Time by Pink Floyd.

Back in the day. Moped, cassette Walkman, and very early wired earbuds. The engine noise covered the several minutes of ticking in the beginning, so it seemed like the tape had stopped. Then the alarm clocks kicked in and startled me so badly that I almost crashed.

I started reading it as “Al” as in the nickname for Allen.

Makes the constant stream of headlines a bit more entertaining, imagining all of the stuff that this guy Al is up to.

Bagpipes. One of the few instruments that can both make you cry and make you want to charge into battle.

It’s no mystery if you consider the world at the time and the target audience.

Home computers were only a couple of years past where you had to solder the chips on yourself and still in nerdy kid domain.

There was a big overlap with the Dungeons and Dragans crowd. Puzzles and imagining yourself as some character were a huge appeal.

Now factor in that the underwear section of the Sears catalog was still the closest thing to porn as most 12 year olds could get their hands on.

The Farmers Daughter. It was a text-based video game for the C=64 similar to Zork.

The premise was that you are a traveling lightening salesman whose car breaks down. You stop at a farmhouse to use their phone, and the beautiful daughter answers the door.

Your mission is to try to bang her. If the farmer catches you, he shoots you with his shotgun. If her brothers catch you, they’ll analy rape you to death. You need condoms but they are stuck to the shelf.

Fiction is fiction.

In real life, stalking the victim for months, sniper shots, or anything that involves any sort of sofisticiation or team of people is asking to get caught.

KISS principle. A successful hit would be as simple as possible, happen fast with no prior interaction, and involve as few people as possible.

I am about 1 hour drive from NYC and the bus from here costs $620 per month if you buy in bulk. Otherwise, it’s a $40 round trip. There’s also a trains and ferry, and those are even more expensive than the bus. $500 in gas is cheaper than working in the city.

Since when has any hobby with an engine been “inexpensive”

I was running for a couple of years , and my knee started to give me problems.

I went to an orthopedic Dr, and his advice was to take up swimming and if I wanted to keep running that I should hold on to his business card because someone needed to pay for his kids’ college.

I stopped running soon after and avoided surgery for a decade, but it still caught up with me. Knees are definitely cheap with for-profit healthcare.