Eggs In A Dead Man's Pan

 

Food And Data

I am Listening to Fiona Apple, and thinking about...apples...about getting a bag of them, to juice with my newest juicer, which I got for $12.78 at the Goodwill Store.

The previous juicer was a Black and Decker brand and was heavy, giving the impression that it was heavy-duty. It probably was and probably had a strong motor. Only, there was a slight wobble to the thing. When the motor was spinning fast, it became evident. I knew I should find the screws to open it and tighten down whatever was loose. But, I didn't and the thing finally seized up, with the rotor becoming jammed, and then the motor burning up in short order, complete with whitish-blue-green sparks, and a smell that reminds me of the transformer that came with the electric train set I had as a kid. You could get a good dose of that smell by shorting the tracks together with a piece of wire, I recall.

I had gone on a bit of a binge, these past few day, on the free "good meal" packages of food that I have been finding; discarded by finicky other residents.

A good six pack of beer, such as Modelo "Negro," and 2 or 3 of those microwaveable meals, and all I am dirtying is a fork, when it's all said and done. The beer gives me a don't care attitude about the dry, flaking skin I might wind up getting from any hydrogenated soy oil that might be in the good meals.

But, it is time for at least a day or two of juice fasting.

I went to the Goodwill Store earlier this afternoon, with the intention of buying one vinyl album (50 cents) which would become "the first album" in my collection of them (not counting the boxed sets of Beethoven and Brahms albums that I found by the side of the road -the thing that made the idea of getting a turntable a feasible one. I had a couple hundred bucks worth of classical music, and would only need some $25 turntable from the thrift store to cash in on them.

One regret about the turntable that I have now is that there is no "repeat" function that would make the same side play over and over. I think it would be cool to have one classical piece on repeat for a few days; in order that I would become very familiar with that symphony or violin concerto (as of today's find) and maybe even some of the compositional skills would worm their way into my head over time.

And, if I were to ever go on that "Name That Tune" show; classical version; I might be able to name that violin concerto in D by Mozart in just one note.

The listing of this album on Amazon's website has a price of $14.95 for one in used, but "good" condition.

The same can be said of the condition of the one that I got for 55 cents, tax included, after I was unable to find any totally random album by some band that I had half-forgotten exists (at my age, it is when one of the members passes away that I am reminded of a lot of them) in order to make it the first album in my collection.

I just think that it would be cool for the people who live on my floor to walk by in their daily routines and hear the same B-52's album, from 1979, playing non-stop. It has to be an album that I could pick up the guitar and play right along with, note for note (eventually).

There was hardly any pop music at all there (although. A James Taylor disc without a scratch was tempting) and that is probably because people regularly go there with some app loaded in their phones that allows them to swipe the bar codes on stuff to determine how drastically the Goodwill has discounted them.

At least one such guy owns a "used goods" store across the river, where he transports merchandise to, from the Goodwill Store, and then triples the price tag, over what he paid for it.

I've seen them in there doing that, especially to the books, minutes after the place opens on a Monday morning, after being restocked over the weekend. I guess the app rates books, and gives their "worth." It is discouraging to see someone pushing two carts full of books out the door as I am on my way in, to look through the new book arrivals.

Of course, a brand new Charles Dickens paperback, of great interest to me, might still be on the shelf at 55 cents, with the Stephen King, James Patterson and Harry Potter ones having gone out the door in one of the two carts.

I learned a lesson once, after I found a Linux Certification manual, which had a $39.99 price on the back, but was only 50 cents. It would have been cheap enough at a dollar, had it been a hard cover, but it was flexible, and hence 55 cents. How many people are interested in technical manuals about the Linux operating system? I thought. I'll come back and get it tomorrow,..

But, the book wasn't there the next day. It surely had been grabbed by someone who knew he could put it on E-bay to advertise it world-wide and reach an audience much larger than the 40 or so people who might see it in the Goodwill Store. He probably bought it for 55 cents and wound up selling it for like $19.98, or around half price -quite a good deal for some student in Estonia, who might not know what a Goodwill Store is.

But, Alex in California would probably warn that "there is a lot of b.s." involved in selling stuff on Ebay -procuring shipping materials, shipping things, and then probably the one-out-of-twenty people who are going to want to return the thing for a refund, so that, the next time you sell the item, you are just about breaking even.

Speaking of Alex in California, who was probably hoodwinked by the radical left California Snowflake ideology that flows there like a mudslide, into avoiding this blog, for fear that he will be doxed by Amazon, Ebay, Google and Facebook, and outed for being a party to a misinformation campaign, and then getting cancelled. No more posts about green beans and sake from him...

But, speaking of Alex, I thought it might be fun to look through his blog for clues as to his whereabouts, and then try to zoom in and find him, like a needle in the haystack of San Jose, CA...

I have at least made note of the busking spots out there, in case I ever wind up there, on a vacation, or something. I'll be playing Dylan out in front of Whole Foods, near the Amazon lockers; especially if there is a Sharks game that night, LOL!

Where Is Alex?

That bugger is in there (the above map) somewhere..

A couple of hours ago, my food stamp card should have been reloaded, helping to grease the wheels of the economy, that relies so much upon petroleum products, and also, my data is down to something like 30 megabytes, which is just enough to be able to post this when I hit "publish."

It is already Friday (again). Time is flying so fast, geez, Trump will be back in the White House before we know it. I keep my ears peeled for phrases like "even the democrats think this is a bad policy" as being a harbinger of hope, that in 4 years there will at least not be an empty suit spouting platitudes from a teleprompter on the evening news. Hopefully, CNN will have been sold to a home shopping network by then, too.

In a mere 3 hours, the grocery stores will be opening, and I will go after some stuff to juice. That leaves me time to listen to Mozart's violin concerto no. 4 in D major a couple more times.

Upon returning from the Goodwill Store with that record, I noticed an entertainment console in the dumpster. It has a 5 disc CD changer, dual cassette decks (damaged) AM/FM radio (with the bonus of antenna jacks in the back for improved reception) and I made a mental note to fish it out of there, plug it in and see what happens.

As soon as I got in my place, there was a knock at my door by Bobby, who wanted back the powered speaker that he had come into possession of, and left here, wanting me to plug in to see if it worked.

I plugged it in, and it did work. It even had a single RCA input, that accepted one half of the stereo signal coming from the turntable. That allowed me to listen to the albums that I had found. I gave Bobby his speaker back, and then immediately went and fetched the entertainment console out of the dumpster, to replace it, finding that the turntable plugs right into the back of it, and runs through the auxiliary channel.

I can either attach a couple of the speakers that I have a half dozen of (whenever someone dies here, their speakers often wind up in the dumpster, as this is the Land of the Forgotten, where homeless people go to die, and there seems to be a superstition among these mostly "of color" people about appropriating the goods of a recent decedent, so they leave the stuff there. This extends to cookware -they don't want to be frying eggs in a dead man's pan, I guess (that was supposed to be witty, but I guess my delivery wasn't dead-pan enough). 

I don't harbor the same taboos myself, except when it comes to the clothing that invariably gets thrown out. I draw the line at sallying forth from the building, sporting a sweatshirt or something that everyone has seen the dead guy "always wearing").

This is where he gets his yakitori!

Or I could run the headphone output into my good amplifier and speakers, which put out about 4 times the wattage of the console (with all the features of the thing, to include karaoke capabilities, they had to cut corners somewhere, I guess).