The Hat Trick

It's been a good year, folks. I suppose. Still kicking, still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. Though it's looking like I may never reach the age of responsible maturity.

A few things I'm happy about:

I've gotten back into music. Bought an electric guitar and amp and sound augmentation pedal and went to an impromptu get-together with some old friends, played a private party with a new friend, and am practicing to play in my church's Christmas Eve services. Next year, I hope to be employed more weekends than not in some kind of musical venue.

I still write and edit, mostly for an online financial magazine, but sometimes for something called DemandStudios, which is a little harder, but $15 is $15, even if it takes a couple of hours to make.

My urge to volunteer at my son's school took fruit in something called Masterworks Art Program, where a parent, in my case me, goes into class with a bunch of examples of a certain artist's work and tells the class about the artist and leads them in producing an example of that work. I even get to do some of the art myself, just to show the kids that a human can do the stuff.

Music, writing, art--that's the creative hat trick.

I think next year, I'd like to continue the music and add a marathon and the loss of 30 pounds of fatty tissue from my body. See you here this time next year to see how that went.

Pity the poor billionaire

Tiger, take a lesson from Letterman: when you do the nasty, admit it, get it over with, disarm the haterz, because they will maul you, have no fear.

I like Tiger. As a sportsman, there is none better at looking hurdles in the eye and conquering them.

As a person, I lost my respect for him the first time I heard him curse on television because he missed a shot. Every time he slammed his club into the ground in a fit of pique because something didn't go his way, I shook my virtual head. This is how a billionaire acts when he's on display. Pathetic. I can do that and often do, but for far more pathetic reasons, compared to his.

Tiger's also famous for his desire to keep his private life private, and now we know why! Not only is his etiquette on the golf course lacking, so is his respect for his wife and children, not to mention the rest of his family and friends.

When David Letterman got caught in his affairs, no one was too surprised. Letterman is a goof, a late-night comic. Nobody expects him to be a saint, and he never held himself up to be one. Of course, he didn't mean for his indiscretions to come to light on the world stage, but he's a million-dollar a week celebrity, so his screw-ups are news.

Tiger is a world-class athlete, held up by many as a paragon of virtue. Look at all he does for kids and this agency and that agency. And how much money he makes for his sponsors like Nike and Buick. (Do they still make Buicks?)

The more Tiger tries to hide behind his stardom, the worse it's going to be for him and his family. Get it out, dude, get it over with. We know you messed up and the scandal rags are not going to stop till they bleed you dry.

Heavy metal chess

Everyone has wanted to build a chess set out of hardware pieces at one point or another. Okay, not everybody, but anyone who knows that Ace is the place with the helpful hardware man. And a rocking selection of nuts and bolts.

Besides the desire to move chess pieces around a board again, I also acquired knowledge of bolts I'd not known about before. Namely the slotted hex nut, or as it's also known, the castle hex nut. It looks like a crenelated castle wall.

Also learned about the flanged hex nut, along with the flanged hex bolt.

Plus, I learned that half-inch hardware can get expensive, so I went with five-sixteenths instead. And some metric thing I'm not sure what it meant for the rooks. Those were $2 each, which really blew my budget out of the water. (Thanks, Discover Card Rewards.)

Some tips for would-be builders: Ace Hardware has bags and pens so you can write down what you're getting, how many, and how much for each. Don't wait till you've got a pile of hardware before going back to find how much they cost and what they were called. Unless you have an extra 15, 20 minutes.

Keep an eye on your growing pile of hardware while you're looking for other hardware. Somebody might decide it needs put back in the drawers.

Be ready to substitute. Sometimes your list of materials might include something not available at your store. That means being flexible with design options. For instance, the design I was using had something called a long-sleeved hex bolt for the queen and king. No such thing in my Ace, so I went with a group of hex nuts. That gave me a new idea for the final version of those pieces and the bishops.

You've probably seen programs from time to time about sculptors who work in junk, using nuts and bolts to build stuff, some neater than other. Working in the area of nuts and bolts isn't nearly as junky.

I wonder if a cool chess set could be built out of PVC plumbing supplies. You know it could. And probably already has been.

Keeping up with the updates

You may have noticed the blogging hasn't been happening so much lately. What gives? you wonder. Well, I think it's status updates. I would blame it on Twitter alone, the 140-character (including spaces) update system, but since I update my MySpace and Facebook statuses at the same time as my Twitter, I'm going to be generic about it.

Like right now, what do I have to blog about? This and that, but mainly:

Looks like a good night to watch some animated entertainment while I get my week's work set up.

Eight words, 95 characters (with spaces).

After I text message that from my phone, you'll see it on my Twitter, Facebook, or MySpace. Maybe you want to ask me what exactly I'm going to watch, so you comment on my status. And if you do, I get a message tone on my phone telling me that somebody has done something and where.

Just like that, we're having a conversation, and all our friends are able to listen in--read in, to be exact. It's like being at a giant party on the Internet.

There you have it. You can still come here and find out what I'm doing, just as though I were someone whose doings were important, because I have a Twitter feed there to the right. And now and then, I'm sure I'll have a thought that requires more than 140 chcaracters. And spaces.

The Saturation Code

Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT) has saturated most North American and European markets, says a report from Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) Finance, while its attempts to sink its claws into some other parts of the world have faltered. In Germany and Korea, it failed so drastically, it moved out. I remember when the giant came to my old home town in Ohio. The good folks of Jackson would have killed to be able to drive mom-and-pop-store killer away (not to mention the state's four-lane bypass around the town, but that's another story).

But Wal-Mart has more money than most of the civilized world put together, so they'll eventually get into every place they want, just as surely as health-care reform will not result in affordable health care. (Get off the health-care kick, Bob.) (Quit talking to myself.) (You.) (No, you.)

My query is: what happens when every place on the planet is infested with a Wal-Mart, big-box, discount-price store? I know I'm getting ahead of the problem, but you hear all the time--if you read financial news--that companies and Wall Street love it when stores beat their previous quarter, the previous year, the last decade. Stock prices go up. Fat cats convene in teak-tabled meeting rooms and chomp on big cigars. But if the prices go down, they decry the state of the world and call their brokers and shout, "Sell, sell, sell!"

Capitalism may not be the best way, but it's our way, and it's my way, and it works as well as it can, but what happens when saturation comes? How will companies squeeze more profits out of their turnips? Where do our heroes turn then?

Tune in next time for "The Wailing Wall of Wal-Mart" or "I ordered a fritata and they brought me an omelet."