One year ago today: June 30, 2017, rice concentrates pesticides!
Five years ago today: June 30, 2013, me, in hot water.
Nine years ago today: June 30, 2009, a lousy $63.
Random years ago today: June 30, 2008, the old Taurus.
I could not get motivated today. Start with three hour in the coffee shop. That was A-okay. Then I treated myself to that hand-held router I always wanted and had five munchkins instead of my usual four. Retirement doesn’t get much better. There was a skinny blonde babe in there reminded me of someone, but that someone was forty years ago. Sigh. She’s been there before, studying something. People who are getting things done act differently in public. I think she caught me glancing at her out of the corner of her eye, but it was just a glance. This was my big morning. I still want to get out and party, but there is nobody to do it with.
Tell you what, if I actually go drag that bale inside the house, I’ll put some of it up later. It is twice as expensive per square footage and around half again as heavy. I could only find the 16” grade, while my building is 24” studs. But that’s okay, I used surplus porch money. And I’ve always wanted one of those dovetail making devices. A musician can never have enough wooden boxes. Plastics and fine musical instruments, like my Danelectro Longhorn, just do not mix.
And while I was up, I downloaded the actual European tab to the lead riff of “Venus”. It has to be modified but when done, it is not only a great-sounding bass lick, it also looks flashy. Non-bassists often presume that the upper frets are harder to find on the bass, but for me it is the opposite. I can drop from the upper frets to a specific target note at lightning speed, and I often emphasize the motion if some babe or smooth-tightie is watching. This riff fits the bill, taking up three of the available three and a half octaves available.
Note that I’ve long since perfected a way to make a walk-down sound like four and a half octaves but that is totally faking it. Like most bassists, my early days were in awe of how ascending runs made rock and roll sound so neat. It was not until my thirties that I began to seriously study the patterns and around that same time realized I could, if I tried, get those thirds in there. A musical third is the middle note of a basic triad. Guitar and bass strings are a fourth apart, so guitarists generally ignore that third unless, and this is important, it is between the G and B strings, which on guitar tuning are only a third apart.
But on the bass, you have no such easy way to play thirds. I struggled with it for years, finally rejecting the “rock clichés” used by finger-bassists, and going totally with picked notes. This positions my left hand offset enough that I’m continually telling new guitarists not to try to follow my left hand. “Venus” could be a winner, because without that single offset B string, the same licks on the bass, along with the wider spacing of the frets, make for livelier action. You may have noticed how little some guitarist move their fingers when playing riffs make for some spirited hand movements where a guitarist is barely moving at all.
At the pencil factory.
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It didn’t take long to find out why Harbor Freight was unloading the small routers at cost. Two small wrenches are required to change the bit. Both wrenches were stamped out of metal and were slightly too small to fit over the spindle or the collating nut. This was no big deal, just hand it to the guy with the robot repair shop and his grinder, shown here. He was busy, so this is his stunt double, a remarkable likeness though without the toned muscles and sturdy, confident manner of the original.
I tried to re-read that chapter on dental methods used to determine the diet of the creature, but same thing, I quit trying. It is out of my league, and to think I once considered becoming a dentist. I’ve been to college long enough to know sometimes things make sense the second pass, but it could not even hold my attention long enough to try. I was talking to JZ on the phone later and his forte was not dentistry either. He hated it. He’s sounding chipper after two months with the flu and we’ve decided in August to give these Miami women one more chance. You’ve never seen so many divorcees who’ve never learned their lesson. Of course, them being money-hungry bloodsuckers doesn’t help their cause much either.
Of all the topics that came on the radio while I’m failing at reading this book, they bring on a program about dementia. My hypothesis of dementia is that it is not a disease in the strict sense, but the logical and predictable outcome of a lifetime of mental laziness, the most prevalent symptom is the victims have always been exceedingly boring individuals. Or maybe I should stress I mean I see a correlation. I hauled out this book about sailing, intending to read the chapter on navigation aids. This book, published in 1961, turns out to be a fantastic description of all aspects of sailing that I ever heard of.
You should see a picture of the display case lid. It was a solid piece, like a trunk, and I cut the front panel out to place a piece of glass. What an enjoyable project. It turned out to be a lot of fun, even if I made mistakes. When cutting a center piece, move the router right to left. Then I decide to throw on a DVD once the radio started with religion. I chose “Big Daddy”, about a single man who adopts a kid. That part was predictable, but what amused me is the way the story centers on Hooters. That’s where a lot of the couples met. Didn’t I tell you I dislike Hooters. Every time I’ve been there, around three times total, it is not full of the big-boobed babes the title would suggest. A closer to reality name would be single mothers telling stories about working their way through college. But then, who’d film a movie there?
But I do commend the producers for an entire movie with no fat broads. They had the other Hollywood stereotype, the queers, but all the women were skinny and looked fantastic. Now, if they had a restaurant named good-looking women over 21, I’d make an effort to show up. Later, it is siesta time and I’m zonked.
ADDENDUM
Even though I know what some people will say, I got to tell you I think in my own lifetime, houseflies have gotten faster. My ban of spray chemicals in the kitchen means flies can get in if I prop the door open. That should be no concern since I have a flyswatter. Hmmm, about a quarter of the flies get away. Here’s where the jerks will say I’m not admitting my reflexes slowed down with age. Yeah, well I’ll challenge them to any test they want on that one. From a lifetime of bass playing, my reaction time is instantaneous. But that had occurred to me until a few weeks ago. What happened was two of the flies got spots of paint on them, so I could tell them apart.
They were fast enough to avoid the flyswatter, even when I was poised waiting for them to alight. Then I remembered reading several recent accounts of the speed at which insects can evolve. Fifty years is plenty of time for the fastest flies to out-survive the rest. That may not be the answer, but there is nothing inherently wrong with the theory. Flies reproduce at 600 times the rate of humans, so they’ve had up to 10,000 generations in the past 50 years (roughly, since source information varies). Now humans are 100 generations out of the jungle, so in human terms, the flies evolved in fifty years at a reproductive rate that would have taken humans over 121,000 years.
[Author’s note: I’ve just been advised by normally reliable sources that I should not be surprised if houseflies can evolve faster than the flyswatter. Why, they told me, the Canadian education system has, since the war, produced the “Justin Generation” of 15 million males that are brainless, spineless, gutless, clueless, and able to reproduce more of their own kind without actually having any balls whatsoever.]
(Millennial MBA kit.)
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