One year ago today: July 13, 2023, box of the week.
Five years ago today: July 13, 2019, talk about old piping.
Nine years ago today: July 13, 2015, two large parties.
Random years ago today: July 13, 2004, he bought retreads.
It’s not my favorite thing to point out, but I don’t know anybody in this town who could give me, or most anybody they know, a lift. That’s wrong, I could ask, but they make it so you don’t want to, it’s an east-coast thing. This means it is noon and I still have no transportation. Other than my nice new bicycle, I mean. Did I mention I got that for $98? Bicycles are not taxed in Florida. So I’m stuck at home, but getting a lot of logistics accomplished. I sent off the letter for the $6,000 estimated dollars to cover this turn of bad luck, but $3,000 of it is recoverable, so I’m taking the remainder of the morning off. And so should you. Incidentally, it was not our imagination, the rain storm y’day morning was a county record.
The summer rains, says Tampa, will continue for a week, which gives me time to think ahead. This triple hardship (the Honda, the KIA, and my fan) is a wakeup call. This has to be considered in a larger framework. This strained my resources to the limit, all over not having any backup vehicle here. The Civic saved our bacon, but that was 750 miles from here. A vulnerability has been exposed, and that is reinforced by so many of my friends who know I travel alone a lot.
The solution is a second vehicle here. It’s unpleasant to ponder, but what if this had been a type of emergency needing a ride to a store, or clinic, or indeed to help somebody else? I’ve got the logistics for the Hyundai worked out, my fixed cost is a one-time $3000, plus insurance which I have not priced. Think this one through, my repair budget is $100 per month, and that was gobbled up by one tow truck. Auto insurance for me is roughly $100 per month. I’d be better off having that car sit in the yard than money but unable to get around. I have not decided yet.
The picture above is representative of the unit I’m considering. You know, I have lost track now of how many different cars I’ve owned over the years. That’s partly because of the business I had in my mid-twenties that involved work trucks and such. The business that taught me there are no real honest businesses in America. But anyway, my guess is this is vehicle 36 or 37 in my life. I barely remember the ones I kept the longest. There are three sitting in my yard right now, but two are motorcycles. I repeat, this is only the type of vehicle, I won’t test drive the real thing until Monday.
The final item this morning was an interview. I bicycled downtown to mail the all-important budget letter, then cornered the guitarist Keith for information. I’ve mentioned this guy plenty, since he’s a long-term guitar soloist and music contact. We would have a hard time forming a team over that. He’s soloed so long he rarely plays the tunes consistently enough for others to follow, and he travels too far for my liking. My max is twenty or thirty miles for the right pay only. But, he has over time trimmed his solo gear down to only what works and only what pays its own way. I needed a list of what he considered essential.
By luck, the place was crammed with noisy, shouting women, mostly the local housewives and it was payday at the mines. Let me stray off topic here a moment, the owner over that the local craft brewery passed away while I was gone. They held what’s called a “Celebration of Life”, an alternative to funeral services. I like the idea, it focuses on the life of the deceased, a role that, since I’ve moved around so much, this blog will have to serve for mine. Back to the club, this meant is was so noisy nobody noticed we were outside talking music business for over a half-hour.
He’s another pal who tells me to solo. I have his equipment list, and the primary device that intrigues me is the guitar-vocal enhancer. He says I can join in on guitar at a few gigs, but he waited to long that I now have my own band for that. The brand name a looked at is Vocal-Live to discover these devices are a newer generation of voice enhancers that can detect the key by playing the guitar through the same box. Some have built in microphones to correct anything that gets past the detection circuitry.
The ads, all youTube, tend to feature blonde female guitar soloists who spend half the footage apologizing for something. Like we all believe everything they do is for the first time, right? Honestly, while I prefer blonde women, most of these began to annoy me since they were cashing in on it. Ladies, play the guitar or pose, but you are not good at both, girlies. Keith uses the TC-Helicon or something, but I’ve seen a VE-8. Have you heard of a Wazinator? It’s the $250 version of the stomp box. I’d buy one if you could stomp a beat and have it keep playing that until you tell it otherwise.
Anyway, no decision made due to other priorities. This blog does not shy away from quoting prices, the Boss VE-8 sells at Sweetwater for $350. I would not purchase any such gear until I had my acoustic act already to go. But I would like to try one. Same with one of those invisibility shields. Only $70 bucks. Who will commit the first crime? The nanotech invisibility cloak predicted by this blog in 2013 is now being tested by the military, It is a fabric blanket that routes the light around the object to be hidden. Bezos of Amazon has dumped over $10 billion in shares this year so far.
Breaking news. Somebody took a shot at Trump. Trump is okay, the shooter is dead. Question, now did he get that close? And Biden was far too quick to express concern. My stance is the Democrats are to blame for an obvious assassination attempt. They’ve spent years and a billion dollars demonizing Trump and this is the result. Ninety minutes later, videos posted on Gab from downtown New York show the mainstream media has not reported a single word of it. USA Today casually mentioned that Secret Service agents removed Trump from the stage after the crowd was startled by loud noises.
Was it a setup? How did a shooter get onto a rooftop directly in front of the stage? Some Secret Service, they left Trump’s face fully visible until he was right off the stage, nearly a full minute.
The Mississippi River basin.
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My plan is for Monday. I’ll hit the neighbor up for a lift, he’ll say yes, I am sure. I need not only a lift, but a driver, meaning a driver who can wait while I run inside and back. This is going to take half a day. Gaining more info on the process, I see I will be broke until the middle of August. That’s budget broke, I will still eat, drive, and play. I’m truly surprised sleeping on that concrete sidewalk in Ocala did not bother me, other than it was not that restful. Maybe I still have a little resiliency left; I contacted the tow driver to ensure he got home, now I have for you another tale from the trailer court. This photo isn't clear, but there should be a big fan where there is nothing.
As the dust settles, I look more at this entire sequence as one that was minimized by advance planning. I say, there was no wasted time or blind alleys and it did not break the bank. It merely showed while you can’t plan for everything, don’t rely too much on the system. Remember Brannon, the Virgin Airlines guy, who set out around the world by balloon and forgot to take toilet paper. He confesses at one point they had to wait for incoming faxes, which seems a fitting end, so to speak.
Alcohol is not the only thing the government has tried to prohibit—rather it is the finest example that prohibition does not work. Turns out the rule making it a felony to distill alcohol at home is unconstitutional. So fire up the still, grandpa, a little snort now and then never hurt nobody. I’m in agreement, it is not the government’s business what people do at a personal level. There are differing rules for what is prohibited, banned, and restricted, but prohibition is connotatively about blocking your personal behavior, while the others tend to be safeguards of others around you. This is the contentious issue—if it harms nobody except possibly yourself, do they have any right to stop you? Generally, I say no, they do not have any such right, and in fact if they have any sway, it should be to ensure that you personally, and not society, suffer any consequences.
Any other news? Um, okay, sometimes I buy bags of oddball electronics at the Thrifts and this time I wound up with a bag of sensors. If I can’t get them to work, I reverse engineer them. This connects with something Adolf Hitler mentioned about capitalism—it draws people apart by forming businesses out of things people ought to be doing for themselves. He got it right about Radio Shack in the sense that all the user manuals on-line have disappeared. Once posted, things like manuals are not likely to change or need maintenance—so where are they gone? To people who want $15 a copy, that’s where.
ADDENDUM
As you’ve guessed by now, Google has screwed the pooch again on photo uploads. It is part of their on-going quest to keep identity files on everyone. I think I know where that comes from, it is something the government in India has been trying to enforce since roughly 1860, when they learned of the East India company had such control over their employees. I’ve tried the usual hacks, and found one that would work—except I don’t allow Google Chrome on any computers around here. (You can drag & drop photos from Chrome into the blog’s compose view.) Ask me how I know Google only employs magnificent idiots. But then, if one was predisposed to being an idiot, that’s a good choice.
