August 2020 • kemeny.ca | Website and Blog of Horatio Kemeny

August 31, 2020

Numbers are out, and they’re pretty-much what was to be expected… relatively consistent, but slowly creeping upwards. Dr. Henry today talked about it with an interesting spin… that when this all began, we answered the call, did what needed… and it worked.

Then… we purposefully took our foot off the pedal a bit… took the Summer off, as it were… hung out, visited friends, had a good time.

But now, as before, it’s time to take it seriously again, and we know how to do it because we did it successfully the first time. The case counts we’re seeing are higher than ever, but it’s no reason to panic. Fair enough… the first time around, nobody really knew what was coming… and that, possibly, despite our best efforts, this whole thing could blow up.

There doesn’t seem to be that sense of urgency this time around… which isn’t necessarily a good thing. We think we know what we’re dealing with, but it was a lot easier back in the Spring, when we weren’t heading into “respiratory season”.

The fact is, given all of the social distancing and masks and care, “respiratory season” really shouldn’t be as big a deal this year. The precautions we’re taking against transmitting C19 should prevent common colds and flus from spreading as well. We shall see.

I was curious to hear Dr. Henry’s response to a question that was sure to be posed to her today, related to the TV ad she’s in which you may have seen… where she’s in a completely unrealistic classroom set-up, answering kids’ questions. It was, in fact, the first question asked.

The classroom has like 6 kids in it, all spaced out… there’s a sink, for hand-washing, off to the side… all of it not looking like any B.C. classroom any local teacher has ever seen. Her answer was that indeed, it was just a comfortable setting for kids to have their questions answered. There was no intent to imply that this was the way classrooms would look. Hmm.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:10-07:00August 31st, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Fact, Question, Dr Bonnie Henry, COVID-19, British Columbia, Masks, Numbers|3 Comments

August 30, 2020

No pandemic numbers to update, but let’s talk about something relevant in my last 24 hours… my involvement in the World Series of Poker, which was going really well, until… suddenly… it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, that is the nature of the game, and there’s actually something relatable to the world in general, especially these days.

In tournament poker, unlike cash games, you play until you have all the chips (and win) …or you bust out with nothing. Often, in tournament poker, you’re put in a position where it’s blatantly obvious what you should do, but plain old (good or bad, depending who you are in the story) luck will have something to say about it.

Even in the most extreme and obvious cases… and here’s the math on one of the most extreme examples… things can (and do) go wrong.

Let’s say it’s just you and me battling against each other in a hand. You have a pair of Aces, the best possible starting hand. I have a 2 and a 7 of different suits, which is generally the worst starting hand. For some misguided reason, I think you’re trying to bluff me with whatever you did to kick-off the hand, so I go All-In on you, meaning I bet everything I have… not because my cards are any good, but because I think you don’t have anything that good, and as per what I wrote yesterday, this is a game of money played with cards, not the other way around. As long as you think I have something better than you, you should throw away the hand.

But instead, this scenario is a dream for you. Someone pushing All-In, while you have pocket Aces. You call instantly, and are even further delighted to see my awful cards. Here’s the math: After running 5 board (common) cards, you should win 88% of the time. I, through sheer luck, will win 12% of the time… having hit 2 pairs or 3 of a kind or who knows.

And that’s the thing… one out of eight times in that dream scenario, you will lose. And it will feel like someone sledgehammered you in the gut… and if you visit the hotel bar at any poker tournament, you will see an ever-increasing group of gut-sledgehammered people wandering in to drown their sorrows and tell anyone who’ll listen how they just got completely screwed by some idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

I will spare you all the details of exactly what busted me out of “The Big One” this year, but there’s no expert that’d tell you I did anything wrong. I got all my money in with a much better hand, and the other guy got lucky. In a real tournament, “IGHN” – I Go Home Now. Silver lining of course… I already am home. And instead of having a bunch of drunk, depressed poker players to make me feel better, I have my dog licking my face.

What’s relatable? That sometimes, doing the exact right thing… doesn’t yield the results you were hoping for or expecting. You’re wearing a mask, you’re social distancing… and somehow you caught the bug. It’s happened. Bad luck. But in no way does that negate what you (and everyone else) should be doing. Knowing that sometimes things aren’t going to work out is no reason to not do the right thing in the first place.

And, for what it’s worth, there are still some smaller WSOP events I might jump into. If things go well there, I assure you, you’ll hear about it. Kind of like the pandemic… when that starts going well, rest-assured… I’ll be here to tell you all about it.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:11-07:00August 30th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature, Our Dog|Tags: Masks, Game, Numbers, Money, Relevant, Work, Math, Pandemic|4 Comments

August 29, 2020

No AB or BC numbers today (or tomorrow)… so, like waiting for that final “river” card in poker, we wait to see how the hand plays out on Monday.

Indeed, poker is on my mind because I’ve spent the better part of today (and will continue into the night) trying to advance a bit further in the World Series of Poker Main Event. It’s all online this year, which has its advantages and disadvantages.

The biggest advantage of course is being able to sit at home, comfortably, and scream at the computer and throw your mouse at the wall in frustration when appropriate to do so. I haven’t done the latter, but plenty of the former… certainly something you can’t (and wouldn’t want to) do in a real cardroom.

If you’re only familiar with the game of poker from what you’ve seen on TV, you might have a bit of a misguided notion… but here’s the deal: Poker is not a game of cards which you play with money. Rather… it’s a game of money which you play with cards. It’s a subtle distinction, but it makes a huge difference.

Watching on TV, you’d think most hands are people throwing their money into the pot and hoping for the best as the cards get dealt. Certainly, that does happen… perhaps one out of ten times. The other nine times, all the poker playing takes place before any cards are seen… or just a few. It’s 80% luck, 15% mind games and 5% math.

Everyone knows the math, and the 80% luck aspect can be rolled out of the equation… other than it serves to level the playing field to the extent “good” amateurs like me can go toe-to-toe with the pros for a while, but eventually they’ll get caught by that intangible 15% of mind games. There’s a reason that, after 5,000 people have entered a tournament, you always wind-up with a lot of familiar names in the top 500… the guys who can stare at you from across the table; stare into your soul and make you think exactly what they want.

To some extent, not having that be a part of it… helps a bit. Nobody can tell what’s going through my mind while it’s counting down, waiting for me to do something. For example, at this moment, for the last two minutes, I’ve been typing here while some guy in Italy put me All-In and is waiting for me to Call or Fold. I already know I’m going to Fold, but he can wait.

If we have to wait till Monday to know what's going on, he can wait 120 seconds extra.

And with that, the break is over — I will gratefully accept your wishes of good luck and let you know tomorrow where I'm at.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:11-07:00August 29th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Travel Stories, Sports & Gaming|Tags: Italy, Money, Game, Numbers, Mind, British Columbia, Math|10 Comments

August 28, 2020

To be honest, not great numbers today, if you’re looking at new cases… as we head into the weekend, today’s new-case counts are the highest ever, here in B.C… and in Alberta as well. The only positive thing about that, one would hope, is that it serves as a wake-up call. We’re presently heading in the wrong, direction… albeit slowly. And now is the time to address it. We can at least appreciate the transparency with which we’re handed this information. That’s not the case everywhere.

The U.S. election is 67 days away, and Donald Trump needs to make sure things look as good as possible during that time. All other issues aside, his continued waffling and ineffectiveness with respect to managing the pandemic (the U.S. response is now ranked 2nd-worse on the planet, only slightly better than the U.K.) has made him look awful, no matter what he says. His insistence that things are going well, and it’ll soon be over and all that… most people are wising-up that this is far from the truth.

He’s taken two significant steps in trying to put lipstick on this particular pig. One is that the testing data no longer goes directly to the CDC. It goes to the White House, where it’s compiled, curated and released to the public. The other is his strategy of testing less… because, you know, the less you test, the less positive results you get… and the better it looks. Duh.

The combination of those two things has led to a significant decline in positive test results.

If you average the number of positive tests in the U.S. (and Canada, in [brackets], whose population is about 1/9th the size), starting a month ago, the 4 subsequent weeks were:

56,061 [395]
55,197 [382]
47,356 [377]
42,872 [425]

Wow – those are some great American numbers… look at that downward trend, even as Canada, at best, stays flat… or goes up a bit. Let’s hope some aide doesn’t jokingly suggest to The President to cut testing altogether… because what’s better than zero positives!

Of course, when reality checks in, things look a little different. Here are the daily deaths averages for those same time periods:

1,053 [5]
1,095 [7]
998 [6]
1,059 [7]

Remarkably consistent. No matter how you try to hide the numbers with respect to this disease and its spread, it’s hard to hide the deaths. Those numbers are beyond the reach of the White House to “manage”.

The President of the United States may not be aware that there are two things in life that are a certainty… death and taxes. You can’t escape either….and history will not be kind in exposing his attempts to cheat on both.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:41-07:00August 28th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Politics, Business & Economics, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Alberta, Respect, Canada, United Kingdom, President, United States, Numbers, Testing, Data, American, Deaths, Pandemic, Hope, Trump, Population|7 Comments

August 27, 2020

In school, you could always tell who was left-handed. It was all the students whose left hand had an accumulated smear of blue ink running down the left edge of their hand; you know, the edge closest to the paper. When you’re doing cursive writing and dragging your hand across the page, that’s what happens. One of the many perks of being left-handed.

Needless to say, my handwriting was awful, and the resulting pages of in-class effort often resembled, as one teacher once told me, “a sloppy dog’s breakfast.” I’ve never met any left-handed people with good handwriting. For the most part, I switched to printing in ALL CAPS, something that seems to be pretty common these days, but I was doing that decades ago, when it was barely tolerated. Teachers would question it.

“Why do you write like this?”
“So you can read it.”

My dad would’ve been left-handed, had he been allowed. He was forced to sit on his left hand while learning to write, though he hit left with tennis and kicked left with soccer. He’s the one who taught me all-caps printing thing.

Back in elementary school, while I wasn’t forced to write with my right, there was little accommodation otherwise. For example, every single baseball glove owned by the school was for right-handed people. Catch with your left, throw with your right.

I throw very well with my left. I can’t throw at all with my right… the result being, I was always the goof who’d catch the ball, and attempt to quickly remove the glove, the ball from it, and then throw it. It’s ridiculous. I spent all my time on the field praying the ball wouldn’t get hit my way, because every time I had to make a play, chances were it’d be a botched mess.

But among all of those failed, miserable, laughable screw-ups trying to field a ball, there shines this particular moment (and apologies to those who don’t know how baseball works, but I’m sure you’ll get the gist of it):

There was this player… Michael Finch… truly a great ball player in comparison to the rest of us. He was an actual Little-League star; we were a bunch of hacks. And every time MF came to the plate, he’d swing on the first pitch and launch it into the stratosphere. Every single time. And he’d hit it so far that there was no way to play it. It’d either go soaring over everyone’s head, or you’d be so far out that there was no way to make any play. Either way, he’d already have rounded the bases by the time the ball made its way back to the infleld.

On this particular day, our team was ahead by a couple of runs going into the bottom of the last inning, but they’d loaded the bases, and even though there were two outs, it was MF himself coming to bat. “Oh well…”, I thought to myself, “We almost won.”

I was somewhere out in right field, far away from where he’d typically hit it anyway, but I didn’t want to be part of the game-losing play. I was muttering that mantra to myself… “pleasedonthitittome pleasedonthitittome…” as he stepped up to the plate, wound up and, as usual, uncorked on the very first pitch with a tremendous crack of the bat. But this time, unlike every other soaring, towering arcing cannonball, this one was a missile… a line-drive, in my direction.

I wish I could say I made some amazing, diving play… but the truth is, it was coming directly at me. I took one step forward and then put up my glove, more than anything to shield my face.

It’s good think I took a step forward; had I been standing still, I think the momentum would’ve knocked me backwards. The ball hit my glove so hard I couldn’t have dropped it even if I’d wanted to; the ball’s leather seemed to fuse with that of the glove. My hand exploded in pain, but I barely noticed. I stood there for a moment, staring at my glove — and the ball embedded in it — with the same dull surprise of man who’d just accidentally slammed the hood of the car on his hand.

And then I was surrounded by my team, all cheering wildly as if I’d just returned from the war. I recall seeing MF just dropping the bat and walking away with his astonished frustration. I remember the coach from a distance, giving me a huge smile, nod and fist pump.

For the next several days, all sorts of random people I didn’t know… other students, staff, and even (gasp) girls were coming up to me…

“Hey, nice catch”
“Way to go”
“I heard you made a nice catch”

It was, without a doubt, my 15 minutes of fame. I faded back to obscurity after that, but obviously I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t know where Michael Finch is these days, and I doubt he remembers it, but it meant a lot to me when he came up to me afterwards and said the same thing… “Nice catch.” He meant it. In the grand scheme of things, that little event was nothing to him, but he realized how much it meant to me. Mike – if you’re out there somewhere – cheers.

And…uhh…. this posting was supposed to be about left-handedness, but somehow I got lost along the way. I was going to talk about how even though only 10% of the population is left-handed, 6 out of the last 12 U.S. presidents were as well. And that a similar over-representation finds its way onto other lists as well… writers, painters, Nobel Prize winners.

But you know what – you can Google all that, if you’re interested… this is already long enough… and there’s probably a pandemic-related connection to make… perhaps something like… even though it’s looking like things are setting up for a disaster… it all turns out ok.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:42-07:00August 27th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Cars, Population, School, Remember, Question, Pandemic, Game|0 Comments

August 26, 2020

As a kid, I rode my bike all over the place… and when I was riding around the streets of Kerrisdale, I’d usually go by the Kentucky Fried Chicken on West Blvd. near 45th. I wouldn’t go in… I’d just coast by slowly and inhale the heavenly fumes emanating from within. Rumour has it that they used to (still do?) pipe out the smells to attract people. Whether it was on purpose or not, who knows… either way, it works very well.

The history of that entire chain is interesting. Everyone knows it was Colonel Harland Sanders who created the whole thing, but what most people don’t realize is that The Colonel was 62 years old when he launched that first franchise. He died at age 90, so that last 28 years of his life was quite the wild ride. Not that it wasn’t before that; on top of the usual assortment of early-century jobs (farmhand, dishwasher, painter, blacksmith-assistant, many trainyard jobs), Sanders became a lawyer… and the future of fried chicken as we know it might have been quite different, had his legal career not come to a crashing halt… and that’s a good way to put it. Sanders got into a serious disagreement with his own client… in a courtroom… which led to an actual courtroom brawl. That destroyed Sanders’ reputation, and he ended up moving back home with his mother. Back to work… labourer, life-insurance salesman, ferry-boat operator, lamp manufacturer, tire salesman, service-station manager, hotel operator.

It was in that hotel that he perfected his secret recipe, and from there, as they say, the rest is history.

Managing the entire massive enterprise was too much for Sanders, so he sold the whole thing a few years later, but held on to the Ambassador role we all know so well. He also hung on to all of the Canadian rights, moved to Mississauga, and collected franchise, royalty and appearance fees for the rest of his life.

In the early 90s, Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed its name to KFC. If was of course known as that colloquially, long before that. But they made it official. And the reason they really did that was to remove the word “Fried” from the prominence in the name. That was when “Fried” went from being yummy… to being unhealthy. Nothing else changed; same chicken, same cole slaw, same biscuits and gravy… but hey, we won’t remind you that it’s fried, nor will we remind you that it’s perhaps not as healthy as you may have hoped.

In the last couple of days, KFC has dropped the “finger-lickin' good” slogan. Again, not because the food has changed. It is, still, undoubtedly, finger-lickin' good… but in these days of C19, they’ve decided that’s a poor message to promote. I’m not sure most people need to be told not to lick their fingers, but ok… I can see someone suing KFC for $50 million, claiming they contracted C19 because, you know, they said I could lick my fingers… or something like that.

Maybe they’ll never bring the slogan back. Maybe they’ll never put the word “Fried” back in the name. Sign of the times; but it doesn’t change anything. It’s still Fried and it’s still Finger Lickin' Good… just like it was before C19, and just like it’ll be after.

Optics – which applies to so much these days. The underlying issue hasn’t changed; just the messaging. Don’t fix things that aren’t broken… just fix things that might make it look like they are.

Is this a good time to talk about the messaging behind masks and social-distancing? Probably not. The people who’d tell you masks don’t work and social-distancing is nonsense and it’s all a hoax… well, I suppose they’re the ones who’ll continue to lick their fingers in defiance.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:42-07:00August 26th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Masks, Work, COVID-19, Future|8 Comments

August 25, 2020

We’ve all heard the joke about the guy who calls in a computer expert to fix some problem. The expert comes in, hits a few keys, problem solved. He then hands the guy a bill for $1,000.

“Outrageous!!”, screams the guy, “How do you justify that?!”

“$1 to hit the keys, $999 to know which keys to hit.”

I was reminded of this joke, dealing with some emails today.

Actually, a somewhat-related story from ages ago… a prof telling me about how when he used to work for some big company back in the 1960s, and they had some fancy, big, expensive IBM adding machines… which were available in three different models… and to simplify things, it was something like the basic model cost $1,000 and ran 1,000 calculations per second. The next model up cost $2,000 and ran 2,000 c/s… and the fanciest model cost $3,000 and ran 3,000 c/s.

Those numbers are off, but you get the idea. And, IBM offered upgrades… if you wanted to go from 1k to 3k, no problem… just pay the difference.

These days, where everything is digital, this is easy to do. Most software can be upgraded online.

But how did that work in the real world? As he told me, when they upgraded from 1k to 3k, an IBM mechanic showed up, broke the official IBM seal, used an IBM-specific tool to open the machine… and then moved a belt… from one small pulley to a bigger pulley. It took two minutes.

Exact same machine… like, identical. Just running faster. Functional pricing at its finest.

If you watched that happened and didn’t quite understand the engineering and backstory, you might feel like it’s a complete rip-off… but the truth is the exact opposite. The guys paying the bills just want a faster machine, and they got it (instantly). How it got there doesn’t matter.

The expert that came in and restored that one corrupted operating system file… that suddenly fixed everything… how much was that guy worth?

Real expertise has a cost, whether mechanical or digital. Lifetime accumulation of knowledge and experience is worth what the guy (or company) providing it thinks… not what you think, just because it looks easy. When it comes to real expertise, typically… the easier it looks, the harder it actually is.

Yadda yadda… it often makes sense to listen to experts; it's often more than just a fancy opinion.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:43-07:00August 25th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report|Tags: Numbers, Understand, Work, Idea|1 Comment

Kemeny Korner – August 24, 2020

Did you know I have an intersection named after me? Don’t look for any official signage… it’s all very informal, but legendary in the history of my school to the extent that it still gets brought up… from an event that was decades ago.

The school, being right next to the UBC Endowment Lands, uses those trails in the forest extensively. Wander or bike those trails during school hours, and you will often run into a group of depressed Saints boys slogging through the muck. They’re beautiful trails, those that make up Pacific Spirit Park… but not when you’re forced to run them in freezing December rain.

On this particular day, in the Spring of 1983, there was some sort of cross-country race for the whole grade. Somehow, I’d managed to get out of running; in hindsight, as miserable as that might’ve been, it would’ve been preferable to what happened…

I was assigned the corner of 29th & Imperial as a spotter, to make sure cars were aware there was a race running by, and to be careful. So I made my way out there before the race, and just walked around, sat around, wasted some time.

If you’re not familiar with that particular intersection, it’s a hairpin turn… at the end of the straightaway of 29th Ave, as it turns into a beautiful short cut through the forest of Imperial Ave, all the way to 16th. If you’re approaching it from the east, it basically looks like you’re approaching a dead-end, but then there’s a sudden sharp turn to the right. If you’re approaching from Imperial, and you’re not expecting it… it goes from an uninterrupted, undivided forest road… to a sharp left turn, back to reality. The signage from both sides is supposed to slow you down to 20km/h. It’s that sharp.

On this particular day, Chevrolet was on campus at UBC, allowing students to take cars out for a test spin. This was long before L and N and whatever restrictions… got a license? Great, good to go.

Some guy at UBC packed his three closest friends into the little Chevy, flew down 16th, turned right on Imperial and kept the speed up… right up to that intersection. Police reports and skids marks and all that imply he hit the hairpin at 80km/h. He tried to make the left turn, but there was no way. He hit the concrete curb thing, flew over it – fully airborne briefly – before slamming head-on into a tree. What’s left of that tree, the dead stump, is still there.

Unfortunately for me, I happened to be sitting on that concrete curb thing… and looked up just in time to save my life, but not in time enough to avoid getting hit. I sprung up and dove to the right, but the car clipped me and sent me flying about 20 feet. I landed with a thud in the forest, and avoided going head-first into a huge boulder by less than a foot.

I wound up with two broken vertebrae and plenty of bruises and cuts… and, as it turns out, two broken back bones is better than just one, because it dissipated the force of me slamming into the ground. It otherwise might have been a broken spinal cord, and a whole different story. Or worse.

This all happened before the race. By the time the guys went running by, it was a full-on accident scene… cops, paramedics, a couple of ambulances. Nobody was hurt as badly as I was… still lying on the ground being tended to when all of grade 10 went running by… many of them looking curiously at the car embedded into the tree… and stopping abruptly when they saw me. I may have set the record for hearing the most “Hey, are you ok?” over the shortest period of time.

Anyway… yes, thanks… I’m ok. After several months of rehab and all that. Painful as hell at the time, but like the pain we’re all going through right now (see, there’s always a way to make it about the pandemic!), I made it through all of that ok…. as hopefully everyone reading this will as well… eventually.

And be sure to visit Kemeny Korner™ next time you’re in the area!

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By Horatio Kemeny|2021-07-06T16:46:13-07:00August 24th, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Follower Favourites, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Pandemic, Cars, Country, School|15 Comments

August 23, 2020

On one hand, I’d like it if B.C. and Alberta, like they used to, reported numbers over the weekend… it’d help keep things up to date… and I like accuracy. On the other hand, if one or both resorted to that, it’d imply things are getting out of hand enough that it’s important to do so… which means, for now, I guess we’re happy to have to wait for Monday. Even today’s U.S. numbers look suspicious (I’ll correct everything later, or tomorrow).

Even so, unraveling the weekend data into component bits isn’t always easy when, sometimes, single clumped numbers are reported on Mondays. “356 new cases and 5 deaths since Friday.” Great… Where? Who? When? This is like the mechanic saying, “Yeah, we fixed everything… that’ll be $4,500” and you asking “What and why!? What did you do? Where’s the breakdown of the parts and labour??” and they say, “Yeah… well, don’t worry about it… it’s kind of technical and very complicated.”

I do worry about it; even if I don’t understand what they’re talking about… even if it’s complete B.S…. “Yeah, see… the muffler bearing was rubbing up against the flywheel bracket… and your car… it’s a model without an exhaust impeller, so we had to machine not only the suspension elbow and rotary pistons, but also replace the fuel pump linkage.” I’d prefer that nonsense to just a single final obscure total.

Speaking of cars… here’s the story of my first car…

I bought it in 1986. I’d been saving up money over the years, and was actually still a couple of thousand short for what I wanted… when, that Summer — and all the racetrack people here will appreciate this – I hit the Sweep Six. This is the wager at the track where you try to pick the winning horse in six consecutive races. It’s obviously hard to do, and very lucrative when you manage it. The few thousand dollars I picked up for that put me over the top.

I paid cash, exactly $9,200 for that new red Ford Mustang LX, and over the next 12 years, put over 280,000km on it. I could write a book on all the memories that car provided me.

By 1998, it was time for a new car… and I’d been so happy with this one, the next one was also a Mustang… a blue 1998 GT.

The old one sat in my parents’ driveway for a while… my intention was to sell it privately, thinking I could get a lot more for it than the trade-in value that I’d been offered. It sat there for weeks… months… my parents over time wondering when I’d remove it, gently asking when I’d sell it, implying in stronger language that it’s time to get rid of it, and finally telling me to get it the hell out of there already.

One summer morning in 1998, I decided it was a good day to do this: I would drive up Kingsway, which is littered with used-car lots, and simply sell it to the first place that would offer me what I was after. I wanted $2,000 for it (yeah, I know, ha ha).

The first place offered me $500 cash. I was offended and laughed at that. The guy laughed back.

The next place didn’t want it. Nor did the place after that. And after that… place after place, not interested, or ridiculous low-ball offers like $100 or $200.

By then, I’d reached the intersection of Kingsway and Victoria. That’s the intersection where the McDonalds is, but kitty-corner to that, there used to be the best Indian food in town, a restaurant called Rubina Tandoori. I had a sudden idea… for sure I was going to spend a bunch of money there in the future; why not trade the car for some Rubina credit?

So I wandered in there and spoke to guy who greeted me, and explained my offer… $1,000 of Indian food credit for the car. He didn’t know what to think, but he went and got his father, the owner of the place.

Then the three of us went outside, where the two hummed and hawed and inspected the car… they popped the hood, literally kicked the tires, scratched their chins, hummed and hawed some more, but ultimately… decided they didn’t want it. I dropped my offer down to $500 worth of credit but they still didn’t want it. And that was that.

I did U-turn, went back to the first place, and told the guy I’d take $500. Nah, he said… I changed my mind. I don’t want it.

So back on the road I went, past Rubina, heading towards Burnaby and New West, and zero luck. I got all the way to the end, and to say I was upset about how this day had turned out… would be an understatement.

Give up or continue? It was now late afternoon… I decided to give it one more shot, and crossed the bridge into Surrey. I stopped at the first lot I found, and while waiting for someone to attend to me, an older lady who was there looking for a car approached me. She offered me $400 for the car. I’ll take it, I said.

“Well, I only have $200 cash with me, but I can give you some post-dated cheques.”

“Sure”, I said… “No problem.” Ha ha.

Conveniently, she had all the necessary papers to sign over the car… so we filled it all out, right there on the hood of the car, signed everything… and that was that. I sold my car for $200 in cash, $200 in cheques, and a ride to the SkyTrain.

But the story doesn’t quite end there.

First of all, the cheques all bounced, and I was unsuccessful in tracking her down… so I guess I actually sold the car for $200. But that’s not all.

About a year later, I got a frantic call from an insurance agent in Surrey. Apparently, this woman was trying to renew the insurance on the car… but couldn’t, because the car was still in my name. Whatever paperwork we’d done didn’t properly transfer the car to her, and she’d somehow been driving my car, with NO insurance, for a year. I hightailed it over there and signed what was needed.

Many great memories with that car… and I still have the license plates, hanging on the wall in my garage: SWEPT 6

Look, I managed to write a whole update without mentioning Trump… and barely mentioning the pandemic. Sometimes, it’s nice to set aside the present day and dig up some good old memories. There are plenty to choose from. And there are also plenty of new ones, waiting to be made.

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:43-07:00August 23rd, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Life in Vancouver, Sports & Gaming, Philosophy, Art & Literature|Tags: Alberta, Understand, British Columbia, Cars, Future, Burnaby, Money, Horse Racing, Numbers, Data, Deaths, Pandemic, Mind|0 Comments

August 22, 2020

No BC numbers, no AB numbers… no rain, no worries. No update… and no real time to write one anyway, because here’s where I am right now. ????????????????????

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By Horatio Kemeny|2020-10-08T01:09:44-07:00August 22nd, 2020|Categories: COVID-19 Daily Report, Philosophy, Art & Literature, Our Dog|Tags: British Columbia, Numbers|21 Comments

Monthly Archives: August 2020