One Of The Greats

One Good Day; One Bad Day; Repeat

I guess, to my credit, I bounce back pretty fast and go from feeling "I'm never going to do that again; I feel pretty rough.." to, in the space of 24 hours, to more of a "I feel rested, hydrated and well feed; I would metabolize red wine quite efficiently in this state" sentiment.

The puzzle is missing pieces; I can tell already, with probably 200 left to "place."

I catch my mind racing when I do puzzles and some of the material repeats itself. Feeling like I am doing the puzzle to impress Tanya Huang, is a recurrent thing.

But, for long stretches, I would envision a certain The Puzzle Channel, that would be streaming me live; with a studio audience of maybe 300, wearing shirts that have my face on them with a jigsaw puzzle piece-like border; and they would cheer every piece placed (they were always behind plexiglass like hockey spectators, in my reverie, I don't know why) and crazily jump to their feet en-mass, after I was able to perhaps connect one big section of assembled pieces to another, maybe one where the two chunks joined at several sockets. Maybe that was why I always had the plexiglass in my imagination; maybe they would try to throw a beach ball onto the puzzle table in their rabid celebratory enthusiasm.

But, it was the announcers I would hear in my head. The one painting in broad strokes talking about how we were all watching a master at work; and he would have a color commentator who would make observations upon things like: "He was working along the hedge pretty hard yesterday, but it seems like he's focusing more on the sky, tonight, Tony"

Tony: "Yeah, we could even see, when he was digging in the box, him pulling out mostly sky colored pieces; especially that purple kind of blue right above the horizon."

And then there would be the self deprecating remarks: "Just to see him pick a piece out of the box and know exactly where it goes in the puzzle, it's just remarkable. McKenna truly is one of the greats [here the camera goes in for a close shot of my face, just as I pick my nose and hold the booger out].

But, yeah, I used to be on Monday Night Jigsaw, in my mind; the fans in the studio groaning when I try a piece where it doesn't go "Oooh!" or ready to jump to their feet and give a fist pump or two when I "interlock" a piece.

Oh, but the self deprecating remarks would be like: "I know it would have taken me at least an hour to snap together that one patch of sky!"

"Yuck, yuck I'd still be working on it!"

But, I stopped doing that. I might have just gotten tired of the idea. But, it was also because I became aware that I was trying to come up with ideas for making a video just like that, with a fictitious Puzzle Channel, a bunch of extras in studio audience, and the persistent voice overs of the two correspondents, adding color and commentary.

Now, If I could somehow get a hold of about 150 Ravensburger puzzles all of the same picture, and distribute them to predesignated puzzle building competitors, and time was kept using Grenwich Mean time, or whatever, and each one of them had a good webcam and a good broadband connection...

Then, it could actually be a race to see who can put one of the identical puzzles together the fastest.

It would be something that Google can't help you out of. Like, how do you know the guy in Germany that you play chess against online doesn't have Chess Brain 2020 or some app in order to consult, when he is in doubt?

In the puzzle races of the near future you won't be able to Google" "where does this piece go in the puzzle."

But, it would turn into a marathon where people would stay up how ever many hours it will take them to put the 1,500 pieces together. The winner would probably come in around 38 hours; at which point all the other contestants could just get some shut-eye and come back to the puzzle the next day.

I really think I could organize 120 or so puzzle enthusiasts (who own decent podcasting equipment) to enter into such a puzzle building race. It might be wise to start the competitions using maybe 750 piece puzzles, so that the contestants wouldn't last for days, thus cruelly subjecting prize seekers to sleep deprivation.

The puzzle of the cosmos that I am doing seems to be on a timetable of it own, toward its completion date. It might be that I get my act together, figuratively speaking, just as I am snapping the last piece into place.

I usually work on it for almost a half hour after Jeopardy has ended at 6:30 in the evening, and after Wheel of Fortune has started. 

Funny how Jeopardy can be enjoyed without having to see the picture (minus the advantage of being able to read ahead of Alex), while with Wheel of Fortune, you kind of want to be staring at the puzzle along with the contestants. But, I have taken to working on the puzzle during that half hour -there is just nothing else on free antenna TV worth watching- before switching over to the computer for any one of about 6 things.

I think I just need to get the cheapest $19 Tracfone and use its number to open a brand new Google account. It's possible that I might have to buy some minutes in order to do the setup on the phone. There has to be a way that Google knows if your phone number is already in use.

And what happens when a person gets a Boost Mobile phone and then defaults on the payments after a certain amount of time. Does that phone number get put back into a pool of available numbers? What if that person opened a Google account using that phone number, and then they assign it to another phone?

That has to be the way the globalists plan on keeping track of every person in the world; eventually they will all have cellphones of some type. Then, just count the phones that have made a call within the past month, type of thing.

So, this brand new account is created on Google. I will have to build a profile from scratch. I wonder what kind of videos will be recommended to someone that Google's algorithm knows nothing about. "Hey, shop at WalMart?!"

It's going to want to connect to the device I used the phone number of to create the account. Then they are going to want to allow the phone to report my location, who I call the most, etc. And a really smart algorithm would be able to detect that the guy who apparently just moved into the same apartment as another guy, who just closed his account, lives. He shops at all the same online retailers and watches the same news channels...

It should be fun to see how high I can climb as a new account. I'll have to resist the temptation to become a 25 year old man of color when filling out my new profile.

At 1,500 pieces this would my lifetime record for puzzle size. The next puzzle I have after this is 5,000 piece, six month project, one, made by the same company of Ravensburger.

I already know I'm going to be missing at least a couple pieces; the risk you take buying a used puzzle. I can already see that I'm out of border pieces; yet there is one missing...

I have distilled things down to a few basic problems, such as running the headset microphone into the Yamaha amp (shown).

There is a little device that runs off a 9 volt battery, like my transistor radio did, back in '75, that is designed to allow one to plug a guitar into a smartphone.

I assume that there are smartphone apps that can take advantage of this and maybe record the guitar part, or whatever.

But, instead of running it into a smartphone, I believe the device will boost the signal so I could run it into the Yamaha.

Then it will be up to how much of the acoustic guitar the microphone picks up, as to whether I get an electronic pickup to go in it. Those things come in handy around the studio, so it is usually not a total loss if I buy something that I can't use at the Lilly Pad. 

 and how I need to position it to pick up the harmonica