The Tangential Conversation

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I got to ride in the backseat of our new fire truck. We were all put in and buckled up. We rode up the hill as everyone went over rules and things about the truck. My one guy friend was videotaping our ride until he filled his memory card. Later we washed the trucks. I like washing them.

Speaking of video-tapes... years ago, I used to be heavily into video-tape piracy.
Before the advent widespread copy-protection technology.
It was so easy.
My older brother worked at a video store, and he would bring home new releases for free.
Both he and I used to copy these movies, amassing a large collection of really interesting time-pieces in the world of 80's and early 90's movies.

Then all of a sudden, everything changed.
My brother quit his job at the video place, went off to college, found "God" and then proceeded to either dispose of or erase nearly all of the pirated tapes. I suppose he could no longer bear the moral ramifications for the sake of his soul.

Anyways, it was a treasure trove of obscure and interesting films, lost to a random act of religious zealotry.
*sigh*

Well, I can relate to the frustrations with religious zealots, as I had a great aunt who was a Baptist.

Long ago there was a televangelist named Oral Roberts. He claimed to heal people by laying his hands on them. He also apparently convinced people that if they sent money, he could heal them over the airwaves if they put their hands on the tv screen while he preached.

Deafness is genetic in my family. I am one of the deaf ones. My great aunt did have me as a small child put my hands on the tv screen during the Oral Roberts show.

Needless to say, I am still deaf, but I wonder what cool hearing aids I could buy with the money at compound interest that my aunt probably sent to Oral Roberts.

I've often been asked the question, "would you rather be blind or deaf?"

and I always answered, without a doubt... BLIND.

This seems to be different from the way most people would answer.
I know that so many people are so heavily dependent on sight, and think that they would not be able to function if they could not see.
But I've always had poor eyesight, and never put overwhelming empasis on what I see.
It's usually blurry anyhow. Please, take my eyesight.

I lean far more on my sense of hearing. If I could not hear, I believe that I might just go insane. I would be like Beethoven, sawing the legs off a piano and putting it right on the floor, then banging on the keys, so that I could feel the vibrations.

I think that my inner mental and emotional states correspond with certain frequencies. If I lost my ability to percieve some of these frequencies, it's almost like part of me would die.

but perhaps I'm just exaggerating. I do that...

You mentioned blindness there. Two of my favourite blues musicians were blind: Willy McTell and Lemon Jefferson. Back in those days there really wasn't much work a blind person could do so it was in fact quite common for blind people to play music (contrary to the assumption that blind musicians would be a rarity). Jefferson was in fact perhaps the first commercial blues star who was male, as before him the succesful "race music" singers were female jazz blues singers. McTell, too, was very successful - unlike most of his peers in Georgia he earnt enough to live off music alone and not have to do other work (although he did work as a bootlegger at one point - an irony considering one of his releases was about God's hatred of Moonshine).

Moonshine is a nice way to quickly damage a liver. I'd rather have a London Broil than a liver. How often does it get hot enough in London to broil? It was hot in my room earlier, I had to open a window.

The outdoor temperatures here have finally risen above the freezing point of water for two days in a row. Unfortunately, the weekend is supposed to contain snow and more blasted frigid temperatures yet again. I am really looking forward to summer, though spring will be nice also.

Yes, Spring warmth is good because I can plant my seedlings in the garden and watch them grow all Summer long, then in Summer I have lots of runner beans and courgettes and in Autumn I can harvest lots of potatoes. I hope my onions don't rot this year and that my leeks don't get rust. Interesting that the fungus infection is called rust because the plants have little orange specks on them like they are going rusty.

in 4th grade, i had to write to write a short sentence about what we did on a school excursion (we took a ferry to "garden island" in the harbor)

i liked the use of brackets in sentence structures, and i disliked the teacher who had warned me about an earlier piece of work i did that i liked but she did not.
she wanted me to get to the point and not go off on "tangents" as she said.
so this is what i wrote about the excursion given her instruction.

i got on the ferry (with a fiat engine as i was told (not originally designed for the mass market(due to it’s high running costs(because of the type of fuel used(not designed for octane enhancement(due to the lack of adjustability of the timing chain( double linkage(untwisted(bidirectionally(similar to a bracelet(with two entwined linkage points(unsoldered)))))))))))) on monday and it was fun.

Well, as to the subject of engines, I can honestly say I have absolutely no interest.

However, as I child I did ride on a ferry between Detroit and Canada. It was a big excursion and very exciting. I remember that when we were in the little tourist trap in Canada I was very happy, and my parents did buy me a t-shirt that said Canada and had a picture of a maple leaf on the front. I was also very intrigued by the currency of Canada with pictures of the Queen.

And speaking of the Queen, England and its history have always been fascinating to me as many of my ancestors, (the ones who did not come from Ireland) came from England.

Of course I know that some of you here on Wrong Planet still come from England as the entire country did not migrate to the United States.

But in point of fact, when many English did migrate to these fair shores, it was not yet the United States, but still a part of England.

My hands are tired of typing now.

I saw the Queen once, when I was 7 years old.
We had traveled to England on a summer vacation, just in time for the Queen's "Official Birthday" celebrations. During the parade, I was right up front when the Queen went by in her carriage, on the way to Buckingham Palace. I remember she was wearing a sky-blue hat.

I furthermore remember seeing the piles of horse droppings along the way, and innocently asking someone what they were. "Green Apples" was the reply.

That trip was a little boy's dream. Sherwood Forest and Loch Ness and castles and knights and all that cool medieval stuff. I'm glad I still have some of those memories.

I don't think the Loch Ness Monster is real. But I do believe in the Yeti, or more than one of them. I wonder if that one will ever be proven or not. Like proving math stuff like trigonometric identities or something.

Whether Nessie or a yeti are to be found, Molkele Mbembe is an interesting creature which possibly fits the description of an apatosaurus or diplodocus - sauropods, that supposedly live along river systems in parts of the Congo. Cyrptozoology is an interesting hobby for some, though it usually gives people who undertake it humiliation just for their quest rather than admiration, plus any findings are automatically relegated to categories of fraud or deception, making it so that even if something were to truly be discovered, that its veracity would be rejected off hand.

Several chimpanzees were given typewriters at the local zoo and asked to type the complete works of Shakespear. However, the sequence of letters seemed almost random, which led to the observation that the chimps were actually typing the documents encrypted! This is the first known case of cryptology in a zoo.

On the subject of chimps in a zoo, I believe that would be a humorous anecdote and not by definition truly a tangent.

Of course I am not an expert on tangents by any means. Nor of the ability of chimps to write in code.

I am however a person who strictly upholds to the conventions of any game going. So I must request anyone who would like to talk about cypher prone chimps to go off on more of a tangent than just a small cohesive paragraph.

In a thread devoted to tangents, even though not an expert, as I stated previously in this same post, I hope to excel.

(Tangent tangent)

Talk talk talk...

I can not think of anything to talk about. I have been emailing soem kids from school.