MORNING
Upon closer examination, I do have a recorder, not a flutophone. Some of the holes are indented, some are not. So I matched the notes up to some sheet music and some finger instructions in German, reaching the consensus that it is a recorder. A check on the model number says I have a Yamaha 72, made in Indonesia. A soprano tenor, they call it, and there are two fingering charts. One is German, the other is Baroque. This is just a plastic pipe and already I feel like I need another cup of coffee.
Speaking of losers, I read some translations of the material by the "great explorer", Sebastian Cabot. The guy is a hardened liar. I wasn’t three pages in before I could begin to remember the other material he was stealing from. We were taught he was a great English explorer, which shows you what happens when you let the English write history books. This Cabot was obviously working off Portuguese maps of some kind and taking credit for the discoveries of others. Even his own father. If he was alive today, he’d probably be a guitar player.
And while I’m still cranky because I haven’t had my morning refill yet, let me tell you about last evening. That skinny blonde was on duty at the club, we get along quite well once she discovered I’m not one of the blurry-eyed drunks who stares at her ass when they think she isn’t looking. I told her I had analyzed the women drunks in her bar, that they went through four attitude phases. Ready?
Stage 1: “I still got it, so millionaires only.”
Stage 2: “Now that you mention it, yes I do know all the males here on a first name basis.”
Stage 3: “I left my money in my other purse.”
Stage 4: “I shaved my legs for this?”
NOON
Next, I discover more of the technology behind recorders. Normally I’d be certain the makers of these things would quickly place the finger holes where the notes are, but when I played my first C scale, it was clear some the notes are off key. There are wild claims of the superiority of tone caused by the material, so I looked up what they make these from.
Okay, okay, enough recorder. Except to say I found the exact one the gal is playing in the photo above, the most popular model they say. It is another Yamaha, the YRS-301 with an “arched windway” for better tonal control. Oh, well that explains everything.
But everyone wants to know about the wheel bearing. Shown here, the material is unbelievable sturdy and the bond to the axle is something else. It even resists being wedged loose by hand sharpened chisel, as shown here. What I wanted was the hub part of the mounting. I can shave with that chisel but it will not cut those wheels. I suspect I may leave the object intact and simply drill mounting holes. I am determined to find out how they made this thing, so the one shown here gets sacrifice if I have to burn it off.
My two favorite oxymorons this week: “loosely sealed” and “random order”.
AFTERNOON
The ubiquitous Dan Lewis tells us of a game called “The Last Man”. The challenge is to avoid learning who won the Super Bowl and by what score. You can twitter it, but no links to anything like twitter appear in this blog. The usual duration is a few days but some report up to a year. However, even I find such claims bogus if the person at all watches TV.
I know as much about sports as a million sports fans know about real bass playing. The only detail I know about the Super Bowl is some ugly lady’s tit fell out a few years ago and panicked the stadium or something. But I am never surprised to hear about sports people shitting their pants over nothing.
And here’s a weird stat. As a ratio of world population in children country by country, the segment that plays the flutophone or recorder the most are Koreans. But the lowest proportion are black American schoolchildren. All ethnic jokes aside, there is apparently no explanation why the instrument is not only unpopular, but actively avoided by this one group.
Meanwhile, I’m watching a documentary on shark evolution. The narrator is Scottish and so dang hard to follow. The sea was barn. Huh? Oh, barren. Plus, his choice of words more than once had me lmao. For extinction, he tells the name of a shark that “didn’t make it into the record books”. The real reason is nobody in the world could write down the shark’s name from the way he pro-noonsed it.
EVENING
I listened to some Nashville on-line. Some people are right thinking the glory days of country music may be over. It’s mostly pop-country, the songs are all slow and formulaic. Back in my day, you had to really be able to do it all live, but this new stuff is being mass-produced in boardrooms. No wonder Johnny Cash hated Nashville. A lot of it gets mighty hard to listen to after only an hour.
You know the sad part? Of all the roughly 300 people I know in south Florida, when I did find the camera I wanted three months ago, not one of those people had a working valid PayPal account. Around 200 didn’t know what PayPal was, another 80 refuse to use it for the same reasons I do, and the remaining 20 ranging in age from 19 to 37, every one owed more money on his account that I cared to bail out. “Oh, if you put $50 on my account, then we can get it and I’ll pay you back next . . .”
Anyway, here is the set screw, easily visible once I removed the drive belt, about 2x life size. The Harbor Freight brand name is “Drill Master”. Yes, it is cheap equipment, but I’ve never had even one item bought there break or wear out on me. The good news is more than figuring out the saw problem and fixing it, but that two years ago I would not have even attempted this kind of repair. And, get this, I’m finding other folks who were far more skilled than I when we started have an aversion to fixing tiny pieces like this and the switch on that sander.
The reason all this is blog-worthy is vindication that I guessed right to set up retirement as an active portion of my life with a budget for small, inexpensive projects, and a learning environment. I can’t say how many horror stories I’ve heard of men who tried it any other way. Of course, I would like to someday soon stub my toe on something that makes money. But at least I won’t wind up 85 years old sitting around cooking up schemes to blackmail friends, no name mentioned.
To recap, just think. I do not know one person with a permanently working PayPal account in all of Florida. Time to get my recorder and learn to play Aura Lee.
Last Laugh
I guess I was a hipster before hipster was cool.
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