September 21, 2025

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 21, 2024, lacking depth . . .
Five years ago today: September 21, 2020, possibly on to Mars.
Nine years ago today: September 21, 2016, 2:24 with a craving.
Random years ago today: September 21, 2006, this early blog format.

           Duty bound by blog rules, I’ll report what I did this morning, then go shopping for coffee. I’m low, plus I like to rotate my brands. True coffee aficionados know this is crucial to true enjoyment. Thing is, I’m out of cash and the nearest bank I can use is 22 miles away. On purpose. I detected, correctly, that despite the cool morning, and an accurate forecast of only 84°F, it was going to be a burner. I rapidly raked, bagged, and boxed the back yard. Smart move. I also discovered this morning I was out of grits, so I had to settle for pancakes. Nice, but they don’t provide energy, not stamina.

           I got inside and began clearing the space to work on the kitchen floor. The outside walls radiate heat, so I only got that much done before the furnace clicked on. The lure of the big work shed got me. It's cool, under the triple influence of shade trees, a roof that allows wind but not rain, and my three best work fans. The new planer is in there and it’s a challenge to beat the temptation to run every board through there. Check back in six hours when the sun is over in the west.
           Instead, I finished tree of the utility boxes, the half-size with a draw that can be pushed back into someplace just about anywhere. Remember, I’ve had nine years of setting up shop around here and my focus is not cable TV. You’re beginning to find these boxes everywhere around here. Why look, there’s three of them now. Dangerously perched between my desk and the coffee maker.

           The rest of the morning is time off, I wrote a letter to JZ presenting the case that he should buy a mobile home on the Gulf next spring and get out of Miami. If there were any good women in Miami, he would have stumbled across one by now. There are a dozen cities I could name that have that character, that once you are over 40 or 45, nothing is there for you. Nothing. You are past the prime marrying age and any woman showing an interest in you is a leftover gold-digger. But I am comparing apples and oranges, JZ would benefit meeting any women at all. I have seen him go to a club full of pretty women all night and never hit on any of them.
           I’m opposite there, if any woman shows remote potential, I’m talking to her instantly—but JZ is too shy to move in even when I bring several to his table and pretend I have to leave for a while. Like so many men, he is not even sure how to cut one from the herd. In his defense, I know this is a skill that cannot be learned by example nor observation, it is a long process of removing what does not work. See the dilemma? If you don’t keep trying and failing, you never get there—and most men don’t like failing, so they don’t try. There you go.

           China has returned rock samples from the far side of the Moon. Seems more like showing off than science. But they have detected landslides, or at least collapsing crater walls caused by moonquakes. Israel is again issuing reports their laser (Iron Beam) can shoot down 20 drones a minute, but I don’t quite believe that. But I do believe in Australia, where it is tomorrow morning, silver is trading at over $43.50 per ounce. And some trivia, “Give it the whole nine yards” has nothing to with sports. The ammunition belts in the P-47 fighter plane were nine yards long.

Picture of the day.
French “spy movie” café.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.

           More news from Tennessee, both kinds. Bad news is the budget. We are being hit with drama that is only supposed to happen to other people. Expensive drama. I can tell you to the dollar why most people never make it in music. The saving grace here is that we are not using any form of credit to get by, and credit causes you to make bad decisions. It’s not like the lenders don’t know that. I have fewer teeth than I should because I won’t use credit, butI regret nothing. Good news is we have a date for the album release. None of these things are certain, but the target is mid-March, 2026. If it flies, I’m promised a fancy laser cutter.

           [Author’s note: things are not as bad as this picture would imply. First of all, I have zero payments of any kind until my property tax is due in two months, I am completely stocked up with coffee and grits, the utilities are paid up until December, and I have experience living without money—another grace possible because I use no credit. I have well over six months of buffer room. This only shows the joint account and it is misleading. It is blogged not because it is a problem, but because it is an historic low. In ten days, it will be back.]

           This meant the extra 44 mile round trip and time to get to chapter 13 of “Holy Ghost”. By now I’m identifying with Skinner, the kid who kind of suspects he’s smarter than everyone around him, but knows that adults control all the ways and means that prevent him from getting ahead with it. (What’s more, if this was not a constant factor in your childhood, then you don’t know.) For example, Skinner figured out why the shooting took place at 4:15PM and nobody heard the shots.            Now Skinner, well, he’s bopped every gal in Wheatfield, and one of them is the fiancé (pregnant) of a truck driver who provides a sub-plot. You see, he stole a tractor trailer full of Legos. Turns out they are special editions worth close to a million bucks and he has his brother over the state line selling them on eBay half-price. But Skinner, seeing the fiancé has just bought $4,000 worth of new clothes, figures out where the trailer is hidden, and since they won’t give him a cut, applies for the $10,000 reward from the insurance company. Can you see why I like this guy already?
           Something is going on west of town, the highway toward Bradenton is sealed off and there are warning signs not to try using back roads to get around the roadblock. The news today is Florida has finally executed the triple-killer after 35 years in prison. This grip the lawyers have on the justice system has to be purged, like Shakespeare said. The guy was caught red-handed and confessed, but the lawyers drag it out until the last dollar is milked out of the system. They say the true cost of keeping a prisoner in prison is $80,000 per year.

           Another is hour required to balance the books, mostly small debits, but that is my doing. The Reb can access my account directly and one condition is that she is not allowed to let her gas gauge drop below 1/4 tank. That is carried on the books here as an emergency, so when I see the statement showing the service station nearest her place, that is approved. But she often forgets to e-mail me, but I’m a trained accountant. I know exactly how much gas she would have to buy at that place to add 12 gallons, so I know she’s buying 3/4 of a tank and keeping to the rules. She also gets an allowance to top off pet food prices to get the best available.
           On the topic of accounts, Amazon is required to publish its books and something funny is going on. Nothing illegal, but there are ratios that tell me they are on the decline and are restoring to various categorizations intended to mislead the average investor. Think of the figures shown as “Doubtful Accounts” which should not change much but has. Or “Corporate Securities” which is an asset, but also a piggy bank that could be raided and gone before the shareholders knew a thing. Depending on how you categorize (right?), Amazon has $101,202,000,000 just sitting there. Quite the plum.
           That company is also basing and investing a lot on A.I. supporting their next moves. It’s complicated, but still a gamble, moving so rapidly from CPU logic to A.I. logic. I’m reminded of a short story by Asimov on the danger of this move. Hang on, I have a treat for you, I just now found a narration of the story—and it’s read by Leonard Nimoy. A half-hour tale, called The Last Question. Turns out I got it wrong, but still an interesting link.

           Still no word back from Steve on the next rehearsal. I grabbed the bass and played the old song list hits from Jack, the 1960s guy. That means tunes like “I Fought The Law” and I can now fake the lead break, which is really a string of chord inversions. By how it is past bedtime, but lets grab a hot chocolate and see if there is any news besides the NATO hysteria, the Kirk sympathy, and the hit pieces on Trump.
           Here we go, three States (NY, CA, MN) refuse to cooperate with ICE and, I hope, get Federal funding cut. At the operational level, these places are financial basket cases. TMOR, the law is simple, the States are supposed to inform ICE before they release criminal illegal aliens from jail or prison. Instead, these States are releasing dangerous felons into the general population.

ADDENDUM
           Ah, you want to know why nobody heard the shots. Ha-ha, made you read this far. Skinner knew that Mass was at 4:30PM, so the church started ringing the bells fifteen minutes in advance. If the shooter had a suppressor or used subsonic ammo, he’d only need to be sure of a safe getaway. The cops are looking for his vantage point, but still think he needed a ladder or rope. I say he just walked out the front door somewhere.
Another thing I like of this plot is that it does not use the old formula where the cops are geniuses being held back by uncooperative witnesses who only need a little cajoling to, you know, see things their way. But this is incidental, not really part of the story. By now, three carloads of big-city detectives have shown up, all with the same mentality—that anybody can be squeezed into telling secrets.
Last Laugh