I think I’ve been going about this all wrong… Story of my life!

What, you might ask?

Well, my answer would be pretty much everything!

It seems that I’ve been giving away my knowledge when I should have been charging for every single bit of useful information that I know.

I’ve confirmed this only recently, but have suspected it for a while now. I chose however to live in denial, comforting myself by believing that what I knew, or had to say was of little to no value.

How did I come to this epiphany? 

That’s a slightly interesting tale. I was looking at starting a podcast. In the course of that investigation I was led to the more important question of how do I monetize a podcast. After all, I’d like to earn some cash…

The easiest ways are to charge a subscription fee, or come up with some advertisers. Okay, that makes sense, but as always the devil is in the details. To monetize, you’ve apparently got to use some payment processor like Stripe, Venmo, or Square. Each of these folks take a % and often they add a flat fee too.

Some transaction processors will charge 2.9%+0.30 per credit card transaction. Wow! I should start a processing center!

If my math is correct that works out to about 0.33 per dollar. Meaning that if you charged a dollar for a subscription you’re only getting  0.67. By the way, that doesn’t account for normal taxation Federal and State which works out to about 30%. So in the end you, the person actually doing the work, end up with about 0.47 of every dollar you make.

But wait! There’s more! A podcast requires specialized hosting services, Figure around $20 a month, So before you’ve gotten your first subscription you’re already in the hole $240 just for a year of podcasting hosting services. It’s better to purchase a year than to pay month to month because that’s about 3% higher.

Some of the podcasting directories which typically are not hosting services may add even more fees. Apple for example might charge 30% if someone subscribes to your podcast via their podcast application. So that immense wealth of 0.47 you’ve made may get whittled down again to 0.17 of every dollar.

That depends on how Apple takes their 30%. I’m assuming they’re going to take it right off the top at 30% per dollar, because… They’re Apple! Then the payment processors may also take their fee on the original transaction amount and so on. I could see a scenario where the person doing to podcasting ends up losing money on subscriptions.

Amazing!

So all these podcasters absolutely have to come up with additional sources of income besides subscriptions and at the same time have to produce content that is entertaining enough that the listener count is pretty high for the podcast to be worth an advertisers time.

Don’t get me wrong, pennies add up, but as the pennies add up, so too do the taxes and fees.

I’m going to keep looking for a combination of systems that net the largest potential amount of $$ in my pocket. Now I know why some of the popular podcasts have commercials for something every 6 minutes.

This made me think, “How long have I been writing my blog?” All that time with no subscriptions, 13 -14 years? I should have been selling advertising space, and figuring a way to create more engagement. I thought it was a labor of love and that people would enjoy it on its own merit. Some have and to those loyal followers you have my profound thanks. 

I realize that Blogging, Podcasting, & Social Media engagement are all potential income streams. Now I begin to understand the difference between me & folks that have been doing these things for a while. They know or believe in their value. For them, engaging in these things are actually a business and they charge for their time one way or another.

I’ve never had that kind of faith in myself, or that what I brought to the table was worth a damn. To some degree, I think that is a function of a career in corporate America. After 20 or 30 years of shitty bosses, policies, and being ground under someone’s heel it’s tough to believe you have any value, especially when you’re thrown away on a whim in layoffs, or when you or your department are pawns between to executives settling old scores.

Corporate America’s mistreatment is not the only reason I never had faith in myself, but they sure helped cement my lack of faith in myself.

This year because of that lack of faith in myself,  I almost terminated my blog and my web hosting entirely. Part of my reasoning  was because instead of charging a reasonable fee for 3 years as they had done in years past the hosting service wanted almost $1000.00.

I’m not going to do that. I renewed for one year and am in the process of comparison shopping for a new web hosting service. The current company I’ve been using for years, maybe 13, has relocated their help services to the Philippines. They’ve made changes to the web control panels and their billing panels which have made the service far more difficult to use, and to top it all off, They’ve decided that I don’t need to see invoices or have the ability to look at past invoices.

So, the cost of my narcissism in terms of cash and annoyance to maintain has exceeded my ego’s ability to justify. That being said, I’ve got an organization that I’ve been providing hosting for, and moving my stuff and theirs would have been a Royal pain in the ass. So I’ll wait until they find a new host and someone to do their web site. I’ve got a year to plan and handle the move.

All of this kind of underscores the fundamental truth.

I have not been valuing myself. I’ve been giving away too much of myself in various forms, for free, for years.

Jerry had it all over me in that regard. He knew what to charge. He was often not charging the full price he could get, but at least he was charging more or less fairly for his services. To be fair, he’d charge more for weddings and he almost never discounted them.

He knew he was going to have to deal with a monster bride or worse, the bride’s mother! He really could take or leave a wedding. He once said that playing funerals was more satisfying because he wasn’t going to hear the deceased bitching & complaining, trying the wheedle a discount after services had been rendered, when it came time to write the check.

I saw him on multiple occasions tell a bride he was refunding the deposit because the whole wedding had become such a pain in his ass the price he was charging was insufficient. He hated outdoor weddings, especially those in the Palm Springs area. Oh, they paid pretty well, but often the bride would expect the musicians to be sitting with their instruments in the blazing sun and gusting wind blowing sheet music all over the place.

Hint to any soon to be brides… Put the musicians under an awning. Acoustic instruments don’t like sitting in scorching sun for hours. They tend to fall out of tune when heated. The musicians are also none too pleased to be sitting in formal attire usually black out in the desert sun. Jerry would say I know that it’s the Bride’s special day, but she doesn’t have to make it literally hell on earth for everyone else.

Jerry was on the verge of putting a clause in wedding contracts that charged for broken harp strings incurred at an outdoor wedding. One of the last Palm Springs weddings he played, due to the heat, humidity, and lack of awning or any shade he broke 9 strings on the big harp.

In addition to him having to remap the music in his head avoiding the notes that he couldn’t play with broken strings, while he was playing, the cost of replacement strings almost wiped out the fee he charged for the wedding.

I wish I’d had more confidence in myself. I could have learned a lot more about putting myself “out there” from Jerry. I tried to handle all the technical stuff and let him be a Musician. Now that he’s gone, I’ve got a lot of technology laying around and I’m wondering if I should sell it, or do I have enough of value to say, that putting the tech to work could turn into a profitable enterprise?

I put together a prototype podcast episode just to see if I could. I liked the result, and the one person I’ve shared it with liked the effort as a first step.

That same person has floated the question of having fun in a podcast in the flavor of the old Mystery Science Theater TV show. That show hearkened back to earlier SciFi shows on Friday Nights or Saturday Afternoons. One of the most famous was “Elvira Mistress of the Dark”

Depending on subject matter, that could be fun to do and perhaps entertaining to listen to.

I’ve got a leg up because I already own the audio tech, so if I push forward into podcasting, the investment would be pretty close to zero. Although the technology for producing voice tracks has become dirt simple and cheap. A lot of the audio gear I have laying around may be overkill now.

There are USB mics that have a shit ton of intelligence built in. If you add some decent audio processing software, it’s as simple as just having a computer, one of these mics and you’re going to produce high quality results by default.

Some of the podcasting hosts have the recording software on the server side of the equation. That means that your computer doesn’t have to be terribly powerful, all it has to be able to do is get the audio stream to the hosting server. Then all the processing is done there. Thinking about that, I suppose you could do a podcast from a dang phone with zero investment in equipment at all.

Jerry and I had been looking into “Smart” Mics. During COVID Jerry was doing a ton of Zoom sessions. He was using a borrowed USB mic to capture the harp music. Eventually, he started using the USB mic all the time because it did a fine job and could be powered by his iPad and / or his computer.

There’s one of those kinds of mics that I’ve considered. I was thinking more toward working from home and knowing that I’d have to deal with conference calls. This particular mic also works on video game consoles. Those were my original use cases. But if I were to find a suitable podcast host, subject matter, and start podcasting too. It might be a win all around.

Well CNN, That’s a step in the right direction!

The news media losing their minds over a phrase in the background of a video that a Trump aid reposted, demonstrates that everything “Trump” is under a microscope. 

If only they’d be as diligent with all things Biden. I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

CNN though, has tracked down the origins of the offending comment. They have determined that it was “not a fascist dog whistle.”

Well that’s a relief! CNN of course being known in recent years for their amazingly accurate, in depth reporting, and marvelous “Journalists”.

I watched the video in question. It was interesting, the “Offending Phrase” was “unified Reich”.

The phrase literally appeared in the background of a video montage and was part of a newspaper headline that was quoting a German article about something which I don’t accurately recall.

When I went back to review the video for this piece, all the videos I can find online at this point appear to have been intentionally blurred. That really pisses me off!

Not only did the Left raise a stink about words taken out of context, they appear to have intentionally obfuscated the source material, making it difficult for the casual observer to do their own fact checking. I believe everyone should be fact checking articles that interest them. Reliance upon some oracle of fact checking is just as stupid as blindly believing the original piece of questionable information.

The video I originally saw, showed a newspaper background which was clearly vintage, judging from the style, and I think I recall seeing a date. In other words, this was a photo of a newspaper that became part of a video background that wasn’t supposed to be read, it was just supposed to be a wallpaper for the video elements presented on top.

By the way, this “unified Reich” statement wasn’t even talking about Naziism. The date I think I recall seeing on the paper was late 1920’s, before the rise of Hitler. Oh let’s not forget the word Reich actually has meanings in the German language other than its association with Hitler.

If the word isn’t capitalized (reich) it generally translates to “Rich” or similar meanings, “wealth”, “money”, “costly”, “finery”, & similar meanings.

If the word is capitalized, (Reich) then the general meaning is “kingdom”, “realm”, or “empire”.

One example that caught my eye was this:

Dein Reich komme.

That one is biblical, in English it translates, “thy Kingdom come”. 

Recognize that phrase?

Note that “empire” and “realm” would also be generally appropriate translations and would fit in context. “Kingdom” is chosen based on convention possibly due to earlier translations of the Bible from Greek or Aramaic.


What none of the initial news reports made mention of was, the video wasn’t generated by the Trump campaign. The video was put together by someone who is a Trump fan, and showed their approval of Trump by putting together a montage of Trumps promises and comments, over a publicly available (template / background).

Based on the way the American news media reacted to this “Fan Video”, you could cause all kinds of trouble.

Just find a German print news piece of Trump reciting The Lord’s Prayer then paste that piece into an American hit piece, using it to damn Trump for inciting a Neo-Nazi uprising, because the word “Reich” would appear in the German text of the prayer. 

That would be interestingly ironic if you think about it.

Damning Trump because he prayed The Lord’s prayer in a church and a German reporter dutifully translated it into German for their readership back home.

Context is everything. Has anyone ever asked why Hitler called the movement, “The Third Reich”? Why not the First or the Fourth?

In the video I saw, the “Unified Reich” headline appeared to be referring to some kind of production being improved, I want to say it was something to do with crops or farm yields. 

In that context, the headline could have said, “blah blah yields increased due to unification of various realms in Germany.” The journalist may have had a word limit in the headline and chose to imply Germany, using the word “Reich”. Doing so eliminated several other words but got the point across. (I wonder if ‘Cantons’ work in this context?)

Remember, in the time before television, people actually read the entire paper, and headlines were meant to catch attention while providing a little taste of what in the article may be of interest to the reader.

Yes, I understand the concept. I’m just not good at it. That’s what made real Journalists special. They were masters of language and conveying information. Journalism degrees used to actually mean something, as did most other degrees from reputable universities.

I don’t even speak German. I speak English and bad English! That being said, I do know from a smattering of languages that I’ve been exposed to, that words almost never have a singular meaning.

Words evolve over time, and that’s why even in my native language there are multiple definitions of words. In nicer dictionaries there are often century notations about a particular definition. These century notations make it easier to glean the meaning of a word in one of Shakespeare’s plays when contextually the modern definition of the word simply doesn’t make sense.


I’m a moron. If I know this, then I expect for the “Journalists” blathering on the boob tube nightly to know this as well.

After all, they’re supposed to be my betters aren’t they?

The only reason I can imagine anyone seized on this “Unified Reich” headline is an unreasoning hatred of Donald Trump.

Whoever spun this into the “tempest in a tea pot,” it became must have been viewing the video almost frame by frame looking for anything to hurt Trump. Is that really the best use of one’s time or life? Living in that kind of frothing hatred cannot be good for one’s health.

Surely Trump has outright factually said things that are disagreeable, which could, and should, be addressed with logic and reason. If he’s such a bad guy then public discussion should be possible without resorting to misquoting or using out of context images.

That logic cuts both ways.

Why is it, issues surrounding Biden and his administration have gone unchallenged? Why is it that there is almost never public discussion regarding Biden’s statements, or actions? Except, to walk them back.

If you think about it, “walking something back” used to mean bringing something back from an outlier position to a more mainstream one. Now, it means flat out correction of erroneous statements. Why is this term used?

Because it looks really bad to have a press secretary or the news media saying, “We need to correct The President’s statements…” on a daily basis. Correcting The President daily suggests that either The President is not a person of their word, The President is not actually in control, or The President is an idiot.

None of these are good looks, domestically or internationally, for The President of The United States of America.

The Supreme Court has said Biden can’t make student debt go away at taxpayer’s expense, Congress alone holds the purse strings.

Yet Biden has acted in defiance of both the Supreme Court and Congress on this matter. Is that not breaking the Law? Where is the public discussion about that?

Why has the media acted as a rubber stamp about this? Why haven’t the pundits and wags called out the Biden administration on ignoring the ruling?

Yes, there’s the taxpayer element but the more fundamental issue is that we have a President who is defying the Judicial and Legislative branches of government. That latter issue seems to be far closer to a dictatorship, than anything Trump did while in office.

Perhaps someone should be going over every frame of a Biden speech or commercial. Perhaps someone in the CNN newsroom should be reporting on all the “Walk Backs” of Biden’s statements. 

To their credit in addition to CNN doing the research about the “unified Reich” text, they’ve also recently fact checked Biden’s 9% inflation claim too.

They admitted on air, inflation was around 1.6% when Biden took office. Inflation shot up during COVID and topped out around 9% in 2022.

Biden continues to claim that inflation was 9% when he came into office and that it was a problem left to him by the Trump administration.

At least CNN is starting to apply some journalistic  rigor. There may be hope for them, I’m not holding my breath on that either.

Darn it! I always forget about the Memorial Day garage sale event!

Garage sale.There’s a ton of people that will be wandering through the town over the next 3-4 days, shopping garage sales.

Normally I wouldn’t think about this kind of thing because Jerry wouldn’t let me sell or throw away anything. So aside from thinking about the Men who died in battle, including some friends and perhaps having the day off depending on my employer. Memorial Day blows by me.

Last year I wasn’t in any shape to consider it. This year I‘d planned to drag crap out of the garage and basement and sell it. Trouble is, I completely forgot about it.

It took me a minute to figure out why there was so much traffic, while I was walking the dog. Then I remembered and now as I’m cooling down with a glass of Iced Tea, contemplating what I’ll have for lunch, I’m also wondering if I can make quick work of some of the boxes of stuff.

I’ll make that decision after I’ve decided what’s for lunch.

I might have to unplug the surveillance camera in the front yard just because of the traffic. The poor think is pinging like crazy.