One year ago today: November 4, 2016, Zephyrhills, FL.
Five years ago today: November 4, 2012, Miami Art Show = no parking.
Nine years ago today: November 4, 2008, agent 86.5.
Random years ago today: November 4, 2009, my 2nd oldest friend, like 30 yrs!
I just finished reading the crime book. Amazing how often false convictions have been attained by circumstantial browbeating. Once again, eyewitnesses turn out to be the least reliable evidence, less than 30% accurate. The accused denies involvement how many times for sixteen hours, deprived of food and water. Then he finally admits something in return for basic needs. Which statement is admitted in court above all the denials?
This photo is from a well-known case in England, the “Bambi Killer”. Here he is hamming it up at the family funeral. Later, his girlfriend snitched and turns out he shot all his relatives with a .22 rife, pausing to reload twice.
The fame of this case was that the police missed all the evidence (relatives later had to search the house themselves and found the silencer). The police had ruled it a murder-suicide by the wife, who was too short to have aimed the rifle at herself and pulled the trigger. Twice.
Reading past 2/3 of the book, it began to sound repetitious and much like every other such book, often quoting the same crimes in England. It states that just as police detective techniques have changed over time, so have the criminals. We now live in an era of serial criminals, the worst being the murder-rapists. And the nature of the motive has shifted from money to seeking recognition in the media. I independently drew this same conclusion in my teens.
There are interesting predictions in the sense they all became true. The majority of crimes are committed by people under 24 who are easily rounded up due to their ineptitude. The criminal to watch for is the male over 24 to around 40 who becomes a professional by luck or, more often, by learning how the police think. The police can predict how each category of criminal will evolve and most apprehensions occur by cross referencing computer files. As in pulling over a car as an excuse and linking it to other times and other places. Security at the expense of personal freedoms, I believe they call that.
One more intriguing chapter talks about the motives of criminals. It would seem other than being extreme, they are the same motives that operate in most of your sane and ordinary people. Everybody wants to be rich or famous or powerful. The difference is that the criminal wants to achieve these ends at somebody else’s expense. I disagree of using that criteria. Why? Because, you see, I simply know too many people who operate at that level socially for such a correlation alone to ever be used as a sure-fire indicator of criminality. To do so would mean making stupidity a crime and FEMA aside, nobody really wants to see half of Tallahassee put in jail.
But one thing makes sense. There is a movement in England to make the crime labs openly available to the public as well as the police. As it stands, the police can and often do restrict access to the labs. I’m for the idea of open availability. The public should have just as much right to investigate anything they want as do the authorities. After all, the labs are generally paid for by the taxpayer, or in the alternative charge a fee to the police, who are paid for by the taxpayer. And I would really like some proof that my youngest brother and I have the same father. Dakenken is a crude, unsophisticated brute of a drop-out.
[Author’s note: that’s my brother where the father of his girlfriend broke them up by the straightforward expedient of sending her to a college 1,500 miles away. That put her out of my brother’s league on so many levels, possibly every level.]
Faroe Islands.
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This will not be a bang-up day. There is a reason I get my haircuts in the next county, and today the redhead I met at the thrift was in the store. Except, as I suspected all along, her roots were no longer red. There was a lively exchange of mind-reading going on as I can read the other gal like an open book. We happen to be 110% compatible except for the fact she is a bit too married. I picked up an electric drill, one of those roto-rooter pipe cleaners, and a beautiful leather carpenter’s belt all for ten bucks. The only thing wrong with the belt was that it had been left in a damp location and all the rivets were tarnished. Folks, this was a $60 belt otherwise brand new. I insisted the shop take $25 for the lot.
Next hour found me in Winter Haven filing some important documents. Finishing up, I zipped into the Grove Root for a craft beer. Not knowing one from the other, I asked the pushy housewife type (with frumpy-getting upper thighs) for a glass of whatever was on special. She icily says to me they don’t have specials—great sales job there, lady. Six bucks for a glass of wheatie dry something. Maybe my being the only man in the place wearing a dress shirt and tie offended her. Or maybe it was my lack of baseball cap, type of thing, that got her fatness in a snit. I should have said, "Ma'am, you misunderstood me. What I said was those Bermuda shorts make your ass look fat."
How I long to get my little electronics lab set back up. I know there is nothing new to be found at my beginner’s level, famous last words. What I mean is I enjoy making small projects out of discrete components (resistors, capacitors, LEDs) that other people use integrated circuits or purpose built components. I’m less attracted by how binary and miniaturization works and more by how small electric voltages can be used to perform logic. Guess I’d rather hear a relay click than trust that some invisibly tiny circuit is doing the job. Another item I picked up at the thrift was 80 feet of 24 AWG phone wire for fifty cents.
“I stopped understanding math when
the alphabet started to get involved.”
~Somebody like Ken Sanchuk.
See these tiny screwdrivers. I saw them and had to have them. There’s two matching sets of slot and Philips. Um, one thing that caught my attention is that the packaging and literature could easily lead the purchaser to conclude this product was made in America. Not so, when read closely it specifies that the package and product were designed in the US of A. This is part of the larger matter where I have warned these millennials they are not thinking ahead.
[Authors note: there are no Sony service centers in North America. There are only disreputable shops that pay Sony a fee to put that “authorized” sticker in their window to sucker you in. They do not repair Sony products and do not carry anything like an adequate supply of spare parts. I have boycotted Sony for nearly 30 years now.]
Here, following, is your free magazine-grade article, the kind that is hard to find any more. That means the article contains actual opinion by an author not chicken to stick his neck out, it names specific bad operators, is not politically correct, and does not pollute the topic with any themes of equality, tolerance, homosexuality, or puny liberalism. Ready? Here goes:
Like self-serve gas stations of my time, consumer trickery was always on the horizon, but nobody was low-life enough to actually implement it until the mid-1980s. At first it was small-scale rip-offs, like the so-called “limited” warrantee which is no warrantee at all and then those stinky unbundled cellular plans that always worked back to the same dollar cost. I was in my final year of accounting when the changeover began in earnest.
The transfiguration was overnight. In our final year [of accounting], America began to embrace the dorky “Japanese business model” which has since become so discredited it is laughable. It was 1994, when their economy was growing annually at nearly half the percentage as their suicide rate. Up till then, efficiency class taught budding accountants [like me] how to calculate real dollar cost savings at the corporate, production, and distribution tiers.
The new classes [instead] focused entirely on shaving pennies here and there off the consumer. Put on a decal that the product could not be returned to where it was purchased, but shipped to some distant factory. Make it a little harder each passing year by having the purchaser show ID or produce the original receipt. Fire the repair department and replace them with customer service phones. You know what I’m talking about.
Sure, we had misleading advertising in my day, but it was confined to the obvious, such as the top half of the potato chip package being a printed label instead of product. Nobody deliberately pumped the package up to four times its content volume. Sure, it cost a bit more to hire a gas pump jockey. As soon as one station went self-serve, everybody had to follow suit. Now instead of paying a few cents more per gallon, the public pays a few dollars more on food stamps, defaulted student loans, full jails, and the not-yet-felt horrors of an entire generation of idled but entitled teens entering an economy that cannot no-how employ them as adults.
Back to the package shown above. The actual manufacture took place in China, which is so far away it is almost as hard to see as this tiny label on the back of the package
Yes, if you’ve spotted the shortage of photos lately, all my Vivitars quit working. Three of them. They all developed the same problem—this batch will either not read or not write to the SD card. I’ve always been suspicious of electronic products that have this all-too-specific a match between utility and malfunction. Let me explain that. Think of all the things that could go wrong with a digital camera. Say the flash quits, or the sepia setting won’t work. Maybe the anti-shake device fails or the telephoto button goes kaput. Folks could probably live with that. Yet none of these features ever fail. The only thing that goes wrong is always some precise function that renders the entire camera inoperable. Think about that one.
ADDENDUM
Nobody can figure out why the Hippie is so irate. He broke the contract, I walked out. That’s how it works. We play as a duo means once we start, two people play every song in a continuous string except for breaks. History shows you cannot let him play a solo, not even one. We also do not play any song unless it is on the pre-agreed list. We do not argue about this on stage. Nor is it allowed to insult the other guy by on-stage coaching, totally unacceptable. (Actually, it is the Hippie who can’t follow other musicians. When he makes a big deal out of following, he means following him, an insufferable presumption.)
He’s taken to leaving obscene messages at four in the morning. He’s not getting up special to make the calls, why he’s just getting drunk around that time. Something about me walking out on the gig. Will somebody tell him that was the fault of the guitar player. The guitar player who started playing solo at a duo gig. And playing material the band didn’t know. That’s the problem, not me. Unless the guitar player is actually stupid enough to think other people are obligated to put up with such nonsense. Naw, nobody is that stupid. What? Well, okay, liberals are that stupid. What again? Well, yes, the Hippie is a liberal, but only when it comes to you. When it’s his turn to pay, suddenly he's a socialist.
He is also on about how I am not a very good bassist because sometimes I’ve never even heard of the songs he comes up with. Maybe so. But unlike him, at least I can get the undivided attention of the whole room. And I can play “Jambalaya” the right way, which he should learn. Both chords. The guy breaks his own contract by lying to get you on stage, then howls persecution when you opt out. There is some ancient Levantine connection here that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Last Laugh
