One year ago today: August 29, 2016, bait & switch eye exams.
Five years ago today: August 29, 2012, DNA data storage.
Nine years ago today: August 29, 2008, the old Money Order scam.
Random years ago today: August 29, 2014, a busy day!
The first reports of major damage are pouring in from Houston. The press have glommed onto a new peril, this time “black mold”. Buildings infected with this cannot be demolished by regular means, they say. Houston will never dry out, they add, due to the supersaturated air. No mention is made of how Houston has managed to dry out from previous hurricanes. You don’t worry about that because we got us a full-fledged black mold event in the makings. Forget about your levels of personal debt and the tanking economy. DC says 320,000 jobs were created “mostly in the service sector”. We’ll soon have an economy entirely based on wiping each other’s asses.
I’m monitoring a bank account for a friend who wound up paying $470 in fees last year, more than one mortgage payment. I’m the opposite, I’ve likely paid less late fees than anyone who even has an account, including yourself. I read the rulebook. Actually, first thing is you disable overdraft protection. If you need such protection, you are an azz-clown and even so, it’s not the kind of protection you want from a banker. To those who disagree, it’s time you grew up. I found something odd. The bank waives the monthly service fee if you use their debit card more than 15 times?
Is it me or does that plain smell funny? I could see fewer than 15, but what is the incentive for over 15? What springs to mind is the bank knows people get in trouble by using credit cards on impulse items. Why, they want you to lose track and zap you with the $35 overdraft fee. That’s pretty slimy, there banksters. But it is their goldmine when they use such tactics on stupid people. I advised my client to destroy the debit card and bite the $5.95 per month service fee. You get out of step even once with your credit or bank and it takes monumental effort to get back.
Meanwhile in France.
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Dad-nerb-it. A bolt fell off my red scooter and the muffler is again noisy. And it is the only odd bolt on the machine, a custom 6.5 metric. This muffler connection has given trouble since the machine was new. Rather than stew over it, I dug out my DVD of Joe Dirt and watched it for the bodies on the skinny women. Man, you have no idea how much I miss scoring with women like that. What’s the one that waited for him, Mandy? Like that would ever happen in real life, but she was so fine. I was busy going over the building budgets when she wasn’t on-screen, and it looks like Plan C is taking form.
Insurance company stock are up, bringing up the topic of bank operations, and the one that comes to mind is D-Day. By then the US was spending a million dollars an hour on war, every penny of it borrowed from banks which had been kicked out of Germany for usury. In total, it cost something like $30,000 to train, feed, equip, and ship each soldier overseas. We know the total troops in Operation Overlord were less than a quarter of the number the Soviets used every day, but for the USA, let’s go with the flow and consider it a big deal. I thought you might want to know what our military was up against, so I arbitrarily picked Omaha Beach. The one with all those slanting wooden poles. That beach, and it only represents about a fifth of the whole battle. (The on-line Lego diorama has the poles pointing the wrong way, duh.)
Opposing them were around 1,200 third-rate Germans with five machine guns. These were troops with medical ailments but no tanks and minimal air support. Most of the 3,000 American casualties were reportedly caused by one machine gunner who fired for 9 hours and then walked into town for a beer. Patton sat this one out, he was over in eastern England commanding a phantom army while the politicians figured out what to do with the old cuss.
The ultimate bank fee is when the bank gets you to die in a war so they don’t have to do any of the fighting themselves. The bank's biggest concern is to back the winning side so that their war loans can be repaid. Germany didn’t borrow, instead they established a money system based on worker productivity. The world banking system takes a dim view of that and bought American an air force to flatten Germany. Not fight the German armies, but to bomb the cities. Just ask Moammar or Saddam how that works. What, you forgot about that? Moammar was about to introduce an African currency based on gold and Saddam was beginning to pay his bills with oil instead of petro-dollars and now they are history. The Germans on Omaha beach were outnumbered 28 to 1. Other than that, it was a fair fight.
“Keep rolling your eyes,
maybe you’ll find your brain back there.”
~ dunno.
Let’s play a little game. I want you visualize the most stereotyped author you can in your mind. Think of somebody who has gone all out to act the part, past the point of tackiness. Got it? Now let me guess. Forty-ish, wears a sweater in the summertime, uses a jacket as a prop slung over one shoulder, top shirt button undone, perfect dentures, doesn’t smoke yet carries an expensive pipe, constantly posing, Liberace haircut. Now, ask yourself, how did you know I was reading an Irving Wallace book?
A good example is how he does go on about how Hitler was a failed artist. Like you are supposed to conclude that because Adolph was not an instant success at the first thing he tried, he became a schizophrenic megalomaniac bent on world domination. Yet that characterization adequately describes, with spotty exceptions, every hack electric guitar player east of the Mississippi and West Point’s class of ’82. Like the rest, Irving does not specify why, when these things happened to Hitler, they supposed to be more particularly wicked. Pretty ho-hum there, Irving.
Otherwise, the plot revolves around a tiny but apparently well-funded group in various places on Earth, and Los Angeles too, seriously involved in collecting Hitler’s paintings. Pretty amazing how, in the pre-Internet dark ages, they all knew each other from newspaper clippings, anonymous letters, and art auctions. The top guy is murdered on page eight, but not to worry, he as a gorgeous, unmarried, and sexually frustrated daughter to fill every vacancy, breach, and void. In the plot, I mean.
I already do not recommend this book because it is annoyingly slanted. Irving is continually slipping in pro-Semitic snippets of history that contemporary research has thrown into disbelief. Like, DNA testing has proved the lampshade was pig skin and the tattoo was added later. As for the story line, I’ll describe it as I read along. The theme is well-worn, that Hitler did not die in the bunker. Suddenly, a new painting showing a building nobody can pinpoint (probably the DMV) has been traded for a Jesus icon in the Hermitage, a five-building art gallery in Russia, just barely. That implies a stone’s throw from the Finnish border, which I’m given to understand is attempted “not that infrequently”.
ADDENDUM
Trivia. Brain surgeons rarely have IQs above 106. I was right about the guitar player. He was a jazz musician who only knew one or two tunes of the other styles. But he was, typically, not into playing any of those styles in a new band, his song list was fixed and he had no intention of learning anything new. Especially not no country music. He wrote back saying he had been contacted by other bands, meaning I pretty much know who that is. It will be a waste of time unless they all play the same music already. In Florida, that happens more often than you think, it’s like wondering why meteors always seem to land in the middle of craters.
Last Laugh
(The 10-minute transformation.)
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