September 16, 2024

Yesteryear
One year ago today: September 16, 2023, the shop that lost.
Five years ago today: September 16, 2019, borlotti?
Nine years ago today: September 16, 2015, WIP
Random years ago today: September 15, 2015, my last big band.

           The PA system won out. PA or A/C, well, I can’t make any money with an A/C. He (the seller) has no idea what a good deed he’s helping out with here. A gig this weekend means I may have an air conditioner that works decent again. That, folks, is how important music is. I keep my bands informed by e-mail. Even though they are not burdened with any of the operational part of the group, they still get to hear about it, ha! (Um, actually, that isn’t really a joke. Bands have to have a clear chain of command and everyone need to be informed. We already had one show go wrong when Iearned the hard way that the Prez can’t get text on his office phone.

           Today will be your reminder that this blog is a daily journal. You get the tale from the trailer court, you decide what to make of it. I was up early, contacting Pinellas Park. We hammered out a deal on the phone, where by he keeps the big speakers and knocks $50 off the price. I was on the road by 8:30AM, knowing I’ve got no path around Tampa to get there fast. I picked up the money and opted to use the old Bartow highway. This got me into Tampa, where the signs said traffic stopped ahead. This is Florida, the only place know where they let people stop on the freeway, often beside the sign that says “Minimum Speed 40”. Go the front of the line, arrest the first guy who is stopped with a clear road ahead, tow his car, and give him a $500 fine.

           Don’t be thinking the Garmin(GPS) was any help. You can type in the correct address on 70th Avenue N in St. Petersburg and it will tell you No Location Found. For that matter you can type in Saint Peterburg and get the same. No, you can’t abbreviate Saint or it shortens it to St for street. I had to tank up and grabbed a sandwich & coffee, noting I was the one paying cash and that snack cost me $10. It took an hour and a quarter to get past downtown Tampa on the freeway.
           However, the trip was 100% worth it. The rest of the drive was pleasant, with light traffic. I listend to another disk of “The Stars Are Fire”, but out sheer disdain for the way this audio-book is going, partly because the market for this must be out there, it’s worse than Danielle Steele, who has learned not to trap herself. If I didn’t say, this book said on the jacket it was about drama surrounding big forest first in Maine after the, so it has some passages that describe an America that was wrecked by immigration. How kids could just drop their bicycle on the school lawn and they’d be there when school was out. Or how people could leave a box of apples beside the road and come back later, if any apples were gone, there would be some money in the box. Today, the Democrats would let them steal the box.

    &nbr />bsp;      By now, I’m mostly listening to the unintentional comedy. How the story stresses how much kinder women are, but every other chapter there is an incident that proves otherwise and the authoress does not seem to know it. There seem to be two types of women who lose their man. Those who never get over it and those who almost immediately move on to the next. This book does not seem to realize it promotes both of these totally self-centered routes as not only default, but as normal. The unspoken quirk is that the husband is only missing. Here’s another quirky bit of shallow thinking. The wife never got along with the mother-in-law. When she died a few weeks earlier, she left the house to the only son, that is, the husband. So while I agree with her just moving in, right? The mother dies, the son gets the house, the son disappears, the wife gets the house. Okay. But where I disagree is the wife’s attitude that doing things like this is just her providing for her family, which is not the case at all. She was a hopeless basket case had sheer luck not intervened and she should be taking credit for none of it.

           I had lots of time to tell the lady off in the slow traffic. As I said, quite the trip as I met a character, got an excellent PA for $50 bucks off, and he threw in a Shure 58 and XLR cable, plus two fancy guitar stands. Turns out he’s a guitar buff and has a lengthy background similar to my own, even knowing some people in common from back in LA in the early 90s. Here’s the PA set up in my office later.
He’s got a ton of excellent equipment and some guitars you don’t have to know a thing about to know they are worth astronomical sums. We talked for nearly an hour despite me not getting there until almost noon. What a hoot to talk to somebody who knows what side the musical toast is buttered on. Take that Shure mic. In the day, that was the microphone to have, actually a sub-model called the 585, but I instant recognized the 58 from band posters from the 60s onward. Beatles, Who, Eagles, Doobies, Kiss, Purple, all of them this was the definitive mic. Now I have one probably 60 years old in perfect operating condition, but the finish has flaked.

           Yes, I heard that Team Trump (which is not Trump himself) has a list of every Democrat who used violent language against Trump leading up to the latest assassination attempt. The MSM is going to have a mouth-party trying to squirm their way out of that one. The shooter was arrested by a Florida sheriff who is under no obligation to obey DC. The Feds are demanding the investigation be turned over to them, but DeSantis seems to have relocated the suspect to parts unknown. This could get interesting pretty fast, for once a bully is faced down once, well, you know the rest.

Picture of the day.
PPP
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           We could have swapped band tales from the trailer court, but I decide not to return through Tampa, but take the toll road around the bay, stopping in Parrish for a coffee. It’s supposed to be a sleepy Florida town. Not no more. You remember those empty fields around the town I loved to drive past just a few years ago? If you go 1.1 miles past the marker that says “Welcome to Historic Parrish”, nothing but cookie cutter subdivisions, I saw hundreds and I wasn’t looking. I got into Parrish too late for a café on leche, so I grabbed to fried burritos, the ones that were 99¢ last trip. Now $2.50 and not that good (but very filling for sure). You should see pictures of both Parrish and the Shure microphone.

           What makes the Parrish art shown here so rare is that this is the only intersection in town. To the right, however, is a nothing road maybe a mile long before it hits the soggy river banks, no houses, no nothing. But, if you go to take the picture shown here, somebody in a pickup truck will drive up and park in the way. Sadly, I deleted the several pictures I took to prove it, but saved one of this guy doing his darndest, the picture is in the addendum. Trust me, that road is so empty you could sleep on it—until you want a picture of that mural.

           There is a collector’s item I doubt I’ve mentioned. Believe it or not, early bands used to carry along a full size Hammond electric organ. Guess what was inside them? Tubes, lots of tubes. I’d heard these “guts” were sought after to make into guitar amps and today I saw one. Yep, six tubes and the new guy, call him Rob or Roj for Roger, anyway, he knows the guy who makes these things. Darn rights I gave him my contact info, show me how to build these tube amps and he can have all the tubes he wants. Wait, there’s more.

           I instantly saw this new PA was two or three generations newer than my Gigrac. It has built-in in effects like a choruser, even a SD disk player for our breaks to stop people playing the jukebox. I estimated it would weight 2/3 of my old unit, it is actual 5.5 ounces less than half. I took the small speakers, which were something most people today would never have seen: Radio Shack. If you have seen them they would have been called Tandy, Realistic, or LG (Lucky Goldstar). These are the original lightweight 12” cabinets. What a find! Let me put this piece into the puzzle. This unit is a Peavey.            They have been around a long time and have adopted most of the features you could want. Genuinely useful touches like a pilot light on the inputs to tell you your mic or amp is working. The equalizer also detects any feedback and lights up that frequency. It has several other features, most of which I’ve tested already that don’t seem to have much effect. Like the choruser ot something called Kosmos. Give me time. I need to find the setting that creates my own harmonies. It could be this feature is not working right. The knob is pushed to select the effect, but it seems to be permanently pushed. Hey, I was not expecting perfection. For now, all the essential PA features work plenty fine. Wait, there is still more.

           Since the guy works on tubes, he’s probably encountered Bluetooth more often than myself. This perks up Roj, saying the guy is a total Bluetoon expert. I asked him to pass on my contact info. Hmmm. After years of meeting zeros, in one day I find both a guitar maker and somebody who can install Bluetooth on an acoustic bass. Aha, one picture of There, I’d say that’s a full day. How did your’s go?

ADDENDUM
           See, here's ther guy trying to block the mural. Another vehicle was parked to my immediate right, so he could not see me in time to get right in front, but historal visits to this town say he would certainly have tried. It is positively uncanny, these people.

           I’ll explain another day how and why the following gets blogged today, but there are four psychological stages that an investment must go through if you plan for old age. Start in your 20s, and yes, I do know how painful this is. It is the hardest part because are sacrificing at the very time you are ever really going to enjoy it. This is the source of my ancient saying from when I was 16, "Yes, but you are going to be old a lot longer than you will be young." They are:

By your 30s, you can cut back on your portion and still move ahead.
By your 40s, your investments no longer require your input.
By your 50s, your investments self-sustain and you can stop inputting.
By your 60s, you start pulling money out and still get ahead.