A sentimental favorite and on my brain jukebox Top 40; “I Can’t Get Started” begins with the dotted eighth/sixteenth swing translation of the written eighths as the simple C-chord is played in arpeggio. Not that anyone needed to know that. Opening and closing scenes of “Save The Tiger” (Jack Lemmon 1973, written by Steve Shagan) are shown with this haunting lament.
The 1937 version (also recorded in ’36 for a movie soundtrack without the opening flourishes) by Bunny Berrigan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVj0cV1omVo
Snakepit KansasAugust 4, 2019, 4:54 AM
Those were some very interesting designs. I cannot wait for Ghost’s input on such creativity.
AnonymousAugust 4, 2019, 8:34 AM
This one’s my favorite. My enemies would only be able to come at me from the front:
just so no one thinks I’ve lost my mind my comment was related to the lyric from “I Can’t Get Started” noted by the title of Gerard’s post.
ghostsniperAugust 4, 2019, 10:05 AM
Hey Snake – I aim to please.
Don’t mistake that nastiness for “home design”.
Real estate agents are the LEAST knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to anything house or building.
So ya want a little story to go along with it, eh?
Here ya go.
I have designed over 7000 building projects spanning more than 40 years, from simple residential porch additions and interior retail remodeling, to 12,000 square foot custom homes for famous sports stars you’ve heard of and the Sarasota Justice System – courthouse and jail, and the Tampa Bay Stadium. I wrote the book.
I have also been a licensed real estate agent since 1991 though I have never worked in that capacity – I simply wanted the education.
In 2005 I hired the most successful real estate company in the history of Florida to sell our almost new custom home. I had no idea the depth of insanity I was in for. Over the next 6 months more than 300 potential customers tromped through our house, with us under the illusion someone wanted to buy our crib. Silly me. Believe it or not, in southwest Florida, there is a plethora of sub-retarded people running loose that spend their weekends rolling through houses for sale with never any intention of purchasing. They are THAT bored. A dollar to a donut says most of them are not capable of purchasing real property. The real estate agents can’t be bothered to “pre-qualify” potential customers. “Come one, come all, to the the show that never ends!” How many of these people were casing our crib to come back later and rob us? Maybe that Gettysburg brand fireproof steel vault in my home office gave em a clue.
Not only are real estate agents not bothered to pre-qualify customers but they cannot be bothered to do even basic cursory education on what the homes in their current folder are all about. Serious. They had a print out card that stated the number of bedrooms and baths, number of car garage, whether the place had a pool or not and a couple other elementary things. If a potential customer stepped outside that narrow barrier they received, “That’s a good question! I’ll contact the owner and get back to you!” sigh If you can’t answer ALL questions right on the spot you’re in the wrong business. Because our home was designed and built by me it had hundreds of custom features that just cannot be found in most homes and the customers were not being made aware of it. We weren’t getting our money’s worth and we were unsatisfied with Century 21’s Sunbelt service.
Know who sold our house?
My wife. And she has nothing to do with real estate, at all.
But she had a goal and come hell or high water she was going to achieve it.
She bought the domain: http://www.southwestfloridahomeforsale.com , hired our son the IT engineer to assemble the site, and a week later we were getting calls from across the country and around the world. A month later our house sold for MORE than we were asking and my real estate education was complete. We still had to pay $38k to the agency even though they had nothing to do with it.
We moved here to the great white north later that year and we found real estate agents are as stupid and lazy here as they are elsewhere. I’m not sure of the reason for this, except that it must be very easy to get a license so all sorts of nitwits have invaded the field. Just like every other field or profession out there today.
Regarding anything a real estate agent says, don’t. Just don’t. They are the used car salesmen of the housing world. Regarding those appalling house interior pictures, we’ve all known people like that, no? People with more dollars than brains, and the unfortunate souls with no dollars and no brains. Is this a new thing for real estate agents, to stick their fingers in the eyes of their customers? And for that they require a 6% real estate fee? Maybe that’s why they show 35 homes for each house they sell, and then their fee is watered down amongst all the collaborating brokers and multi-listing sevices to where when it’s all said and done they get a paltry $300.
How about this idea, invest yourself into your future and your career and stop being stupid and lazy? Spend an hour educating your customers – the people that are hiring you to sell the home. Be assertive, aggressive even, be smart, be empathetic. Teach the customers what they need to know to be successful home sellers that get the most money they can for their home. Be truthful. This is where being a good communicator comes into play – after all, it’s they only way to have successful relationships with people. For example, if the homeowner has curtain rods installed on strange angles over the large window in the living room tell them that is not a good thing. In the same breath tell them they need to install a set of curtain rods properly. Etc., etc. Explain that these things will lower the expectations of the potential buyers and that will be reflected in their offers. It’s called “Staging”, where the home is brought up to the proper condition in order to warrant a sale. If the customer is unwilling to comply with your educated suggestions then you should let them seek sales service from another company. Believe it or not people wanting to buy a home are not impressed with thousands of listings of homes that are substandard like those in the link.
NoriAugust 4, 2019, 1:45 PM
Good grief. Were the designers/decorators on LSD?
That resin toilet seat would be great if it were filled with scorpions instead of butterflies. For the guest bathroom when unwanted visitors make an unexpected appearance.
Dan PattersonAugust 4, 2019, 1:59 PM
Snakie has it exactly correct: most agents are full of sh** and “sales techniques” and neither are good for much of anything.
Snakepit KansasAugust 5, 2019, 4:59 AM
“sub-retarded” and “used car salesmen of the housing world”. Ghost does not disappoint!
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Camouflage
Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Chimes of Freedom
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
De Breanski
VAN GOGH
Hillegas
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “1054 AD”
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Comments on this entry are closed.
A sentimental favorite and on my brain jukebox Top 40; “I Can’t Get Started” begins with the dotted eighth/sixteenth swing translation of the written eighths as the simple C-chord is played in arpeggio. Not that anyone needed to know that. Opening and closing scenes of “Save The Tiger” (Jack Lemmon 1973, written by Steve Shagan) are shown with this haunting lament.
The 1937 version (also recorded in ’36 for a movie soundtrack without the opening flourishes) by Bunny Berrigan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVj0cV1omVo
Those were some very interesting designs. I cannot wait for Ghost’s input on such creativity.
This one’s my favorite. My enemies would only be able to come at me from the front:
https://main-designyoutrust.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/real-estate-agent-worst-home-designs-photos-13-5d43e6aed29ed__880.jpg?iv=78
just so no one thinks I’ve lost my mind my comment was related to the lyric from “I Can’t Get Started” noted by the title of Gerard’s post.
Hey Snake – I aim to please.
Don’t mistake that nastiness for “home design”.
Real estate agents are the LEAST knowledgeable people in the world when it comes to anything house or building.
So ya want a little story to go along with it, eh?
Here ya go.
I have designed over 7000 building projects spanning more than 40 years, from simple residential porch additions and interior retail remodeling, to 12,000 square foot custom homes for famous sports stars you’ve heard of and the Sarasota Justice System – courthouse and jail, and the Tampa Bay Stadium. I wrote the book.
I have also been a licensed real estate agent since 1991 though I have never worked in that capacity – I simply wanted the education.
In 2005 I hired the most successful real estate company in the history of Florida to sell our almost new custom home. I had no idea the depth of insanity I was in for. Over the next 6 months more than 300 potential customers tromped through our house, with us under the illusion someone wanted to buy our crib. Silly me. Believe it or not, in southwest Florida, there is a plethora of sub-retarded people running loose that spend their weekends rolling through houses for sale with never any intention of purchasing. They are THAT bored. A dollar to a donut says most of them are not capable of purchasing real property. The real estate agents can’t be bothered to “pre-qualify” potential customers. “Come one, come all, to the the show that never ends!” How many of these people were casing our crib to come back later and rob us? Maybe that Gettysburg brand fireproof steel vault in my home office gave em a clue.
Not only are real estate agents not bothered to pre-qualify customers but they cannot be bothered to do even basic cursory education on what the homes in their current folder are all about. Serious. They had a print out card that stated the number of bedrooms and baths, number of car garage, whether the place had a pool or not and a couple other elementary things. If a potential customer stepped outside that narrow barrier they received, “That’s a good question! I’ll contact the owner and get back to you!” sigh If you can’t answer ALL questions right on the spot you’re in the wrong business. Because our home was designed and built by me it had hundreds of custom features that just cannot be found in most homes and the customers were not being made aware of it. We weren’t getting our money’s worth and we were unsatisfied with Century 21’s Sunbelt service.
Know who sold our house?
My wife. And she has nothing to do with real estate, at all.
But she had a goal and come hell or high water she was going to achieve it.
She bought the domain: http://www.southwestfloridahomeforsale.com , hired our son the IT engineer to assemble the site, and a week later we were getting calls from across the country and around the world. A month later our house sold for MORE than we were asking and my real estate education was complete. We still had to pay $38k to the agency even though they had nothing to do with it.
We moved here to the great white north later that year and we found real estate agents are as stupid and lazy here as they are elsewhere. I’m not sure of the reason for this, except that it must be very easy to get a license so all sorts of nitwits have invaded the field. Just like every other field or profession out there today.
Regarding anything a real estate agent says, don’t. Just don’t. They are the used car salesmen of the housing world. Regarding those appalling house interior pictures, we’ve all known people like that, no? People with more dollars than brains, and the unfortunate souls with no dollars and no brains. Is this a new thing for real estate agents, to stick their fingers in the eyes of their customers? And for that they require a 6% real estate fee? Maybe that’s why they show 35 homes for each house they sell, and then their fee is watered down amongst all the collaborating brokers and multi-listing sevices to where when it’s all said and done they get a paltry $300.
How about this idea, invest yourself into your future and your career and stop being stupid and lazy? Spend an hour educating your customers – the people that are hiring you to sell the home. Be assertive, aggressive even, be smart, be empathetic. Teach the customers what they need to know to be successful home sellers that get the most money they can for their home. Be truthful. This is where being a good communicator comes into play – after all, it’s they only way to have successful relationships with people. For example, if the homeowner has curtain rods installed on strange angles over the large window in the living room tell them that is not a good thing. In the same breath tell them they need to install a set of curtain rods properly. Etc., etc. Explain that these things will lower the expectations of the potential buyers and that will be reflected in their offers. It’s called “Staging”, where the home is brought up to the proper condition in order to warrant a sale. If the customer is unwilling to comply with your educated suggestions then you should let them seek sales service from another company. Believe it or not people wanting to buy a home are not impressed with thousands of listings of homes that are substandard like those in the link.
Good grief. Were the designers/decorators on LSD?
That resin toilet seat would be great if it were filled with scorpions instead of butterflies. For the guest bathroom when unwanted visitors make an unexpected appearance.
Snakie has it exactly correct: most agents are full of sh** and “sales techniques” and neither are good for much of anything.
“sub-retarded” and “used car salesmen of the housing world”. Ghost does not disappoint!