One year ago today: August 23, 2023, India's clone probe.
Five years ago today: August 23, 2019, where's the Esso station?
Nine years ago today: August 23, 2015, a show of hands.
Random years ago today: August 23, 2008, a songwriter’s contest.
You’re up early. What’s this, the Democrats lied to draw an audience by naming guest speakers who never showed up? Let’s make French toast again and take the day one vacuum tube at a time. Best one-liner of the morn, “I looked at the DNC guest list and mistook it for the Epstein Island flight log.” And my new $325 reconditioned fridge cost $430 when all said and done. Another trend emerges, merchants tacking credit card fees on to the price tag. Good, let users of those things know they contribute to higher prices in many ways. Yes, everybody I know except me uses credit cards.
I’d considered a movie but the only feature within driving distance, unless I want to drive over to Winter Haven, is “The Forge”. No thank you. Where is that “Alien” sequel? I don’t want plot. I don’t want character development. I want special effects. The trailer shows great dialogue like the guy yells, “There’s something in the water!” And the women shout back, “What do you mean there’s something in the water?” This movie is already showing promise.
No job ever goes perfect, so let’s jump in. Where one shelf has to go, it sliced through where I need an outlet. Do I make the outlet too high or too low? No, the shelf is temporary, so I ran in the outlet half above and half below, photo attached. Don’t you love blogs where the photos support the text and not the other way around? Works great, so while I have the tools out, I ran in another ten outlets in the south work area. Plus another switched outlet, and that was the slowdown today. The switch has to tap off a hot wire and I forget how that is done. But the hot apart is wired, that is the photo above. A total of 18 connections just in the one box, which is why I used a triple box. Lots of wiring needs lots of room.
US Navy ships no longer have missile loading cranes. This seemed odd, since the latest variants of the Tomahawk, the terrain-following granddaddy of it’s class, now weighs half a ton. The missing cranes could mean a number of things but to me it confirms the Navy no longer has people skilled enough to load the launch tubes at sea. I was aware some of the ships in the Gulf had to return to port to re-arm, but thought those were special cases. Nope, folks, the most modern navy in history has to sail home to reload the weapons.
Making a point of learning something about every process, I located a video of a Fender amp, all the rage in my day. You were nobody unless your stage amp was a Fender. Until you make it big, then your gear was “a stack of Marshalls”. Yes, that’s how little I had to go on when I was fourteen. This video is important because the narrator patiently explains each step, and more importantly, the voltages. If you don’t care for electronics, I still recommend that if you are going to watch one amplifier video in your life only for curiosity, this should be the one. I’ll explain, and I am fully aware of how boring material can blur the mind when I say watch this one.
The narrator is an excellent teacher who presents the material at a consistent “intensity”, a rare quality. He has mastered the correct speed at which reasonably intelligent people learn things. Going faster can be done but doing so would not allow time for each step to be understood. He also grasps that sometimes an inaccurate analogy can aid the process (he describes it as popcorn). Analogies are double-edged. They have a cut-off below which dummies can’t follow either academically or socially. You know what I’m talking about.
Hold your horses, I’ll give an example. That 12AX7 I now know is the pre-amp part of the circuit. It is a diode, having two 6-volt components, that’s where the 12 comes from. Inside the tube are 7 working elements, meaning it likely has 9 socket pins of which just 7 are used. The first diode strengthens the very weak signal from your guitar pickup, and is the portion of the circuit where the volume knob is connected. And we now reach a known stop point, where I may never pursue this further or build one because now I know (and I’ve proven I can if need be) that I could build one of these if I really, really had to. So there.
West Concord, Minnesota.
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Here’s a couple of over-friendly mice, caught in the Hav-a-hart. Florida is like Detroit, the number of pests is constant. This indicates the rats are finally gone and the mice have arrived. These two got nabbed over night and they are born in litters, so here we go again. They are about to enjoy a whole new set of life’s adventures. Just this time not in a place of their own choosing. We have to run in to Winter Haven via Bartow tomorrow, so they get a free ride as well.
This is not a fully operational shed. The switch here also controls a new overhead light. Part of the logic here is the light switch also cuts other items that might accidentally be left plugged in, such as transformers or compressors. What I mean by operational is the entire shed works off one breaker. While four or five people could conceivably work in there, no more than one or two power tools should be used at once. There are now thirteen lights on that circuit. Relax, it is designed so I can easily upgrade to a second breaker.
Cancel the movie for today, as the only time slot I could manage means driving home in the dark. I think I’ll bake some muffins and cake, stay home. There is a changed situation that I don’t recall ever explaining in any detail, which I’ll go over now. Some parts you may already know. The old club has gone through many changes, but the latest one has altered the character [of the place], rarely wise in a rural areas. This is the old downtown club that JZ and I first went to, when Agt. R was the bartender. Agt. R. has disappeared, by the way, but he’s around because he’s yard is always full of cars.
The present barmaid is from Vegas with her husband, who runs the Karaoke show, COVID killed the old club and it was struggling—but it was on the road to recovery. That’s important. Stay with me here because I’m about to describe some incompatibilities that somebody is certain to take the wrong way. We begin with some background. Cathy and hubby moved here from Vegas middle of last year. Being a professional bartender, she gets hired immediately. Overkill, but she got there in a slump and what happens next is predictable, but misleading. It was not a “dead” club, but a victim of COVID slowdown. Follow closely, it gets complicated.
I immediately pegged Cathy for a bar manager that should be running her own place. But the only place around for sale at that time was Kooter’s, and it has only beer and wine. It would take more time and money to change that, for example, there are still laws on the city books that state the condition there must be a church entrance within 200 yards of the bar front door. That’s one of countless reasons I never considered the place, but I did think about it.
Back to Cathy. She knew the club was doing poorly, but she did not know it was well on the road to normal again. The club had established clientele. You could drive past every day of the week and see the same vehicles parked. There was always a crowd of ten or twelve every night. COVID whittled that in half but the watering-hole atmosphere was still there. There was a live band every weekend up to 2020 and weekdays you could walk in and find a jigsaw puzzle group, or chess another night, etc. And on paydays it could get swamped. On other weeknights, there was always a small crowd till closing time.
Are you with me here? The draw was the aura, the place was underpinned by steady local customers. It was an alternative to sports bars and craft breweries. Cathy was not around to see this, she only saw a half-empty bar on weeknights. That’s where the jam session came in, but you will soon see it folded for some unexpected reasons. My duo was matched to the traditional settings and that doesn’t fit what she’s got going. Cathy, by now managing the place single-handedly, has done what she believes is right, which is out with the old, in with the new.
She brings in pro acts from Tampa and Orlando, plus has other relatives who followed her here from Vegas. So now, you get more recorded music and lately stand-up comedy and guitar shows with negative audience appeal. Things are going wrong, subtle for now, but increasingly wrong. The acts are her uptown friends, apparently some who play for free. They bring a crowd, but it is a crowd of strangers who leave when the act is over, never to return. The short-term view says that Cathy has injected new life into a dying establishment—but I said short term, these types of changes have no staying power. To make such changes, she should buy a bar of her own.
The town does not have the population base to operate a city bar. The telltale signs of decline are already there. Now DJ music is standard twice a month, radio and rap music that chases the regulars away. And they are now all gone. That is, where there used to always be a small crowd, the bar has long empty spells of nobody there. It has taken to closing early several nights a week, something that never happened before. Other local staff have left, since Cathy gets all the good shifts. For the others, no regulars means no tips, so why work a Tuesday?
Where is this heading? I’ll tell you right away that the younger crowd these days (around here meaning 30s and 40s) are finicky. As soon as a newer place opens or Cathy buys a place of her own, the club is in heap big trouble. The regulars have all found alternatives. Busy as the weekends are, they cannot prop up the rest of the week. The usual live entertainers have also moved on, I think there are just two guitar players left. There used to be five-piece groups, but no more. The weekend shows create income spikes, but overall revenues must be in decline.
The balance is upset and there is likely no turning back. It’s no longer a place you can drop in after work and meet a couple old chums. If I go there are all, it is to write a letter or something. I don’ t know any of those people but I do know how to tune out the crappy rap music on the juke box. Most people can’t. The club used to have a solid following of seniors, I’ve told you about dancing up a storm. All gone. So is the background chatter. When the man-bun music stops, an eerie silence settles over the room. All this is coming home to roost.
The solution is to demote her back to being a barmaid, the capacity in which she was hired. Even then, it will be a long process enticing the regulars back. I see them now at the Legions, which are bottom-rung for entertainment, but it’s live and they have, of a sort, the home-town atmosphere that is a non-negotiable aspect of small town drinking establishments.
ADDENDUM
Man, it is impossible to ignore politics. Maybe that is because it is really organized crime masquerading as a political party. In a near death blow to the Democrat party, the sole independent, a former Democrat, has thrown in the towel and is now endorsing Trump. In a scathing condemnation of the Democrats, he spelled out how that party had changed from champions to squabbling thieves. This means unless there is open and possibly violent cheating, there is zero chance of the Democrats winning and they may lose their home districts.
The farce surrounding Harris is so blatant; as is the convention where Kennedy points out Trump was mentioned 142 times in two days. Trump single handedly brought down a corrupt regime and America wants him to go after those who criminally attacked him and his family. It would seem any hope the left has now rests on whether the military and civil service will obey orders that breach the Constitution. I don’t think they will, that huge swaths of both groups secretly have supported Trump for years but are afraid to act on it.
Mr. Trump, cancel NPR. They are presenting Harris as a black woman (unbelievably, the Democrats still think the race-gender thing still holds the sway it did in 2012, when they could shame anyone who objected.) Public opinion of her is, they say, “still forming”, emphasizing she was not talking to the “thousands” in the audience but to the untold “millions” they assume are watching from home. She “flipped the script” on Trump, meaning she presented his ideas as her own, yet claiming her vision is in “stark contrast” to his.
NPR ended the broadcast saying Democrats walked away thrilled by her speech and adding that the race is very close. It isn’t close, independent polls (like Musk on X) are showing what this here blog predicted a year ago. Democrats are only 1/6th of the population who use the media to pretend they are ½ and this time it is not working.
