Contractors at Avalon Acton Standing Around

Note:  this is only the last 15 seconds of the leaf-blower guy just standing around with his smelly blower running; he stood there for about 3 minutes before this video; i wish i had captured more.

#LowBidContract.

#AvalonActon

New Meaning for “Reagan Republican”

Ronald Reagan, it turns out, was willing to lie & cheat in order to win the 1980 election:  with the cooperation of Iran, the release of the hostages was delayed until after the election, making the Carter administration look bad and influence the outcome of the election.

That kind of deception is what Republicans stand for.

In a scheme worthy of Richard Nixon, Reagan ripped off the American people — but there wasn’t much direct evidence, until now.

This new development makes Donald Trump the ultimate Reagan Republican.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/19/ronald-reagan-allies-sabotaged-jimmy-carters-re-election-telling/

What Happened To U1LIB.ORG???

On or around Friday 04 November 2022, the website u1lib.org (aka book4you.org) was apparently seized by the FBI/DOJ.  The site was a large repository of ebooks, presumably available for academic use.  No more.

COVID-19 Vaccinations & God

Conservatives in the 1980s promoted the idea that AIDS was a judgement from God visited upon the gay community.  (And that told me all i needed to know about those Conservatives.)

So what are we Liberals to think of people now— in 2021 — who refuse the COVID-19 vaccination?

(And i'm not talking about people whose doctors have told them that they cannot take the vaccine for medical reasons.) 

If vaccine-refusers die from COVID-19 now, is it a judgement from God visited upon the willfully stupid?

Doesn't sound so far-fetched to me.

Get vaccinated; don't be an idiot.

My 30 Seconds of Fame!

 They read my letter on Naked News recently!

Here's the video.

Ciao!

Presti Family Limited Partnership

or

Presti Family Ltd Ptr

or

PFLP

aka
Richard Presti

[Family Partnership, my ass — it’s all Rich Presti, with a nominal contribution from his son, who isn’t responsible for anything i’ll describe here.]

Do NOT rent from PFLP — it’s not worth it. I wish i hadn’t.

Presti Family Ltd Ptr won’t give you your security deposit back. Presti won’t even put your security deposit it into a separate, interest-bearing account, as required by law — he’ll put it into his slush fund and give you as little back as he can get away with.

We had to break our lease with PFLP this past August; but we needed Presti to “approve” it to the local housing authority so that we could take our housing voucher to an affordable unit that had become available somewhere else — we’re both disabled and living entirely off of Social Security payments.

Presti decided to charge us two months market rate rent — $3200 — as a penalty for breaking the lease. And then he turned around and double-rented the apartment two weeks later! That’s fair. And so legal. What a fucker.

When he told us of the $3200 penalty, he said “Don’t worry, you can use your security deposit to pay off half of your loan.” So how much of our security deposit do you think he gave us back? You win a prize if you said “6%”.

Fortunately my credit was ok, and i could borrow $3000. Now i just have to pay it back for the next five years. Now every month, for the next 60 months, i will think about what a money-grabbing whore that Presti is.

He just wants to be a dim reflection of Donald Trump, i guess — all about the money, and not about substance. That’s the legacy Presti wants.

Happy Douglas Adams September To All!

well, a little more than halfway through editing a Word document (created from an Amazon Kindle ebook) of Douglas Adams's The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul to conform to the audiobook he himself recorded for it.

first, i had to clean up the audiobook itself a bit:
• inserting "Chapter X" (where X is a number from 1 to 35) at the beginning of each chapter (borrowing the audio mostly from his audiobook of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and "Chapter 1" from his audiobook of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish);
• repairing a number of words which had gotten cut off halfway through (often at the end of tracks) or were otherwise incomplete — only having the 'hoke'  part of "hoax" but not the 'ks'  sound at the end, for instance;
• inserting small silences between chapters to help with the flow;
• and deleting the commercial branding of the previous (now defunct) copyright holder.

now i'm closely listening to the recording and altering the text in the Word document to more precisely match the recording.

and i'm making footnotes to document each change and/or to give the original text in the ebook that has been omitted or changed in the audiobook; this is the part that takes some time.

like i said, i see this as Douglas Adams's final edit of the book.  next, i plan to do Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and eventually move on to the five books of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series.

when i've finished Long Dark Tea-Time, i may work on some software which could quickly (i hope) move through the AIFF audio files and extract the audio for a given sample of text from the book — sort of an on-demand Douglas Adams voice.  it would be limited to text which appears in the book, but i'd be interested in the results; if it's successful, it could be expanded to include more books as i edit their corresponding documents to match their Douglas-Adams-read audiobooks — that's the main point of creating a text that very closely matches.

Happy September!