And much of the new stuff is impressive. It appeals to me if only because it is music most other bands don’t play or can’t play. As in four part harmonies. We need only get in with one good-paying house gig to pay off. This is nearly an A-room sound and that is saying plenty for a band that does not use a soundman. And all I have to do is stand there and play bass.
When I joined up, it was all me learning the band’s pre-existing song list. I never got to see the rate at which the band could itself learn anything new, an important point with me. But the addition of the lady singer has allowed me to observe the workings. And let me tell you, Glen, Eddie, Cowboy Mike, and the rest of you, this band waxes your sorry asses. That’s eight new songs, which is more than I’ve seen the whole lot of you learn in ten years. The band has changed and is becoming much more to my liking.
True, I don’t care for the “middle-aged housewife” look. But doesn’t apply to instances like that lady in the Laundromat this morning. Wow. But it also spells out the main reason I want to move out of this town. It is too plebian for me. There are few intellectual pursuits, the libraries are full of junk books, weekend activities amount to binge drinking, the women have a forlorn manner, and I seem to be the only one operating at a surplus. The nearest bookstore is ten miles away and the live theater twice that. There isn’t any place nearby I’d care to go for a stroll in the evenings.
On my way home from bingo who do I see but Reid, the drummer. He’s going to the Octopus, so I parked and we walked over there. Ah, if you are wondering where the crowd from Buddy’s wound up, check there. Even the waiters. However, the live bands are gone, so is the atmosphere. The new management has changed it into a shick-a-boogah girlie bar. The gals don’t strip, but they do the pole dancing, which attracts the wrong crowd. Except for the odd jewelry store, there is now not a single business still downtown that has been there since I arrived in 2004.
That’s a long time for me to stay put. True, the first five years was the time it took me to recover physically—and get a few harsh reminders how fragile even that can be. I’m referring to the stretch 2005 to early 2010 when I rode my bicycle back to semi-wellness and adopted the quiet lifestyle I now lead. Other than Wallace or JZ and I hitting the Keys or the Gulf coast, travel was limited. I never even got out of Florida during that stretch. Since then, it has been motorcycle travel only. But hey, taking a scooter all the way to St. Augustine is definitely good adventure.
Trivia. It says here the entrance to the NASA headquarters has a picture of Tipu Sultan. Who is that? The implication is that he invented the rocket. He didn’t. He’s the East Indian who first used iron rockets against the British, who in turn got the word out. These were heavier and longer ranged than the paper rocket tubes used in Europe at the time. One of the iron rockets took out a British ammo dump, but most were fitted with sword blades and fired at infantry. Apparently Congreve, the British rocket guy, had examined captured models. I think NASA is indulging in a little hooey diplomacy by claiming the modern rocket was invented in India.
Not so, firework factories were common in the area and, given the general respect for human life in that part of the world, it would not take more than one or two accidents before somebody figured out how to use this Chinese invention against the English. So NASA, get it right. During the 18th century, there probably was not a single invention that wasn’t used by someone to kill the English, and rightly so. It was the English, not the Germans, who invented the concentration camp. Boer War, 1901-ish.
I’ll tell you the kind of woman I can really like. Dresden, 1908. German coffee used to be made by boiling the grounds right in the water, which made it bitter. So the lady ripped page out of her son’s notebook, poked holes in it and some more holes in the bottom of a brass pot. It was the birth of drip coffee. Her first name was Melitta. So you get double trivia today. NASA and coffee. Great combination.
Factoid. Almost 70% of the world’s coffee is now made with the drip method. Way to go, Mel.
ADDENDUM
Enough people have asked about the QBASIC dice-throwing program I described last week that I’ll go over it in a more step-by-step fashion. While this blog is not for the less than average or the easily offended, I know that arrays are not something everyone grasps equally well. And I did use arrays in my solution. The program in focus is a tiny bit of code, maybe thirty lines, that determines if single die is honest. It accomplishes this by “throwing” the die one million times and tallying up the occurrences of each result. If the die, in this case the computer random number generator, is honest, each number should show up approximately one-sixth of the total, or 166,667 times each.
So why complicate this with the use of arrays? Because computers are very fast at processing arrays and most people are not. Thus, I will describe the logic without using arrays. Instead of throwing the die one million times, imagine I had a million dies and six large bins. I throw the first die and if it shows a 1, I toss it into bin 1, if a 2, into bin 2, and so on. Think about that. I don’t really care if it is 1, 2, 3 or A, B, C. I wind up with six bins and now, all I need do is measure the bins. They should all have the same number of dice, or displace the same volume, or all weigh the same. I’m looking for equality.
Make sense? Good, because I tricked you. In your mind’s eye, you imagined all six bins to be identical. You likely further thought of them as bin 1, bin 2, etc. And you had them all next to each other in a row. That makes them an array. In computer terms I declared the bins to be identical in memory size, which allows the computer to process the information in the bins far faster than other methods, such as declaring six variables. You see, the computer will clump the elements of an array into a block of identical, sequential, consecutive memory locations.
There, now you know arrays.
