paint brushes in the tubes and snapped this photo. This is Hayley’s paint set. Customized. See the neat bottle cap paint wells? That is why the women I like think I’m such a sweetheart. Never you mind what the women who don’t like me think. They know that I know why they don’t like me, and that is precisely why they don’t like me. Because I don’t care and am proud of the reasons they don’t like me.
What’s this? Swampbilly is looking for a bass player? That would be fun without profit, but give the link a listen. I have not played in a band like that since my mid-teens. Why does the drummer have to count in a song with a long guitar intro? These, and other urgent questions are likely to remain unanswered for a long, long time. These guys are bad, but I have experience with bad bands. Lots.
Don’t listen too much to the Swampbilly band, the music is contrived to sound contrived. It will grow on you. And they stole my yodel gimmick. You know, where instead of actually yodeling, you speak “yodel-aye-eee-ooo yodle aye-eee. But that’s okay, I copied that from somebody myself, and so on.
I did finally get a response from that acoustic player in mid-Broward who plays a brand of Bluegrass, kind of like Irish jig music. It’s a hoot. What attracts me is his intention to form only a duo to play a few weekends a month. This guy is far more in touch with the evolution of music than your average Florida guitar flunky, who still lives in the 70s and is still working on the other two chords to “Mustang Sally”.
That’s good because he also wants somebody to take over some of the vocals. He’ll quickly learn to like the money I coax into the tip jar. This could be a rare find, inasmuch as I’m betting the guy could not be from Broward. He hasn’t got the guitar player’s disease, passed from teacher to student. This month Popular Mechanics even has an article on Jimmy Hendrix’s upside down Stratocaster. Claiming the unequal string length was the secret reason of this and that.
Morning coffee back at the comfy surroundings of the bakery has me planning to convert the scooter seat well into a compartment for a major 48 Amp deep-discharge marine battery. Like the one in the cPod. It is heavy, but has 16 times the cranking power and costs only half again as much as a new Pep Boys brand. And Pep Boys can keep their crap batteries, they are really bad. The conversion will take half a day, as I must redesign the basket and make the old battery cavity into a small storage bin for the papers, spare bulbs, and fuses.
NOON
The scooter conversion is going well. I’ve got all seven fans going inside, since I have to pop in and out for tools, and it is so snug inside I’d like to snooze through till tomorrow. But I promised Hayley I’d attend her party tonight, as a guest only. Unless there are single women present, then I’ll sing. But I wish I had not promised, It’s a lazy day and I just got back from a trip. You know the feeling.
I don’t have the know-how to determine if it is the battery or the charging system. So the charging is now done by the solar panel controller and let’s hope that suffices. Because that’s really all that I am in the mood for today.
And Trump scores another emotional victory with the increasingly vocal Silent Majority. When asked about foreign matters, in this case the Russian missle, he said, roundabouts what none of the other chickenshit candidates would dare. Look, we’ve got problems right here at home that need solving long before we start worrying who’s firing missiles in western Asia.
Fantastic! What about the grieving families? Let some Liberal go over and comfort them. That’s not the president’s job. What was an American doing flying over the Ukraine? There is some partial blame to be placed right there. In my life, I have declined plenty of cheap airline tickets because they flew over combat zones. To do otherwise is irresponsible.
Wal*mart does it again, the battery I need is on $61 and at that price, I’ll consider two. These are the deep discharge trolling batteries for marine motors. They can be discharge many times before losing their ability to hold a fresh charge. That’s the opposite of the junk sold by Pep Boys. I will have to replace the saddlebags on the Honda, but authenticity has never been a concern for my rig. Long distance travel is.
The two batteries would have 32 times the available cranking power on the Honda. This is a concession to the new cPod, not the motorcycle. The electric problems with the Honda were cured 100% by the new alternator. The new cPod, when I get around to it, is destined to be more livable. The single battery was enough to have music, light, and a fan all night. Then recharged by day using the large solar panels which are stored right now in the back shed.
Two batteries is nothing more than a backup plan. The Honda circuitry is protected by diodes so all current drain comes from the extra batteries, not the small Honda standard. A throw switch can operate the motorcycle off the marine batteries if all other electric fails, but I’ve never seen that happen in real life.
EVENING
It’s dark and raining. Please keep up for another two hours and I can legit miss the pajama party. Besides, I haven’t worn pajamas since I was maybe twelve. They were a post-war confidence trick to sell surplus uniform material anyway. Take a look at this picture and tell me what it is. I was stumped until I looked it up.
Give up? It is an Australian crow trap. Like all attempts by the Aussies to control the rampant spread of introduced species, these traps have no effect whatsoever on crow numbers. The reason for the elaborate setup is that smaller birds caught in the trap can be easily released through the green triangular hinge in the upper left.
One the songbirds are released, one crow is left in the cage. This works better at attracting more crows than putting addition bait. The other crows are then deported back to Mexico, or, I mean, they are taken care of. You see, they cannot simply be relocated, because crows can always find their way back across the border. Or, I mean, the frontier. The mountains. Oh, heck, they return to the same place they were not supposed to be. Dang, I’ve got myself in a trap here, don’t I?
I tried to watch a National Geographic documentary on wearable technology (think Google glasses) in 2015, but I could not take more than five minutes of the voice on that half-something faggy scientist who built the Darwin. People with voices like that, whether it’s real or a fake put-on like this one sounded, should be legally barred from making information videos. It was really that annoying.
EVENING
Rain. It’s 9:30PM and still at it so I get to stay home. Everybody over there knows I drive a motorcycle. Anyhow, I like Fridays at home. I made chicken soup and watched some downloaded videos on Pluto. I have never cared for that new NASA format that focuses half the program on people. I want just the scientific facts. The crux of the matter is that those dismal bastards know you don’t give a twit about Sally over in shipping but they make you sit through that crap to get the goods. Screw you , NASA. They sabotage the space program and now are bent of being regarded as heros.
While researching on my seven-segment device, I ran across Tindie. It appears to be a place where DIY types can market their products. If you are a beginner who needs some perspective on what is selling, it’s worth a browse. However, most of the products look factory-made. I paged through every screen there and saw only a couple of items I had not thought of or seen before. All the numeric displays used chips, which was my motive for looking. Mine doesn’t use chips.
I’m friends with the finches outside, even though they are considered a pest. That’s why I only feed them off season. Anyway, there must be some type of salt deficiency in their diet, which I would not expect in Florida. What happened is I had some stray sunflower seeds that go into my feed tube, along with gems like bread crumbs, leftover millet, and any peanuts that fall on the floor. These are ordinary fried in oil and salted sunflower seeds.
And they set off a mini-bird-riot. Unless there is something special about sunflower, it must be the salt. I tried mixing a few grains of salt, but they prefer the seeds. Who knows? Arnold, the avocado, is showing no signs of progress after two weeks. The other plants are still incubating, and I cannot find a ten pound bag of potting soil. It’s forty pounds or nothing.
Food, time to mention food. I tried a small tray of what was labeled Texas Toast. It is sliced Italian bread with a garlic spread. I thought, this is terrible. So I examined the ingredients. Sure enough, I guess I expected that garlic spread would, as a necessary ingredient, contain butter. Nope, in modern marketing, if it spreads, it is a spread. It was more like garlic flavored Vaseline. I added it to butter, half and half, to get something that resembled the namesake.
I also stopped at Starbucks to wait out an earlier rainshower. The late afternoon crowd reminded me of all the reasons I don’t care for Starbucks. And the overhead announced the Trump has caused one of the networks to roll back a debate schedule from 3 hour to 2. That’s one step closer to my bet that he will eventually charge the networks to air his speeches. This is common practive, and if he gave the money to charity, that would be another coup. And set a useful precedent.
By that I mean not that only people with their own money should run for president, but that swinging from candidates accepting money which amounts to bribery, to changing the ground rules so that candidates with no money can still vie for the position. That’s far-fetched, but a germ of an idea. Make campaigning dependent on promises, not who can afford the most air time.
Last Laugh
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