One year ago today: August 7, 2016, the acorn stash.
Five years ago today: August 7, 2012, one dealership.
Nine years ago today: August 7, 2008, Millie-Belle.
Random years ago today: August 7, 2013, I debunk aspirin welding.
It’s about time I broke down and bought a decent case for the Fender guitar. Shown here, but not very well, is the plush $70 padded case, a pretty snug fit. This has shoulder straps, or I should say strap. They are so cheap these days you get one. This solves the problem of always having to lash the guitar onto the tiny rear deck of the Rebel. Now I have a case that cost almost as much as the guitar. Actually, that’s not bad if you think about it. I bought the gear at the music store in Winter Haven, not a cheap place to shop. But, these days the idea is survival, so you can make your money as the last one standing.
Phase three is when you spot where it is possible to compete. And let me tell you, not one of the local people I’ve seen have anything like the stage personality I can project by just standing there. This will cascade exponentially once Agt. R can play basic strum patterns. I told him about last evening, if we had been there we would have flounced the rest of the crew by just making faces. Dude, those ladies weren’t recording my act for nothing. He understands I’m sticking with my plan to put my solo act together because I’ve been let down so many, many times.
This is the blog that warned the world about Google back in 2004, when that company began keeping records that could personally identify each user. Some may recall how they made a big stink that the records were private—to smokescreen the fact the record were being kept. Most people didn’t listen. Have you heard of the big upset over there with the memo? One of their employees circulated an article that Google was engineering its own collapse. However, that [memo] is not the topic here. It is the reaction of Google to the memo, announcing a witch hunt to track this guy down.
You should be using IXQUICK, the company that Google fears almost as much as free thinking. The Europeans, in particular the Germans, have much more experience than Americans when it comes to dealing with powerful entities that act above the law when it comes to keeping records on people. You know the types, why, if you have nothing to hide, they want that fact on file as well. Ixquick still uses Google, but it strips away the tracking cookies. Google can’t tell where the search request originated and they were sued for a bundle trying corporate sabotage to shut Ixquick down.
As for the memo, it was your basic treatment of the old gender bias issue. It explains the twist that many people have gone too far by assuming any difference is bias. It suggests as long as promotion in Google is based on placing high value on items like logic, determination, greed, money, and status, this in itself ensures it is mostly males who will strive for them. Women are more attracted by flexible work hours and cooperation at peer level. Hence you get the Enron effect where the most ruthless rise to the top instead of the most qualified.
Cape Town
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Here’s another item I bought at the music store. It’s a peg to hold the guitar strap. The one on the guitar is factory issue and the strap falls off once in a while This single screw was $3.50 plus tax but I’m confident I’ll make it all back after a couple of shows. Did I mention the tips were zero again last night? The stage is set too far back across the room, whereas I like to play up close to the crowd. Breathing distance, or in the case of young, slim females, much nearer. But nobody is going to walk forty feet across an empty dance floor to put a dollar in the jar.
Sure, I’d like to know why those two ladies were so attentive to what I was playing. I’m not that good and not that hunky anymore, so dudes, let’s hope they were talent scouts. That’s a joke, peeps. I’m cruising around for another venue. I must return next week to redeem myself. To let the place know I’m a bassist at heart. That’s for the benefit of the musicians, who may have erroneously concluded my crappy guitar is my talent limit. After two weeks ago when the mini-concert happened with the Virginian fiddle player, there is no way their guitar player is ever going to give me a free hand on his stage again.
To that end, several times he commenced playing some rock material I didn’t know, but the point is when I asked him what the minor chords were, if any, he was reluctant to say. To me, that is so wrong. I’ve explained long ago why I ask about minor chords, but I was not about to explain on stage. If he won’t say, I just leave the chord out and his lead riffs sound like thin air. I’m as much a ham when I’m not playing so getting territorial on stage won’t gain you brownie points on me either. Even if you can fake stage personality, you probably don’t want to try that when I’m around.
To put this into place, I’ve played with eleven bands in my life and jammed significantly with around another 30, well maybe 35. For example, the Hippie would rate as a jam band because we never did rehearse proper sets. His atmosphere was more akin to six years of off-and-on jamming, although he was remarkably consistent in playing the tunes faithfully. He never screwed up on stage. But problematically, he never seemed to learn or evolve either, and six years is a long time. He could deliver the wow in a short term fashion, but his poor reading of the crowd meant he just as quickly lost the moment. Like many lead players, he could impress other guitarists and cult fans, but fell short whenever that bunch were not at least a noisy majority.
His between-song delivery was marginally better than deadpan and even that’s a compliment. On the other hand, my entire voice, timbre, and body language change to match any joke or comment in mood. It’s a simple fact of life. I not only have my 10,000 hours on bass but I’m approaching 8,000 hours on stage as well.
The two skill sets are not interchangeable. Nor is studio time a substitute for live performance, I mean, just ask Kris Kristofferson. I’ve knocked myself out trying to find a guitarist who knew the true value of stage presentation and who had both the talent and inclination to do it. No luck in 17 years, minus the 6 with the Hippie, it’s been 11 years looking. I never did find a balanced guitarist. Instead many of them pointedly ignored the element of stage time. Until they met me, anyway, ha-ha. What I got instead was imbalance. A glut of lead players who either could not sing, could not play, or could not put on a show. Nor could they learn anything. And as long as I, myself, could not sing, I was compelled to put up with that situation.
Tell you what, referring narrowly to only guitar playing and singing, I have the piddling total of maybe four hours stage time. Last night, I did not solo, for instance, so that doesn’t count. I want you to come back and check me out once I’ve got a several hundred hours in the spotlight. I’m anxious to move on it asap, so it might not be that long. I’m still lousy but I have no qualms about getting out there, ready or not. After all, I have, ahem, the confidence imparted by massive stage time. I could always stand there and tell guitar player jokes jokes.
“Graduation – going from 130 days
vacation to 14.”
~ who knows?
Blog rules say I must report the potential demise of the super rat. He or she was getting into my birdseed. Far too smart to take a baited trap, even one descented by ground burial, I finally got the upper hand by baiting the trap in unsprung mode for two weeks, to let down his guard. Whap! Around midnight last. A solid kill, very quick.
ADDENDUM
Okay, who rose to the challenge of the three switches on one light problem? Nobody? That’s okay, I didn’t get it either. It involves something I’ve seen mostly on the shelves at the lumber yard: 110v three-wire cable. The way it hit me was as I sketched out the pattern, it began to look more and more like a 3-input exclusive NOR gate, that is, computer logic. It operates by the difference between the switches rather than whether any given switch is active. Then I remembered back in fourth grade, how the school janitor, Gustav Lehner, could turn the lights on or off from any switch along the entire hallway.
Since there were no logic gates in the 1960s, I concluded it was a common but advanced wiring design and dug out my old Black & Decker. Sure enough, it was circuit 23, shown here. That three-wire cable isn’t cheap. Wouldn’t it be nice if every problem was this easy to solve?
[Author’s note: this circuit really opened my eyes. I did not know, for instance, about the special switches shown in the diagram. I had the impression they were ordinary switches wired fancily. Not so, they are a combination of special 3-way and 4-way switches. The 4-way is always positioned between two 3-ways, which must be installed at the ends of the switching array.
If you are, like myself, a complete novice, look again at the diagram. Note the left and right switches have three screw terminals each. The switch in the middle has four screw terminals. There can be any number of these 4-ways between the ends. Aha, Gus, now I know how you worked that magic when you saw the little boy peeking in the school window after class.]
Last Laugh
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