One year ago today: September 4, 2016, Columbian gooseberries.
Five years ago today: September 4, 2012, at the continental divide, sigh.
Nine years ago today: September 4, 2008, WIP
Random years ago today: September 4, xxxx, WIP
If you’ve been seeing blogs over the long weekend, that means I got something to work on the laptop. Today is irresponsibly known as Labor Day. I mean, what does it have to do with labor? It’s the same as any other day—you don’t work, you don’t get paid. So in what sense it honors labor escapes me. I suppose it has something to do with banking. They lend out worthless printed money and charge you interest. Thus, your labor goes into paying back something that has no inherent value. They lend you nothing, you work to keep them rich. If they can trick you into getting married and borrowing while you are young, they’ve got you for the 25 or 30 years that count. But to name a holiday in your honor, like a laborer is something special, that’s disgusting.
I did that the first time I opened Tor and Google snagged me before I had a chance to get inside and block them. That’s okay, I will now always use a proxy. But that is how fast and desperate Google is to get your identification. Make no mistake about it, they are not after your browser size or passwords, they want your identification. Now they know I am johnsmith@aol.com. Yes, I’m the first guy that set that account up back in the 90s. Any many more accounts, I had intended to sell the names. And I will sell it for $10,000, except for the variations on johnsmith. I own them all, and I want $15,000 for those. Cash.
To counterbalance most bad news, I invested in one of those suet cage bird feeders, see pic. This is the product called suet as shown. The idea is to attract more birds away from the other feeder which is designed to target northern cardinals. Suet is a greasy compound infused with bits of berry and nuts. The concept is that it will attract animals that winter-over with this type of diet. I put it out there because I’m curious what will show up. I wonder if there is such a thing as a butterfly path. While sitting in the yard on my fancy bench, I counted 27 butterflies that come through a gap in the trees in the same general direction.
Concerning the Chick-fil-a pouches tested last week, the results are bad. The metallic-looking interior lining is a poor conductor. And the pouches are far from waterproof. When actually immersed in water for any length of time, the foil package and inner material itself allow water through at the seams and opening. T’was another chance experiment that fizzled. On the other hand, my heavy duty eyeglass neck-chain works ideally, though it likes a shirt that has a collar.
Malta.
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Ha, I think I tripped up a major office up in Bumfeck, Michigan. I group that state with all the lowlifes that infest the eastern USA. You see, all the legit ways of making money up there were mob-owned by 1940, so what does that leave for the rest of them to do for a living? Quick, name me a piece of trouble in this country that doesn’t originate from the Atlantic Northeast. See, you had to stop and think about that one. That’s where the shysters and tax collectors live. So, without revealing any identifiable entities, I’ll tell you what I did.
You see the problem? Say it was a house foreclosed for $40,000. They flip the house for $30,000 to their cousin (don’t talk to me about honesty in auctions until you read the Arcadia Files of 2015), and still go after now homeless people for the $10,000 balance. Evil incarnate. The cousin then sells the house for its value of $60,000 and does not have to pay the victim the overage like he would if he was the direct collection agent. So anyway, here’s what I did—without telling you anything too deep.
The foreclosure people had sent out a series of form letters demanding payment, knowing very few people can pay up. What they are doing is establishing a pattern of sending notices that they know rarely evoke a response. It is not good enough for them to tell the magistrate that you didn’t pay back the money, they have to establish that you did so on purpose because you were ignoring them. But if you do reply, your non-payment can be interpreted as a breach by frustration, and the magistrates tend to side with the citizenry on that one. That’s a chance the lender won’t take.
What I did was go over the records and spreadsheeted the frequency that these form letters were arriving at my client’s place of business. I noticed it was a somewhat different turnaround time than any responses from the assigned “account representative”. Hmmm. So within 48 hours after each letter appeared from one department, I sent a letter to the other. I had correctly guessed the “account rep” was just another fat middle-aged flunky who worked to rule. For anyone who doesn’t know, work to rule is the minimum amount you have to do at any job to avoid getting fired.
My strategy was three-fold. The rep is under orders to make a prompt answer, but that operates on a different schedule than the form letter people. Am I right, or am I right? The rep quickly learns anything sent evokes a reply, which means more work, you get the drift. Form letters don’t get a reply; I call this doing a Kennedy. If you get a stream of letters, only answer the one that is easiest to deal with. This is how American offices work, if you’ve ever phoned your account rep, you’ll know they are never at their desk. Sure enough, the replies were soon arriving on a different timetable than the foreclosure department. Aha, they are not talking to each other over there. Success on phase one.
Next, they have to log all these incoming letters, meaning there is now a record that the customer was not at all ignoring the notices. They are compelled to enter into a dialogue that not only increases workload, but throws a wrench into the foreclosure department. One has to hustle over there and tell them to quit with the form letters for as long as the borrower is negotiating. Which with my involvement can be a rather long time. Success on phase two.
The third phase? That remains to be seen. The easiest foreclosure is when they go to court and the borrower doesn’t even show up. They can then present a long string of notices to which there was no reply, and that implies the borrower was not even attempting to make amends. The form notices have to stop, for if they continue, they can be shown to be frivolous. The account rep will now test the waters, or more likely, refer the account up the chain of command, because they now know several things. They are not going to get away with a no-show. They cannot prove non-cooperation. They cannot go to court unless they have a lawyer.
That last item is significant. If they don’t have an unbroken chain of unanswered letters, they don’t dare show up without a lawyer on the chance that the borrower will now likely be there with his own record of how hard he’s trying. And any consumer who gets that far may be smarter than the bureaucrat who tries to represent himself. From what I hear, a lawyer on that count runs something like $8,000. And the party in question does not owe the bank that much. Time, I’d say, to renegotiate the loan.
Tee-hee, I love screwing the bureaucrats around. Keeps them on their toes.
“I’m no sniper,
not by a long shot.”
unknown
Deciding I had to sketch out the shed for parking two or three motorcycles, I drove east to Winter Haven and found the “Central Tavern”. It’s one of those downtown places you go when you’ve lost all hope of finding decent women. Tonight confirmed that is more than a theory. Could it be the reason women never learn to shut up is the constant availability of barflies? Hang on a second, let me put something to this. Barflies = barf + lies. And I watched how superbly this ancient tactic works on Florida women tonight. I was likely the only man in the place that owned the vehicle he was driving, but you see, it was only a motorcycle. As in “only”.
There was actually (as in astonishingly) one in there with a body. I’d say 30-ish, wearing her LBD, though it was more of a little black skirt. The eye-catcher is that she was not wearing any foundation garments. Holy Sigourney Weaver back then. Except she would not shut up. On about her lousy day at the office. Being female, she had an audience. Just not for the reasons she thought.
That’s all. If you see any pictures, consider yourself lucky. I get no appreciation for the excellent photography you see here. One day soon I should show you the amount of photos that I sift through. Thousands. Here's one I'm pretty sure of, a picture as I was leaving town. It's a fairy ring of mushrooms. Do you want the trivia? Okay. The sporing mushrooms often appear is a ring because the growth begins at a central point and spreads out. The mature plant appears long the perimeter and there's your magic ring. And the picture is what I'm talking about. Do you have any real idea of how difficult it is for a non-photographer to get you these beautiful shots?
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