It is sad in the sense that neither Wallace nor I drink wine, so it sits. I really can’t tell good wine brands from the rest, no more than some men can tell good women. (Ask Mel Gibson.) Wallace checked with his daughter about the prices and that’s how we learned these wines are far too expensive to use for cooking. Both Wallace and I associate going out for a drink with socializing, so we don’t even keep beer in the fridge at home. The last bottle of liquor I bought was in 2002 and it was still here when JP drank it last year. So the good wine will, hopefully, age well. The good women, too, but my money is on the wine.Today’s trivia is a splashmeter. It looks like a pole in the ground and it measures splashes. It is not a boon to mothers who have to give their nine-year old boys a bath on Monday nights, but rather a device that trips when raindrops cause splatter above a certain height. The reason? There is a family of plant fungus that can only spread when bounced high enough to reach the lower leaves of the crop. The farmer need only apply expensive fungicide after storms that set off the alarms. Now you know.
My car was on TV last month. A second person saw it, not just Teresa. Yes, I did stop at the Burger King for coffee that morning. Yes, I did back into the parking space. Yes, I then walked across the parking lot into the book store. No, I did not see anything unusual when I came out and left an hour later. They had a big police incident meanwhile, and there was my Taurus in a background shot on the 6:00 o’clock. Some loony caused a ruckus at the Burger King. My car was unharmed.
In the “I Never Knew That Department”, I always thought any bridge that hung from cables was a suspension bridge. Nope, only bridges which have big cables drooping downward qualify. The ones that have the straight cables are called, logically, “cable-stayed span” bridges. Aren’t you glad I do all this research for you? I make a mean pot of coffee, too. Which is what I am doing tonight. I’ve got the gig tomorrow and have decided to spend a rare Friday at home.
Later, yes I know this meant I would take the night off. But, but, I, er, ran out of popcorn. So I tackled the Cakewalk sequence to edit the lyrics. That important attempt was unsuccessful, but I can now patch in tracks using the on-board synthesizer and man, what a sound! (Also, what a lot of work.) Still, anything is easier than finding a backup band that could do what I just did on my own. Now I am fired up to get the sounds off that Yamaha keyboard I gave myself for Xmas back in ’95.
You should hear Not Half Bad (my band) do Chapman’s “Gimme One Reason” now. I’m careful with adjectives when saying I finally have some truly incredible boogie piano lines to flesh out my specialty (the boogie bass) in a way just not possible by a guitarist. I tested it twenty different ways before I could believe it myself. As luck would have it, I have a ton of excellent non-guitar music awaiting this treatment.
Mind you, I am still tackling the lyric editing function. There are at least three ways to enter the lyrics (with Cakewalk), but only two of them will display (the other prints them between the clefs of staff music). Each syllable has to be associated with a Cakewalk musical event, which is tricky because Cakewalk lacks the capability to display the words like a Karaoke player. Arnel tends to attach his lyrics to a melody line because he only needs the occasional reminder. In my case, the audience will see what I type, so I must consider the entire presentation, not just the melody. The next time certain people hear my show, they will be whistling a different tune themselves.
Last, I’ve got to hand it to the retards who work at Nokia. Sometines my phone would not ring. Sometimes hours later, I’d notice a “missed call” message although I had the phone on me all along. Today I discover the phone has a deeply submerged default setting that turns the ringer off if the calling party’s phone number doesn’t display. This fooled me double, because the phone will ring if I have the calling party’s number programmed into my contact list and they call from that phone. How many calls have I missed? Only convention prevents me from telling you what I think of Nokia at this point. I mean, what kind of total ass would do that to a phone and not warn the purchaser about it?
Return Home
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
