One year ago today: December 17, 2016, on published articles.
Five years ago today: December 17, 2012, McAfee’s “young” girlfriend.
Nine years ago today: December 17, 2008, fork handles four candles.
Random years ago today: December 17, 2010, cruises to nowhere.
First take a glance at this quasi-mystery object. It’s an easy one. I bought it to see how it might fit into my plans. There is no final design for the porch yet. The space for the screens will be twelve feet wide, minus the width of the columns. The specs I’ve read say the screens or windows are not to be more than three feet wide. That means nine pillars which seems excessive. I had planned on fewer uprights but the result is a compromise no matter what you do.
This is the classic day everybody was born on. It was the day back in 1982 that I began warning the world about filling out “surveys”. I didn’t know about so-called required fields, but I could read the signs. That’s the year I began advising people to begin spoofing. Here’s a reminder of part of the data I suggested people put into those blank.
DOB 12-17-85*
Gender: M (always put male)
Mother’s Maiden: Daphne
Grandfather’s Occupation: gravedigger
ZIP: 96598
Area code: (612) (South Pole)
SSN: 567-68-0515 (Richard Nixon) or 409-52-2002 (Elvis Presley)
Visa Card Number: 4111111111111110
The above is just a beginning, and of course you would never put this information on an official form. Strange how 35 years later this advice comes too late for so many. They must be tweeting instead of reading good blogs. On the *DOB above, every time your age rolls past 45, you reset the birth year ahead by twenty. I wonder how many times this has been used. But who remembers the time BrandsMart insisted I enter my private data to make a return? When I tried to key in certain information, I found so many had done it before that the chain had blocked further entries.
For the phone number, I used to use the home numbers of telemarketers as published by Dave Barry. They gagged him and changed their numbers. But there must be somebody you can think of that appreciates random calls 24/7. The DMV? The lottery office? Your ex? Used car lots and insurance companies are good because they have software that defeats number block and will always return calls, including to the wrong people. They will often call back knowing caller's name, age, and pretend to be old friend, which leads to some spirited exchanges. Think of yourself as providing a telemarketer-to-insurance-company dating service.
For more security, set up a Tor account. Tor is an acronym for “the onion router”. Just be aware that all ISP’s now have software to detect encrypted traffic and have been known to provide that information to the authorities. My objection is it runs contrary to the presumption of innocence. Consider using obfxproxy (obfuscation) which makes encrypted material appear normal to snoopers. The worst assumption you could make for your own privacy is that because there is so much Internet traffic, nobody has time to pry into your silly old affairs. There’s a file on you 65 yards long. That’s the average these days, FYI.
Blue Dragon river, Portugal.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Off to Winter Haven for shopping and supplies. I have much more experience living in small towns than most of the people who live in one. Ken, see if you can figure out what I just said there. So when I spend above a certain dollar amount, especially on building materials, stamps, books, or medicine, I drive over to the next town to do it. For an example, here are the joist hangers for the porch. They are supposed to be fastens with special nails, so I took a look at them. Special? They just mean galvanized. Since I don’t like pulling nails when I mess up, I opted for the extra cost of exterior screws.
That thrift I mentioned that is never open just has a weird schedule. They are open only Friday thru Sunday, the two days I’m least likely to drive past. But they were open today and have they got a gold mine of old movies on DVD that I’ve never seen. I picked up a dozen, mostly action and murder mystery. And a BBC documentary on WWII that is pure propaganda. Not a lot of people know that prior to the war, the British rounded up all the Jews in England and put them in camps.
The British, not the Germans, invented the modern concentration camp during the Boer war. The concept was of separating a group from daily interaction with the populace. So later, if anything happened to that group, nobody in town would miss them. The video did not emphasize enough how proper the Germans were on the British soil they did occupy, the Channel Islands. Nobody there, especially the shopkeepers, complained a bit.
That didn’t stop the BBC from speculating that the Germans might have been really nasty. That’s the premise of such propaganda. It compares the behavior of the Germans in Poland, but ignores the fact that Poland had recently invaded Germany and was persecuting the large German minorities in the borderlands and East Prussia. The Germans hated the Poles, but they did not hate the English. They somewhat admired the British system, which took a grubby nothing island and created a world-wide Empire.
I don’t know if it is true, but the Germans have a side of the story about how King Edward abdicated to marry an American divorcee. Berlin claims that was a cover story. Edward was forced to step down because he was known to be sympathetic to the German cause. It was known that if the Germans knocked England out of the war, they planned to bring Edward back to keep the Empire intact so that neither the Japanese or the Americans could grab it. Ha, that’s a little different than the version they taught you in history, I’ll bet.
ADDENDUM
On the radio there was a documentary on dementia and they got it all wrong. They listed early symptoms, but only the obvious ones that appeared, in my opinion, far too late in life. The researchers are not backing up far enough to find out what these patients have in common. Fortunately, they have me to help set the record straight.
I say the signs of who goes demented appear as early as the age of eight. Following is a list of the things that tell you exactly who is going to wind up a slobbering vegetable. I won’t quote a ton of examples because the best proof is that people who don’t do these things with their lives never wind up loopy. Here are the early childhood indicators of dementia.
a) An intense interest in other people’s private business.
b) Strong opinions of how other people should behave.
c) A preference for gossip over things like homework or hobbies
d) Addiction to computer games, television, facebook, phone talking.
e) Obsessions over personal appearance and reputation.
f) Compulsive lying to get their own way.
g) Lack of a variety of opposite sex partners before adulthood.
Show me a demented person, I’ll show you somebody with every one of these signs in spades. My theory is that these markers get overlooked because they are always present in ordinary (synonym for boring) humans to some degree. The staff who study such subjects are too politically correct to tell it like it is to a majority. If research could somehow single out the hard cases, it would be plain how right I am about this. The fact is, let an intelligent man observe a room with such people for twenty minutes and he could point out the ones heading for the funny farm. A mind running on empty sooner or later conks out. So there.
In a related topic, I was in the coffee shop when a Sunday group of teens came in. They grabbed the tables all around me. I overheard plenty, but nothing that could possibly surprise me. What did startle me was how this large mixed group was, what’s the word, unchaperoned? I intend that contextually to mean by comparison to my own early teen years. The world back then was hardwired to make sure no how could male and female teens ever truly have any privacy together—unless they were breaking some rule. It was just not allowed.
Of course, that [system] didn’t even slow me down, but it did precisely that to most others. No wonder so many of them grew up twisted. Those who don’t have sex until they are 18 or 21 are damn well by then going to develop some mighty strange concepts on the subject. Or worse, and we’ve all seen this, they spend the rest of their lives and paychecks failing to make up for lost time, often in bizarrely sub-concious ways. Not me, by the time I was twelve, I had handily figured out how to work the situation in my favor. No, I will not give you a list of guidelines. But I will repeat my guiding principles because they still work to this day.
1) Never talk or brag about your exploits. Not one word, not in any company or blog.
2) Don’t ever ask for sex, let her broach the subject and you’re in.
3) Leave the dirty jokes and pickup lines for long-time losers like my brothers.
What stunned me was the teen boys in that setting did not seem to be able to take advantage of the opportunities presented. I thought what gives? Here’s the latest generation barraged by sex messages from birth but these guys were a slow and shy as anything in my day. I’ve seen this before, but man, that was forty plus years ago. How could these guys have learned nothing? They were as bumbling and idiotic as the competition back in my day. I think goes to show us something. Myself, I would have just picked the pretty one and worked my magic. Then the next prettiest one and down the line.
And those millennials just sat as if they were paralyzed. Talk about destined to finish last. If you can’t score in high school, the real world is going to come as quite a shock to you. Guys, you will never have it so good again. Unless you move directly into college or university, it is all downhill from there.
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