One year ago today: October 10, 2024, Yeti—better than nothing.
Five years ago today: October 10, 2020, Fetch – now a walking game.
Nine years ago today: October 10, 2016, it’s not Drive-Park-Neutral.
Random years ago today: October 10, 2019, find a calling, you say.
My day off. Shall we start early? Okay, but that means coffee, not a trip to the coast. Keep that on the slate, I feel a bit like driving this weekend. But as stated, there is nothing to do or see in Florida that, if you are over 30, won’t cost you. Your budget is $71 plus anything left from last month. Call it $100. That’s gas and lunch money, so tax your atlas for somewhere worth seeing. Aha, I just heard the neighbor start a motor, so I’m grabbing my bass. Check back in an hour.
Bidenflation. Here is a case (12) of soda that two years ago cost $3.51. This is one of the examples that assures Democrat failure in the mid-terms. Their propaganda arm is still insisting that inflation under Biden was 3% Before the Internet, their media was most people’s source, now few believe anything from there. The Democrats must think nobody notices the price go from under 30ȼ per can to over 70ȼ, which is 130%, most of it in the last month. The blog that dares feature a box of soda is actually waiting for a real all-time high on silver.
Since I cannot tell the difference, I switched to less advertised brands, which themselves have climbed from $2.79 to $4.99. This brings investment back into the picture and I’ve spend thousands of hours looking for something that is not buying yourself a job, or locking you into somebody else’s work schedule. Tube sales were okay, but that has dried up to nothing. There are millions of Americans looking for the same thing. There are now a thousand ads a day on-line with one thing in common. They will not tell you anything until they get your ID, which turns a lot of people (such as myself) right off. They want it on file that you even asked.
Next, I’d like to address a punctuation issue. This blog changes a few Chicago rules for presentation. Most publishing rules about quotation marks are designed to the reader can distinguish who is speaking, not for what looks right when dialogue is minimal—as it is in this blog. There is no lack of style here, I write plenty of dialogue elsewhere. I changed some features to better convey messages that are displayed on-screen.
For clarity, much of the sentence structure in printed material is designed for dialogue. When applied on a display, the same rules applied to monologue look funny. I ran into this ay back in 2006, opted for what looked better on a monitor, with less regard to who is speaking. This is 100% intentional. There are no consistent punctuation mistakes in this blog.
Apparently the Jack Daniels brewery used to donate leftovers to cattle farmers, but are ending the program. It consists of the spend malt grain mixture, called “slop”. Farmers came am hauled it away by the truckload. Land that could not be farmed could feed 250 head of cattle for less than $10 a day. And that’s after fortifying the mix with salt, vitamins, and minerals. Just mix it with hay and the cows love it.
Why the shutdown? Because biofuel people are offering top dollar for the waste, which after refinement, the byproduct can be sold as fertilizer. Sad news is, I know the area around the booze factory and those farmers are not going to be able to raise cattle. They can’t buy much hay and there’s not enough flat land to grow it on. As for the farmers, some smart aleck told them to contact Bud Light, since they had a lot of barley they were not using.
Ending this morning with another coffee and a read through these entry level Pascal programming jobs. I passed those courses back in the mid-80s, but the $75 per hour starting salary for entry level beginner’s, I could not ignore. I confirmed that dollar figure with ZipRecruiter and Finxter, but it is too good to be true. Pascal is really a bastardized version of BASIC. I might have kept up with it but long ago the compilers were not available to private programmers. I looked at the ads closely, part of the explanation is likely that they need somebody who knows database “internals”.
I don’t know what that is, but I know Pascal was not designed for databases. No problem, show me once. I flagged the ad to keep an eye on it. What a difference it would make if I could contract out a job like that for just a couple of years. Sub-contract, I mean, you know what I mean.
Devon Island Mars training station.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
What an interesting article I just read about riot-proofing your house. Meant more for suburban areas where thing could spill over, it was very cautious about what you could get sued for. This is America, where self-defense could land you a life sentence. I have not read the entire piece but it makes sense to remove anything from your yard that could be used as a battering ram or ladder. Predrill holes in your plywood window covers and store the wood under your mattress. It contains testimonials from victims who described there were not police, no firetrucks, no ambulances. And unlike Republicans, the Democrats have learned to follow police and politicians home.
There are more around back of the building, and in ten years I have never seen any of them being used. These are new installs, appearing around a week ago. They remind me of tombstones. I talked to the guy at the cellular store but I’m beginning to suspect he knows less about cell phones that I do.
Stop here until I get back from downtown paying bills. Okay, that’s done and it’s recession time. People can only live on credit cards so long. I’m slowly getting on my feet, but I doubt many are that lucky. Music certainly has not paid me anything, really, since I got to Florida. (But it has taken care of most of my entertainment expenses.)
Another look at businesses on-line show a pattern I do not like. They are really outfits looking for distributors and sales staff beholden to a remote headquarters, or in the alternative operators who are likely to fail after paying a huge startup fee. And that failure is due to lack of infrastructure. Most people don’t have it and the ones that do guard it carefully, for establishing it is far more expensive than inheriting it.
News. The Met company, British for meteorology has been caught fudging climate data. They are reportedly deleting huge volumes of files from remote monitoring stations. Trump is getting rid of thousands of government employees. No data yet on the target number, but it should be around 750,000 who will just have to go get real jobs. Oh, and deciding you are okay with digital ID will be the last decision you will ever make.
In other news, some two years ago I spilled some artificial vanilla extract on a wooden trivet. I picked it up today to place under my avocado seed and the aroma was still there. I shall experiment with this. Trivia, I did not know Western Union did not end its telegraph service until 2006. I finished watching “The Scorpion King”, did you know I met Kelly Wu in a Waikiki Music store back in ’84. If I’d know she would be Miss Teen USA within the year, I might have pressed home the charge. It says here she is now 57, single, no kids, and worth $10 million. Guys, I was THIS close.
[Author's note: in 1984, I was slim, trim, and had long blonde hair down to here. I did not look or act a day over 18 and had the gift of gab, along with my blue, blue eyes. But at the same music store was a babe who was entertaining at the Pearl Harbor base, and I went with that.]
ADDENDUM
Malta has always been a mystery to me, no more so than in World War II. Both Italy and Germany knew it was the base for attacking Rommel’s supply convoys, yet they never occupied it. I say occupied because I find the arguments against invading it very flimsy. True, it would be an amphibious operation, which the Axis did not plan for, but other than the harbor, most of the island was undefended beach. A large force of soldiers could easily have been landed and supplied. Any of the hotel beaches would be ideal and from there it was walking distance to Valletta.
It is like 18 miles end-to-end the long way and in 1940 had no defenses outside of the main harbor. There were no military aircraft and no armor. The story you year of the Gladiators is later, when the Italians began bombing. A military clerk found the four airplanes listed in storage in packing crates. Turned out they even had assembly instructions. Old biplanes, they were more than a match for the overblown Italian air forces. They bought enough time for the Brits to torpedo half the Italian fleet at Taranto.
Since it was the Italians involving the Mediterranean in the war, the Germans didn’t show up until 1941. By that time, England had sent modern fighter aircraft to the island and Germany was pre-occupied with Barbarossa. I know the logistics are incredible and any landings could have been bombarded by sea, but a half-dozen U-boats not much needed in Russia and would have had a heyday in the confined waters south of Sicily. Nor do I believe the hype that the Maltese were brave supporters of the English. More like they just hated the Italians.
Trying for some documentaries on the island, I found myself watching “No Way Back The Mountain Road”, heralded as the greatest war movie of the 60s. But employing the worst of the 1950s actors and acting. I mean, James Steward and Harry Morgan (Col. Potter) in one movie, give me a break. It was so bad I had to watch.
