One year ago today: July 9, 2015, that de-escalated quickly.
Five years ago today: July 9, 2011, bingo and air conditioning.
Nine years ago today: July 9, 2007, no loot in Scotland.
Random years ago today: July 9, 2010, identical face-squints.
You win. Today is full of gifs I'll leave in, even though this is not a gif blog. All gifs and external links are beyond my control and most eventually break down.
MORNING
Here’s the first piece of bad news from the renovation, and it is not the house itself. On Thursday, we lifted one of the floor boards to make some determinations. I told you what happened years ago in the Everglades, how I was outside for twenty minutes before the skeeters even began to bother me. But remember the picture of those thumb-sized horseflies that attacked JZ instantly? All we did this time was step down onto the sand and snap a chalk line.
JZ is now too bitten up by insects, we cancelled today’s trip. There is nothing under that house, just dry sand. And we were both wearing long pants, I was actually in the pit over ten minutes and nothing bit me. I cannot allow this to happen again. I’ll rake the sand because some leaves have blown under the house and spray. Unless this can be solved, I cannot let him work under the building. I’m serious, the guy has real problems with insects, and he’s not the wimpy kid from down the block.
But I will tell you who is wimpy. Bright Star credit union. That is the one I arbitrarily chose because their on-line reputation is not quite as bad as the rest. Well, it is now. What a bloody bunch of useless incompetents. Tell me it takes two days to make a decision, they do, so when I’ve heard nothing in three days, I drive over there. I don’t get paid to drive over there. I never give my home phone number to a bank and there is no law says I have to. Nor can they legally refuse service over it—she was just doing it to see if she could pry the information out of me.
The very reason people form trusts is to block personal information from twits like her She stalls a decision until 4:00 PM, then books off. Leaving me in the room with some junior employee who has to gloss this over. Oh, ho, lady, you’ll book off when the work is done. She needs to be taught a very valuable lesson. She fucked over the wrong guy this time. I’m ex-phone company. I know precisely how to deal with old bitches who pull stunts like that.
She can keep her dead-end job parroting the rule book, but she can kiss her career good-bye. Just ask Patsie, who has not yet spotted that a lateral promotion is not a real promotion, what happens after you try to jack me around.
Vote. Or else.
NOON
Signs that Florida is third world. One of the telltale symptoms is startup industries that make money off trash that used to get thrown away. This morning I drive to the supermarket to pick up a few boxes for my remaining belongings. All the boxes are now flattened and locked in a wire cage. Same thing at the dollar store, then the Russian store. So I ask the guy working outside, he says they came by and offered to pay for the boxes, even gave them the locking wire cage for free.
Now that’s not what makes it third world. Lots of cities have cardboard recycling plants. They take a long time to set up. That’s not the issue. The issue is how, so far in advance, did they know which year and which month I would be moving? It is the answer to that, Sparky, is what makes the situation third world. It’s the mentality they’ve got, you see, now people have to go buy new boxes and that creates even more business. Yeppers.
In my mandate to provide a top-notch show, I’m looking at actually learning Johnny Cash with “I’ve Been Everywhere”. No cheating, you cannot read the lyrics, you have to memorize them, and there are four long verses. Okay, since half the job is making it look easy, I’ll pick a random verse and see how that works for me. When I get a tough song, then I reward myself with an easy one. That would be “Get Rhythm”. Listen for the chunky guitar part, I replace most of the bass line with that riff.
JZ called, some of his insect bites have given a possible allergic reaction. Seriously, I’m thinking he’s got some condition. Let me look for solutions, good friends are too rare. Plus although he’d never admit it, he’s wary of being left behind on this project. He’s more aware than anyone that not keeping up with me can be an irreversible situation, if only because I build on new information daily. There is nothing unusual about that but so many people don’t do it. They have cable TV and that is their daily “new” information source. Right, Ken?
AFTERNOON
The last of the boxes are stacked near the door. Saying goodbye to this place is not hard to do, I’ve said before that when I’m in a city I do most of my living as if I’m in a small town. I never go shopping in Miami or pubbing in Davie. I visit mostly long-time family friends, so moving to a smaller city is barely an adjustment for me. Once it cools down later, I’ll vacuum the corners, but not before I get a late siesta. The batbike is loaded up and ready for the final one-way trip any time.
Sorry, no pictures with the new camera. I won’t explain but the first thing I did was break a plastic chip off the memory stick door. The camera won’t work unless that hatch is closed. Then I lost the chip, so I’ve got a replacement waiting for the glue to dry. It’s an Olympus, one of the brands I checked out before and had similar problems with lack of basic ruggedness. Also, it prevents the battery from charging. Way to go, Olympus. May you be the next Kodak.
While doing the last major cleaning, I had the customary documentaries in the background, and one was on the mercantile system, or mercantilism. I’ve often used the term in the simplest sense, that everybody’s gain is somebody else’s loss, but it is actually a grander theory than goes back centuries. When applied to countries, it is a concept of regulations that tend to make the nation rich, as opposed to the merchant class. The problem is, it works equally well by impoverishing one’s neighbors. England was a good example, forbidding the colonies to trade with each other or anyone else except merry old England.
The topic got my ear because we were not taught this concept in either economics nor accounting school. I have extensive training in both fields, but mercantilism is apparently written out of the texts. You get that with English history. For example, England does go on about how they abolished slavery. Yes, but they did so only because they saw the US was industrializing faster than anyone imagined, and they had to cut off the supply of slaves as fast as possible.
I was also amused to see this old movie about the British in Pretoria, complaining to Kruger that they had no “representation”. Ha, all they wanted was the gold. That will be the day an Englishman cares about slavery or elections when there is a dollar to be made. All highly amusing indeed, the spin those Brits put on their worst offenses. They are the source of that urban legend that the south of Africa as native black homeland. False, the areas the Boers settled were uninhabited, even Cecil Rhodes, the guy to nearly bankrupted England, admits there was nobody there.
But you can’t free the oppressed unless you can find some. So when the Zulu tribes began migrating down from the north, they suddenly became the aboriginal people, all oppressed and all. True, the Boers saw them only as fit to serve but then, the Boers were not looking to make up causes and such. And if you look at the general situation in Africa today, were the Boers totally wrong?
Lloyd Blankfen: Economics, 2010. Lloyd is the CEO of Goldman Sachs, who, in partnership with AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stears, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar Capital for “creating and promoting new ways to invest money—ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.”
Lloyd, last seen riding his bicycle on the crippled children’s walk.
NIGHT
Ah, I see you caught that comment about Rhodes. Yes, he single-handedly over-strained the British Empire to nearly the breaking point. He was the prime advocate of attacking the Transvaal and Orange Free State, but only after gold and diamonds were discovered there. He convinced the Queen that it would be just another romp into Pretoria against a bunch of farmers. The troops would be home by Christmas.
When you hear that the English had to pour in 360,000 troops, keep in mind the era. England was a naval power and did not have a large army intended for prolonged warfare. They used their navy to shunt a relatively small force around their Empire to achieve local superiority, then pack up and go home, leaving only garrison troops. I’ve read several sources that the huge army in Africa was costing the crown a million dollars a day.
And all this going on with no real results. The Boers were armed with the latest German rifles and were fighting for their own land. The most common casualty on the British side was several bullet wounds to the head. Often, they could not even see the Boers. So they attached the Boer farms, putting women and children into barbed wire compounds. The concentration camp is an English invention.
Just before dark I heard the distinctive sound of a DC-3 overhead. It was gone long before I could get my trousers on. I wonder where it was headed that time of day? There are several airfields in every westerly direction from here. I would love to ride in one again, it is the earliest airplane I ever remember from when I was four years old. I’d been on the same type of plane before, but was not cognizant of it. You know something odd? I don’t get jet lag on propellor aircraft. There were no stewardesses in those days, you brought your own sandwich. However, every gravel airport had excellent coffee served in those urns.
I used to always get a seat where I could watch the propellers start, that is where I learned the sound. Then I’d move to where I could see the ground. The planes were never full and they flew low enough to see the trees. To this day I remember the incredible distances and the first time I ever saw a stewardess (though I don’t remember where exactly). I remember because she gave me a coffee and showed me her pin that she was a nurse. She had a blue uniform, I was around 8 or 9 years of age. And yes, I knew about “it” and I wanted to do her.
Back then, you needed 20/20 vision to be a pilot. That was not the only stumbling block. I openly envied city kids for their exposure to the world. I was raised in the bush, so there was no way of ever knowing if I would have been a natural pilot, or tennis player, or machinist. Same with all the kids around me, for all I know I could have been surrounded by talent. But you never know that on the farm. And by age 15 half the class has dropped out to go work and the other half are pregnant. The world was a lot smaller back then. I didn’t even know if I’d be a good musician. Pretty much the only thing I knew is I was getting the hell out of there at the first opportunity. If only somebody had told me weathermen made $80,000 per year, you’d have heard me sing the damn weather report for that kind of money.
ADDENDUM
Here’s some trivia for you. Remember the “Peter Principle”? Lawrence Peter showed that people are usually promoted based on how well they do their current job rather than whether they have the aptitude for the intended position. Wiki puts it another way, that anything that works will be tried in ever more complex situations until if fails. A study based on this shows that firms who promote people randomly become more efficient than those who “preserve the hierarchy”. Makes sense to me, but then, I always was the over-gifted newcomer who never go the big apple.
Last Laugh
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