I could teach you in detail how to play a blues lead break, yet I cannot play it myself. Take heart, we can all do Karaoke, and here is a photo of the amazing quality now available on a $100 flat screen. I took this photo with the Jazz camera. You could not get such brilliance at any price ten years ago.A morning at the shop, which means you get some facts about something. I’m very fond of information. I could not help seeing the headlines proclaiming the real estate bust is over, that there has never been a better time to buy. Yet there are over 16,000 condos on the market in this area. Let me tell you how it really is. I know the reason the bottom has not fallen out of the housing market. Do you? Here’s how it works.
The middle class are the ones totally responsible for real estate prices, so they have nobody to blame but themselves for what is about to happen. Prices have dropped over the past two years. The middle class thinks, “That was just the speculator and investors. That will never happen to me.” Then recently, the prices have apparently stabilized.
What has really happened is the middle class still have mortgages. They’ve noticed their houses are not “gaining in value” like they used to. This is unsettling and they’ve quit “trading up”. That is, they’ve stopped selling. So each one of them is sitting on a mortgaged property falsely thinking theirs is the one house in the community that is holding its value.
Fact: prices aren’t dropping because nobody is selling. They are sitting, hoping for the market to return. And it is amazing to hear them rationalize. They bought the home to raise a family, or houses in some other part of the continent are still selling high, or their banking system is different. These are lame positions taken by those secretly praying they won’t be next. They will be.
As I wrote long ago: beginning in February 2011, the real crisis begins. Ten thousand boomers a day turning 65 and trying to unload their houses. Here are 85 million people who are about to realize they cannot afford to live in a big empty house with $800 per month in taxes. They will realize they only thought one could live cheaper after retirement. But living cheaper takes a lifetime of experience.
And they can expect no mercy or pity, for they are also the ones who supported the system that supported Madoff and Enron and foreign wars and the welfare state. People like me (the minority) repeatedly tried to warn people like you (the majority), but you didn’t listen. They can still vote themselves some borrowed cash that their children will have to repay, but my money is safely in Euros. Did you read about that couple that vacationed in Greece and found the locals no longer accept American dollars?
Evening found me at Bingo. That has quickly become an institution. It has been some three months but there is already an established clientele. The jackpot now regularly ranges from $38 to $52, depending more on the number of cards sold than the number of people present. My backing tracks are expected and my style unique enough to keep the crowd spoiled. Pity the person who tries to follow my act.
That Saturday evening is also the slot I’m eyeing for my Karaoke show. I have the basic equipment, what I don’t have is the massive disk collection, as I cannot find a suitable format to commit to. The popular CDG is a bad choice but that is where some of the highest quality tracks are found. My idea is to purchase a burner with the G sub-channel capability and then make friends with an existing Karaoke show who wants backup copies. (Of course, I would quickly see if the CDs could be made into DVDs. Way ahead of you on that one.)
The alternative is to copy all the CDGs onto hard drives. The problem there is the computer playback apps have personalities. None of them faithfully reproduce the sound of a good Karaoke disk player. Try it. Also, one would have to keep complete backup hard drives, due to something about eggs and baskets.
No, I have not forgotten my quest for a decent drum machine. I’ve read the specs on several dozen pieces of drum software. Most are the same repetitious crap, where each “song” has to be painstakingly built up layer by layer and the built in beats are mostly useless. They are not so much a true drum machine as they are another instrument that requires skill and talent, and hell, most drummers ain’t got that, dammit. The literature never delves into the parts I need, like does the software burn standardized files in formats that can be played on other machines? On this venture, I’m no further ahead than months ago when that English guy quit responding.
