November 9, 2019

Yesteryear
One year ago today: This date blocked by Google 2018, locked out by Google.
Five years ago today: November 9, 2014, submarine warfare, Mexican style.
Nine years ago today: November 9, 2010, 60,000 properties vanished.
Random years ago today: November 9, 2011, my one anonymous Facebook ad.

           Another weekend, and I’m planning to go out tonight for a few hours. I heard a new term (to me) for new country music that is played on radio stations. Hooty. Does that make sense? It’s easier to say than mind-numbingly formulaic. A couple of the guitarists brought up the topic of new country, which I see as desperate attempts to find anything that works better than what they’ve been up to. With a single country tune like Folsom Prison bringing in more in tips than some of these boys make in their lives, it is unlikely I’ll replace it with some overproduced and cringe-worthy Jason Aldean material.

           I’ve let each of the new people know that they must be willing to make changes. Face it, that’s the reason they called. The change involves the work of learning new material and that will weed out most of them right away. Usually, I insist only on learning and playing one set. Most guitarists already solo, so it is easy to show up for an hour.
           One of them, the slide guitarist, may have bolted already. This happens when they discover they cannot recruit me as another flunky bassists to back up their stale old act. Don’t get me wrong, some of those acts have been honed to perfection, but the staleness remains. The turning point is where I show up for “practice” and they hand me a song list. So far okay, it’s when I hand them one back. I learn one of yours for every one you learn of mine. This is an affront to their guitarism, an insult not to be endured. Actually, it is just work and they don’t want to do it. This guy didn’t even get that far, but I’ll be showing up at his gig tonight.

           The [above] photo? That’s not lunch, boys, It is dog food. Yes, they get a custom cooked mix of veggies and meat and they are healthier than you and I. That’s 93% lean ground turkey in the big pot, and the carrots are steamed twice as long as the greens because it has to be softer for the small dog. Talk about livin’ large, huh? The prep time is about one hour for a week’s supply. I once made the mistake of mentioning this to the Reb. Mistake? Yep, she spends three hours at the same task. I dunno, maybe the food tastes better when it’s, um, slow-cooked.

           There is another side to pet ownership. Who doesn’t enjoy the eternal gratitude of a pet who loves feeding time. Here’s a shot of the other side. This is cleaning the cat box. At this point, I gotta speak up. This is a staged video, as are many you see in this blog. Even when not rehearsed, what you see are the best of the best. I like to emphasize the cleaning of the cat boxes because I find it an unpleasant chore. Instead of giving it a rinse, this photo is angled to take advantage of the morning sun.
           This makes it look like a steam pressure hose and I need a fireman stance. The reality is that is an ordinary garden hose set on spray and there was no practical need for the theatrics. But, in a larger sense, I could say much the same for most of my stage act. Let’s leave it that there is a reason for everything. Now, I’m going back for that third morning coffee. I encourage all to do the same.

           Say, I know why I’m running early. I set my watch back an hour for the time zone, but missed daylight savings. For the longest stretch (I think) in my life, I’ve showed up for everything an hour early. Say, isn’t it about time we heard about Martin Shkreli again? The guy who was the victim of a classic American witch hunt. Portrayed in the media as hiking the price of an AIDS drug by 56 times and defrauding investors. The trial was a mockery, portraying American cowboy law at its worst. The fact is he repaid the investors who said they lost money. Factoid: they didn’t lose, they just failed to gain. Yes, he repaid them with money from other funds and investments. Banks do it all the time.
           And it was not an AIDS drug, that was cheap-shot media hype. It was a drug that fights parasite infections in people who are already in a weakened condition. It was a drug that might have been used by people with AIDS if they also managed to somehow catch, say, malaria. But calling it an AIDS drug and implying it was a cure is total CNN mental gymnastics. It’s more like CNN and NYT waged a demonizing campaign against Shkreli calling him “the most hated man in America”. That was a total lie. Nobody hates him but his business competitors and their media hirelings. It’s ironic that, except among die-hard liberals, the NYT became the most hated newspaper in America.

           Shkreli paid $55 million to buy the drug because its patent was expiring and there was no subsitute. By any other token, that was one smart investment. He raised the price because the drug was mainly purchased not by consumers, but by big insurance companies. His mistake was in not paying them their cut.
           The worst part of the trial was the way Shkreli was forced to kowtow to the court, blaming himself, saying he was sorry, and calling himself stupid and negligent. How sad that justice cannot be served in an otherwise great country except by such embarrassing scenarios. No American should ever bow to anyone, including any judge or jury. It was blatant the whole case was about putting Shkreli out of business. He was too much of a threat to the status quo. The judge, Matsumoto, gave him seven years for a conviction that carries an 18-month maximum sentence. To protect herself from historians, she also ordered him to get mental health counseling, a move clearly designed to discredit him should he write a book. A U.S. attorney named Kasulis also threw in that “the public needs to be protected” from Shkreli, but somehow not the big insurance companies. Talk about your “old girl network”.
           And we say the Soviets held show trials. Shkreli gets out in 2025 and he should be appointed finance minister. Actually, Trump should pardon him right now because “pharma bro” was made into a scapegoat by the media. His worse sin was calling Congress “imbeciles”. They got him back.

Picture of the day.
Tree apron moss.
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           Moments later, I get a call back, it’s the guitar guy. That’s how mercurial this business is most of the time. He had me confused with another bassist who had promised to learn his list but didn’t. I had used the spare time here to learn a double-stop intro to “Lady Madonna”. Hmm, I can now fake that solo on the bass. Y’now, I always thought the lyrics were a dig at welfare mommas. The Monday morning papers were the welfare checks. Apparently McCartney wrote the song after seeing a poster of the Viet Nam conflict titled “Mountain Madonna”. C’mon, admit it, the lyrics would apply to your typical USA welfare single mother, wonders how you manage to feed the rest. Nobody likes that welfare crowd but everybody is afraid to speak up because they’ll get slapped with the motherhood card. Why, if you don’t wan to pay for somebody else’s kids, you must be anti-family.
           JZ was on the phone saying he’d head up here for a week. But as usual, he will not leave town without a thousand dollars. This time he says sixteen hundred. He’s got that truck which will hold one of those smaller box campers. It’s also a crew cab and I’ve slept in those lots of times. He could probably travel anywhere he wanted if he’d get started. As it was, the dogs saw more of Tennessee than he has in thirty years. I walked them over to the green area near Roxborough and unhooked the harnesses. They are too old to run far enough in any direction over there. But I’m telling ya, Sparkie is going deaf.

           Six hours more and I was in a club in east Nashville. Great music, disappointing results. You might want to review what I said on April 23, 2016. Sadly, I’ve lost the link to my list of types of guitarists who respond to ads. I’ve referred to that second list, but never reviewed it. My bad, because these lists are well-thought out at the time. And nearly impossible to recall on demand. It will turn up, it’s the one where I describe the categories of losers who respond, such as the unemployed rocker who can only play Folsom Prison.

           It’s a social problem, no a musical one, and I’m experiencing it in wonderment. Why? Because the local standards are so high. It shocks me to meet people who are incredible at what they do, but woefully lack a fundamental understanding of how successful bands operate. People ask what happened to country music, the answer I propose is the recording industry. That’s what changed rock and now it has changed country. It moves music away from live entertaining to selling music tracks. These differ at the molecular level. As an entertainer, I can freely admit what I play is not suitable for industry caliber production. Why is it so difficult for guitar players to admit what they do is not suitable for pubs & clubs.

           Tonight, I was treated to an excellent array of musicians who sucked as entertainers. It was one of those play-by-the-hour joints so I stuck around. Not one of the four groups had any inkling of how to entertain a room full of drinkers. The guy I was there to meet had the advantage of knowing I would be watching the audience, not the bands—and saw that I was right about nobody paying attention to them. As I’ve said, if the act was a juggler or a comedian and nobody watched, that’s a fail. I’ll say it again, original music belongs on store shelves, not on stage. All four groups were plugging original CDs for sale, but nobody in the crowd was on a shopping trip.

           The second act was Kenny Owens, with a group called something like “Paradise Wings”. I only know the guy because he’s been wearing the same hat since 1965. Once again, tech-perfect but wrong music. Read my lips, you will never play a song well enough to make anyone change their taste in music. They may listen once for the novelty, that’s it. Next was my slide guitar guy, drop back tomorrow for the review on that. One remarkable coincidence as this video clip shows, his hand motions are very similar to the way I play bass. Imagine what we would sound like if he could

ADDENDUM
           There’s a guy who built a drum machine using Excel, the spreadsheet. It’s clever, using that same grid strip you see portraying MIDI tracks. The software is free, but it is Visual Basic, which has two immediate downfalls. One is that is C+ format, the second is that C+ code runs in a loop that uses the system timer. Remember, we learned this problem from Arduino studies around five years back. Any timed sequence, such as running a sub-routine, stops any counting that is already going on, then resumes when you return. Arduino solved this by installing separate timer for any pins that were pulse code modulated. You don’t generally have that luxury on a regular computer. See June 16, 2015.
           Nonetheless, I will attempt to contact the guy over my idea for a pre-programmed drum box that you can display song titles rather than obscure beat patterns. Who remembers my planning on that? The worst feature of drum machines is they are not fit for stage work. With my unit, instead of tapping in a pattern number like “A46”, you would hit “Folsom Prison Blues” and it would play a drum track exactly matched to that tune. As far as I know, it is not possible to copyright a standard drum track. No, you cannot run out and copy this idea because I have several features that most people cannot imagine.

Last Laugh