One year ago today: July 23, 2019, what's the delay?
Five years ago today: July 23, 2015, the blue dot.
Nine years ago today: July 23, 2011, duets were uncommon.
Random years ago today: July 23, 2007, frustrating & fruitless.
This photo is presented as proof that Texas Disappearing Pie is baked on the bottom rung of the oven. This browns the edges of the crust without burning. The oven time and temperature are important as everything in this pie is already cooked before it goes into the oven. An excellent side dish is cabbage in heavy cream, cooked exactly 8 minutes.
This fake heiress makes me wonder. These charges may have been leveled at her because she was a successful without kissing insider ass. In America, bullshit fraud charges are how they get you when they can’t get you any other way. That’s how they got Al, and Martha, and Martinii. These people got successful but they didn’t pay a cut to the banksters. Golly, I’d better be careful, for 50 years I’ve been pretending to be a bass player, writer, and for the first 30, a world traveler. The left is obsessed with other people’s tax returns. Have I made any mistakes they can inflate?
And the leftoids are growing desperate, even to the point of thinking Hillary should run again. How sick is that? All the issues and angles they are trying to exploit are their public face. Their private face is they have to do something about Trump. And they have to do it big and fast. They pathologically hate him because every moment he is power dismantles their carefully planned takeover. Trump reminds people there are other systems that work, that being called racist isn’t the end of the world, and it is okay to not want America to become the same as Mexico. The Democrats thought they had it sewn up, that no matter what they said or did, they could cause any critics to cringe under the threat of being labeled.
The other factor is that Trump has learned how deep the swamp is. If he gets in with a double majority, they know they are in deep doo-doo. Every stunt they pulled has backfire on them. It has not been about the election for some time now, it is only about getting rid of Trump. They now have to quash him because he represents that being called names by a liberal is not the end of the world and they had just spent 40 years getting it to that stage.
The public has never been so focused on election fraud and it is doubtful people will stay away from the booths because of the COVID scare. I still refuse to take sides and stress that I am not anti-Democrat. I am anti-liberal, and that is a mind-set, not a political party.
Prague.
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For siesta, I watched an excellent movie that I’d never heard of. “Limitless”. It’s about a pill that opens your brain-power. Of course, you get all the side effects and intrigue, excellent acting. I got a different take on the movie that they intended, in that it shows what happens when you give performance-enhancing drugs to the wrong people, particularly idiots. The rain did not let up until after 4:00PM, making it too wet to trim the trees. The water makes the branches too heavy and gums your saw. But we did get on large limb down. We had the ropes and everything, it still crashed to the ground, barely missing a few things.
We cut this first tree to see how dangerous it was. Quite, and we must cut the limbs in smaller pieces as short as two feet. The ladder is deceptive, when you are that high off the ground, you cannot take chances. The small electric saw works, but it is slow and binds easily. The plan is tomorrow morning drive down to Bowling Green and get gas saw he lent out. I’m expecting delays.
One lesson learned was it was not so much the weight of the saw, but that the electric saw took so long that your arms got tired. Loose your grip even slightly and it throws the chain. The tree shown here gets lopped off at nine feet, same as the others that show an amazing regrowth of small branches. Not these big solid logs. The single tree that came down made a wonderful improvement is the yard lighting. Now maybe the other plants will stand a chance. Shown below is the 30 or so foot limb that came down. If it had decided to fall either left or right, it could have taken off my awning, or broke my swing and crushed my pecan tree. This photo shows barely half the full length.
The log is already cut up and mostly hauled away. That’s the easy part. Howie is going to lend us the 30 foot ladder, but that is a beast. He says five years ago he rented a lift and it cost only $75 for a half-day. That means $150 today—with a credit card, and I would rather see what we can do first. We got lucky this tree fell where we wanted, I’ll not suppose that will continue. Another lesson was that the limbs shown here will break before they bounce. You do not want limbs that bounce and shoot back. Widowmakers. From this photo, you can already see how much brighter the yard is. Summer foliage is out in full. I’ve got all the shade I need in the back yard now.
I’ve begun to include more Shania Twain music in my list, but as Ray-B predicted, I find my self playing the guitar tags. Twain is new country, making it difficult to find any fast music. Mostly slow, depressing ballads, but she is the biggest female seller of that music. I’ve had to settle for medium speed tunes, which is what prompts me to fill the void by riffing off the guitar licks. To any non-bassists out there, guitar “lead breaks” are really a collection of around ten patterns with the only real variation being the way they are played and how well they fit the motif of the song.
I mention this, because when played on bass, this falls to around five patterns. An unexpected side-effect is two of these patterns emulate a whole range of generic Bluegrass fiddle licks. And that makes them natural fill for Shania Twain’s somewhat plodding music. Obviously if she played fast, I could never manage full speed with widely-spread bass notes. It is an interesting effect because I can play these ear-catching arrangements behind most guitar strums, a combination few people have ever heard. They know there is something familiar about it, but until I began learning this slower music, I never had much call to play it.
ADDENDUM
By late evening, I see Google has backpedaled on their “new” blog screens, it’s pretty much where it was before. I’ve detailed why you can never test an HTML document so well that you can turn it up by flipping a switch. That requires people smart enough to anticipate everything and we know such people don’t work for Google. The only way I recommend is to make one change at a time and don’t proceed until the bugs are worked out. They’ve still removed the direct access to older posts, but since I first saw the format they are using back in the 1990s, I may be able to get it from the elements view.
You gotta hand it to Amazon and AT&T this week. Amazon for holding fake startup capital interviews, then copying the idea. And AT&T for just being the bastards they are. I’ve warned for some time that it would soon become very inconvenient to not carry around a tracking device. The government is complicit in AT&T’s announcement to cut land-line service in around 19 months from now. Upgrade, or your old phone quits working. I will explain the extra significance of that.
AT&T is a regulated monopoly, like many utilities. It is, in theory, better for most cities to have only one set of phone wires, one set of electricity wires, and one bus service running down the streets. So, they grant a monopoly, but under strict conditions. One important one that seems no big deal is that once a monopoly offers a grade of service, they are compelled to continue offering it until the last customer voluntarily drops it. I speak from experience, back in the 80s, I maintained equipment that had been in service since 1923 because there were still seven customers in Washington state who used the service.
Some might squawk that this would bankrupt most businesses, but regulated monopolies are a special case. They are allowed to set their prices at a level that guarantees them a profit. Thus they are not risking failure by losing here and there. I won’t argue why they should never be allowed to cancel a service, it is something you should figure out on your own why it is so important. On top of that, the major reason for 52 million US homes to still have land-lines is over privacy and reliability concerns around cell phones. You could expect a service to be dropped by the likes of MicroSoft or BoostMobile, but not a company that’s been making a guaranteed profit for the past 150 years. Nor could AT&T get away with this without the help of their paid political stooges. Cell phones, as they exist, are not good enough to get almost have the US population to switch.
In early 2022, your old phone will “cease to receive service”. You will buy and carry a tracking device. Over the years, the corporations have quietly stopped supporting various seemingly small items. In New York City, always a great bad example, it has been difficult to book a room or hail a taxi without a smart phone. Multiply that a thousand times before you think you won’t need to shell out for one. And they have the perfect brain-washed generations to let it happen.
