February 15, 2016

Yesteryear
One year ago today: February 15, 2015, it’s an epheremis.
Five years ago today: February 15, 2011, too many admirals.
Nine years ago today: February 15, 2007, more doggie wigs.
Random years ago today: February 15, 2009, she was nice when we met . . .

MORNING
           Trivia. American alligators are twice the size of the only other species of alligator in the world, which is native to China. This is going to be another nothing day, so no need to buckle up. I’ll tell you what happened and you can compare it to your nothing days, if you ever have them. I gave up reading the “Rise and Fall of the Great Nations”, at least as a project. Maybe a chapter or so now and then. But the book is too deep to digest in one sitting. Nell’s, that was the name of the eatery in Winter Haven that I used to have coffee at from the Amtrak. Gone.

           How about Super Rat? No, he has not disappeared. But all the Havahart traps are gone. Super Rat has twice gotten out of spring traps. He got his nose whacked in the process, so he disappears for a bit after that. He cautiously returns once in a while, maybe a couple days per week. Thus, I still have to trap him.

           That was quite the find, a complete booklet of my daily chores and such from 2001. That would otherwise have been an undocumented year. You may notice the postings appear, be sure to read some of them. They are quite short, any photos shown are likely to be generic, as I didn’t have any type of camera. Photography was an expensive hobby back when Kodak essentially ran things. I forgot that I’d written that journal, but there it is, 91 pages in my own handwriting. It ends abruptly on June 18, 2001.
           Plus, clipped inside the back cover was a 2001 desk calendar with a variety of notes which I may add to the daily record. I say may because some of it is junk. Like I wrote letters all day on February 18th and got a haircut on the 24th. Other entries are mysterious today, like the word “Hannibal” on the 10th and on the 17th, I paid 24% tax on a matured CD that only paid 7%.

           The banksters plunged silver again. It’s quite legal what they are doing. At any price rise, they flip a few millions ounces between themselves at an agreed upon lower price until nobody out there will pay anything more. Silver sank 40 cents (over 2.5%) in one hour this morning. But don’t you worry, it’s a pressure cooker on a tinderbox. And the pressure is building.

           Face it, train travel is green. The catch is, like the bus, the train doesn’t go where you want to go when you want to go there. For me, this is not a problem, since I never get lost. I just redefine where I was going (ha, I read that somewhere). The other trade-off is that train stations are not in the best parts of town, so there is the added cost of Ubering your ass out of the ‘hood. And I don’t like Amtrak as much as I did just a year ago. That’s when they brought in their highly discriminatory practice of packing single travellers together at one end of an otherwise empty passenger car. Consider it forced assigned seating unless you fit the cutesy Amtrak definition of “a family”.

Wiki picture of the day.
BMW Headquarters
NOON
           The featured item on Wiki today is a compact FM transmitter designed to look like a receiver. The range is five miles, but it will network. Hmmm. Working off your cigarette lighter, it is advertised for pirate radio, crisis zones, or situations where “unbiased reporting has become unavailable”. Double hmmm. It is meant for use in areas with “tightly controlled communications infrastructure” and is “very hard for authorities to detect”.

           You can get most other information except the price of the damn thing at their website. And deeply buried in today’s post is information that I’ve put in a low-ball offer on a 3 bedroom in “the central Florida Highlands”, an area that is 95% same as me. And statistically, there are 35 available females, but careful. If a woman in a small town is 18-44 and single, there’s something is haywire, and it ain’t stored in the barn.
           But, the offer went in because it is only 15 miles to Lakeland. Hell, it’s 13 miles from here to Ft. Lauderdale. And I’m a Texas boy, used to driving 70 miles for a cup of coffee after midnight. Each way. I doubt the offer will be accepted, but I need to know exactly how that works, too. Nobody says, but it stands to reason sooner or later, something will go wrong at the other end and somebody will take my standing “half-price” offer.

AFTERNOON
           Rehearsal was cancelled, so I used the time to actually get the old Zoom MTR to play a 3/4 time beat. There is only one auto-pattern that’s close, and it’s for 6/8 time blues. The instructions are maddening, I just kept at it until I got it working. The tempo of Tritt’s “Here’s A Quarter” is 113 bpm and I’m getting more confident with the Tascam.
           Documentaries. They are getting harder to find. Instead you get tons of those shallow “docu-tainment” productions, mostly click-bait. Calling themselves a hour-long trip to Mars story, that means 50 minutes of listening to how tough it was on the janitor and the office steno. The older material is better, I watched Cronkite on Dien Bien Phu and Ataturk. Don’t you hate these morons who say “MOOSE-ta-fah”.
           As for recording, I’ve overestimated my ability to play the CanCan polka on bass. True, with my skills, I could record it slower and give it a boost later. But you can’t do that on stage. The layered recording is already a severe handicap to realism. When I grew up, musical instruments were often played to match some quality in the vocals. Prime example, Johnny Cash. You can’t get that effect when each instrument is played in isolation. The musician is paying attention to the wrong things.

EVENING
           You’ve met this little doggie before, at least if you read today’s blog nine years ago. By coincidence, today is the day this little guy appeared on the scene. I think it’s a he, I dunno. That was the mascot model for the wig shop. If you are still doubtful or laughing, may I inform you the lady who invented these novelty wigs has personally met The Beatles, Tom Selleck, President Nixon, and got more time on Letterman’s show than, well, I’ll quit it with the names here. There is a plan afoot and I don’t want to give away the ending.

           I said this is coincidence, and I’m leery of such things. Nonethless, make sure you follow the links back to 2007 for the the next little while to see if any more appears on this topic. I today sent an e-mail to Arizona with my plan on how a book of memoirs should be structured. Did I get that right, “memoirs”? Or is it biography? Well, I mean the one that does not have to be exactly factually accurate or in context. I think that is “memoirs”.

           How’s my nothing day shaping up so far? I didn’t even set foot outside, although my perimeter sensors say it was a mild 72F all day. Trivia, did you know the word sensor was invented for Star Trek in 1958? The Almanac says it is nearly Ember Day. Ember? Here it is, a religious day of fasting. Hey, hump that, Buddha is proof you can be just as much a believer as the next guy and eat well, too. Then, I learned how to dance the Macarena. Because you never know when you’ll get flash mobbed on Calle Ocho.
           I also took a look at square dancing because I wanted to learn the right way to do-si-do. Yes, that’s the correct spelling, it comes from the French back-to-back. Well, I found out that there is an opposite to a do-si-do. Ready? It is a do-si-do around your partner counter-clockwise. And it is called a “see-saw”. Man, am I getting old.


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