Yesteryear
One year ago today: May 9, 2015, Bibles, a form of gossip.
Five years ago today: May 9, 2011, a cathedral too far.
Nine years ago today: May 9, 2007, I like Audacity.
Random years ago today: May 9, 2010, chopping 40 lb. of cabbage.
MORNING
Here’s a stock photo. My supply has dwindled to nothing, it will take a few days to get the repaired camera up to snuff. This is synthetic gold, a process I don’t understand. It is grown into these crystals from some type of chlorine compound and can only be told from gold by a chemist. It makes sense there is somebody working flat out to produce this material, let’s hope they do not succeed.
That got my brainwaves meshed and I have come up with something new. Yodel as a replacement for fiddle riffs. To me, the ultimate yodel would be “Orange Blossom Special”, with some sharp cookie on the melody line. Try to imagine that, I’m not even going to provide links. I wonder if the concept is original?
Then I thought I’d do that spoof on Green Day’s “Good Riddance” only to discover that band cranked out some 240 hits in a matter of months. Wasn’t it Stalin who said quantity has a quality of its own? The spoof is Things You Don’t Say To Your Wife.
And you know, I’m not the least concerned about announcing what I do even though I know my competition reads this blog. There’s not one of them that could learn a new song well enough in the next month, much less the next couple of days. I reiterate that I have never yet seen a Florida guitarist learn a new song. It happens, but I’ve never seen it. I’ve heard the results, and months of lead time isn’t enough.
The 5:00AM scan of the interior shows [house] prices have stopped falling. The institutional buyer(s) continue to buy all lower end properties, which is the root cause of some people saying there is a “boom”. Careful if you do your own study, because the prices that are falling are mainly in the places in bad neighborhoods which are falling because they are not selling. You must check all sales, not only those in your price range. Most sales last week were above my upper limit, and those prices have doubled since 2013.
As silver plunges below $17 as the NYMEX opens, the sales of real silver reach another low but can the banksters keep it there? That’s another statistic you be careful reading. The prices in New York are silver certificates, while the prices overseas, particularly Asia, are for the actual metal. Once again, the bank-owned SEC stands aside while the big manipulators work, ready to leap in and halt trading when the small fry try to get in on the action. It’s disgusting, really.
It was Trump that made this blog political, or at least the little bit political that it is. My interest is mainly economical and business-based. I don’t support much, but I am against anything that gives unfair advantage to the existing order. I still maintain that nobody should have a life of ease except by his own hard work and entrepreneurial genius in his own lifetime. No fat cats with zero business sense buying politicians to preserve his inherited position. Hence, I would tax all transfers of wealth to family members after that member is 21 years old. But that’s another issue.
Even if Trump gets in, I can’t see America returning to its old ways for one very powerful reason. You see, the corruption of the last half-century has trained the majority of Americans how to cheat the system—they watched how cheats time and again rose to heights of wealth and power while the law-abiding got nothing but the short end. They got their privacy invaded, their taxes raised, and their family groped at the airports.
We can never go back to the situation where the bulk of the population respected and trusted DC. Difficult as it is for many to make the connection, the fundamental distrust of government results from naïve but well-meaning prohibition. You make things that ordinary people do into illegal activities, it accustoms them to evade the law. Before long, the average citizen and his teenage son know where to find a bootlegger, a drug pusher, a prostitute, and a high stakes poker game.
Note what I said presupposes the “criminals” to be males. This is not sexism, but a realization that most laws are made by men against other men. When women commit the same misdeeds, the system does not arrest, convict, or punish them to anything like the same degree. The point here is if you bring back the old ways, you’d be asking for trouble. Back then, the ordinary man was easy to nab because he had no idea how to cheat the system.
This time around, he’s had fifty years of lessons and a lifetime of watching police dishonesty on TV. The dumbest of criminals now knows mostly what not to do, which created the spiral of police power abuse which became ever more prevalent when mere deterrence didn’t work anymore. America can’t go back, the system has been training its own bad guys for too long. Where people used to fight speeding tickets, they now buy radar detectors—because the police have taken to using traffic stops as a shakedown tactic.
Trump has stated he will allow police to “do their job”, but it will not be long before the police turn those powers inward on the entire population. For, you see, the absurdity of prohibition works both ways.
Photo made of potato starch.
NOON
The nearby photo is one of the “impossible” shots taken by the $15 Argus. As I like to put it, the camera you have on hand is worth ten times the rest. If you see the crescent moon on a rare cloudless day, then you are as happy as I am. It may be hard to see, but center left of the picture is the security camera attached to the doorpost. And slightly right of center is the new moon. This is a remarkable feat for this camera, the photo, alas, does not show how dark it really was. Shine on, Argus moon.
It was understood the banks would quickly use the system to play buyers off against each other before the “deadline”. Now I realize the deadline is not there. It’s a fake-out to get the offers in as soon as possible and the scam is that the bank doesn’t have to pick the highest or any offer. Back to the “auction scam”. If they don’t, then it isn’t for sale.
Now I discover the bank is using the information to set the price they pre-calculate each bidder can “afford”. Don’t go laughing that I should have known this all along. Remember, this house-hunting over the past year has gone far greater and more intense than the average consumer. There is more to our shopping than is revealed in this blog. One of the items is carefully encoding what information is given as “proof of funds”.
The relay is simple. The bank will hold out for more money if they think you have more money. And I think this is unfair--setting the price by checking the buyer’s credit score and other things (as opposed to any underlying value of the property). I have decided to institute measures to prevent this activity. I feel the bank is already cheating by removing the buyer’s element of urgency, that is, real buyers are not set up to hold out for long months after they decide to sell. Banks are not wrong to do this, but it causes a market imbalance.
Another aspect which I want on record is that during this entire episode, I have only received meaningful help from anyone except those expert on a facet or two of the process. But the list of people who did not contribute a thing is far longer. So if someone things it funny I’ve overlooked or missed something in the learning process, it is not like they had anything worthwhile to contribute. Most of them bought houses with a mortgage, which I now see is a completely different animal to what I’m doing. I don’t solve problems by throwing a few hundred thousand borrowed dollars at it.
For now, just keep in mind no way a seller is going to be fair about a damn thing if he knows a purchaser is good for ten times as much money than is being offered. And I’ve been suckered into that exact situation. I’ve called a meeting to put a stop to it. Proof of funds is now contingent of proof of integrity. Since I can’t force banks to have integrity, I can record it when they don’t. My database now has a field for names. Don’t let yours be on it.
Bob “Robert” Glasgow: award in Chemistry, 1994. Bob’s the senator that made buying glass beakers and flasks without a permit illegal in Texas. He had not the wherewithal to know that meth labs could substitute any type of glass container, or go shopping in Oklahoma. Bob failed high school chemistry when the explosion damaged his brain, causing him pursue law instead.
You don’t know who the guy in this next picture is. He was a professor by age 25 and was the man who gave the famous “Rivers of Blood” speech back in 1968. Anyone who thinks it is “neat” for European countries to allow non-white immigration should be forced to read what this man had to say. And that was some 60 years ago now, but applies to all of Europe. There is a reason non-whites are flocking to the west and not the other way around.
True, there are other options, for example, maybe I have no clue how to search on the correct criteria, or maybe there is a law against my topic. But just you search and try to find some amateur medley arrangements. No, not commercial medleys that became hits, but just a list of tunes that are musically compatible enough to make up a medley. Not only can I not find a solitary list, it seems the countless guitar freaks on youTube don’t like recording them either.
There is no shortage of guitar lead break “medleys” but these are useless for my purposes and not at all the real thing. I would not say much if these were ordinary occurrences of failed searches on obscure subjects. I’m referring to the seemingly incredulous number of searches that happen here on fairly major topics that come back with nothing. Who would have thought searching for musical medleys would be futile? The Internet seems to be mainly Chapter One of all the easy surface knowledge on the planet.
[Author’s note: after more searching, I finally found this sort of compilation of “nonsense lyric” tunes on Laughing Squid. If you eliminate the too slow passages, I had already guessed the top six tunes on the list I’d made off the top of my head.
Although that session is not what I had in mind, it nonetheless has been done. Hence, I change my criteria to maybe tacking these segments onto the endings of songs where I leave out the instrumental breaks. We shall overcome.]
I have a backup plan, as usual. Since I could not find the “opposite” of guitar ballads, why not find tunes where the lyrics tell a far lighter-hearted story? It’s a dreadful thing to sit through some guitar player trying to emote his way through another shop standard, so let me look at the what should be delightful to hear.
ADDENDUM
Double ha! The stinking, steaming cauldron of party politics continues to tip over as Trump crushes the rotten infrastructure of the former Republican party. I do not know that shabby maze of dark alleys, but I know that the insiders who support it are not waking up to the fact that millions and millions are voting for Trump regardless of what the conspirators do. And the voters will be in a foul mood if the special interest supporters short-circuit them.
The party hacks seek to override the factors that have made Trump the popular candidate. They don’t understand why their entrenched double-dealing and underhanded dirty little bag of tricks isn’t forcing this contender into line like it always did before.
Dirty because its main purpose is to pressure anybody who gets to the candidacy level to fall in line with the existing corruption or face withdrawal of support from non-elected factions which ignore the will of the people. Problem, Trump’s popularity is exposing that cesspit for what it is. If the remaining internal Mafia of the Republicans doesn’t wholeheartedly get behind the people’s choice, they are only revealing their own hidden agendas and will suffer accordingly.
I cannot underscore enough that I do not understand the workings of the political system. But I recognize crooked practice and warped thinking when I encounter them. If, on the bottom line, these dishonest Republicans do anything now that does not reflect the wishes of the majority of electors, they are only laying bare that they are nothing but political parasites bound to worshipping the defunct apparatus that brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy.
And I will be among the first to dance on their graves.
Last Laugh
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