One year ago today: August 5, 2017, my code vs. their code.
Five years ago today: August 5, 2013, my most advanced project.
Nine years ago today: August 5, 2009, thousand dollar bills.
Random years ago today: August 5, 2004, retrograde motion.
Ah, a Sunday luxury. Sweet condensed milk in my coffee. I needed it, this was a seven hour work day. And thanks to thunderstorms, bad radio reception. Easy work, making the cutout for the kitchen A/C. It’s not likely I’ll rush over that since I’m leaving on Tuesday. And I’ll make good time as I’ve learned how to drive a car all over again. I botched a dozen biscuits because I tried something I’m no good at, which is using yeast. Some guys have a knack for it, but I got a bunch of small loaves of bread-like flat scones. Airy and moist mind you, but not biscuits.
I have a decision to make. The entire morning and early afternoon were taken up making the cutout for the kitchen A/C. So, do I show you a picture of the cutout, or a picture of the diagram of the cutout produced on my nice new chalk table? Which would you do? Now, c’mon, be honest. It was the big event of the period, so that makes it bloggable. The majority of the time, I was listening to Boss Hogg fade off the air and planning my revenge on that turkey who sold us the cart that didn’t work. That’s an interesting study in small town politics. Here’s the partial details.
Whereas I wanted to see the thing fired up and working, he was playing the angle (intentional or not, same thing to me) of old family friends with Agt. R. Five months went by and I was fully willing to wait the guy out, but Agt. R was not. So when the two of them finally worked out the deal, I went along for the ride to pick up the unit. As soon as I got there, a major trip, I could see that it had not been set up and tested. But he had stressed to Agt. R time and again that it was working “as far as he knew”. That was the big lie. As far as he knew, he knew nothing. It would have been more truthful to say as far as he knew it did not work. Because he could not have sold it to anyone else without testing it, he took advantage of Agt. R, and by extension, of me.
[Author's note: I'm not as sore at the guy as I say because I really doubt he would intentionally rip off Agt. R. But I do think he could have done more. I feel that way because he knows the business and at the same time he knows that we did not. We were at his mercy, and he was aware I'd asked to see the thing working. But I delegated the matter and you know how that sometimes goes.]
So today, I put 48 miles and another 3 hours (total time till I got back) in driving out to Rural King and Camper World, this time with the actual piece to show them what I wanted. It is no good trying to explain it to these people. When they look at the picture and say, “What’s that?”, you know how far things are going to get. This might baffle my overseas readership, but in America, just like we once had a burgeoning middle class, we now have a huge “management class”. And they have sunk to new lows.
They are a product of contemporary colleges who claim they can teach management, which is bunk. Our country is now full of people with management degrees who don’t know a thing about the industry they work for. Their attitude is not to solve your problem (like a real manager would) but express regret over your situation, to emphasize that it is your problem, to explain store policy, poke holes in your explanation, ask if it was plugged in, and suggest similar alternatives that have one thing in common—they are things you could do, not what they could do.. As if you had not tried all that before driving the 48 miles. In the pinball game of life, these manager’s flippers are a little further apart than most.
And I have some trivia for you. There are eight orbital launch sites in the world. We know about the two in America, Vandenburg and Canaveral, and the one in Russia at Tyuatam. There are two in China and one in Japan with unpronounceable names. That’s six, where are the other two? Some may have guessed correctly one is the European station in Guyana, or whatever, in South America. That leaves one more, and that is today’s trivia. Where is it? Don’t know? That’s because it is a secret. Hint, it is in the geographic area that really controls the USA, and like all other rockets, everything they launch is traceable back to what they copied from America. Not Germany, America. We are talking space rockets.
Danish prison cell.
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Here’s a still from y’day’s movie. These biscuits I can make, because there is no yeast. Help yourself, I always make lots. Because I enjoy baking, though my emphasis is on totally natural ingredients, not pretty. Rodney Dangerfield would love my kitchen. I do not allow GMOs on the property, and I even insist on natural vanilla flavoring. There are a few exceptions for things not available, like real maple flavoring, and I have not choice with artificial sweeteners, though only for eating, never for baking. Um, one thing that may put people off is I use flypaper. The city does not spray, so if you leave your door or window open even a while, you’ve got flies.
We had lots of flies when I was growing up. Every house had several flyswatters handy. By the way, I was right, the flies have evolved to the point where most people can no longer hit them with a flyswatter. The flies can detect the rush of air as the flap approaches. My parents would never spend money on a luxury like fly spray. We used the fly ribbons you attached with a thumbtack and pulled down. They never unraveled as neatly as the pictures. I remember there was a family of boys up the road that we played softball and went bike riding with. Their mother was a real bruiser of a woman, beefy arms and jowls, and she spent all day cooking on a wood stove and looking out the window at who was walking by.
Well, they had flies really bad all the time. And they used the same fly ribbons. Except theirs would get full in a few hours. Their mother would taken the stove handle and lift one of the lids. Then she would take the whole fly ribbon by the thumbtack and feed it into the flames. We would listen as the flies, many still living, went off like popcorn. One of the boys, Eddie I think, rode a girl’s bicycle, hated apples, and had a guitar that only the lowest two strings would stay in tune. Every time you went over, he’d insist on showing you how he could play “Peter Gunn”. That would be when I was around six or seven.
ADDENDUM
And that brings me to my own musical tale from the trailer court. Here’s an inspired passage.
Make no mistake about it, my motive is and always was to get more and better women than I ever could on my own. I am not tall, not rich, not handsome, not tough, not athletic, and definitely not one to please everybody. This is why I insisted on music lessons when I was ten. I’ve already posted how I took “inventory” of the local dating habits, that is, which type of guys got which type of girls. I did not care for the type of girls who went out with jocks, dropouts, greasers, or nerds. Yes, folks, there is a very noticeable pattern to these things.
Thus, by the time I was twelve, music was serious, serious business for me. I single-handedly put the town’s first “rock band” together and this required every resource I had. This is well documented, how I had to learn each instrument and teach often unwilling locals from scratch. But this is also where I learned that to play in a band, most times you do not need more than a few hours training. You do not have to study music for two years like I did, but then, it’s not like there was anybody around who could have told me even if they’d had the capacity. Now was there?
An important factor, which I also learned the hard way, was that the management challenges do not taper off once the band is up and running. And that became such a task, holding the band together I mean, that my performance suffered. People I’d taught to play months earlier could now play better than I could. But the instant I quit managing things, the group fell apart into squabbling little factions. The only gigs they could get were the ones I’d pioneered myself.
Nonetheless, I was in a band and that fact alone overshadowed the music anyway. I further noticed that other members of the band, who now fancied themselves musicians, were never able to cash in with the ladies on anything like the scale I could and did. Now you can believe me when I said that being in a band was, for me, an innate, almost instinctive necessity. I’m not even that talented, but without music, I’m just another schmeeb.
There were other nasty lessons in my budding music career. I was exposed to the whole spectrum of putting a group together and others only got the music part. Before long, and I admit it, I was the worst musician in the band. But I was the only one scoring all over town, and the next town, too. Believe you me, it has precious little to do with who is the better guitar player, rather who is better at using what they had. (Bands are a complicated and, time-wise, a risky business, which is why I know most guitar players are too narrow-minded to ever succeed at it.)
The rest is on record. How my brother, at age 15 or 16, began to clue in, and he went ballistic. This is where I emphasize that although he is two years my junior, it took him a full five years to catch on. Five long years. But it took him only two or three months to bust up my band. Bands are inherently fragile, so it requires no special skill to go in there and convince the guitar player and bass player they didn’t need me. Ha, judging by how things worked out for them, they were dead wrong about that.
Epilogue: My own brother got to dance on my band’s grave. He was certain he’d finally shown the world that I “was not the only one.” Yet, for him the worst was yet to come. As I later found out from his girlfriend’s sister, it was to be several more years in his life before he even began to meet women I had not met first. Isn’t family strange? Some people are born followers and hate themselves but will not stop following.
And if by some mischance he ever reads this, let me rub a little salt in the wound. Hey, asshole, remember Cleo Werner? Yeah, well her too.
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