Haggling.

I love haggling.  I haven’t inherited a lot of cultural traditions, but haggling is recreation for old Jews, like those stupid balls are for old Italians.  It’s sport.  And there’s little that’s more disappointing than goys who don’t understand it, know how to do it, or appreciate its value in the realm of social intercourse.  Today I start this blog entry because this morning’s haggle was a thing of beauty and it would be a shame to allow it to be forgotten.  Sometimes improvisation kicks the ass of anything you could write.

The Gate

Some stuff happened here recently – the acreage down the road where my girls have been riding and keeping a couple of horses was sold, so we had to bring the horses home.  But we’re about to take off for a week of camping (and sailing, I hope) in Montana, and didn’t want to deal with having someone stay here to take care of them or hauling them off to yet another stable.  Instead, it was decided they’d be turned out in our field.  Only that field has never been properly fenced – we’ve just kludged up electric fencing from time to time and the stupid things sometimes manage to get past it.  So now I’m dealing with planting 50 fenceposts and stringing half a mile of barbed (ahem – Canadian) wire, which really isn’t much fun.  Job’s nearly done, though, and we just needed a (10′ long steel tube) gate.  Spotted one at a garage sale in town last week, asked about it, and was quoted $90.  Didn’t get it then because I wasn’t sure the size was right.  But a week later we decided it would work, so I went back, and it was still there (outside – where, truth be told, we probably could have just stolen it at night, but that wouldn’t be as good a story as this).  So here’s where we pick up this morning’s dialogue:

Me:  I figure we should take that gate off your hands.  Might be a little small, but I think we can make it work.  How does $60 sound?

Him:  Oh, I have to get $90 out of that.

Me:  Come on, $90 was last week’s price, and it’s still here.

Him:  Well, I’ve had a lot of interest in it.

Me:  You have a lot of interest, but I have cash and a car.

Him:  Okay, but I can’t go any lower than $80.

Me:  Sold.

Honestly, it’s not the ten bucks.  It’s the game.

The (first) 2001 Subaru Outback 3.0 H6

It’s the summer of 2019 and I really want to move up to one of these cars – we’ve been towing sailboats and Seadoos all over the place with the four of us and all our gear, and with that load the four-cylinder 2.5 litre engines in our existing Subarus are really at their limit.  I needed more power and was reluctant to go the turbo route, as the 2.5 litre w/ turbo combination has a bad reputation.  So I spotted this H6 on kijiji and took a look.  Body was terrible – more than the usual rust around the rear wheel wells, grille and bumper missing, hood not closing due to slight crease (all of the front end stuff a product of a minor crash).  But it started and ran great, so we got down to business.  I think she was asking a thousand, and I didn’t have any sense of how low she might go, so I said “Look, I don’t want to insult you with a low-ball offer like $600…”, and before I could get any further, she interrupted me and said “I’ll take 600”.

I’m happy with the result, of course, but almost a little disappointed that she didn’t make me work harder for it.

The (second) 2001 Subaru Outback 3.0 H6

I hadn’t even been able to get the first one on the road yet.  I’d taken care of the front end stuff, but it really needed the brakes done, and some MORON had installed Simbolz locking wheel nuts on this thing.  Go look them up if you wish; they use this idiotic system of keying pins, and you have to get the right key to fit the nut.  It wasn’t so much having to spend $30 to buy the key from a place in Vancouver that pissed me off – it was that when the car got new tires a year or two previous someone was stunned enough to reinstall these things on a nearly-20-year-old beater rather than replace them with regular lug nuts – and then lose the key!  I mean, if you’ve got $10,000 worth of rims, I guess locks make sense, but these were old stock rims.  So between that delay and my having to make a blitz trip (in the ’99 Outback whose engine I’d rebuilt the previous winter) to Long Island (a 5000 mile round trip) to pick up a Supercat 19, next thing I knew it was the dead of winter and I didn’t have a chance to get at it until mid-May 2020.

But, being stupid, I was still watching kijiji and another one popped up in October of 2019.  I got ahold of the guy and took a look at it the night before I headed to New York, and the story was that it had a head gasket leak and he started to take it apart, but soon realized that he was in over his head.  Pulling heads on the older 2.5 litre engines in situ isn’t a big deal – it’s tight, but doable – but I don’t think it can be done with the larger H6, which is quite a bit more complicated (for example, unlike the plastic EJ22 and EJ25 timing covers, this one’s is metal and has 60 screws that need to be torqued).  To really seal it, though, he was working out behind the house on a soft, unpaved parking spot – no pad, no shelter.  So he just stopped in his tracks and left it in pieces – a kit car, though with a body rather better than the first.  I told him I was interested, and when I saw in January that it was still there (not a big surprise), I dropped him a note to begin to arrange towing it home.  The fun happened when we had to settle on the price.  (Before I forget, this one too had those fucking Simbolz locks (and no key) made worse by his attempt to drill one off – a mess I have yet to clean up.)

He was asking $800.  Suzy was (for various reasons) resistant to getting it at all, but if it had to happen (it did), she wanted to see it at $400.  I told her that was a nonstarter, but that I could probably pull off $500.  So when I broached the subject with buddy, here’s what happened (Oh, and did I mention that he was a Jesus freak?  Some weird Christian sect that flash around a lot of Hebrew and shaloms and shit, but think that the Jews got it all wrong.  No matter.):

Me:  You were asking $800, right?  All things considered, I don’t think we can do that, so where can we go?

Him:  Well, I prayed on it, and the answer I received was $600.

Me:  Yeah, that’s still tough.  I too answer to a higher authority, and I’m getting some real heat from her over this.  We have too many cars right now, she just left her job, and it’s a collection of parts – she wants to see $400, but I don’t think that’s fair.  But I’ll tell you what.   I’ll check with her and we’ll settle it tomorrow.

The next day I came back and told him that the answer I’d received was $500, which he accepted.

The moral of this story is that Susan > God.

 

 

Stand-up Comedians.

The Standard Bearers

Doug Stanhope

The inheritor of the Lenny-Carlin-Hicks line; his social commentary is stunningly on-the-mark and utterly trenchant.  I’ve only seen him live once, but I actually, literally plotzed for the first time in my life.  And he gets bonus points for name-checking Derek Edwards in his book.

Marc Maron

I’m very big on Maron too, and not only because he’s maintaining the old Jewish man’s ennui tradition in comedy (though if you agree with the “old” part you can go fuck yourself, because I’m young and he’s younger than I am).

If you don’t know those two, you’ve gotta get current.

These people kill, and you’ve probably never heard of them

Anthony Jeselnik

Jeselnik is a fucking assassin.  With every joke comes a setup that you know is a diversion, but you still have no idea where the kill shot is going to come from.  Most people only know him from the Trump roast (which runs hot and cold and he only appeared on because Greg Giraldo died).  There should be a lot more of his stuff out there, but I think he scares people.

Gary Gulman

So smart, and his bits have depth and detail that draw you in like crazy.  His piece on “Role Play” is amazing because you really have to work to keep up with it and not lose track of which character layer he’s in.  Funny coincidence:  He did a knockout piece on Trump vs. Gates – years before Trump became SCROTUS.  Another comic who should be way better known.

Daryl Lenox

I love this guy.  For a unique point of view (pun intended), you just can’t beat a mostly-blind black American who spent a bunch of years living in Canada.

And now, the unfunniest “comics” in the world

Dane Cook

The Nickelback of standup comedy.  (In “Everything Trump Touches Dies”, Rick White calls Trump “the Nickelback of presidents”.  Applying the mathematical concept of transitivity, then, that makes Nickelback the Trump of music.  I think that about covers it.)

Iliza Shlesinger

I have to admit to having only seen her “Elder Millennial” special, but if it’s typical of her act, I don’t even get why she’s called a “comedian”.  She’s certainly smart and observational, which is what makes this so confusing.  It’s a performance, but there’s no art in it, so it’s not performance art.  What she actually does is lecture, punctuating it with awkward physical poses, annoying voices, and mugging.  During her act she refers to her “jokes”, but there really isn’t anything funny about them.  Not a single giggle from this side of the glass, though to hear the audience you’d think that George Carlin just rose from the grave with a fresh head of long blonde hair.  And if you think I’m just being sexist, here are just a few current funny bitches who slay me:  Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Niki Glaser.  I’d probably add Whitney Cummings to the list, but I don’t think she actually exists because that’s too much of a porn name to believe.

But Shlesinger is rippin’ hot in those high-waisted pants and bare midriff.

Larry the Cable Guy

Of the Southern crew, there are some pretty damn funny guys, including Jeff Foxworthy, Ron White, and Bill Engvall.  Unfortunately, LtCG isn’t among them, though he has been known to tour with them.  Along with Dane Cook, I’ll change the station rather than subject myself to his redneck pastiche.  In his book, David Cross outed LtCG as a complete phony – it’s a hilarious takedown.

 

 

The Stampede Breakfast.

You may know of the Calgary Stampede.  If you don’t, here’s the Cole’s Notes version:

Hundreds of thousands of people flock to the city over ten days for a parade and to attend the carnival midway and rodeo.  Some animals die, and some cowboys get the shit kicked out of them.  People – mostly the locals – dress in “western duds” and descend into a drunken stupor for the duration; very little real work gets done and STD rates spike.  When the price of oil is high (as it hasn’t been for some years), oil companies are flush and hire decades-past-their-commercial-prime former top-40 rock bands to play their parties.  When the price of oil is low they do what they do the rest of the year, which is complain about what a raw deal Alberta and their business are getting from the rest of the country.  Alberta is Canada’s designated Whiny Little Bitch.

Another feature, though, is the Stampede breakfast.  There are hundreds of free pancake breakfasts held in the city and surrounding region by various groups, companies, and organizations for various reasons.  Most are pretty lame – a couple of pancakes with the requisite fake maple syrup and a couple of nasty little breakfast sausages, plus coffee, juice, etc.  At the bigger events, you can line up for this for hours.  I’ve lived here for a long time, so I can’t stand that stuff – my annual limit for those two particular items is generally two of each, and that’s only if I bring along my own fruit syrup.  Freebies normally exert gravitational pull on me, but this is a notable exception.

There are some breakfasts that diverge from that norm, though; the one we’ve been going to is held at a little rural church near where we live.  A couple years ago they really outdid themselves with additions like hams (on the bone!), bacon, eggs, homemade hash browns, and buckets of fresh fruit salad – just great.  That was a peak that they haven’t reproduced since, but their breakfast is still pretty good.

That’s a long setup for a short story, but it’s worth it.  A thing happened there last year that you’d file under “You Can’t Write This Stuff”.  My wife (Susan) and I queued up, got our grub, and headed for a table.  Sat down, started eating, and (inevitably) another two or three women joined us at the table, which required (so I’m told) an exchange of pleasantries.  One of the newcomers – English, as I recall – introduced herself as (another) Susan, which sent my mind spinning briefly into the there-must-be-a-joke-here department.  I speculated for a moment on what might be the collective noun for a group of Susans (and yes, I know of and have listened to Band of Susans.  Used to be on a music mailing list with the guy in the band not named Susan.), first considering “a scourge”, but then settling on “a blight”.  So I asked whether we actually had a Blight of Susans at the table.

The new Susan paused for a beat, then said “You know, that was my maiden name.  And I can’t begin to tell you how much of a relief it was to change it when I got married.”

I’m Sick and Tired of Being Ahead of the Curve.

I don’t think I’m all that smart.  I mean, I’m smart, but I’m under no illusions about how smart.  I’m always the first to say that there are about a zillion people out there smarter than me; I can learn more stuff that way, and learning is always more interesting than just Being Smart.  So I don’t have any special insight, I’m not somehow prescient, and I’m not visited in my dreams by spirits that show me The Way.  I’m just reasonably good at looking at problems and seeing what seem like obvious ways to solve them.  And while you might think that if I have that ability, and sometimes exert it on a given problem before anyone else, it would give me a winning edge, you would be wrong.  I have somewhat of a track record of being onto the right idea years before everyone else, and it’s gotten me bupkis.  Fuck being ahead of the curve.  People who talk about “first mover advantage” don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Virtual Reality

Early in 1991 I got a call from a guy who saw my ad in the Yellow Pages (kids, ask your parents) under “Electronic Design”.  He asked if I knew anything about virtual reality.  VR was still a pretty new, obscure, and fringe thing in ’91, but as it happened I knew some people.  I’d been in Survival Research Laboratories for a few years by then, and SRL was kind of a nexus for new, obscure, and fringe tech in the Bay Area.  People doing interesting stuff tended to drop by the shop; one was Eric Gullichsen, who was running an early VR program at AutoDesk and later started Sense8, we knew some folks at NASA Ames, Jaron Lanier’s VPL may have been running at that point too, but I’d have to check.  So I had about as much awareness as anyone.  Anyway, I met the guy – Jim Durward – who had an idea for a system that would create a shared virtual environment.  To rather abbreviate the story, we started a company (Parallel Universe, later renamed Virtual Universe), I brought in a couple of guys (now ex-friends) to help with the design, and we got to work building a UNIX-based system that would allow up to 96 users to connect over dialup phone lines (remember, this was when about the best you could do was 28.8kb/sec via modem, and DSL/cable Internet connectivity was still about half a dozen years away) and interact in the shared 3-D space.  But our real innovation was to couple a second phone line to the first and use it to carry audio, with a central mixer under control of the UNIX system managing the user’s soundscape.  With our proprietary board and a Sound Blaster installed in the user’s PC, we could steer their stereo audio field around to conform to their visual field.  Basically, we learned that in terms of bang-for-the-buck, we could generate a much more convincing immersive environment by adding realistic audio than by using fancy, expensive, and really-not-all-that-great head-mounted 3D displays.  So we did an embarrassingly-small IPO (though what’s really embarrassing is that in Calgary nearly 30 years later you’re still lucky if you can raise a few hundred thousand to do real technology), filed our patent, and got to work.  And then, in early 1994, the whole thing started its slow slide into the shitter when I was driven out by my emotionally-disturbed now-ex-friends and control of the company was handed over to what surely must be the most clueless bag of protoplasm I’ve ever had to sit across a table from, Lorn Becker.

Long after the company had ceased actual operation, that moron sat on the patent and refused to cooperate with any effort to license it, right up until it expired – a clear violation of his fiduciary responsibility to the then-still-public company and its shareholders.  You can look it up and judge for yourself (Durward, Levine, et.al.), but I remain convinced – as I was then – that there was an awful lot of royalty revenue that should have come from companies like Second Life.  As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, this stupid sonofabitch’s plan never saw beyond using VUC‘s losses and R+D tax credits to offset the profits of his other companies.  For my part, getting the bum’s rush when I did worked out okay; I had enough free-trading stock to get my next company started, though if I’d been really smart and unloaded that stock the instant I was out the door (rather than sitting on it because I had no model for how the company – and its stock – could spiral down) I’d have been hundreds of thousands further ahead.  About five years later the settlement I got as a result of suing them for wrongful dismissal and defrauding me of my patent rights helped buy our place in the country – and brought a memorable quote from my lawyer, Peter Linder:  “It’s one thing to deal with people who are broke.  It’s another to deal with people who are broke and stupid.”  So that was that.  Jim and I have worked together on other stuff since, and we remain tight.  The rest of them should die of cancer, very slowly.

Not that we were the only casualty; I don’t think any of the early VR companies survived.  I don’t recall actually hearing of VPL’s demise, but Jaron writes and makes music these days.  Last I was in touch with Eric he was hooked up with the crown prince of Tonga and running their domain registry.  I think Ono Sendai was involved with Sega‘s VR game system, but I heard stories about their HMD giving people simulator sickness and it went away.  Scott Fisher (from NASA Ames) ran Telepresence Research for a while but appears to have moved on.  I don’t know what became of those guys in Montreal who were doing that rather slick Amiga-based thing.  And, of course, Silicon Graphics rotted out and the pieces flew everywhere.  We used the Virtual Research HMD in-house but I’m sure they didn’t last, nor did the Logitech ultrasonic 3D positioning system it used.   I’m sure that digging around in some old stacks of business cards would refresh my memory as to others, but you get the idea.

Then in March of 2014, Oculus was purchased by Facebook for two billion dollars.

Internet of Things

In 2005, with the two companies I’d been running since 1994 winding down, I brought in a couple of new partners and we started GreenServer.  The idea was simple:  Low power computing targeting media delivery.  That is, a little server with a fraction of a PC’s physical and power footprints with a Bittorrent client for acquiring content, the usual local Windoze/Mac filesharing, and a streaming server; a place for all of your music, video, etc., to reside and the means by which to manage it and stream it out to media adapters – simple.  And since the product’s spin was power savings (vs. keeping  a fat and power-hungry PC running 24×7 for media collection and delivery), we added functions for managing household power consumption, such as shutting down PCs that were deemed idle and monitoring the actual power consumption of devices around the house via small, embedded, networked meters.  For this I was derided as “evil” by no less a shit-for-brains as Kevin O’Leary during two visits to CBC’s Dragons’ Den (a pair of fiascos worthy of their own blog post – one of these days).   After a few years of banging our heads against the wall trying to raise investment capital (including a trip to San Francisco during which fraudsters tried to scam us), we simply gave up.

Marijuana

(sorry, I got distracted here, but I’ll be back to finish this up asap.)