Look and listen, America, to something very simple.
America, YOU ARE THE “1 PERSON” in the schematic above. Don’t turn your head away. That stiff is YOU. The other people are your friends, parents, grandparents.
If you slept in on Daylight Savings Time, then you may have missed that we have another war erupting in the Middle East — Saudi Arabia (through the newly public Aramco which it controls) has lowered the price of its crude, while threatening to increase crude oil production by more than 2,300,000 barrels daily to a total of 12MM barrels per day.
This is a hissy fit on the heels of an unsuccessful OPEC + meeting (the plus being the addition of Russia) attempt to reduce production by 1.5MM barrels.
As always when this group meets, there was a lot of discussion, but no consensus.
I was working with an entrepreneur on a pitch deck. It was a damn good deck, but it had a stock photo that was not the best selection. I mentioned it to him several times, but he didn’t change it.
Please note it is always perfectly fine not to follow my advice. It doesn’t bother me in the least.
We got to talking about the kinds of images one should use — I favor original, fresh, light, pleasant. I like images of people who you would want to meet, or who you think might be like you.
The chap asked me, “How bad could it really be?”
That made me think of this picture of former CIA Director John Brennan.
Do you want to have a beer with this guy? Sit at the same table with him? Does he look like a friendly chap?
This is a copy of a letter I sent to Her Royal Highness, Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, applying for a job at Buckingham Palace. There have been some personnel changes and she is looking outside the box for some fresh blood. Maybe I am that fresh blood?
21 January 2020
Your Majesty,
Thank you, Ma’am, for taking my call and inviting me to present my credentials for the position we discussed. I really enjoyed chatting and think we established a rapport that may come in handy. I am confident I can represent the Royal Family in a manner that will add to the luster of you royals. [Not exactly running the high hurdles with Charles, Andrew, and Harry, eh? JK]
In a hotly contested, early-called election, the United Kingdom has given the Conservative Party of Boris Johnson a resounding victory providing him with a comfortable majority in their Parliament (House of Commons).
Prime Minister Johnson had taken a huge gamble calling for elections two years early as the country was bogged down in a vicious fight to follow the will of the people as demonstrated in the 2016 Brexit vote to part company with European Union. [The Brits were members of the European Union though they kept the British Pound Sterling as their currency, refusing to embrace the Euro.]
This election dissolves any idea of a Brexit do-over vote. It is now settled science that the UK is leaving the European Union.
The major opposition party, Labour, headed by Jeremy Corbyn, was handed a bruising defeat ending with 203 seats to the Conservative’s 364 (there are a total of 650 seats with 649 seats decided, one remaining to be finalized). It takes 326 seats in Parliament to govern.
Corbyn took things poorly, resigning in the wake of the keel hauling. A perfectly eloquent man, Corbyn said, “Ouch!”
The Scottish National Party took 48 seats (which will spark discussion of Scotland slipping away from the United Kingdom) and the Liberal Democrats took 11.
I was sitting here minding my own business — contemplating a new paint job — when my cell phone rang.
“Hello, Big Red Car, this is Hunter Biden. Heard you’ve been talking shit about me.” I could tell he was juiced up and nervous, had an edge to his voice.
I laughed as, in fact, I had not been talking about Hunter Biden. I noted a blog post I had posted back in October and directed him to take a look at it.
There is a difference between the North and the South. One of the differences is the lullabies that Southern babies hear when they are rocked and sung to sleep.
This is on my mind because I have a Southern baby grandchild named Tempe (Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance — shortened to Tempe and graced on many girls in my wife’s family. My wife is also named Tempe.).
Every Southern baby has had their grandmother (and momma) sing Summertime to them. It is a “spiritual” in the genre of the American Southern African American experience, but it was written for the folk opera Porgie & Bess by the Gershwins.
The story is set in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina — a city with which all Southerners have a love affair — and revolves around a street person named Porgy (black, disabled street beggar) who attempts to rescue Bess from the abuse of her violent, possessive lover (Crown) while simultaneously trying to part her from her drug dealer, Sportin’ Life.
About a month and a half ago, I got hacked. That made me focus on the Big Red Car website. It was very frustrating. Lots of time on the chat with support from a bunch of different places — talking to you, AWS.
I changed a lot of things — hosting, security, analytics, CDN, cache, backup, image optimization, fonts, SSL, subscription, SEO — had to. I had let the site get a little overgrown and spindly.
So, I have been doing some work on it. Have three or four more things left to do, but today, I got the speed where it needs to be.
The site is loading in less than a second. For a site this large, that is a superb speed.
I use GTMetrix to measure performance and keep my results. It has taken at least a month, but to see an A-96% on PageSpeed and an A-90% on YSlow with a 0.8 second load time, is pretty damn good.
The smartest thing I did was to turn loose WPSpeedGuru in the person of Alexei Kutsko.
I cannot believe how much better the site does on search rankings. I never really configure it for that, but the speed makes all the difference.
I hope you enjoy it.
If there is some change you’d like me to consider. Drop me a comment. It feels like you do when you finish tying a big, fat, beautiful Monkeys Paw.
Thank you for subscribing.
Something went wrong.