One year ago today: May 17, 2021, Kaiser stayed in Nashville.
Five years ago today: May 17, 2017, when my yard was new.
Nine years ago today: May 17, 2013, swanky?
Random years ago today: May 17, 2010, on French dectective novels.
Today’s joke is Twitter. Have you followed that story? In a nutshell, Elon Musk moves to buy Twitter based on their market evaluation. Twitter goes ballistic trying to stop him with the cover story he’s a right-winger. But the reality is Twitter (and I did warn you about the East Indian mentality toward lying) was really trying to prevent the market evaluation. Turns out much more than 5% of the accounts were fakes. Even cooking the books could not get it below 20% that they are willing to admit. So, Twitter has been inflating their numbers and lying to the SEC.
Musk has intimated that he has evidence as much as 90% of daily Twitter users may be fake accounts. If so, I can see some advertisers sueing hard and fast. My opinion is PollyWolly Doodle and the rest of the Twitter staff have been lying all along. I smelled a rat the minute they opened for business.
I put the turtle outside and went to work on the Taurus. The battery has finally given out, the expensive unit replaced just months before the Cagle collision. I guess right that this simple project was going to take all day long and did not get out to the tool store until early afternoon. Don’t misread me, it’s not lieke nothing gets done in the meanwhile, I only mean I don’t work on the car only and continuously. I had time to bake another cake while the battery charger was running. We also walked the dogs way to the west side of the highway, where they both decided to eat grass and throw up. This is not a huge cause for concern because they get the healthiest of diets and they do this on a seasonal basis.
The gluten-free coffee cake from this morning, the Reb notes, says 15 servings. What’s with that? Maybe 8 servings tops. So she cut it into 15 pieces for me to look at. Smaller than cookies and who eats one cookie? No gluten, but the cake is 42% sugar. All this befuddles my head so much, I had to have an extra cup of coffee. That’s the problem with the millennial world, they don’t drink real coffee. Starbucks isn’t coffee. If you ask for real coffee, they have to go check if they have any ready. Starbucks killed the roadside coffeeshop, then they killed the custom.
I watch tech companies a bit but not who runs them. Still, I see the Intel stockholders had it with paying their execs in the hundreds of millions and voted no. It’s the behavior I expect from tractor companies and airlines, so Intel is a surprise. I do hope it is a trend because I have never bought the line that they have to pay these rates to attract top talent. There’s plenty of that in the tens of millions range, plus they are easier to boot if they screw up.
An interesting challenge to Sweden and Norway joinging NATO has come from Turkey. What do the Turks care? Plenty, it turns out. Turkey has never forgotten the Swedish arms embargos and further consider the Scandinavians to be harboring terrorists. A third of the Swedish population is now Arabs, most of them unvetted. This could be interesting as Turkey has one of the largest NATO air bases and could, if they split iwth NATO over this, grant Russia access to the Mediterranean.
Marsailles harbor entrance.
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Please let me be lucky and find the part for the Taurus. I have a universal auto supplier code and a rumor that it is stocked at NAPA. The late afternoon traffic out of Nashville stopped me getting over there today. .Tomorrow after morning rush because my old favorite donut shop is out that way. Other than a sore throat, I’m over whatever, either a mild cold or a practically non-existent COVID. The tiredness slowed me down more than the combined other symptoms. Showing up and getting sick second day did not impress the Reb. But other than that car, I’m done here for this visit. I may stick around until the car is sold.
The important development is the input for my bass solo act. While it is all people who know me and have heard me play, the response is 100% to go ahead. All say I am good enough to pull it off. The general theme is to find places to play that appreciate what is going on and that my act is entertainment in itself enough to keep a crowd. Socially, I’m past my own deadline when I said I would care if I failed but face it, that is not the easiest barrier to get over.
All I can say about that for now is to check in later. The set lists are made up and rehearsed once each. I start with strumming guitar and ease the crowd along if I have their attention. Then second set I hit them with the bass solos. Third set depends on their reaction. I can play guitar, bass solo, or half and half. As for the show times, it fits with my plan to charge the same money for a somewhat shorter show. This I will describe.
Tradition has it a show is four one-hour sets with three 15 minute breaks. In reality, the final three sets are cut short by each break to 45 minutes. In reality, it is closer to 40 minutes. They play the first set an hour to make it work out, but that first hour is when the fewest people are likely there.
My plan is three actual one-hour sets, with the breaks advancing each hour for a total of 3-1/2 hours duration for the show. I know which clubs have a only a $200 budget. If you do the math, they get athe same180 minutes, but I get out of there a half hour earlier. I think I can sell this but it is unwise to presume club owners can follow any such logic.
The dandelion in the picture is here because they don’t grow in big crops in Tennessee that I’ve seen This is the first one this whole year so far. And for the record, behind the USA, Turkey has the largest military in NATO.
