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.)

Useless Links

Utterly random link #2. This shouldn’t be done. The facial expressions in every picture on this site read very clearly: “KILL ME NOW.”

Utterly random link #3. Go to this page and do a Find on "Rogers, Arkansas." Those crafty liberal, leftist, commie, pot-smoking hippies! Those meddling kids! But this is the best part. Some poor schmuck ranting about Hollywood and how he’s going to only go see movies by Bruce Willis and the Rock rather than go see movies featuring actors with whom he disagrees. God forbid he should make choices based on artistic merit. This guy must really feel unempowered by the world. Sure celebrities are mostly idiots (or worse, they’re normal people), but I’ll trust an actor before I’ll trust a CEO. And here’s why. Something I learned from an actor: Even the villain is the hero of his own story.

I’ve often wondered why Hollywood is so liberal, given that so many in La-La Land are so wealthy (I’d expect them to be conservatives after they’ve made money). But I really believe that good actors (not celebrities, since they’re by definition out of touch with reality) have studied the heart of man more thoroughly than most people. A good actor understands the motivations and churnings of the human animal. It’s not make-believe when a great actor is performing, it’s a work of art. A work of art that says, "here is Man in all his grandeur and folly."

Having worked as an actor (I actually got paid to act – I’m still not sure I was worth it), I’ve learned a great deal from the process of putting yourself in the shoes of another and trying to understand the reasons why people are the way they are. So perhaps by definition good actors have to have bleeding hearts.

It’s Ron

The Incredible Moses Leroy returns. Leave it to the guy who made my favorite record of the last two years to come back with an ultra-spiff new website.

Incredible Moses LeroyIML is really just Ron Fountenberry. There seems to be a real band around him this time, but it’s his brainchild. I’ve discovered that the new record features some work by Roger Manning, Jellyfish‘s keyboardist, and Miho Hatori of Cibo Matto. This is particularly amusing to me because now I can put 3 degrees of separation between Jellyfish and De La Soul (Miho was on Handsome Boy Modeling School with Prince Paul, who produced De La Soul). IML’s last record, Electric Pocket Radio, is utterly fab – every song is its own genre. Click that link and you can get it for as low as $7 from the good people at Djangos.com.

Meanwhile, Utterly Random Link #1 in a continuing series.

Female Trainspotter Wanted

Why is it that, by and large, men are more fanatically geeky about things? Comic books, music, computers, Star Trek, mathematics…each demographic has a population whose female participants are far outnumbered by the males. Do we obsess more? I have no shortage of male guitar geek friends, but I have no female guitar geek friends. That are heterosexual anyway (congratulations, Trina – you’ll always be exceptional). I do have two or three women with whom I exchange album recommendations regularly, but I can’t really have in-depth conversations about irrelevant minutiae with them. And really, I guess irrelevant minutiae is what I’m talking about. Trainspotting.

For those who don’t know, trainspotting is a hobby of many Brits who wander around UK train stations and keep track of train serial numbers in an effort to catalog the trains. I would imagine there’s a certain romance to this, although it’s not something I think I would find appealing. However I certainly relate to the collection of useless data. So the term "trainspotting" gets applied to any brand of hobby where the participants are obssessed with something.

Oh the tiny joys of irrelevant minutiae. Band member names, album credits, Ibanez catalogs….my brain is host to inumerable bits of information that I’ll likely never use. Sadly, there’s not even a trivia game worth watching or playing to which I can apply my vast stores of obscure knowledge. I think I get it from my father, who can tell you just about every tune that ever made the record charts pre-1965.

Failed Attempts at Humor #1

This just didn’t turn out as funny as I thought it would. Plus it’s a web geek joke, so not content with simply being lame, it’s also esoteric. Nevertheless, I feel it has a right to exist. I mean, we let these people run around freely, don’t we?

PBR