One year ago today: December 12, 2022, the sentimental cargo.
Five years ago today: December 12, 2018, $107, a record.
Nine years ago today: December 12, 2014, women who frat-party.
Random years ago today: December 12, 1981, my first paycheck weekend!
It’s a sad day, but the Dupont Registry now directs to an X account. Buy your luxury car on-line. Fact is, I like the old magazine format because of the non-car products. They are now hard to find, you know, in case Taylor shows up and decided to buy me a yacht, I would not want to waste any time shopping around. Except for women, I have no qualms about buying anything pre-owned by some Russian billionaire. Remember Tay, the MicroSoft A.I. chat-ware that after assimilating the facts, became “insanely based”? They spent $10 billion making it White-proof and guess what it just did again?
Here’s an interesting video on robotic weapons of the future, in the sense they don’t need to be large. I understand and would be fully capable of building this object in about a day. But my goal would not be destruction as much as to make sure it is dumb people who get sent to the front lines, because it is the only trait my detractors share in full.
This morning I bought a packet of tiny wood screws. They used to come in a spar pack sold by weight. Now they are counted individually at 93 per tray, and the tray is designed to fall off the table or slip out of your hand. Try it. Even the hole in the tray to hang it on your pegboard is designed with the tab on the lid, not the box part, so if you pick it up wrong, well, you know how millennials think. The part that gets me is they fancy themselves clever, that nobody thought of these things ever before. They don’t see that until their generation came along, nobody was un-American enough to do business that way.
Blog rules say report my shoulder. It’s the cold nights, even under the quilts. It’s not the intensity of the cold, but long exposure to even cool air, and I feel it. Mind you, nothing like the days before Big Loretta where you seize up. I have full movement but with a taut rigidity that has to be worked against accompanied by a deep dull muscle ache that follows the bones. It is what I imagine arthritis is like. The cure is working in the Florida sun for at least an hour. The inflexibility remains but the discomfort goes away.
Clothes hook spy cameras.
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Nothing happened on this perfect afternoon so you get domestic news. I checked all balances including investments and concluded they have to double in 2024 for what lies ahead. How this can be accomplished is unknown. It was a pleasant drive into town, where the lack of traffic and people kind of threw me. Is this some holiday I don’t know about? On the way back from the post office, I bumped into Wilford, reminding him to get me those avocado plants or he’ll wind up throwing them out. Myself, I prefer them to papaya. The largest fruits have ripened and disappeared, I will assume they fell and were consumed by yard critters.
Festus Tuesday. Today’s episode was about a blind girl whose father steals horses for money to send her to an eastern school. Whoever cast the Gunsmoke women sure had an eye for the right ladies. In the later series, they do most of the good acting. The plots of these older westerns were more complicated than today’s material, which is likely attributable to lessened ability of today’s viewers to follow anything but the blatant.
I stopped at the Thrift, always good for a chat about Trump. While they know the happenings shown on the TV, which is always on, I may be their only source on non-aligned information. I know often the first time they understand newer terms and phrases is when I bring them up and explain the meanings. I didn’t hear anything directly, but it does seem the Democrats or at least their media wing, have openly advocated harming Trump. At least to the extent of saying they would not pursue punishment. But without doing something, they are sunk.
A paperback on early German diplomacy and politics has my attention. There are weird parallels to what’s going on in America 100 years later. We resemble the Weimar Republic is a freakish number of ways. This booklet is about the era that led up to that situation. Much of it is dry talk over early communist and middle-class struggles after Bismarck was gone. It’s a revealing work on the German side of the lead up to World War One. It’s a facet never seen in the victor’s history books, that a primary cause was the British trying to prevent a second European world empire. One of the first acts of the Allies was to seal off and then carve up the German empire.
Plus, I’m also reading another novel which I thought would be a fictional battle story. Nope, it is about Wake Island. Most folks are familiar with Midway, but there was one hell of a fight at Wake. Turns out it is a first-hand account of the lead-up to the Japanese attack and covers the involvement of the civilians in the defense. I on page 62 and I can recommend this already. A real eye-opener on the state of things and a most informative historical account of a dozen related issues. For example, America was so isolationist that Roosevelt had to disguise building a navy base on Wake as part of the Pan Am clipper (flying boat) route to the Philippines, a flight that took only one week.
The story is full of tidbits even if you are not a military buff. The contrast between the luxury life of the civilian workers, who had steak and ice cream and the Marines who had bully beef and horse cock (sausage), but got a beer ration. The work contract was nine months and many civilians breached once they saw the place. One professional gambler returned with $20,000 and another managed to get his wife along as the only woman on the island. With thousands of men, but it was plain self-control was more valued in that time period. If the remainder of this book proves as interesting, I’ll collect some of the best instances for you.
If that still does not get your attention, here is a Mars video of the Perserverance rover landing.
ADDENDUM
The computer revolution has spawned a new type of creature. One of the lowest forms of worker that has existed in centuries, kind of the death-knell of the skilled clerical worker. America now exists is a void, where the new lower class, which I’ve spoken of as “techno-peasants” have completely replaced their predecessors. Every clerical job is now reduced to an operator who knows little more than how to key an acceptable item into a computer. It is right, wrong, valid, accurate? That’s not part of the job.
Such it is with my utility bills. The turnover at City Hall is either atrocious or the people there avoid any semblance of job training. Over the years, each clerk has added or taken away something from the bill so they could do their part of the job without any grasp of the concept a bill should be readable to the customer. It isn’t, so once a year I reconcile the books and 2023 was a nightmare. The statement now displays the amount of your last payment, even if was two months ago because you paid in advance because you went out of state.
This baffles them because their statement is designed primarily to harass delinquent accounts. Any advance payment turns the statement into a mess of negative numbers that requires specialized bookkeeping to sort out. Worse, the bill shows the figures from their point of view, not the customers. Hence, techno-peasants.
Another example is the cellular bill. It’s a moving target. Sometimes they will cut you off on the due date, but you don’t know if will be at midnight or the afternoon. One reason you do NOT pay in advance or by credit card is their policy. If you go over your minutes, they will enroll you into the next higher payment plan and rumor is it can take months to get that set back. That’s also why you don’t leave any surplus in your account—Boost will nickel and dime it away. So, I wait until the morning of the due date and walk in. The payment is exactly the amount, not a penny more. Then, it becomes a guessing game when your service is restores, usually within an hour most of the time.
Now I know the gal who works there, she manages several of the offices. That gives her a full-time job having to fill in for workers who don’t show up for work on a given day. I usually buy her a coffee and empanada because I know she often has to skip breakfast. As of this week, there is no place left in this area to buy Spanish style coffee. The last place, a supermarket with a counter selling pastries, finally quit serving it. If you must get yourself a café con leche, Dunkin Donuts has a fair simulation, though ask as it is not on the menu.
