One year ago today: August 22, 2016, a paragraph on competition.
Five years ago today: August 22, 2012, a swampful of invasive species.
Nine years ago today: August 22, 2008, my small but happy crowd.
Random years ago today: August 22, 2007, shoulda kept that wagon.
Millennial nails. Come on, guess what I’ve been working at all morning. Well, close, I was working on the scale model. The final dimensions of the new bedroom will be slightly altered thanks to the new bearing wall. The previous room was your standard 8’x12' with a footprint out of the corner for the closet. The new room will be 11’-2” x 9’-0”. This is a gain of 4 square feet, but the somewhat taller ceilings in the framing gives it a spacious aura. What, didn’t I say the older section of the building had 8 foot studs? That tiny bit of extra height works wonders.
This time was different. I nailed half a crib together, then flipped it over and that placed me too far from some nails purchased last month. So I dug some old nails out of the bottom of my carpentry pouch, around two years old. Now I have a box built with new nails on one side and old nails on the other. What do you think happened when I went to extract them afterward? You got ‘er, it was the new nails that were systematically bending beyond recovery.
I compared the boxes the nails arrived in and they are marketed as your standard 3-1/4” spikes, shown in this photo. Yes, yes, I know the one on the right is galvanized, but that made no difference here. These are typical and representative examples of nails whose major difference is the dates I bought them. Or so I thought.
Of course, I’m calling these “millennial nails”. This would not be the first time they’ve built a defect into a product. If you’ve ever tried to replace a battery on your iPhone (is it?) you know what I mean. The gloomy part is these people have no idea they are setting themselves up. I just hope when the time comes, Margaret Thatcher was right. She’s the one that said these liberal policies are all warm and cuddly, but sooner or later, the other guy’s going to run out of money. I should show these nails to my cardiologist so he could just brush the evidence aside and suggest my ex-wife was behind it.
And in case you ever wondered, yes, the phone company could put all automatic robot dialing telemarketers out of business by tweaking a simple piece of computer code they already have. If your phone number anywhere its sequence the number 411, 711, or 911, you may have noticed you never get as many telemarket calls as other people. These are among a group of phone numbers the telephone company refers to as “sensitive”. This list also includes numbers that are very close to heavily used or advertised numbers, such as pizza parlors and taxi companies. The phone company computer can easily pick out consecutive dialing any time they grow a conscience to do so.
Mennonites in east Bolivia.
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I kid you not, I miss my hobbies. What triggered this round was my quasi-brilliant idea to calculated the ground points of the sun and moon on Monday last. I get to reading the chapters. I have five books on celestial navigation with the relevant chapters showing signs of wear. Maybe I miss sitting down and reading challenging material. That’s how I do it, y’know. It is not unusual for me to read a single chapter and spent twenty minutes figuring out what it said. You can bet when that happens I’m not reading Steele or Koontz.
I’ll repeat my observation that anyone who invents a way to connect breadboard wires without tedious soldering will be an instant billionaire. Today I was looking for alternatives to clamping or bending the wires in place until the solder cooled. One guy was crazy gluing the pieces, then soldering right through the glue. He made it work, but didn’t mention if this produced toxic fumes and other relevant tidbits.
My study time today was on the water ram. I had an idea how these things worked but have never seen one in action. I once saw a non-working unit shut down for the winter. But Texas is so flat, there was no need to get water to run uphill and nobody did it. The most interesting [of the lot] was an animated video but the commentary was that robot reader who can’t pronounce any technical words. Joules becomes “Jaw-oo-leez” and hydraulic sounds like “hide-raoul-uk”. Guys, if you can’t comment on your own videos, please hire a human to do it for you. I finally shut the sound off and just watched the cartoon. I might add the same for any commentator with an East Indian accent.
Listen, Baksheesh, it isn’t English unless you are willing to work on the inflections as well as the vocabulary.
“In the spring, at the end of the day
you should smell like dirt.”
~ Margaret Atwood.
Let’s start the afternoon with a siesta. If you ever can’t sleep, for entertainment two items with the same value would be building a wall or watching the DVD “Mega Piranha”. Where they can’t even afford an actress with a body. Her lines include yelling “hurry” and “faster” as the gigantic fish start jumping out of the harbor and exploding. Our hero is Fitch, but somebody needs to talk to that boy about that acting degree he got from Arthur Murray’s. And never mind an Academy Award, Fitch deserves a Nobel Prize for how he ever landed a movie role with that haircut.
Factoid: if I played bass with a limp wrist, the last thing I would do is post a video of it on the Internet.
That got me to thinking of the four stages that a good bass player has to go through. Well of course I know, I went through all of it so very long, long ago. Here they are for your reference.
Stage Two: Place this bassist in his late teens, early twenties, but there is no hard limit on discovering that bass has a lot of fifths and octaves. Although triads still baffle him, at least the guy is playing more than one note per measure. This is where most bassists stop. They do not possess the aptitude to get any better and they develop the predictable mind-set that bass is accompaniment. A good bassist at this level does what he is told. By a guitar player. Most old-guy rock bands who advertise on Craigslist seek this species of bass player because they can’t figure out how come the last one left them “after so many years”.
Stage Three: the bassist turns 30, a crisis time for any jazz, rock, or blues musician. He now plays a few riffs and runs, but realizes all he’s done is copy crappy old guitar licks onto the bass. It works, but none of it is original. This character is your self-appointed King of the Bass Solo. One solo, twenty seconds tops, third set, after the drum break. He’s invested so much of his life into being a clone that he’s allowed the guitar player to paint him into the “bass is easy” corner. Unable to undo the mental damage, he resigns himself to being the band flunky. Keeps telling himself he’s just glad to be there. He’s so boring he makes the people around him boring. You have now accounted for 95% of all bass players.
Stage Four: This is the guy that makes you realize the bass is its own instrument. This is BB King’s session man, this is Carol Kaye, this is Paul McCartney when he was a Beatle, but not for one split second thereafterward. Careful here, don’t just name big bands. Many of the lower orders of bassists get dragged up to this height by sheer luck of the draw. They get quoted and interviewed, which is the cheap cousin of fame, but they remain bush league. The real bassist at this level can get every sound out of his instrument without pedals and toys and slapping anything. Each note is precious and he captures the essence of the song so well you can tell what’s playing instantly. That is the pinnacle of bass playing. This is the foundation behind the warning, “Be careful of old men who play bass.”
You may never have heard that one before, but you don’t play in a band, either. Google it.
[Author’s note: just for the record, to anyone new here, I’ve had trouble finding guitar players who can keep up with my bass playing ever since the summer before I turned 31. Most can only get up to the point where I insist they have to learn a completely new song. Without exception to date, it’s always been a song that does not feature the guitar, or worse, features the bass, and unconscionably, a song they personally hate for those very reasons.
Now, there’s a staggeringly well-written article for you. If the above critique was in some guitar magazine, it would have cost you $12 a copy and wouldn’t be a fraction as imaginative. Editors, you know. And since I blast guitar-think, it would be continued on page 49 beneath the coda to “Smoke On The Water”.]
ADDENDUM
In the definite weird story of the day, check out this article concerning a private submarine. It sank and the headless body of a lady journalist may have been discovered nearby. I was looking for music when I encountered this tune by The Candymen. Called Georgia Pines, I defy you to try to both listen to and watch the entire video. I got as far as 23 seconds and had to yank my power chord out of the wall. Merely clicking the stop button was not fast enough. I pity those moron millennials who have to fingerdance their way through up to seven taps to get rid of the thing while it keeps on playing. Argh!
But that was the era when I began playing bass. I had a lot of trouble convincing others that my band was not going to have uniforms. We are not going to act like Beatles wannabes. For the record, there was a lot of that going on in the recording industry, but not so much at street level, thank god. There were a dozen bands a year that tried the same format at the Beatles but I found them all ho-hum.
Never bought even one of their records. In fact, the only record I bought in my teens was a 45 single named “Mendocino” by the Sir Douglas Quartet. Back then, every band had to have a Hammond organ wailing in the background. Even then, I saw that organ was the replacement for an orchestra and even the organ was on the way out. But I wanted to learn the organ part, since that’s all I could do back then. To this day, I cannot play piano without sheet music, and I’m so out of practice I won’t even try.
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