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

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Sat Apr, 05 2008

The Banality Of Evil

“'Principals make hundreds of decisions everyday based on our best judgment. And in that time, smelling that marker, I felt like, "Wow, that’s a very serious marker,"' Benisch said."
Behold the idiot, one Chris Benisch, who suspended an eight year-old kid at Harris Park Elementary School in Westminster, Colorado, who found the odor of a Sharpie marker interesting.


There can be no outer limit of contempt for an asshole like that. He cultivates his own delusions as he sees fit, and is in the business of pressing them on budding minds completely without reference to facts of reality. Reality doesn't matter to him. And now, that kid has gotten an object-lesson in arbitrary power: it can strike out of the blue for no reason at all and reason has nothing at all to do with any of it. This will be an element of his understanding of politics for the rest of his life unless something happens in his developing world-view to condition what this creep did to him as a psychotic aberration. One problem with that, of course, is that these aberrations are common, now. If he grows up paying attention to events around him, he will see that aberration is the norm in American ethics and politics, and he will have to be an exceptional individual to see through it and understand what it all means. For now, however, all he knows is that just being himself can land his ass in a sling: at his age, it's his job to integrate his senses and cognition (who here was never momentarily fascinated with the smell of a Magic Marker at his age?), and that is why he got stomped by this mindless punk commissar, Benisch.

Get a good look at that face, ladies and gentlemen. That's the banality of evil, right there: a little shit who beats up on kids, because he can. And he didn't leave a single mark, except for the worst kind: one that you cannot see but will never go away.

Chris Benisch: you are a disgusting individual, and you should count fortunate the historical context of your appearance in the news. In reasonable times, you would be summarily run out of town on a rail.

Apr 05, 08 | 10:29 am

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}