One year ago today: February 6, 2017, real men eat quiche.
Five years ago today: February 6, 2013, books for the homeless?
Nine years ago today: February 6, 2009, what’s a pay phone?
Random years ago today: February 6, 2010, radio-shielding material?
Here’s a photo for the novelty, it’s an old style ground wire. I’d never seen them before until this place, but it has one on every major circuit loop of the old place. It’s a rod driven twelve feet into the ground, then attached to the metal electrical box. The old wiring is only two-wire, so there is no third grounding wire. I’m replacing all with contemporary circuitry, but these old grounding wires are still in place. So if we ever get struck by lightning, we are doubly protected. Um, all those stories you hear about Florida being the lightning strike capital of the world are referring to gold courses. People who play golf often lack the sense to get in out of the rain, it would seem.
Thank goodness Tarzan was on the radio. His problems are so much worse than my silly old U-box. It’s not just the advantages he has in special effects and dramatic music, either. Today, some evil sheik kidnapped a French woman who had to be rescued from a tiger pit when she tried to escape. In the good old radio days, French women were beautiful, hairy armpits and all. And Tarzan rescued her in time for Thanksgiving, an American festival that neither the French nor Africans would recognize. I forget even how they worked it into the script. But what the hell, nobody quibbles unless we don’t get at least two mighty ape roars per episode.
Ha, let the damn thing tank. The market is a casino and who cares if the gamblers lose? Every last one of them that’s worried is because they are in get-rich-quick mode. I used to invest in dividend stocks and never care a twit about the prices as long as the income measured against the sunk cost was better than the next riskiest business. It’s the speculators who worry, not the investors.
Yeah, let the economy sputter so badly they get those idiotic life insurance commercials off the air. That twerp asks fifty times a day, are you paying too much for term life? But he won’t define “too much”. Life insurance contracts are so complicated you can’t really compare them. Every rider or clause is against you. He means strictly the price you are paying, but that probably has benefits you’d be losing by opting for something cheaper.
My policy is $2 million, which is through my former union, so cheap that I cannot even remember the premium. It comes out of my account, something like 90 cents per week. I collect unless I die of old age before age 91.
You should be getting less reading these days due to the band, but the other half is moving slower than I thought possible for an experienced musician. So I was re-reading SuperFreakonomics, the book that compares real life situations to the lab experiments at university level. I agree that on campus, there exists a definable type of student who will participate in these experiments and they will give the answers they think are expected. Or as SuperFreakonomics puts it, “It works in practice, but does it work in theory?”
The thrust of the book is how to put old economics theory through tests to peel away some of the entrenched ideas about human behavior. Like the scientific management theories, the old theories often work simply because the subjects know they are being watch. I participated in a game of “Ultimatum” at a seminar in the late 70s, only to conclude there is no lab experiment that can actually duplicate real life. Let me tell you about Ultimatum. (Note how I tend to put the first mention of a new term in quotation marks the first time it appears? Or if it has not appeared in a while? That’s because I’m a nice guy.)
Ultimatum is that game where two test subjects don’t know each other, but both know the rules of the game. Player A is given $20 and can split it any way with Player B. If Player B accepts, the both go away happy. But if player B rejects the offer, the both go away with nothing. On average the happy people split the money 70/30. But this is also the test that caused me to reject its validity. It purported to be measuring altruistic behavior, and I saw the flaws immediately.
[[Author’s note: I know that if it was my family, player B would reject any offer except you give him the full $20 and thank him for teaching you how to be generous. (And now that you’ve committed to a pattern, when are you going to do it again?) My family would opt for a guaranteed complete loss if they could force the same upon you. The thinking is that they know they would just blow the money, whereas you might invest it (asshole that you are) and they know your motive with that is to make them look bad because they just “know” it and you’ve done it before. They’ll reject any split if they believe doing so will make you suffer more than themselves, which, if you don’t invest, is probably eventually going to be true. It sounds complicated, but I’ve seen it often enough to recognize every move. It’s pretty amazing.]
What I saw wrong was Player A was given the money, he did not earn it. Player B knew that he did not earn it, and thus had veto power. Hmmm, now does that sound a lot like an inheritance as viewed by a liberal? What if Player B knew that the other guy had earned it? That only changes things slightly from liberalism to welfare recipient. There are countless variations on Ultimatum since my day, but the only certain fair play occurs when both parties know the other has earned the money—in which case they tend to leave each other alone, neither asking nor demanding anything. To me, this is the ideal state, but for one major exception.
That exception is that although I am most definitely not a liberal, I am strongly for 100% inheritance taxes under some strict guidelines. In their simplest form, that could be put that you may give free to your children every advantage before they are 21, in terms of education, status, exposure, and any other infrastructure matter related to being rich, as long as you pay the going rate for it. Send them to Europe to get culture, send them to Princeton get some degrees, send them to Miami to get drunk, but if you send them money, that is income and should be taxed like the rest of us.
The rule is to ensure that every person who has a fat cat lifestyle worked for it, at least some. After 21, any money they get for free is taxable income, above a certain ceiling of course. Nobody is going to deny them everything except the temptation to use their free money to prevent others from getting ahead. Which is the way it is done now. It’s nonsense that the rich build factories and create jobs. Instead, they vote in laws that protect their own ranks. There are exceptions, but those are not what I’m referring to here.
There’s your fit-for-publication article, free. Now, how nice is that?
Desert Breath, March 1997.
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Grabbing the bass, I re-visited “Love Me Two Times” by The Doors. Except for “Light My Fire”, which is kind of draggy except for the keyboards, the rest of their material is ho-hum in my books. By making a few changes, the possibility of an acoustic & bass configuration in there somewhere. Instead of trilling the mediant note, I moved it to the octave. And learned the significant note of each lead or chord riff. On the bass, each chord has a single note that “makes” that sound for each piece of music. Players who take lessons are hesitant to play it, always going for roots and fifths. Could be because they can’t find decent guitarists to play the chords?
In a scary development, the music rights people have been visiting the local pubs and clubs to make sure they’ve paid their dues. This is the team of lawyers who buy music rights and pushed through a law that live performance is a form of copyright violation unless you have a license. This encompasses, of course, 99% of all performing groups. According to the Funbar, the harassment starts the month before Superbowl. The staff doesn’t have all the details. So what I have for you is some statistics I based on what they were able to supply.
The price of the TVs is based on the number of screens, not the number of chairs occupied by people who are watching. Thus, that club pays a fee of $2.95 per chair because somebody who is not sitting in it could, if they looked up, see a television screen. And for Superbowl, if you counted the number of patrons actually in the place, the fee was $9.95 per person. That’s what the club has to pay just to open the doors. Something is seriously wrong with this system. Keep in mind, the artist does not see a penny of this money. He long ago sold the rights to his music. The money goes strictly to the owner of those rights.
What I was unable to find out is how often the club has to pay the $2.95 fee. I hope it is annually, because they not only have TVs, they have a juke box, three Karaokes a week, and occasional live bands. The Funbar did mention they were only ‘licensed’ for one Karaoke per week, and hoped the music Gestapo would not find out. What, I thought, kind of shit is that. A lawyer telling a bar how often they can have entertainment. Mr. Trump, please enact a law saying live music is freedom of speech.
Where that sticks in my craw is that the provider of the Karaoke has already paid a fee to play the music. If there is a fee at all, that’s the one that would make sense, but also the one I would disagree with the most. The people providing the entertainment are the least able to pay. Who remembers back in, what was it, 2014, when I contacted the music rights people? My plan was to find out the price of a license, and if it was reasonable, buy it. See how that works? If they got active, they could then shut down all my competition without me being directly involved.
It doesn’t work that way. Instead, I got a law clerk, who wanted my ID, “for their files”. No dice. He also wanted my phone number to call me back. Double no dice. They would then NOT sell me a license to play country music, but after they got my money, would hold a meeting and pick which songs they would allow me to play. I would be given no say in this matter. I would not even be allowed to ask for certain songs to be included. If you’ve ever been ripped off by the juke box playing some shitty live version of the song you really wanted, that gives you some idea of how fair these people play.
Their tactic of attacking the bars makes sense, that is, scumbag sense. Unlike the band, the bar cannot just pack up and go someplace else. I doubt any musician sold his music rights thinking they would be used for this purpose, that is, to prevent the performance of his material. This point, I believe, will be the thing on trial if the music rights people ever do start charging entertainers with copyright infringement. Take my act for example. Are people paying for the music, or are they paying to see my act? I would strongly argue the latter.
ADDENDUM
Looking through a low cholesterol cookbook, I see a group of dessert recipes called for ice milk. Ice milk? I’ve heard of the dreaded material Dairy Queen uses, but is it commercially available? I’ve never seen it. That’s ice milk, not iced milk. I put the book in the reading room, so over a period of time, I’ve gone through it cover to cover. It never does specify what it is. If you hate books that use undefined terms, then you’ll know why I don’t care for MicroSoft manuals.
I’m going to put a skirt around the base of my building. Those feral cats can get under the structure, so let them find a neighbor’s house. Very new residences build on pylons have skirts in this area, so the cats have their choice. As the skirting is ground contact, I decided to use that white plastic lattice. Until I saw the price. It comes with two sized of openings. One is too small, the other has holes big enough for, you guessed it, cats to get through.
The small openings uses more plastic per sheet, so that carries a price tag of $52 per four by eight. The larger mesh is $27 per sheet. Time for a trip to the recycle store. Since only the smaller holes make any sense, skirting my place with that material would set me back $540. That’s the same price as materials on my new porch—without the permit, mind you. Where did I see it in a green color being given away? I could easily paint it.
For more information than you though possible about porch skirting, click here. I’m considering other alternatives, for instance, I have an awful lot of short pieces of oak flooring that are about the right size.
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