One year ago today: September 26, 2013, 25 milliwatts.
Five years ago today: September 26, 2009, I hate guitarists.
Ten years ago today: September 26, 2004, what apple?
MORNING
Temporary power today, so things will soon be back to normal. Normal around here is not to be confused with boring. Last evening was a major event for me, possibly a breakthrough but ten years too late. Read about that below. Enjoy everyone, except for the pricks who put un-skippable advertising on youTube videos. Those sick bastards can go you-know-what themselves. I avoid products advertised on youTube and you should avoid them, too. Note my paragraphs are not indented when I don't have commercial electrical power. Kudos if you figure out why.
And this picture is here simply because I don't have anything better.
I sent to list to my small group with whom I talk music and every one says the same thing. They've never heard of most of this music or most of the bands. Probably because it isn't real country. Just a mass of tunes written to spec, all as stereotyped as an Eric Clapton lead break. Play it forward, play it backwards, then call it original. But I must show up for this audition if only to prove a point. And of course, to see what else is out there. My unique style has prevailed before.
NOON
Hmmm, what’s this that one needs a license to own or trade more than a certain amount of gold.? But I can’t find out what that amount that is. I wrote a while back how each ounce of gold requires 38 to 40 man-hours to produce. It’s only been in the last hundred years that national sovereignty was not based on gold reserves. And I don’t believe there is any gold in Ft. Knox. Or in that underground vault in New York which refuses to show it to even those who own it.
What do I think? I think the government has squandered all the gold and there remains only one source of it left, just like in 1933. The government did not seize people’s gold, only that the gold had to be sold to the government at a fixed rate. $35 per ounce, wasn’t it? What was seized was the price. If they do it again at $1200 per ounce, this time there would be massive inflation shortly as those who had to sell their gold [will rapidly] seek to put it into other “safe” investments.
Oil, housing, food, water, I don’t know. But I do know what happens to prices when big money starts chasing it. If you think food is expensive now, just wait a year. Kraft dinner is already $1.87 per box, three times the price early last year.
The largest buyers of gold for years now have been banks. They obviously know something is going to happen to paper money and they want value. These banks are usually associated with the government of the country where the buying is going on. How much gold do they have?
India: 558 tonnes. Netherlands: 612 tonnes. Japan: 765 tonnes. Russia: 957 tonnes. Switzerland: 1,040 tonnes. China: 1,054 tonnes. France: 2,435 tonnes. Italy: 2,452 tonnes. Germany: 3,391 tonnes. USA: 8,134 tonnes.
But here’s something to consider. India, Japan, Russia, Switzerland, and China actually possess 90% of the gold. The other European nations and the US actually have less than 30% of the actual metal, the rest of the gold they claim to own is being held in “foreign reserves”. Yeah, like where? Brazil? Botswana? In the barn behind grandma’s house?
EVENING
I did a Karaoke show. My first and only, it finally happened. It is now 12:44 AM and I’m home and happy. A reminder to the reader that I have only sung, never conducted a show, and I never did get around to learning that disk machine that’s been sitting under my PA head for the last five years. So I had 75 minutes to get it together for the show at the club tonight. The regular act did something I have never done—cancelled out at the last minute.
Music is too competitive to leave an opening like that. I at first said no, but the club was really stuck, saying anything was better than nothing. I scrounged Wanda’s old disk player from Lee-Ann’s son, I ran the sound through my bingo PA and used some RCA cables to display the lyrics on that old TV by the pool table. It not only worked (I had to drive home to get the right power cables and microphones) but we actually started on time.
Tomorrow: breakfast at Tiffany’s, anywhere you want to go. On me. I did not make anything in tips but the base pay made up for it. Will anything come of this? Certainly, the right people saw in the end it was yours truly who came through in the lurch and pulled off a show that seemed impossible one hour before.
My impressions of my first Karaoke show? Foremost, I should have been ready and I wasn’t. The show was a mere success where it should have been a splash. There is more to Karaoke, but a lot of it is make-work because other people are doing it. And you have to compete. Be prepared, I just happen to have enough spare parts and adaptors to pull something like this off since I had to jerry-rig four of the six connections.
You need a second CD/DVD player to keep the sound going between singers. Fortunately thanks to bingo, we have an awful lot of experience doing that just right. The Karaoke machines have a greater lag time than regular players. The disks are not normalized (different songs come on at different volumes) so you cannot leave the set unattended between tunes. I was super busy all night because I used the house TV, my PA speakers, and a completely unfamiliar Karaoke machine Lee-Anne’s boyfriend brought in late. And it was missing the mixer.
Overall, not as easy a money-maker as music or bingo. By comparison, a lot of work. I would have to streamline any such show for me. I didn’t make any tips. Perceptually, it “moves” about three times faster than bingo. That would improve once you memorize the routine. And who do we know that is an expert at memorizing routines? So don’t run out and throw a Karaoke show. Yeah, I just did, but it was, let me tell you, by the narrowest of margins.
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