One year ago today: July 30, 2016, travelogue, a day in Lakeland.
Five years ago today: July 30, 2012, illegal searches.
Nine years ago today: July 30, 2008, So, which is it, toots?
Random years ago today: July 30, 2009, remember ripoffreport.com?
That’s what I thought, too. Coconut vinegar? I would have tried it except for the price tag, around $5. The label says it contains mother, so you can set up your own little factory if you run short. I once used some rice vinegar so I guess most any vegetable product will do—though I’m still a bit antsy about classifying palm and coconuts as vegetables. Anyhow, that is your distraction for today. July was a whirlwind month of delays, expenses, and disruptions. But also progress and changes. The plans for August, made so long ago, may be cancelled. Thanks, Doc.
I said I would look again at real estate, which I did over the past week. Nothing viable is out there for less than $69,000 though that did not stop me from examining these properties, in some cases driving past for a look. That takes it out of the realm where a cash purpose is possible. How about we go over what has changed with the money situation? Would you like that? Myself, I find it clears the clutter away when you hear out somebody who is going to invest their own cash. It is so much more real than when they’ve borrowed the money.
In 2015, around this time, I ran the numbers on the rent-to-own scenario. Should I be looking at that option again? If prices are such that credit is needed, that doesn’t automatically mean I would approach a bank. There are several properties offered through owner financing right in this area. Don’t expect any rapid movement since I am in the process of completely revamping my retirement strategy. I wasn’t expecting to live this long. I will have beat all the odds before this upcoming December. Still, I could only invest for a five year maximum and we would have to see an immediate potential for cash flow before I would even budge.
What’s stayed the same is the figure amounts on my spreadsheets. I was by chance looking for a rent-to-own in the $80,000 range right up until mid-August of 2015. Who recollects how this place drained me down to less than $200 in the world? I was not worried. That’s still better than people with mortgages who live their entire lives in the hole. I was close but never below zero. What’s changed is that if I took on a purchase of this nature today, I could guarantee that I’d never miss a payment, even if I croak.
Here’s where to listen closely. I specified a potential for cash flow, not that I would require rent money to make ends meet. You’re damn rights that’s a comfortable way to approach a real estate investment. Are we clear on this? I would not have to rent the place out to make the payments. I could let it sit, and I’ll get to that in a mo’. I’ve looked at various options, including a bed and breakfast (I have a lady willing to run the place), but Polk County is not that great a tourist or convention destination. It’s and hour’s drive to Disneyworld, and about the same to Tampa which is half the distance, but twice the hassle. (Bad road grid.)
There is a house near the library that wants 5% down which I’ve used as an example. Comps in that neighborhood are $60,000 though I would not pay that much. The district is just too far away from everything except the library. It is a six mile round trip to buy gasoline or groceries. The only convenient road is the highway and because of Mulberry and Bartow, it experiences a rush hour. But what are the plusses? This is sheer speculation but let’s look anyway.
If you wanted quiet seclusion, that’s the place for you. Big yard and it is across the way from a major park donated by the mining company. Nobody ever uses it. The street is dead end and about as residential as you can get. Even if it was left vacant, my spreadsheet says it could be purchased in 48 months. Just in time for all my long-term plans dating from 1981, which all end in late 2019. No way I’m touching a thing right now but if the opportunity arose, it’s nice to have a strategy in being. The average rent in that area is nearly $1,100 per month. Ah, but is now the time to buy?
I’m leery. The stock market is boiling but one look around tells you that upwelling is not based on any improvement in the economy.
Ireland.
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This is a sad photo. Here I am, 50 years later and still repairing my own guitar cables. Even an excellent mend like this is never as good as factory new. Sad, because for all my effort, I never made it big in music. I can place a lot of blame on circumstances, but the bottom line is I didn’t have what it takes and I never stood a chance. Blame or not, if I had to define why I personally feel I failed, the big factors are nobody to show me the ropes, no help from home, and a youthful misunderstanding that musical ability was not the primary ingredient of success. I’m far from alone on that because it is a fantasy the music industry is wise to propagate. It assures them a constant supply of new suckers at the bottom of that pyramid. And it is the only pyramid I ever found still worth climbing.
I did not know until I reached the city how the music industry there was dominated by the recording studios. There were two types of bands, in my thinking. The rock bands which I liked and the “old guy” bands that played the cabaret circuit. Cabarets were what you’d call a lounge these days, a somewhat better room than the saloons. There is no really comparable circuit out there, most of these places how rely on banks of big screen TVs for entertainment, and considering the type of clientele they cater to, television works just fine.
Through most of the 70s, I barely dabbled in bass and that was usually when nobody else was available. That was my era of jam sessions, but thanks to the girlfriend I had at the time, I could go for months without touching music. I regret that. However, once she left me for the son of an oil company executive, I found that as a bassist, I could always find work—and it was a lot easier than lugging around an electric piano. By my mid-thirties, bass playing had become a type of graveyard for failed guitarists. This would not apply to me as I never had any inclination to learn the guitar except as now—to do a solo act when nothing else materialized. You know the rest on that count.
There was no place where I grew up to buy guitar cables. If one broke, it meant asking around for who was next going to the city with their parents and begging them to buy one for you. There was a music store in Muskogee, if you wanted to pay $6 each. In my first bands, there was not one spare piece of equipment. A dead battery was a crisis. So you can imagine the effect on my poor head when I arrived in the city to find bands whose parents showered them with anything they wanted. Forgive if I did not knock myself out to get to the top—I knew I never stood a chance.
Y’know, it’s not like I didn’t know what the path to success was. By elimination, I was smart enough to know a home recording business without major distribution connections was a waste of time. Some of my best friends invested thousands in recording gear. I would not doubt if most of them still have it. My total in such equipment is less than a hundred bucks and I’ve made and published more recordings than most of them added together. What? Because I make my own sound tracks for my video backgrounds. Around 35 recordings total, of which I mostly use three, in this order:
a) MovieFiller001 (yes, that’s what it is actually called)
b) Alaine & Snookie (haunting church organ mood music)
c) Maybe Time (bass study in A minor)
My consolation prize is that I never set out to compete my way to the top. It’s like right now, my chances of hitting it big are actually greater than if I was slogging my life away at a job. I can’t see myself spending even eight hours of valuable life in a recording studio. Didn’t I just quote Lily Tomlin who said if she’d known what it took to have it all, she would have settled for a lot less.
I had to watch it because I can’t watch Meg Ryan movies. I won’t explain that in any detail. That’s why I switched to and Indian Jones classic that’s been dusty for years. These movies came out shortly after I started my final career back in the 80s. They were condemned by parents everywhere for being all action and no plot. Back then I was dating a Farrah Fawcett look-alike so I was okay with that admixture. Furthermore, I like the cinematography in those LucasFilm epics. If I ever invest in a big screen, it would be to see these like the movie theaters they were meant for. Not a lot of people know the scenery and implications in those movies are very historically accurate. Including some I am certain are there to demonstrate what an uncultured lot the censors are.
Hark back to my theory that comparable scientific advances took place in Germany and America in the 1940s and the 1950s, both approximately five or six years after rumors abounded about UFOs and strange expeditions. Hence, I don’t watch the movies strictly for entertainment. What Indiana says in his class is a lesson a lot of people should learn: deal in facts, not truth.
“We could soon reach a point at which our smartest machines become
more intelligent than we are and accelerate away from us
on an exponential learning curve.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
I thought you might like to see what is involved in the proper repair of a guitar cable. It is possible to Mickey Mouse anything, but I’ve learned to make a good repair in the hopes it will last longer. Each time you fix a cable, it lasts a shorter period. Shown here are many of the less obvious tools to do it right. Insulation strippers, Phillips screwdriver, wire cutters, side cutters, multi-meter, marking tape, insulation tape, reinforcement tape, and the compass (bow pencil) shown at lower left is for the metal tip.
1) People yank the cable by the cord instead of the plug.
2) Plastic shielding instead of metal on the plugs gets stepped on.
3) Casters rolling over the coax cable cause an invisible internal leak.
To show you what a softie I am for music, I had to test the cables. I automatically reached for the bass rather than the guitar. Then I had to put on some of the music I’m learning to strum and began playing my brand of rhythm bass. In no time at all I had lines that brought out the feel of the songs. Bass did not evolve from guitar as much as people think. In the early days, the lines were simple copies of the old stand-up bass oom-pah style, then a leap into the mid-sixties with those acid-rock standards that you get when you hand a stoned guitar player a bass.
There was no incubation period, the bass never grew up on its own, except possibly in small pockets here and there. It’s wonderful to hear an original or novel bass line in a hit tune but that is vanishingly rare. Remember when I play, I do not alter the original bass notes. All of them are still there. The fills and riffs I do are extras that emulate the ambiance of the song. That’s what I was playing tonight. If you listen to Bobby Darin’s “Things” and hear that bopping part, I can fake that on the bass. A very distinct sound, which, alas, remains unknown to most of the world, proving how talent is such a small part of creating a hit recording.
Add that to the list of why I can’t agree with my old band, the five-piece. One of the items that producers want to know is what the band can do for them. That normally entails showing them you can write original material that sells. The studios are up to their ying-yangs in clone bands, which probably represent 99% of what is out there. The few bands that play any originals sound like they flunked Line Dancing 101. More than once.
The five-piece squandered enormous resources on a sound that went out by 1967. This was part of our incompatibility. I would not pursue that musical direction. Instead I have spent half a lifetime in pursuit of something quite different: the search for the elements that create a hit. You’ve got a million three-chord specials out there. Why did “Louie Louie” and “CC Rider” become hits? I may never find the answer, but I’ll wager I’ll get closer to a hit song than the rest of the pack.
Everything I know for sure about hit music is already common knowledge, it would seem—except to the countless clone bands who are pursuing it the wrong way. How do we know it is wrong? Count the number of hits produced in basements, that’s how. I fully understand my approach is not as much fun as jamming with the boys and a half-sack, but you are not going to find me wasting my paycheck on vanity recordings. An example of common knowledge is that any band that gets enough exposure can produce hits. Prime instances? “Smoke On The Water” and anything by Abba.
They may have arrested a few small fry in the Payola roundup, but if you think that ended graft in the music distribution system, well, there is a reason they still offer the line dancing class. It is not the listening audience who determine who gets air time. The Tennessee trash bins are full of demo CDs, no doubt produced to perfection. Unless you get something that grabs the attention of the bigwigs, you are wasting time. Even then, they want to see that you are ready to hit the ground running and can continue to produce a string of albums, usually three or four, before you burn out.
ADDENDUM
Last evening, late, I went downtown for a brew. This is new, they had entertainment. But it is that moron Tuesday Karaoke dork, the one who plays favorites and doesn’t know how to work his equipment. He leaves the vocal volume way too loud, so singers who eat the mic blast to the back of the room. He seems impervious to the distortion and echo. And whenever I sing, he turns the music down so low it creates an imbalance to the presentation. I have to keep turning around and telling him to increase the volume. After he makes the lame excuse that this or that “isn’t a loud song”.
The guy is slightly retarded. A song is as loud as you turn the knob. If he’d leave it alone, but no, he turns it down. Since this is the fourth time in a row he’s done that, I’ll take the message that he doesn’t like me. Fine, that’s just setting himself up and the whole room knows it. He’s on my turf. Everybody there has heard me sing with the lady that had the act before him. I put a mark in my notebook for how many people he lets sing after I put my name in.
The whole room can see the mark, but he can’t. This time he called up 11 singers before me (around an hour and twenty minutes) and there were only nine people in the room including the audience. That’s it for that jerk-off. He even looks like some kind of gimp. My guitar show may be second rate, but his show is third-rate. His hair-cut comes in eighth or ninth depending on how you rate the bar rags. I would not hesitate a second to take over his route. I also don’t follow the logic of the owners putting in such a repeat show even if the guy had any aptitude for it.
Last Laugh
(The sign says “Police”.)*
so about 75 years old. Are you listening, China?)
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