One year ago today: December 23, 2023, cannot be trusted.
Five years ago today: December 23, 2019, a three-mile hike.
Nine years ago today: December 23, 2015, by age 24.
Random years ago today: December 23, 2016, remember the Rebel?
Years ago (in 1978) my pal, Moogie, left me a small square he got from his father. It was stolen in Miami in 2002 and I never replaced it. Now, my box-building is finally better enough that I need to replace it. I did not know what it was called, but his father was a metal worker. Turns out the thing is generically known as a precision square. I’m entering a phase of boxes now where I’m paying closer attention to the initial cuts so this morning, we examine squares. This picture is the model Moogie provided, which he used to scrape things. It is also called a machinist’s square.
It’s dawn now and 54°F again, the sign of a good day—as long as the sun keeps shining. I used the cooler early morning to rustle up grub for the day, here’s the spuds and carrots. Always buy big carrots around here or I’ll make you peel them yourself. Meanwhile, there’s lots, help yourself. The secret ingredient in the carrots, by the way, is sugar. The water they are boiling in is slightly sugared. Broke as I am, I was able to live most of this month on supplies in the pantry, even though I no longer have a pantry. (Vermin & humidity factors.) Ah, but what is that lovely aroma. It’s the cheapest spice available, called “Italian”, which I often use for air freshener. But I do use it for boiling carrots.
You know who else likes breakfast? The backyard birds. The deer camera was outside the past 15 hours, so will we find anything? While I don’t always turn around from my desk to see the birds, as they can detect the motion, I estimate around 120 visits to the feeder at morning feed time. Many are the small birds that grab one seed and then flit back into the leaves for cover.
An item that is annoying me is the way my bank handles CDs. As mentioned, it is a ridiculously complicated affair, the result of having low-grade computer coders who never passed their FGMT 300 level courses. I ran into the same hurdle in 1994, but studied until I passed. The problem in a nutshell is that 2% + 2% is not 4%. They keep insisting it is, then I get a surprise adjusting entry that doesn’t match my books, causing an internal audit, which takes time and effort.
That is followed hard by their policy of “introductory offers”, a situation that sooner or later had to come to a head. I’ll remind you of how it works. The bank offers a CD at 4.75% APR, but if you are not present on or near the maturity date, it rolls over at maybe half that interest. The bank explains the big interest was introductory and there is no provision to both cash the CD and create a new one to qualify for the new introductory offer. Any one who knows me will spot it is only a matter of time until I calculate the breakeven point of cashing the CD and waiting until the next time I’m in Tennessee to buy a new one. I’ve done this a couple times to proof my calculations, and it was a hassle getting into the bank and so on. But not no more. The “dead period” between CDs that would cost me is well-known over here. But how to convince the bank? From my point of view, once a CD is cashed, buying another is “introductory”, that is, their system applies only to rollovers.
Factory silk production.
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Let’s look at my Monday afternoon. It got warm enough for me to drive into town, and here are the results. I found $40 in the savings account, the result of those times the ATM truncates you to multiples of twenty. I went further downtowns and got myself a fancy haircut. I put twenty in the tank and bought a MegaMillions (lotto ticket). Be nice to me, I have a standing plan to give away the first $100 million to people who did me right. I triple-checked my balances and we are going to just squeak by this month.
hen a stop at Ybor Cigars. Aha, one of the dudes playing pool recognized both lady singers from their promo shots. He steered me to the afternoon barmaid, who posted a notice on their media to contact me. They are both, she says, from Winter Haven, which would streamline things considerably. I truly miss playing out and part of the is the pressure it takes off other expenses. When I play a steady gig, I always have money for gas and my own entertainment budget can plummet to zero, as I have no other reason to go out.
This picture is just here to balance this page on a desktop monitor. Someday I may format for Android, but where’s the motive? This view shows birdie paradise as seen from the back window. The main birdfeeder, the clock, the thermometer, and the target practice frames with the bull’s-eye photos tactfully removed.
Here is an incident that makes the blog for uniqueness. As I went to mail the vacuum tube, I see this guy standing near the mail slots. I said to him, watch me, that other slot is for mail that has been put in the wrong boxes. It’s apparently a big enough deal that they need that extra drop. I tapped on the other drop and said this is the one you want. He was taken aback just a moment, how, he wondered, did I know what he was thinking. I explained that I was a bit of an expert on how the denizens of small-town America think backwards. It was a dead giveaway, I told him, when by reading the local instructions, you had to dumb down and I noted the hesitation. That, plus, I know a lawyer when I see one. They overdress for this climate.
It being still light, I drove down Hwy 60 to Kooters. It was dead, so I wrote a bit. The media is doing everything to suppress the subway torch story, but the version all over the Internet shows her to be a college student. To most Americans, this seals the fate of these illegals. Trump has to kick every last one out and soon, or we will elect a dictator. Some are saying it is a publicity stunt. Even so, that is not going to change what’s happening. The illegal had been deported once already, then allowed back in by Biden, so the blood is on his hands. Yet, there is something about this whole situation that does not quite add up.
Later, the circulating stories put the victim somewhere between an 18-year-old coed to a 29-year-old feminist. The illegal was housed in a luxury hotel with tax money, this will never be forgiven. Biden and his mob are toast. They announced later in the day that they had made the subways the safest in the world and that the woman had “caught fire”, like it happens all the time. I guess the radical left does not think Americans hate them enough already.
I was on duty and checked in with all four clubs (including Ybor) where there was any chance of a last minute New Year’s gig. It’s a lamentable sign of our times that none have anything planned. There was a spark at the Legion but our contact there has to go through channels. With all this driving around, I’m listing to the audiobook, “Guest Room”, the story of the two mafia goons killed at a bachelor party. By the third disk of eight(?) the plot has bogged down to semi-interesting soap opera. The principle characters are the husband and wife, his brother and her mother. The police have his house sealed off as a crime scene, He’s living in a motel because she won’t let him in, the kid brother who caused the fuss is being a total jerk, and now that it’s all over the radio and TV, he’s losing his job at the law firm. Bad publicity, y’know.
Anything good in the book? Well, there are some long passages of the Russian girls telling how they are kidnapped and held as sex slaves. It’s as I thought, they are not brought to the USA until they are over 18 and already losing their appeal. Yes, this is a contentious issue, this age 18 thing, which I view independently. I’m more amused by the soap opera aspect. The husband did not do anything but host the party, and he was alone with one of the girls long enough but did not do anything. Not so with the kid brother, it was his bachelor party.
That’s where the soap begins. His bride-to-be and the wife cannot “understand why” men could do such things with “women like that”. On they go about they might not have married these men had they known such things went on behind their backs. Never for a moment suspecting the men might feel the same if they know the women were discussing their performances in such detail behind their own backs. That’s where the soap begins. His bride-to-be and the wife cannot “understand why” men could do such things with “women like that”. On they go about they might not have married these men had they known such things went on behind their backs. Never for a moment suspecting the men might feel the same if they know the women were discussing their performances in such detail behind their own backs. It’s a bit of study as well on how the women think. Wives are good, prostitutes are bad, but you’ll never see a society where one exists without the other. I’ve always thought men pay for what they are not getting at home, a much bigger deal than I used to think. Half of the disk is on about the women beginning to feel sorry for the pimps. I’ve always thought men pay for what they are not getting at home, a much bigger deal than I used to think. Half of the disk is on about the women beginning to feel sorry for the pimps.
What if they were just guys with families doing he best they could to make a living? But smarmiest of all is that the prostitutes were never, ever to blame for their situation. “No woman ever willingly becomes a prostitute,” they go on. Fine, but they add it is “the occupation of last resort”. I disagree. It is the second-last resort. Because you never hear of them getting desperate enough to take a dead-end job for half their young lives like the rest of us, nomsayn? So now I’m wondering how they can fill the rest of the disks. I thought it was a murder mystegy. So far, the two strippers have disappeared. Check back, things have got to get better.
ADDENDUM
I was a bit surprised to find you can buy jet engines on-line. I figured okay with model airplane power plants. Then I see $70,000 fully workable units on eBay. Knowing what I know now, it would take some well-funded would-be terrorist around a couple weeks to build a virtually unstoppable suicide drone that could easily take out any target he found politically disagreeable.
And if you really want to waste time, here is Judge Dread and the Credible Threats Boogalo Boi Band.
Have you ever been millennialized by a scanner? I have. If there is any generic scanner on a computer, I use that. The one with Win 11 is just called “SCAN”, how can a millennial screw that up? Easy, when you open the scanner lid and place things on the glass, ever so often the scanner will print the page rather than store it. This is colorful, but not as red angry as I get because of the way it wastes valuable printer ink. You see, I print so little that I buy the small cartridges because the big ones dry out to quickly the way they are made nowadays.
