One year ago today: October 18, 2017, aboout my old band.
Five years ago today: October 18, 2013, interesting article on deserts.
Nine years ago today: October 18, 2009, 70 applicants per job.
Random years ago today: October 18, 2008, $150 and a birthday card.
Er, hi people, as I furtively sneak into the back of the blog-room. Yes, I know I’m behind with the posts. Have faith, I’ve never let you down in ten years without good reason. Trust me, blogging either becomes a habit or it never takes off. Kind of like all good things in life. There I was, wiring and listening to Boss Hogg. Twice a day they play a tune that impresses me. Funny thing, one of their major advertisers is that tax relief blah-blah. I told you about their ad that gives a discount to the first ten callers. Well, since they haven’t changed the ad, they must not have had ten callers in the past two years.
This is a picture that may go down in history. My history, anyway. Am I allowed to say that by now? This may be the sought-after breakfast hotdog. The idea wasn’t mine, but this recipe is. (You won’t find me selling hotdogs at 7:00AM.) Agt. R’s concept is sound, but we didn’t have a product. Knowing full well the big players have long had this idea, I set down to reinvent the wheel. I’ve come up with something that feels and tastes right. All the ingredients are shown except the Mexican cheese shreds. On the plate is a soft flour tortilla. The corn tortillas don’t hold shape and crumble when bitten. At this time I cannot find a guaranteed supplier of the right tortillas, but carry on.
So you’ve got yellow mustard, chili powder (not flakes), tomato bullion, and sweet relish (not dill relish). This took a bit of experimenting, so I’m not telling you how the ingredients are used. My mandate was keep it simple. Although we would let the customer add the condiments, it works best by smearing a mixture on the center of the tortilla. Place the hotdog on one end (not the center) and roll it up. This traps the condiments between two layers of tortilla, so stuff doesn’t slide off like a regular dog.
Because the ingredients contain chili spice, it is okay to use a cheaper brand of hotdog, in this case bun-length Gwaltney’s. Also, it takes time, too much time, to spread and roll. Because the hot dog is served hot and its in the center, these cannot be pre-made, at least not by me. I’m thinking of a “special sauce” from said ingredients that could be spread quickly and made up a few in advance when it isn’t busy. If any don’t sell, I found they keep well if frozen for later nuking. A standard order is 2 for $3, and you will not, cannot get a better deal in Polk. Add a buck and you get a soda and chips.
That remains the chips. We use standard 1 oz or 1-1/8 oz Frito Lay products. (The extra 1/8th is packaged with a lot of air and looks bigger.) Since the product already has a Latino hint with the chili powder, can you find a chip flavor that complements the dish? Did I not see lime-flavored corn chips somewhere within the last year? Or the other sway, something fiery hot. And find me a decent coffee maker that isn’t a percolator. Why? Because percolated coffee isn’t the right way to make a good cup and the coffee isn’t consistent, which I demand.
As for creamer, which I would keep an eye on (remember the bookstore experience), half & half is the best, but a close second is the Nestle product, a liquified Coffee-mate® variant labeled “Italian Sweet Crème”. You know what happened? Just before I decided on it, somebody went through hundreds of bottles on that display rack and picked out all this flavor. Leaving only Vanilla and for people with truly horrible likings, that abomination called Hazelnut.
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is find a snappy name for the dish. Doggie in a blanket? Perro in a serape? Doggie-Break? No, not a dog’s breakfast. Tex-Brex? Pup-Torts? C’mon, there is somebody out there in Readerland with the answer.
Way too much time . . . .
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This time, we do it my way. But I’ll be nice and let the other guy take all the credit and not say a thing about it. To anyone. Here is the primo location, the corner of Main and Washington. The occasion is the antique fair third Saturday of the month. It’s a foot in the door. If you see that single parking spot to the left of the little grey car, that’s it. The second picture shows the space. Backing the wagon in will keep the customers where you can see them. My suggestion is to keep the menu down to a few simple items until experience is gained. The usual objection comes from people erroneously think it takes everybody as long as themselves to gain experience.
The event starts at 7:00 AM, but they need a food vendor and we appear to be the only ones willing. That day, Agt. R has to work his day job starting at 5:00AM. So we negotiated that I sell only chips and soda until he arrives at 9:00AM. So, I’ll be starting at 5:00AM as well. The cart needs to be set up and guess who the only other person is who knows how to do it? Young Rick is not trained yet and hasn’t had the food handler’s course. I don’t know what it is with Florida. I returned to the store to buy the flour tortillas I sampled two days ago. In that tiny interval, once again somebody went in there and took all the 12-packs, leaving on the 10-packs. What is it with this town, it’s like some evil twin follows you around just to make life that little bit rougher.
Next, I got more information from the “sixties guitarist”. He’s definitely a part-timer and openly admits no matter how hard he tries, his playing has not improved in twenty years. How come I’m not laughing. Because here a dude that was not brainwashed by lessons. He is also homo. I told him I am not and it would be unwise to ever let the topic surface again. He can use the band for the same as me, to meet sex partners, but I exclusively like women and he won’t be competition. He bases a lot on hobbies and such, but I don’t fish or boat or have really any non-academic pursuits that cost money. We’ll schedule a rehearsal as a sound check. The musician pool in Polk is at most ankle deep, in fact if the Devil showed up with ye olde golden fiddle, I’d give him an audition on the spot. Heard that bastard could play some.
MAGAZINE GRADE ARTICLE
Have you gotten a load of the “international furor” about the missing presumed dead reporter? Khashoggi, never heard of him. What furor? So another paparazzi is dead, so what? Do we need to hear about it 48 goddam times a day? On and on, typical third-rate American journalism, trying to whip up a frenzy where there isn’t one. Like with this nonsense with the “massive movement” to impeach Trump. No sign of it at street level. How do I know the reporter was a paparazzi? He’s dead, isn’t he? That’s how newspeople get dead. Talking when they should’ve been listening. By creating news instead of reporting it. You can't go around pissing people off because you are a "contributing columnist".
I don’t recall the exact wording, but who remembers the lady reporter in “Hero”? She describes how the media creates a story. Jump on someone accused of child molestation, put it on the front page, set the guy up. Grill him, watch how he answers, that’s another story. Keep digging, expose his life, his wife, his kids, that’s another story. Turns out his mistress was lying, another story. Keep digging, grilling, grinding until you finally find questions he doesn’t want to answer, and you got it, another story. Dig, dig, dig until there is nothing left and you have destroyed what was originally being investigated.
American media does not report just the facts, which if the Constitution is interpreted correctly is the only free speech that is protected. Lying, spinning, twisting, none of these are shielded to any degree, although ignorance is extraordinarily well-guarded. No law against saying anything stupid, probably a concession to California. That is my concrete view on American media, and until they quit reporting people’s names unless they are convicted, I have no reason soften much less change my opinion.
Meanwhile, we get the message. If you whack a reporter, his slimeball buddies are going to build it up into the next moon landing. Job protection, that’s all it is. Hark! American news for sale. Buy two get one free. The only reason I buy the Tampa rag is the puzzles, and they’ve cut back by two crosswords last month. From their entire circulation, it seems I’m the only person who noticed. That’s easy to explain. One has to know what a crossword is in the first place before it can be missed.
This last bit here is a reminder to myself. The reason the kitchen 20 amp receptacles use 12/3 is because they are split receptacles. Careful here. Code calls for all small appliances to be on a dedicated circuit. The temptation is to split a receptacle to service two appliances. But, the code also says the appliance circuits should be GFCI, and as far as I know, they don’t make splittable GFCIs. I’ll look into that, but the mechanism that trips the outlet is wired to both plug-ins. I had to read 233 pages to get this information.
What I conclude is the 12/3 wiring is when you are require two (and only two) dedicated appliance receptacles on a single branch, but don’t want to run two 12/2 cables. Examining this new information closely, I converted my existing GFCI lines back to single location protection. Previously, a GCFI at the first port of a circuit would protect anything after that. Neat, but not worth it. Now I got to buy 100 feet of 12/3.
ADDENDUM
New item, I got the money orders returned from the hotdog insurance company that refused to issue us a policy. The reason given with the accompanying letter is different than what actually happened. The supervisor got bent out of shape when I questioned the agent on a couple basic points of network security before I gave him a bunch of personal information. Was their data encrypted? Were they on a VPN? The agent, who had just assured me they protected customer information, had no clue what I was talking about. It turns out they store sensitive customer information on the cloud in plain text. I guess they didn’t want anybody knowing that.
But the letter states the reason is I was using call block, which I always use. I had called them for information about the policy. Several times the clerk wanted my phone number and of course I said no, since there was no coverage yet and steered the conversation back to insurance. Well, folks, it turns out that them getting your phone number is the vital part of their operation. You don’t need much more proof that these days a telephone is identification.
The letter goes on to state that their guideline is that they demand a phone number, the right to call you on that number, cancel your coverage if you don’t answer, and the right to publish that phone number anywhere and any time they please to anybody or everybody. So much for respect over non-listed numbers and personal privacy. I asked him if this “guideline” had the strength of law. Stumped him. He wanted my personal name, not the company I represented. I was on to that long before cell phones came along. Interesting.
Informing him I was calling on behalf of a client had no effect. It would seem he wanted to be called on a regular phone, tipping us off that his software could not defeat my call block. In case you did not know, all insurance companies have equipment to display your phone number if you *67 the call. Try it. Call an insurance company and hang up when you hear the robot. You’ll get a call back within the day, both to sell you and to let you know your pathetic attempt at anonymity didn’t work. They will even ask for you by name. Which is why I get a chuckle when they ask to speak to “D. Duck”.
The letter added a couple of paragraphs of computer mumbo-jumbo, possibly to cower old guys like me with terms like “web-based” and “housed”, but what got me was he stated an inability to print copies of their policies. Really? There is something fishy about this whole matter. You know what I suspect? There really isn’t any insurance in the normal sense, rather FLIP is a tertiary operation that is based on the fact that if you tow a food cart, the towing vehicle is required to have automotive liability coverage. FLIP only covers the cart when it is detached and in operation, not even when it is parked for storage.
Let’s do some arithmetic. Let’s take a gross estimate of 100,000 hotdog carts. Because the outfits who sell the carts recommend FLIP (that’s about to change), lets say 40% insure with FLIP. That’s 40,000 policies at $449 each. That’s pulling in close to $18,000,000 per year. The maximum paid for cart damages is $5,000, if I suppose it gets hit by lightning, crushed by a runaway Ferris wheel, or flattened by an off-trajectory human cannonball. Let’s be generous and say they pay out two such claims per year. Now ask yourself, when was the last time you ever heard of anyone successfully suing a hotdog cart for damages, which would have to be based on negligence. Right. Never happens. There is no record at the courthouse of this ever happening in Florida – but I do recognize that many carts are listed in the owners name and it would be a monumental task to research that.
Still, it’s clear there is something besides insurance going on over at FLIP. Now don’t go blaming the staff I talked to. That bunch of flunkies was far too unread to set up an operation like this. The estimated $15,000,000 per year in pure profit is going upstairs some place.
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