One year ago today: August 26, 2021, predicting Canada.
Five years ago today: August 26, 2017, some real estate stats.
Nine years ago today: August 26, 2013, dress uniform, you say.
Random years ago today: August 26, 2007, my first beach solo.
It’s almost noon and I’m just stirring. Physically, I mean. At dawn, I decide to write another few paragraphs of my autobiography. The last six paragraphs took and hour and a half. But if that is ever published, it will be the one-of-a-kind book of our era. Maybe not famous, maybe no sales, but definitely unique. The story of my life as an unrecognized entertainer. Once more, I get millennialized. My complete My Video folder just disappeared. It is not in the Restore and fails all searches, though with MicroSoft that means little. Fortunately, I learned my lesson with Windows 95 and all was backed up on a separate drive. Still, MicroSoft sucks and that I why they’ve never made a penny off me.
That hour’s work will have to be my quota for the day. So, hotels in California will soon be required to take in the homeless. TMOR, never mistake a homeless person in America for a person who doesn’t have a home. There is plenty of housing in America. It just isn’t in the core of the cities where these people congregate. You do not just become homeless in America, it is definable mindset developed over a lengthy period of ignoring and rejecting all good they have seen, experienced, and have been taught. You have to, against all advice, put all your eggs in one basket and make sure there are no job skills in that basket just taking up room. These people are not destitute, they all get welfare and food stamps amounting to enough to share a place if they would clean up their acts.
But why bother? If you camp on the sidewalk, then you have a big wad of cash to go smoking and drinking the rest of the month. This is why I say a condition of welfare should be they must move out to small towns far away, where locally they can’t constitute more than 2% of the local head count. Trust me, they would smarten up in a hurry. Another news item reveals 20 million Americans are behind on their electricity bills. I saw that one coming and I’m paid up months in advance. Don’t go over that, however, because they could pass a law saying those who can pay must pick up the tab for the deadbeats.
LastPass, the company that lost all your passwords, says that your data is “probably safe” and that it is perfectly fine to keep using password managers. Folks, if you need a password manager in the first place, you are screwed in the head. The rain finally arrived but there was no storm. Just six hours of light but constant showers. I ducked inside and continued reading “Gold Coast Pioneer”. By now he’s in the inter-war Florida boom and bust real estate market and I can identify with what’s going on.
I missed the test firing of Artemis, NASA’s big booster. It’s not a big deal and I’ll tell you why. Because just like the ISS (Space Station), Artemis is a couple percent new and all the rest baloney and hype. Fifty years after the Saturn lifted Apollo to the Moon, NASA is on about how great and wonderful this rocket is. It does the same job with a similar payload ratio and requires strap-on boosters. The thrust greater, but the ratio is hardly changed, no gain in efficiency. NASA still will not let go of that shuttle fiasco that kept us off Mars, in fact the assembly rooms, tools, and techniques look to me identical to the 1980 shuttle facilities.
The few videos available are watered down. I want to see the sections being bolted together, not listen to some flunky talk about how hard it is. Do you job, shut up. It’s a politicized operation so you waste time listening to how wonderful it is for NASA that some of the parts came all the way from Utah, whoop-dee-doo. Once again, it is evident that rather than build quality components, the emphasis is now on testing, which results in plastic parts which pass tests designed for plastic parts. How long before another fiasco? The Orion crew capsule already costs billions more than it should because it must accommodate crews chosen by race and gender rather than qualification. It is disgusting to watch some masked 280-pound ape-like female with tattoos saying she is all about safety. And begging you to subscribe.
If I’m so unimpressed, why watch the progress? Because I have a plan to simultaneously launch the world’s cheapest functioning satellite and immortalize this blog. Who remembers that one? I submit that I could build a working satellite for $100. Artemis has a shroud that connects the upper stage, and inside that is room for small packages destined to be released into orbit. Called “Cube-Sats”. I forget the price but that was the only thing stopping me. It was an Arduino that transmits the contents of this blog in a continuous loop by Morse code. But sigh, it’s just a dream.
Southern Rhodesia 1975
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My book tells of the many subdivisions I’ve been around and the development of Las Olas Boulevard, which I knew well until they closed the bookstore. It was prime Sunday sidecar touring and Trent & I used to tour the clubs a bit. I was right about something always being funny concerning the Florida real estate market. The insiders share other information newcomers would have difficulty finding out. The old boys did not really reveal insider secrets about the real estate itself, but regularly passed on influential tidbits like where the railway would be built and where they approve a new hospital.
A worm’s-eye view of a yard mushroom. It’s a little past that season but things have been soggy. I presume all mushrooms are poisonous. This one is a bit bigger than your thumb. I’ve been lax on these dramatic shots lately. The rain stopped but the cloud cover remained so nothing is dried out. My plan was to build two more sawhorses, which requires 14 pieces of lumber. Maybe I’ll get them inside the shed and measured out, check in after I’ve had more coffee. Then I watched an exhibition of Karen Carpenter on drums. I always go a bit haywire when I see people with that much talent. It’s not as simple as that. Nothing else going on, so let me explain.
I know part of talent is making it look easy but I find it equally true that the same process will make it look easy even if that is not what you wanted. Did I say that right? Most things that are difficult show it and the worker gets his awards. That’s where musical talent becomes quite indistinguishable from a head start. I know precisely what it takes to get to a certain level from a standing start. By the age of fifteen, I’d detected that people with talent did not work harder than me and they did not have more time than I did, on average. But they had talent.
What I would bust my balls for, with the same amount of applied effort, we would both arrive at the same spot. At that point it does not matter for whom it was easier. There’s your proof that whatever it is that drives me with playing bass, it is not the money or the accolades. There are not extra dollars in the jar for having worked extra long to get there.
A mild letup before dark had me working in the shed until 9:00PM. It’s now dark and I see which of my solar lights are kaput. These things do not last forever, in fact, if it is the rechargeable battery inside that is giving out, they don’t last much more than two years. I built one more sawhorse and laid out the lumber for its partner. I’ve learned to work at bench height so two sets of sawhorses are nice. Throw a sheet of plywood over one and there’s all the table space you need without setting your tools down or lugging tem around on a belt. Usually, I set up a saw on one table.
This time, I used old pallet lumber and got a few surprises. Some of it is of surprising quality, but use it up because you never know if it has nails somewhere. The decline in quality of hardware from China is blatant. I salvaged the deck screws from the old treehouse and wore out two bits driving them through the pallet lumber. Chinese bits, I think, have a higher tin content. They make everything out of tin over there because the whole country is an earthquake zone. And the new high-dive record is 172 feet. This will continue until some stupid-ass jock kills himself.
