One year ago today: April 10, 2016, $185 of information.
Five years ago today: April 10, 2012, the impossible dream, seriously.
Nine years ago today: April 10, 2008, Meet Mr. Weebles.
Random years ago today: April 10, 2001, a DNS transcript?
I’ll try to get you some photos of a candle hurricane lamp. These are shaped like a lantern with a carrying handle, most likely you’ve seen them in the movies. These got a very close examination when we discovered they regularly sell for $35. It appears to have five pieces of wood held in place by some bent wires. It was not long before I determined the manufacturing cost to be less than $4. But it is missing some kind of small dome chimney arrangement on the top and until I find out how that works, this is another project that gets put back on the shelf.
Gold pan prices. Most are made out of plastic these days, leading me to conclude you’ll get the same results with an old frisbee. The prices hover around $6, add a couple dollars if you want stainless steel. I’m going to take a look at what is involved in assaying. Why not, and besides, the robot club made it a near-rule to always have somebody internally who knew or at least understood any activity that was farmed out. That’s what I was doing learning basic welding.
The principle of having someone “in the loop” has never failed us. It makes sense that somebody should be me and it suits my temperament because it is always great to be indespensible. And has not experience with the club taught us that whatever book-learning problems we encounter, we will also encounter others who have run up against the same but could not pursue the academic part.
In a new development, Agy. R has contacted an old guy who has a mining claim in Georgia. At this point, I heard a tale from the trailer court that I’ve heard before out west. It is a damn fool thing to go into the wilderness by yourself. The old guy did. He slipped and fell on his noggin, almost bought the farm because there was nobody to help. He called it quits, but apparentlly has all his dredging equipment for sale.
Fruit carving.
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You’ve been extra nice, waiting until I got caught up with the posts. So, here is another special for you. A unique display, never seen anywhere before. But you’re worth it. You’re much to young to remember these things, probably because so am I, but these are matchbooks that used to be given out a truckstops. Back when all the truckers smoked, I believe. These are the originals, not reproductions. Eleven of these twelve are listed variously as collectors items, meaning this set is going to cost you around $800.
Apparently the artist used Marilyn Monroe as a model, but she was before our time so none of us know which is here. Our guess is one of the middle pair in the top row. I’ll attempt to look it up to see if there’s anything to that rumor. We have a trunk full of these matches, and yes, they still light. Why, do you smoke, or is that an insult question?
I kept busy running the sand blaster. It makes quick work of taking the paint of old brass hinges, our hottest selling item. I need more practice and we are going to have to modify the cabinet, the hoses, and get a better electric supply for the compressor. These all work but they are not up to snuff. Nowhere near robot club quality. To me, it’s all part of the adventure.
The hoses that came with the unit are so weak, they will collapse if there is a blockage. I’ve already cut a replacement from the clear acrylic “moonshine” robot hydraulic piping. You cannot kink that material. I’m also reinforcing the ends with springs from the old cPod solar panel mounts. Today I cleaned brass latches, wrenches, and had a go at a frying pan. Or more like a griddle. I’m not a fan of pans that have metal handles but this one, I’d fry eggs on it just to say I could do it.
Later the newest guitar player called. He lives nearly twenty miles away, but in an excellent area of town for country music. Again, the distance always depends on how much the club is paying. Once my cut gets above $100 (twice what the Hippie pays), I’ll drive up to an hour each way. Add in some enthusiasm because the dude finally sent me some of his song list and it reflects the same aversion to “new country” that I have. Except for the odd jingle that sparkles, that music is bland to a true country fan.
However, I must act fast. He can sing and the danger with every guitar player who can sing is striking out on his own. I have a narrow window to demonstrate how what I do on the bass adds a priceless dimension they just cannot get anywhere else. This is a serious factor, because most guitar players won’t even listen or give it a chance. I even tried paying them to learn my system and that even that could not pierce their ego armor. Worse, the two that even tried did a horrible job of it and quit after the first few minutes.
This is not to be confused with the guitar and stand-up bass duos, which I will have nothing to do with. These are different concepts and I draw the dividing line at musical presentation. A stand-up bass will entertain you, but unless you are watching the show, the sound will bore you in no time. This is a different listening experience to hearing me play the electric bass in fully integrated studio-grade custom bass lines to each tune. It would be physically (and conceptually) impossible for a stand-up bassist to do what I do.
While I have your attention, let me explain what goes wrong with these guys. Some of this we’ve already gone over, but I know I’ve never described the process itself. Foremost, playing in a duo is not the same as playing a guitar part with one other person. Somebody has to be playing the rhythm most of the time because there is no drummer. Most duos you’ll get two guitar players, one strumming and the other picking. Sometimes the particular tune they are playing is originally intended to have two guitar parts. Most music does not.
This is where things break down. The guitarist wants to showcase instead of strum a decent rhythm. There are no other rhythm instruments in a duo. Now, there are certain tunes that can be played with a lead, bass, and drums. Doing so is called a power trio, but that is definitely not the same as a duo with a drummer added in. Not even close. The good news is that most popular music can be adapted to a duo—if you pointedly leave out the lead break. This is repugnant to most guitar hero types. And outfits like Guitar Center, who cater to these guitarist freaks until they run out of money, would rather the concept just go away.
My usual method is to pick songs that I know are already arranged for duo work. Like most of my song list. This is why I ask for their song list, to pick the ones I already know to break them in. Otherwise, every guitarist I’ve ever met has an aversion to other people’s lists. Glen, Mike, Ray, Bill, you know exactly what I’m talking about. People who don’t play guitar have lousy taste in music, and don’t you guys know it.
I require about a half hour EACH of going through enough of these tunes, one by one, explaining what should be played and why. This requires patience, because in no time at all, the guitar player is going to realize a lot of his pet material is not suitable for this treatment. That’s a lot of his time and effort down the drain, and guitar players are not used to that. I’d feel the same, but I have a concept of team work, of working toward a common goal. Most guitarists talk about teamwork, but only from the context that they are the captain.
This process of going through the songs and learning what to add and leave out is like learning Martian to even long-term rhythm guitarists. They never realized how they were tending to select pieces that had strong or ready-made rhythm chops. A rare few have said I was the first person who ever pointed that out to them. Most just don’t listen. Most Eagles tunes have two rhythm guitars and a lead player. On the duo stage, you eliminate the lead and make a blend of the two rhythms, and very few players can do this naturally without over-playing the results.
It takes that full half-hour per tune until enough has been covered that they can begin to select what fits best on their own. This is also the juncture at which they realize they can have a fairly good career soloing in this manner, which is why I seek guitarists who cannot sing. But the guitar part, well, I plain prefer guitar players who can do a better job of it than myself, but I have yet to meet one who both can and will.
Um, let me think of a pro rhythm guitarist you might relate to who would do the job right. Hang on, I’m still thinking. Glen Campbell, whose music I don’t care for, is an incredible rhythm guitar player. Don’t listen to his hits, because that is not his best strumming. He was a session musician so there are dozens of videos where he plays duos with his contemporaries, often singing harmonies. Listen to any of those and notice his nearly mind-boggling interpretation of his part, how smoothly he captures the quintessence of each piece of music. This is what I try to do on the electric bass.
“I heard hipsters often cry after sex,
$500 is such a lot of money.”
Next item, I’ve written how the birdbath has turned the corner of the front yard into its own micro-world. Nature is amazing if you have time to watch it and the competition is fierce. The pigeons and bluejay have learned to operate the feeder. While they are too large to sit on the perch, both species have learned to lean on it sideways. Kind of like pulling up to the take-out window. This leans the feeder over and they can go through a week’s supply of songbird grub in a day.
I need to devise some method of excluding them. Later I’ll try to find information on this matter, but here is another instance where I’ll wager there is limited or nothing available. This has always been my criticism of the Internet. No depth. A million tons of beginner’s trivia, but no real in-depth data except possibly what is for sale. But even that is so over-priced and carries no guarantees that itself isn’t the dreaded MicroSoft manual format.
[Author’s note: MicroSoft format is 600 pages that has never been proof-read and you can’t look anything up unless you already know what they’ve called it. Not what it is called, but what they’ve called it. And they are, you know, kind of retarded, making up the labels in-house instead of simply asking real people what they would tag it.
Example: try to find the instructions to permanently set the icons when you open your files on anything after Windows XP. All I want is only my picture files to show as a thumbnail, but all other files to display the details. The operative word being “only”. Unless you are apart of the greatest generation, you should be able to grasp this.
Ah, I know what you are thinking. You are wrong. Try it. Follow the instructions, which send you to the Folder Options under the Tools drop menu. Oddly, this feature worked before the Millennials go hold of it. No matter how many times you set it, after a bit, it will randomly change to what it pleases. Worse, it will globally change all your icons. Like anyone needs a thumbnail of a word processor file.
Now, if you really want some frustration, try to set the Styles and Formatting feature to match this blog. To this day, I still have to set it daily by hand.]
Later, I find out the birdfeeder problem has no single best solution. Of the options, I think I will surround the feeder with a cage that excludes the “bully birds”. It is a housing that only lets smaller birds through to lunch. I think I’ve seen wire models at the Tractor store sold as squirrel guards. I shall investigate. I further learned that larger birds cannot bend their necks down to feed, so maybe there is a design solution. The feeder holes on my model were cut from the plastic lining of old flat screens, so experimentation is easy.
ADDENDUM
There was finally an article on the Watchdog program of a tactic discussed here more than 25 years ago. If I can find it, I’ll post. It concerns the corporate takeovers in the early days, so I was amazed to hear it being addressed just this morning. This is where a group takes over a company by paying off the investors by buying their shares back by liquidating the company’s own equity. I’m convinced this is what the Enron brass were trying to do in some slippery form, but they forgot one thing—the company had no equity. Anyway, for the non-financial sheet people out there, I’ll run through the process. Take a company worth a billion dollars on paper. Of that, at any given time, they have an inventory of $250,000,000 to build their product. They continue operations but get progressively slower at paying for their incoming supplies. Nothing to raise an alarm.
The company continues to ship product to all their retailers. The game begins when the company ceases paying for its supplies but continues to sell to the retailers on credit. When the company finally declares bankruptcy, all those retailers will still owe for what they bought. What hard cash they did pay was entirely pocketed by the company executives. Ah, now you get it. The crooked company brass were able to literally operate the company on credit alone while raking in millions in salaries for as long as nobody caught on—usually about a year. Nothing illegal about it.
Here’s a bacon-slicing machine in action. It's not embedded, so hit the play button.
Last Laugh
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