One year ago today: July 25, 2016, plastic-faced Ted.
Five years ago today: July 25, 2012, I buy the batbike.
Nine years ago today: July 25, 2008, a stop at Boston Johnny’s.
Random years ago today: July 25, 2011, teen paranormal romance.
Here’s your poor man’s RFID jacket. The old piece of tinfoil in the wallet tactic. It’s just a wise precaution because RFID devices are now being installed in all manner of objects without your knowledge or permission. I figure if they are sneaky enough to do this without telling you, they are up to no good. It has nothing to do with whether or not there is any crime taking place. People with nothing to hide should read this and this. Do you remember those little Roomba vacuums? The company has applied for permission to use the device to map your house and sell this data.
Meanwhile, there is a rumor circulating that you can zap these hidden RFID tags inside your microwave for a few seconds. I may try that with some old cards, but keep in mind the RFID is only active when it is moving in relation to the receiver, and nobody is going to tell you if inactivating the RFID also disables the other card functions. I think a lot of people are not protecting their privacy because they lack the brainpower to understand what it is they should be keeping secret. One of the above links delves into meta-information, where the load limits on Swedish bridges was a secret so the Russians would not know if they could support heavy tanks.
That is typical of meta-information. Most people have not the foggiest what the information is used for. They don’t understand walking your dog past a cancer clinic could result in a cancellation of your health care benefits. It goes far beyond the teenage girl who gets caught by her father because she bought birth control on-line. It’s a factor few people stop to ponder. My advice there is to do what you can to keep off as many lists as possible. Civil servants are lazy and they will not go looking for something that isn’t there. However, the day is looming when searches will be constant and automatic. Thought I’d let you know.
Did anyone else see that article about practices that other countries think are strange with Americans? Like eating cereal for breakfast, riding in the back seat of taxis, and not talking about their income. My, isn’t that an abnormal slant for that author to take. My feeling is that if you see successful people behaving a certain way, it might be a good idea to find out why rather than label them as eccentric. Maybe Americans don’t talk about their income because of the tax system, which encourages vigilantism by posting rewards for turning in cheats.
That may have initially been an honorable concept, but since “creative law enforcement” became a government institution, well, you know. These days, on-line publication has made suspicion, accusation, and acquittal just as bad for your reputation as a conviction and this development has been weaponized by the authorities. So, don’t talk about your income.
Sales associate of the month.
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Here’s something I’ve not seen before, lifted from Jimmy R, the news amalgamation site that could be a winner if he ever kicks the libtards out of the way. It’s a sunken bathtub. The literature says it is in a hotel. While I like my head to be above toilet bowl level, the layout of my bathroom places these fixtures at opposite sides of the room. It’s a novelty that caught my eye. Something else that attracted my attention was a video output port on the side of my microscope that is not even mentioned in the documentation. This could be interesting.
I’ve commenced reading a book on German history. I don’t expect they will get a fair shake. The presses are controlled by people whose best interest is to never let a powerful Germany again take control of its own destiny. Look at it from the German viewpoint, where until recently they were not a unified nation. They were attacked and occupied from every direction by all their neighbors. The Germans are not just imagining things, they’ve been occupied by the French, Russians, Polish, English, Dutch, Italian, even Sweden carved out a chunk. When they weren’t being invaded, much of there territory became the battleground for other armies.
And when German was disunited, it invited all manner of political and financial manipulation. Without any central authority, organized groups of bankers and mercenaries could and did run roughshod over the German-speaking peoples. One excellent example was coin-clipping. This was the shaving of tiny chips off gold and silver coinage to produce other coins. Plainly, only wealthy bankers were in a position to handle enough coins to make this worth while (but you are not supposed to know that). They clipped so much that soon the money had to be weighed instead of counted. There was no federal power to prevent the bankers from clipping and the moneylenders preferred that situation.
It’s a difficult read, so I’ll try to give you just the more interesting tid-bits as I discover them. Foreigners, particularly the French and English, had a vested interest in keeping Germany as disunited as possible. It was these countries who were first to insist that people who spoke their native languages were ordained to belong to the same country. And they were first to decry the concept when Germany sought exactly the same thing. This should be an informative book.
One neat thing about this blog is you get ideas of what you can do on your own without spending a lot of money. And after even a week, I can calculate the savings of insulating the bedroom. The comfort level shows on the wall thermometer as 82°F. That’s a relative temperature because the thermometer is not calibrated and it is attached to an outside wall. It is the reading when I find the room naturally most comfortable. This is achieved with the new A/C set at 3 out of 10 in the day and 2 out of 10 at night, both on the low fan settings. See, JZ, I was right. I can leave the A/C on all year for like $4 per month. Who’s saving money now? Who’s comfortable 24/7? Huh? Huh?
I was also right about the room drawing me away from the hard work. These days I tend to walk through the kitchen, grab a cold drink, and proceed directly into the bedroom. Where the music, computer, radio, bookshelves, and desk are all set up. Like this morning, I was up at 5:30AM and wrote letters until 8:30AM. Quiet, just the distant hum of the fans. Will I ever get the gumption to work on the other bedroom now? JZ says I should find a nice maid who wants to live there. That’s not my style, dude, and thanks, I’d already considered that. There may yet come a day I’ll, er, need the money.
Then from 8:30AM to 12:00 noon, I did the books for the last half-year. Not bad, on extraordinary items, I was only $1,039 over budget. That includes things such as non-budget vehicle repairs, that battery powered amp, the microscope, and the digital camera I replaced before I found the one I’d lost. Other items like the scooter battery and the new $160 batbike tire are not counted, as those are budget items. Still, only a grand over is good news. There were times back in Broward when it was costing that much every month for stretches at a time.
It was a good idea to clear out of the city when I did. After a certain age, city living ceases to be an advantage. It becomes a bigger selection of what you can’t have. That reminded me of when I first left home and landed on a university campus without an ounce of preparation. I met people my own age who possessed skills I barely dared to dream of. People who could sing, but didn’t want to be vocalists. People who could draw but didn’t want to be artists. Even people who could fly airplanes but didn’t want to be pilots. Where I had already begged, unsuccessfully, to have any one of those to help me get by, here I was surrounded by others who could not be bothered. Now I live in a town where every day I drive past abandoned three-story mansions that are used only to store the family’s books and pictures. And I don’t just mean one or two of them.
“Do you believe in love at first sight?
Or should I tackle you again?”
~ Aileen Erin
Here’s a photo from 2011 to make this page look better. I think it was never-published. This is a side street in the old town of St. Augustine, Florida. According to the watermark, this was in 2011, so I think that was the first trip to the town, the time I took the scooter when it was new. That was a 13 hour drive and man, I needed that break. I stayed in the motel across the bridge, that’s on the coast road I took the whole way up and back. If I recall, that was on or about my birthday that year, and was the longest motorcycle trip I’d taken in decades.
It would have been a good movie except for the lousy sound track. This morning’s background movie was “Sleepless in Seattle”. Typical of the horde of movies I’ve never seen, it is a decent treatment of your standard theme. Single man with kid gets pursued by a ton of women, one of whom is special. I could identify with that fantasy because I’ve always thought women would get pickier as they got older. No, they never learn. But that music, it’s that dreadful 1940s mix of, I dunno, blues-jazz all over the place syncopation. Totally depressing lyrics. Kind of the way I used to look at country.
Which was relevant because today I stopped for potato salad downtown and talked with a girl born in 1996. She’s a Beatles fan. That’s out of character because the media has been doing its level best to convince the last few generations that the Beatles are blah, as in here, buy some Michael Jackson instead. I carefully listened to her explanations and was amazed by what they have not been told. The Beatles represented a generational change that I was too young to understand. By rights, I should have been a Grand Funk, maybe a Who fan. These were more the bands of my demographic but I still preferred the Beatles.
These follow on “after the revolution” bands could not match the Beatles. I’ve described how that single band was different in one major sense—they were young people producing music for young people. Prior to that, American youth had been fed a steady but shallow diet of hot rods, surfing tunes, and slobbering Elvis laments. Make no mistake, that was all music written by old people who wrote what they thought young people should listen to. People in their 30s and 40s, the ages of my parents at the time. Who, same as yours, had totally forgotten what being young was all about—except for all those lame hard-luck stories about the Depression.
The Beatles were also one lucky piece of timing. They arrived just as rock and roll had been making a clean break with the past era of big band crooner and clarinet music. And the music world was recently transformed by electronics, both the music and the broadcasting methods. By comparison, which is a lot of what music is about, the Beatle’s music was a kind of pop-rock which showed the entire word that teen music did not have to be wafer-thin schlock. It is fair to say nothing like that has happened in the world before or since. The conditions have never been right again, leastwise not in our lifetimes.
The boomers had massive impact on everything through the later 1900s. Alas, by 1995 there was no viable replacement for rock. (Rock videos did prolong the death throes for ten more years.) Myself I was jaded by the offerings and I’m not surprised that indie music and disco-like tribal chants began to hit the charts. Ha, for that matter, charts began to hit the charts as they created categories for anything that didn’t fit. So little of the music is innovative, my ear just tunes it out the same way I tuned out jazz and most blues when I was a teen. Nor has the next generation invented any new instruments where my age bracket had electric guitars and amps to get creative.
It was refreshing to meet somebody who appreciates the Beatles for the same reasons I did so long ago. She related how her circle has been subliminally coached to consider the Beatles as yucky. Who could pull that off other than the media? They can even make it a task to find music on the juke box. I’m going to let all what she said sink in over a few days.
ADDENDUM
Here’s a rare picture that nearly got lost in the archives. This is a class photo of my guitars from back in 2012. That’s the Fender in the middle, with the Ibanez in front and the Danelectro in the background [inside the soft-shell case]. This must be after October that year when I returned from Colorado. For ergonomic reasons I favored the slightly smaller dimensions of the Ibanez. It was last month when I began to play guitar for more than an hour at a time that I appreciated the comfort of the Fender. This photo was, I vaguely recall, from a montage of my early attempts at recording with the Tascam. I still have all that gear, y’know.
I see no evidence from their advertising that they’ve played anywhere except that tired old vet hall out in Cooper City. As usual, their presentation on stage is near-studio-quality, which is parallel to the speed of a runaway horse. Why they bother is beyond me, they don’t have the wherewithal to make anything of all that hard work.
Something leaves an aftertaste, however. The on-line blurb features a recording made at Markee Studios. The recording is top-notch, but it is a clone remake of the old Beatle’s hit, “Something”. I’m not the least jealous because I am not a recording musician. I dislike endless hours in a studio to get something perfect. The finished product often comes out too slick. But what I’m questioning is the utter precision of that bass line. It is being played by a musician that had one and only one style in everything else I heard him play up to that point.
You see, I gave a listen to their initial videos with this new bassist and found him to be the one-dimensional sort of player they have fixed in their minds as the ideal way to play the instrument. He was uninspired and comped a lot, fine because that is what this band was looking for. It is very easy, on this basis, to make an estimation of what the man is capable of. And I don’t believe in sudden or quantum leaps of talent.
Then out of the blue I hear that same bassist suddenly cranking out flawless McCartney? Pardon me if I suspect something funny is going on. While it is not impossible, it is too strongly out of character in the big picture. The contemporary studio can make great sounds out of flawed passages, but they cannot inject that winning charm to bass playing if it isn’t there. I’ve allowed for the fact that I’ve gone all out to produce top-notch recordings and he may have done the same.
But that caliber of expertise, I feel, would have revealed itself in at least some of his other work. It doesn’t. He plays the notable riffs bang on, but sloughs off through the other parts of the song. I know when somebody is playing bass filler material because not doing so is my one area of expertise in this life. Comping is a bad habit that cannot suddenly be completely erased to make a single recording.
And don’t second guess me, because even if I abhor it, I am very, very good at playing filler material.
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