One year ago today: September 26, 2016, 13,560 inches per second.
Five years ago today: September 26, 2012, the ten-year mortgage.
Nine years ago today: September 26, 2008, big-butt truck.
Random years ago today: September 26, 2004, a calendar entry.
Here’s the picture I was looking for last week. This is the unidentified object these people decided to tow down Dixie Highway at rush hour. They moved it a few blocks, then parked and stopped for ten minutes. Then all over again. The traffic was slowed to 4-1/2 mph because it took two hours to get from downtown to Dadeland Mall. Don’t even think of taking any shortcuts, there aren’t any. The city has long since blocked all side streets. You can never get away from stupid people in Florida. Did I ever tell you why that is?
For the cost of the ten thousand cars blocked by these idiots, they could have flown the object in by helicopter. The business model of Miami is figuring out how, like the above, to pass the cost on to somebody else. So what if a few thousand gallons of gas get wasted and people are late? As long as they get what they want as cheaply as possible, to hell with the other guy. I know, because I was raised in just such an atmosphere.
To the library to look into mini-campers, the kind that would not raise many eyebrows if they were parked overnight at Wal*Mart or even Denny’s. These places often show an antsy side to rigs that look like they are professional campers avoiding hotel rates. This attitude diminishes as you work further west, but don’t blame the businesses. The East has a fully matured class of freeloaders who are keen to exploit any opportunity
Nor do I blame these people, for I view them as displaced persons. They are mostly white and should, by rights, have been able to drop out of school in the American past and thrive as laborers. But along come the libtards who let in 30 million illegals who took those jobs away. And equal number of Americans were thus shunted to the sidelines by a society they had once trusted. I remember a time when a teenager could work his way across the country. But nowadays, every one of those jobs is being worked by two illegals with another two standing in line. Darn rights I think that was a plain evil thing for the liberals to do. No call for it.
The campers I researched would be too heavy to tow with the batbike. The average was 900 pounds, or three times the batbike limit. So obviously, I was looking for the elements that justified that extra weight. To me, it all has to be amenities or hardly worth it. The cPod had all the basics. Light, fans, radio, and room to roll over. You don’t know how much you miss rolling over in your sleep until you can’t. Or you have to wake up to do it.
So, nothing yet shows any promise, they are all overpriced and too fancy. I don’t need cooking gear. If you can boil water, you can get by the day or two until you find a Burger King. Otherwise, survive on one pot and one small frying pan. Even make your coffee in that pot. I’ll tell you the best piece of camping advice I’ve seen in ages. Goes like this. When you pack for your trip, put a piece of masking tape around everything. Remove the masking tape when you use the item. After two or three trips, stop packing the things that still have the masking tape. You don’t need them.
Hotel water glass.
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See this photo? That’s the size of trees that Hurricane Irma toppled in the city parks. There are no trees that naturally grow this big and tall in the hurricane zone. So the question remains, do people plant such trees only along power lines, or do they only put power lines in the path of these trees? Because every storm brings an outage.
Not much, really. All the easy start-ups are gone. It’s disgusting to see how there are still magazines that claim to have fifty easy ways to start a small business. Nonsense. To get most anything underway since the 80s, you need massive seed capital. Enough to create a barrier to the average person—and remember that person probably has a credit card. He can borrow the money to start. Even if he fails because he can’t make the payments, he will still be competition until then, undercutting you while he’s digging himself deeper.
The lowest cost obvious business is still becoming a landlord. Your choices appear to be the lower orders of the working class or the upper crust. One group rents because they don’t have the stable income to buy their own place, the other rents so they can dump the maintenance costs on somebody else. The difference is one group works for the money, the others don’t get up in the morning unless they feel like it. Anybody in between is up to their earlobes in mortgage debt. And of course, it costs a lot more to cater to the top end of the market. They want major amenities.
As for a business location, Lakeland is no-man’s-land. The two cities of Tampa and Orlando pull all the young people away. They only come back in their 30s and such, even then only when they’ve bombed elsewhere. It is like those personal ads from women tired of the bar scene. What were they doing there that made them tire of it? I confirm prices are rising, one of the towns I use for reference is Mulberry. On the map it is south of Lakeland, but in reality it is a bedroom community. There are large mobile home parks in the area, also known as hurricane targets.
“I don’t eat lobster because
they’re alive when you kill it.”
~ Snookie Polizzi
It looks like I may have gotten the last bargain in town. Sit back and wait, however. The situation I reported is on-going—prices are rising but sales are stagnant. This cannot continue forever and that’s the state of affairs that precedes most bubbles. The lower-priced rentable places start around $65,000. That’s up some $20,000 from two years ago. But whoever was snapping up all the early listings has ceased doing it. Houses in the lower mid-range are staying on the market for weeks and months. How curious that the media keeps referring to this as a recovery. Wait this one out.
Bushnell adultery radio was broadcasting a strange mixture of Johnny Horton and Dwight Yoakum. I never could figure out their premises for this, but it plays enough country to give me the odd forgotten tune to add to my list. Speaking of old songs, the Hippie called again. He never seems to get my e-mail, which is the only sure way to get a response from me. I advised him to check his junk mail, and says it looks like everything is in there. So, go hunt for my message dude. I sent you some MP3s.
Back to the floor. What you see here is most of the old flooring ripped up already and some plywood sheets to cover the joists temporarily. The sheets are good side down and yes, that is daylight you can see in the gap. The trick, as usual, is to find the highest spot and level the entire floor to that point. The lowest point is the far corner as seen in this photo. Also, I found the mystery of the strange electrical wiring. The wiring is the old “chicken coop” style. That’s where the power lines run to a central box, and spread out from there like a spider web.
I found it in the center of the living room, a box with the four main 110V lines fanning out. Whew, this makes for an easy upgrade and explains why two of the three 220V lines appeared to run the opposite directions away from the appliances. Nothing under there is up to code. It will be soon. Alas, I did not have the presence of mind to snap you a photo before the plywood went down. Hey, I’m still in pain, okay. The original wiring setup is just an ordinary octagon box with no cover and the entire house is running on three circuits. That will be doubled and done right.
ADDENDUM
I’m a third into the new book, called “Prometheus’s Child”. If you want something new and refreshing in the retired military and mercenary field, this book is not it. It’s your standard tale of American military involvement through covert operations. A lot of the plot so far centers on the boardroom bureaucracy that typifies the American way of making war. The mercenaries and retired colonels using their contacts to edge through pet projects. This whole concept of war by corporate-style management is rotten to the core. It didn’t work in Korea. It didn’t work in Nam. It isn’t working in the Middle East. But that never stops them. Have another conference, recruit some more assets.
The book is also a bit much on Pentagonese. An idiotic acronym for almost anything, and they get hard to remember past chapter three. There is no glossary. PMC, UXB, and such, although this book is not bad as far as most go. You can usually get the meaning from context. It’s really the clichés that will get you. The sexy women in the board room, the pushy black broad, the retired Marine who acts surprised when recruited on a fishing trip, and the reluctant but Arabic-speaking office manager.
Throw in your Israeli spy and the sadistic lady torturer, and that leaves room for what? I predict a feminist, a homosexual, and a misunderstood coward about to turn hero. But I’m only on page 79, so hold your horses. They’ve only just now told us the women are single mothers, although we might have guessed that, them being high-ranking executives and all. The single men over forty have lost their trophy wives to various tumors, muggers, freak car accidents, and the odd plane crash. That does not stop them from parachute practice. And both sexes have hobbies like rock-climbing, deep-sea fishing, and vintage airplane racing.
I am learning a lot about Chad. Rated the second most corrupt nation, now they have apparently discovered uranium there. Correct that. The deposits were originally in Libya before the neighboring countries were given enough American guns and ammunition to do the border dispute thing and before Hillary murdered Moammar. The plot is based on these items, but contains all manner of errors, the most annoying of which is to use the term “you all” in reference to single persons. And so far, every one of the good guys—and gals—is an Olympic-grade crack shot, to boot.
Why, there’s already more heroes in this book than a downtown Toronto bar on the last Wednesday of the month.
[Author’s note: for those who don’t get it, up in Canada, the monthly welfare checks all come out on the same day. Since one Canadian in three is on welfare, this radically distorts the national economy. There are entire families on welfare, sometimes all three generations and it is not unusual to meet perfectly healthy young men on the dole. In some cities, the entire skid road saloon and drug markets are adapted to “Welfare Wednesday”.
Locally, it is known as the Mardi Gras. The welfare checks are blown by end of the first week and the rest of the month the welfare cases subsist on petty crime and street hustling. You can often get a $200 bag of groceries on the street corner for $20. There are twenty-room hotels who rent out to over two hundred people as an address to get their checks cashed, then go sleep in the city parks or stink up the city libraries.
As I’ve mentioned before, the one striking quality of Canadian welfare recipients is how alike they look and act. Vast numbers of them have the act down perfect. The lisp, the limp, the dip-shit haircut. It’s an amazing thing to see. And I’ve seen it, I lived in Canada for three years. Incidentally, once a Canadian gets on welfare, it is illegal to investigate them or report them cheating at it.
Undoubtedly I’ve written it before, but I can never forget the welfare lady I saw living in just as nice a house as the one we rented. At Xmas, she was throwing the food hampers and turkeys out on the street, yelling at the welfare workers to stop bringing her food. She wanted cash money or nothing.]
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