One year ago today: February 4, 2017, finding the sun.
Five years ago today: February 4, 2013, another museum.
Nine years ago today: February 4, 2009, the knuckle song.
Random years ago today: February 4, 2012, Florida, land of the disappearing bicycles.
It’s not supposed to happen, but there I am at the coffee shop this morning and my computer keeps telling me the password is wrong. I know I’m typing it okay, so what is the situation. After a bit, I notice when I type my password, a split second later, my cursor moves one extra blank space. Reboot, check this, check that. Where is that extra space coming from. I switch over to my Bluetooth™ keyboard and be-danged, there it is again. Then it hit me. There was a lady across the divider also using a Bluetooth™ device. I disabled my tablet feature and there you have it. I thought the technology had built-in software to prevent that.
Yeah, and not only that, the 3-1/2s drain your drill battery noticeably faster. They’re all in on it together, damn Internet.
What’s worse is I somehow acquired the DVD “Supergirl”. February or not, that has got to be a contender for the shoddiest movie of the year. Two-bit special effects. The only scenery is the close-ups of Helen Slater. Whatever happened to her, anyway? Did they find a real virgin to play the parts? Even the shower scenes in the girl’s dorm were all woof-woof. But I couldn’t find my Justin Powers collection so I actually watched that piece of Warner Brothers junk. Faye Dunaway is the evil witch who unleashes the power in a jealous fit. This was in 1984, when Hollywood was pushing that it was okay for older women to chase younger men, but never the other way around. Hollywood unwired ten million years of evolution in a couple of years. Or, at least forced it underground.
Only one way to handle such a day. Make a big pot of tea and kick back. All in favor, say, “Aye.” Good, it’s unanimous. How about this orange pekoe. Did you know in China what we call black tea, they call red tea. It seems they go out of their way just to be different. And let’s play a little bass. Do you know I can play a Doors tune on the four-string? Remember “Love Me Two Times”? The bass line was probably written by a guitarist. You see, when guitar players attempt bass, they get tired quickly and revert to simplistic bass lines.
So when I spot that happening, it’s my prompt to play the bass line as it was supposed to be. And I walk all over that song. Another clue is when the guitarist goes up a fourth on the bass, there is a tendency to play a different riff. If I detect that, I’ll play the root riff just to see if it fits. And in that song, it does. I’ve often said bass is like playing one long lead break. “Love Me Two Times” is a classic for my method of adding in the lead fills. The assumption is I’ll play it with only rhythm accompaniment and it works plain great for that song. Pass the tea.
Highway. In Tibet.
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So the financial radio talk station, the only one with any content, says everybody should go out and start a business. That this is the year. How is that going to work if everybody does it? The experts said that the tax cuts make now the best time in fifty years. That’s a laugh, that any type of tax, cut or otherwise, could in any way be beneficial to a business. D’ya think maybe they had just invested in some sort of business startup service? The only good tax is a non-existent tax. At least we are not as bad as Canada. There is nothing they don’t tax, but rather for the moment at least, some things are taxed at a zero rate. Now there’s a healthy business climate for you.
Did I tell you lately about the course I took in Canadian tax law? It was a requirement for one of my accounting credits. Man, you have never seen such a screwed up system. America is bad, but Canada is sick. The most amusing part is how the examples in the textbooks were written. Talk about libtard, the tax department likes to portray itself as a cheerful little office over here in Ottawa, shucks, just a bunch of regular guys and gals. They come across as while most Canadians love to pay their taxes as their part of making paradise work, there is the occasional bad white male who hasn’t yet learned that he is living in Utopia and has to pay his full share. Even if his share is more than anybody else’s.
You see, Canadian tax law is, like America, stuck in the past where most people pretended that the nuclear family was a majority. It never has been. Some of the text examples involved people phoning the tax department because they felt they owned more tax than they had calculated, and sure enough, the office was able to find somebody to give them a hand finding it.
The best example was Rajeet. Rajeet had $800,000 in cash and wanted to know the best way to invest it for after-tax profit. That’s the example that cleverly avoiding mentioning until the last moment that Rajeet was female and turning 18 this year and wanting to attend college. Ottawa actually resumes that since Canada “is a rich country” that everybody operates at that level. The majority of Canadians never have any meaningful amount of investment.
What’s this in my collection? A book on faking knowledge of wine? Here’s a fake wine label, see if you can which is the counterfeit. Let’s see what they say not to do.
1) Don’t say “rosé”, just say “red”.
2) Avoid those double-armed corkscrews.
3) Never decant, but if you do, playact a lot.
4) If the wine is too warm or cold, say it is “cellar temperature”.
5) If in doubt, use female terms to describe the taste.
There is a growing business in fake wine labels, sold in kits that soak off the old labels. French wines in America tend to sell based on the pronounce-ability of the brand. And champagne’s lure is not that it is great wine, but that it is one of the most difficult to imitate. The grapes grow where it is too cold and apparently never fully ripen. Don’t look at me, I have not drunk wine for so long I can’t remember. At least ten years, and I have never drank wine regularly. Just do not like it, but I do have a thing for ice cold grape juice.
ADDENDUM
Here’s the latest on my expensive porch drawings. According to the county office, any homestead (that’s an owner occupied primary residence) does not need a permit, nor does the homeowner require a license or a permit to do any of his own work. However, if he makes certain improvements or adds to the living space, an inspection is required, not by the city, but by any mortgage company looking to finance the property. That’s another matter altogether. The wording is vague, but it is clear there are several ulterior interests intertwined in the code.
I’d better read the first chapter, however, because quite often the questions I asked about code were given answers that concerned the permit. Not the same thing, folks. Nor can City Hall demand, as was the case here, that you provide a CAD drawing from an engineer licenses in the county or they will not issue a permit.
Turns out you can go to the county building and get a pre-approved generic drawing of your project. This includes electrical, plumbing, and of course, additions to your dwelling. I need to get to the bottom of this, since nobody told me these things. I asked the city building manager where I could get drawings and he never said a word. We were maybe three blocks from the county office and that bastard never said a word. He specifically state, instead, that he would not approve any drawings except as above.
What’s more, no obeying a city rule is a civil offense, not at all the criminal offense that was mentioned by the code enforcer. Hmmmmm. And, it would seem that the only time an inspection is done is when it is requesting, which I did most definitely did not do. Most of the time the request comes from a lender, as said, when a property is to be mortgaged. This place was purchased in cash. How do we just know that that those jarheads at City Hall are empire-building?
They want no responsibility for the safety or quality of the building, because they would just pass any problem off as the fault of the engineer or architect. They want no accountability but insist on the say-so. It smells of inspections for the purpose of the county tax rolls. I’d be okay anyway, because this place was listed as a two bedroom. The whole matter just plain stinks. It’s a matter of finding time, which should happen in around a month when I run out of renovation money and have to import some.
Last Laugh
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