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

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


Tue Jul, 21 2009

To My Personal Book-Creep

...who serves me wonderfully and on his own initiative:

RE: Mailbox Terror --

Mr. Brown,

> Absolute horror headed your way!

You mad fool. My god, how can you keep doing this?

Look: do you realize that you've been doing this for years and I haven't even so much as bought you a beer? (sigh -- do you know that my car is currently out of inspection and I'm probably going to get arrested any day now because I haven't solved this exhaust problem yet?) Do you know that there are still whole volumes on my shelves, from you, that I haven't read yet? (I eye the Zhou Enlai bio, often. Haven't gotten to it yet.)

This is fabulous. My god: another Stalin biography. I own more of them than anyone I know. I'm going to try to resist for a while (Gibbon goes slowly), but I won't for long, I think.

"The Great Merchants" -- you have added some terrific titles to my economics history section, and this one goes right in the sweet-spot. How the hell do you know how important this stuff is to me? You must be paying attention.

I think I owe you more than I can ever repay, Ernest. I don't know what I'm going to do.

Great, great esteem, mate. It's all I've got right now. Bless you.


B.

Jul 21, 09 | 2:05 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}