This was actually end of august... when Lena took kvašenice to school for snack, the stock market leaped :). They offered all sorts of things in exchange... except she couldn't explain what these were. "Breaded bread but without bread in the breading" sounds utterly silly. "It's... bread". Because there's no word for pohovano in english.
On second I purchased online some tobacco (7 cans for myself) and cigarettes (8 cartons for her), which cost 163$ altogether. I actually printed the old [purchase] order, filled it and sent it, because they're fucking these Indians any way they know how to, they forbid them online sales, because they can't guarantee that the buyer is over 18 years of age, and selling tobacco to minots is a criminal offense. Which doesn't bother the porn industry at all, for them it's enough that you click „yes, I'm over 18“ and everything goes.
Just the other day it dawned on me how they invent pixels in police labs, how they get out the license numbers on cars, when the area occupied by the tag on the shot is circa 4x12 pixels? Elementary - they enlarge it, and just remove the out-of-focus pixels. Whatever remains, is sharp.
After I started wearing the reading spectacles (fall 2001, so at age of 46), my lenses got somewhat lazy, so now I carry the work spectacles in my pocket (those of five dollars, 1,5+) just to be able to read the labels when going for groceries.
Heard how one manufacturer found a way to use drumsticks and other darker meat to make white: it gets ground finely, then centrifuged, until it loses color, and then kneaded, frozen and covered with breadcrumbs. If you drop it frozen straight into the pan, great; if you let it thaw, you get some yucchy grayish mass of memories of some kind of meat...
„...listening, eehye, my playlist has about 3900 numbers, and that's only what was...“
Kleks: You have a playlist?? You have time to _listen_ to music? ;) To me it occurs along the way, usually I pick the stuff to listen on the spot.
Noooope... I have a hard habit, from my academic days, to have a sound wall. Without it I'd have to listen to echoes of narodnjaci from kantina, three corners away (with mandatory „Ramo, Ramo“ at least three times per evening), and didn't turn it off for years, even when we had babies in the house. The habit remained that something should be playing always.
Now I'm trying to suppress a bit those ships that take off and land every now and then (the navy base is 3km from here), or at least the hum of the four fans I have in the machine, or... Well, when on that list something comes up to halt my ear, then I rewind to the beginning of it, dial it up a bit and listen out... then back to work.
Ouch, yes, that thing about those, as it were, ships... When we were buying the house last year, we checked the traffic zone around the base. Turned out that each time, guess that's how it's written for them, as soon as they peel the wheels off the tarmac and reach the end of the airstrip, they turn about face and climb. The about face makes two semicricles (one to the right, off cross), i.e. two semicircular rings as broad as half the airstrip's width, and our house is exactly on the outermost point of the semicircle's end, on the spot where it has already gained some elevation. And it really wasn't too much of a problem
Now it begins to be, because those were drawings for F-116. Now they got replaced with F-117, which is larger and clumsier, so it not only lifts slower, but its turn radius is also larger. They literally fly over our heads, and while that lasts, that's four runs of some forty seconds, each time, of absolute noise when any attempt to talk is just futile.
Initially, I consumed Napster for about a year, while it lasted, then I had switched to NjinMx, which worked nicely for me and acquired... let's say the first 100 seedees of matArial :)
Then the trouble occurred in the shape of my boss who insisted that I should install Office 2003, which then wouldn't unless there's a SP4 (I lived on Nj2K SP2 until then, without DRMA and the rest of the le Caré), and this refreshed my memory, what was that BSOD like, may m$ fuck them... And NjinMx first stopped sending, if one or two guys a day may hook in, the others just kiss the port. Two months f that and it stopped working altogether... who knows which patch did it in. Since NjinMx is mostly abandonware (one version a year, or rarerly), I raised my hands and switched to Soulseek, at children's recommendation.
Though, Slsk is the same shit as NjinMx was (nobody can convince me that IE is the best way to draw tables), and it would freeze my machine at times, but to differ from NjinMx that doesn't mean I'm going back to be the last in everybody's queue.
And, on Slsk it's customary to share directories with whole albums. There are fewer movies than on NjinMx (specially fewer than on eMule), and I still haven't seen simultaneous download from two sources, which may not even exist, but then the folks are cultured and don't hook you off just like that, and no Japaneses who fake having hundred free slots in their queue room. And there are some very interesting things there, I fished out a few rarities.
There's one public channel here, NPR (v. npr.org) which has a common programme to a point, and beyond that the member station broadcast their own [stuff], all without ads. One Pol Šagru (Paul Shugroe or some such) has a good emisija, „Out of the box“, which goes I guess twice a day, where he plays things nobody else does. Lots of local bands as well. The so-called Americana doesn't quite impress me, but things come along... btnj, last week he played no less but a whole Dylan's album with real versions of things which the producers thooughly fucked up the first time. For examle, it has „Stuck inside the mobile with the Memphis blues again“ in a totally acoustic version, with fifteen stanzas (which lasts...), and is not even alike to the electric [one], which suffers back home on some single.
On sunday evenings they have notorious country. It's forgiven, those thirty minutes a week (okay, it's two hours, but this much overlaps with our dinner) can be digested. That's their nyeee-haaa, catlike howls and jeazus mye jeazus shomme d'wae...
That is, the genre where Sturgeon's percentage goes well over 95, or may I say 99. And though Pol Šagru plays a lot of Americana, there's rarely anything to impress me. Perhaps one thing a week, and even that is still short of making me take a pencil and wrote down who is it that I should catch.
These days I realized that my Njinamp (Winamp) breaks when it has more than 2-3K songs on the playlist... and along the way that I'm running of space on some partitions, so I decided to clean up a bit. The stuff I don't feel like listening fit about one DVD, and the movies which nobody means to watch did one more, and there I noticed that I collected the aforementioned Rattle and Hum... so let me listen to it now. Erased the playlist and played that in a loop.
What can I say, didn't find what I was looking for... that is, the black aunties are a blast, but the rest of it is a bit of a stretch. It endured for two rounds, and then I switched to listening to Joe Zawinul, listening to him third day in a row, some four albums (from sixties and on) in a loop. I think it will hold until monday evening, and then I'll see what to fry to listen on the way to Newyork.
Once Zyanna told me how she tried to write a song which would sell. The publishers were very interested, but she was disgusted and just discarded that thing. Never played it in public and I think she doesn't even keep a recording.
So, the dilema alone, between (whole)sale and doing one's own [thing] suffices to keep many good authors somewhere far from the eyes. And now how would they be elevated into a class to themselves... I don't see a way.
30-VI-2024 - 23-XII-2025