One year ago today: March 11, 2016, taking an $85,000 bath.
Five years ago today: March 11, 2012, Sam, the twins, & Kermit.
Nine years ago today: March 11, 2008, instead he shot himself.
Random years ago today: March 11, 2007, the brunette next door.
Here’s the Rebel at the vegetable stand. Half the price of the supermarket, I like to stock up. Daybreak was too ideal to waste, I took off to see what there was down old Highway 640. Nothing. Except this barbershop in a town called Keysville. They have one intersection and there was a T-bone collision on it just before I got there. Raul, the barber, is on $8 and I showed him some basics on the guitar he had in the shop. Would you like some hot buttered corn on the cob? I’ve got lots.
Seven bags. The amount of leaves in the front yard just this week. I raked them, but that’s when got on the Rebel and headed over to the south end. This explains this mornings snapshot. I want you to see what I’m up against with this soil. The nice green clover cover burns off in the winter. Leaving this gray-colored bare sand, shown here around the leaf piles. If you look close, my experimental flower garden is in the upper right. That’s the area getting the Black Kow treatment this weekend. Right now, the water that hits this soil beads and runs off to low areas. After a while this causes high and low spots all over the yard.
Face it, the soil even looks anemic. The small patches of green are weeds or seedlings from the camphor trees, which appear willing to grow in anything. There are also many tough roots and vines in the way, just under the soil surface. This makes it difficult to turn the soil over, and rules out a light duty roto-tiller. It has to be done by hand, so time to get started.
Turnip Rock, Michigan
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The Internet remains too untrustworthy, instead I drove over to Agt. R to find out what is going on. It turns out I did purchase the correct brand of soil compound. We toured the citrus trees in his yard, have any of you seen how a rat goes after citrus fruit? There’s a wee artistry to it that reminds you rats are mammals, and thus can figure things out. The oranges are a favorite and the rats must need their vitamin C. It’s curious how they slice an orange around the “equator” and hollowing out the fruit half to the very last molecule.
What’s this? Your first clear picture of the new birdbath. It cost more than I wanted to spend, but look at how it enhances the flower area. This one photo shows the birdfeeder, the sunflowers, the new birdbath, and some newly intermixed soil additive. But the best situation this picture shows is the partial shade area of the front yard, probably the biggest issue of why I’m struggling to get something to grow there. By the impressive difference it makes, maybe I should start growing birdbaths?
I didn’t want a plastic birdbath. They are just too tacky. The concrete was heavy but it conveys that look of permanence. Again, it is not the weight that I find difficult, it is the strain. A quarter hour later, I’m always dog tired. So I made for a siesta and read some more chapters of Freakonimics. Previously, I’d only picked out the chapters that interested me, but once I figured out Ann Coulter is getting some of her source material from that book, I’m suddenly interested.
I’ll tell you why Freakonomics is different. The authors recognize all the same cause and effect factors the others do, but do not stick with the single theme so common in other studies. Kind of like realizing that cause and effect exist, but rarely in isolation. These reactions are often just one interrelationship that contains innumerable other facets which are not controlled by the study. They further understand that while incentives work, the very people who try to create incentives so often get it wrong. Like speeding fines, if I was a speeder they would not deter me, I would just absorb the cost as another business expense.
What caught my eye this time was they did a study on dating clubs and came up with the same conclusions as this blog. However, they took a different path when it came to wordings. Where I would point out the humor or hypocrisy of the ads, these guys actually measured the effect of the words. How they did this, I don’t know, but here, take a look at some of their results.
The median age of the users ranges from 26 to 35, depending on which club. I would think ChristianSingles has a different mix than USMilitarySingles. But everywhere, more than half are men, the normal being 57%. Overall, on-line dating is predominantly a white activity. Freakonomics compares the ads to a job interview, but the idea with dating is always to elicit as many responses as possible. This makes perfect sense to me. I’ve often lamented that after one’s teens the greatest limiting dynamic of dating is lack of choice, which is normally the result of poor exposure. My complaint has always been that while I recognized this early on and maximized my exposure through music, I found out the hard way it is the actual selection of decent women itself that was severely limited. They are physically not there, and that’s a head count—not a result of looking in the wrong places or not trying the church.
Let’s further examine their statistics. According to Levitt & Dubner, certain words carry connotations that affect the number of responses in ways the user doesn’t understand. On-line dating strongly reinforces common dating stereotypes, they deduce. Considering most people who advertise on-line must necessarily have trouble finding a date, d’y’think? This explains why in most ads, the men are taller and the women blonder far in excess of the national average. But on-line, being a blonde woman gets the same number of responses as her being a college grad. Interesting, that, but I’d still take the blonde.
The best way to fail at on-line dating is to not post a photo. For men, no photo means only one-quarter the response, for women it means one-sixth. Underlying that is the statistic that 57% of men and 23% of women don’t receive a single response. For men, a woman’s looks are most important, for women, it is a man’s income, although this obviously varies with intensity. That is, a woman is far more likely to marry a not-so-rich man than a man is to marry an unattractive woman. Millions of years of evolution, right? No so for women, as the book points out. Most men do no want to date low income women, and are intimidated by high income women.
So what do men want to date? Artists, musicians, students, celebrities, and veterinarians. They don’t want to date policewomen or secretaries. Women want to date military men, firemen, lawyers, executives, but doctors are not mentioned. Women do not want to date artists, students, actors, laborers, or men who work food services, but musicians are not mentioned. And all the ads overwhelmingly contain far too much political correctness, though I view that as a given when you let people self-assess.
This is why I so much dislike liberal pressure. It compels people to say one thing in public, then act on their actual prejudices later, after your time has been wasted. Over 50% of white women and 80% of white men stated race didn’t matter, but 97% of white women answered only white men and 90% of white men answered only white women. And I say that proves my point that you cannot get an honest answer out of anybody unless they are allowed to remain anonymous. These people said race doesn’t matter only because the question was asked in the first place.
What I do know for sure is when I see a dating ad that the woman is open to all races, she may think she’s coming across as open-minded, but it has the opposite effect on me. Not because of the sexual imagery of what she’s saying, but because I don’t like liars. You can’t really get away from liars, the point being if they’ll lie about that, they’ve crossed the line.
“Where do the lottery people get those
checkbooks that are four feet wide?”
ADDENDUM
Constructive sabotage, that’s a good term for it. Want to hear about some fun? To truly appreciate this, you’ll need an opinion on imbeciles, specifically the ones who swear at the “stupid computer” when it won’t do what they want. So you fix it so it doesn’t. It is well known that Puerco, the gross Cuban, comes in on Saturdays and sits a computer 15. The one behind the post, like nobody knows what he’s up to. Keep in mind, this guy knows he’s a pig; he’s been openly called that before. But to a Cuban, that is just confirmation that everybody is racist.
So today, before he grunted and burped his way in, I used control panel to adjust a few settings, you know, to assist him in his fervent quest to become multi-culturalized. Amongst my favorites are to target the settings which truly low-end users can’t readily undo. Adjust his mouse-click speed, lower his screen saver to one minute, and shorten his repeat delay. But the best is to activate the gimp narrator. The robot that lets the world know you are accessing “Oriental Hooker Dot Com”. The little prick went ballistic this morning. What a spectacle that was!
He doesn’t always use computer 15, but I’ve more than once warned the guy to not sit near where I am working. For the record, I could bounce the scrawny bastard off the nearest wall. The way he constantly hacks and eats snot, he might be a lunger. He’s a skinny wimp around 35 who mistook me for some mild-mannered type. Until he saw me help the librarian move a metal table and learned I can easily pick up 200 pounds. That’s the table, not the librarian.
Last Laugh
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