Author: Joey deVilla

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It Happened to Me Slice of Life

Sunday morning, August 7, 2022

Sunday’s my day to check the grounds before my daily 10K bike ride.

Aside from some weeding that I’ll need to do over the coming week, the front yard looked good, so I decided to take some photos.

Seminole Heights’ seal, which depicts a two-headed alligatorYou can’t go for a bike ride without a bike. After eight years of pretty regular riding — and near-daily riding since the start of the pandemic — my bike was beginning to show its age. It was getting to the point that it would be cheaper to replace than repair it.

The supply chain for new bikes is a bit thin at the moment, but the local Facebook marketplace had a decent-sized selection. Once I’d filtered out the bikes that people got at Walmart (the bikes are so-so, and they’re usually assembled by the associate who drew the short straw), there were a couple of good picks.

I ended up buying relatively gently-used bike pictured above. It had new brakes and tires, and I got it for less than $200 from someone who lived a few blocks away and rode regularly with my go-to bike repair guy, Jorge, whose business is named Bike Haus (which I highly recommend). It rides quite nicely.

I usually drop by the Seminole Heights branch of Spaddy’s — a coffee trailer with patio area — on weekends for a Cuban toast with cheese and a cold brew with condensed milk.

All in all, a nice morning.

Categories
It Happened to Me The Current Situation

You might want to cut back on socializing for the next couple of weeks

Photo of Joey deVilla and friends at “The Sail”, a completely open-air patio.
The scene at The Sail on Monday, July 25, 2022. Tap to view at full size.

Two weeks ago, on Monday, July 25, I attended a send-off party for StartupBus Florida. Despite being in an open-air location on a breezy evening (there was a thunderstorm later that night), five people who were there ended up sick and testing positive for COVID.

Here’s a photo that shows how open-air the party location, The Sail, is:

I’d hoped that an open-air location would reduce the odds of anyone catching the latest COVID variant, which was proving to be very contagious. Here in Florida, the incoming reported cases had remained steady since the beginning of the summer:

Most of us were there for about two and a half hours. Near the end of the gathering, one of the guests mentioned that they’d started their throat had started feeling scratchy and they were feeling a little ill, and I suggested that they go home and test themselves.

And as a result, 5 people got sick. Two tested positive the following day, another got ill a couple of days later, and another a couple of days after that.

My recommendation: You might want to cut back on socializing in larger groups for the next couple of weeks.

 

 

Categories
Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me

I wore it better

Elon Musk looking like a fatter sadder Hunter S. Thompson in a black cowboy hat and sunglasses
Why go with the “bro-ligarch…”
Joey deVilla posing with accordion and cowboy hat in front of the American Flag ighting display at Voodoo Donut in Austin.
…when you can have the “Joe-ligarch?” (Photo taken at Voodoo Doughnut on 6th Street, Austin, Saturday, July 30, 2022.)
Categories
Music Slice of Life

42 years ago today…

Tony Pierce reminded me that two formative parts of my youth entered the world on this day…

42 years ago, on July 25th, 1980, one of the greatest albums of all time came out: AC/DC’s Back in Black, the band’s first album after the death of original vocalist Bon Scott. Brian Johnson debuted as the vocalist on this album, and it ended up being the third best-selling album of all time.

Brian Johnson now lives a 90-minute drive south of me in Sarasota.

Also released on this day 42 years ago: Caddyshack!

So now you know two elements that warped my youth.

Categories
Money The Current Situation

Someone’s sitting pretty in this economy

Some noteworthy facts from a recent post in Jordan Uhl’s newsletter, I Hate It Here And Never Want To Leave:

  • I’ll open with a direct quote from the newsletter: 75% of middle-income families say their wages are falling behind inflation, according to a new report from Primerica and Change Research. 77% say they’re expecting and preparing for a recession, with 71% already cutting back on spending to help make ends meet.
  • Corporate profits are at 70-year record highs. Since 2020, the after-tax profits made by corporations who aren’t in the business of finance have grown by a trillion dollars:

    Chart: FRED’s “Nonfinancial Corporate Business: Profits After Tax (without IVA and CCAdj)” chart, showing corporate profits since 1970, with the big leap in the years 2020 - 2022 highlighted.
    Tap to view at full size. You can also see this graph at its source.
  • There was a record level of stock buybacks: $882 billion! A stock buyback is the act of a publicly traded company (one that issues stock to the public) using cash to buy its own stock on the open market. This reduces the supply of the company’s available stock, raising its price, which is what shareholders like.
  • The rise in global food prices…
    …has created 62 new “food billionaires” in the past two years.     If you combine the energy-for-biologicals industry (food) with the energy-for-machines industry (what we call “energy”), they’ve grown their fortune by nearly half a trillion dollars in the past two years.
  • I’ll close with another direct quote from the newsletter: “The average S&P 500 CEO received $18.3 million in total compensation in 2021, an increase of 18% in one year. During that same period, average hourly earnings for workers fell 2.4%.”

At the same time, you’ve got the hue and cry from the executive class, with that same old “nobody wants to work” refrain. It’s nothing new, and suggests that the current situation isn’t a labor shortage, but a wages and worker treatment shortage:

Categories
America The Current Situation

“The courage of one’s convictions” requires COURAGE and CONVICTIONS. Josh Hawley has neither.

Photos: How it started (Josh Hawley raising his fist) and how it went (Josh Hawley running away).
Tap to view the chicken-shittery at full size.

Here’s a life pro tip: Live in such a way that your hometown newspaper doesn’t mock you for not having the courage of your convictions, as the Kansas City Star did to Missouri Republican Josh “Brave Sir Robin” Hawley:

One of the discoveries of the January 6th hearings is that after waving his fist in support of the mob who would descend on the Capitol in an act of terrorism and sedition, Hawley was seen in a later video running for his life from that same mob. At the hearings, this brazen chicken-shittery elicited some much-deserved laughter.

That’s one of the challenges of having “the courage of one’s convictions” — the prerequisites are courage and convictions, neither of which Hawley appears to have in an appreciable quantity. He stoked a crowd with a lie, and ran when he had to deal the consequences of said lie.

Oddly enough, Hawley is currently working on a book on a particularly pathetic obsession of his: his somewhat warped view of manhood. Titled Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, it purports to be an antidote for a country that has forgotten the masculine virtues, one of which is taking responsibility. One might think that taking responsibility might include stopping the violent crowd you incited or maybe not inciting them in the first place, but that it would require those pesky courage/conviction things. Like Jordan Peterson’s books, it’s really just another attempt to hustle money and attention from mediocre white men who’ve discovered that they’re nothing special and aren’t handling it very well.

I think the whole thing is best summed up by Michael Fanone, a D.C. police officer who was injured during the January 6th sedition that Hawley encouraged and then ran from: Josh Hawley is a bitch. And he ran like a bitch.

Categories
Tampa Bay The Current Situation

Stay away from Tampa Convention Center this weekend

Why? Because the right-wing student indoctrination group Turning Point USA is holding their Student Action Summit at Tampa Convention Center, and the base is coming out. And these days, with the mainstreaming of what used to be the conservative fringe, that means Nazis are showing up, and the organizers aren’t shooing them away.

Tap to view at full size.

And to no one’s surprise at all, they’re DeSantis fans.

Tap to view at full size.

Oh, and they’re blaming the Jews…

Tap to view at full size.
Tap to view at full size.

For more, see. Creative Loafing’s article, Photos: Neo-Nazis gather outside Turning Point USA summit at Tampa Convention Center.

And before you say “No, this is the fringe,” let me disabuse of that false notion right now. This is the new mainstream, and it’s been part of the alt-right playbook for years now: