CarlSeibert

Played the records we bought yesterday on the little den speaker system, which was in fine voice. Used the Torx bits I bought at Harbor Freight to adjust the tailgate glass latch on the Smart. To do this, you actually take the back body panel off the car (six little screws), leaving a skin-less vehicle. It's an odd car. Washed the cars and pressure cleaned the sidewalk. Then we went to the more or less new restaurant on Anglin's pier and had lobster rolls. Good day.

I will try This ^.I've lately been on a rampage against that little crinkly noise that somehow gets left in the grooves after I've cleaned a record. (And too often on current pressings, comes in the darn grooves)FWIW, I've had some decent luck using the gooey In The Groove Roller after a regular vacuum cleaning.I changed the kind of velvet that my brushed are made of, too. That has helped.Are you doing a water rinse after the #15?

Yeah really. x-rays are photographic and that bone would be much prettier if the light source was to the side.

Ummm. Pop Tarts. I have a great (well, long anyway) Pop Tart adventure, involving the Garden of Eden and lots of flames. I need a sugar buzz to relive the story......

Happy Birthday John! Shuck and Dive on me.....

Without Snowballs, how will I ever drive across the ally?

Way to go CJ!

We - as in at work we - discovered a few years back that one of our local hospital districts had a general ledger account for money that they bullied out of people who didn't owe it. They used it in their revenue projections. That's cold.

Annoying day. --- rant warning--- I went to the dentist, which went well enough, but I still feel like I've been punched in he jaw. The Novocaine gave me back the southern drawl hat I haven't had since I was about 25. That was kind of funny. Then Sprint called to say they'll turn off our service if I don't pay them within 48 hours. Check the records to discover they hadn't bothered to send me a bill in the last two months. I hadn't, that I could remember, signed up for telepathic billing. I hadn't signed up for email billing, or more specifically, spam basket billing, either. They had slammed me into emailing billing without telling me. I was unhappy. T-h-e-n I opened an EOB from the health insurance company. The lab was going to charge me $1,000 for the blood test for my annual physical. It was actually $300 worth of tests but since it wasn't covered, it would be a thousand. According to my policy, it was supposed to be zero out of pocket to me. (I have blood tests done at the same lab three times a year and have for years. There had never been a problem.) All this, according to the insurance company CSR, was because of a fantastic set of screw ups that could only happen in a system where healthcare is 18% of GDP and life expectancy at birth is 32nd in the world. The explanation/excuse was way too convoluted to recount here, but it's all OK because of "the system", and no, the insurance company isn't obliged to do anything to rectify the situation. That slides downhill to me and to my doctor, who is a nice guy and really doesn't get paid lavishly enough to have to deal with this kind of stupid shit. I was more unhappy. I got to use my new southern voice to be either very sweet or really nasty, as appropriate, to a half dozen people. And then I had to go to work.

Happy Birthday Dinny!

Vicki - that just blows old shoes. Take good care of the ankle and get well as fast as you can. Ken - I had to do that a while ago and my recip saw worked fine. I was able to get it into position and it it cut like a Jedi light saber. Subsequently I won an oscillating saw in a raffle. It turns out to be a very clever device. Very maneuverable. It's become my go-to gizmo for tight spaces. I bought a car and went to see the new James Bond movie. (Yesterday, actually)

That's so cool.

Wayne, women know these things. Trust the force.

Went to lunch with Miguel. The waitress got all excited over his chick magnet VW. Had to take a picture with it and everything. Fortunately, the conversation was in Spanish, which I don't speak. So it was Miguel who had to try to operate some camera phone he had never seen before. (I hate it when people assume that because of my profession I must be proficient with their gear.) Went home to feed the cats. Miguel had been talking about cafe con leche and guava pastries. So the expresso maker starting looking at me funny. The result was a cafe Cubano big enough to go stand up paddle boarding on. Then went out to buy some spokes. Stopped at the Goodwill superstore on the way home. Now I am looking at bags of stuff and thinking that totally ripped on caffeine and sugar just possibly might not be the best way to go to the thrift store.

Go Vicki!

From what I'm seeing on the wires, it's a good thing that no 'Casers live on the beach in New Jersey. It doesn't look super widespread yet, but storm surge is a bitch. In the bad areas there are lots of houses reduced to toothpicks. That's what I always hate: people coming home to find their entire material world turned to rubble and mud. Flooded cars and lost business - and two weeks without a hot shower - are a pain in the ass but a month later you're over it.

My photographer from the Dolphins game Sunday is still stuck in Manhattan. This is like the plot of the last Batman movie. We sure could have used him tonight for the Heat game. Think I could ask him to walk to Newark?

The flooding photos (including that PATH station looking like das boot) I was getting just before I left the office did not look good. The wind damage didn't look bad (yet) but it's going to blow for so damn long. It looks like New York will be miserable for a while. Stay safe. Don't step in any electrified puddles. Be patient. Try not to kill your neighbors unless they loot.

This thing has some nasty storm surge, given the extra high tide. We had water sloshing out of storm drains on the river five or six miles from the ocean. That doesn't hurt anything fortunately, but you don't see it very often at all. Be careful everybody.

Voted. Pretty encouraging first day turnout. We went to ArtServe first. You couldn't get near enough to the place to park. Wilton Manors city hall wasn't happening either. The line of people stretched down the block. Then we went to the African American Research Library and the line there looked like it was two hours long. Bonnie went all Cortez burning his boats on the beach and said we would go no farther. We would vote. So we did, two hours later.

Good question. I took it to mean ten manufacturers with license to produce whatever floats their boat. Are there sub-genres of Beats? Like a Dr Dre/ Phil Spector edition? (Everything sounds like it was recorded in a prison shower) or Dr Dre/Ke$ha edition (no sound at all, but they prevent social disease) I have to admit I don't keep up with that product line as well as I should.

I meant to post this a couple weeks ago. Lefsetz had an item about discounted Beats (as opposed to counterfeit ones, I suppose). Lefsetz said it was killing the brand. The next day, Dre's manager responds. OK fine. But there were some very odd bits. The part that freaks me out is where he says that Beats from different factories sound different and he doesn't seem to mind. WTF? Maybe he misspoke. Maybe the market has become an alternate universe. Maybe Dre's hometown is an alternate universe. Some excerpts: "We got young people interested in sound quality once again." [big snip] There are multiple sets of Beats headphones, and they all sound a bit different, they've got ten producers around the world who tweak the sound as to their liking. As for the sound curve, Jimmy emphasized that Beats headphones were made for modern music, the music of today. Jimmy said I'M AN AUDIO FREAK! He said he's got five sets of Tannoys, he shows up in the studio with Brystons. He took six weeks to get the sound right on a single track on "Damn The Torpedoes." And Dre puts in the same effort. "When we started this, they said no one will pay for sound again." Jimmy's right about that. And like a true rock and roller, he wouldn't take no for an answer. "Our goal is to get kids to go from earbuds to headphones." And he's done a good job of that. "It's our version of studio sound."

Don't get Bonnie started on those crowd-sourced logo sites. They're pretty much a lose-lose proposition. I like your current logo, really.

Yipes! All together now - let's be v-e-r-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l until the stars return to a more favorable alignment (or whatever it is that they do in situations like this)

Happy Birthday Vicki! Let's hoist a birthday latte when schedules permit. Bonnie says Happy Birthday, too!