I got a few chores to do, then I’m going to sit down and do an experiment: I’m going to convert a guitar I just got got from a steel string guitar to a nylon string guitar.

It’s an a 3/4 size, all mahogany acoustic, and it sounds good, with good definition in the mid range, and nicely balanced highs and lows, it’s just a bit harsh for my ears. I already have a beautiful 3/4 size that I like, so I think this conversion could mellow out the tone of this new guitar, and give me a sound I don’t already have.

I’m also going to change the nut, saddle, and pins from cheap plastic to bone. That should help, too.

And then he went in front of the cameras and fished about how much he loved the amazing beautiful children.

Obvious trolling by the Chinese, and he went right along with it. What a putz.

Waterworld was a flop that got a reappraisal, and is now considered a pretty cool movie. It was really a victim of a critical wall that was against it from the start. That happens with some movies.

Babylon is another. That’s going to get a reappraisal at some point, and become a cult classic.

Showgirls is going through a reappraisal, and people are starting to see it differently. It was a Paul Verhoeven movie, of course it was great.

They remade Dune, and somehow managed to make it worse.

A buddy and me were the first in our circle to get an apartment after college, so we became the meeting place. It wasn’t a party house, we drank beer, and smoked weed, but it was calm and quiet, and the old folks below us never complained. They were frequent visitors, as a matter of fact.

People would start showing up around 8. My buddy and I managed different record stores, and we were into all sorts of music, and we had ALL the latest promo recordings, so usually we had a ball game on the TV with no sound (for our buddy Mark, who loved sports), while we listened to music, smoked, and talked. There were usually a dozen people, guys and girls, all ages, right up to old folks downstairs, sometimes. He’d had a stroke, and he could understand everything, but couldn’t converse, beyond random curse words, which he would deliver with either exasperation or disbelief, which we all thought was hilarious, and so did he and his wife.

At 11:30, we’d watch Johnny Carson’s monologue on the TV, and at midnight wed switch it over to two episodes of Twilight Zone. After that, everybody went home.

That was our ritual about 3-4 nights a week for a couple of years, until everybody started to scatter as they found jobs in different places. We’d go out now and then, but only because we weren’t going to meet any new girls hanging around our apartment. Going out often meant moving the party to someone else’s place for the night.

We couldn’t afford to go out to party much, but we always had a better time at home with our friends, especially since there were no threats of judgemental parents, RAs, etc. Our first real taste of true adult freedom was sweet enough to keep us happy.

Imagine if we were a country that made a genuine effort to be friends with the nations around us?

WHAT? ISRAEL HAS BEEN RAPING PALESTINIAN PRISONERS?

If you can get a decent sauce for $1.74, you should definitely buy it. I don’t shop at Walmart, but around me, sauces tend to be $3+, even house brands, and I find that they still need to be supplemented with more herbs like garlic.

Now and then, Publix will have one of the imported tomatoes brands for 10 cans for $10. You can make a lot of sauce for $10, and a bunch of seasonings, most of which are very easy to grow.

Learning to cook for yourself is helpful, and that means not just avoiding eating out, but avoiding the purchase of prepared foods.

For instance: Instead of buying a jar of Spaghetti sauce, get a large can of crushed tomatoes, add garlic and Italian herbs, and let it simmer for several hours. It’s super easy, and tastes far better, and is much cheaper. Cook up several cans in a giant pot, and freeze the sauce in single or double containers.

Chili is another cheap, nutritious meal that freezes easily. Just ground meat, beans, a can of diced tomatoes, and herbs. Just don’t forget the Cumin, that’s the taste of Chili.

When pork shoulders are on sale, cook one up in a slow cooker, and freeze that. Cheap pulled pork available whenever you want it. Do the same with chicken breast and/or thighs, when they’re on sale.

Do one of those, and a couple more, every Sunday, and you’ll have a lot of cheap meals for the next month or two.

Looking for the silver lining, if you’ve needed to lose some weight, now is a good time. I’m looking at it this way: I’m not short on food, I’m keeping temptation out of the house.

I’m just saying it’s a huge genie, already out of the bottle. Good luck getting control of it now.

I’ve been a solar advocate for decades. You got the sun giving off free energy all the time, and all those roofs and parking lots that could be covered with panels to capture that free energy, what’s the problem?

Oh, yeah, the Free part. American Capitalism doesn’t like the sound of FREE.

It doesn’t matter. I’m NEVER buying a car from that psychopath, at least not until he’s been imprisoned, and his companies nationalized (we paid for them, after all, they’re ours), and most of the profits gone to the workers who built it, and the remainder to a government account to fund social safety nets.

Yeah, we can do hard stuff, too, and maybe we should start doing the hard stuff here.

We spent decades having to deal with other countries and our oil policies, and it’s been a nightmare of wars, embargoes, etc. Now that we can go down a completely different energy path, why shouldn’t we keep it inhouse? We need to work with other nations, but we don’t have to voluntarily line up to be totally economically enslaved to another country for the NEXT wave of energy.

I just saw a video on the first music synthesizer. It was built in 1897, and took up the entire basement of a city-black sized building. It was huge and useless, but it worked. Over the next 75 years, technology improved, until it could fit into a suitcase, and be carried around.

The concept and the tech existed in its basic form, but it wasn’t really ready for deployment yet.

I see data centers that way. Technically, they can build it, but it still has too many problems to be truly viable yet. There are too many problems with cost, the environment, the corruption, and that’s before considering the impact on society.

In 50 years, maybe we’ll have the technology and the public policy to do this right, but right now it seems like we are forcing an inferior system to accommodate something that is too advanced for it. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves.

It’s like body builder who gets on a bike for the first time, and can’t believe how fast his giant muscles can make that bike move, without realizing how out of control it will be at the same time, or how big the crash will be when it finally arrives.

Yeah, it’s creepy and weird, but we already have cameras watching and recording your every move. I don’t see how this really changes anything.

We probably can’t stop it from happening, but we can make it very socially unacceptable, and we can make some behaviors illegal.

Fun to drive? I’ve never experienced that. You drive a car. They’re all pretty much the same. I never take it above about 75. I wouldn’t call that fun. What’s fun about it?

I’ve said Fuck You, and that’s pretty close.

OR, we could build those solar panels right here in America, and not only relieve the pressure on oil reserves, but kick off a new big American industry, backed by a national energy initiative, backed by tax incentives. There would be lots of new small businesses around the country selling and installing solar, creating thousands of new jobs.

Now he’s going to want to invade Australia.