One year ago today: October 8, 2016, I’m not buying that.
Five years ago today: October 8, 2012, types of bridges.
Nine years ago today: October 8, 2008, comments on bank REOs.
Random years ago today: October 8, 2011, music and chayotes.
Here’s the AirBnB report. Here is the single room available on the outskirts, and it is also the cheapest, at $45 per night. There are cheaper ones in the city limits, but I don’t think you’d like to stay in the Combee Settlement. This room is in Mulberry or was it Bartow? It looks great, but the pictures always do. I had to laugh at one ad which showed a room in a guitar player’s crash pad. Hey, maybe the guy does a booming trade. I crashed pretty much where I could until I was 21, y’now. You don’t get much sleep most of the time, but the price was right.
Talk about weird. I stopped for coffee and the next table was a group of young people, I guess late teens. They were talking about movies from what they must think is a firm perspective—how the movie was produced. Myself, the very purpose of a movie is fantasy, escapism into a world that is exponentially different than day-to-day existence. My sole criteria is whether or not the movie entertained me. But these teens were concerned with how each scene was made, how much it cost, what special effects were used, and things like the total the movie brought in during the first week.
They seemed well-informed on these issues. Not a word was said concerning if the movies were any good or not. It was evident these are the people who are watching those “extras” on many disks. I can be enticed to view the odd clips of bloopers, but to interview the director or the key grip, you talk about boring. To me, it takes away from the delight of the movie. It’s like watching sausage being made. The same applies to music. I don’t care how many hours were spent in the studio, only if the song was a hit in my field of the industry. Come to think of it, I cannot name you one Jazz or new country hit song. Or one movie’s director.
But if they are learning it in public schools, I object from the point of view of wasted tax dollars. I know, get in line. There was just as much waste in my day teaching people to read and write who hated it. Still, I don’t mind as much that they learn math or science, what I really object to is courses in non-American culture. They should pay for that crap themselves.
[Author’s note: okay, I admit I did not go see Spiderman because of the bad trailers, or as they were properly called, the previews, for in my day only material that required thinking was a credit course. I found the material much too “comic book” for my movie tastes. Marvel is just no good at creating anything but ever weirder comic books, and that’s what they should stick with.]
Tenby, Wales, June 12, 1962.
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Scab joists, sister joists, whatever you want to call them, they are half done. The electrical wiring took the predictable all morning simply because it has to be run parallel to the old work and then cut over at once, probably later today. The two rooms already done have used up 370 linear feet of copper cable since none of the existing work was worth keeping. Most of it was an admixture of two-prong and mis-wired three-prong outlets that had coats of many colors.
Let me qualify that. The cool weather has not yet arrived, so it was a sweltering pain to get anything done by mid-morning. Fans, A/C, and shade together can barely dent 95% humidity. I don’t know if you can make out the lag bolts, but the two joists have to be clamped together before the screw threads will cinch them up good and tight.
So the Hippie calls again. Once again, he does not grasp that reading about something for the first time when you are fifty is not the same as research. We talked mostly music, but he does not even realize he is barking about things for the first time that were well known to most of us since day one and, importantly that he categorically argued against the same when others said them. To the extent of calling everyone else that favorite New Age put-down, “conspiracy theorists”. But you watch, I've observed that even though he is behind the times, he is consistently 15 years behind. Watch him change over to the other side once he learns the facts.
One curious item is he is just now beginning to take an interest in the Holocaust. This surprises me because a lot of his students are Jewish. The thing is, he’s reading the propaganda and buying into it so much that he does not realize it is only one side of a story and he’s experiencing a manufactured and directed hatred toward a group of people who are mostly innocent. The citing of small, individual cases as a premise for a big picture is never a valid debating tactic. This is known as “The Fallacy of Composition”, and he seems unaware it even has a definition.
Let me think of an example for you. Wait, since I want to think of something definitive. Okay, I’m back. He says the Holocaust must be true because he knows an old Jewish guy who showed him a tattoo. Hmmm, I guess the Hippie is unaware of the confession recently of the fake tattoos, and he is unaware of the tattoo number registry. Somebody tell him to ask the old Jew for the number so he can look it up. The Hippie has not heard that right after the war, when certain countries began to “restitute” Jewish losses, there was a stampede to the tattoo parlors. While you're up, you might wonder why "certain countries" would restitute anyone in the first place, unless those countries were not in control of their own affairs.
It turns out the tattoos were taken numbers from the German records. Um, there were not enough valid numbers to go around, which you would not expect if there were 6 million of them. Careful here, I’m not taking either side. But I have long been aware that only one side of the story is presented in most histories, and there is only one sure way anybody could get away with that. Control of the printing presses.
“dormitory = dirty room.”
~ another anagram.
Things went inefficiently, but since I was in the house most of the day a lot got done on the floor. The most expensive single component is again the insulation, followed by the lumber, then the drywall. Rather than deal with the whole wiring scheme, I ran temp power to wall panel and figure how I can afford the insulation. Throw down the plywood and put in the new partition. Then the room can be finished from the inside. Leaving the flooring unfastened leaves the option to get at the plumbing should JZ ever show. If not, I maybe learning that trade as well. Having the car to pick up materials really speeds things along, but I don’t want to think about the cost.
This is why I laugh when I hear most people complain how tough they had it. You know, when I think about it, the only guy I know that ever really had it rough was JZ, my rich buddy. When he dropped out of university, he was like me—no street level job skills. Back then if you didn’t go to college you were expected to get a job and support yourself. If you were qualified to get into university, there are some real difficulties with that game plan. Every drop-out I knew had some trade skills and landed great jobs, where I piled lumber in Montana. Three-quarters of what I took home was eaten up by living costs.
By comparison, today was a treat. All I had to do was muck around in the dirt, lift one board at a time, and take a rest. Enough hours go by, and things show progress. I have some home-made apple crumble in the oven baking along with some drumsticks. It will be done in ten minutes, at which time I’ll put on the coffee while it’s cooling and find me a good book to read. This month’s Analog, my science fiction magazine is again too little science and too much fiction. Sometimes, lately, you get entire issues where the short stories are purely imbecilic and intentionally hard to read. Drug-fogged fried-brain scribbling is not the same as a good surrealistic narrative.
Today’s fiction writers seem, as a general observation, to be really poor at creating memorable character names. Even the old two-syllable heroes had better monikers than what you get today. Tarzan, James Bond, John Wayne, these names you don’t forget. But what was the name of that guy in Tron? Or the lady in Avatar? None of these characters leap out at you. Okay, I’ll give them points for Indiana Jones, though that is hardly this generation.
ADDENDUM
I’m no fan of HFCS, what most call high fructose corn syrup. Like the scientists say, it isn’t corn and it isn’t syrup. I was eating yogurt and, if you are not careful reading the label, that product is one of the worst users of HFCS and modified corn starch. Both are approved food ingredients and both are linked to obesity. However, the manufacturers have enough lobbyists and pull to keep most everyone in the dark at the consumer level. That got my attention. Just a few months ago, the food regulatory people rejected a proposal to rename HFCS as “corn sugar”. That’s where things, well, they get sticky.
The average person might think that the name change was refused because it could fool people into eating foods they normally spurned over HFCS. The government agency, being totally concerned with ensuring only good nutritious food is consumed turned down the evil factories wanting to contaminate the American food supply. Hooray for the government regulators? Wrong, the quality of the food had absolutely nothing to do with concerns about your health. The government departments are so beholden to outfits like Monsanto and Cargill that they don’t dare touch the issue of whether the food is good for you.
Fact is, the name change was turned down because years ago there was another product called corn sugar. It’s called dextose. The two are chemically unrelated, but the government overseers felt it was misleading to have two different products with the same name. So that, and not your health, was the real reason you won’t be seeing “corn sugar” on everything from breakfast cereals to soft drinks.
Do you want the name of the worst cereal for HFCS content? Fruit Loops. The one with the ugly bird on the box. It’s something like 42% junk. And don’t forget your soft drinks. They use HFCS because it is so cheap, and it is so cheap because your tax dollars are used to subsidize the farms that grow the corn. And, incidentally, to file frivolous lawsuits that bankrupt surrounding farms that won’t grow GMO corn.
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