Brought to my attention by the Woman of Interest:

Please hear the story of Guy Gabalon's heroic, effective, outside-of-the-box actions during World War II. Marine PFC Gabaldon is officially credited with single-handed capture of over 1500 Japanese during the struggle for Saipan in July 1944!

Then please sign the petition to give him, posthumously, the Medal of Honor that he was owed.

(There have been some grumblings about Gabalon being denied the medal because of his ethnicity. I suspect that the denial had far more to do with him having been incredibly successful using methods so alien to the military.)

There's a fellow who frequently comes to David's Coffee Place who looks and very much sounds like Paul Adolph Volcker. Paul Volcker was the Federal Reserve Chairman who bit the bullet and broke the back of the inflationary spiral that threatened to destroy the American economy (and thence the world economy) in the late '70s and early '80s. (His immediate successor was Alan Greenspan.)

Anyway, I have discovered that this fellow at David's Place spends much of his on-line time playing on Neopets.com. At first, I though this an amusing juxtaposition. But then I asked myself

What if he doesn't merely look and sound like Paul Volcker? What if he is Paul Volcker?

The economy is acting all scary, and maybe Paul Volcker is responding by focussing on Neopets! Or maybe the reason that the economy is going wack in the first place is that Volcker started messing around with Neopets!

Should economists be rushing to Neopets? Should we drag Paul away? I don't know!

To-day's mail brings a catalogue from MAT Electronics. I always enjoy going through their catalogues (though I fear that one day they will break my heart by offering the very Motorola chip that went-out in my Mitsubishi television set years ago, which I was unable to replace through Motorola, through on-line parts dealers, or through Mission Hills Radio & Television).

Catalogue #117 presents one of the Mysteries of Capitalism. On page 101, they are selling two Fluke multimeters, the Model 10 and the Model 12. The description for the Model 12 declares

The Fluke Model 12 is everything the fluke model 10 is and much more!

What makes this claim interesting is that the Model 10 is priced at US$149.50, and the Model 12 at US$149.95. So apparently the marginal cost of much more! is 45¢.

In fact, the explicitly described additional functionality of the Model 12 is that one can hook it to the circuit and walk away, and the device will thereäfter record maxima and minima, noting the time of each. That could indeed be a very valuable feature. In any event, it's a feature worth considerably more than 45¢ to a technician of almost any sort who would have been willing to pop for a Fluke meter in the first place.

I forgot to mention that last night I actually saw a stretch Hummer stage (turning east onto Washington Street from the alley between Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue).

Perhaps some such vehicles have a better use, but I'm inclined to regard them as an example of conspicuous consumption, and therefore as repugnant.

As well as continuing to desire an unusual amount of sleep, I notice that I have a persisting sensation of white noise. I'm definitely ill, though the symptoms remain low-level.

I did, at least, get PHPMailer working for me at PraxioLogic.com. That's good, because I've been approached to creäte a small website for a client, which would use such functionality, and FourBucks are probably the folks to host it, as its traffic should be relatively light and as the client apparently only wants one domain.

It is now possible for you to correct or otherwise to edit your comments to this 'blog, so long as three conditions are met:

• Not more than 30 minutes have passed since the comment were made.
• You must have been logged-in when commenting and be logged-in (with the same ID).
• You must be using a machine with the same IP number as that with which the comment were made (which would typically hold if your connection to the 'Net weren't broken in the interim).

When one saves an edit with Edit Comments XT, one none-the-less is returned by it to the comment-editing form, with no real indication that the change has been made; so confirmation is not ideal. One can go back to the main page and from there again click on the Comments link to double-check that the edit was effected.

David's Coffee Place in Hillcrest has a rear patio and some sort of back room which have long provided meeting places for chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous and similar organizations. Yester-day, I learned that the new owners have applied or will be applying for a license to sell beer and wine. To-day I saw a notice on the front door declaring that, beginning on 1 May, the patio and back-room will be remodelled and no longer available for such meetings.

The notice also indicates that Babycakes is imagined as a bakery and bistro.

David's Coffee Place has been around for about 15 years, but it has only been a few weeks since I started hanging-out here. Now it is apparently to be gentrified. Perhaps I should be glad that I didn't have more time to get attached to it.

Up-Date (2018:01/30): Someone informed me of a change of the domain name for Alcoholics Anonymous, and I've editted the entry to reflect that change. That same someone asked me to include a link to a resource hyperlist from Comlumbus Recovery Center for those dealing with alcohol addiction. That's a bit tangential to the original purpose of this entry, but….

One of the things that I greatly appreciate in my relationship with the Woman of Interest is that when one of us has a joke to relate to the other, it can be described, rather than told.

Each of us likes telling jokes, but sometimes that's too much effort for the occasion — indeed often both for the conveyor and for the recipient. (Much of the time, I just need people to cut-to-the-chase.) On those occasions, the conveyor just sketches the joke in sufficient detail that the other could, if so desiring, reconstruct the joke and indeed tell it.

I may have some low-grade illness. I fell asleep relatively early and quite quickly on Thursday night. Though yester-day morning I awoke from a dream that had left me furious and nauseated (it involved child abuse), I thought that I'd otherwise got enough sleep. But I fell asleep again in mid-after-noon, thinking that I'd nap for perhaps 20 minutes — I left my computer, albeït in its backpack, on the foot of my bed — and, instead, I slept until late at night. And for the last few hours I have been increasingly sleepy.

In other thrilling news, I'm having trouble getting various pieces of PHP code working for me on the FourBucks server that I use for two of my domains, but I'm largely working blind, since I don't have administrative privileges for the operating system itself. One of my subscribers here hasn't been able to add his OpenID to his account here. And I've not been able to get PHPMailer working at PraxioLogic.com.

Yester-day I received an old Haldeman-Julius catalogue that contains a picture of David Oliver Cauldwell. He looked like some cross between a stereotypical Marine and Beaker.

The mail to-day brought four tickets from Television Preview:

You have been selected to participate in a survey whose findings will directly influence what you see on television in the future.

The thing is written to make it seem that the audience will be evaluating a show or shows (and my gut reäction was to be appalled that any of us in SoCal should be asked, it being bad enough that the thinking in Los Angeles has such a disproportionate and otherwise perverse effect). But I did a quick check on the WWWeb, and what I've learned is that the audience will really be used to test commercials, and otherwise be surveyed for their reäctions to consumer products. The shows presented will be old-and-probably-failed pilots or series.

I stopped at La Vache for lunch, and ate too much food. I entered planning to eat a salmon sandwich, and found carrot soup on the menu. I ordered a bowl (rather than a cup), and this in itself was a good choice; but I should then have forgone the sandwich (and its side of mashed potatoes), in spite of the anti-depressant virtues of salmon. I am now parked at David's Coffee Place, attempting to remain relatively inert.

Speaking — well, writing — of David's Coffee Place, my understanding is that the new owners are going to change the name to Babycakes. I think that this new name is a generally bad idea. First, David's Coffee Place (AKA just David's Place) is something of a neighborhood institution — a well-regarded institution — and a wholesale name-change will make people feel as if that institution is gone. Second, I see the particular name Babycakes as the sort of thing associated with something at best briefly fashionable.