October 3, 2018

Yesteryear
One year ago today: October 3, 2017, more like Elmer.
Five years ago today: October 3, 2013, early diet stats.
Nine years ago today: October 3, 2009, Me? Play "Stormy Monday"?
Random years ago today: October 3, 2003, I quit.

           I’m going to need 48 feet of that expensive cable. It brings this house up to snuff with every appliance on a dedicated circuit and hookups for the washer, dryer, and when ready, power to both sheds. All circuits that call for GFCIs to current code have been upgraded and there will be provision for spark protectors and such, should I at some future point become convinced they are worth the expense. I tore out the drywall shown y’day and the cleanup took longer than the demolition. I won’t show you pictures until later in the process, but here is an interesting telephoto item.

           This shows a toppled tree branch a half mile off the roadway. Anything that falls like this becomes a hatchery for vines, fungi, brachyophytes, and Spanish moss. For those who think the moss is pretty, remember that it also houses a lot of biting insects. This formation remined me of far off rain clouds. How do you like it?

           I’m off to Winter Haven for supplies around noon. I stopped in to see my friend on the downtown committee, and she says the farmer’s market is doing a booming business. This is the same place I told of last week that I have never seen even one person actually shop there. She says it is all business from the courthouse on trial day. Hmmm, well maybe that explains it. What would I be doing there? I’ll be over there in about ten minutes, so drop back later and get my follow on report.

           This session, I stayed and watch for a half-hour of prime time. 12:15 to 12:45 PM. I saw three or four customers in the 22 stalls. None of them looked like big spenders. Here is a picture of the main entranceway, a path through the park. The only two people visible are the vendors sitting down. Yes, this the is farmer’s market everybody assures me is growing and expanding and breaking all the records. I’ve checked it mostly mornings until today, so there is a possibility they get a surge later in the day, but in that case, why set up at dawn?

           Now, I’d like to talk about my acting portfolio. I’m the top in my field and yet I get no calls. I can only do one thing, but it is very important. I told you my roll, I’m the guy that stands up at H-hour and says “Go, go, go!” You know, like the team that’s been training for months doesn’t know it is time to go over the top or jump out the airplane door. All really good movies have a character doing this, but they are not as good as me. Since I can only do the one thing, I’m a specialist. But maybe I should branch out. There’s the guy who can’t say it is the “end of life” without adding “as we know it”. That’s the line for me, because I figure if it was life as you didn’t know it, then you could not tell if it ended or not. MGM needs a guy like me in front of their cameras.
           I don’t know if I recorded this before, so here it is to be on the safe side. Safe in the sense that some day I just know a big expensive lab will come up with the same results and it would be so nice to get a little credit for being first. My ex used to have a rule, don’t eat anything fattening after 6:00PM. Ahem, it certainly worked for her. But I got to thinking, maybe the connection is not as direct as fewer calories alone. We were night owls, usually not getting up until mid-morning the following day. I’ve learned you don’t really lose weight unless you feel actually hungry. Thus, if you don’t eat anything with calories after 6:00PM and don’t get up until 10:00AM next day, you are running on empty for 16 hours.
           The suffering is minimal, because for the worst part of it, you will be sound asleep. And, as most dieters know, the easiest time to control your appetite tends to be the mornings. Skip breakfast and you may well be burning fat reserves for more than 20 hours a day. In the opposite direction, we all know eating a big meal and going to sleep can really pack on the poundage.

Picture of the day.
Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen
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           There was plenty of headway on the electrical sub-panel. Here is the coil of 6/3 Romex cable. The price tag says $140. At $2.80 per foot, that’d not much of a difference to buying it precut, but better to buy the extra seven feet since I have to drag it under the house. Plus, the rolled brand had a somewhat heftier feel to it. I spent the next two hours drilling and strapping this cable, crawling around in the dirt under the house. The bright side is I’m saying around $25 per hour in labor and it is not that bad. You just have to like the feel and taste of mine tailings.

           What’s this, the President is now into telemarketing? By my definition that any party who co-opts your property for their own convenience is guilty of an original American evil, then the President is telemarketing. It was either a text or a twit, I don’t know since both are not enabled on my phone. It was masked as a emergency alert system, in case of an incoming missile or tsunami. This is bogus. All it would accomplish is to panic the least prepared layers of society. Most Americans are so stupid if they heard of a disaster as close as across town, they’d run home to watch it on cable.

           Ah, then it hit me. These people can’t head for the hills because they wouldn’t know what to do once they got there. They can’t fish or trap and they won’t get their welfare checks. Slowly I figured it out. The reality is the authorities want a panic. You see, the type of people who rely on the telephone to get their information are also the least desirable. Get it? They are the ones most likely to feed off the system. If we could get rid of say 40 or 50 million of these telephone-parasites, the economy would be back on track for at least half the next century.

           Next important deed, we find the doggie birdhouse. The neighbors let the rat-dog out to bark steady from 6:18AM this morning and it is now 9:43PM. Non-stop. Cranking the stereo doesn’t drown the little bugger out, and headphones are out since I can’t hear the alarm or the phone. As far as I can discover on-line, the nearest place that physically has them on the shelf is in Jacksonville, a place I’ve never been. Except passing through in the rain and in the dark. It’s another retard-designed Florida town because I followed the road signs exactly and it wound up taking me on a two hour goose chase that looped right back around to where I started.
           I used the oscilloscope to test the sound at 24,000 Hz. I can’t hear it directly, but I can tell when it is on. It’s a kind of white noise pressure. I’ve got some piezo tweeters that are rated even higher. I’m after power, not frequency. I hauled out my Gigrack, 300 watts per channel. Again, no sound but the air takes on an “electric” feeling. It’s pretty amazing neighbors like that, bringing a yappy dog into the middle of a quiet neighborhood, but I understand the mentality. People like my family seek out quiet places so they can be the only one making all the noise. Don’t laugh, I’ve seen it.

           I wondered why there are no services to rent to get rid of these nuisance dogs. It would be a valuable service. I’ve read the complaints on a number of models, and it seems a percentage of the dogs start barking again after a while. So maybe renting just isn’t the answer. But I will look online and see if I can find a noise generator. My oscilloscope is too fragile, but I could easily rig up a footswitch or something right on my desk here. Blast the little bastard manually. Either way, the situation is unacceptable and we all know it is useless to complain. If all this sounds cruel to anyone, remember, they started it. And they obviously intend to be cruel as long as they please. That’s the family man who claims to be a good Christian.

ADDENDUM
           A few years back, I read “The Billionaire’s Vinegar”. It was a tale of the counterfeit wines being sold, often at auction houses. It included the infamous “Th.J” wine bottle from the Thomas Jefferson estate later determined to have been engraved with a machine tool. It did not click at the time that the victim was one of the Koch brothers. And I remember my general “serves them right” attitude about people who think they are wine aficionados. (Test after test shows that so few people can tell the taste of expensive wine that it strains the odds to think so many billionaires have the knack.)

           I view wine collecting along with yacht racing and hot air ballooning as stereotyped behavior for people who have money but lack creativeness. I mean, does anybody except me notice there are no billionaires doing what I do? What’s more, now that I have a hundred times more money than when I started, I have to gravitated toward conventional moneyed activities. Me gamble? Me hire prosititutes? Not bloody likely. Mind you, “a hundred times” is more descriptive of my initial poverty than my net worth today. And here’s a spotty picture of this afternoon’s progress on the electrical sub-panel, showing the 24 circuit positions, since I know you were dying to ask.

           At the same time, another aspect of the “vinegar” book that struck me was that these billionaires had to use their own money to track down and prosecute the forgeries, and even when they caught them, they had to sue in civil court. That is not fair either. Fraud is stealing and so where are the police? But, it makes economic sense. The award for the wine forgery was $380,000 and the police probably double that monthly just in handing out speeding tickets in this county. Sure, they are sworn to serve and protect and the law is supposed to apply to all equally, but we are talking money here, folks. In my opinion, the police should have jumped on the fake wine sales and pursued it with the same fervor as they do the hookers down on Front Street.
           Even that coin has a third side. If the police had pressed criminal charges, the billionaire would not have gotten anything in damages. With the wine episode, I think they later awarded him $12 million in punitive damages because the auction houses were in on it. Still, don’t quote me because most books on the topic don’t give details of successful prosecutions, though they certainly mention if the charges get dropped.

Last Laugh

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