One year ago today: June 6, 2015, Dwarf name rejects.
Five years ago today: June 6, 2011, my original gas budget.
Nine years ago today: June 6, 2007, the old thrift.
Random years ago today: June 6, 2005, a generic day.
MORNING
Here’s the tea dispensers at the Sweet Magnolia, self-serve. This is not a fast food joint and if you are a McD’s fan, then yes, the prices are steep. It’s a family-run business and that’s good enough for me. I guess we’ll soon find out how waterproof my shed is. The tropical depression is now a tropical storm. “Heavy downpours” with 5 to 7 inches of rain. I noticed the street in front floods, but not on my side, which is a few inches higher. I’m back in Hollywood.
I had to smirk at this documentary of Tobruk, the town where nothing has happened before or since. It portrays the Australians under Brit command as level-headed and clear-thinking. The Germans, continually referred to by the Jewish term “Nazi”, are shown as bumbling idiots, driving gasoline trucks into battle and charging dug-in machine gun pits with human wave infantry attacks. Folks, that never happened.
Fact is, the Germans didn’t have many tanks so they knew damn well how to use them right. And they did not waste them in broad frontal attacks. This documentary says the defenders "drew" the Germans toward their anti-tank guns, which is a lie. It was a German tactic the English did not catch onto and copy until much later in the African campaign. The English were not faster at learning back then than they are today with their immigration policies.
Fact is, they did not “defeat” the Germans, they merely used some 50,000 fully equipped men in a stronghold to blunt a German spearhead that was under-supplied at the end of a single thousand-mile supply line. The earlier Italians had dug over fifty miles of anti-tank ditches and hundreds of bunkers, making Tobruk, by far, the most strongly defended anti-tank fortress on the planet until Kursk in 1943. The British found a prepared fort when the Italians pulled out. And the Germans had nowhere near the customary 3:1 advantage for the attack.
It was a tough battle, alright. I’m just saying it was not the planned set-piece stolid defense the victors portray in their newsreels. It was not, as claimed, the first time the German Army was defeated because the German Army was nowhere near Africa at the time. It was a single German tank corps on an expeditionary campaign. Tobruk was so well-stocked that it was receiving 50 tons of mail a week. That’s correct, 50 tons. So don’t hand me this crap about hardships and bully beef. If you want gourmet chow, don't joint the army, Kyle.
Another fact is, Churchill knew Rommel was running a sideshow and poured the entire resources of the British Empire into Tobruk. He needed a victory, even a victory of defense, to present to the Americans. Not long after, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor, Churchill was overjoyed, and forgot about Tobruk. It fell to the next minor attack. And by the way, there were no Americans involved in the Great Escape.
Sherman tinker-toy.
NOON
Yep, the new bathroom floor is coming up. I know there is water damage, so why look for quick fixes. Off come the tiles and floorboards, plus, this will give me access to the location where the new wing was built and I can see what kind of challenge I’ll get with placing piers. I have no problem with replacing floor joists if need be. There are some pretty flowers, kind of light purplish-blue around the front that are also getting dug up.
I know I’m not the only one who says so, but have you ever noticed there is never a convenient day of the month to go pay your cellular bill? I going out to order the new sidecar tire and pay some bills. I won’t rest easy until I get confirmation that the bank has processed the documents for this new place. I’m informed that can take up to 21 days. Try as they might, the system will never convince me that cash is outdated, but they are sure trying to make it difficult.
Unsurprisingly, the new cabin has become a money pit. The good news is that the immediate needs are done and the daily requirements are tapering off. It’s still beyond my daily income, but as long as the trend is downward, we’re okay. It’s not like we need a paved driveway this week or next. Put another way, it will be a while before the place approaches the ideal of “enhanced mid-century charm”.
To those not aware, this is not the first time in my life I’ve bought a house for cash. What’s surprising me is how little other people have learned from the bust of 2006-2008. They put blinders on for years hoping it would not happen to them and they are doing the same thing all over again. I could care less for them, but their behavior is having a side effect that concerns me. Listen to this.
I go into the store to price things out and everything is considerably more expensive than it should be. A regular lawn mower is just not worth $250, but I think I know the reason. Homeowners who are too deep into their mortgages to back out now must represent the last and largest block of the old “middle-class” who, because they have not yet quite been milked dry, who still buy things they can’t afford unless it is on time payments. That’s a mouthful, but suffice to say, they are the remaining credit junkies keeping prices for home ownership and operation at all-time highs.
So when I stroll in looking for what I can buy for cash, all I get is the low end product. Above around $500, nothing gets bought in cash. Actually, standing behind people at the checkout tells me very few people have cash for much more than $50. Which is why I think there should be a separate checkout counter for people who delay the game putting everything on a card, or worse, writing checks while others are waiting in line. Only spastic assholes do things like that.
I mean that. Inconsiderate assholes write checks at the counter. Up yours if you disagree. Checks are something you send in the damn mail. If you ain’t got cash, don’t use the express lane, bunch of dumb jerkoffs.
AFTERNOON
Where have we seen this before? Everybody says otherwise, but it turns out nobody around here actually owns a sledge hammer, a pry bar, a good leaf blower, or a chain saw. No, Ken, I did not find this out by asking to borrow them, but by asking what features I should avoid. Owners can tell you that. If they have no idea then they do not own mechanical devices. When you own tools, you have easily expressible opinions and that is that.
I like this book, it has a light style, as opposed to some deep mathematical books that plow into your brain. You’ve already been informed I passed the exams, this time I’m looking for deeper meaning. Mathematic proofs scare many people. I already know the reason why, it is because they demand deductive reasoning. Most people are not any good at that. The easy way to consider this type of thinking is to look at the way people tend to group things by cause and effect. That’s the shortcut and after a while, they lose the ability to take things apart.
For example, when I say all the good women are taken, every dumb bastard will make the standard assumption. Because he sees the situation a one big problem that he can smart-mouth his way out of. It isn’t, and it can be broken down in dozens of smaller cause-and-effect sequences. So what I’m stating is an overview of very complicated situation which has no very simple answer. It’s also an emotional issue, where deductive reasoning plays an even smaller role in this life. Nonetheless, so it is with math. Those who don’t get it are the ones incapable of breaking down a bigger problem to its components.
Myself, I consider deductive thinking akin to cross-examination to get at the truth. However, I don’t use word connotations to trip up the other party and make implications. I’m only on chapter four, so the book is still defining terms. I like that, he isn’t missing a trick. Bisect means to cut into two parts, it does not mean the parts are equal. So far, reading this has put me back to the mode of memorizing it for the second time. I’m enjoying the mental exercise.
Chris McManus: Medicine, 2002. For his up-close study of "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture". Is this guy on the level? There are no published links for old Chris, although I suppose the willing could always check the m4m on Craigslist . . .
NIGHT
I’m packing up a trunk full of renovating type tools. Still no answer from JZ so I’m heading back myself if I must, soon as the storm is gone. I’ve accumulated so much stuff that this move is going to be difficult. Only one thing to do: Take the evening off and go play bass. I drove up to the Land Crab again and stood in for a couple hours, maybe a little less. Some of the material from way back came to mind, so I was able to put on a somewhat decent show.
Make no mistake, however. The Hippie has not changed in the least. He still tries to “teach” the bass player on stage and still considers following- the-guitarist as the supreme skill of others (although he himself cannot follow the simplest two and three chord specials). I am not singling out the Hippie because in Florida all guitarists have the same mental block. But even so, most of them would notice when the audience yells to turn up the bass. This happened last night again, yet no matter how many times it happens, the Hippie will always write it off as an anomaly.
Another item came up, it is the urban legend that a bass will “blow” a PA speaker. This is practically impossible, we’ve covered this territory. When I played with “Not Half Bad” I tried out dozens of brands of bass amps, and most of them were inferior to the bass speakers in every PA system since 1975. The only way to blow a PA speaker is to connect it through another amplifier, say for instance, a guitar distortion pedal. Idiots who do that blow speakers all the time.
But as for bass damaging a PA, that’s an old wives tale. You can turn most amps to the distortion level, which is borderline goofy. You don’t play any speaker in this range. However, if you don’t want to turn up the bass just because the audience wants to hear it, please don’t make lame excuses that your PA can’t handle it. Cut the guff—we’ve already played through that same PA at much louder volumes for years without incident. And the time the speaker blew, you did it, not me.
I have not played through a bass amp in thirty years, except on the rare occasions you meet the dorks with the speaker theory. I was hoping to run into the guitarist from last week, but he was a no-show. It’s all good, since it now looks like I’m moving permanently out of South Florida. Miami is the next Detroit. It’s headed for the same place all communities wind up once the European taxpayers move out or form enclaves.
Last Laugh
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