One year ago today: October 12, 2016, reporting & lying are identical.
Five years ago today: October 12, 2012, tales from the sidecar.
Nine years ago today: October 12, 2008, I hate VanBascoe.
Random years ago today: October 12, 2009, Siamese 101.
Here’s a random picture of the small benches that Agt. R makes from old bed frames. This one is not painted yet, but you can see how the construction works. Personally, I think it’s a great idea and he doesn’t charge enough money. Now you just be happy I didn’t hand you another picture of the work on the floor. That’s the big deal these days. I want to finish it so I can set up a small work station for my electronics. I still like making small circuit boards as a novelty.
That is one performer that I simply cannot identify with. I know he was born with a malady and died from a heart attack in his late 30s, but was that as much of a handicap as say, having to pile lumber 200 miles from civilization or being 5-foot-5? These people have talent but given the resources at their disposal, you have to wonder what took them so long. They seem to have money for cars, recording studios, paid musicians, and most of them have that irreplaceable thing called family support. It is just beyond reason to think I could ever relate to the “struggles” of anyone with that kind of luxury backing them up. Time after time you hear these tales of how their mother or equivalent showed them the ropes, introduced them to producers, helped them smash down more than a few doors.
Myself, I had zero support. For that matter, I bore nothing but criticism and conflict, I even had to figure out how bands worked on my own. There wasn’t anyone around to ask about that, and in any case in such a small town, you would not dare to ask. Any one of these things is a tall order for a twelve-year-old. Added together, I sometimes wonder how I ever did it. But by thirteen, I had my own band. It heavily relied on the parents of the spoiled new kid in town, Barry White, the guy with no eyebrows. His parents let us practice in their basement.
These are the local kids I recruited myself, first learning each song from the 45 rpm record. Learning each part as best I could, the guitar, the drums, the bass, the organ, and writing out the chords and words. Then painstakingly showing each guy how to fake it, again as best I could and them doing the best they could, often a questionable enterprise. The lineup was Gerald on bass, Barry on guitar, John on drums, and myself on keyboards. Nobody could sing and I never learned to proper way to play keys, I mostly just held the chords down because we had no rhythm player.
[Author’s note: You know the rest, against my advice, we added an “older” girl singer from the ninth grade and that eventually broke up the band. Well, not directly, but she was in the same classroom as my older sister, a born gossip. Word quickly got ‘round to the parents that, how can I put this, that I was capable of far more management and organizational skills than they ever dreamed of on the farm. This had to be suffocated, and quickly.
Thus began the uproar and clamor. The same old BS, now redoubled. People with so “goddamed much energy” they can “play guitar all damn day long” are simply not working hard enough on the farm. My next band, which by the way I started simultaneously while playing with the first, was stealth. Nobody knew about it until it was already a reality. You see, this time I smartened up and chose my people from the Catholic school across the tracks.
My legacy of refusing to give strangers anything to go on has deep solid roots.]
I was learning fast, but I’ve told you before, the rest were learning even faster. Ahem. The reality is in most cases I had to beg them to join me. They went from unwilling nobodies to experts within a few months, telling me how to run things and refusing to follow orders. You really have to grow up in a small town to see this effect. How each gronk can transmute from blunt ignoramus to distinguished genius in the few minutes it takes them to stick their nose into your business.
This is where I learned it is often better to start over with complete beginners than to try to undo damage. One beginner in around 80 makes it past the third rehearsal. But if you can propel the guy right up to stage work while there is still the momentum of enthusiasm, you’ve got something. Jag & I were a shining example of how that works. From nothing in common to playing out in what was it, six weeks? But he’d never heard any of the music we played, so there was no guitar-based ideological skirmishing. He was glad to be in a band and making money. I gave him all the tips, by the way. Most money he’d ever seen, he was only 15 at the time. Best guitar player I ever met east of the Mississippi, but he went off to college. You’ve heard all this before, but you get a little more detail and perspective each time.
Natural History Museum, London.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
So I’m reading on-line and it says not to raise your house unless you are an expert. Now they tell me, but that raises the question of how does one become an expert? Do they sign up at the House-Raising College of East Iowa? Or is like a Florida “college degree”, that is, eighteen months in night school? Or a Trump U correspondence course? These are vital questions as our economy does the capitalist tail-spin into the red Georgia clay. Actually, it is pretty hard to crash a pure capitalist system, but you got these left-wingers at the controls.
Say, guess who I got an e-mail from. Pat-B, he’s still in California and wondering how anybody can afford to live there. I explained to him how they use these forest fires to sell their houses. Nobody will pay $500,000 for a one bedroom shack, so they insure the mortgage and set the woods ablaze. It’s a no-brainer that precedes even the scams that Katrina taught America via CNN. You get asking price for your house, another $100,000 for your belongings secreted away in a Shasta mini-storage, and you clear out of the state like roughly 2/3 of the businesses have that could.
You see, in California, they’ve never heard of a backfire. The cave men knew that when the big burn is headed your way, you light a controlled back fire to create a firebreak around your property and sit back with your garden hose to snuff the odd cinder that gets through. I mean, that’s what you do if you have any brains. But not California, where they let entire subdivisions of mortgaged properties burn to the ground.
Now Pat-B, he lives on the cruise lines, often a year at a time. That’s the life for me, that’s what I would have been doing if I’d learned to sing before I was 50. He reports he’s sold everything except his guitar and one bag of clothes. That’s the guy I wish had at least tried to form a duo with me. We jammed a bit but never got around to putting any effort into arranging the music. That would have been the life for me and don’t think I didn’t try. But poverty in America is relative. I had to spend my years from 20 to 41 working to build an infrastructure that allowed me to even go live where I wanted instead of where I had to. Sigh. I wish him luck. Ha, remember he is the guy who learned the hard way that on a boat, to the women there is the captain and nobody else. Guys like us are just the hired help. But then again, he is not like me, he is far too shy to hit on every good-looking woman he sees.
Myself, I admit that’s my prime motive with music. To score with prettier and younger women than I ever could on my own. Did I ever tell you the original “concept band” for me was a cartoon? The few real life musicians I knew as a child were not mentors or role models by any stretch. Until I came along, there had never been a teen band in that town and there still wasn’t when I returned for a visit fifteen years later. It’s just goofy to think that I was handed anything like good advice or any real help. The band I modeled my early work on was “The Archies”, the comic strip. The actual Archies band came later and I didn’t care for them. But if I could have found a Betty and a Veronica, yummy yummy yummy.
The reality is when I left home at 17, I was totally disillusioned by small town people and their negative effect on themselves and all around them. Bred and programmed for failure and hating anyone with motivation because it made them look bad. At least be the end of every comic strip, everybody was friends again.
“If at first you don’t succeed,
go into management.”
~paraphrase.
I’ve got the sister joists lying in place and the concrete blocks ready to go. That tiny square footage of floor has already cost me $60 in materials. The 1/4” lag bolts I was using just don’t cinch the boards together well enough, so I upped to 5/16th carriage bolts, which each require two washers and a nut, meaning each matching set costs $1.80. Here’s a photo of one of the assemblies, and it requires six of these to bolt every eight feet of joist. That makes the hardware more expensive than the lumber.
I say disaster because I am not convinced there is any need for taxes at all in a capitalist society. I’m very much a user-pay advocate. But when you tax income, the factories pay tax on their earnings. It’s like taking on a partner who does nothing but is guaranteed a profit. In a true competitive society, theoretically the cost of commodities like bolts and washers would come down over time due to competition and innovation. Not so when the factory is taxed for it becomes in their best interests to not allow any newer or better factories to begin operations. The favored method is to add so many regulations that the startup costs deter all but the richest corporations.
The orthodox argument against no taxes at all is the free rider syndrome. Remember that one? The usual example is the lighthouse. The shipping companies are stuck with the cost of building and operating them, but once it is operational, everybody else gets to use it for free. I find that a weak claim because, over time, the free rider syndrome is a vast incentive for somebody to figure out a better system that makes money. Did that happen?
Yes. The few lighthouses left in the world are mainly tourist attractions. Somebody came along and invented a vastly superior system called GPS. And no, GPS is not free. If you total up the billions in sales just to automobiles, the cost is far higher than was ever spent on lighthouses—and it is user pay. Ah, some might say, but it required tax dollars to put the satellites into geosync orbit. Think again, it was the government that made it illegal for businesses to launch their own satellites until recently. Now that there’s competition, the prices are dropping.
I do agree with a certain amount of taxation in that the proper goal of government is to do those things, but only those things, that the people couldn’t or probably wouldn’t do for themselves. Like operate air aircraft carriers in the goddam Indian Ocean or spend $18,000 to equip each grunt in the army. But I stop far short of believing any government is rightfully or morally qualified to tell people how to live their lives.
ADDENDUM
Here are the blocks for the new piers. The guy at the lumber yard said two stacked blocks are sufficient, but I’d rather play it safe. I bought a couple of extras to be on the safe side. I didn’t get everything back to the jobsite until late afternoon and by then the heat was stifling even with three fans operating. I’m running out of space to move things already. The one side of the living room has been used for storage since a year ago. It’s a half-day’s work just to clear the space.
From the local newspaper, I got two other pieces of information. One is that of the ten deadliest highways in the USA, based on numbers of fatalities, three of those roads pass through Polk County. The worst one, Highway 27, is just twenty miles east of here and is the one I used most often to commute to Miami by batbike. This is often mistaken, as the article points out, to mean that stretch of road is a killer. No, careful what the statistic says. Highway 27 goes all the way from Miami to Indiana. The deaths recorded (614) are along the entire length of the road, not just Polk County. Same for the other two, but still, that is a gruesome coincidence.
Reader’s Digest recently reported an incident of attention for the uneducated dorks who still in this day and age think contracts have to be in writing. (It is always wise get it in writing whenever you would suffer if a contract is broken.) Except for certain types of contracts, usually real estate, there is no requirement to have things in writing.
However, be aware, in Florida, the courts will usually not enforce a contract unless it is in writing when the terms of the contract cannot be fulfilled in less than one year. Stay with me here. That is not a demand that it be in writing, but a decision by the courts to not enforce it otherwise. That’s tricky for most people to follow. If a contract could be completed, it does not mean it must be completed. Read on.
It means if I make a contract with you over something that could completed within a year, that contract is binding past a year even if not completed and not in writing because it could have been completed in that time. Got that? If it could not possibly have been completed in that year, the Florida legal system will NOT uphold it UNLESS it was in writing. So the two parts of the law are not mutually exclusive nor opposites. This is another case of the difference between lawful and legal. Lawfully, you may have a valid contract. Legally, it may not be upheld by the courts. This is the mess that American law has become.
The said incident was two ladies who bought lottery tickets together and agreed if either won, they would split the winnings. Years after they had a falling out, one of the ladies won $500,000. The other demanded her half. The first lady said no way, any contract between them had long expired. How did the Florida courts rule? According to the rule book, most people would say no enforcement because it was not in writing and it had been more than a year.
Wrong. In twisted Florida law, the verbal agreement could have been completed in less than a year if either of them had won during that time frame. It does not matter that nobody won, it was a valid contract not in writing because somebody could have won. The winner was ordered to pay the other an equal share. This is a true story, what happened is the first lady quickly stated she had spent all the money and declared bankruptcy. The second lady says no dice, and the authorities began looking for hidden assets. I don’t know the outcome.
[Author’s note: personally, I would have ruled in favor of the winner because not doing so would be punishing her for behaving naturally. Consider their conduct. Both ladies went on about their lives as if that agreement was no longer in force and the plaintiff was not laboring along under some burden of unfulfilled provisions. Her motive was clearly financial speculation. In my books, the second lady would be potentially liable for malicious prosecution. No contract should be enforced where it causes undue hardships and this lottery ticket was probably just one of countless promises they had made to each other. It’s unfair to pick and enforce only the one that later in time concerns big bucks.
The lesson here is what I’ve always said. If you ever come into money, tell no one.]
Last Laugh
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
