One year ago today: March 30, 2017, everybody's on the take.
Five years ago today: March 30, 2013, I audition with the big band.
Nine years ago today: March 30, 2009, Florida's most famous non-post?
Random years ago today: March 30, 2007, now that's a kickstand.
A few more hours on the stealth Florida room and my muscles are finally sore. I really mean it, as I am tremendously happy that I can do that again, at least once in a while. I’m into my fifteenth borrowed year and have no complications at all for the previous three. I’m actually getting decent at placing and leveling concrete blocks, moving at a pace of nine feet per hour. That’s not saying I like it, at least not lying down in the dirt at times, and the taste of dirt, you can have that.
The photo is not quite a “when you see it” because this is for real. The type of road sign you’ll find all over Florida. The setup is not clear until I point it out. This shot is in Arcadia, about an hour south of here. Imagine you are from out of state and just pulled into an unfamiliar town with these road signs. The route marker is the same shape, size, and color as the speed limit sign way over on the other side of the street. This is a highway, not a city street. Imagine how easy it would be to mistake the route 70 for the speed limit. Because the big fat speeding ticket you get next is definitely not your imagination.
FYI, entire communities have been sued in Florida when the wrong lawyer or attorney has been cited. But, Florida policies ensure that the state will have a permanent majority of the apathetic, the complacent, and the truly too stupid for words types. Nothing to report today except the heavy digging work, now camouflaged. Or I think it is, you can never tell with City Hall. A further meeting with Agt. R confirms if he wants to pursue the hot dog cart, he’s on his own. I will reconsider if the price drops to $600. A food cart operation is more work than everybody is letting on.
Chocolate festival, Belgium.
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In other news, I find that MicroSoft, in their never-ending quest to become the worst assholes in computer history, have fixed Win 10 so you cannot turn off those suspicious updates. Worse, it hogs the system forever and drains your battery. There is a way to suspend it, but it knocks other features out of whack and just enables itself next time you power up. Up yours, Redmond. One day they’ll go too far and they’ll be history. They are already resorting to vile ploys to stay in business.
Seriously, if I had the opportunity to launch a satellite, what would I do? First, how about a survey? Everybody who could have a functioning satellite ready by tomorrow raise your right hand. That’s what I thought, and that’s why you love this blog and this blog loves you. I would grab an Arduino and the solar recharging panel from the motorcycle that is no more. Then, I’d find the software I wrote for my sun-following plan back in I think 2012 to keep the panel facing the sun. Then I would program the Arduino to transmit Morse Code. We all know Morse by now, right?
Next, I’d connect that daughter board that transmits on the blackberry frequency. Rechargeable batteries we got by the dozen. If Earth operators can hear a signal the strength of a five watt bulb from Mars, they would handily pick up my transmission that keeps repeating, “Read Tales From The Trailer Court, best ad-free blog ever.” Or, “Are there any real guitar players left down there?” How about, “Single man seeks slim athletic women for purposeless afternoon flings. BYOB.” Laugh, but then realize none of this is impossible; I have all the necessary hardware within reach of where I’m sitting and the skillset to write the code. None of this is conjecture. For that matter, if I added a memory module, I could have it transmit this entire blog. I have every post archived, something like 4,800 of them, each with a secondary copy in ASCII awaiting just such an opportunity.
So there, if any of you like beer, you can go tell your buddies you know some screwball who says he could build a satellite for $40. Now the $100,000 launch fee might take a little longer, but that, too, is doable.
I went for coffee. I stayed all afternoon. It’s my day off. I read the newspaper. I watched this lady who was incredibly attractive, but too much so to be single. We were the only people in the shop for several extended periods. It was one of those situations where I deemed it unwise to make the first move. She was waiting for something or somebody, is my guess. Great shape though, for a forty-ish type. The staff knows me well enough over there to wonder why I held back. I don’t know, but it certainly wasn’t fear of rejection. More like spider sense saying wait for a hint, and that never happened.
The Friday crossword was impossible, so I weighed up a list of potential tunes that could be breezed through by what my guitar player knows by now. Who recalls, “You’re Still Gonna Die”? It’s been on my flash drive a couple months. Oh, and we got a request for Haggard’s “Momma Tried”, which I showed her the easy way to crank. She took the audience requests a mite to seriously, considering she has not yet learned the parameters that make a tune suitable for duo adaptation. And there were some issues with our more complicated arrangements. It’s important she get those better before we look at even heavier arrangements. Don’t look at me, I’ll play “River Deep Mountain High”--if you’ll sing it.
We are due for some trivia. Ready? When adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing films of all time aren’t even in this century. The closest is “Titanic” in 1997. The all-time record, in constant dollars, is “Gone With The Wind”, but in another deviation from strict comparisons, that movie was released several times. For movies released only once, that goes to “Star Wars”, way back in 1977.
From the same source, the American-created funeral industry buries more than 100,000 tons of steel each year. And “The Landlord’s Game” came out 24 years before “Monopoly” and had 4 railroads, a jail, and 22 rental properties. And Ben Franklin regularly got his almanac sayings from British newspapers and books, which was not illegal in the 1700s.
And then the interesting passage on boomers that divides them into two groups. Those born before the Korean War, and those born after. Interesting, because I had a lot to say about that in my youth, I did not like any one of my older sister’s friends. I did not like their habits, their dress, and those horrid hair styles. Their music was terrible, they danced funny, and wore ugly eyeglasses. That crowd was all about becoming model citizens and disliking anything new. My connection with them was that I had entered first grade when I was only five and skipped enough grades to catch up to my sister’s class by eighth grade. I hated being in the same room with her and was confident I’d get accelerated past her.
Instead, my parents had me held back. Hence I can claim I don’t have a seventh grade education. But I have two years of eighth grade. That was the last straw, I never trusted my parents again after that. The only good that came of it is I swore I would never be like my sister and her crowd, with their one-piece bathing suits and arse-kissing “respect” for elders. Within another year, I had my own “Beatles band”, the sexiest girlfriend in town, and dreams of getting into UCLA on a scholarship. I never suspected my parents were treacherous enough to make sure that would never happen.
ADDENDUM
What I read today made sense, as it pointed out these two groups of boomers born just a few years apart could be characterized by their completely different “experiences, aspirations, and opportunities”. I swear it is all true and what a great way to put it.
Tell you what, I’ll let you in on a hush-hush about one actual difference that could not be greater between the two groups. The others, I’ve told you this before, pretended that sex did not exist until after marriage. With me, there was something always going on in the boy-girl department. I learned about “doing it” by reading the encyclopedia, but I’d also learned how to do it without getting in trouble—and more importantly the value of keeping a secret—from everybody. I was the town paper boy and my older sister was the paper girl, we each had 32 customers. The town was perfectly safe for this back then. The situation is, the town banker had three daughters exactly nine months apart and his wife worked at the newspaper office.
All I can say is during the four years until we moved away, my parents never questioned why it always took me a half-hour longer to deliver my papers than my sister. And nobody in that town ever questioned if a paper boy always went around to the back door.
How I miss that paper route.
(I am quite aware of how that penultimate paragraph actually says nothing. What did I just say about keeping a secret?)
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