One year ago today: May 5, 2017, investigating the solar chimney.
Five years ago today: May 5, 2013, DIY ROM.
Nine years ago today: May 5, 2009, holy anthracite!
Random years ago today: May 5, 2011, reinvent the wheel.
This is your indispensable working tool. A must for carpentry, electricianing, and general robot cases. Guess which year this picture was taken? Unlike the Stanley contraption marketed as a wrecking bar, this unit will pull nails. And the designers recognized you often have to whack it with a hammer to dig under the nail head, so they made flat surfaces for that. The curved Stanley piece is an invitation to have a glancing blow smash your thumb. (Wrong. The picture was taken today. The wall was built in 2017.)
And let me give you the rundown of today real quick-like. Something has come up so this might be the whole entry until Tuesday of next week. First, I told you the animal people were gonna go get that poor dog and fine the owner. Serves him right, locking the poor thing out on the porch like that. Next, I e-mailed to find out exactly what my guinea pig check was and they gave me what I asked for. Five times as much as the opioid people. This is neat, I’m going to buy all new shirts with some of that money.
Instead of Texas, I may use the rest to put some super materials into my house. For example, the new code that says all the smoke and monoxide detectors must be in series? I found six of them on sale. Instead of $48 each, I got six for $98. I don’t have six rooms. Yet. These are all hard-wired with lithium backups guaranteed ten years. I won’t be around to see that. Oh, and the plan is to starve out the hotdog guy. I could still lose in the rare case that somebody else comes up with his asking $1,250. But I’ll chance it, since the real cost is not the wagon. None of this rules out a small trip this month.
It was so clear in my sleep that it woke me up and I now have a custom line to “Do Wah Diddy”. Put simply, there is a 3rd note in the melody and those are my specialty. I wasn’t really listening for it but it got through to my subconscious. The note is sung, not played, which explains my delayed brain connection, but now I got it. I woke up, grabbed the bass and what is going to sell this version to my crowd is my old anti-guitarist trick. Remember how I will often play the lead riffs ahead of some show-off, so it sounds like he is following me? Well, this would not work if more guitarists actually paid attention to anyone but themselves. It hit me that this would be a very fancy way to cue the audience when to sing without being as obvious as counting them in.
I came across some old TV videos in my DVDs and watched a few performances by the 1950s people. These were the shows that had become reruns by my era, but they still dominated the entertainment hours of television. I have seen episodes by Liberace, Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, but others, like Topper are unknowns to me. I find it remarkable how these people reached such pinnacles of success without the manipulation that goes on today. I’ll explain, but back then these people were pioneers so they could hardly fake it like goes on today.
Here’s a still of Liberace, candelabra and all. You see, back then, some kind of talent was necessary to make it in entertainment. That was a given, but after that, only those few truly talented people who were reasonably good looking also had great personalities ever got big. There was Liberace, performing a live piano solo, where these days they’d get some hack to perfect it in a studio and then overdub it to some talentless bozo whose daddy is producing the show. By copycatting the surface layer, today’s stars don’t just seem shallow—most of them are. I mean, what really can a Jay Leno or Oprah Winfrey do that qualifies as talent?
Myself, I am solidly from the time when talent was a necessary component. And I’ve lived through the transition to today, where talent is optional. You go on line and luck is a bigger determinant. I saw three phases, from talent as a basis for success (Fred Astaire), to the 80s and 90s where roles were gotten less by ability than by people who had the time and money to be nearby and first in line (Rene Zellwenger), to the final death of talent, where even the most plagiarized string of clichés can be parlayed by some coke-head into box office success (Robin Williams). The [most common] place I hear any amount of modern music is the overhead “Dunkin Radio”, where it is more like tribal chanting than singing.
Mars training walk.
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The rain slowed me down so I built a birdhouse. For cavity nesters, I followed the directions too closely and had the box nailed shut before the reminded not to forget to hinge the front. To clean it out annually. Well, I’ll put the thing out and worry about that after I find a location. Birds can be finicky about location and it can take years to attract a family. The rain also kept it cool, so I watched that old DVD “The Day After”. Those were the days, no fat girls in the picture, no geeky teens, one oriental but he was a banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside), and all the cheerleaders were, well, you know, and had poodle cuts. Sigh, what happened America, you had it made.
The movie was made in 1983, so it was still a country to be proud of. There was basic respect for the authorities before they became more interested in political correctness and job security than in obeying the law themselves. The food supply is probably many times more serious today since most of the food is corporate produced. Self-sufficiency died a generation after the Feds began handing out food stamps. When you hand out welfare checks like there is no tomorrow, pretty soon there isn’t one. I know people over 50 who have never worked a day in their lives. Myself, I’ve paid more into the system than I’ll ever get out. The single largest expense of my life has been income taxes.
So this time I watched the movie with the perspective of how it compares today. The country is destroyed by exterior forces, it just took a little longer. City cores in ruin, the economy plastered back to the stone ages, no decent nothing left any more. Ha, did you see the paper today saying that unemployment is the lowest since 1999. Sure, if you count heads, there’s lots of McJobs out there. Trust me, you’d rather have the average job in 1999 than today. But when the rent and the food are free, only schmeebs work for a living. I’ll tell you why everybody has something to hide.
Because the welfare system works on people who know how to hide things. Thus, if there is every any chance that you personally would ever wind up on welfare or food stamps, you’d best have plenty of experience hiding things. Or you will be living below a poverty level you didn’t know exists in America. You may notice the number of people in the libraries and parks and beaches during the day, all far to young to be retired. Most are probably on welfare of some kind. Where you would be living in gut-stretching desperation, it’s plain the people with something to hide and know how to hide it are the ones you see living the good life around you. Ergo, even if you think you have nothing to hide, it’s best to keep in sharp practice how to do so. One day you’ll likely need it—but not for the opposite reasons why you might think you don’t need it today.
Next, we take another look at the map. I went right past the [Okefenokee] wildlife refuge in November last year, roughly 30 miles to the west. It’s probably the same distance as a trip to Miami, so maybe I could take it as an overnighter. It’s at the end of another of those strange Florida roads that goes through nowhere and stops at a T intersection miles out of any population centers. It is weird indeed, for Florida is flat, flat, flat. There is no good reason all the roads could not go perfectly straight to any destination. But the maps show the roads were built after the days of contractor kickbacks.
What’s there? Probably nothing, but it is across the state line. As Frank Bytheway pointed out, the eastern end of the state line followed geographical features, then around the civil war time, switched to surveyed boundaries. So I’d be crossing some river, which I hope is a ferry, not a bridge. See how strongly I remain influenced by motorcycling. I found Fort Myers, didn’t I? Who knows, maybe they got another Hoyt Hotel out there. What? Oh, you wouldn’t remember that. The Hoyt is a hotel in Portland, Oregon. They used it for a lot of old westerns.
ADDENDUM
Another mystery solved. When Mitch was visiting, he heard water dripping from the roof. The leak was not apparent, but the drywall had been getting wet. Alas, all this time went by until today. The sneaky thing did not reveal itself until today, a very rare Florida downpour with no wind. When the wind picked up later, around 10:00 PM, the leak disappeared again. All these items must be attended to before the insulation is placed. So in a sense, I’m lucky it rained like this today.
Speaking of insulation, have you seen the prices on water pipe insulation? It costs more than the pipe. I’m going to perform an experiment to see if I can use substitute materials. This involves another scale model, a robot club specialty. I’m going to buy something I saw that looks like insulation, fit it around a pipe filled with hot water and see how long it stays warm. If so, what I found is 1/7th the price of the official brand, meaning if the experiment succeeds, I can insulate every pipe in the place. Stand by for photos.
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