One year ago today: December 3, 2018, needs more pennyroyal.
Five years ago today: December 3, 2014, tough noogies.
Nine years ago today: December 3, 2010, blog anniversary coincidence - scooter
Random years ago today: December 3, 2002, sounds redacted.
This morning found the dogs and I in Waterton, and it looks like a great little place to hail from. Beyond that, it is just too far away and there are not direct roads to the place. There are roads, but like Florida, you will have to contend with some greaseball in a jacked pickup riding your bumper most of the time because he’s late for shift at the mill. There was a coffee shop on main street but no place to tie up the dogs. The place reflects a lot of community spirit but like all these backwaters, there is nothing there to keep the kids around. After high-school, they are gone.
The GPS again proved useless for finding the scenic route. There are a series of small highways radiating out from Nashville that would not display, so I unplugged the unit and played it by ear. I had decided to loop around the lake to avoid I-40. Be prepared for a dismal lack of road signs but the area is typical rural for these days. Run-down hundred year old farms next to new ranches with solar panels. I finally found a road called Spartan Pike and took a chance. We got into Waterton around noon.
Time maybe for me to coin a new term to describe the change in American business practices. Years ago I noted that in the future, electronics would create a world where instead of selling big ticket items to a few, fortunes would be made selling junk to the millions with a fraction of a dollar in profit each. A study by Business Insider supports this trend, albeit 30 years after I pointed it out. They researched how much money actually made it into the fist of the person whose youTube video attained the magical million hits. By enabling every available ad option to the annoying max and inserting commercial breaks in the video, a million views nets most people a lousy $4,000. And drives viewers like me away. If there is an ad I can’t skip, I usually have something handy to do until the ad is over. I cannot bring to mind a single youTube ad.
I’m seeking a phrase to label this watering down effect, the change from big quality big prices to small quality small prices. I was impressed by the theft of fractional cents by early bank system programmers. This formed by early theories on how future sales (and scams) would be conducted. I presuming there is no popular phrase already out there or certainly I would have heard it by now. I’ll take another look.
Coal mining drill bit.
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Here’s another view of the dog. I told you it was slow. It was a couple hours out in the chilly air and that worked up the appetite. I took the Reb out for Asian food, that place in Mt. Juliet. She got into the sake and that had us reminiscing. I came away with a realization of just how long I’ve been a musician. She talked about a whole series of gigs we’d played that on my part were completely forgotten. She named around eight places I remember playing, but never with her. Um, I'm too lazy to download trip pictures, so here is Sparkie at the nut house sign. Laugh it up, that's all you get today.
It was during that stretch that the Hendrix-Clapton Disorder permeated down to the lowest levels of guitar player. Even complete buffoons thought guitar made them the superior band member. That’s the tightrope I’ve been walking since 2012. Every guitar player who is good enough is already taken and the leftovers can’t learn the material. Additionally, there is the ego factor but it doesn’t always work in the familiar way. Many guitar players who would otherwise be easy to get long with won’t change their style to play in a duo because of a prevailing attitude that it would spoil their image. It doesn’t take much ego either. While I feel I could do a better job than some guitar players in my home area, I find myself shrinking from getting out there because it is not my forté.
I’m aware the project [my duo] has taken forever. Nobody really predicted the change that clone guitar playing would have on band formation. I didn’t play for the first few years I worked for the corporation and I pinpoint that as the stretch where things went sour. By 1987 when I got back into music, it became next to impossible to find a guitar player who didn’t carbon copy every lick and that is a style which isn’t quite good enough for duo work. It seems routine now that every time I decide I’ll go ahead and guitar solo, an opportunity to play bass comes along. When will I learn?
For reasons yet unknown, radio stations for sale is a confidential matter. There are a few sites that advertise the general area, but not the call letters. I looked at a spread of prices from places unheard of with $100,000 price tags to stations in Houston for $2.7 million. That’s buying the business, not the station. A site called Prometheus has a price breakdown of starting your own station with used gear for around $15,000. Of that $3,000 is the purchase of an Emergency Alert System required by the FCC. After that, it says, the price of running the station is around $1,000 per month. Time to talk to Boss Hogg.
ADDENDUM
Last day I said how one could always make money with cheesy ideas. The idea generating process is not a congeniality contest in these parts and I held a quick on-line forum with the old club. The nature of the best idea [for digital AM broadcasting] was a station that plays nothing but embarrassing reports on the lives of Trump opponents. That’s correct and you heard it here. See, right now, the average American has none of the resources to dig up the dirt on politicians who oppose the will of the majority. Prime example is the way the liberal radio trumpets and drumbeats that it is “Congress” that is blocking funds to build the border wall. Because Congress sounds more important that “bunch of shitheads”.
This radio concept would name names, something the liberals dish out but don’t like in return. For instance, it is the Senate that is a big part of stopping the wall and their mouth piece is another inbreed from another family of professional politicians in New Mexico. Poll after poll shows the majority of New Mexico wants the wall.
The US Constitution abhors the very concept of professional politicians. My radio station would go on about how he got his jog through connections, in this instance his father, cousins, & nephews, by name. Sounds cruel? He is denying the will of the people in a democracy, so he deserves any ass-kicking he gets. Don’t be conned by the constant news stories that people have changed and don’t want the wall. They are misquoting surveys that show 43% of Texans want the wall to claim that means the other 57% oppose it. No, some 9% of the people asked had no opinion and another 15% wanted the border shut down, just not with a wall.
The logic is easy. These people are not the opposition, they are the enemy. Point them out, hound them, have some platform of exposure other than the liberal-controlled press and their phony releases a out integrity and expose the ones who vote contrary to their promises or will of their constituents. But go further than Wikileaks, which is boring and hard to follow. The public wants to know which Senators were caught stealing when they were ten and got off because daddy knew the police cheif. Radio needs to sink to tabloid level, and we all know the money that tabloids make.
The trick is figuring out how to make it pay. This plan is not the same as newspaper reporting. Everybody has those embarrassing moments they just cannot forget and this is a systematic search for those moments. While the Reb would not like a “Dirt on Democrats” station, there would be little objection to her and I playing good-cop bad-cop on the issue. She says so-and-so opposes the wall and I say isn’t that the same guy who wet his bed until he was 13? Where does one get the dirt? Easy. Go spend a week in the town he grew up in. Somebody will talk. Anyway, this is just an idea. It is meant to be as bad as it sounds. Because so is taxation.
