One year ago today: September 22, 2020, why Space costs so much.
Five years ago today: September 22, 2016, the batbike in Audburndale.
Nine years ago today: September 22, 2012, time to move . . .
Random years ago today: September 22, 2011, a generic day.
5:30AM. Give me time to wake up. The gentle sound of the rain leaking into my closet had lulled me into a twelve-hour snooze. I see the source but can’t get to it yet, plus I’ll have to scab the rafter in the attic. Any damp wood in Florida is termite food. I have experience at this so it should go fast enough to give me some time off. There is another rehearsal for this evening as the new band has not discovered you can’t play catch-up. I’ll bet I’m the only one who picked up his instrument since last time. Even then, it was for a tune I don’t care for, “Lost InThe Fifties”. Milsap play a song with less than eight chords? Why would he do that?
Digging out after the storm, my trench was only half-filled in. But some of the trim on my house finally succumbed to the wind. Shown here is a piece of decoration above my side door. Much as I don’t care for that song, “Friends In Low Places”, I finally learned it to spec this morning. I pointed out I am the youngster in this news band and they are influenced by those 1950s jazz chords, or whatever they are called. The flatted 7ths add 5 junk, a sound I really do not care for, but I recognize its significance to some.
Wouldn’t you know they’d play the weakest tunes from the original lists. They toss around band names I’ve never heard of. Give me a break, the “Deltones” and the “Mills Brothers”. Isn’t that 1940s or something? I may have heard of the “Vagabonds” but you got me on the “Chordettes”. I’ll tell you what I do to spice up these outdated pieces. As a former piano player, I know what notes make a chord, while most guitarists haven’t a clue. Thus, I can pick out the relevant note or two and use that in riffs and as passing notes. This works even better when a guitarist omits the note. The goal is audience appeal. Use sparingly.
And the Portland rioters have conducted a police-style survey into their conduct and concluded anything they did wrong was somebody else’s fault. The Biden mouthpiece lady says the illegals don’t need the vax because they are not staying. Yeah, not staying in Chicago, Detroit, Yakima, El Paso, and all the other places they are being flown at great expense to the taxpayer. Have you tried to find a notary public lately? There services are supposed to be detached from the content of the documents, but these days they want to record your ID. We had this issue in Tennessee a while back. It didn’t take long for Florida to get as bad.
Lovell radio telescope.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Here’s the fried circuit board off my best air conditioner. It’s causing the delay because the one feed wired changes into ten wires, shown here, with no circuit diagram. Thus I just spent a nearly two weeks using a fan and I’m getting pissed off at this thing. Before I do my customary exhaustive examination of band rehearsal slated for 4:00PM today, I went over my videos of what has already happened. There is progress, but it is grindingly slow. The guitar player is the weak link but it is likely because instead of thinking about what he’s playing, he memorizes the notes. This could explain his tendency to drop chords and to play wrong notes. If you don’t know what comprises a C chord, you won’t have a clue when I ask you to flat the 7ths.
I found a notary, but it was a 30-mile round trip. I complain again how ordinary things are getting so millennialized. A notary should be detached from the document contents, that is, only a witness to the signing. Instead, I chased around half the county for someone who did not to photocopy ID, which creates a different scenario altogether. I know a lot of people don’t understand the reasoning here, and you’ll eventually find them in the FEMA camps.
Band rehearsal was tough but productive. The “lead” player does not know his theory or the circle of fifths. He does not respond well to instruction and is the weakest link in the chain. There was a lot of progress, we covered another 12 songs. But overall progress is slow and as before, management is not so great. But they are certainly reacting better to the way I play bass. I’ll describe the situation a bit, for it’s today’s top story. I’m anxious the band might want to replace the rhythm player. This would take us back to square one and get us into a drawn-out practice mode until he is up to speed.
I asked the guitarist to strum some acoustic material and played my rhythm-bass style, which more than compensates for all but the above-average rhythmist. He’s unclear on the concept and has to wait for a hook if he loses his place. It is more work, since it involves playing rhythm all the time when you are not playing lead, but if I can do it on bass, it should be easier on guitar. Next rehearsal is a week and I’m taking my music stand and PA. I just can’t get a good mid-range on the equipment they’ve got. The low notes are too booming.
The keyboard guy is back on keys, he’s top dog and calls the tunes. That’s quite simple, without him the band would collapse. If I didn’t say, the lead player is what I’d rate as adequate, he’s got a bad ear for music, and does not know his scale tones. But I’ve worked with worse. The drummer on his own stated he knows he was galloping and is making a real effort to stay on tempo. This means he follows the bass, which don’t care for. It looks like the way it’s going to be. We have so far gone over the bulk of what we’ll likely play and my vote is we do so asap.
According to the far left show hosts, this band is not important, it’s Climate change I should be concerned over. You see, Greenland has not been cooperating worth a damn. It got colder and added ice, lots of it. The Biden administration has found that large islands are very difficult to shove into a DC jail celsl and are impossible to coerce into vaccination. The DC game plan is to schedule the first of a chain of “climate nights” on national TV. The intention is to break Greenland into groups of smaller islands that can then be set to squabbling with each other in classic Marxist fashion.
On the agenda are glacier “right to calving” and “Eskimo Lives Matter”. The strategy is to keep the glaciers and icefields distracted while the Bidenistas install huge numbers of surplus refrigerators around all UN weather stations. If that does not result in enough global cooling, the backup plan is to bus all the women sex boycotters out of Texas, headed by Rachel Maddow. Says a usually reliable source, “That lot is so frigid Hell is afraid of ‘em.”
How about youTube censorship. Like most on-line algorithms that try to claim they are A.I., these are piss-poor snippets of code written by semi-literate millennials. What got my attention was one of these censored the Ig Nobel Awards. My long-term readers will remember these spoofs were popular blog items here a few years ago. It seems their on-line show was blocked because some millennial algorithm determined some of their theme music was copyrighted. The music, written 107 years ago, was flagged by youTube.
The problem gets worse, because youTube took on these blocking algorithms and then fired the human staff. Like all C+ code, a month or so later, nobody can understand it. The users complain that youTube has nobody at the help desk, but the fact is, youTube could not put a knowledgeable human there if they wanted to.
ADDENDUM
That’s neat. A black TV host complaining white murder victims get more press. (Insert joke here about how blacks make up for it in quantity.) People in New Zealand have been arrested for smuggling food into lockdown areas. The Pope invites Chelsea Clinton to speak on human rights. Government workers trying to come clean as the audit deadline approaches. Massive protests in Australia and this time it is not defenseless grandmothers. (Told ya.) Australia is the likely flashpoint, but the protestors are still dumb-as-fuck not showing up ready for police tactics. Not violence, I don’t mean that and publicly declare it. I only mean the protestors are not ready to assert their rights.
The police are again following their paymasters and ignoring their oath to protect the public. What I saw was a peaceful but angry crowd outside their union headquarters. Inside, the union bosses promised them answers in an hour, then used the time to go on the radio and call them extremists. It was a setup, their reps came out of the building to pick a fight, but only when they knew the police were due to arrive. They got their timing wrong and a few of them got a shit-kicking. They had it comin’.
