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

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Fri Jun, 04 2004

A Vegetable Curiosity

When you're doing savage battle, almost without regard for life or limb, with a gasoline-powered weed-whacker against various three foot-tall grasses, innumerable tiny bits of your victims will fly all over you. "All over you" will include the panes of your sunglasses.

When the battle is over, the tiny bits sticking to your sunglasses will be amazingly difficult to remove.

I thought about sandblasting.

I'm just sayin'.

Jun 04, 04 | 3:59 pm

The Fakest Generation

When Tom Brokaw's book first dropped, I was aghast. The very idea of that creep doing a book on that subject was just appalling to me. The first adult book I ever read was Col. Robert L. Scott's "God Is My Co-Pilot". That was in the fourth grade -- 1965. Long before I ever even heard of Brokaw, names like Don Gentile, Don Blakeslee, Hub Zemke, Raymond Spruance, and George Gay -- just a few stars of an enormous constellation -- could roll off my tongue in trail of recital of their exploits of devotion. By The Time of Brokaw, I wondered where the hell he'd been for decades, and I was disgusted with the tones of revelation with which his insipid book popped on the country. It was news.

It's nothing terribly special as a bit of journalism, but this article rather more than hints at the real significance of Brokaw's book.

Jun 04, 04 | 11:26 am
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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}