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

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...am here to tap through the walls.


Wed Aug, 12 2009

The Paper-Thinity Of Ezra Klein

"That is what socialised fucking medicine is all about. When the chips are down, if you can’t fend for yourself, you’re dead. If you think the free market is the same thing, you’re wrong. You’re worse off with socialized medicine because it fails you after you’ve spent your entire healthy life 'donating' to it. Socialism continuously drains the very resources individuals could use to provide for themselves. Education, health care, it’s the same. If you want to give your kids a decent education, you have to pay the fucking taxes to support the public schools, and then you still have to pay for that private education. Those well off in the U.K. have to pay the horrendous taxes for the 'free' health care, and then they have to go and pay for private care, too. The poor slobs who can’t afford to pay twice wind up crushed in the maw.

And Ezra Klein is an ignorant twit and should admit that Stephen Hawking, and those like him, are routinely denied substantive care by the socialists in the UK."
I don't know what has precipitated Mike Soja's splendid lashes upon the prancing nitwit Ezra Klein, but I'm just saying that a guy could make a regular blog career out of that shit. The "Klein Boggle" tag should already go down in net.history, and he just demolishes the fool's presumptions into the Stephen Hawking matter.

I don't expect it to inhibit the cannibal-dance that Klein conducts, but that's well-done work worth doing. Good show, Mike.

Aug 12, 09 | 7:06 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}