Author: colter

Mind for War

“Right now, the military is the only action agency in the United States government, so any time anyone wants something done, the military is being called upon to do it. But that’s the trouble. The military knocked things down in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s very good at knocking things down. But now we have to build things, and the military’s not very good at building things. It’s not about building things. It’s about allowing what you’ve built to be destroyed. It’s about allowing people you love to be killed.”
– Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark

Somebody make that guy run for office! Click the link above to read Esquire‘s full article – it’s fantastic. It pointed out something that I’ll have to doublecheck somehow: that the Republicans in Congress voted against intervention in Kosovo. So all the ethnic cleansing that was going on, the Republicans didn’t particularly care about. Yet suddenly they care about the evils Saddam Hussein visited upon his people? At least that’s what their defense is when asked about WMD – "we went in to liberate the people!"

On a similar tack, here’s a neat bit of math from your pal and mine, Moby:

"so according to donald rumsfeld the u.s is spending 4 billion dollars a month maintaining the nilitary presence in iraq.
or 1 billion dollars a week.
or 140 million dollars a day.
or 6 million dollars an hour.
or 100,000 dollars a minute.
that’s a lot of money.
and i just visited my local police precinct and it’s desperately in need of funding.
and we’re closing down firehouses in new york city cos we don’t have the money to keep them open. and education budgets are being slashed. and budgets for health-care for the poor are being slashed. so maybe we could cut the war in iraq short by one minute and my local police precinct could be given 100,000 dollars.
or maybe we could cut the war in iraq short by one hour and we could use the 6 million dollars saved so that we wouldn’t have to close as many of new york cities fire houses. or maybe we could put the war in iraq short by one day and give 140 million dollars to the new york school system so that the hundreds of thousands of people in new york’s public schools could have a better chance of having a safe and decent education. just some thoughts."

Ill Communique

I’m sick. Wednesday night as I was finishing up watching Sunset Boulevard, (another in an increasing spate of Billy Wilder movies I’ve added to my collection) I got up and felt dizzy. Some kind of loss of equilibrium. I figured maybe I’d sleep it off, but no. I woke up Thursday even worse – moving around gave me motion sickness. I got ready for work, but my stomach complained too much when I got in the car. So I went back inside, called in sick and went to bed. And slept off and on until 5:30! I think all I ate that day was Honey Combs, Ramen noodles, cookies and toast. And orange juice. I woke up today somewhat better and made it to work. If I sit still, I’m OK. Getting up and around is like being a little drunk. Turns out Steve from Superflux has the same bug, so we cancelled band rehearsal last night – thank god, because not only did that mean I didn’t have to leave the house but also that I’m not alone in my suffering and it’s less likely to be the inner ear infection I had feared. Nevertheless, I think this is going to cancel my weekend trip to Fayetteville. Bleah. Maybe if I’ve improved enough by 5….

Happy birthdays to Robin, Tracy and Arika, who all have birthdays within a span of 3 days this month. Although none of you are reading this, I love you all to pieces and I wish you all lived closer to me.

Practice Generator

Sadly I’m so bad with numbers that I’d never be a real math geek (not that I aspire to it or anything), but I do enjoy the conceptual end of things, the applied mathematics. I’ve discovered how the application of mathematical concepts to guitar playing can make for a lot of practice material. Say you have three notes – with just those three notes you can make 27 exercises. Say I have three notes, A, B, and C:

AAA

AAB
AAC 		BBB
BBA
BBC		 CCC
CCA
CCB
ABB
ABC
ABA		 BAA
BAC
BAB		 CAA
CAB
CAC
ACC
ACB
ACA		 BCC
BCA
BCB		 CBB
CBA
CBC

That’s 27 sequences to practice – granted many of them are boring and useless, but you can weed out the ones that suck. Better yet you can mix and match to make 6-note sequences like CAB-CBA. I further discovered that you take any number, and take it to its power, and that will give you the number of possible exercises:

2 notes = 22 = 4 combinations
3 notes = 33 = 27 combinations
4 notes = 44 = 256 combinations
5 notes = 55 = 3,125 combinations

And so on. And that’s just a few particular notes. Factor that times a 12-tone system of music and a 4-octave guitar and you’ll never run out of crap to practice.

I’m Down with OLP

Guitar Acquisition Syndrome. I thought I was immune to it by now. After 13-odd guitars, my guitar lust should be sated. But now guitars are getting cheaper. China is making some killer guitars for $200. Like this one:

OLP MM1

I had to have it. I bought it Thursday at Banjo Center. It’s unbelievably great for the price. The brand is OLP, which stands for Officially Licensed Product; in this case, it’s a licensed copy of an Ernie Ball Axis, which was what used to be the Ernie Ball Eddie Van Halen model. So in a way it’s another signature model to add to my collection (Paul Gilbert, John Petrucci, Steve Vai, Blues Saraceno, Richie Kotzen). I can’t put this thing down. It’s the best $200 I ever spent!

Man Walks on Fucking Moon

Zep

I can’t say enough great things about this DVD. I’ve never been an especially great Led Zeppelin fan – the only CDs of their I own are Presence and the Page/Plant No Quarter album. I have some vinyl, but really I’ve always accepted Zep as a given; something that was influential to the stuff I listen to, but not something that totally grabbed my attention. Maybe it’s because I’m a visual thinker (and maybe because “Song Remains the Same” was lame) but seeing and hearing these guys playing in their prime is a revelation. A message from the past that not only says, “this is what great rock is” but also implies that much of what passes for rock today is predominantly derivative, lame crap. And I’ve only watched the first few tunes of Disc 2.

Tone Tone Tone

Speaking of revelatory experiences, I drove 3 hours to Fayetteville last night to see one of my personal gods, Eric Johnson. He Who Has the Tone. This is a guy who, for all his guitar prowess, can do something few guitar players can do – move the chicks. The crowd consisted mainly of guitar players (predominantly male) and their girlfriends, and I noticed that while the guys stood motionless with their arms crosed (as musicians so often inexplicably do), the gals were swaying back and forth and even dancing. Eric writes good pop tunes and keeps his shows a 50/50 split between instrumentals and vocal tunes, so there’s something for everyone. Hopefully my friend Kerri wasn’t too bored. She made me chicken and broccoli. Mmmm. And she loaned me her Pantera and Megadeth CDs so that I could stay amped while I drove the three hours back to LR.

Predictions for the Future

Or, you’d be surprised what 100 years can do.

  • Everyone in the modern world will one day have a personal communications device that functions as a combination phone-TV-Internet and GPS unit. Obviously, all bandwidth will be wireless to these units, eliminating the need for conventional network infrastructure, thus removing all high wire telephone lines from our sight. Phone numbers will be largely hidden from view (much the way http://66.253.8.233 is rarely seen compared to pointedstick.net because the words mask the numbers) as these devices will be likely be entirely voice activated and user-interactive. Telephones will be obsolete as two-way video communication becomes the norm.
  • Radio and media consolidation will be moot as every car will have web access so that you can listen to your friends’ radio programs streamed in high-definition audio from anywhere.
  • Record companies will diminish as music becomes less a commodity and more a service. As Pro Tools or some competing format becomes more user friendly, musicians will have the means by which to make high quality recordings more easily. Bands will gig more and make their money from shows and merch. Possibly they will offer subscription services on their websites, thus removing the need for record companies.
  • Cut-and-paste music will become a more popular genre as new ideas and sound sources become more scarce. Possibly "sound designers" will emerge as a genre.
  • Garage bands will be replaced by bedroom programmers and electronic music will likely overtake the musical forms based on the playing of conventional instruments.
  • Flying cars will likely never happen, as there’s just no safe, suitable substitute for gravity. We just don’t have any leads on how to manipulate it. However, it will be possible for transportation to become almost entirely free of conventional tire-road friction (this will of course depend on the willingness of petroleum industries to find other things to do than make gasoline). With this, it may be that we will see the closing of many many gas stations.
  • The space elevator may well be a reality (for those who doubt it, remember that we routinely strap people to 4 million pounds of explosives and blast them into space).

Strom Thurmond Finally Dead

Big News day today. Strom Thurmond is dead, the Supreme Court struck down the Texas Anti-Sodomy laws, and the EPA is being told by the Bush administration to edit out hefty chunks of global warming data in its latest report on the environment in favor of findngs released by the American Petroleum Institute (surely an unbiased source).

Maybe it’s just me, but I have to ask, why is the American Petroleum Institute even making environmental reports? Isn’t that a conflict of interest? Isn’t that a bit like Philip Morris doing cancer research?

At least it’s OK to have gay sex in Texas. Not that I’m going to get involved anytime soon. This, coupled with Canada’s recent approval of gay marriages, makes it a banner year for the Liberal Humanist Commie Homosexual Agenda. Too bad the environment will probably collapse in a few more centuries…

Meanwhile…

Here’s to Strom Thurmond – we’re gonna miss you, you crazy bastard.

Strom was always a ladies man

1902-2003

"I want to tell you, that there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches."

Just So You Know…Some Popular Misconceptions

“Infer” means to receive an impression; “imply” means to send an impression. I infer from what you imply.

Referring to text layout – “justified” does not mean “aligned.” To "align" is to set something left, right, or center. To “justify” means to spread out the text to prevent jaggedy columns and line breaks.

Like the text of this page is justified and this one is not (see the ragged right side of the text).

Tomatoes are not vegetables and dolphins are not fish.

Fruity       Not Fish

This makes a handy refutation for anyone who likes to say "walks like a duck, talks like a duck…" Well, looks like a fish, swims like a fish…could be a dolphin.

Use "its" the way you would use "his" and "hers." No apostrophes for possessive pronouns. Only nouns. The dog’s bark is loud. Its bark is loud. His bark is loud.

"Your" is possessive. "You’re" means "you are."
You’re a churlish boor if you’re not getting your grammar on, fool.

A Neat Internet Explorer Shortcut: Say you’re going to google.com. Type only "google" into the address bar, and then hit "Ctrl-Enter." This keystroke command adds "http://www." to the front and ".com" to the back and executes the request. Isn’t that marvelous?

And Now, Your Moment of Zen:

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
— Robert Frost

(side note about "temper." A temper is something that keeps you from getting angry, a limitation of sorts. A temper is not an angry disposition, it is the very opposite. If someone has a temper, that means they’re well in control of themselves. Having a bad temper means having difficulty restraining oneself. It’s like having a bad muffler; losing it means there’s going to be a lot of noise.)