FERRERMAN- AGAIN?

 As has been well documented in this space, I have a lot of trouble with streaming services, mostly with quitting them. Recently I was getting phone texts from HBO/Max about their being a *problem* with my payment method. Since my bank makes those payments and there had never been a misstep from them before, I figured this was a third-party scam or the (alleged) problem was that they wanted to charge me more and the bank wasn't cooperating with that. Not liking either scenario, I opted to ignore. Season II of "The Pitt" is over until next January and I had recently completed my umpteenth bingeing of "The Sopranos". The other HBO attraction, John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" is available quickly enough on YouTube. I don't really need HBO until next year. So, they warned me and I dallied. And I lost it. No biggee.  I found out it was gone when I went to finish up a short-lived, 8-episode series from HBO called "Duster". Set in the '...

 I was thinking how great it would be to be a Major League baseball player. I'm not 8 years old again or thinking of trying out for the Cubs or anything like that. Just been thinking it's an amazing job to have, even if it's hard to think of "professional athlete" being considered a "job". But it is and its nice work if you can get it.  Thing is, it's hard to get. The road to the majors is quite the Odessey for nearly every player. They pay their dues from Little League and travel teams before they can shave, to high school and travel teams before they get scouted and into an MLB team's farm system where the next stop may be- but probably won't be- the big leagues. Along the way, each player is competing with and against the best players from wherever they are from in the states and in the world. If you don't get better, someone else will. There are 780 players in the bigs right now, and not all those slots are open as many are held by so...

 In my commercial painting career, I worked for some big outfits that did things like sports arenas and hotels. If anything was too big or beyond the scope of the company's usual expertise, they could always sub the work out to people who actually knew what they were doing. In fact, the arguably best outfit I worked for, had a vision of eliminating ALL  the pesky labor and the burden of overhead and all the day to day yada-yada of actually working, to sit back and make their fortune by "...subbing out work- just like The Walter Brothers". I heard that exact phrase for years while working at Ratmo Construction LLC. Their dream was to be gentlemen of leisure, bidding on jobs and subbing them out to others who still had to work for a living. Pimping, but without the stable of ladies, and never having to get their hands dirty. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose, but not really interesting or accomplishing anything. I was thinking of Ratmo recently and wondering if they ha...

 If there is anything worse than moving yourself, it has to be helping someone else move. You understand and accept why you must move- reasons- and you go about the annoying, backbreaking task as you can afford. It is always best to pay professional movers to do the deed, but that is often not affordable, and you have to wing it. It is nice to have a friend or family member with a truck. I am that friend or family member, because I'm a truck guy. There's a lot to be said for being a Kia guy though when these moving situations arise. You can just 🤷 and say, "Sorry, I just have a Kia. How about Joey Bagadonuts? You know him? He's got a Ford F150. He works cheap". But nobody works cheaper than family.  Cousin Bobby is a little lost these days. I think he quit his job a few months after I came to town, after he came down with a case of the fuckits. He was pushing 60 and just tired of working for a living. Aren't we all? Well, I have ten years on my younger cousin...

 A person- maybe- on a local thread wondered aloud that the us would not survive without billionaires. At first, I laughed. How could someone be so stupid? I've long said that 340 million people in a country allows for millions of idiots and that's just the way it is and must be. It's a maga thing now but always was part of the human condition. You can look it up. History is chockful o' stupid people.  But on the internet, you never know. They might be trolling. They might be a bot. They might simply be stupid. My first thought was that they were stupid, but I figured it had to be a bot. AI progresses in its fuckery every day. Why not put bots into conversations on extremely local sites? It's all about winning, right? Sure, there are people who will defend Trump on absofuckinglutely  every stupid thing he says or does, and we know from the internet that these people really are out there and have no shame about exposing their ignorance to the world. This is because t...

One of my first tasks tending bar, was working the service bar in the kitchen of a very nice steakhouse. It was a good way for a kid who technically wasn't legal to drink alcohol to learn how to make cocktails. It was a good set-up for all as the waitresses could put in food and drink orders in the same area, saving time and a lot of steps in the process. Most restaurants don't have the space for this, but this one had been designed by a very good restaurant man. It was a busy place and I learned speed. There are only two kinds of bartenders: the quick and the dead. I was becoming a top hand.  I was brand new to the business and fascinated by the organized chaos of the kitchen with the waitresses barking out orders to the cooks on the line, the cooks repeating those orders and all this getting done in a timely, tasty, manner. I picked up on what was going down, enough to know that I didn't want to be on either side of that line. It has always bemused me though, that it took...