One year ago today: July 19, 2019, my account, or is it?
Five years ago today: July 19, 2015, what, $2 for coffee!
Nine years ago today: July 19, 2011, she was boring . . .
Random years ago today: July 19, 2006, CSS sucks.
I was up early enough to run through some chick material on the bass, and one tune I picked was an old Lynn Anderson tune, “Rose Garden”. The version I chose was by somebody called McBride because the bass line is somewhat smoother, hence more danceable. For such an old tune I thought there would be no problem finding a chord chart. If I’ve ever played this song before, it was not with any intention to deep learn is, so the quickest route is the chord chart. Alas, I had not reckoned on what a damn mess these millennials make of everything. I’ll explain this weird picture below, but it is at the lumber yard.
Instead, I find 30 versions of the tune, not one of them in the original key. That’s a lot of effort and for what? Ah, I have a theory that covers that. Fact by majority rule, a cousin of truth by majority rule. What if you take a huge group of ignorant or brainwashed people, the proletariat who normally amount to nothing and hand them a huge collective voice. It’s been done, and that voice is the Internet. Before that, the only thing the masses had in common was that they were balkanized. Let the Internet unite them and soon 2+2=5 and the Moon landing was faked. Even the word Internet , a proper noun, is uncapitalized. Leave these fact-by-majority-rule people in charge, and before long fortune cookies are Chinese food and you can prevent disease spread with a face mask.
[Author’s note: face masks don’t work. The reason doctors wear them is when you speak, small droplets of saliva fall from your mouth. The doctor does not want any falling into the patient during surgery. And quarantine works by isolating the potentially infectious, not by inhibiting the population at large. Personally, I cannot believe the middle and working classes have not revolted in some way, other than maybe 40 years of cable TV has left them that complacent.]
The sky isn’t quite clear yet to work on the shed, so I followed the Rose Garden string a bit longer. Turns out the Internet is packed with low effort versions of this tune. Is there some secret underground group that has singled out this song to be the worst tabbed on-line rendering in existence? Unless you’ve got a better explanation. The song has a refrain that my ear won’t pick out, some weird guitar chording with a top note that won’t make sense to me, but I know it is G-G6-G7. So my plan was to just find the guitar tab and adapt it. Guess which part every one of the posted versions leaves out?
The only one in the correct key is on e-chords, another of those bastard sites that swear they don’t share your personal information but demand you fork it over anyway. The Internet was never intended for that but you cannot filter them out. It would be different if there was at least some guarantee of quality. The surest mark of a bass amateur is the use of open strings and the e-chord notation actually strains to use them whenever possible. Talk about clueless.
They have disabled copy and paste for the tabs unless you become a member, and since I don’t like pricks that do this, I’ll tell you the workaround. Right-click on the page and select “View page source.” Then keep scrolling down past all the javascript bunk until you find the HTML that matches the display. Sure, you’ve also have a few HTML tags, but you can edit that out. It’s a no-brainer, and my rationale is I don’t like people who disable commands from my computer.
Okay, what about the [above] picture. It did not take long for word to get around that the fence panels were half the price for places you did not need plywood. I was lucky to get the last 32 good pieces. This photo shows the lineup of people buying the planks by the cartload. I was fifth in line. The boards are $1.74 each plus tax, so it was around $60. I’ve got pictures below but the sad part is, which is no surprise in Florida, I am one picket short. Just you watch the hoops I will have to go through to get that single piece.
North Korea state-sanctioned food.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
The neighbor’s tree casts a shadow on my new roof that, if you move correctly, you can work in that patch of shade all morning. Wish I’d know that before. This time, I used up all the available planks and got a little less than half the roof finished by just after 1:00PM. I’ll make a supply run to the Mulberry store, I think I may get away with fewer boards, leaving me enough cash to check if Ybor Cigars is open, that’s the big pub in the south end that has the most live music in the city. I tested the camouflage on the neighbor the south and he could not see the shed roof at all, even when I tried pointing at it.
Here’s an excellent photo of the planks on the roof. It’s a bit gloomy but I preferred to keep on working until well past sunset. Better to finish the job in a fell swoop than cavort around taking blog pictures—although that is highly dependent on the circumstance. The afternoon clouds kept spitting so it was not drone weather. The photo is clear enough to see the intentional patchwork staggering of the pieces, as this roof is not only load-bearing, it is semi-structural. All the tools used are shown here. Drill, saw, and clamps. The clamps are needed to compress the boards into shape. Being fence panels, if you don’t square them up with force, the error can multiply to crazy proportions over an expanse of these dimensions.
Me rich? How do you figure that? Easy, become a liberal. I have a house paid for, just like Donald Trump. I have more than one vehicle, a sign of affluence in their books. I now have a shed and a garden, and according to them that is due to white privilege. Those who say my situation is so buried in the pile of records they would never get around to taxing me on this. I agree, but I also have an unusually deep understand of how A.I. works. Artificial intelligence looks for patterns and I fit their profile for rich.
Mid evening begins with slow trading in the Aussie exchange, with the kiwi still bouncing around the pound. Expect dozens of little trades. Last week, a record trading week for us, saw the bulk of the transactions netting between 32¢ and 51¢, but there were a plethora of them. By end of the day, we are already up 0.497%. Put into perspective, a six-pack of YeungLing beer is $9.95 and the cashier asks if you want to donate the nickel change. No way, that is bank interest on $100 for a year. The total return the past 22 days has been 20.336%. Which is too good to be true.
ADDENDUM
I’m resolved to continue learning “Rose Garden”, glossing over the guitar part my ear cannot hear. Jazz chords are the opiate of the guitar masses, the fact is very few others give a flying shit about them. There’s a point after which it gets too commotional for my liking. I’m not an adherent to the theory that complicated music is better or exists on a higher plane. For most popular music, the kind I like, the choice between simple or complicated has already been made. Did I just say “commotional”?
T here’s a connection with another piece I learned in Nashville, “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under”. It has the same swing bass motif that adapts to stage presentation and has chord progressions well away from the standard three, making these among the most complicated I play. Constant effort is required to keep the lines simple. Ray-B would laugh because one of the first things I learned was to fake the guitar riffs and tags, but I stress my motive is to keep the tune interesting while the guitar player is strumming. My intent is not to play the lead breaks, as he likes to put it. But what I do does raise a flag with your average turf-conscious guitar player.
