One year ago today: June 2, 2016, my first stay in Lakeland.
Five years ago today: June 2, 2012, on genetic recombination.
Nine years ago today: June 2, 2008, since 1797, huh?
Random years ago today: June 2, 2015, last chance saloon.
Things were so exciting this AM I transplanted 12 more African spike plants. My yard is now my new outdoor hobby. I see the bluejay is just able to fit into the bird feeder and I would have worked on that except it finally rained. It’s pretty soggy out there. Yet still not the soaking the farmers are wanting, there is talk of a drought. That’s okay, I’m snug as a bug in a rug. Remember that saying? Is it still around? I drove to the downtown library in the rain anyway, and put together some work for the weekend. Below is a picture of a neat hedge in Ireland.
One day I should go back over my records and find out just how many bands have been false starts for me. I can keep hopes up, but the real answer is to cross-examine these lying guitar players up front. It would chase a lot of them away, but so far, I would not have missed any one of them. Now the new guy, he’s doing the work. He’s asking the right questions and mentioning the right hurdles, in order. He’s having real fun with chord groupings, he’s another guy who played for years without ever knowing there was a pattern to it. Now he sees them everywhere, once more that’s because he now knows what to look for.
It makes music fun again. It’s a new way of doing the same old, but until you really get into duo arrangement, how to tell? As mentioned, none of the other guitarists would even try, some of them I paid to try, and they would not. I know it seems strange that they are all so hard-headed when the stereotype is the guitarist who is cool and accepting of everybody. Not so, the average guitar player is anything but open-minded and willing to learn. I believe this to be caused by the way lessons have been institutionalized over the past 30, maybe 40 years. They all learn the same few songs by the millions and the single qualification is do they have the money for lessons. They learned each tune with painstaking effort and if you want them in your band, it’s your turn.
My buddy from Louisiana is down with another bout of food poisoning. That’s haywire because it seems to me that is something you get maybe once in your life, not once a year. Nor was he troubled by this when we were in grade school together. I attribute it to his diet, and his diet includes genetically modified food. I’ll say it again, the industry claim that there is no proof GMOs hurt anyone is not the same thing a guarantee that they don’t. That’s the angle the tobacco corporations got away with for decades.
Allow me to fill in that background. The gene that is used to modify corn has been shown to cause sterility in lab animals. In 2001, a corporation called Epicyte isolated the gene and sold it to Monsanto. The details are hush-hush, but if you are not eating corn that is specifically labeled to be non-GMO, you are consuming this modified gene, it is a type of DNA. The human system has needed a million years to adjust to what is food and what isn’t. This modified corn is present in countless other food products. Often, it is listed as “less than 2%”, but in parts per million, that’s still 20,000. And how many millions of molecules do you consume at every meal?
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For me, it’s a good book and some tea for this Friday. I bought a mystery, something about poaching in the Congo. I know the deadline is passed for me to believe Trump hasn’t been turned by the system into just another clone president. I’ll wait until I hear what Ann Coulter has to say. Whatever Trump does will now be accompanied by disappointment. That wall needed to be built long before he took trips and tours. He’s now a demonstration of how much power the presidency has lost to the lobbyists and special interests. They’ve got him dancing around but doing nothing per his campaign promises, and the clock is almost wound down.
Rain is not gloomy to me, I’m okay with rain. I sat by the front window and wondered if all the time and effort put into that yard is ever going to pay off. Probably not. Moving those spike plants along the fence, though, that was a master move. Only able to move between downpours, I still managed to get up to the laundromat, where there was a sprightly lass in charge, if only she had been my type. And maybe a little less husband-hunting. But I will commend the women over a certain age who know that coin laundries are a damn good place to meet single men. But like meeting single women at bingo, don’t expect them to be young and pretty.
I’ve been around here eight months and acknowledge that my “newness” has worn off. I went downtown and bumped into a few women, not my types, that were once fawning over me. It’s probably instinct that we now see each other for what really is. Alas, most women have a vicious memory if you didn’t fall for their charms on day one. It’s the counterpart of my expectation that women should instantly spot that I may not be perfect, but I’m not anything like the rest. Can’t have it both ways.
But one thing clear is that this area is flooded with 3rd rate guitar solo acts, and tonight’s show was one of the worst. Don’t read me wrong, the guy was a passable guitar player and he could sing as well as any other guitar player on the circuit. That is my point. It was like listening to AM radio. To the trained eye (pssst, that’s me) this guitarist had pointedly ignored every aspect of what my new band is covering. He got another guitar player up for a set, but they just played more of the same old GC specials.
It would be no different if he stood up there and dictated to the audience that they do not deserve real novelty or a real show. They must be satisfied with what he dishes out because he and all the other guitar players have been dishing it out that way for twenty years. This is why, folks, that I would be considered a very competitive sort. No, there is not enough to go around. Watch the talent shows on TV, they have far more vocalists than can ever make it big. I sometimes land on the videos online and don’t bother watching 99% of the ones that feature the next blah-blah vocalist.
Why? Because it is not good enough. People want to see a show. Taylor Swift put on a show, although she may not have fully realized what kind of show at the time. But the rest of these guitarists and singers are a dime a dozen. Ah, but when you see my show, you are not only going to get all new material (because I don’t play GC music), you get quality entertainment. I’m also showing the new guitar guy how to emphasize his strumming visually as well as manually.
[Author’s note: the newest musician is a virtual beginner with my material, but he is glomming on to it almost instantly. It is now open knowledge that he had given up hope of playing again. Now, he realizes he is not playing guitar, he is playing rhythm and using a guitar as the instrument. This is a significant attainment because most guitar players would refuse to even try. It relegates them to being a accompanist and their egos can’t deal with that.
And I’d rather be called an un-kewl competitor than a closed-minded guitar player who can’t and won’t learn anything new. I’ll repeat my goal is precisely to take over the type of gig these boring and mechanical guitar players currently consider their own private turf. If I’m competitive, it’s because they are protectionist. I ascribe to the theory that entertainers succeed where musicians fail.]
“He’s so dumb his father finished
fifth grade before he did.”
~ James Thurber
Let’s talk money and retirement. Who recalls my “equivalent cash” calculation? Not many, but it is so important to anybody who wants to retire that you may want to pay extra attention. Examples are always good. Say you had retired in 1977 with a million, all in CDs (Certificates of Deposit, or “bank bonds”). It was easy to get 7%, so you would have an income of $70,000 per year. Taxes and prices were lower, but ignore that for the sake of this equation. As you read this, remember you cannot spend any of the money invested. You must “die with that money in the bank” or risk destitution.
Let’s suppose the lady was getting $1,000 per month pension, or $12,000 annually. If CDs were paying 7%, that pension is the equivalent of her having $171,428.57 invested. When in fact she has nothing but a singlewide in the Tampa north end and always complains about her electric bill. Nonetheless, you can run these numbers yourself. Keep the concept in mind, the equivalent cash you would need securely invested to get the same income as if you had no pension. CDs are considered very secure, BTW.
Uh-oh. Since 2001, look what happened to interest rates. They dropped from 7% to 1/2%. For the purpose of demonstration, let’s say you could get 1% instead of a half-percent. That would mean today, a million in CDs would only bring you 10,000 a year (or $833 per month, coincidentally the least amount welfare pays). You would need a million dollars to live hand to mouth. Obviously something has serious gone wrong with the money.
The eye-opener is when I plug in today’s numbers into the 1977 formula. Let’s suppose an income of $2,000, which is probably what you need today to retire in comfort. How much would you need in CDs at today’s interest rate (assume 1%) to make $2,000 per month, or $24,000 per year. That’s $2,400,000 and good luck trying to get 1% on that. The reality of the matter is you would have to have over $5,000,000 per person to have an average income. I don’t personally know many people who have achieved this, and the ones who did got a significant head start.
But I can tell you, without revealing what my income is, according to the 1977 formula, I must be worth millions. Now it makes sense why you see always old people selling tomatoes and honey at the flea markets. An extra $500 per month to somebody on a pension is all gravy. And the IRS has not cracked down on that crowd yet, so I wonder if they would even dare. So run your own retirement through, here is the formula you can copy and paste to your spreadsheet.
=(M*12)/i%
Where M is your monthly income, multiplied by 12 and divided by i%, your ANNUAL interest rate expressed as a decimal. For instance, 2% = .02. The formula ignores compounding periods, which are not material in this short of a time span.
ADDENDUM
Did you every have one of those long non-medical talks with a doctor’s office? I did, and there may be some court action over this one. You see, the person who was responsible for the last 8 years for security of my information has been trying to lie her way out of things. But this doesn’t work with me. She’s saying she followed procedure, but that procedure she knew to be quite different than the instructions attached to my file. Let’s just say that passwords and codes don’t work for the military, and there is no way they work in that office either. My file was closed and handled separately by request on this point. She may not have been the one giving out the information, but she is the one responsible.
But I can’t get past her and she’s had nearly two months to fabricate a defense, so I talk to the doctor directly. I intend to show him how lax security is and that the person supposed to be in charge of it has no clue how the job is properly done. Expect more news on this in a matter of weeks. Whereas I’ve been complaining, she was blocking the news from getting through. She’s been abusing her position as office manager to tell my doctor everything is fine. It isn’t.
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