One year ago today: April 24, 2017, windmill anatomy.
Five years ago today: April 24, 2013, oh boy, another railroad museum.
Nine years ago today: April 24, 2009, so there.
Random years ago today: April 24, 2008, Brit foolery.
I don’t even have a picture for you today. It took me six hours to go buy some finishing nails. It stayed cool so I taped part of the red scooter for a paint job. Then I went over the upcoming tunes for this week’s practice. Yes, I believe all the easy tunes are already done. Unless my guitarist starts singing, as promised, I’ve also reached a plateau where I have to call a moratorium on anything new until what’s already on the books can be brought up to snuff. Actually, change that. I threw on some cutoffs and went out in the morning cold to get you this photo. Because you’re worth it.
As for taping, this is painter’s tape from the dollar store. It is cheaper to use aluminum foil to protect the big areas than that paper stuff they sell. Aluminum is more impervious and it stays put. Another trick of the trade, cover the appendages with plastic, but don’t use expensive sandwich bags. I keep the plastic sleeves they put on newspapers in the vending boxes. Cheap, and essentially free.
New music. That makes for a balancing act. Everybody wants to move on, but you can see the dilemma. The type of mistakes we are making on stage should be eliminated before channeling energy into new material. Not fixing things now all too often cascades existing mistakes and bad habits forward. My attitude remains, gig work is the best therapy so we continue on, doing a bad job of it. Believe it or not, I’ve learned the hard truth that most people would rather hear a bad band than some slick production—as long as it plays the music they love. On that last part, I’m a past-master and have the footage to prove it. But yeah, I would still like to do a really nice job as well.
There is progress, though sluggish and often directionless. The videos show the guitarist tended to play a little louder this time, which threw off the mix. I wonder if she is getting family pressure to not let me dominate the show so much. If so, volume is not the answer. I’ve never been a loud bass player and can be drowned out in a wink—if you want to look like a stage Nazi. I’m a pro at keeping guitar players below 120 dB by simply letting them realize they are blotting out the bass. Works best with the ones who need the bass to keep on tempo.
Thai festival.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Here’s another mystery object, except this time I don’t know the answer. It is a Singer and it was in the sewing machine section. I didn’t have time to get a model number and none of the staff had any clue. No, I’m not saying they didn’t know what it was, I’m saying they didn’t have a clue period. That’s the prime qualification for working a Florida minimum wage job with no benefits or pension. It’s the kind of thing that happens when your libtard parents ship all the good jobs overseas to help strangers and you grow up with the attitude that everybody is equal. Then again, at the bottom, they really are all equal, aren’t they? My generation had our share of idiots and morons, but they had no qualms about
If you know what the machine is, leave me a comment.
I got a few hours in on the bass. The song list has enough classics that I guess we can begin looking at novelty tunes. I tend toward light comedy tunes. To date, the guitarist has not expressed any preferences, but I do notice she can “play guitar” to a lot of contemporary 1990s tunes. It is the guitar part only, thus not really suitable for what we do. Is that clear? To do a guitar part, you need a drum part and a bass part and a singer part. It doesn’t fit together as smoothly as arranged duo music, especially when some parts are missing. My arrangements fill those back in. The short-term goal is we need that fourth hour of music asap, because that is what we are most likely to get, initially.
I bought this DVD thinking it was an Australian production, but I kept recognizing the old buildings and actors. Except I wasn’t in Australia in 1996 (though I had plans for it). As the end credits scrolled past, the band members caught my eye. Ah, I’ve jammed with every one of those people. So I scrounged up the DVD label and sure enough, this was filmed in Montana. And the town was a restored historical site I’ve been to twice, but forgot. Sorry, no details. Now it makes sense. I was all over Montana in 1986, the year before I met Miss you-know-who. Boy, if she could see me today. Driving a repainted ancient motor scooter, living in a 1940’s cabin in the middle of nowhere, playing in a third-rate country band. Um, maybe I’ll pass on that one.
ADDENDUM
My links to the past, yesteryear, found there was no April 24 posting in 2013. I quickly found it and it will be posted probably by the time you are reading this. The whole episode with that left me in a gloomy mood. You see, it reminded me of how early and how late I got into computers. I first programmed when I was 17, yet I did not invent a thing with it. I never became an early billionaire.
To this day I am still stunned by the simplicity of how others did it. Amazon, selling books. Craigslist, a bulletin board. eBay, an auction. It wasn’t what they did that always amazed me; it was how they even found out what the opportunities and capabilities were. I mean, at the time, I read all available commercial sources of information and never once did I see an article that explained that (and how) and ordinary person like me could program a thing called a website by himself and make money at it.
Now, I know. They grew up in the era after me, surrounded by peers who were computer literate. Not me, with the singular exception of Mitch, who lives a few thousand miles away, there was not one of my contemporaries who could tell me the slightest thing about computers. When some new feature came out, I had no incentive to try it, especially if it involved communication or social networking. With whom? Somebody half my age who talks jargon? I didn’t even get around to blogging until 2006, by which time it was nearly what, a ten year old concept.
Thus, I not only have no contemporaries, the subject was not even taught in the schools until I was over 30. By then, the computer was already changing into a plaything and I was still in the pinball era. So, the ease with which I recovered the file of April 24, 2013 reminded me of how far things have moved along, yet in my lifetime all progress has been solitary. Nobody my own age has a clue (they think checking their email twenty times a day makes them power-users) and those younger than me seem to have skills that don’t do any good. For instance, I have no idea how half these on-line businesses make any money.
But by 2013, my system is elaborate enough to recover the missing post. It parked itself in error for five long years. To the world, it’s a nothing. To me, it’s a reminder how each piece of progress to even get to a blog was a solitary struggle. The advice books were useless, there was nobody to ask. So today, I presume maybe ten or twenty of my thousands of monthly readers are in my demographic. In another few years, will I even be able to write about any topic that is making the rounds with the crowd that is just arriving now? Like I said, gloomy.
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
