the frig blig

One of my favorite comedians George Carlin died last night. I used to watch him on Rowan & Martin when I was a kid and he always cracked me up.

He gained notoriety in the early 1970s for his ‘Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV’ routine. George was not afraid of controversy, of having unpopular opinions or of speaking them. He enlarged his audience with those tactics and made them think.

Lots of people are bold; few were as funny and observant and had as much fun playing with words as Carlin. He got cranky and mean in his later years, but was still an interesting character.

Dang, what’s that up there on the roof, looks kinda like a frisbee?

Is here. Read it and leap.

Does anyone else find it ironic that the art chosen by the U.S. Postal Service to adorn their ‘Forever stamp’ (“The Forever stamp will always be valid as First–Class postage on standard envelopes weighing one ounce or less, regardless of any subsequent increases in the First–Class rate”) portrays the Liberty Bell — with a large crack prominently visible. The bell was used for approximately 100 years before the crack rendered it unusable in 1846.

100 years == forever…eh, close enough for the U.S.P.S.

Q: How is playing guitar like shooting pool?
A: They’re both all about leave.

Viz. when playing guitar, in order to sound like less of a klutz and move smoothly to the next note or chord, the player needs to be thinking ahead about which fingers will be used in that next note or chord…and that means making sure those fingers are available by using other fingers now.

And when shooting pool, in order to sink more than a single ball, the player needs to be thinking ahead about positioning the cue ball to leave makeable shots.

Q: how is playing tennis like playing go?
A: they both can be approached using a certain style of play; i.e. keep making good returns or moves and wait for your opponent to make a mistake — then capitalize on it. With each mistake your opponent makes, he or she is more likely to try to overcompensate…to your advantage.

Bo Diddley died last week but his beat will be with us for quite some time to come.

I was learned about Bo during my stint with The Shakes in Tallahassee in the early 1980’s. I’d heard his name before but wasn’t aware of his seminal influence — viz. the Bo beat. It was used in so many great rock and roll songs it just seemed timeless, and in fact maybe Bo just channeled it first. But you know it. The songs I was familiar with at the time were ‘Who Do You Love’ (Quicksilver Messenger Service) and ‘Hand Jive’. There are countless others.

I was fortunate enough to see Bo perform live around that time, in an outdoor concert on a beautiful spring day on Florida State University’s infamous Union Green. He had his trademark box guitar, and his daughter played the crap out of the drums.

Hey, Bo Diddley! Thanks for everything. Be jammin wherever you be.

A month ago I decided to learn the song Misterioso on guitar, which seemed excruciatingly difficult but I figured if I could learn that one I could learn almost anything (and I’ve always loved those notes). I dutifully practiced it almost daily, and after 3 weeks it started sounding like the actual tune, and I started playing with alternate rhythms and figured out my own riff at the end and which blues chords sounded natural to transition into.

For my upcoming birthday, the fish paid for a couple of lessons from a real guitar teacher. My first lesson was a week ago yesterday, during which time I discovered when playing with my teacher that my guitar was at least a half-step out of tune. Upon returning home I tuned it to my trusty old pitch-pipe. An in-tune guitar is good, and I felt satisfied.

Since that first lesson I have been learning the notes — not that they’re called A, B, C etc., but which strings produce which pitches when plucked, etc.

Today the horrible realization struck me that the notes I’d learned to play Misterioso with are actually a half-step off! I quickly confirmed this by listening to the first few notes of Monk’s recording. Apparently I taught myself to play this piece in the key of f#. Which is very cool until you want someone to accompany you.

Of course this has occurred on the most fiendishly difficult fingering I’ve learned, and moving it down a half-step on the fretboard totally changes the fingerings. Should I relearn the piece in it’s true key, or stick with the key of f-sharp?

Perhaps you’re familiar with the old interrogation strategy called ‘good cop/bad cop’. Basically it works like this: when a pair of police officers (they always work in pairs) find a victim criminal but no evidence, one of the cops plays the ‘bad’ role in order to scare or beat him into confessing. If after an extended period that doesn’t work, the ‘bad’ cop takes a break and the cop playing the ‘good’ role sidles up to the prisoner individual and says, “hey, you look like a decent fellow…tell you what, if you run now I’ll tell my partner you got away, by the time he returns you’ll be safe.” When the sucker relieved citizen thanks him and starts running, the ‘good’ cop counts three seconds, removes his pistol and shoots him in the back ‘trying to escape’.

I was reminded of this strategy when a young woman rang my doorbell this morning looking to “register democrats to vote.” It’s so sad that so many young impressionable folks think the Democrats are the good cops and will save them from the bad cops. When in fact both political parties in this country are paid by the same bosses.

When I was a kid, people used to say “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

Nowadays people are frantically trying to figure out how to deal with what we’ve been doing about it, on a grand scale, after all.

Everybody loves cars, but hates traffic.

There seems to be a bumper crop of new bumperstickers popping up this spring. This one was on a Prius on Jackson Street:

Runners-up for today’s award:
2nd place goes to ‘Your humvee looks stupid’
3rd place goes to ‘WTF’ using the Bush team’s re-election logo design.

Met a gentleman the other night who adamantly insisted that global warming is a hoax. What’s more, he claimed that he had two college degrees in physics and a PhD in mathematics, and was an active participant in the scientific community, having just published his n-teenth research paper last month.

Very curious. His primary argument was that it’s impossible to accurately predict the weather, citing the Lorenz effect as proof.

Before I could muster my defense he baited me into saying I wouldn’t believe his story about how spotted owls also were a hoax — then triumphantly exclaimed “why should I bother explaining it to you when you won’t believe me anyway.”

His preemptive strike successful, he sat back smugly in his happy little room of delusion.

I spent the next few hours thinking about what’s up with him. First, I noted that he was a refugee of the USSR, and had up-close familiarity with state propoganda from the left. This made him skeptical of official explanations, sensitive to propoganda, and wary of being fooled again.

Clearly, forecasting climate change is vastly different from forecasting the weather. But he had shut me down before I could even start a rebuttal, and I suspect should I have started he had more tactical verbal weapons at his disposal.

I also noticed that he believed in god, and clearly there is less evidence for the existence of god than for the existence of global climate change. I didn’t mention this either.

His foolish beliefs made me question the veracity of his claims of education. Of course I kept mum on this too,

And so the evening ended with the Russian emigre and myself both convinced we were correct, smiling and shaking hands taking our leave.