One year ago today: January 22, 2017, pie, a thing of the past.
Five years ago today: January 22, 2013, keeping up with the Rockefellers.
Nine years ago today: January 22, 2009, I examine (and reject) MP3+G.
Random years ago today: January 22, 2015, but most of all . . .
Please stay warm again, I’d like to put in some more time on the renovations. I broke another two drill bits for my collection. It’s one of life’s constants for we masters of drilling pilot holes. Just leave the bit in the wood, it adds character as well as strength. Your all purpose pilot hole is the 1/8” and I buy them by the spar pack. The new bedroom partition is the next stage, then the electric which takes (me anyway) a lot of time at the planning stage. I’m considering putting in a rare four-way switch. I believe I described how the kitchen common area will have three doorways. Front, side, and hallway. Since all three are convenient, it’s probably wise to put in such a switch or risk having a lot of back and forth in the dark. It’s tricky wiring but compared to programming the Arduino, ha, I could do it in my sleep.
Communication with the outside world has gone from slowdown to nearly non-existent. It’s the intense start-up curve of the new band responsible. We’ve only had one good rehearsal from five, but no other guitarist has ever gotten that far. The great guitar player I met last Sunday has not answered his phone since. He works some kind of swing shift job. Please let Lady Nik surprise me again this week and play the tunes like the pro she says she once was.
I talked with her on the phone to confirm this week’s rehearsal on Wednesday. She is putting in the time. I’m listening between the lines for the telltale signs of progress and they are there, for example, she began practicing and four hours had gone by before she noticed. And she got hung up on one tune, fighting with it for two days until she got it right. These are the tiny positives that add up to success at this activity, where progress is predominantly a function of time.
That [the chance of this band actually flying] would bring most other activity here to a standstill. Don’t forget, I have extensive experience at getting bands to stay together—comparatively speaking—and it ain’t easy. Organizing a band is not one of those skills you can gain by roundabout learning what not to do. I can name you more than a few people who’ve been trying it that way over half their lives. I can list the top ten factors associated with band success, and the first three are making money. I stay away from people who do or claim to do it for fun. They go nowhere and will drag you along if you let them. What’s more, most who say that are hypocrites because they have tried to make money and failed.
If you want to succeed with a band, follow my top three rules are get out there and make money. This will endear even the flightiest musicians to your cause. I sent Ray-B an MP4 of our better-sounding arrangements and he’s still doing the cruise ship circuit. Most guitar players last two-three years at it before realizing it is fun without profit. You also find that after age 35, something psychologically strange happens to women your own age that causes men to start looking at younger women again. Women bring this upon themselves. This strange behavior is especially noticeable on a ship. I expect he’ll be finding something on shore.
Ray-B & I would have made an unbeatable duo, both live and recording. Such it is with guitar players who can sing. I avoid them because they will always overrate their chances for individual success and go solo. After that point, they have gone spoiled for ever playing in a substantive group again. It seems to center on a lack of patience to learn the altruistic manners required for band work when the temptation to quit and go do a solo again is overwhelming. This has so similar to other areas of human existence that I can’t blame them. The more they solo, the more the opportunities fade away until they can no longer get into a band even if they want to.
But I also said when in my teens that the individual rarely wins over the organized team. I meant music then and many things now. I’m working on a team of two and we’ve already put in 15 hours of rehearsal time. I’ve put in double that revamping my bass parts for duo. My motives are more money and younger women that I could otherwise put my hands on. That should give you some idea of how lucrative [and important] playing in a band has always been for me. Nothing else comes close. If we have another successful rehearsal this week, I may begin setting aside immense resources into getting this thing up and running.
It’s a tap I haven’t turned on since 2014. Part of the impetus to get that second bedroom framed in is to have a live practice environment.
Drone art.
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By noon, I was in Winter Haven, six hours later I was in for a nightcap at the Fun Bar. Their wifi blocks Tor. Don’t you hate people who say ‘wee-fee”. I guess they never heard of HiFi. Or, it seems, anything else that happened before 1991. I was trying to find one of those wattage meters, but they are strictly an on-line item in these parts. I bought more electrical gear but in the end, didn’t get a thing done on the renovations. Don’t go to the Fun Bar unless you are okay with redneck joints. Everybody there is married or divorced, sometimes from each other.
[Author’s note: if you are into the Christian comedy circuit, you might know this guy as “Big Daddy Roberts”. His music show is normally a keyboard and a banjo with plenty of audience patter. He was often on the road twenty days of the month doing thirty shows. Myself, I like traveling too much turn it into work.]
He was telling me why there are so damn many Latino radio stations. I didn’t know the US government subsidizes them and in some cases outright gives them money to buy out “white” stations. They now outnumber white stations eight to one. He was working for a few when the Cubans walked in with cash money and bought them out. The last one, he and a friend were trying to borrow $300,000 to buy it themselves, and a Cuban bought it for $500,000 on sight. When they suggested that might have been too much, he just said so what, the government makes good all his losses. It’s disgusting.
We got to talking about welfare in general. Nobody really likes it and like anything else the government touches, it goes bad in a hurry. The classic example is the guy on unemployment, which last time I looked pays $225 a week for 18 weeks. Suppose the guy was offered a job that paid twice as much, that is $450 per week. In the government’s viewpoint, he would leap at such an opportunity.
Wrong. After taxes and deductions, he would take home only around $315 per week, a difference of less than $100 to what he’s getting now. For that, he is expected to get up every morning, operate and insure a car, buy lunch fixings, gas, work clothes, and commute. It’s not going to happen. And when you think about it, there are strong parallels with people on welfare and people with rich parents. They become less concerned with what the job pays than with the difference between that income and what they are making now. As long as they are comfortable, why would they put up with the hassle of working?
To people who live in more socialist states (like Canada) this all seems perfectly normal. But the work ethic is still strong in America, strong enough to cause real resentment when the undeserving are first in line for handouts. Worse, the majority of the really wrong programs are at the federal level. This is why the framers of the Constitution placed in rules to keep the federal government as weak as possible. But that has been undermined by two world wars and Democrat liberalism. In my opinion, once certain European interests spotted how weak the central US government really was in 1914, they decided it was ripe for the takeover. I’m hardly alone in thinking this. The same thing happened in Germany when it first became united.
national debt
ADDENDUM
Since last day’s password check was so popular, here are a couple equally harmless links.
What your bowser is tracking.
Internet Frog
Last Laugh
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