One year ago today: April 22, 2023, remember the 10lb payload?
Five years ago today: April 22, 2019, nothin’ good grows.
Nine years ago today: April 22, 2015, Broward Transit sucks.
Random years ago today: April 22, 2017, on carbon dating.
Earth Day, and I didn’t make it to Harbor Heights. I don’t even know if JZ is still there. But it he was home, he’d be calling by now about the situation because I’m the one who’ll tell it like it is. For me, I’ll spend a quiet morning working on my shed, drinking coffee, and other ordinary stuff around here. Calibrating a sextant, testing some vacuum tubes, making peanut butter cookies with coconut flour, and laying out Golden Ratio box dimensions. The average ind kind of thing around here before playing at a kava bar.
Here’s the Golden Ratio box and there is something “right” about it. Even this junk box, with glued joints and not squared exact has an extra appeal. Before I cut the pieces to maximize the use of lumber but we have an awful lot of lumber these days. I won’t get to the silo until this afternoon due to this perfect working weather, which encourages puttering. I can deliver the yard report which first notes that squirrels also love the climate. I’ve not seen how, but one of them emptied my cardinal feeder to the last seed. We’ll figure him out. We have an adolescent female cardinal patron of the birdbath. She’s the first I’ve seen get right under the running drip hose and get soaked, plainly having some version of birdie fun.
Ah, there is the squirrel now, what a brazen imp. Basking on the hose feed in the cool of the mister. Time to time, washing his little squirrel face, but not showing me how he gets to the feeder. Let’s put out some bait and watch the action. The banks move in, almost doubling the volume of silver trades to 34 million ounces. Now that we know what to watch for, I don’t see silver skyrocketing with this level of manipulation going on. Statement like hitting a “ten year high” would merely bring the price to $30. I would expect the banks to hammer the price down to $24 because that’s where they seem comfortable, but today it’s still trading at $27.50.
So, if you can’t watch silver, watch gold or watch the people instead. They still base a lot on historical rations. If the demand stays there for long we might see a pressure cooker condition. Either way, I’m not planning on selling a thing unless we see $50 per ounce. Let me look up the ratio for that. For $50 on silver, gold would have to reach $2200. Where is it right now, hang on. There, gold is $2,035 and climbing. Just like the rich, if you don’t have to sell, eventually you will get a spike.
Autobahn traffic jam.
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The afternoon was all silo windows and electric wiring, kept me busy. The big story is, the kava bar, so get comfortable. This is not the place if you only want to hear about the fun part of the music, but today was mostly a great good time. I was first to arrive at 7:20PM and as I kind of figured, there is no house PA. Just one powered speaker with four inputs, probably some repurposed Karaoke apparatus. I also found the place did not formally open until six weeks ago. None of the operation, including the music show, has any real mileage. This meant that the Prez & I mostly were the show. We played 8:00PM to 11:00PM and we aced it.
What went right, what went wrong? This blog probes the underbelly and backstreets of the music trade. I hauled in my old 2006 gear, this is our first gig with the full setup. Up to now we never had a chance to test the entire routine from set up to tear down. I am simply going to have to get some lighter gear, even with the Prez helping, I finally admit it has finally become too much work. It also meant their stage rarely looked so great for jam night, though it ran more like a music drop-in. This was also the first gig for the band that put a lot of our hard work to the test. I rate the night a very good success. Some of my reasons are not obvious, but they are important.
Instead of three songs, we played three hours before I called it quits. After an hour all the single women in the place were a ring around the stage area and for everything some envious malcontents will say about that, there is a satisfaction to interacting with pretty women on a friendly level that makes other men creeps when they do it. Eat your hearts out, lechers, it makes all the difference in the world that I did not do the approaching, and you know it.
Two of my management trademarks were prominent. Do not play any slow music, let somebody else make that mistake. Put mildly, while our music is duo arrangements, my bass lines are solos and that can rivet nay-saying guitar players to the spot. I think it is possible this may be the first time some of the younger people present ever saw this form of music, it just is not taught any more. Remember the troubles I had finding a guitar player who would even try? Well I also said once the concept was proven, we’d have all the guitar players we could shake a mic stand at. Our show was a clincher, yet the Guitar-Center-Think is so pervasive, some of the guitarists present still thought we were “missing” a lead player. Amusing.
And who recalls how I insisted we favor presentations and techniques that were difficult to imitate? Damn smart move, that one. This can have an overpowering effect, and why should it not? Imagine a professionally managed band with months of tough conditioning in the harshest of hungry environments suddenly showing up at a musical church picnic. The show was, overall, that of experienced amateurs doing their best, it’s just that this time the big boys came out to play. I went out of my way to encourage them and offer to help if they ask—except for the guitarists who asked if we wanted to join their acts. Fat chance.
My guess there were at the busiest, ten single women present. Don’t dare lecture me on motives when I report that the three youngest and best-looking were at my table the instant we took a break. Beauty brings a tear to anyone’s eye after a certain spell. The youngest, the redhead, is somebody’s dream come true. See photo, that’s her on the left. All three shown one song each. It was fun, but between you and I, none of them are going to have much more than fun. In case there are any jealous bastards reading, yes, the gals all nuzzled up to me and you know why? Because time spent playing bass is not deducted from your lifespan, so they were up close and friendly.
Of course, there were plenty of musical considerations still needing some thought, but that can wait The show itself and what it took to get there was strongly connected to the directed way we conducted our rehearsals. I make no pretense that my first motive to play in a band sixty years ago was meeting women with slim waists—how was I to know that was to become an endangered condition? Don’t blame me for getting distracted. I don’t care that other men fail so miserably at this and I’m not into divorced housewives. Single women, that is truly single, unattached, no baggage, unencumbered women have a different manner and I happen to like it a lot.
Synopsis. it was a super gig by the standard it should be rated. We handily adapted our music list to match venue, the crowd was clustered about the stage, the sound balance was smooth for such a large echoey room, and overall the music was not outdated by easy listening standards. This was planned, so if we get either of the pending Legion gigs, our immediate worries are over. The basic expenses would be covered and you cannot find a better pastime. And I’m fully aware of the improved outlook of musicians who are not in it for the money when they realize they no longer have to spend their own money on gas and groceries. Instead of a short set, we played three full hours with two curtain calls and that means we played all our core tunes. What a treat!
