(second block, fourth letter of the prisoners' quadratic tap code...)

image
...am here to tap through the walls.


Tue Mar, 11 2003

Mollycoddling

Even before consideration of its horrendous flaws ("...what makes the state legitimate is..."), I, for one, was saddened that Tech Central Station felt constrained to apologize for publishing a bare nine thousand words in one piece.

Perhaps they should have considered an illustrated multi-volume Golden Books edition.

Mar 11, 03 | 4:29 pm

Don't Look Now...

...but Jimmy Wales has a blog up that he doesn't want anyone to know about.

He's an eminently sensible Objectivist who I recall fondly from eons ago at humanities.philosophy.objectivism, and I'm just here to say that I'll be paying attention.

(It was Diana who spilled the beans, so I'm off the hook.)

Mar 11, 03 | 3:04 pm

Was It Broke Before They Fixed It?

Little Miss Muffett on a squat by me
Took a turn around, I said: Can y'all see?
The little strings on the Giant Spider?"
The Zipper From The Black Lagoon?
The vents by the tanks where the bubbles go up?
(And the flaps on the side of the moon)

The jelly & paint on the 40 watt bulb
They use when the slime droozle off
The rumples & the wrinkles in the cardboard rock
And the canvas of the cave is too soft
(F.Z. -- "Cheepnis")

We are reliably informed that "The War Of The Worlds" restoration is to be avoided because THE WIRES have taken over.

(It's Lileks. Read your way down to it, already.)

Mar 11, 03 | 12:47 am
PREV page NEXT page

AxeBites

Various guitars I see floating by, mostly Gibson and mostly eBay.

Early Norlin ES-335 -- 1970, in Walnut ("ES-335TDW"). This is a period-piece look and feel, and arguably the sound as well but that's to cut things very finely. A "classic" 335 would be the original of 1958 in the Sunburst or Natural finish, or the Cherry Red of 1959; the Walnut of 1970 (second year of that finish offering) is not really a "classic" 335. In the history of the Gibson aesthetic, this is analogous to, say, vertically-striped polyester bell-bottoms or Bahama Blue shag carpeting. None of this is to say that they're not cool guitars, and this is a nice one. Excellent photographs.

Chrome hardware, featuring the trapeze tailpiece (like my L-47 and I've always liked it) and ABR-1 bridge with period-typical nylon saddles. Bound rosewood fretboard, with small block markers, and then the crown inlay at the machine head. These would be the T-top Humbuckers. Vintage Nazis would moan that the upper bouts are pointy (the body templates were wearing-out in the factory) and the fourteen-degree machine head with the volute signals a sometimes not-fun era of the line, but these things really do rock or moan or whatever you want a 335-type semi-hollow to do. ...which, of course, is because it really is a 335.


In the months since I've let AxeBites languish all to bleedin' hell, Gibson's Robot Guitar technology has sifted out to other models than the original Les Paul application. I don't know how it's going: I still haven't even seen one of these self-tuners. I don't see piles of them burning on the sides of the highway, nor reverent hangings in display cases over bars, so who knows? This 2008 Robot SG is ready to rock in the Metallic Red. Nickel hardware; it's the stoptail wired for data to send to the tuners, with dual Humbuckers. It's a bound rosewood fretboard, but I really like the single-bound machine head with the crown inlay. That's a real cool old-school look, right there, to set off that crazy-ass color. {nod}