It’s a picture of a package of tea. The design should be familiar to anyone who has walked the lonely aisles of Winn/Dixie, Safeway or Publix. Who’d think there was a market for so many different brands of tea? I’ll stick with orange pekoe. Since you know I’m not selling tea, what is with the picture? The man who designed the package was in the store today. Barry Zaid, who has a store on Meridian in Miami Beach.
He was in about some art work and of all the people in the room, I appear to be the only one who gave a second thought as to why he had an old box of tea in his display case. Thus, you are viewing a scan of the only original Celestial Seasonings tea box. You saw it here first. Some of his other work includes what apparently was a huge financial success for him, the floral patterned Kleenex box. It took all day to get the VoIP hooked up. The snag was (again) duplicate IP addresses. This one took time, as the product was from two different manufacturers, namely D-Link and Vtech. They both use 192.168.15.1 on their Vonage compatible equipment. Now it is working, and I’ll do the wireless next time around. I saw something new today, the lady who trims the hairpieces asked me to fill a small gallon jug of chemical from the back room. I have no idea what it is, but the fluid is used for cleaning wigs. And it costs $535 for a 5-gallon pail. It is super heavy and that pail is unwieldy, I suppose $10 worth of it evaporated before I could hit the spout.
For now, I’m at home making chicken garlic stew. The pilaf of last day was as tasteless as most grains unless you add too much butter and salt. Today it provided just enough ballast for my evening meal. Cowboy Mike is due for practice and I have more news I’ll return with soon. Cancer Steve is out of the slammer and needs his clothes, maybe that bicycle I saved for him as well.
This could mean the end of Pudding, you know. If you think time has got me attached to the cat, you are wrong. There is one situation where I would agree to keep the cat and let us see if you can guess what that is. He is welcome to Princess Pudding, the only cat I have ever seen that will not eat chicken. Steve is going to get some cash and get into a motel for a week.
Mike was over by 7:00 p.m. and we added four excellent songs to our list, we now have twenty. Bright Lights Big City, Key to the Highway, and two more I’ll learn to tell apart by tomorrow when we play them at Jimbo’s. The drum box is an integral part of the act now, that is, we cannot do without it. There is (at last) no more talk of a guitar player, either. The few tunes that absolutely require guitar, I play them on my Fender.
Mike did bring out a revealing point, that in his former bands it was usually a guitar player (and rarely any other musician, except of course a drummer) who most objected to the drum box. Upon questioning, it turns out that the guitarist in each case had a hard time playing along with it. Couldn’t do it right. Do I hear an echo?
I decided not to drop in at Booz, as we practiced until past 9:30 p.m. From my standpoint, the biggest improvement from these sessions (because I am not learning anything new) is how Mike is subconsciously reacting to the melodic bass lines that exactly match each drum setting. Coincidence? He no longer feels any urge to rush into the next instrumental part and will take his time when switching instruments, so it is kind of neat to hear him say that I’m “getting it now”.
[Author's note 2016-06-28: as you read this post, remember that I had not yet figured out that Mike only knew these twelve songs, had been playing them for 40 years, and was incapable of learning any new material. It is not only Mike, I found this out to be a truism for all of south Florida. Mike was just the first. Am I blind? No, in my decades out on the west coast, I had never met any guitarist list this. Whenever I was in a band, it was my band and the guitarist had to trade one-for-one on songs learned. Then came Florida, home of the Guitar-Nazis.]
The progress is quite rapid, particularly since Mike now knows exactly how fast he can feed me new material. This has been what, around three weeks now? Certainly the confidence level is right up there as Mike no longer hesitates to just get out there and play the stuff.
We talked a bit about recording and I made my stance very clear on that. I have wasted too much time believing people who said they had written the best songs ever. I’ve had many bands ask me to record, so it is not my bass playing, yet not one of the hundreds of songs I ever helped people with ever became a hit, including the ones I’ve learned in Florida. Much of that was due to the writer’s total lack of connections in the industry and blatantly retarded ideas about the skills and attitudes it takes to succeed in any field.
Sadly, recording music is one of the most corrupt businesses imaginable. Thus, I record if you pay me or you can take your original music and get somebody else. If I do record, I get a cut of the profits as well. Same as any other business I participate in. You may think you play guitar better than anyone else, but let’s see how you make a business deal.
There was one part of the conversation that was quite revealing. Cowboy Mike asked me if I had a scanner and I replied I did. Mike has been in business in this area most of his life, so you must not be astonished that he went on to ask more questions. Is it hooked up? Does it work? Can you operate it? Is there electricity? Does the computer work? Is the software installed? Is there are printer? Is there paper? Do you have ink? Will you scan something? Do you have blank disks? Are these the right disks? Can you copy files to a disk?
Myself, I can’t really say who is responsible for this situation. Mike is not a skeptic and I am not a cynic. Anywhere else, a simple “yes” would be enough as it would be my responsibility to say “no” if the scanner was not fully operational. You can imagine the difficulty if the first person did not know how a scanner worked and was seeking information. This area is a scum-bag salesman’s dream world. This is how things are done in Florida. You think I’m kidding, don’t you?
ADDENDUM
The news today was that the “Immigration” bill was defeated. I only vaguely followed the issue, but the figure of 25,000,000 deportees has been kicked around. Of course, I have always said they should go after the people who hire them. I would rather have tomatoes cost ten dollars a pound than pay fifteen dollars in taxes because of illegal use of the system, if it means anything. That is a whack of people but there was plenty of warning over the decades that in the end they would not be tolerated.
My beef is with the vocal Illegals who are here that don’t like the system. There are plenty of Illegals here who do like it, so the others basically know what they can do. Some politican by the name of Martinez declared the bill’s defeat to be “right-wing” (Nazi). Apparently he does not grasp the concept of majority rule very well, but then, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
