Here is a hole I drilled into my Danelectro bass. On this otherwise great instrument, they mounted the phono jack on the side of the guitar, below the dials, where it fell out on stage just once too often. It is such a great instrument, I took it to a guitar shop to find out how much to move the jack to the front where I’m pointing. A very stern-faced technician described in some detail how this was a major operation, that unless done right, which would “throw the whole bass out of balance”. $275.
I simply drilled a pilot hole and fed the innards through the plate I took off the bottom assembly. Plugged it in and it works fine. The only glitch was while I was drilling the large hole, I underestimated the thickness of the wood and accidentally butchered the opening (it was very thin wood). The plate covers the worst of it, but I’ll make you a deal. You don’t talk about how sloppy it looks, and I won’t tell anyone what you looked like back in high school while I was a totally cool long-haired hunk with the gals. You know, the hippie-chicks that the Fonzie grease-balls could only dream about. The ones that losers had to marry to get anything out of.
Now I can’t figure out how drilling that tiny plug was supposed to materially alter the center of gravity, but what do I know about Physics? I’ve played it for two hours since then and there is no perceptible difference. This brings up another topic, my unhappiness about losing this workshop. It is July 4th (happy 236th, America. Your women don’t look a day over 150) and I spent all morning puttering around. I even managed to “fix” the bicycle odometer by finally taking it apart and putting it back together with hot glue and electrical tape.
A point I’ve never mentioned is the privacy factor of an indoor workshop. I can’t begin to supply the reasons this is important to me, but it is. Trust me, that goes back a long, long ways.. Just think, I not only get to fix things, I can fail to fix things, without six other opinions about why I’m so stupid to even try. (“If you were as smart as you think you are, you’d get a good job and buy a new one.” Anybody who knows me could tell you exactly where that came from.)
It is a pitilessly hot day, just a fraction under 104 degrees F indoors in the Florida room where the bench is located. I’ve got heavy duty fans all over so it is comfortable enough, but now I have to try out the bicycle. I’m over to Aventura to make the bank deposit on the hottest day since I moved to Florida. (It is 99.8 F outside and contrary to popular thought, the high humidity makes it probably impossible for it to ever exceed 100 in these parts.) Hey, Wallace, here is that global warming you were requesting for the west coast. If you were here, I know exactly where you would be heading right now in a fast hurry. Da-yum, it is hot!
On the way back I met with one of the longer rainstorms for this area, as in two hours. So I stopped at the Friendly Inn, upon noticing the owner’s truck was there. A quick discussion of music reveals he wants me to “set up on Sunday” to see what I can do. When I hinted I was kind of looking at something for today, he said he had lots of problems on his hands. That’s the first time my music has constituted a problem so I went on my way. I mean, I quoted him $65 for three hours, but possibly he thinks he’ll get a better deal in this town.
When the weather got wet, I biked right over to the bookstore and spent a couple of hours on research. I read a book on computer forensics that contained nothing new. Except for encryption, I have all the safeguards in place and all the hacks are child’s play. There is a new logging software that will peel back email addresses, I’ll take a look. No, it will not tell you who flagged you on the Internet, which is an interesting problem in itself. A lot of people would love to find out who is flagging them. For any newcomers, many popular posting sites allow other readers to anonymously censor what you write. The tracing problem is that the censor does not send you an email, rather sends a PHP response to the site software, which de-lists your post.
A far better tactic, which I have used with a 100% success rate, is to pick out who screams loudest about “his” room being invaded by low-lifes who dare to have a different (and usually educated) point of view. That is your perp, so all you do is send him a fake email claiming to be a chick-type who is bothered by the same things. You’ll have an email back in no time from the repressed little bastard who thinks he’s found an ally and a woman to boot, and now email is easy to trace back to the source. In fact, it is so easy a guitar player could probably do it. Figure out on your own how nasty I get once I find the identity of a censor.
But everyone wants the higher-grade of trivia I always bring back after a session at the bookstore. Okay. Remember the Concorde SST, the airplane that flew faster than a bullet and whose ticket prices did much the same? The engines, which I understand were only partially built by Rolls-Royce, where designed that no matter how fast the plane flew, the airflow through the jet was never over 300 mph. Like most people, I assumed otherwise so that fact was a heads-up. How can it fly twice the speed of sound?
My goal was to play music today, to not miss yet another Independence Day counting and waiting on other people to get into gear. I wound up doing three free shows, around an hour each but requiring at least three hours to pull them off. These were all new clubs that I walked in off the street and offered to play for free in lieu of a “demo tape”. One of my aversions to demo tapes, besides the fact that they are usually total fakes, is that they cost up to $3,000, not counting the wasted time and effort. I can put on fifty free sample shows for that kind of money and have far more fun in the process.
None of the shows were a success by my standards, that is, none resulted in a paying gig or positive situation. At least I did not sit at home or spend a ton of money, and I did get out and play. Although one place liked me, they admitted they could not afford to pay even $20 for entertainment. I packed up and left, what else could I do?
Another place had this horrid scritchy woman, the aging bar-bunny with eye makeup like Dracula. She kept demanding I play a “chick” song so she could sing. Since I could not tell her to f-off (these are saloons) I instead said to her that I was not looking for a singer, I was not auditioning this evening and I was not doing a Karaoke show. She failed to grasp my meaning, insert sexist remark here. These type of women think they can get away with anything they want, which is absolutely true. Providing what they want is to spend their lives as punching bags for third-rate alcoholics. I packed up and left again.
Ah, elusive success, but at least I now know three more places not to bother with. I may still consider the Friendly Inn this Sunday. Sadly, all [the other] three were some of the closest places to my abode, where I was hoping to conserve gas and other travel expenses and now I will have to look for places further away. Florida is bad for these tiny 25-30 seat pubs and clubs that must be very uneconomical to operate. There don’t seem to be any 80-seat clubs out here. That is the size that makes sense to me.
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