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I Like It…But Would Make A Few Changes

Interesting rendering walkthrough…

I would make a few minor changes to the floor plan, however.

I’d put a pocket door between the kitchen and the utility/laundry room so you don’t have to drag your laundry outside in order to get it in the washer. I’d keep the door from the patio kitchen area in place because the connected half bath is useful adjacent to the pool area.

I’d also flip the orientation of the master bath so that the fixtures can share a common plumbing wall and cut the overall cost.

If the overall length of the house is fixed, I’d add a couple additional feet in the little office area at the front of the house by pushing the living room and atrium to the right and reducing the kitchen/dining area (which seems a little excessive). Finally I’d remove the attached dining counter in favor of a traditional table and chairs which could be oriented 90 degrees to how it is currently.

Also, I don’t know if it was a rendering glitch or an intentional design choice in the master bedroom, but how does a flat screen television get incorporated into the wardrobe doors (unless they’re not intended to be full height across the wardrobe’s entire length)?

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I’m Tired Of Dicking Around With Tuners

This is the fourth tuner I’ve acquired since I got my Yamaha amplifier back in 2023. Why, you ask? It’s because I just can’t seem to find one I like that matches the amp. When I originally had this model amp, I had the matching tuner that I bought at the same time. It was nothing to write home about, but it was adequate considering how infrequently I listened to the radio. (In fact, I ended up selling it after I’d briefly moved back to Tucson from San Francisco because Tucson was a radio wasteland.) When I replaced the amp in 2001, it came with the matching tuner again, and I kept them as a set throughout my remaining time in San Francisco as well as my move back to Phoenix in 2003.  I sold both again that summer—not from lack of interest, but rather from lack of funds.

I didn’t want the matching tuner when I replaced the amp in 2023. I wanted something different. But different turned out to be problematic. Thankfully second-hand tuners (even Yamahas) are dirt cheap, and this allowed me to experiment a bit.

Last year I thought I’d settled on one I could live with, the T-7. It arrived with some issues, and for the most part I was able to fix them myself. But it needed some major work done (despite replacing the battery that powered the preset memory function, it would still lose its mind if it had been turned off for more than a couple days, indicating it needed work at the component level—something I am definitely unqualified to do). Looks-wise, it was a good match to the Yamaha, but and annoyance of making sure it was powered on every few days just to recharge its aging capacitors was just one. more. thing. I didn’t want to deal with.

I loved the look of my CD player. So I wondered what the Yamaha tuners from that era looked like. Bingo! The second to top of the line model caught my attention, and five Franklins later, it was mine.

I knew the key to getting good reception in this house was the coax antenna I got for the T-7. I attached it to this TX-930 and…WTF? I had one bar of reception on the only two stations I listen to and no stereo reception whatsoever on either one.

This tuner had funky antenna connections, so while I had one of those old coax adapters like you once needed for televisions back in the day, I was thinking that maybe that was the culprit. So I ordered a proper adapter from Amazon. (Yeah, yeah, I know.)

The adapter arrived today and after hooking it up, I got the same result. Then I remembered that among the numerous other issues with the old T-7, it too had  difficulty receiving stereo as well—until I squirted some De-Oxit into a few of the internal pots and gave them a good exercising..

So I popped the cover on the TX-930…

…and did the same. It wasn’t a miracle cure (I’m still only now getting two bars of reception, but apparently that’s enough to trigger the stereo detector circuit and it kicks in. I mean, both stations sound great, and since that’s all that really matters I can live with it—especially considering how I actually listen to radio these days.

I like how the unit itself fits in with my other components, so hopefully this one will be sticking around a while.

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Dumb With A Capital B

From Palmer Report:

When Donald Trump announced earlier this week that his son Donald Trump Jr was getting married, he initially appeared to say that his son was “someone I’ve known a very long time.” Upon closer inspection, a mumbly and barely coherent Donald Trump actually said that his son has “got someone I’ve known a very long time.” Not much better. Trump clearly has no idea what the woman’s name is, in spite of how long he’s known her.

Somewhere in there Trump revealed that he wasn’t going to attend his son’s wedding, blaming his presidential duties. Then his babysitters reportedly booked a trip for him to his own resort in New Jersey for the weekend. So he’s got time for that, but not time to go to his son’s wedding. Or maybe he’s just not well enough to travel to the Bahamas. Given that his trip to his resort has since been canceled, who knows? Something isn’t right with him.

But the larger underlying story here may be that Donald Trump simply can’t remember anything. And not in a forgetful, aging brain, “I can’t think of the word I was about to say” senior moment kind of way. No, this is something different entirely. It’s not that Trump momentarily couldn’t remember his son’s bride’s name. It’s that he has no recollection of having ever known it. How do we know this?

When Trump tried to give a speech yesterday, he came to the word “dumb” and then stopped to announce that a lot of people don’t know that the word “dumb” has a “b” on the end of it. No really, he said this. And it wasn’t a one-off, either. Recently Trump came across the word “sea” and then stopped to announce that a lot of people don’t know the word is spelled “sea” when referring to a body of water. Before that he announced that he’d never heard the word “groceries” in his life. Before that it was “corner store” that he’d never heard of.

No one would ever describe Trump as being particularly literate. But he’s certainly seen the word “dumb” enough times in his life to know full well that it has a “b” on the end of it. He also knows full well that “see” and “sea” are pronounced the same. And he’s spent a lifetime hearing words like “groceries” and “corner store” even if he’s never done his own shopping in his life. He knows these words. Or at least he did. But not anymore.

It’s pretty clear what’s happening here. Trump’s brain is dying one area at a time from dementia, and in the process he’s losing an entire lifetime’s worth of memories and experiences. His dying brain clearly no longer has any recollection of any of the thousands of instances in which he’s seen the above words. That’s all gone. And so when Trump is seeing these basic common words now, what’s left of his brain thinks it’s seeing them for the first time. Hence why he’s so surprised to learn how some of them are spelled.

. . .

Trump is trying to deflect his own frustration and insecurity by projecting all of this onto unnamed other people out there who have no prior recollection of having ever seen the words “dumb” or “sea” in their lives. And yet this fully senile individual, who has now lost most of his lifetime’s worth of recollection, is somehow President of the United States.

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