Years ago RofR and I had a Ford F150 with dual tanks. Until today, that was the last time I had ever put $50 in a gas tank until today. That’s 13.931 at $3.589 per gallon, the most expensive tankup on the Taurus ever, and you see it could probably have taken $60. I’m not the least concerned because these prices punish people who drive SUVs in the city. Oh, they’ll just put it on their credit cards and stave off the issue, but it all adds up.
What? I don’t like SUVs for two reasons. One, they are a truck. No matter how many creature comforts you pack into them, they are still a truck and hog the roads. Two, they became popular because (being a truck) they were [originally] not subject to the gas mileage guidelines set by the government for conservation. The people that drive them are destroying the environment.The drum shop has an item called a
tambouline. I was searching for something to emulate a snare drum. A tambouline is a small, single-skin type of tambourine, but it has the snare strings and a snare sound. The problem is the dang thing costs $150. That’s around twice what I was looking to spend. Also, a drum pedal costs around $85. Music is not a cheap business.
A new magazine, or at least new to me, may be my first regular in years. I used to be a huge consumer of magazines but the watering down of my favorites during the 90s kind of let that fizzle. Popular Science became PopSci, you’ll know what I mean if you read a recent issue. The new magazine is called “Make”, about home projects. One of my first acquisitions may be their Top 100 and they offer kits of some kind.
[Author's note 2020: Make magazine suspended operations in July 2019. Amid a massive show of support from over 100,000 subscribers and over a million youTube subscribers, the company was slated to begin again on a limited basis by August. I don't think they ever did.]
One of those projects was a simple but brilliant clock. No picture [yet] but the guy took three old VU meters and mounted them side by side. He put new scales on the meters to replace the old amps or decibels, whatever they measured. Then he hooked up a set of capacitors and a transistor. As the capacitors charge and discharge, the needles on the meters tell the time. The far fight meter is seconds, the middle is minutes and the far right meter the hours. Brilliant. Why can’t I think of things like that?
Will dropped by and invited me to Legion #92. He said there is a regular guitar player there. Except that guitarist was not there tonight and in his stead was a talented but unimpressive “lounge act”. One of those acts, while of high technical and musical virtue, put the audience to sleep faster than the Hippie at a coffee house. No end of two-part harmonies and Lydian modes, but not one person dancing. Goes to show you that these audiences just don’t know technically perfect music when they hear it. The dummies.
There is a series on Puddingvision about country stars. It documents their “struggles” to get to the top. These shows never get to the core of the issue but it is fun to see these people caught up in their own hype. Myself, I don’t need to know about who somebody else is divorced from before I like or dislike their music. This one show features some country singer who gets pregnant just before a big tour, and does go on about how she performed anyway. Her fans say wow where I say it figures, she would pull a stunt like that on her producer.
These documentaries carry, in my eyes, one single element of truth that escapes too many people – that even with prodigious talent and copious money, to get ahead you still have fight against people who have neither. That is, most people don’t realize how much in life is due to circumstantial advantage. Ah, a good example would be my own background. People could say that I should have been guaranteed success because I was blonde and blue-eyed, that is, I had all the advantages. Wrong, for you see, where I grew up, so was everybody else. There was no circumstantial advantage whatsoever.
The blonde, blue-eyed girls married millionaires from the city, and the blonde-blue-eyed boys went to work in the local lumber mill. You still needed rich parents and plenty of their help to really get ahead in the world. Before anyone points out that I should still have become rich, I would like to point out that most of the kids who had all that parental money didn’t become rich either. They didn’t have what it takes to fight the system. In fact, I would be curious to know if, other than RofR, whether anybody I grew up with ever became truly rich.
You know, rich enough to sit around the house all day drinking expensive coffee, writing blogs and never working another day in their lives.
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