One year ago today: May 6, 2013, real root beer.
Five years ago today: May 6, 2009, Klondike solitaire.
Today was tough and grueling. Enough to cause the first disagreement in our local (not Nova) robot club. I had to step in and ride herd. It does not matter if there is something new or better or faster on the market. If the customer wants XP, we give him XP. No arguing. Telling people what they are supposed to like is best left to MicroSoft. Shown here is the first test drive of my light-frame bike. Agt. M is the test pilot. As depicted, the unit is all wheel and spoke, almost no visible frame. It will soon to receive a 36W electric motor. What’s 36W? Enough to brag about.
To any wise guys out there, every last set of instructions available on the Internet are wrong. No, no, you didn’t listen to me. They are wrong. They do not match the screens and requirements that actually appear after the second or third step into about a fifteen-step process. Unless a set of instructions accounts for every configuration error message, the instructions are wrong. Some guys still don’t get it.
JZ is off to the Bahamas. Fun? Depends. They are taking his brother’s small airplane, which gives JZ the heebie-jeebies. Like he says, when he shakes, the whole plane shakes. Plus, the Bahamas is like a private resort. No phone service, no women, no fun unless it is allowed by the house. They have laws and systems to prevent the place from being overshadowed by the USA. Tourism makes it one of the richest per capita nations, but in reality the life of non-millionaires is reduced to basket weaving and cable TV.
He returns on the 20th and swears he will be ready to head out on one of our epic scrunt-hunts. That will be the day when he is ready on time, but we’ve got underway before. He likes the idea of a train trip—but says he’s never been on one! And guess where he disappeared for a month? He went to the government office to check on a file and they gave him an Obama phone. So that’s why he never called for three weeks. He finally threw it in the drink and got his old cell back.
It is official, my blogs are not here from early May 2004 to end of August 2004. Too bad, that was a happy and exciting time. I believed I had six months to live. Since I doubt I lost them, maybe they never existed. Why I didn’t write everything down, I can’t say. It would have, for me at least, been a fascinating account. Today I thought about that as I attacked that song from 1967, “I’m A Believer” until I got it right. Five hours, but I picked out the notes. They knew how to play a bass line back then. There are 19 or 20 notes in that bass line, depending on how you play the octaves. Most contemporary music has maybe 8 bass notes.
At the risk of some saying that after a year, the band is finally joining me, okay. You have a point. We are learning Monkee’s “Last Train To Clarksville” and they also threw in “I’m A Believer”. The band has a weird aversion to playing only one song by an artist. This mystifies me as I firmly reason that every tune should be chosen solely its own merits. I suppose I should be glad they didn’t glom onto that elevator tune, “Daydream Believer”.
I’m pleased with this development because this band is unwittingly choosing music I can play in my sleep. What do I mean? Well, this band is conspicuously antipathetic toward any solo bass, right down to individual bass notes. By that, I mean somebody in the band will overplay even my shortest riffs. However, this is not necessarily negative, as from what I hear their former bassists had a nasty habit of not showing up and I fully agree somebody has to play the part when that happens.
To me this is important for another reason. The majority of musicians I ever met only really “hear” their own instrument. The rest of the band largely exists as a framework to support what they play. And I’m in a room full of people who consider the bass an inferior part, at best having a secondary accompaniment role. The emergence of tunes with heavier bass parts show the band is adapting, if only subconsciously, and if only mildly. Put another way, they have become wary of my less-than-passive style. Even if they don’t realize it, they have become cautious over throwing any old tune my way and blurting out, “The bass is easy.”
This is not to say they have progressed to actually listening to the bass part before selecting a tune. That will be the day, but let’s inspect that “I’m A Believer” song. There is no right way to play that muddy, overdubbed bass. I hear at least two tracks if not two different bassists. Some of the note transitions are impossible as your “fingers get in the way”, hence no way that bass was recorded live. My job is to pick out the notes that capture the essence of the song and shoehorn them back in while still playing technically correct bass lines. And that’s something I have a little experience with on stage
Final word for now on my fancy dating club is I did not re-up. The women I met were no different than could have been chatted up at a beer bust or riding the city bus. In a year, I met six and talked with twelve, none of them the least bit adventuresome. None were intellectual on a scale I’d recognize. What brought this up is some of those women, now rejectees, have placed me on external lists from which I receive junk mail. That, ladies, is not very nice.
How about some trivia? Every notice the trivia here is nicer because it is not the repetitive stuff you get everywhere else? Since most readers have already noted that, I won’t have to point it out. How do I know my trivia is new? Because of the way I acquire it and that is a state secret. Trivia: the deodorizing effect of baking soda has only a marginal effect, the rest is psychological. However, there are still more refrigerators in the land with an open box of baking soda than there are with working fridge lights.
Want more? For a lark, here is some “alphabet-ary” trivia from Squidoo (no link):
All alphabet letter names are one syllable except “W”.
The longest word with no repeat letters is “uncopyrightable”.
The dot over the letter “i” has a name: tittle.
Allow me. My ex-wife has no tittles to her name.
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