What is this strange photo? It is some topiary the City has placed downtown. There motives are a little obvious, depicting shoppers and in this case, food servers. (Come on, Hollywood, if we are talking downtown, where are the fat broads, fat hookers, and fat meter maids?) I could not find a camera angle with a contrasting background, so I finally had to outline the life-size figure. For the eagle-eyed, yes, I also magic-wanded the truck and some of the nearby greenery to a dark rust color. I was going to remove all but the statue, but stopped because this looked okay.
The computer shop is soon to be the census shop. This is typical of the evolution in this area. There are about 200 of these census people and my guess is Fred stands to make $15 per day off each one that works hard. I’m setting up the basic accounting system. The walk-in student [that came in today] has tremendous potential, she described an office to me that gravely needs computer training. For what it’s worth, she drives a hundred miles to get my lessons.I missed a $50 callout, dammit, that would have been easy. So I stopped at Trader Bob’s, a local used bookstore. In an hour, I could not find a book that interested me. I had planned on some music playing but as the week progressed I did well enough to just decide not to play. Easy money does that to me, I decided to stay at home and learn a few new tunes.
First on my list was Galveston, and I got it. That song is a demo of what happens when guitar players take far too many jazz lessons. I’m still considering an entire Johnny Cash set and I should tell you a little about his early music. He breaks a lot of the rules because he nobody told him otherwise. By comparison, his later material, such as “I’ve Been Everywhere” has a strict chord pattern that was missing when he began. He literally seems to have gone out and hired musicians that would play according to his off-time singing, and only later hired pros.
This means when I pick one of his original tunes, I can’t adjust it here and there, I have to custom learn the bass line to what ever he did back then. Listen to the pattern changes in “Ring of Fire”, where he doesn’t sing any two verses the same. I decided to force myself to learn at least one Grateful Dead tune, so I picked the one that I deem nearest to rock. (I may have erroneously listed this tune as by the Black Crowes, but that is just my filing system, I do not know these bands.) The song is called “Hard to Handle” and I’ll have to fake the entire line. Also, it has a super easy intro that I can fake on bass.
Later, I found a top-quality version [of the Grateful Dead song just mentioned] and the bass line is still muddy and indistinct. It cannot even be electronically enhanced. The lyrics don’t charm me either, I must have missed that drug store love era. However, I can now say I play some Grateful Dead. While looking for it, I found an entire folder of tunes with faint or vague bass lines that I rejected at some point. Maybe I’ll scroll through that anew.
Pudding-tat, the flea-free feline, who successfully defended my living room from the attack of the giant PA speakers, now, for some reason, carefully watches the place on the floor where they used to sit. She prefers to sharpen her claws on that particular part of the carpet. In case the speakers get any ideas, I suppose. Any cat psychiatrists out there?
Today’s trivia. My fascination with French military incompetence continues, this time to early World War II. Again. It seems during the initial attack, the British RAF shot down enough German airplanes for the French to bag 400 pilot prisoners. Sure enough, when the French surrendered, you guessed it. They handed the lot back over to the Germans. (Churchill groused, “We shall have to shoot them down again.”)
Something else I did not know was that during the war, ships from other nations were allowed to join the Atlantic convoys. It was called “hitchhiking” and it was encouraged. This makes partial sense because the carefully package Lend-Lease operation also stated that any nation could purchase American arms, as long as they came and got them. As the Royal Navy had Germany blockaded, it was certain even ships from non-belligerents were heading for Great Britain. This does not seem to have been mentioned in the newspapers of the time.
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