May 1, 2020

Yesteryear
One year ago today: May 1, 2019, stil my fave project.
Five years ago today: May 1, 2015, my political IQ.
Nine years ago today: May 1, 2011, if I was an oil company . . .
Random years ago today: May 1, 2004, 15% intentional blenders blunders (damn spellchecker).

           The neverTrumpers are back in force. Tons of posts that it is Trump’s fault the nation is dying and the economy is tanked. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Funny though, they don’t explain how Trump also did the same to the rest of the world. Yep, the majority rule thing again. What Trump meant was that if the state governors shut down their businesses over the virus, he was not responsible for the consequences. The left-wing vowed they would rather destroy the country than let Trump succeed. We shall see in November. No matter how bad things get, nobody wants another out-of-touch elitist globablist Democrat as president. Martin Shkreli, are you listening?

           You see, Martin has experience sticking it to the real enemies of the American people. Big pharma, medical insurance, and Wall Street regulations that target only the small investor. Or how about the bunch posting the picture of the armed protesters at the door of the Michigan governor? I would like to know the other side of that story and it would not surprise me if the governor is not perceived as the enemy. There, them’s my opening comments and I feel more relaxed now. I got up, fed the chickens, and went back to sleep until noon. Got to ring in May on the right note.

           Here’s the upside-down planter getting a coat of paint. That’s wire mesh on the bottom with some slats holding things in place. The liner is not the same material you lay down in sheets under a flower bed, but the principle is the same. I get to do things like paint on my day off, anything that is relaxing. I hope to have a crop of some edibles by June. And I should give some thought to how these plants will be watered while I’m away. Agt. R was not around y’day, I will drop in to see. He is paid for the work, you know.
           This is a repurposed lawn light. It’s the kind you push into a stake on the ground and keep tripping over until you figure out they work just as well mounted up on a pole like this. Agt. R came by helped me get the tarpaper on the shed roof. Upon examining the planter, he advises that the landscape liner is not going to hold up. He says anything works better, like styrofoam or cardboard. Folks, that’s one day after I burned a huge pile of cardboard and styrofoam or any such plastic chemical product is toxic. Not necessarily to the environment, but to the Reb. He has a source of lumber suitable for the boxes. We’ll meet up in the morning and see what gives.

           We talked some about the bands that play at his old club. Tell me the band name and I can tell you their song list. Playing the same list forever is a mistake I never make. I already include one “show” song every set. Expanding on that is how, when I jam alone at home, I will often play a bass line that “bites into” the tune I’m playing. I incorporate other musical notes and sometimes beats into the bass line. It gives the listener a novel perspective on how bass can affect a tune.
           I can’t demonstrate for you, but I’m kind of wondering if I should spring that on the audience. It works best with complicated music, by which I mean Chet Atkins who pretty much played out everything that’s been done on guitar since. Stick around and if I mention this again, I’ll name the tunes. The one I’m working on is the Jerry Reed version of “Mule Skinner Blues”, just don’t ask me to remember his name. Woman if you can’t find your damper, woman you better turn your bread around, it’s getting’ burned.
           I have four passions in this life and one of them is playing bass. Another one lives in Tennessee.

           The hardware was the most expensive part of the planter. Agt. R says he’s got a bog bucket of lag bolts I can have. Good, I don’t a lick about how it looks. Remind me to get him to deliver some new fence panels. And too stick around to help me stand them in place. He is as leery as myself that this ground contact lumber will last 40 years. And, he predicts once the peaches have a complete growing season, they will plump up to the right size. He remains incredulous at items like tarring the poles but then, he’s not a robot club member. Could be that is why he was impressed by my growing collection of custom tool boxes. He says people pay for that shit because they think it is some kind of special.
           The club budget still has that allocation for a quadcopter. That was before the requirement to register anything over 250 grams. Register is the same as license, if you have a drone (the state classifies quadcopters as drones), the state wants to know about it. So far anyway, nobody has strapped a grenade on a drone and flown it into a bank. The average hobby quadcopter can lift 15-20 pounds. How much is that in fifties and hundreds? I don’t know, maybe ask a drug smuggler?

           Watch for a picture, but conjure the thought of that fancy 1952 crystal doorknob set that I saved so long and installed on the bathroom March last. The crystal part fell out. It’s epoxy to the rescue. I wonder if some symbolism isn’t at work here. I wait too long and the fancy part lets me down? Didn’t that boring Englishman have a lot to say about that? He was the original, turning a couple of snappy phrases into a three act play. Shakespeare, that was the guy’s name.

Picture of the day.
Map & recordings
of N American dialects.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           The situation with the Auvoria people is below standard. This is not the software, which I have the incentive to learn, but the situation with the training that was promised. They use Zoom for meetings, but every time I go to Zoom, something has changed about the log-on that takes five or ten minutes to sort out. The usual problem is some strange screen message I’ve never seen before. Today it was “Host is at another meeting.” And that’s the problem.

           This meeting was scheduled. I took time off and canceled other plans to be there. I finally get into the room at the appointed time and I’m the only person there. I wait 15 minutes in case everybody else is late. Then this message. What other meeting, dude? What about the one that was scheduled, or is scheduling just another toss-word from the last century. What part of schedule don’t you people understand. But I can’t say anything because I’m still too new. But if they think I don’t watch every move they make or don’t make, they are dead wrong. This is the second meeting that evaporated, so how long before I begin to question everything they say?
           It smells of the NOVA Syndrome. Worded differently it says that when texting gives inconsiderate people the right to cancel at the last moment it will increase their likelihood of doing so. Now you know why I don’t automatically trust “services” like Zoom or Telegram. Their idiot-to-responsibility ratio is way out of whack.

           Music is as much of my day as coffee, so let’s go over what’s in the works. I regularly clip songs that fade out. Fades rarely work on stage, so I choose a part of the tune that naturally resolves to the tonic and splice it in as and outro. This is a ten minute process, but today I struggled with one tune over an hour. I use pattern matching and the wiggles would just not line up. Complicated software rarely helps in this situation. The picture is to show the pecan tree is doing fine. Agt. R weeded the base area, and how about that fancy circle of blocks. I did that. The tree has grown around 5 inches already.
           Then, find that missing set of receipts from 2018. I had to redo the month of August. Somebody else’s receipts got into my stack. I’ve never been to a Zaxby’s (restaurant) and I don’t pay for anything by credit card, certainly not restaurant food. If you can’t pay for food cash, that’s an indication of something. Let me review. That month cost me $1,718. I was in the red by the 11th and it shows here I spent $382 for gasoline. I should use this blog to find out where I went. I see both tank ups for the car and the motorcycles. I recall going to Miami and buying a hotdog cart (which is still mothballed) and I co-paid $95 for eyeglasses that didn’t last a year.

ADDENDUM
           I pulled up videos that claimed to be ships off the Somali coast firing on pirates. What crock. Repetitious scenes of deck guns firing, but limited footage of what they are shooting at. People already know what guns look like. What they want to see is the slugs and shells punching holes in boats and pirates. When you finally see a few seconds of real footage, you wonder how can our navies be such bad shots? Hundreds, maybe thousands of shell splashes around the target, which simply scoots out of range. Or you see a billion dollar navy ship pull over an empty speedboat 600 miles from land and let them go because they claim to be fishermen.
           Get it right, folks. Somalia is the shithouse of Africa. The government is totally corrupt, the army is on the take, and the men are the regarded as the most violent of all Africans. Even when caught, the pirates are not tried, because piracy is a lucrative business for the nation. The US sends $500 million per year and supplies the joke of a Somali army with tons of guns and ammunition—as long as that army claims to be fighting Islamists and not torturing political prisoners in basements. The US has created a long-term dependency and now 2/3 of the population there under 30 have never worked for a living.
           This is the archetypical “foreign rathole” whose main use is a testing ground for our latest drones. The population has shown once they get free food, they won’t even bother to plant their own gardens. Yet we pour millions into the place for idiotic causes like female empowerment and gender justice. Wake up, Mr. Trump. We already have a Puerto Rico.

Last Laugh
(Danish elevator.)