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

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


Thu Aug, 14 2008

I've Got Your "External Costs"

"I am an American, by flamin' Christ. The[se] people don't know what they're fucking with. This is a great American tradition. My grandfather drank his way through Prohibition as a political act, because a bunch of presumptuous martinets told him that he couldn't.

I'll be goddamned if I'll let these punks push me around like this."
Me, crashing the party over at Ezra Klein's joint.

Here is something very important to bear in mind about all this, kids:

These imbeciles rattle-on about "external costs", as if this is an axiom come down from a burning bush. What it really points up is the stark ethical and political vacuum in economics now. What never enters any of their analyses is the arbitrary unilateral presumption of these "external costs" in their principles of socialized medicine.

This is the reality:

"Everybody is paying for everybody else's medical costs. That's why everybody gets to assess 'externals' on everybody else. We assumed this 'mandate' and that's why we get to regulate how you live."

Never. Not while there is one nicotine-tanged breath in my body.

Aug 14, 08 | 1:57 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}