One year ago today: March 27, 2018, the new normal.
Five years ago today: March 27, 2014, here is the cartoon.
Nine years ago today: March 27, 2010, the plane lazy.
Random years ago today: March 27, 2008, a true story.
Logistics. That’s how I’d describe today. I got some shopping done, the result of finding out in tis entire house, there is no pot that is right-sized for making grits. Grits is like rice, you disregard that 1/4 cup serving size and make enough for now and to fry up tomorrow. For perfection, you need a certain head of steam. And that’s another thing. With the price tag on these houses, why do I have to wait nearly two minutes for the tap water to get hot? This country is a dump compared to what it should have been by now.
The band is nearly my style right down to a close match on the song lists. Why not? Several reasons. They are from Dickson, 56 miles away. Second, I think I see from the video why the last bassman is leaving. The band is far too dominated by lead playing and although the bass guy does move a bit, it lacks believability. Like he has to rehearse to move, and this is reinforced by his totally stereotypical conduct.
As for the lead player, I heard every lick he plays back in the 1970s, and he is clearly in it for himself. Those triplets he plays are torture on my ears. Such a situation spells trouble for the bassman, unless he is me, in which case it spells trouble for the lead player. Watch the video. I put on an infinitely better show than that bassman, who looks and acts like he’s a born follower. And if I got on that stage, that guitar player wouldn’t know what hit him. He’s so uni-dimensional it hurts to even listen.
Scanning the music lists, who do I see but a gal I jammed with in Los Angeles 28 years ago. She put out some singles that went nowhere, so I recognized the artwork. I can’t remember her real name but it is not the stage name she uses now. I poked around on several sites and finally came up with a photo of her today. The years have not been kind. We were around the same age then. Today, she looks like my grandmother. She was nice so I’ll decline on posting any photos. It’s such a difference, I suspect if we even were near the same age back then.
The FTC handed out some piddling fines to the robocallers. Pointbreak Media, NetDotSolutions, Veterans of America, and Higher Goals Marketing. The reports won’t specify who paid what fines, rather trying to garner brownie points by stating the total is over $4 million. What’s significant is the revelations this brings. One is that there is no actual law preventing the robocalls, rather the FTC can only file complaints. What kind of horseshit is that? Secondly, this only brings the prosecutions up to about the middle of last year. Third, why are the faces of these people not plastered all over the newspaper, like yours would be if you got arrested for jaywalking?
Now watch for those partners in crime, AT&T and Comcast to turn this into their long-awaited excuse to institute digital authentication. They plan to “offer” it, meaning you’ll pay extra for a version of call blocking. The real solution has been at hand for decades from sources like this blog. Follow the money. Somewhere along the line, the robocallers must come out of their holes to get the money. You hire only discharged Florida traffic cops, armed only with a billy club, to stand by the hole as they attempt to scamper back in. The phone company is not, repeat not, interested in stopping telemarketers. They were ordered to do something by the FCC.
“Shaken/Stir”, that’s what they call it. As it stands, spoofing works because caller ID does not originate in the calling phone (as it should*), but in the phone company central office. They could easily block 99% of the spoofing by trapping any line that makes more than a sixty calls per hour. However, the system was not designed to combat telemarketing and it will not work all the time, plus it is vulnerable to counter-measures. The software was designed to create a massive database of your outgoing calls and the giants have prayed for some excuse to implement this for a long, long time.
Legal weed map.
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Last evening was a no-go no-show. Not that Kayla was too good to be true. I drove up to “JB’s Pourhouse” and didn’t like the place. She wasn’t there and it was not real trivia, but millennial trivia. You know, where there is a guy in the booth posing the questions, you fill out an answer sheet, and check the results on your phone. Not for me. That style moves too dreadfully slow and the millennials have a bent concept of trivia. The first question was something like what trademark owned the theme music to the movie “Bumblebee”.
This brand of trivia is a phenomenon unknown in my life. I can and often do go to the cinema and have a great time watching the movie. It never crosses my mind who has legal custody of the movie rights or who owns the sound track. I left. What is it with this fascination with special features, alternate endings, and interviews with the directors. Have you ever watched such an interview? The only astonishment is how such bland, middling bores could imagine themselves as entertainment. Same with the producers and most of the crew. They think they are imparting something of value but they come across like a pack of boy scouts trading comics.
I went back to the “Rusty Urinal”, which was equally dead. Ah, so people are broke at month’s end here as well. No welfare checks until tomorrow. They have Karaoke but the music is a lot or that disco-like chanting. Have you noticed there are no disco joints any more. There’s a reason that music never lasts. She wasn’t there either, but it was half-price night, so I stayed a hour. Got bored. Went home. I’ve sent list requests to a few local bands, rejecting those which contain a majority of stuff I’ve never heard of. It’s nothing to do with being an old fogy. I listen to as many as I can and the music itself is just not interesting to play. Automatic drum tracks and one-note bass-banging were never my idea of live music.
Further checking on the real estate in this area is the same eye-opener as I found back in 2006. The market is not following the rules, I’ll try to explain. Once again, prices are going up but nobody is buying. I use a loose formula that takes the average household income in a district against house prices. And there is practically no correlation that I can spot. Like central Florida, most jobs that are available do not pay enough to buy even the lowest end fixer-uppers. The present trend, since around 2012, I attribute to boomers selling the house they purchased in the 70s and using the money to get something in Florida. Strange how that drives the prices up so in the end, all they have is what they started with. A place to live that needs constant upkeep.
I’ve advised Robynette that buying the conventional way is not going to work so well for us. I pulled up my cabin on-line and it says it is worth $22,000 less than a year ago. But I’ve turned down offers of three times what I paid. What made that purchase possible was having the cash. For those who weren’t here at the time, I had a 20% down payment in hard cash and was looking for a mortgage. When the cabin landed in my lap for my cash on hand, everyone was stunned. I got it half-price because I had the cash. I was a bit in disbelief, but four days later, it was mine.
[Author’s note: the only furniture was a sofa and I slept on that for a weeks. Because after it was all over, I had, what was it, $193 left in the Universe.]
Nothing smoothes out the complicated path like having a pile of cash. I’m suggesting that it could happen again, if we are patient. We know interest rates are rising and the banks are still tight-fisted with mortgage money. FSBO, or For Sale By Owner, is always a good place to check the mood, but keep an eye peeled for false advertising. They like to “accidentally” mistype a missing zero. There are small places within 100 miles of Nashville in the $100,000 range. The hitch is I don’t know where half these towns are. Google maps is far too slow and never did work right for intelligent people, so I’m back to working with atlas in lap. Where is Lobelville? Only? Bucksnort? Here is a photo of the Bucksnort Saloon and Family Inn. Hints: the zip code for Only is 37140 and Bucksnort is 1,874 miles from Mexico City.
How much money will we need? My guess is $60,000. While my cabin has everything except a second bathroom, the same arrangement won’t work with Robynette, who requires a separate office inside the house. In a sense, so do I, but my office can be as tiny as the footprint of this computer. While we would never agree on amenities, I’m quick to point out this million-dollar place over here has no dishwasher and there’s that two minutes for the water in the kitchen to get hot. Why $60,000? Experience. I bought one house cash three years ago, that’s more experience than any other blog writier, I believe, barring those who do it for a living. Nobody likes them.
Half-price means the circumstance of somebody wanting to quickly unload a property. And having that much cash breaks the sound barrier. Under $50,000 all you hear is talk, the reality is very few people ever have that much unencumbered cash. If you put together $60.000, you are in the elite in America these days. The qualification is unencumbered, as in sitting there waiting for a deal. Myself, I don’t want a subdivision unless the lots are practically invisible to each other. As ever, I’m not much into zoning restrictions.
