And a day of cold and spitting rain, it was. It’s the kind of stretch I stay at home reading and routine maintaining. All my tools are oiled and sharpened. I spent another few hours getting my old computer running again, as this one [that I’m using right now] is a Win 7 and all the popular controls that require brains to operate are moved to inconvenient menus. MicroSoft ain't about to let you brainiacs have it all your own way.
Here’s an opportunity for someone, I think. The memorial service for Dad is next weekend and the bakery that normally sends the pastries is blocked in by the cold. They are flown in from Chicago. Even that name sounds below zero. Thus, Alaine put in an order for the poppyseed cake from Kiss. I know what praise sounds like, so I won’t even try to tell you anything more than that they have the best product I’ve ever known. Most everyone who tries that place becomes a regular. The food is really is that good.
Since I still have the chemistry and anatomy texts for the phlebotomy class (the course is on hold indefinitely), I read up select chapters that interested me. Blood gasses, I never much thought about them. And when you get blood drawn into several test tubes, I learned the label on the tube is not as important to the lab than the color of the cap on the test tube. Color-coding it. It only proves there are fewer color blind people than people who can't read labels.
That’s all more trivia, what I got really is a doubtful feeling that anybody could read a book that size and grasp it. I don’t care how smart they are, it would take half a lifetime to really understand this material sentence by sentence. One book, people, just one! Therefore I know most people must cram and forget. My confidence in lab procedures and lab technicians has fallen greatly in the past few months.
Put another way, some people I grew up with became nurses and lab techs. If this is the kind of book they were expected to read AND understand, our medical system is in deep trouble. Don’t get me wrong, they probably perform their jobs. But you better hope anything you catch is run-of-the-mill. That is, make sure you only get diseases they’ve seen on the job a few hundred times before. True, I’ve only read part of two books on the topic, but that’s enough. Nobody entering first year college straight from high school could fathom even the chemical equations. And JZ has thirty such books.
Trivia. I found out what dihedral is, as far as airplanes go, any way. Think of small airplanes which have the wing under the fuselage. The wings are both angled somewhat upward. That’s dihedral. When a gust of wind hits the plane from the side, it tends to try to turn the airplane over. With the dihedral, one wing is forced down when the other is forced up. The one pushed down generates more lift and tries to turn the airplane back level. I can sort of see it.
Don’t despair, there is never actually nothing going on around here. I never did care for cold weather, I’m the sort to stay bundled up and let somebody else get out there and roll frozen logs down the hill. At least I heard that is what they do in Manitoba for fun.
Damn this Win 7. Every other command has to be issued twice. You in-copy a file and it gets locked as read-only. Open Word or Excel and it hands you 30 seconds of advertising. If you know what drivers are, then you know Win 7 doesn’t have any good ones. And Internet freedom has pretty much been kissed goodbye when you have to sign up to download drivers. It’s a good thing I kept copies of all my older versions and can a lot of times revert to something that works like it should. And as far as I’m concerned, this whole “cloud” thing is another confidence trick being foisted on the unsuspecting, the sheeple. And why not? They bought Vista, didn’t they?
ADDENDUM
The first rehearsal with Billie-Bill is over and it was somewhere between great fun and pulling teeth. Our styles are so different as to be opposites. This has to do with band management and any manager who has tried to get along with other managers, well, you get the idea. For example, he wants to avoid wasting time now where I want to avoid wasting the same thing later. Are we brewing up trouble or genius? The odds are on trouble--but we both know the other can play what we want. And [the other] has equipment, and experience, and transportation, and things you don’t miss until you team up with the wrong band.
Billie-Bill still wants to make a musical statement. I still want to get out there and play. He speaks of high motivation; I speak of meeting younger women. He regards recording as a goal, I detest it as a Mafia-like racket. The big picture can’t be summed up easily, but I can give you enough to follow along and make up your own mind—if you read all my examples. If this flies, we will have one incredible duo. If it doesn’t, I have my own duo. That’s my insurance policy, in that I know Billie-Bill is playing in four, maybe five, different projects at this time.
His approach is about as old-fashioned as it gets. I know, because I used to do things that way. When I try to demonstrate a rhythm that only sounds good as a duo, he misses the point by insisting he has to know “what song” it is from. Then I have to hunt down an example instead of concentrating on the technique. Then we bog down learning some song (small picture) instead of the skill (big picture).
To make it clearer, he wants to start learning “songs” right now, whereas I don’t want to invest any time on a specific tune until it is clear we are heading in the same direction by showing we are willing to arrange and play the music as a duo. The music has to be arranged, I do not enter bands to “back up” some guitar player. If we don’t agree beforehand this band is a duo and nothing else, it will break up.
Right off learning individual pieces of music is labor-intensive and borderline futile. I want to work toward the larger goal of playing many tunes without repeating a single guitar or bass rhythm, and to play fast music without sounding like a polka band. I see him as hide-bound to the past, he sees my ideas as nothing new. (But I didn’t say they were new, I said I’ve had trouble finding guitar players who have even tried a single new approach to their own music since the beginning of time.)
Two egos, one band. If there are any armchair shrinks in the crowd, I should charge admission beyond here. Billie-Bill can demonstrate the only time we get ahead is by doing it his way. I can demonstrate that is because he is proving so resistant to doing things any other way that it creates the false impression that his way is faster. The difference is I’ve tried it his way, he has never tried it mine.
Ah, some say, how do I know that? Because I could play his versions instantly. But he could only play mine partially right even after I coached him. By the second verses, he was comping and adding extra beats, both of which are the outright mistake called “overplaying”. That means he has not done it before, ever. Read my lips, “NO COMPING”. But he did explain he likes his whole band to play every riff. Such things frighten me. I don’t want anyone else playing my bass licks.
There’s more. He doesn’t want to talk business before we have something we can play, where, I want to address the things that cause bands to fail, which is largely because they focused only on the music part and the business part flared up later. For example, if he wants a third member in the band, he has to train the newcomer on his own time and pay him out of his own share. Why? Because this band is designed as a duo. I trust you can see how important it is to get these things out of the way fast.
We’ll go again in a week. If we were politicians or army generals, this would be a heyday for psychiatrists. We both see the other’s view, we know the other guy can already play, but we are still cautious. I’m not saying Billie-Bill personally, but I find bands that are slapped together never last, while my bands once formed stay together for decades. It will be an unusual experiment in temperaments. One of the reasons I’m insisting he learn my material is so that he can’t play anything in this band the way he played it in others. I’ve watched and as soon as he plays his stuff, he plays only the guitar parts same as ever. And he plays everything at the same speed, 72 beats per minute, no matter how fast I count it in.
Having said all that, we connected on around ten songs and all of them were winners. Once he got into the style, he was toe-tapping to Johnny Horton and Don Wilson. But it took two hours to get him there. There is no way to know where this will end up at the present time.
