This is the picture than convinces me to go get a better camera, although the budget cap is still $40. Here’s Pudding-Tat having discovered the chair directly beneath the ceiling fan. I may try to find another Argus for excellent low light performance. This photo had plenty of ambient light and still came out grainy. But who can resist the occasional kitty picture, a sure-fire blog pleaser.
Sort of good news with the Taurus. It is running reasonably well and I took it for a ten mile test drive. Not to be confused with a total repair, at least I should be able to haul band equipment around town until this, the worst business stretch in five years, is over. My plan is to play Jimbo’s on the weekend. I will have to introduce most of the material I had planned to spring with Eddie but he’s had plenty of time to practice, although undirected practice is rarely goal congruent. He still suffers greatly from guitar-think, constantly pushing tunes like “Tangled Up In Blue” at the expense of [country] music on our list. Trust me, I know that guitar-think is a very hard habit to break.Ah, you want the definition of guitar-think. Among other things, it is a sure sign of doddering middle age. It is the condition whereby male guitarists think that because they play a certain guitar song, and they like that song, and at least one person in the audience likes that song, it is therefore “a good song”. This mental disease also prevents them from taking into consideration what type of band they are in, whether there are other songs better suited to the target audience, and whether the song itself has boring non-guitar parts.
I knew one Florida guitarist that kept wanting to “form a band” yet in over six years never learned any of my music, although I learned all of his. Pardon me, he did play “Hey Good Looking”. Although that one tune was by far a superior crowd-pleaser compared to most of his list, that fact never penetrated his skull. When we played that song, the dance floor had people; when we played his music, a few here and there would perk up for the first part, but quickly turn back to their drinks, pausing to give perfunctory applause at the end. He could not see it right in front of his face and refused to watch video tapes of the facts afterward. Yet he fancied himself a crowd-reader, the primary symptom of guitar-think.
The new student group mentioned y’day turns out to be my former clients. Remember Jim? I did not know he was a doctor, but he’s got a group of 5 together including some teens from Weston. That is a little too far from here to commute, with my car anyway. Wallace and I once cut through Weston after a wrong turn on our way to the alligator farm. Jim reports he has been practicing a lot, a phenomenon seen often in my students, as one of the first things they learn is to associate music with fun again. Not dreary guitar drills. What Mixolodian bathroom-custodian mode? I don't go near modes.
ADDENDUM
I see that crooked south Florida employment agencies are in the line of fire again. These are the dozens of bogus agencies that place fake job ads to sucker in applicants knowing a certain percentage won’t walk away in disgust. It is bait and switch. They pretend to be the employer, often denying they are an agent by saying they “work for the hiring party”. They only want the private information contained on your resume. Often the first indication they are not the business owner is when you pull up expecting an interview, but instead find some stupid fat lady at a strip mall in Broward, by which time you have already driven across town. You get their bull-donkey about putting your life history into some searchable data base which is supposed to miraculously fit you to some non-existent job. It is an “employment Ponzi scheme” dependent on new dupes coming in at the bottom.
There was an interesting inquiry about the rental room today. It is a lady who runs a home computer business who wants a place with a family setting, but not with a family. This I completely understand. Security is not a problem here, but I do like the idea of someone around most of the time. She strikes me as having the same difficulty I did years ago, of finding a place that is affordable through sharing, but manages to give you most of the privacy you need. We’ll see if she calls back.
She didn't.
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