Zombie Houses

I am planting the zombie house meme. 

Those are the houses sitting empty and rotting in your neighborhood. The owner died a while back and the beneficiary kids have let it sit for years. 

Zombie Houses are especially bad in CA where the the new owners get grandfathered in at low, low Prop 13 property tax rates. 

Here in my neighborhood the long awaited Zombie House Apocalypse has started as we boomers are dropping like flies and our kids are too preoccupied to sell the house. 

Maybe I 'll start a website where you can register local zombie houses. Then real estate agents can swarm in like vampires after well-aged zombie blood to finish them off.

Story-matic Jukebox

The time has come when I have to say I am idea dry.  But being an old man, I am rich in one brain resource--boring stories. I thought if I let you pick the topic, then you might not run when you saw me coming.

Here they are. Each topic covers about 20 hours of near truth tales:

• How I protected America from Poland for three years, courtesy of the US Army.
• How I worked for NASA and polished satellite skins.
• How I was a Skinnerian rat psychologist.
• How I wrote a couple of great (my opinion) mystery novels.
• How I was blimp pilot for the DSRV submarine.
• How I rode a Schwinn 30 pound bike from San Francisco to New York with a side trip to LA to practice.
• How I was head (no pun intended) incense maker at a San Francisco company in the 70s.
• How I learned to juggle while studying electronics and building tube circuits at City College.
• How I ran a beach umbrella and surf mat rental stand in Ocean City.
• How I met and did half a life with the best wife ever.
• How I was a telephone lineman and saved the wires from evil squirrel teeth.
• How I was surveying a chunk of Maryland until I discovered poison oak.
• How I was Captain Video (my official job title) at Apple for five years.
• How I thought I was going to be a movie director and shoot the great super8 epic.
• How I lived in the French Quarter in New Orleans, hanging with ex-beats and a bunch of boat people from Cuba.
• How I helped professors quit worrying about students using spell checkers on their assignments.
• How I went to a Virginia military college and learned to march, spit shine, wear Civil War style uniforms, and polish massive brass buckles (and do some classes too).
• How I hitchhiked across the US a couple of times and got to know US 40 really well.
• How I built most of the microwave calibration equipment that HP sold to Iran.
• How I went to India, Pakistan, LA, New York, and Mexico and got really sick in each place.
• How I almost became an Air Force pilot until they discovered I was too tall to fit in the plane and had the reflexes of a dead cat.
• How I learned Polish and then 40 years later, finally learned Spanish.
• How I worked my butt off for 30 years in education as my special way to not get rich.
• How I ended up in Oaxaca, Mexico and almost stayed.
• How I wrote Stanford University's Shakespearian staging simulation, dead squirrel simulation, and jet engine simulator.
• How I almost survived 70 years of this stuff.

US History with a nod to Teddy

US History with a nod to Teddy

Talk free, stick the Brits--the Revolution

Talk French, not much of a stick--Jeffersonian times

Talk westward, beat ‘em back with a stick--Jackson

Enough talking, I want my own stick--Civil War

Talk far west, beat ‘em more with a stick--Manifest Destiny

Buy the talk, buy the stick--Gilded age

Talk softly, big stick--Teddy

Talk Hun stuff, Rat-a-tat stick--WWI

Talk talk talk, bury the sticks--Wilson

Don’t talk, don’t stick--isolationists

Talk red, stick the poor--Depression 

Fireside talk, factories full of sticks--WWII

Talk big, biggest frigging sticks--Cold War

Global banktalk, robo-drone sticks--today