One year ago today: February 2022, oops, forgot my bass.
Five years ago today: February 2018, a four-song limit.
Nine years ago today: February 2014, the Florida Navy.
Random years ago today: February 18, 2009, a wasted 5 hours.
Check back later, this morning we have a scheduled rehearsal with Bradford. He takes a lot of toleratin’ but so do I. The agreement is more of a truce because he has firm convictions on what music to play and how, while I leave that decision generally up to the audience. Rural Florida is not a metal-rap-disco stronghold. It’s a laugh to see these sort of bands from Orlando that have to run permanent want ads for members. Told ya, no money and the band breaks up. You can play music for fun, but you can’t play in a band for fun alone. Try it. On your own time, I mean.
Here’s the Three Sisters. The giant agave plants that came from that single tiny pot JZ donated back in around 2021, I forget. These now measure around six feet across and are tough keep tidy. Leaves, spiders, you name it, gets trapped in and under those spiked ends and become a real chore. Even a leaf blower won’t do the job by itself.
A chilly 55°F out there means porridge and coffee. And some bass runs. What’s coffee without a little bass to keep things moving? It was a half hour with those math-like Yoakum bass lines, I found a piano rhythm right out of Scott Joplin that works with “It Only Hurts” and now I can’t get it out of my brain. I have to shake it, tomorrow is slated for work in the attic and I alin’t climbing up there with that tune in my head. And the movie “Bad Samaritan” is a winner. Excellent acting and a script unusual enough to keep up the pace. Excellent portrayal of how murderers can be such cool liars under pressure.
It is also a good revelation of how America is very much an arrest-the-victim state. Report a crime to the police and you are the one that gets checked out and, if there are not outstanding items in your distant past, you may be let go with a warning.
Later, what did I tell you about going out the evening before a practice? Bradford had to cancel out, but not before I loaded up the truck, went down the highway, and pulled up to his doorstep. You can party hardy until 40, then it begins to catch up, guys. This is one of the reasons I’m rarely there before long after sunset. You miss nothing and if that’s the case by 10:00PM, g’won home, it ain’t going to be. Sure, you miss the odd last minute rally but
The squirrels have found a way into the shed, it has to be up near the gable ends where the lumber doesn’t quite fit so exact. I have some timber to work with today plus with the new table saw, I can seal the shed from the inside. I finished watching “Bad Samaritan”, I’d say it is worth it. Like many budget films, they ran out of cash at the end and had to wrap it up quick, leaving lots of loose ends. My favorite part of the movie is when the gal hits the bad guy over the head and says to the hero, “That’s how you rescue somebody.”
How about Popular Mechanics claiming scientists have created a tractor beam. That’s to sell magazines, folks. It is a laser beam pushing a small object, something Isaac Newton was aware of, that light had mass. And it’s pushing the target, not pulling. The article says all it need is a sail, but then that’s still not a tractor beam. But the truly sad news of the day is the Hindu “doctor” who writes how she laments the cultural destruction that has destroyed Twitter. Now that Twitter does not pander to every whacko left-winger that crawls out of a sewer, she suddlenly wants government oversight
So I did some checking. She claims to spot and correct racism in software. She goes after banks that approve more White loans than other races, without regard to the fact there are simply more White customers at the banks she chose. My favorite is her claim that image software is biased. You know that camera feature that detects faces? It favors, she says, White faces over other races. Not because, as is the case, those are the brightest faces, but because the algorithm is prejudiced against non-Whites. I’m not making this shit up.
Armpit tattoos.
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A couple hours in the far back got me half the target practice boards up. This is utilitarian, in that it is the part of the yard with the two foot deep humus. Fence poles will not stay upright is such soft soil, so the fence is doubled up, two rows of posts. The second row is two feet inside the yard. It was a simple matter to string a couple 2x4”s across the span and throw up some pallet boards. This keeps the fence square and when I add a couple protective layers, that’s a thirty foot target range for air rifle which I’ve wanted for a while. And it also serves as a lumber rack, another thing I need back there.
By dark, the mosquitoes were gathering in attack formation. I also rescued the hurricane radio, it never gets used. The internal batteries won’t charge, but it does have shortwave. I’ll get it working. Sadly, it is difficult to buy just a radio any more. You get fifty models with sleep, snooze, and the dreaded multi-function button. Where an I gonna get 4.5 volts. This is the radio from JZ’s dad’s attic. Brand new, never used. I also dismantled that SONY mini-cassette to see if it had any useful parts. Two. A speaker and the mini counter. SONY, pioneer of the unrepairable.
Back to the target backstop. It is five layers, six if you count air. Metal, air space, 3/9ths inch pallet wood, carpet, air space, replaceable layer of pallet wood. So far no pellet as made it through half-way, and that’s with the rifle. Who remember Karen from the club? She lives in the north end now, I texted her an invite for brunch tomorrow. No, it is not a man-woman thing, we are simple great company. And I have some letters to mail out that way. You hear me, important letters never get mailed from post offices near where I live. Some people may laugh about that, but they number fewer as the government closes in on them. Fifty dollars for 4/5ths a tank of gas today.
I’m also going to build a hutch for the computer desk. Multi-tasking always creates clutter and you know I like to mult-task. Nothing else exciting, so around 10:00PM I went over to Karaoke. It was the phosphate mining crowd, noisy late-thirties I never sang, but took note of which tunes the crowd responded to. It’s kid music and we know what causes that.
ADDENDUM
Today begins the case over Internet privacy. The government is backing the people who say the Internet was used to recruit or brainwash killers. This is a typical millennial mentality that somebody or something else is always to blame. But you know, these days that is a valid argument all too often. The effect of these court cases is always to place a restraint that has no hope of working and just creates a new class of criminal.
A major Canadian newspaper, the Toronto Star, has declared that Trudeau was justified in using the riot act against the trucker convoy. Despite being called out and condemned for abuse of government power, the paper says he’s a swell guy. The media in Canada is 100% government controlled. They investigated themselves and found no wrong-doing.
