I'm walking around in a dream

The maintenance office claims to finally have an appointment to get my bedroom air conditioner fixed. They say their specialist will be ready Monday at 10 am. If that's what they want to say, all right, but I'll believe it when I have the air conditioner working.

I woke up to find that once again the living room circuit breaker had ... broken ... causing mostly the loss of my clock setting on the hard drive recorder. It's not a really big inconvenience, although I'm getting curious why only this circuit ever has the power tripped. I'd ask the maintenance office about it, but they need to win back my trust.

Spirit of Service this week included a bit of black-and-white video, with scratches put on top to make it look sort of like film, of a woman dissatisfied with her ``manual car wash''. There's soap left all over the car while the attendant is still washing it down with the high-pressure water hose. She gets out of the car, begins pointing out spots to spray, and they do a fast-motion jumping around the car, spraying. Finally she takes the hose, and demands it be turned on, and the hose runs wild, soaking her. The baffling moral, according to the hosts: sometimes you just have to trust the service professionals. Well, it's their show.

The show also had a bit intended to show the Zoo's superior service, in that they could handle people asking questions in Japanese. One of the attendants who was asked where the bathroom is gave directions that would take one out of the zoo. Maybe you can get your hand stamped to re-enter; I honestly don't remember. I usually plan to stay through to about the end of the day. It mentions the zoo last year received 1.3 million visitors ``and 300,000 tourists'', which seems like a curious imbalance. I'd think most tourists would try a day at the zoo, unless they had a particular aversion to animal exhibits.

Trivia: Commercial shippers in the United States spent, from 1930 to 1951, a total of US$2.5 billion on new barges and ships, less than was spent in the 1920s. Source: The Box, Marc Levinson.

Currently Reading: Close To Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916, Michael Capuzzo. It's frustratingly unspecific about dates. Yes, all the shark attacks happened in the course of a few days in 1916, but there's background material stretching back forty years and comments from after the fact, and the lack of clarity is aggravating.