One year ago today: September 28, 2015, liquid on Mars (it’s a gif).
Five years ago today: September 28, 2011, $602.35 a gallon.
Nine years ago today: September 28, 2007, bass player’s elbow?
Random years ago today: September 28, 2014, GMO protest.
MORNING
I got into a conversation with a dude who has been programming computers about as long as I have. And like myself, he considers programming to be semi-skilled labor, akin to being able to work a crossword puzzle or build a doghouse. (Careful, I draw a thick line between coding and computer science, which is a creative skill. Programming is not creative, it is mechanical.) He dropped out before graduation for the very reason I stayed. Back when, computers were not really good for much other than accounting. He disliked accounting, where computers sparked my interest in that field.
“Wow, man, what happened to you?“
“Oh, my skin got in an accident so it’s it in the shop until tomorrow. This is just a loaner.”
Mrs. Cardinal had dibs on the birdfeeder this morning. She fed uninterrupted for nearly twenty minutes. They (the cardinals) are somewhat wasteful feeders except for the dried “fruit bits” in this gourmet mix. I suspect it is just raisins. None of the birds seem to drop even a single scrap of that, while they make a good splattering of the seeds.
I’m now reading the American Left for the period between the wars. This is where the divergence between the Left and the Liberals takes place. The Left continues to work on people’s minds, the Liberals have now learned to work on the government. Both are thin disguises for self-interest posing as anything but. Both are completely based on telling other people what to do.
The tie-in here is this coincides with my interest in the Obamacare provisions that don’t bring in health care as much as they extend government control of private lives. I’m reading about the New Deal era, where the government totally runs roughshod over private lives and private industry, getting away with it because of public “docility” noted during the Civil and Great Wars. I’m learning in detail about the coercive means the government uses to push these laws through.
I learned about Magid, (real name Jacob Maged) the tailor who went to jail for pressing a suit for five cents less than the “tailor’s board” had stipulated. He was also fined $100, or $1,697 in today’s money. These “laws” are created by the government empowering non-elected boards of businessmen to dictate to other businessmen what to do, where in a free system such decisions would be made by the individual. This process of criminalizing ordinary people destroys community respect for the law.
While I already knew, I learned more about how it was not Roosevelt (this time the cousin of Theodore, named Franklin) who ending the Great Depression. In 1939, the USA was still at less than 2/3 of it’s standing in 1929. Roosevelt did little but expand government control over a free-wheeling nation. I’m beginning to adopt the position that the depression was a result of government-endorsed factory over-expansion during the Great War. And only another war would gear it up again.
GPS cell phone tracker.
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NOON
We’re waiting on the airplane, so I’m doing household repairs. That tree in the back that JZ calls a “Pumpkin Tree” must be another exotic. It’s not in the field guide. Here’s some closeups, see if you have better luck than me. The seed pods are about the size of medium olives. I stopped by the farmer’s market again, but it was exactly the same. Only one booth selling produce. I don’t need any peanut brittle, whisk brooms, or scented candles.
Now myself, I’m no socialist. I’ll tell people what to do but I expect to be paid for it. Which brings me to this interesting situation with the new “band”. Yes, the guy intends to play his tunes using that ticky-bop Karaoke machine. I had to do some considerable pondering over that. In the end, it remains the quickest way to get on stage.
However, once again, I’m watching closely how the guy learns my material. He doesn’t catch on faster than usual, even when shown the part. Do you see the danger? It’s me learning all his material in within the deadline but him not learning mine. And where have we seen that before? If I tell him to hurry up, he’ll start with the “bass is easy” angle. It doesn’t help to grab the guitar at that point and show these guys—they often insist on doing it their way.
I can see this going several ways. One is that he does a good job and we get to stage work asap. Another is he does a bad job of my material and I’m worse off than before. However, I can play my material as a solo. Curiously, when I showed him, he replied that he could do the same with his songs. He somehow missed the point, which is that, on guitar, there is nothing unusual about solo.
Yet another way is to over-learn his material on my bass, then sit back and wait for him to catch up. The proof is on stage and I am not the least concerned if the other guy makes a fool of himself. Keep wary that this could easily shape up over here. Remember, I have 5-1/2 years experience playing note-for-note perfection to recorded tunes. The Jimbos era.
I’m going to possibly reserve a study room at the library, set up my old pirate computer, and download the other guy’s music. My ad had specified each musician was responsible to supply the other with copies “of the original version we would be playing”. That did not mean strange Karaoke copies.
AFTERNOON
Talk about agreeable weather, I got parts of the yard measured out and took out the recyclables. Here is an interesting shot, the paths of every hurricane to hit Florida in the past 100 years. As you see, there are large tracts where nothing has happened. I’ve seen one hurricane since I’ve been here, back in 2004. A few wild storms, but nothing major after that.
I also studied the framing on the sample items for sale beside the store. Those hurricane straps are sturdy, but they jut into the space where the finishing panels would go. You’d have to notch each panel perfectly, probably not the greatest idea. They also have features that should be structural which, upon examination, are tacked or glued on afterward.
What I’ll do is go in there and clear the plant layer and soil to see what depth might be good for gravel and reinforcing grid wire. I know cars are too heavy, but I’ve successfully parked my motorcycle on ordinary patio blocks. There may be some combination of these cheap materials I can use for the base, reinforcing only the corners. I’ve got nothing against pouring some pylons using good old Redi-crete. Even if it is sand twenty feet down, after a few feet the sheet weight of overburden adds stability.
Right now, I’ve got a roast in the oven and the aroma is driving me up my uninsulated walls. I’ve priced out the studs and rafters for a 10’x18’ shed and said materials are less than $200. For a shed twice the size of the examples I looked at. I consulted with Agt. R, who says not to bother with footings on the sandy substrate. He poured a simple 4” pad, reinforced with 4” gridwire. Then set his pre-fab sheds directly on the pad. Such sheds have a built-in floor that rests above the cement. I’ll have to think on that.
NIGHT
It looks like we have trouble in paradise already. I checked with the postman, and the people across the street are new. Mexicans. And the husband has a contract to deliver batch US Mail. That explains the rumbling of the diesel and hissing of the brakes at 4:28AM, and the big trucks parked in the street during the afternoons. They’re not rich, they just have all the trappings. And I’m not even going to deal with them. I called my people, who said there is an anonymous tip line for code infractions. I left a message about the truck blocking the street.
Folks, you do not even move into an area like this with the intention of seeing how far you can aggravate the neighbors. These people knew they were upsetting the status quo.
Finally, around 7:50PM, I get a call from my buddy. The Florida transportation system is so corrupt, it took him over two hours to get from the airport to his hotel. It is a pipedream to claim that the Florida taxi system is better than Uber or Lyft. He’s lucky we hit a cold snap down to 80°F and he didn’t have to swelter the whole time. I think he’s been to Hawaii and Mexico, but these places lack the Florida humidity. Waiting in line to get out of the airport essentially ate up his first evening in Florida.
Two hours and $55 to travel 12 miles is not any workingman’s idea of good service. In general, the entire US taxi/hotel/airport system is a long-festering open wound. It is a degenerate cancer on the travel industry that cannot be fixed. It eventually must be plowed under and replanted. Pox upon anybody who defends that obnoxious industry. They are probably on the take themselves. American hotels cost at least ten times what they should in a free market system.
Mitch got on one of those junkets where you have to attend a “seminar”. This is normally an illegal bait and switch scam concerned with time-sharing condos. Will anyone explain to me why those sordid operations have not yet been shut down? If you don’t attend the sales meeting, they slap something like $1,800 onto your credit card. It’s in the fine print. That essentially makes it compulsory, so we are not getting together until that chore is over,
Good, that hands me an extra day to clean the yard of leaves and limbs. So I dropped in to Karaoke. It was okay. Before that I had stopped at the Mongolia for a relaxing afternoon coffee. I met a guitarist who could, under other circumstances, do the job but was a street musician. The kind who is a bum with a guitar. I listened for a few tunes, he can play but he can’t get through singing a whole song on his own. Yes, I know it requires discipline, the lacking ingredient of most failure stories.
ADDENDUM
The unusual makes the blog, and today it was a self-cleaning toilet. That’s what I thought and almost walked past. Then it made sense. Name an unpleasant task. So I at least stopped and took a look. The system, at $400, uses a cartridge that fits in a pocket under the tank lid. You can see it here, the light blue triangle. I don’t like the idea that it is battery powered. It has two buttons, a lite and deep cleaning mode.
Since I did not drive to Orlando, I was home early enough to read another couple chapters on the American Left. One of those was wasted over the role of Hollywood writers and the rough time they got trying to toe the party line as Stalin signed pacts with Hitler. It’s the weakest chapter so far, but is probably a necessary lead up to the McCarthy era.
I learned about the hypocrisy and extravagance of the Roosevelt administration, where he correctly ascertained you could steal public money. He appropriated valuable postage stamp proofs for his private collection and perfected the State government’s now commonplace techniques for harassing opponents. These include bankruptcy-inducing jail sentences over (careful choice of words here) trumped-up pseudo-crimes, time-wasting subpoenas, and reputation-wrecking tax audits.
Oddly there were two tactics not much used any more, which are to refuse to deliver mail and refuse the use of railways to unpopular individuals or companies. Like Henry Ford. I suspect the government has found it wiser and more productive to just read their mail and track their movements. You do, after all, have to register at the post office and show ID to ride the train these days. They’re both owned by the feds. Did you know that before the government nationalized the system, there were 2,905 railway companies in America?
Franklin D. taught us long as you steal from the tax pool and not the individual, the public is a pliable thing. You have to love his precedent-setting passage of laws that punish for not doing something that no law says you have to do. Like submit to conscription, pay taxes, or buy auto insurance. There is an interesting passage on how the Federal government has reduced the Constitution to the same status as the British have relegated the Monarchy. It’s there for show when you need it, but otherwise has little force.
This still doesn’t make the book a good choice. It is hundreds of pages, only a few of which contain such gems for the typical reader who isn’t a mean historian. There are allusions to people who likely made some news, like this poor bastard, Albert Wallach. He was one of several thousand Americans (mostly Communists) who joined the Abraham Lincoln brigade fighting Franco in Spain. His boat over gets sunk, his unit is wiped out in one battle, he gets a hernia, and is executed by an American spy on the payroll of the Spanish secret police.
Last Laugh
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