One year ago today: October 18, 2016, good timing or bad timing?
Five years ago today: October 18, 2012, condos ain’t ‘single family homes’.
Nine years ago today: October 18, 2008, Wallace checks the time.
Random years ago today: October 18, 2014, Emma Watson’s eye.
Finally, I met someone who knows what pilot biscuits are, or were. The army calls them hardtack but none of the commercial products on sale anywhere are the real thing. He recalls the same things I do about them. Rick the Mason, often shortened to Rickmason, also developed a taste for them. You had to go get an adult to break them in two on the corner of the table, that’s how tough they were. I liked them with scalding hot cocoa and he likes them in milk, where they get instantly soggy and you eat that like cereal.
The story did not disappoint me because I expected the outturn. I tell you from experience no matter what you do to get ahead, some dismal people will arrive toward the end to trip you up or demand a share or simply interfere for their own perverse satisfaction at seeing you fail. See this dog? He’s the one that’s got if figured out. Lying in the shade of the dock over at Debs in Lake Placid. Not a care in the world.
I learned more about the developing greed of governments over treasure wrecks. I say the governments because I’ve yet to meet a private citizen who gives a hoot or who has ever directly benefited from sunken treasure. But I am quick to note that the governments make no effort to find or recover the treasure themselves, rather they lie in wait to become the true plunderers. The cover story is that the artifacts have national and cultural value. Yeah, especially the gold and silver that was probably looted by the Spaniards from other nations and cultures.
You know, for all the libraries I’ve been in over half a century, I’ve never been in one that has the fabled old documents that these researchers use. True, I tend to use public libraries and you don’t want the public touching valuable manuscripts. Still, some day I’d like to visit such a library just to see what sparks my interest.
The PO-TA-TOES gif.
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Hmmm, my old band is still shelling out real money to make demos of 60-year-old songs. That’s the five-piece I was never happy with. They could always claim I knew the terms when I joined them, and musically I did. It’s my contention that they were not up front about what they thought about bass players. If they had told me they considered bassists to be low man on the totem pole, I would never have joined them. You won’t get much more proof than it was kept a secret.
I’m still not convinced that is their new bassist [playing] on the recordings. Something doesn’t add up, how he comps (he’s quite good at it) but then suddenly is able to play note-for-note when it’s recorded? Real life usually doesn’t work out quite so smoothly. His fretting ambiance isn’t the same in the studio as on live clips. But who knows, maybe the guy can read notes and they’ve got the soundman from outer space. It’s been my experience that bassists who follow the leader—as must any bassist in that band—do not usually display such an outstanding improvement the moment they walk into a recording studio.
Nobody was surprised to learn that in the new promo photos, they don't make the new bassist stand behind anybody. Since it is unlikely they learned their lessons about that, my conclusion is that they now have an option they never had with me: the right to tell him what and how to play so he never gets any attention.
Now, when I first heard this band, I recognized the quality in the group. They are individually great musicians with zero audience skills. But I should have trusted my instincts over why neither of us had ever heard of the other. I’d also told them first day I was looking for a working band. (I made what, $135 with that band—and they resented that I kept track.) It was endless rehearsals because their song list was so bloated it had to be constantly gone over. They had something like 61 songs, though they played back to back and could burn through many of them at each gig. The normal number for most bands is around 32, that’s 12 strong tunes and 20 so-so.
The band lacked a front man, somebody with the personality to reach out and grab that audience. They eventually got the lady singer but unless she ballistically grew a whole new personality since I met her, she ‘ll never be the catalyst that band needs. Not even close. I hoped that after the first few gigs when I got such thunderous crowd feedback, they would agree to try one or two of my songs. It would have been a truly superb sound. Instead, they conspired between themselves to refuse to consider a song if the submission came from my direction.
I remember wondering what in hell they were so scared of? That I’d take over? That they might inadvertently play a song where the bass wasn’t easy? That the audience might like my tunes as well as my performance? (Actually, there’s more to the “bass is easy” bit than meets the ear. They had presumed the bass was always easy until I arrived. Time and again I got the ovations playing their own tunes, so no way were they going to take a chance on mine. But when they ignored how repeatedly people yelled at the band for me to turn up louder, that’s deliberate folly.
I believe the poor track record of that band to be the result of plain bad management by the drummer. I doubt any band has ever met success by selling tee shirts and CDs, yet his brain was stuck in that gear. Bottom line, he had a schoolyard bully personality and kept control by the fact the band rehearsed in his garage. He was a great drummer if only he’d stick with that.
[Author’s note: I have no doubt he was behind most of the things wrong with that band. He refused to try any non-standard advertising despite the fact nothing he was doing had ever worked. (I was all for playing every weekend, push, push, push until we got somewhere.) He’s the one that would not let me sing and he always resented my stage presence. In his world, bass players are supposed to be nondescript. And since he produced the demos, it was pretty certain who was behind deleting the soundtrack all the times the audience cheered my work.
Who’s right? It’s tricky to say. I have my own recordings of the gigs any time he wants to hook up the old Applause-O-Meter and make a fair comparison.]
“If we are all God’s children,
what makes Jesus so special?”
~ definitely anon.
This afternoon I looked into the top twenty sites for small retail operations. Rejecting the ones that were too specialized or charged membership fees quickly trimmed it down to four potential sites. There is no evidence that sites that charge a fee are better. Many of them also charge a commission. The rejection is not over the fee, it is over how they charge the fee. It’s not like you can fire them off a money order once a year. Ever heard of Equifax, the company I warned against over 15 years ago? Them, Wells Fargo, and Experian.
Craigslist is still a contender but it seems every other time you look, they’ve cut out a service or changed the listing rules. Nobody likes a business associate who behaves like a spastic. Did I just insult PayPal and the Bank of America? Anyway, the two sites I like are offeritem.com and letgo.com. What I didn’t like was how slow and unknown they are. One of their buttons follows the history of items listed and when I clicked on that, material came up dated 2011. And while I was there, I checked the top 500 web sites by hits per day. The last one in the race has 508 times more visitors per day than this blog. Don’t be disheartened, that is web sites, not just blogs. I could not find the corresponding statistic for blogs only where I’m in the rankings somewhere But as I’m not seeking mass readership, I don’t check it that often.
Meanwhile, I busting my brain trying to figure out how to get $20 per sale out of customers without getting involved with millennials whose true purpose is to record and monitor everything you do. I didn’t say anything is wrong with that, but I’m saying I don’t like it and regularly defeat such systems just because I can. Don’t we all love these new web sites that don’t let you link or view their picture locations? I suppose it works on the proles.
ADDENDUM
Got $27,995? This can be yours. I read the ad and it is totally restored right down to the engine bolts. And if you get t-boned, Progressive insurance will pay you $202 for it, the old book value scam. This car grabbed my eye because it is in as perfect condition I’ve ever seen. Sadly it is a three speed manual shift. It is too bad America does not recognize the street value of these vehicles. Any way, what I can’t figure out is my old tube radio picks up Bushnell, but all my other radios don’t even get static on the same wavelength. The tube radio is a GE and it has that maddening habit of getting better reception and volume when you are standing near it.
Meanwhile, we’ve got our own share of uneducated liberals and there’s a heavy concentration of them in Tampa. Every newspaper, every day how Trump “failed” at something rather than how die-hard liberals are refusing to represent the elected leader of the majority. But, that’s liberals, they know better what is good for you than you do.
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