One year ago today: March 19, 2018, New Zealand & Malibu.
Five years ago today: March 19, 2014, keep scanning, idiots.
Nine years ago today: March 19, 2010, it’s really my double.
Random years ago today: March 19, 2008, Look what I found.
Another frosty morning, so it was work at home time. Shown here are some bamboo cuttings. This is not the best season for propagation. Thus, there are four types of cuts here, to see which one takes the best. The tall stem and short stem at near center are the recommended route unless you want to start digging up and cutting root systems. The other containers are other plants, but in the background you see four bowls. Two metal, two plastic. These are the cat food dishes, which must be kept off the floor or the dogs will help themselves. The sun is already getting warm enough to leave them to their own resources in the back yard most of the afternoon.
The country roads around here are motorcycle delights. On the return leg, I turned off the GPS and wound up at the Books-A-Million at Providence. That’s the place with the Mexican restaurant that serves the famous disappearing sauce. Put it in the fridge overnight in this place, and in the morning it is nowhere to be found. The bookstore has changed, and it is a sad reflection of changes in the way people get information. The craft section is gone, all moved to magazines. Automation or not, an increasing number of magazines are carrying $25 price tags.
This is wildly disproportionate even considering inflation. There are hard-cover books for sale at a quarter that price. The cause is the magazines no longer appeal to readership for their revenue, they rely on advertising sales. If I was president, I would outlaw all “intrusive” advertising, and no, I don’t care about the consequences for anybody’s job on that count. One group I think should be led to the post is the jerk-offs who place ads on youTube clicks. If you want money, go get a job. But this harks back to my “Internet Index”, my plan to put every on-line bastard out of business. The user could enable a filter that blocks such advertising.
I stress I have little against advertising in general, as long as it stays in its place. That place would be where people would voluntarily go to seek information. The advertising industry will never progress and become respectable until there is some way for the public to block what they don’t want. And nobody wants television style “broadcast” commercials that basically get in your way. Particularly annoying are the youTube header ads that you can’t bypass. And the pop-ups, which to me signify the mentality of the age. Between the hundred million of them, they can’t come up with one novel concept. That’s the best they can do and it is pathetic.
Approaching storm.
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The flu bug is raging through my system. I’ve had to lace myself with remedies that left me groggy. Do you think anybody will notice? I skipped the dog walk this afternoon and put them out in the backyard for three hours. That’s where this picture comes from. That is part of the bamboo stand growing in from the south. I examined this stand closely. It seems to have started as decoration around a quarter block back into the woods shown here. It grows fast, which is what I want. It isn’t thick jungle and you can see the light shade quite a distance into the back. What do you think of my choice?
There is a site called Trovit that lists cabins for sale. Some of them actually are cabins, most are not. But you’ll have to grant me some time to look, since the locations are all places I’ve never heard of. Then again, I’d never heard of Lakeland when I bought there. The lack of regulation on advertising is at it’s worst in real estate. I wonder why nobody has come up with a “what’s wrong with it” site. I scanned some seventy listings and maybe one in six was anything like a cabin. You might think the Internet has made it easy to zero in on what you want. Wrong.
If you total up the time wasted by millions of people who get sent on goose chases by misleading advertising, it is a crisis on a national scale. I got all the experience I cared for searching the 509 properties that led to my cabin. It is commonly recognized I got the last bargain in Florida. Tennessee shares the same hateful tactics, so be careful. Examples? Pikeville. Great prices, but no mention it is a penitentiary. When your 14-year-old son gets his 13-year-old daughter pregnant, do you really want to be living next door to a prison guard? What’s harder in Tennessee is finding out if the property has any outstanding code violations. Or, I think so, because I had that lady doing it for me in Miami.
I’m seeing a lot of ads for suspiciously cheap acreages with mobile homes they call cabins. I wonder, does that make the place classier? Let’s try something. “Tales from the Cabin”. Yeah, I suppose it has a certain appeal. Inviting a lady back to your cabin wins over to your trailer in most encounters. I must give it a try.
