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

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Mon May, 08 2006

Grooved To Be That Way

I just spent the past hour noodling around with a guitar and listening to a pretty good lecture concerning the hierarchical nature of knowledge and the implications for current education. Here. Scroll down "The Concept of 'Hierarchy' in Education" for the Real Audio files: three of them comprising about an hour by Mrs. Lisa VanDamme, of The VanDamme Academy, Laguna Hills, California.

Pay particular attention to Part 3 at about 6:55 --

"The worst schools violate hierarchy, not by failing to teach history before delving into questions of political philosophy, but by dropping the teaching of history altogether. Many schools have done away with history and replaced it with something called social studies, in which students learn a random assortment of facts, from crucial events to the most insignificant minutiae, about wars, imports & exports, physical geography, art, government, eating habits, and so on. Major events in history, to the extent that they are mentioned, appear to be causeless and inexplicable..."
In fact, a lot of this goes a long way to answering my question below. In a time when people are not learning to think, episodes like The Great Island Paradise of Gas Experiment are the routine order of the day. There are no principles to refer to, and what good would they be, anyway?

Just make sure everybody gets the right to vote. That's really important. It doesn't matter that they're stone imbeciles.

May 08, 06 | 4:58 pm

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}