One year ago today: November 27, 2020, a day in Miami.
Five years ago today: November 27, 2016, Polk City aircraft museum.
Nine years ago today: November 27, 2012, Google goes MicroSoft.
Random years ago today: November 27, 2008, Thanksgiving at Peggy’s.
I left too early (from downntown last evening). As my guitar player friend was just leaving, the manager from the Barrelhouse (it’s inside the arena) flagged him down to play.. That’s show biz. I’m up too early this Saturday morning, even the cats aren’t bothering to be fed. I checked for any news, there’snothing out of the ordinary. NASA is trying to score brownie points to deflect an asteroid, an even which unlikely to happen in a million years, but they are correct in that you never know. Plus, unlike their half-century overdue landing on Mars, the asteroid means a constant supply of taxpayer money for them.
Physics.org has reported a 3D printer using living cells, a step toward self-building lumber houses and probably things more dastardly. It’s too early to say One of my bigger feeds remains JimmyR.com. That’s the guy who you can read by the articles he links to. Representative would be a link to “new study reveals nerds who live in mom’s basement are best catch for gorgeous women, have high IQs due to pot-smoking, and are entitled to free government money”.
Interesting how intrusive advertising is now making way into my once secure news links. I go via England for most of it. So I see a lot of weird products that only the English would love, like canned bread. Trivia, the paint job on an airplane is called the livery. I remain skeptical of claims like the Royal Air Force saying they have 100% synthetic fuel (called UL91, it is built up from hydrogen and carbon). If fossil fuel is used on any stage of production, like the tractors that harvest carinata oil plants. UL91 uses “natural” electricity, but the chemicals are toxic, and the used wind turbine blades are such dense material, it cannot be recycled They have to bury the used blades deep underground.
One thing I’ll say is new about the Internet is the current crop of users grew up without the comprehensive guidance of earlier generations. Prior to around the late 90s, parents were able to oversee tha majority of what their offspring were up to and that is because they had some knowledge of most of it. But the computer savvy of my generation and beyond, well, quite frankly they are as stupid as I’ve always said they were. Prior to the Internet, they at least had some knowledge of everything you were likely to say or do.
I know first-hand how this channelizes kids. My parents controlled everythhing, even reading my mail and monitoring my bank account. This never bothered my siblings because they never had such things, but it was not so much ruthless control by my parents as the fact they were also incredibly snoopy individuals who considered everything their business. That part the others picked up, for sure. The Internet, in my parents day, would likely have been outlawed as a threat to their society. As it was, by 1995, maybe 1% of parents could even possibly exercise any real authority over computers, much less the Internet.
This allowed the world we have, where millions of millennials suffer from lack of supervision and don’t even know it. There are sites that offer discount coupons for things they list as free. Every last comic book scam has found its way into their economy. They create floof and sell it to each other. True, we all imagine money has value, but in my day that crazy idea was backed up by actual goods and services. Now it is like communist Russia. You pretend to work and they pretend to pay you.
You know what’s getting old already? These countless stories of people losing their jobs over vaccine mandates. Fact is, there is no excuse for being unskilled in America, and the demand for skilled labor is so high the unemployment rate is a negative number. Now put that aside and realize that no job is worth risking your life by getting a poison injection. Another big union, the auto workers, rejects the vaccine mandate. The whole Biden agenda is running out of steam and under the circumstances, that is really bad news for that outfit. They seem reduced to repeatedly announcing new virus mutations that nobody believes any more. And violence is getting closer in Europe.
Looking for documentaries on youTube has become fruitless. Instead of newer and better material, the results are now full of simulations. This are particularly bad with military themes. These cartoon graphics cannot be easily filtered out as they all fall under the category of “video”. Most are pretty lame and show unrealistic action. The limitation is always the poor imagination of the author. The best published newsreels are German, which are not exactly neutral in coverage. One striking feature is how tiny but efficient the late-war German tactics were against massive odds. In some scenes, the Germans look outnumbered as much as 30 to 1.
An amusing aspect of the Allied viewpoint is their portrayal of Montgomeriy’s troops shown defeating German formations in direct combat. Not so, instead they surrounded the Germans in pockets and waited them out. With vast stockpiles of US equipment, the Allies often stood back and shelled or bombed the Germans, who eventually ran out of everything. This was the cause of a lot of Allied propaganda that the enemy was abandoning his weapons and surrendering wholesale. In reality, they had fought to the last of their ammunition and were ordered to surrender. Which they did, usually marching in columns. You'll never see that on the newsreels.
Inside that CT scanner.
Remember to use BACK ARROW to return to blog.
Next, I played a compilation of hit songs from the 1960s. I was too young to know any of this music, but I sure recognize it from the 1970s and as oldies from the 1980s. What struck me was again the number I’ve never heard at all. Plenty of Elvis music and many bands. The “Tornados” and “Shadows”, never heard, and also plenty of names I did hear at the time, like Pat Boone, but danged if I could tell you what they sang. Technically, I should have been more influenced by this music, but fact is, that never happened until The Beatles. Here’s my stunt double over at Shooters, waving hello.
It was 1966 before I remember most of the music, though I didn’t really play any it. It was a Nancy Sinatra tune, “These Boots” that got me thinking I could play hit music. The Beatles began to get too orchestral and Stones music was always too weird for me until my late twenties. It was a real memory jog. I did not begin to recognize every hit song twelve months in a row until 1968, which is when I finally really got into The Beatles. Meaning I did not like a lot of the non-Bealtes hits, the “Age of Aquarius” stuff. They took up slots in the charts that belonged to my heroes.
These memories go back to my childhood, so forgive any lapses. People who can remember things that much were not leading my life. Beatle’s music was hard to play and the first band I liked from the get-go was Creedence Clearwater Revival. Their music was easy. The early 70s were a dead stretch for me, I lost faith in charts when The Partridge Family got there and bottomed for me with “A Horse With No Name”. But shortly thereafter, my band was playing hits within weeks of release. It was a golden time to be in a band, single, and blue-eyed.
A touch of insomnia kept me up listening to 1970s top tunes. It was an era of great but depressingly slow music and I began to discover Johnny Cash. Only his best material, mind you, and he was still strictly on the country charts. The rest was elevator music. Disco music and something I never did like, remakes of earlier tunes. If I recall, this is when the charts started to break up and go different routes, thank goodness, because radio stations followed suit. I called it the Abba/BeeGees wave at the time, as no band could dominate the charts any more.
The downside of that was songs from other lists would occasionally outsell combo music for reasons other than musical content, for example exercise videos. As recording studio music expanded their market, you got people like Michael Jackson and Prince selling to emerging niche markets that simply outnumbered all that came before. There is not a single hit on my current song list that was a top-seller in the 1980s. Mind you, I can play some of it.
I found hit songs had become big production numbers. Up to then, I played what I could, picking from the lists what could be arranged for smaller groups and it was not easy. It was also getting harder to find guitarists who could do the job. Now I know why, but back then you had to fire them by the dozen, mostly for lack of ability to learn new material. I recall it was the middle of 1987 before I finally chucked out all chart-toppers and began to systematically learn what the audience liked, but not realizing that meant out-distancing 90% of the small-band personnel in terms of stage appeal. It meant the separation of recording and performing for me. I chose performing.
The final straw with “popular” music for me was the 1990s when they started using music to push the black-man-white-woman theme, then other social issues. I like music to entertain, not indocrinate. And by then, hair bands were embarassingly nostalgic. I never cared for the unoriginality of disco versions of earlier hits.
ADDENDUM
I found one potential problemfor old circuits that did not work for the club. It involves tank circuits, those that oscillate with a coil and a capacitor. To capture the signal we used a tap that contained an electolytic capacitor to isolate the antenna current from the amplifier. It turns out that should have been a ceramic capacitor. I don’t know until I get back to the cabin to check, but it may have been preventing oscillation because of its polarity.
