One year ago today: April 22, 2015, timely comment on silver.
Five years ago today: April 22, 2011, sewing class.
Nine years ago today: April 22, 2007, Sunday flea market.
Random years ago today: April 22, 2014, on Carnival Cruises.
MORNING
Much as we liked Lakeland, I’ve got plenty of misgivings about the area now. Not one of the properties we investigated (at my expense) was suitable, and we did look at 50. That’s exactly 50, not a rounded number. A couple more places are slated for a ‘boo, but I don’t like the crime statistics anywhere in that vicinity. I’ve warned the reader that the Trulia crime maps are relative, not absolute. What appears green may misleadingly indicate fewer violent incidents than the surrounding terrain. On such a scale, Hialeah would look green in Hell. Don’t fall for that.
My expensive method of visiting these areas one by one remains the only effective way of checking things out. What a pity this horrid wasted inefficiency is artificially imposed on the already weakening American economy. The next excursion is scheduled for this weekend, where we will inspect the property shown here. We have learned to insist on a large lot with a wide surrounding yard that can be fenced or hedged.
[Author’s note: a reminder to any new or recent readers, we are seeking a temporary mobile or manufactured home to use as an office. This is to cut down the severe travel time and cost where the equivalent hard cash should be building equity. I’m humorless about cash; we are regularly the only people in the room with any and most of it is under my jurisdiction. A fixer-upper is not out of the question, but our concern with crime is two-fold. One, the place will be vacant unless I move there. Two, when we are done, can we re-sell?]
Here’s the next installment in my fictitious saga of the silver market manipulation. Keep in mind, my view is just as valid and based on observation as the so-called pundits. The banksters are resorting to near terror-freak mode as they pull out the last stops on preventing silver from soaring to $200 per ounce. Their bag of tricks is as near-empty as their phantom trades on the New York exchanges y’day. A billion or two in sham silver certificate trades to clobber the price down under the dreaded $17 ceiling while the real silver remains securely in private hands. Waiting.
Along with the suckers who bought it.
I got halfway this morning when a dead short flattened my scooter electronics. I told you, the thing is well into scooter senility. Bypassing the operating lights, I got it started long enough to get home. That’ll be my chores for this afternoon. Finding opens is easy trial-and-error, but shorts can be a headache. So let me make a batch of tea and rest up.
This photo shows me pointing at the repaired fuse link on the batbike from y’day. The presence of yellow wiring on the Honda normally indicates circuits that I have replaced over the years. This is why I know if we have to rewire a house, it is not going to scare me away any more.
Baobab tree.
NOON
“The streets in Philadelphia are safe; it’s only the people who make them unsafe.” ~ Frank Rizzo, mayor.
Here’ my birdfeeder. Pretty nice for no blueprints, you can even see the fancy copper nails. What makes a seed dispenser top news? The sad part, that’s what does it—the birds will not use this feeder. This frustration is known to bird house makers, that sometimes the seemingly ideal location will get ignored. But a bird feeder? For some instinctual reason, they won’t take the food.
Trivia. Most medals and awards given to mathematicians specify the recipient cannot be over forty years of age. I suppose that could be because over that age, one experiences the "Nobel Prize Syndrome", where there is nobody in Sweden smart enough to figure out who qualifies. So they wind up giving awards to complete jarheads like Al Gore and Nelson Mandela, the terrorist. It's also you realize all the people your own age have done nothing with their lives and your birdfeeder becomes more important than they are.
The new neighbor is like me, he has no intention of living like a slave so that he can die in a big impressive house with a ton of money for other people to fight over. He has a big third-hand motorhome that barely moves under its own power, and tows his worldly belongings in a retired u-haul. He doesn’t play guitar and doesn’t understand the majority of the work I do in the yard, especially the electrical stuff. Florida is full of people who lived in New York and got out because of the taxes, corruption, and winters.
I forget what brought it up, but last day I had to explain to him that a woman, even your own sister, will never introduce you to another woman who is better looking or nicer than she is herself. It has to do with instinct or something. Something hard-wired; it never varies. Taken another way, women will only introduce you to ugly losers who nobody else wants. I used to find that insulting until I figured out it is an innate human female method of self-preservation.
By late afternoon, I had rectified the scooter short without finding the source of the problem. You can’t troubleshoot a scooter short the easy way like in a car. What? You want to know the easy way? Okay, assuming the problem is the battery going dead, you know there is a short. You disconnect the positive battery terminal and insert a volt tester, or the dandy little light I made up years ago. If the light stays on when the ignition is off, you got a short. Pull every fuse one by one until the light goes out.
Problem, with a scooter, there are no fuses and there are two paths off the battery, one of which stays dead until the engine is running. The short could be in either and that was the case here. It’s pretty confusing to find a short when you need to run the engine and the short is preventing that. Solution? A second battery clipped behind the starter circuit. Presto. I disconnected and reconnected everything until the problem went away.
During the process, I fixed all the body panel clips, outfitted a small took kit that fits under the seat, fixed the high-beam even though it never gets used, and installed a switch that will bypass the starter assembly if I ever need to test that segment again. The scooter bears only superficial resemblance to the way it came out of the factory in 2006. (I bought it new in 2009, still in the crate.)
AFTERNOON
It clouded over again, so more yard work, and I built a small oil bath for parts and such that get rusty on me. Why do they still make screws and bolts that can corrode? You’d think the first thing they’d apply to nanotech is making metals that hate rust. Get all your work done, once the summer sun burns off the cloud cover from the gulf before it gets here, you won’t even feel like mowing the lawn. And Pete the Cactus around back? He’s become Godzilla, two thousand pounds of scaly green. Or maybe it’s a she, because small patches of dark green mini-cactii are sprouting all over back there.
I’ve never seen the play. But then, I never did get along with women who wore way to much clothes. My brother was the opposite. Did I ever tell you when we used to play with toy trucks. I was always fascinated by the wheels and axles. He always imagined himself as the little plastic doll that was driving the toy.
My random blog chart says today I’m to write a quick list of new things I am responsible for happening. Hey, I need those rules to keep this blog spread over a variety of topics. This blog is now a major entity and that doesn’t happen if the rules are too narrow. So, what have I caused? You get one paragraph.
Okay, I’m the one that addicted my pal to eating peanuts in the shell. It was me that caused the casino to seal off the unused pedestrian gate up by CVS, I was cutting through that with my scooter. And those pigeons that messed up the sidewalk at the Russian market. Me. I dropped a huge bag of sunflower seeds and was in a rush so I left them there. That’s enough, what, you want I should get a guilt trip or something. Heck no, I’m making another pot of coffee.
And a big pot of beans with brown sugar. No, I don’t buy them at the store. If you read the label, they always contain modified corn starch. What’s the one thing all people with gluten, peanut, and wheat allergies have in common? Beans do not bother me, to my system, they are just another veggie. Poor people eat a lot of canned food, I forget who said that. Myself, the only canned foods popular around here is condensed milk, sauerkraut, and raw fish. That got me thinking. I eat a lot of food that comes in plastic bags. Apples, spuds, celery, rice, bread, and peanuts in the shell. What category does that make me? Space cadet?
NIGHT
You know, I’m beginning to suspect certain people I’ve known a long time are not handling this aging process very well. You never get away from stress, I believe the trick is to channelize it or avoid the worst of it. But what do you do when a good friend starts to go batty? No names, but this friend invested in silver. When it didn’t move for some years, it was sold at a loss and put into stocks. Now is the time to get out of stocks, particularly because this friend is not trading the stocks, but trying to make a living off dividends. I once calculated the cost of doing that and walked away from it.
This happened before with me. I advise them to get out of something and they don’t want to hear any advice. Then they lose and say I should have insisted. This time I said nothing. Silver is now the proverbial “one investor” away from collapse. Like the ’29 crash, the situation is hair-trigger. When that one investor too many asks for his silver and can’t get it, the jig is up. You might be curious to know the Germans who caught the banks fixing prices not long ago only pressed civil charges, not criminal.
That means what it has always meant to me. As long as the fine is trivial compared to the money being raked in, the banks will continue to break the law.
ADDENDUM
Quiet down, I know you’re all here for the breakdown of the musical portion of last evening’s episode. Foremost, it is not really amateur’s night. Same as last week, there are studio-trained “professional” musicians on stage, I had to wonder what some of them are even doing there. I was the only novice present and my purpose was to get my initial stage spot out of the way. It’s in both feet, ready or not. I have a long-standing aversion to musicians who rehearse to the limit and never get there.
I must consider playing sitting down even if I view that as a bad habit. Coordinating everything, the chords, the lyrics, the foot pedal, is still a challenge. It will be beaten down by experience, but meanwhile I have to at least try to compete with these slick operators, some of whom I suspect may only know three good songs. It is evident the influence of the troubadour mentality remains fixated in the guitar-mind. The fact that was a couple centuries ago has not yet penetrated their craniums.
Other than the novelty of a very 1960-ish type lady with plenty of wind instruments in expensive wooden cases, it was all guitar players. That’s relegating the ukulele to a brand of guitar, mind you. Note that except for the occasional laugh, there was zero audience participation. The one table of on-lookers sat there stoic except for my set. That’s where they sang along and almost stayed for another round. I say, almost, as they were beginning to leave when I got up there. But the bartender saw that, which is all I care about. Ask him today what he remembers about the show—that I almost sold that table on another round for him.
I required an unusual amount of time to set up, which I will address this week. They have a small powered PA, adequate for the room. I found it too loud for me, I’ll find a solution for that as well. Everybody played through a Fender, the brand that defines excellent sound, so everyone was happy with that. Using a headset because I have to be able to watch my hand as I play, the stage mic had to be unplugged, and it popped. XLR cables are not supposed to do that.
As for the music, I missed a few chords. This had no apparent reaction from the crowd. Some of the sing-a-long music I chose is not as well-known here as out west, I’ll quickly sift out the good ones. One yahoo who could not sing harmony worth a crap got up on stage and made a jerk of himself, often drowning out my far smoother vocals. I tend to sing by imitation, so you can’t just memorize my style. But that’s the type of goofy thing that makes it an open mic. There was also some bozo bashing on a tambourine around the other side of the room who was so bad I’m surprised somebody didn’t make him wear that thing.
What I garnered most was the methods of the other guitar players. Now that I have a week of experience, I’m easily able to analyze the performances. Aha, I was right, every one of them can play ordinary rhythm chops. They will deny this to the hilt, but my suspicions are right. Their game plan is they don’t want to play rhythm, the hypocrites. They want to play lead, where they are the hero, at least in their own eyes,
I picked up on it right away. They do what I do, even though I’m the rankest of beginners. They play a recognizable intro or the like and then farmer chorded through the rest of the tune. This is markedly different behavior than what they will play if they think they are fronting a band. Invariably, these are the same guitar players with the “bass is easy” mentality. Yeah? Fact is, they want you to fill in the equivalent of their missing rhythm pattern while they show off. It never occurs to them you don’t want to play easy bass, probably because that is the only type of bass they can play but never admit it.
Oh yes, I watch this very closely with a new perspective. So, I was right all along. They can do it (strum simple rhythms), but don’t want to. Their egos have become their biggest barrier to success. Folks, there is a lot to be said that at my age, I’m just starting with coffee houses, and at a similar age, most of them are winding up there and the younger guitarists I saw are headed straight in that direction. I will redouble my efforts in the upcoming week to incorporate these new factors into my act.
In particular, I will comb over the material to find aspects I can utilize that musicians, especially guitar players, would find mentally objectionable. This is an open field in many ways. From what I saw last evening, most of those guitarists would consider audience participation as interfering with their look-at-me showcasing. And audience participation is my total show. It’s challenging, but I’ve done this sort of thing before.
[Author’s note: this is the source of the offensive joke that I have memorized a list of the 250 mistakes all shithead guitar players make, that all I have to do is go on stage and not make them.]
Playing on stage is necessary, in my viewpoint, but I see that it does not always have the same effect on others. Now that I’ve got time with the guitar up there, I begin to see a different perspective and it is not that flattering for others. I now see why so many guitar players think “bass is easy” and think it should “follow” them. All the players last night lacked one thing I have in plenty—imagination. Only one of them caught on that I was working the audience and he tried to go on after me and do the same. Fell on his ass, because he assumed it was easy.
Wrong, it demands the fastest of thinking and attention to the audience. Within seconds of trying to copy me, he was forgetting lyrics and dropping chords. He also reverted to the same “boom-chicka” beat most guitar players will tell you they won’t play. I should have pointed that out and said to him, “guitar is easy, follow me”.
Last Laugh
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