I toured the acoustic department and found the semi-acoustic guitar that Jag is going to want. It is $255, so not right away. It is the same model that Lou plays, although I had to find all this on my own. I looked at other prices, for instance, a gallon of frog juice is $25 and they have the battery-powered Roland bass cube for $249 (I won’t need it, as you read on).Top draw was the demo Fishmann SSA, the tiny PA tower I’ve had my eye on for six long months. I will still require a six or eight channel mixer, but they don’t seem to make any decent ones any more. The Fishmann has only two input jacks. It is amazing technology that they’ve eliminated the need for a woofer, you’d have to hear this thing to appreciate the sound. My entire stage show would be reduced to around 45 pounds. That consists of the PA, a mixer, my instrument, a laptop computer and wireless everything.
Last night I got my PA moved and was saw another flopped Karaoke show. These people are competition but they are still friends of mine and if this keeps up, there will soon be a few survivors left. While my plans to streamline my gear are well advanced, it is a pity to see these people using dollies to roll in 800 pounds of gear for each gig, not to mention the time required. And the van to move it in.
Let me apologize if I was a little harsh on Wikipedia. I re-read the entire page of instructions, then called Professor Howard to inform him I now think we can manage on our own. Part of the problem was lack of clear examples until you really dig deep, and the fact that the page is named “Footnotes”, which means a lot of things to different people. I don’t want footnotes, I want instructions on how to code references. Wikipedia gets my apology on because it was there, not because they did a good job of things.
Being a little under budget, I developed a craving for KFC wings. That’s likely as there are no Popeye’s in the vicinity. It was $5 for, well, not very much, some chicken wings and potato fries. And they were not that spicy. Should have gone to BK. That reminds me, can anyone recall the name of Boston Market before they changed it? Something chicken or something fried.
There was a Canadian guy at the library this morning, we talked about what’s changed since I was last there. Not much. He reports that the GST (goods and services tax) has finally evolved into the HST (harmonized sales tax), a VAT (value added tax) of around 14%. Somehow, I just can’t see a province like Alberta going for something like that. Money sent to Ottawa and then returned always comes back with attached conditions.
Later, my Bingo was dead. But not as dead as Karaoke has been for several months running. I really am not sure how to react to this. If it comes down to a contest, bingo is the winner, but who dares to say so? In a very real sense, Karaoke is an institution at a lot of these places. The recession seems to have finally filtered down to street level. Mind you, downtown (a few blocks away) was packed ten deep, particularly all those clubs that seem to make a go if it having a crowd one day each week.
Last, guitar Eddie is again putting it about that he is the person who got me singing, when in fact it was Arnel. Eddie came along three months later and it was one of probably twenty things he said, Eddie being so full of good advice and all. Anyway, I told him finally he was not influential and worse, his singing would have sent me down the wrong path.
