Another Guitar Project

"For your project" is such an annoying description to use. I don't quite know why but it just sounds pretentious. To be clear this project isn't a project, it's a rescue. The battered and broken hulk in the pic is either my latest mistake or just another wonky bit of divine inspiration. Bought for buttons in an eBay Friday evening's mind warped moment and it came with a free fully repairable Gator case that's probably worth more than the guitar. 

All of the above are signs of baseless optimism and time wasting, some might unkindly think or say. I still have a (limited and deluded) vision of how nice it will turn out*. Note the early application of super glue and cotton wool in order to fill and resize badly placed holes - once the mixture is dry you can actually drill right into them, it's as tough as Russian steel I tell you. The ultra reliable Dremel must not, will not fail.

*You may never see or hear of this again. 😑

Can't Stand The Guardian

 

But it's better than the gaslit BBC news output (wonder what's on CNN, ITV and Sky?): When I say that I can't stand the Guardian what I really mean is that I can't stand the Guardian because while I mostly agree with the editorial stances it takes on news and issues etc. I'm also exhausted. What I see and read is somehow drowned out by the memory of similar articles I've read in the past and forever nodded along with ... but now I seem unable to take anymore stuff in. Nobody pays attention to reasoned bits of opinion or advice and that's nobody's fault but everyone's.

I've decided that my head is full up and nothing anyone says or does or writes in the Guardian, however accurate or eloquent, ever fixes anything. Apart from the usually terrible news, the recipes, reviews, opinions and reader's lettuce* only form up as salads of buzzy words that I can no longer chew upon. It all washes over me like a warmish and bland, feeble kind of mayo. I do like about 50% of the cartoons though and the odd celeb fave tunes list. These odd lists are of no real use to anyone but they can mask the bleakness of the headlines and reported life outside. Life can be a terrible thing and of course all power is tyranny. In my lighter moments I mostly stare into space and suck frozen Kit-Kats.

*a green vegetable.

Velvet Revolvers

Revisionist theories: As a teenager my musical taste was formed around the Beatles and Stones records that I'd grown up with - much like most 60s teens. Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go. Noisy guitar bands were my thing. At about age fifteen I discovered the album and so did everyone else, there was a shift in our listening world. Singles were so old hat, we needed more headroom. Cream, Led Zep, CSNY, Hendrix, Yes and Pink Floyd ruled my somewhat narrow taste in the airwaves. Then one day a friend passed me a copy of the Velvet Underground & Nico. It didn't quite fit with me, no love, no peace, strange spikey tunes and dark lyrics but I didn't give up on them. Slowly I decided I liked it and listened to more of their stuff. 

By 1975 however I was over all that, the Bowie, Roxy and Lou Reed catalogue was too arty and just wasn't relaxing enough and I was no early adopter of punk either. I listened to Little Feat, Zappa, Poco, Steely Dan and eventually drifted into full dad rock proper because I was actually a dad and late night radio, long joint-fueled listening parties, gigs and festivals were things of the past. What fun. By '78ish the Fisher-Price years had arrived. I had a cottage to renovate, a dodgy car to keep on the road and hungry mouths to feed, all on my shipyard wages.

So now 50+ years later I'm hearing and playing (Capital Models to thank for this) more Lou Reed and Velvet's tunes and I'm kinda liking them. Sweet Jane has resurfaced (see a previous post) and that riff is probably one of the best four chord guitar bashers ever. Rock and Roll is a proper gem of a song despite the weird lyrics, Perfect Day is just about the perfect ballad to reflect on down at heel reality and personal despair and Satellite of Love is just a strange, abstract, meaningless but wonderful bit of rock fluff. Nice to catch up with the past.

A Bridge Too Far

Rainy day today: The one piece bridge and tail-piece design on Les Paul and SG Jnr guitars is troublesome. It's clunky, hard to intonate and set, difficult to replace the strings because of the top wrap/winding, almost impossible to adjust the action and just another thing to have to bother with, which nobody needs. This guitar came with a Wilkinson one-piece that actually is made up of about a dozen bits including screws and hex bolts. Very fiddley too.

I replaced it with another model with adjustable string settings but found it to be awkward and more clunky than the original Wilkinson. So it ended up being taken off. There are other solutions out there but the best come in at around £50, imported from the States and perhaps not quite worth the punt. I then decided to try to fit a separate bridge and tail-piece. 

Looking on line there are loads of options (Les Paul and SG standard configurations) but the dimensions available don't fit with the Jnr. style bridge drill holes and I didn't want mess up that part of the guitar. So I found a basic "SG" style tail-piece on eBay for £4.50 and stuck with the old bridge and cut out the need to top wrap - as in the pics. The old set up had a huge strain on it when the strings were tight and I could see it lean into the neck direction when tuned up. 

This new, cheap and cheerful arrangement removes the strain and makes the bridge a bit easier to adjust (not much but I'm going to fine tune as I go). Of course nothing looks straight or lines up because of the odd  angles the intonation requires. So overall it's better, not perfect but better. Perhaps I've spoiled the cleaner looks but I think my solution isn't too bad. There are some howler examples on line, one guy resolved the problem by adapting a bottle opener as a tail-piece. I'm forever saying that the struggle is real but ...

In other news, unfortunately this is probably a snapshot of the real struggle:

Machine Heads

Necks please: The bonfire of the guitar related projects slowly grumbles on. That's how older men approach their hand crafted challenges and visionary successes, with a shrug and a grumble (and a deeper understanding of the limits of their imagination, skills and patience). Any old dream will do and yes but no it will never be "quite right". Life's activities are filled with many moving parts, most of which are determined not to move in the ways that you'd want them to. But I've learned to operate in peace and harmony within a mostly chaotic universe. Also you should never begin a sentence with the word "but".

P.S. After less than a week of ownership and solid blocks of use, the Amazon (Basics) mouse is still performing far better than any random small rodent scooped out of the bottom of a garden hedge would if thrust into a similar role.

And There You Have It

spellingmistakescostlives (they're on some of those social media sites you know - and they shared this recently): 

"The Zionist myth that Israeli settlers "made the desert bloom" is as inaccurate and racist as the myth that Israel was a "land without a people for a people without a land".⁠
⁠
As we can see in Gaza and the West Bank, the process of stripping the land of its people, and reducing cultivated land to slashed and burned wasteland, requires extensive, brutal violence. Olive groves that have been propagated for centuries are torn down by Israeli settlers, water sources are filled with concrete, and farmers are driven from their homes.⁠
⁠
In the 1948 Nakba, at least half of the Arab population of Palestine, (700,000 people,) were driven from their homes, and forbidden from returning. Villages were razed, and archaeological sites destroyed. There has been a deliberate attempt by the Israeli state to make its claim of a "land without a people" a retrospective reality. As they will attempt to do with Gaza, after this Second Nakba.⁠
⁠
According to Decolonizing Palestine: "The vast majority of cultivated agricultural land in Israel today was already being cultivated by Palestinians before their ethnic cleansing... On the eve of the 1948 war, around 739,750 acres of land were being cultivated by Palestinians. These cultivated lands were so vast, that they were “greater than the physical area which was under cultivation in Israel almost thirty years later.” The agricultural core of the Israeli state consists of cultivated farmland that was stolen from Palestinian refugees after their ethnic cleansing."⁠
⁠
Colonial ideology has always needed to believe that conquered peoples were idle, ignorant and backwards, unable to manage their own resources, and always requiring Western intervention to improve and utilize the land beneath their feet. The more we learn about the civilisations that European colonialism has destroyed, the more we see that we were simply importing our own ignorance into these nations, alongside our violence and disease. The people who lived there before we arrived knew all too well how to live in their own land.⁠"

Halloween

31st October: The wreckage of a Tim Horton's breakfast. Fast food wrappings. It seemed to cost £1.69 though there was a little more to the pricing structure - a free breakfast with a hot drink. But wait, this not a food review and I've no complaints about TH, it is what it is. Ignore the various food themed pictures that appear on other pages too. Those ready meals and stir fry chicken compositions are of no significance. They simply exist to mask dark secrets. There you have it. However I am not at liberty to reveal anything due to a long standing and reasonably lucrative contract I once made with the Devil (himself). None of that makes me all that bothered about Halloween either, that's just for the dull muggles and the deluded. You're being played. Enjoy your evening. We're not really watching you so calm down.

Still Life

Still life with strawberries and coffee whilst listening to the Cowboy Junkies version of Sweet Jane. I once had a girlfriend called Jane and was constantly ribbed by my pals about her. They used the song to annoy me, "Sweet Jane, yeah yeah!" In pubs, on the top deck of buses, walking down the street, they'd burst into tuneless singing and point. That's how it was. When she finally chucked me (quite correctly but in awkward circumstances), the Sweet Jane torment continued. I was in therapy for years - no it didn't and no I wasn't. Life still goes on.

Orange Orange

They sent me some pictures to hang but I don't own any walls. The first world but in a minus universe. Which philosopher do you still have a crush on these days? Inflamable or infallible? I'm allergic to the cream that might cure my skin and that stresses me out which only inflames the skin problem. There used to be an internet character called "Annoying Orange" - those were the days but maybe not the days. Their love was mostly unspoken, all because of creeping hearing loss. It was the wrong macaroni and cheese but it tasted just right. If they ever rise up and burn down the White House it won't be white anymore, just the charred remains, the Charred House. Why is today International Animation Day? I'm just not feeling particularly animated right now.

Optics of Whisky

Wonderous stories: I do wonder why a basic computer mouse's cable, supplied by our good friends at Amazon, needs to be about four feet long. Who has arms this length and why would you ever need to be that distance away from your computer/laptop and wouldn't you just use a wireless mouse if you did need to be some distance from said device? Life is full of sweet mysteries like this. The cable is not only too long but also annoyingly kinky, not in a good way.

Another one that I'm encountering is where exactly is the spell checker that used to be on the blogger app? I know the actual full checker disappeared some time ago but up until recently mispelled words were underlined in red. This was very helpful for uneducated monkeys like me and now I have full blown spell checker paranoia. This cannot go one. I may well have to resort to asking some AI squiggle where the old google spelly thing is, or has it been axed in some low level economy drive that nobody asked for? We'll find out downstream.

At the moment I'm enjoying fine whisky now and again, served in fancy glasses, here's one I may swallow later in the day.

Dietary Reasons

Famous Fish and Chips: If you're feeling a little fragile inside it may be down to allergic reactions or some dietary reasons. I don't know what the differences are and I've done no research. Luckily I'm not affected by this. I can eat what I like, pretty much. So I do - a very crispy and crunchy offering like this. When your just exploring the over 70 landscape but also wandering aimlessly down Sniper Alley everyday, why would you do anything else?

Psychic spies from China or exotic yogurt drinks from Korea?

You need to choose.

Life in a modern cafe: In the toilets there's a mural based around the antics of Mario, the world's most notorious Italian plumber, however I can't quite remember the name of the cafe. Black Dog, Black Sheep Dog, Black Coffee, Black Mamba ...

Wasp Famine

George the cat searches for the last available wasp.

-------------------------

 It's just a number.

Another number.

There are lots of numbers.

I've seen the main ones.

But as for the rest ...

I had written a big, long spiel about turning 70 with lots of negatives and positives on being this age. It was a clunky, obvious, over egged list. A load of rubbish. Then, quite by accident, I deleted it and couldn't recover it. I think that was the most 70+ thing I've done so far. You have to practice at being old, it's not so easy.

😂

70

 

Time flies by: It's a little less worse than it appears as at least nobody has actually burned it down yet: Seventy years ago or thereabouts I was born somewhere inside this now derelict country house. Then, in 1955, it was Craigtoun Maternity Hospital, close to St Andrews and well and truly planted in the Kingdom of Fife. The story goes that before that it was a mansion house owned by a prosperous family - which makes it a fine base camp for ghosts or a vanity project for somebody with too much money. 

The house is a bit of a first class ruin now and unlikely to recover from the years of abandonment and neglect which strangely enough correspond to a brutal slab of my lifetime. I might feel a bit dilapidated at times but never abandoned. That's what happens in life though, things fall apart, slowly, so I'll just leave that notion here. Thanks for the photos, whatever enterprising seeker of ruins took them. Sorry I can't credit you any other way.

You can see the house if you peer through the trees at Craigtoun Country Park or just veer off the entrance roadway a little. Perhaps I'll pop up for a post birthday look, set my soul free etc.

Coke and Onion Teaser

"This old Japanese trick with some Coca-Cola and an onion blew my mind." 

It's the kind of ridiculous, wild and senseless claim we see everyday. This is how things have evolved and become weaponized, living in a world where weird sentences and images like this regularly pop up on our screens, phones or whatever - but I'm finally starting to resist any urge to accept these messages as normal, useful or anything other than an intrusive invasion of my inner space. Staying numb simply isn't an option, it's a creeping, choking death for your waking hours and any remaining good sense. 

They're there first thing in the morning and last thing at night, clawing for attention and engagement. They make the checking of news, personal messages or emails akin to crossing a digital minefield which also an all consuming slough of quicksand. We're being attacked and controlled from all sides by this plague of time bandits. They want everyone to feed the addiction.  Apart from that everything else is just about fine.

Right Ear, Right Now

This a detail from the recent TIME magazine cover photo of some president or other, can't quite recall the name. As you might expect people are of course banging on about his neck, hair, unhealthy complexion and so on. What I find interesting is that this ear here was fairly recently wounded and punctured by a high velocity rifle shot - or so we've been told. Whatever damage was done by the bullet isn't obvious, the ear appears to have recovered without a mark or scar. Unless it was all just a silly mix up with a rogue sachet of misplaced ketchup. I'm sure there's an AI bot somewhere out there with the answer.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

Now there's a sentence that doesn't actually make much sense - things going "bump" in the night. Cats do more than bump into things, they can be crazy and noisy with their mysterious cat business. So what's nocturnal all about? Nocturnal animals are creatures that are active during the night and rest or sleep during the day. Simple. Not sure it's that straightforward with cats though.

Will The Wolf Survive?

Will it? I hope so, but will we?

Canis Lupus, for one more time: The wolf will survive because it is a highly adaptable and resilient animal. They can live in a wide range of environments, from icy tundras to dense forest and their pack culture allows them to hunt efficiently and protect their members. Wolves are skilled predators with strong instincts and cooperation skills, which help them find food even in harsh conditions. Their ability to adjust their diet and behavior as habitats change ensures that wolves can continue to thrive, no matter how challenging their surroundings become. Just avoid domestication, you can see what has happened to the other side of the family.

When Karma Swings Your Way

My world view isn't quite complete yet: Here's a Chinese map of the earth that is thought to be from around 1418. Quite a lot going on here that needs unpacking but maybe it's all a fake, even though by now alternative history is really last year's thing. They got the roundness bit of a geoid earth right though. We also know that Columbus didn't really discover anything, religions are all fictional tosh and the Egyptians may have had laser cutting equipment for their masonry work(?)? History is of course "just one thing after another" viewed through an often unreliable or imaginary lens.

Many migrations had taken place in all directions well before 1492, mostly on foot or via flying saucer. The Chinese had rockets at this point in their history too and they've still got all the "rare minerals", the drive and the manufacturing capacity to do whatever they like. We here in the UK's stagnant puddle of mud can't even assemble a decent riot anymore. Funny how the West has always portrayed itself as more advanced and civilized when actually it's not quite how things are or ever have been. Mind you we don't eat snakes yet but we do eat jellied eels.  Anyway nobody really cares. It's not as if we're in control our own destiny.

Deeply Sweet and Thick

Deeply sweet and thick, brings creamy goodness to your coffee and bakes, or so it claims. Purchased in error a few days ago when I seem to have become temporarily confused between the meaning of the words condensed and evaporated whilst browsing in the "whatever and non-specific" bit of the un-refrigerated dairy and cake bake section in Tsc. However a few spoons of this goo added to Lidl coffee now and then seems to be helpful in aiding the operation of the elderly gent's rumbustious constitution. 

If only there was some way that this disastrous appetite for self destruction could be toned down a notch or two somehow. An unbiased risk assessment is needed. I did some on line research and it turns out there is a fatal dose. Twenty four 8oz cans, presumably dropped onto your momentarily distracted skull from a reasonable height.

Lexington Lab Band

Headphones are a must for this (and for most music listening) but be warned it's not a particularly good song: There are a few very talented bands out there who can deconstruct and then play live the complicated and multi tracked tunes done by all those old school rock bands. Lexington Lab are one of the best developers of this school of revised  interpretations that I've heard so far. Look for Band Geeks too, they are up there.

I always thought that this Led Zep tune wasn't up to much, pretty weak and cumbersome, just not quite right. Hearing and seeing this new rendition changed my mind, well almost. Despite what's been added there's no denying that the construction of the melody and the lyrics are still poor, but in this version the complicated guitar parts, drum fills and breaks seem much cleaner and better executed - when played live by these musicians. 

The female vocal* also lifts and improves the whole thing as it's miles ahead of  the original but it's the guitar interplay and sound separation that, in this context, that I really can appreciate. Full credit to the song's authors but they missed the mark, or something, when they recorded it first time around.

*I've noticed that female vocalists often do a brilliant job of covering the vocals of Jon Anderson, Robert Plant, Geddy Lee and many others ...