Free Republic

I'll try to get more photos when I go back there tomorrow.

Almost wish I had gone though. That crowd is LOUD! My kind of people.

I was thinking of going over to the rally tonight. I would have been a short hop on the LIRR out of Grand Central

Then I heard that only 16,000 can get let in and there may be some 60,000 there looking for a seat.

I've been to a number of Trump rallies over the years so I'll let some Long Islander get a seat and watch it at home.

I did walk by Trump Tower earlier today and saw all the heightened security around the building. There are large trucks parked outside the front of the building on 5th Avenue and the entire length of 56th street from 5th to Madison is completely shut down as the NYPD and Secret Service have control of that area with guard shacks and plenty of heavily armed personnel.

Here is a photo I took on 5th Avenue right in front.

Well the robots are coming and coming to stay.

This would have happened eventually even without the spiraling minimum wages, getting artificially raised by governments. This legislation merely serves to hasten the process.

It will be interesting to see how society evolves when robots are doing most of the menial labor (and eventually even skilled labor).

Elon Musk seems to think we will go to a universal income. But with no incentive to be productive in society due to having all our basic needs met, what will become of humans?

I like a good beer but I prefer lagers, pilsners, and stouts. I never liked the IPAs.

My wife and I dumped Bank Of America a few years back (when they gave information to the government on their customers who were in DC on Jan 6).

We have done all our banking with a local credit union since. It's been a nice experience so far. My only beef if they don't have much of an ATM network but I rarely have to withdraw cash these days so it's not a big deal.

What do you think is "Communist" about credit unions?

I know. My father was one of them. The only time I saw him in dungarees was when he was doing yard work or working on his car. Even on weekends, he would wear dress slacks, wingtips, and a button down shirt. When he passed away, he had a closet full of ties, many of them dating back to the 1950s and 1960s.

Never saw him even in a pair of shorts. He used to give me such a hard time for wearing them! Said they were for little boys.

Surprised not to see Subarus on here.

My Outback just hit 107,000 miles and still drives like brand new. I expect it will go about 250,000 easy.

It’s crazy loud in that arena. Sarah Sanders is getting hard to hear with all the loud applause for Trump.

Business suits went away pretty quick as well.

When I started working in Manhattan just over 10 years ago, a business suit was required wearing at my office. I felt a little reckless just removing my necktie towards the end of the workday.

Nowadays it is a rarety to see a business suit on my commuter train. The fake COVID pandemic only accelerated that trend as those few who did go to the office (such as myself) no longer needed to dress up as we were basically ZOOMING with the people still at home who probably had pajama bottoms from the waist down.

There is huge enthusiasm in that auditorium.

Not a seltzer but vodka-based.

This is Sons Of Liberty Loyal 9 Lemonade, made from real lemons and packs quite a punch at 9% alcohol.

This stuff goes down easy on a hot day but beware, the alcohol content will sneak up on you fast.

I know that; but a lot of Americans do not yet realize how totally they are tracked. Trump said it in a hedging way that indicated he believes the police do not want that to be commonly known information.

The tracking technology on our roadways is definitely being understated by law enforcement. They do not want us (the citizens) aware of how easily we can be tracked.

There's a reason tollbooths have come down across the country. The sophisticated cameras you see mounted where the toolbooths used to be take super high quality photos of not just the plates but the people inside the cars.

That's why you get a bill in the mail if you don't have an EZ-pass transponder. Nobody escapes the tolls now.

Law enforcement can type a plate number into a database and get an instant readout of exactly what time that plate number drove through various checkpoints.

So if you are on the run, stick to the back roads. Soon enough, even the backroads won't be safe from surveillance.

The Barron on X is apparently real...

@BarronXSpaces is his handle.

He hasn't posted anything on X yet from what I can tell but he's already lined up over 40K followers.

Might have been “Pete’s Dad”

Might have been “Pete’s Dad”

Maybe he was alluding to the SWIFT financial messaging network.

What if Trump was not talking about the pop singer but about the financial system SWIFT?

My list so far...

• #50 - Jack's Mannequin - The Lights And Buzz (2005)
• #49 - The Cars - It's All I Can Do (1979)
• #48 - Lobo - Me And You And A Dog Named Boo (1971)
• #47 - Zach Bryan - Oklahoma Smokeshow (2022)
• #46 - Norman Greenbaum - Spirit In The Sky (1970)
• #45 - Chris Isaak - Wicked Game (1989)
• #44 - Night - Hot Summer Nights (1979)
• #43 - Rocky Burnette - Tired Of Toein' The Line (1980)
• #42 - Emmylou Harris - Pancho And Lefty (1976)
• #41 - Simple Minds - Don't You Forget About Me (1985)
• #40 - Tom Petty - Refugee (1979)
• #39 - Coldplay - Clocks (2002)
• #38 - The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies (1991)
• #37 - Johnny Cash - Sunday Morning Coming Down (1970)
• #36 - Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street (1978)
• #35 - Chris de Burgh - A Spaceman Came Travelling (1975)
• #34 - The Doors - Riders On A Storm (1971)

As I work through my own iTunes Top 50 most played list, I am already noticing that many of my most favorite songs will not be represented.

This is due to iTunes re-releasing albums either remastered or with a "deluxe" version featuring more tracks. I then delete the current version of the album and downloading the new and improved versions, resetting my play count on those tracks back to zero.

For example, you had "Sara" by Fleetwood Mac earlier in your list. Now "Tusk" is my alltime favorite Fleetwood Mac album and "Sara" definitely would have ranked high, along with "Sisters Of The Moon", "I Know I'm Not Wrong", the title track, and others. However, there is now a titanic 85+ track deluxe version of "Tusk" that I have downloaded, erasing all the play counts of earlier versions.

Anyhow, my #34 most played song deserves to be there and it is one of the first songs I remember growing up with back in the early 1970s. There is a personal and creepy story regarding this song that I have posted at length in earlier Free Republic postings over the years but will recap down below.

The Doors - Riders On The Storm (1971)

What makes this song creepy for me? Read on.

I was just 8 years old when this song was released in the summer of 1971. I was growing up in Revere, Massachusetts at the time. A few blocks away from my home was the Ritz restaurant, hard by the Boston and Maine railroad tracks on Revere Street, about a half mile from Revere Beach.

The Ritz (now a Chinese restaurant) at the time was a rather run-down Italian themed restaurant. Revere at the time was mostly a Roman Catholic Italian community and The Ritz was a place to go to get a spaghetti and meatball dinner for just a couple of dollars with all the Italian bread you could eat. I remember going there with my family and wiping my plate clean with that bread. It was more of a bar though, a rough kind of bar where bikers used to go on the way or from the nearby beach.

They also had pizzas that you could take out. When my mother was not in the mood for cooking, she would give me a few dollars to go down to the Ritz to order a couple of cheese pizzas to take home. In those days, you did not phone your order in and there was no such thing as online, obviously. You had to go to the restaurant to place your order and wait for it to get done. If it was before 4PM (when the dining room opened), you had to order at the bar and sit there.

Now in those days, even 8 years olds like me at the time could plant ourselves at the bar and order pizzas to go. Which I did frequently back then.

On this particular day back in 1971, it was one of those very hot, humid days in August and my mother did not want to cook. So my dad gave me a $5 bill to go get a couple of pizzas. As I walked the couple of blocks over there, I noticed that the sky to the west was very dark and there were low rumbles of thunder off in the distance. Seems a cold front was about to come through with a line of thunderstorms.

I arrived at The Ritz and as it was early afternoon and the dining room was not open yet, I had to order at the bar. It was a very dark "dive" bar and I planted myself at a stool in the corner. The usual daytime drunks were there, sipping on their drinks. The bartender was extremely obese, in a wife-beater T-shirt, unshaven and sweating. Air conditioning was still mostly non-existent in those days.

The bartender took my order and slid me a complimentary Coke while I waited for the pizzas to get done. He kept staring at me which was already starting to unnerve me.

As I sat at the bar, the storm began approaching outside and I could hear the thunder get louder and louder. The jukebox was playing, likely something by Creedence Clearwater Revival or Three Dog Night, which were both very popular at the time. Then came "Riders On The Storm" by The Doors, a song I was already familiar with.

By now, the thunderstorm was directly overhead and the thunder from the Doors song was overlapping the actual thunder outside. The dim lights in the bar started flickering and for a short time went out completely. The obese bartender sidled up to me and I could hear his heavy breathing and smell his bad breath as he practically hovered over me. He was probably just looking to protect the one child at the bar but I was totally creeped out just the same. With the power out, the music temporarily stopped and I could hear the pounding rain on the roof as well as the thunder.

After a minute or two, the lights came back on and "Riders On The Storm" resumed playing on the jukebox. My pizzas from the kitchen came out and the bartender slid them over to me with a gap-toothed smile.

I grabbed the pizzas and hustled out of there. The rain had mostly stopped, the sky to the west was brightening, but I still remember running home down the rain-slicked streets while carrying the pizzas and having that "Riders On The Storm" song running through my head.

I would not stop buying beef. That is one of the most nutritious and filling foods you can eat. Get ground beef if you have to. Nutritionally speaking, it's got the same benefits of a ribeye, perhaps even more.

Now I'm a steak guy and my wife and I used to go to steakhouses a lot. Not any more. A decent steakhouse will now charge you upwards of $55 for a single 14-oz steak!

This is where I managed to save a lot of money. Our dining expense used to be more than what we were paying for groceries.

I learned to master making steaks at home using cast iron. A little butter, some chopped garlic, a few mushrooms, and I can make a steak as good if not better than anything you get in a restuarant. I get my steaks from a butcher shop and I'm still saving a lot of money over going to a restaurant for it.

But I can make a quality meal out of ground beef as well. Once of my favorites is an 8-oz homemade patty. Five minutes each side and it's perfectly medium-rare. Then I slide a fried egg or two on top. I just eat it as is, with a fork (no bun as I try to avoid carbs).