Just So You Know
25/04/21 07:12
I'll probably get together with Ev today to nail down the chair he's been looking at over at Staples. We'll need to make sure we get a pad that goes on the floor beneath the chair. You know how concerned he is that rolling around in his new chair is going to make too much noise for the tenants living on the floor below him. He's a considerate neighbor to be sure so that's good. That should keep him in good stead with the other families in his building.
We'll also need to renegotiate his terms with his internet carrier some time soon. He negotiated a pretty good deal a while back and that baby has now expired resulting in a higher bill month in and month out. Like most people his age, he watches little to no mainstream television so there may be an opportunity to cut that service off at the knees.
His plan may have included telephone coverage and he doesn't need that for sure so there's another bite of the apple worth considering. And then there are new services coming online in his neighborhood which may give us a talking point or two in our attempts to drive down his monthly fee. It's all good. One thing we'll need to make sure of is that any new service we consider must meet certain MBS requirements. I'm not sure that they meet or exceed his current plan as I see it today but it's probably just a matter or time.
I watched Trump's interview with Sean Hannity last night on FOX. It was Trump's first on-air appearance since the stolen election of 2020. I wasn't sure that I was going to tune in but I just happened to be flipping through the channels as it began so I stayed with it for a while. Hannity is such a dope. I don't know that I can bear to listen to him for any extended period of time without losing a few points on the IQ scale.
Trump was Trump and I thought he looked well and he was, as usual, on his game. It sounds like he's going to go for it in 2024 but he didn't come right out and say that so we'll have to stay tuned. He didn't bite at any of the low hanging fruit served up by Hannity relative to questions about Biden's mental acuity, etc., so that will probably keep him out of the news for the time being. There's no question he could have put a couple of those questions right over the left field fence if he had been so inclined.
Maybe it's just me but I've seen enough of Trump's interviews over the last few years to pretty much know what he's going to say in response to any particular question. I find myself wishing that he'd find a way to reframe his answers so as to not sound repetitive or over rehearsed. It sometimes has a one-trick pony feel to it and I know Trump can do better but he, for whatever reason, does not. The Trump that we all know and love is the Trump that stands at the podium in a presser taking on all comers. That's not the Trump I see in these interviews.
I don't think it's Trump playing it safe either. I don't think he knows the meaning of the word "safe." He's been a balls-to-the-walls guy all his life so he calls em like he sees em. I'm referring to balls and strikes if you're looking for a baseball metaphor. But his responses are predictable and that makes me thinking it's okay to look away because I think I know what he's going to say. Will he sound like a broken record should he run again? Do I care since I will vote for him anyway? What about the other 75 million people who voted for him in 2020?
Let me chime in on this Chauvin trial thing. All I know is what I've seen on the video and that was painful to watch. What bothers me about the whole jury thing, the verdicts aside, is that the mob determined well before the jurists went off in a back room to do what jurists do, that the man was guilty. The BLM and Antifa types had amassed in streets across the city and they were armed and ready to mob, loot, kill or do whatever if they didn't get the verdict that they wanted. That's not justice, that's mob justice. Don't get me started on comments made by Sleepy Joe and that despicable POS, Maxine Waters. We cannot let this stand!
Now, every time I hear about a black person ending up dead at the hands of a police officer all I can think about is how big will the riots be, when will they begin, how long before Al Sharpton and his fellow race baiters show up on the scene, how many stores will be looted and burned to the ground, what kind of reparations will be paid to the family no matter who was at fault, and what career ending charges will be filed against the officer for performing his duties while in the line of fire.
It does make you wonder, who the hell is going to want to become a police officer in this day and age? I'm still waiting for republicans, any republicans, to stand up to the lawlessness in the streets and say, "no mas." Maybe that's asking too much. The democrats will be either silent or they will be egging on the marauders and brown shirt types from the sidelines. Democrats like Maxine Waters, the congresswoman from I'm not sure where, actually travelled to Minnesota to foment dissent while the Chauvin trial was in its final days.
I suppose the retail establishments in Minnesota that boarded up their businesses in advance of the trial thinking that they might well lose their business if the verdicts went the wrong way, are today breathing a sigh of relief. You have to wonder just a little bit that it took the jury really just a day before returning a verdict that was perhaps really just preordained. That's unusual given the counts that were outstanding. A little more deliberation might have returned a different result. Were the prosecutor's closing comments that compelling? Were the closing arguments by the defense team that unconvincing?
It's important to realize too that the jurists were not sequestered so who knows how they might have been influenced one way or another. Appeals are likely already in the works and they are quite likely to succeed with the shenanigans we've seen over the course for the trial. Take the jury out of the mix and we might have seen a very different outcome.
What happens to a guy like Chauvin in prison? Does the White Brotherhood take him under their wing? Is there such a thing as the White Brotherhood? How long will it be before someone kneels on his jugular for nine minutes to see if he knows what it feels like to die like George Floyd died?
We ordered take-out last night from a local greek joint which we like a lot. I usually get an eggplant parmesan dish served with penne and a nice salad and I rarely look at other items on menu. I've thought about it here and there and nobody likes to be so narrow minded that they never visit other things. I figured last night was the night to do just that.
I've had my eye on their Moussaka dish and I like every ingredient that goes into it so I wasn't going all wild eyed into the decision or anything. I even looked up the dish in YouTube and watched a chef go through the motions in prepping and cooking the casserole-like dish. Who does that? Right?
Well, the wedge of Moussaka that I pulled out of our take-out bag wasn't much larger than a medium sized brownie and it looked, sadly enough, just a wee bit deflated. That is to say, it didn't resemble anything that I had in mind going into this experiment of mine.
All the right ingredients were there but instead of sitting up like a piece of 7-layer lasagna it laid almost flat in the see-through plastic container it came in. When I pressed down with my fork I had to chase down a piece of unbreaded eggplant that oozed out from one side of the Moussaka like a slippery eel. I did my best to include a hint of the seasoned beef with the forkful of eggplant but, alas, I was less than successful.
So this is what I get for going out on a limb. This is what I get for taking chances. This is what I get for throwing caution to the wind. It only reinforces my belief that it's better to stick with what you know you like than to take a walk on the wild side. Had Thomas Edison stopped short of his inventing the light bulb because he thought experimentation wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, we'd still be lighting our homes today by candlelight.
To live is to reinvent yourself day in and day out and that means ordering things from the menu when you'd rather enjoy the dish that is tried and true. I need to keep pushing the envelope but I'll be steering clear of the Moussaka at least for now.
I don't know what I would have done had I looked at the dish before exiting the restaurant with my take-out bags. I might have said something along the lines of, "is this the Moussaka'? They might have taken from my tone that I was less than impressed. They might have said, "oh, no, that's the side dish that we serve. Let me go back into the kitchen and get you our dinner version."
What I walked away with is what you get when you don't ask questions. Besides, there is a line behind you waiting to check out with their take-out dinners and they would likely look unkindly at someone looking to disassemble their take-out package regardless of the reasons given.
The missus ordered a soup and a side dish of humus and pita bread. She was not impressed with the small dish of humus thinking that it should have been bigger for the price. I assured her that it was more than sufficient for the number of pieces of pita bread that it was designed to accompany and that is where the discussion stopped. She had little to say about her soup and I assumed that it was probably garden variety if nothing else.
We both agreed that the cookies we ordered were a bit on the stale side and wondered aloud how that could be given the traffic going in and out of this seemingly busy and popular locally family owned greek restaurant. This wasn't the first time we walked out of their place with stale cookies. It probably won't be the last.
Apple announced a couple of interesting releases the other day. They announced a device that allows you to track your possessions and they also announced an updated Apple TV. I might like to pick up a tracker or two to attach to my car keys. It costs several hundred dollars these days to replace some fobs so investing $25 in a device that will give you leg up in the search process when you lose your keys seems reasonable. The TV thing is a little less appealing since my current Apple TV works just fine and spending money on an upgrade seems unnecessary. Then again, who doesn't like to have the latest and greatest when it comes to Apple products?
Apple announced a new iMac as well. It looks pretty slick so I'm having second thoughts about having purchased a Mac mini for Mrs G. The timing wouldn't have worked out so there's that. The iMac just wasn't available when she was in the market for a new Mac. I'll have to take a look this morning to see what the pricing looks like but I'm guessing it's far pricier than the Mac Mini that she now has sitting in her "office." She has never needed more than a bare bones model so I think I made the right decision. I'll be signing her up for 6 months of free Apple music when we pay a visit this week. I think she'll enjoy what they have to offer.
What the heck is going on with Mike Lindell and his Frankspeech.com site? I thought this was supposed to be the latest and greatest in social media land. A cross between Twitter and YouTube or so he claimed. He went on and on about how this was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. He ordered 5 of this and 10 of those to make sure that his platform was not going to be disrupted or taken down by the Apple's, Google's, and YouTube's of the world when they decided that they didn't like what he or his customers had to say. We're a week into the launch and I see a whole lot of YouTube stuff but not much of the social media. None, in fact.
He's a huckster though. I'll give him that much. He really had us going for a while. When I say "us", I'm talking about we god-fearing Trump supporters. I should have known he was nothing more than a carnival barker when we relented and ended up purchasing one of his MyPillows. It had to be the worst pillow I've ever put under my head bar none. The word "lumpy" comes to mind. Need I say more? If I sound disappointed, it's because I am disappointed. I bought into his jive talk like a schoolyard girl and I'm paying the price. I'm feeling little jilted truth be told.
Lindell has a lot to say about how the 2020 election was stolen but I'm not inclined to listen to any of it until he does a little something to restore my faith in this FrankSpeech thing. That means getting the Twitter portion of his site up and running. I'm not running into a lot of like-minded people theses days on Twitter so that's annoying. I can't even express my annoyance since they shadow-ban my tweets.
My tweets do have a bit of an edge to them so I can't blame them for wanting to silence my sometimes acerbic rants. They're not edgy enough to get me booted so I must be doing something right. I like Twitter as a news feed but I'm more and more of the opinion that I'm only getting the news that they want me to see. Fuck em.
The Financial markets were doing just fine yesterday until Biden and his minions announced that they were planning to hike the capital gains tax from something like 15% to something maybe close to 40%. And then, some asshat from the Treasury said something about taxing cryptocurrency traders to the tune of 80% or some ridiculous number. Not sure why so many sellers starting selling off their equities since the increases would be retroactive to 2021 but sell they did and hard.
I'm not sure how the day ended up. There may have been some dip buyers willing to step in at the last moment to take advantage of the lower prices. Crypto prices were down another 15% this morning so we'll see how the day goes today. Who doesn't like volatility?
If the Biden Administration is looking to finance their socialist agenda by taxing the bejeezus out of hard working Americans, I think they may need to rethink their strategy. Putting more money in the hands of people who have never worked a day in their lives and taking money out of the hands of the entrepreneurs and business owners is a plan that is destined to fail.
It may make the wealth redistribution and income inequality crowd feel better about themselves but the poor and downtrodden have never contributed much to the financial wealth in our society. I guess, by definition, they are probably somewhat parasitic. They have certainly never done much to grease the skids of the financial markets that has made our country the preeminent financial powerhouse on the globe that we are today.
Who do they expect to finance all of this green energy bullshit they're pushing down our throats? How exactly do we fight a war against a country that is not carbon neutral and one that has the necessary resources to beat us like a rented mule when we can't access our logistical devices because it's been cloudy the last five out of six days?
And then we have this bloody power grab by the dems wanting to give statehood to both Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. They want nothing more than to add four more senators to their side creating a near majority so they can pass whatever the fuck them want when they want. Political power in perpetuity is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. Yes, they want to pack the Supreme Court too.
This is the kind of far-reaching nonsense that put people like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump into office back in the day so I say, without hesitation, keep doing what you're doing. We'll be more than happy to bring The Donald back into office in 2024. I'm okay with DeSantis too just so you know.
We'll also need to renegotiate his terms with his internet carrier some time soon. He negotiated a pretty good deal a while back and that baby has now expired resulting in a higher bill month in and month out. Like most people his age, he watches little to no mainstream television so there may be an opportunity to cut that service off at the knees.
His plan may have included telephone coverage and he doesn't need that for sure so there's another bite of the apple worth considering. And then there are new services coming online in his neighborhood which may give us a talking point or two in our attempts to drive down his monthly fee. It's all good. One thing we'll need to make sure of is that any new service we consider must meet certain MBS requirements. I'm not sure that they meet or exceed his current plan as I see it today but it's probably just a matter or time.
I watched Trump's interview with Sean Hannity last night on FOX. It was Trump's first on-air appearance since the stolen election of 2020. I wasn't sure that I was going to tune in but I just happened to be flipping through the channels as it began so I stayed with it for a while. Hannity is such a dope. I don't know that I can bear to listen to him for any extended period of time without losing a few points on the IQ scale.
Trump was Trump and I thought he looked well and he was, as usual, on his game. It sounds like he's going to go for it in 2024 but he didn't come right out and say that so we'll have to stay tuned. He didn't bite at any of the low hanging fruit served up by Hannity relative to questions about Biden's mental acuity, etc., so that will probably keep him out of the news for the time being. There's no question he could have put a couple of those questions right over the left field fence if he had been so inclined.
Maybe it's just me but I've seen enough of Trump's interviews over the last few years to pretty much know what he's going to say in response to any particular question. I find myself wishing that he'd find a way to reframe his answers so as to not sound repetitive or over rehearsed. It sometimes has a one-trick pony feel to it and I know Trump can do better but he, for whatever reason, does not. The Trump that we all know and love is the Trump that stands at the podium in a presser taking on all comers. That's not the Trump I see in these interviews.
I don't think it's Trump playing it safe either. I don't think he knows the meaning of the word "safe." He's been a balls-to-the-walls guy all his life so he calls em like he sees em. I'm referring to balls and strikes if you're looking for a baseball metaphor. But his responses are predictable and that makes me thinking it's okay to look away because I think I know what he's going to say. Will he sound like a broken record should he run again? Do I care since I will vote for him anyway? What about the other 75 million people who voted for him in 2020?
Let me chime in on this Chauvin trial thing. All I know is what I've seen on the video and that was painful to watch. What bothers me about the whole jury thing, the verdicts aside, is that the mob determined well before the jurists went off in a back room to do what jurists do, that the man was guilty. The BLM and Antifa types had amassed in streets across the city and they were armed and ready to mob, loot, kill or do whatever if they didn't get the verdict that they wanted. That's not justice, that's mob justice. Don't get me started on comments made by Sleepy Joe and that despicable POS, Maxine Waters. We cannot let this stand!
Now, every time I hear about a black person ending up dead at the hands of a police officer all I can think about is how big will the riots be, when will they begin, how long before Al Sharpton and his fellow race baiters show up on the scene, how many stores will be looted and burned to the ground, what kind of reparations will be paid to the family no matter who was at fault, and what career ending charges will be filed against the officer for performing his duties while in the line of fire.
It does make you wonder, who the hell is going to want to become a police officer in this day and age? I'm still waiting for republicans, any republicans, to stand up to the lawlessness in the streets and say, "no mas." Maybe that's asking too much. The democrats will be either silent or they will be egging on the marauders and brown shirt types from the sidelines. Democrats like Maxine Waters, the congresswoman from I'm not sure where, actually travelled to Minnesota to foment dissent while the Chauvin trial was in its final days.
I suppose the retail establishments in Minnesota that boarded up their businesses in advance of the trial thinking that they might well lose their business if the verdicts went the wrong way, are today breathing a sigh of relief. You have to wonder just a little bit that it took the jury really just a day before returning a verdict that was perhaps really just preordained. That's unusual given the counts that were outstanding. A little more deliberation might have returned a different result. Were the prosecutor's closing comments that compelling? Were the closing arguments by the defense team that unconvincing?
It's important to realize too that the jurists were not sequestered so who knows how they might have been influenced one way or another. Appeals are likely already in the works and they are quite likely to succeed with the shenanigans we've seen over the course for the trial. Take the jury out of the mix and we might have seen a very different outcome.
What happens to a guy like Chauvin in prison? Does the White Brotherhood take him under their wing? Is there such a thing as the White Brotherhood? How long will it be before someone kneels on his jugular for nine minutes to see if he knows what it feels like to die like George Floyd died?
We ordered take-out last night from a local greek joint which we like a lot. I usually get an eggplant parmesan dish served with penne and a nice salad and I rarely look at other items on menu. I've thought about it here and there and nobody likes to be so narrow minded that they never visit other things. I figured last night was the night to do just that.
I've had my eye on their Moussaka dish and I like every ingredient that goes into it so I wasn't going all wild eyed into the decision or anything. I even looked up the dish in YouTube and watched a chef go through the motions in prepping and cooking the casserole-like dish. Who does that? Right?
Well, the wedge of Moussaka that I pulled out of our take-out bag wasn't much larger than a medium sized brownie and it looked, sadly enough, just a wee bit deflated. That is to say, it didn't resemble anything that I had in mind going into this experiment of mine.
All the right ingredients were there but instead of sitting up like a piece of 7-layer lasagna it laid almost flat in the see-through plastic container it came in. When I pressed down with my fork I had to chase down a piece of unbreaded eggplant that oozed out from one side of the Moussaka like a slippery eel. I did my best to include a hint of the seasoned beef with the forkful of eggplant but, alas, I was less than successful.
So this is what I get for going out on a limb. This is what I get for taking chances. This is what I get for throwing caution to the wind. It only reinforces my belief that it's better to stick with what you know you like than to take a walk on the wild side. Had Thomas Edison stopped short of his inventing the light bulb because he thought experimentation wasn't all that it was cracked up to be, we'd still be lighting our homes today by candlelight.
To live is to reinvent yourself day in and day out and that means ordering things from the menu when you'd rather enjoy the dish that is tried and true. I need to keep pushing the envelope but I'll be steering clear of the Moussaka at least for now.
I don't know what I would have done had I looked at the dish before exiting the restaurant with my take-out bags. I might have said something along the lines of, "is this the Moussaka'? They might have taken from my tone that I was less than impressed. They might have said, "oh, no, that's the side dish that we serve. Let me go back into the kitchen and get you our dinner version."
What I walked away with is what you get when you don't ask questions. Besides, there is a line behind you waiting to check out with their take-out dinners and they would likely look unkindly at someone looking to disassemble their take-out package regardless of the reasons given.
The missus ordered a soup and a side dish of humus and pita bread. She was not impressed with the small dish of humus thinking that it should have been bigger for the price. I assured her that it was more than sufficient for the number of pieces of pita bread that it was designed to accompany and that is where the discussion stopped. She had little to say about her soup and I assumed that it was probably garden variety if nothing else.
We both agreed that the cookies we ordered were a bit on the stale side and wondered aloud how that could be given the traffic going in and out of this seemingly busy and popular locally family owned greek restaurant. This wasn't the first time we walked out of their place with stale cookies. It probably won't be the last.
Apple announced a couple of interesting releases the other day. They announced a device that allows you to track your possessions and they also announced an updated Apple TV. I might like to pick up a tracker or two to attach to my car keys. It costs several hundred dollars these days to replace some fobs so investing $25 in a device that will give you leg up in the search process when you lose your keys seems reasonable. The TV thing is a little less appealing since my current Apple TV works just fine and spending money on an upgrade seems unnecessary. Then again, who doesn't like to have the latest and greatest when it comes to Apple products?
Apple announced a new iMac as well. It looks pretty slick so I'm having second thoughts about having purchased a Mac mini for Mrs G. The timing wouldn't have worked out so there's that. The iMac just wasn't available when she was in the market for a new Mac. I'll have to take a look this morning to see what the pricing looks like but I'm guessing it's far pricier than the Mac Mini that she now has sitting in her "office." She has never needed more than a bare bones model so I think I made the right decision. I'll be signing her up for 6 months of free Apple music when we pay a visit this week. I think she'll enjoy what they have to offer.
What the heck is going on with Mike Lindell and his Frankspeech.com site? I thought this was supposed to be the latest and greatest in social media land. A cross between Twitter and YouTube or so he claimed. He went on and on about how this was going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. He ordered 5 of this and 10 of those to make sure that his platform was not going to be disrupted or taken down by the Apple's, Google's, and YouTube's of the world when they decided that they didn't like what he or his customers had to say. We're a week into the launch and I see a whole lot of YouTube stuff but not much of the social media. None, in fact.
He's a huckster though. I'll give him that much. He really had us going for a while. When I say "us", I'm talking about we god-fearing Trump supporters. I should have known he was nothing more than a carnival barker when we relented and ended up purchasing one of his MyPillows. It had to be the worst pillow I've ever put under my head bar none. The word "lumpy" comes to mind. Need I say more? If I sound disappointed, it's because I am disappointed. I bought into his jive talk like a schoolyard girl and I'm paying the price. I'm feeling little jilted truth be told.
Lindell has a lot to say about how the 2020 election was stolen but I'm not inclined to listen to any of it until he does a little something to restore my faith in this FrankSpeech thing. That means getting the Twitter portion of his site up and running. I'm not running into a lot of like-minded people theses days on Twitter so that's annoying. I can't even express my annoyance since they shadow-ban my tweets.
My tweets do have a bit of an edge to them so I can't blame them for wanting to silence my sometimes acerbic rants. They're not edgy enough to get me booted so I must be doing something right. I like Twitter as a news feed but I'm more and more of the opinion that I'm only getting the news that they want me to see. Fuck em.
The Financial markets were doing just fine yesterday until Biden and his minions announced that they were planning to hike the capital gains tax from something like 15% to something maybe close to 40%. And then, some asshat from the Treasury said something about taxing cryptocurrency traders to the tune of 80% or some ridiculous number. Not sure why so many sellers starting selling off their equities since the increases would be retroactive to 2021 but sell they did and hard.
I'm not sure how the day ended up. There may have been some dip buyers willing to step in at the last moment to take advantage of the lower prices. Crypto prices were down another 15% this morning so we'll see how the day goes today. Who doesn't like volatility?
If the Biden Administration is looking to finance their socialist agenda by taxing the bejeezus out of hard working Americans, I think they may need to rethink their strategy. Putting more money in the hands of people who have never worked a day in their lives and taking money out of the hands of the entrepreneurs and business owners is a plan that is destined to fail.
It may make the wealth redistribution and income inequality crowd feel better about themselves but the poor and downtrodden have never contributed much to the financial wealth in our society. I guess, by definition, they are probably somewhat parasitic. They have certainly never done much to grease the skids of the financial markets that has made our country the preeminent financial powerhouse on the globe that we are today.
Who do they expect to finance all of this green energy bullshit they're pushing down our throats? How exactly do we fight a war against a country that is not carbon neutral and one that has the necessary resources to beat us like a rented mule when we can't access our logistical devices because it's been cloudy the last five out of six days?
And then we have this bloody power grab by the dems wanting to give statehood to both Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. They want nothing more than to add four more senators to their side creating a near majority so they can pass whatever the fuck them want when they want. Political power in perpetuity is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. Yes, they want to pack the Supreme Court too.
This is the kind of far-reaching nonsense that put people like Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump into office back in the day so I say, without hesitation, keep doing what you're doing. We'll be more than happy to bring The Donald back into office in 2024. I'm okay with DeSantis too just so you know.