One year ago today: July 4, 2017, who chooses your 'peers'?
Five years ago today: July 4, 2013, around 125,000 in this photo.
Nine years ago today: July 4, 2009, Lee-Anne, married, with kids.
Random years ago today: July 4, 2008, the infamous "Mary Jane" gig.
It’s 4:57AM and I’m wide awake. What happened is last evening I’d been playing that “Do Wah Diddy” song. Sometimes I’ll go over a tune note-for-note to see if I missed anything. Remember, my rule is to give the audience the richest possible listening experience. The intro to that song is two chords. Or is it? The chords are E and A. But as the guitar falls back to E, what is that odd sound? I heard it in my sleep. At least one of the instruments is playing a different chord. In these early recordings that was a common mistake, but it was an era when mistakes worked better than today. I’ll figure it out. It is always something simple.
This is the blog where you learn things painlessly, so tell me what this object is, which is easy, and how it works, which is less easy. Yes it is a saw, but what kind of saw. And where are the working parts? I’ll give you some hints. We live in an era of wimps, born and raised to be wimps. Wimps are the reason they have to tell people not to stand on the top rungs of stepladders, and have to enact legislation to get them to use seatbelts. Well, this object would never pass any Millennial safety tests for the same reason. In the hands of an idiot, the thing is damn dangerous. Keep reading, I’ll tell you later. The hand it is in right now is perfectly safe, know what I’m sayin’?
When you push one to get removed from the list, they want a reason. If you tell them that the number is on the no-call list, they say, “Which number?” (Well, what number do you think, you morons?) Oh, they say, but you called them. And their number isn’t on the no-call list. Now, you can’t get much Millennial-stoopider than that.
The vehicle maintenance remains best a two-man job. It also reinforces with the new people that once you are in business, it costs money to stand still. Or let me reword that, it becomes more perceptible. Now I can perceive a few people saying what's happened to me, when tire rotation gets top billing. A) I moved here to retire. B) It is momentous and I can prove it. How many people here actually rotated their tires on schedule, show of hands. Ha! That's what I thought. If I'm the only one, then it's blogworthy.
Ladder sold separately.
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The picture above is a mini-saw with no blade guard that attaches to your electric drill. It is for cutting panels and has been replaced by designer tools. In the lower picture you can see the spindle. I say the thing is safe, because your other hand necessarily has to be holding the drill. But you know how these Generation X types need to be watching cable or tweeting every waking hour. That 4” blade could still do a lot of damage to such a total retard. What? Someone was offended by my use of the term “retard”? Good, tell them I have a neat tool I’d like them to try.
That’s correct, I said 1965, not 1865. If you think being raised like that is good for the soul, perhaps you’d like to trade places? A few days of cold water running out of a tap is, from a perspective in my life, a bit of a luxury.
The drizzle and thunder turned into a squall, so I hauled out some robotics test gear. This photo shows the light strip that will likely be permanently on inside the camper. I tend to read until I fall asleep, yes, even after you know, and I have the ex-girlfriends to prove it. T hus, some future research team will conclude I slept with a nightlight. There’s a lot of information in this shot, you can see the power supply is a little over the 12 volts needed to trigger these diodes. The amps needed to trigger this array is so miniscule I’m not going to bother with a switch.
Oh, and that odd chord in the intro to “Do Wah Diddy” is indeed an error. While the band plays the final E, either a rhythm guitar or the bass plays a double-stop B. That double-stop consists of the notes B and F#. What you are hearing is a hint of an E7 chord. F# is the note that turns an E triad into and E7. Real piano players know these things.
ADDENDUM
A touch of sleeplessness found me digging through some DVDs. Westerns, war movies, nothing, ah, this looks like a comedy. It wasn’t, but it had be surely laughing. “Ghost of Girlfriends Past” is another typical post-90s try to make the bachelor realize what he’s missing movie. It plays on all the clichés, written by men for other men. The guy is rich, tall, handsome, and gets women with corny pickup lines that wouldn’t pass muster in the fifth grade anymore.
It is formulaic, the swinging uncle to takes the kid to a night club and shows him the ropes. The scenes were alternately revolting and hilarious, the movie is geared to rubbing in a lesson to that vast majority of men who really do not know how women think. So the movie is just a rehash of stale themes, in that you know from scene one where the script is heading. But the dialogue where the guy describes marriage are hilarious to me, but irksome to the men who found out the hard way—-by getting snagged. I had a simple rule since I was 14. Do not enter into any relationships that you have to "work at". That applies to life, not just marriage. And I’ve never regretted that.
This is not to say that I know how women think. That would be mind-reading. It’s more accurate to say that I do not find the way women think to be a mystery. I also understand that if I had something for which there was a stop-at-nothing demand, that I would likely think the same way they do. So, I have a deep understanding of how women think, but not what they think. The big picture on that is most women do think alike, heavily swayed by peer pressure, over-influenced by unreasonable expectations, and a crazy dread of not being loved at any given moment. Hey, there is not a thing wrong with being alone if that is one’s choice.
And that is just how this movie is designed to cut, to hurt anyone who might have second thoughts too late to change things. I think most people would agree with me that things like misery, rejection, and even tangibles like poverty are much, much harder on people who don’t happen to be good-looking, or talented, or smart. They don’t get as many chances to start over after a royal screw-up. They have less to fall back on, and I think that might account for why so many men fear rejection and so many women are phobic about being single. To stress my point, think of Taylor Swift soon turning 30 and single. Compare that with the gals in the secretary pool at the office who have been picked over. Which of these two opposites is going to handle it better?
The movie also depicts the male as the predator and women the victims. Baloney. His pickup lines are as bad as my brothers, but the script does have him making a few valid observations that sailed over most heads, including probably the people that wrote them. But the biggest joke in the movie is the portrayal of “lesser” males all watching from the sidelines and wishing they could be him. While that does happen a bit too often, it has never been a factor in my life. It’s rare I ever look across a room and wish I could be like anybody else. Sure, I wish I had more money, but I only wish that when I’m not on stage be cause it is often the only alternative. And what the movie is missing is the horrific decline in the average quality of women with age. I’m not talking about looks, I’m talking about quality—and I’m talking averages.
I am confident that I could, right now, go pick up just about any woman that I want. Without any pickup lines, without hitting on her, without buying her drinks, none of that stuff. I’ve done it countless times just to prove how easy it is—if you know how. And that stupid movie is coaching men exactly the wrong way to do things. I may be a lot of things, but I’m not pushy around women. I could be, but I know it doesn’t work. So, why don’t I have a house full of beautiful women? Well, mostly because I didn’t place any ads for hired help. It’s because of the difficulty of finding even the most basic good qualities. I’ve gotten close at times and it is not a matter of just finding company, hell, you should see the women that come on to me when I’m trying to write a letter. I have met enough exceptions to know that there are a few right-minded women out there. But they get snapped up so damn quickly that by my age, they become vanishingly rare.
Unless . . ., unless . . ., let’s just say band practice is at 4:00PM.
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