Author Archives: anachostic - Page 25

The (Sea) Eagle Has Landed

Posted by anachostic on June 9, 2018 No comments

It was many years ago, in 2012, that I started the hobby of kayaking. I was fresh into a new relationship and had experienced kayaking for the first time. It was pretty clear that tandem kayaking was probably not going to work out for us. That meant I needed my own kayak in which to isolate my terrible paddling technique.

As luck would have it, Woot was selling inflatable kayaks at a pretty good price, so I bought some. Two is some, right? I did the research and these kayaks, by Sea Eagle, were pretty well respected. Obviously they had their detractors – those who would never use anything but a solid kayak. But, there are a lot of conveniences to be had with these inflatables. The most important is that I could transport it in my MX-5. Not only that, but I could transport both of them.

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Years have gone by, and I’ve been wanting an upgraded version of the Sea Eagle. I find it very odd they have such a good entry level model at a reasonable price, $200, but if you want the real deal, the model that really earns its keep, the price is over $1000. There’s nothing you can do in-between? Damn.

So I watched and waited. Actually, I let CamelCamelCamel do the watching. When I created the watch, the Sea Eagle model I wanted was a little over $1000. I set my target price at $850. And I got nothing, for almost a year. I had nearly completely forgotten about the watch when I got an email notification that the kayak was now being sold for $822, and that was the cheapest it had ever been.

Part of me wanted to sit back and think about it. The other part of me went to Amazon and saw there were only two left in stock. There’s a lot of expenses that have suddenly crept up on me lately, so I couldn’t justify buying two of these, so I just bought one. The next day, I went back and the price on the remaining one had gone up slightly to $835, so I guess I did the right thing. A few days later, that one remaining kayak was up to $913, so, yes, I think I did do the right thing. However, that’s not the cheapest I’ve ever seen them. Woot, of all places, once sold the Fast Track model in the $600 range. Now that’s a great deal.

The package arrived a couple of days earlier than the the initial tracking estimated. The box was compact and heavy, just as I remember my other kayaks arriving.

I inflated it to get an idea of how it compared to my original Sea Eagles. There is no comparison.

Where the SE330 hugs your sides, the 385FT gives you plenty of width. The floor in the FastTrack is firm and has little give. The material on the FastTrack is substantial and much less pliant. I’m left it inflated overnight to let it sort of stretch out. And of course identify and potential leaks. It was fine for days (because I’m lazy).

I have yet to take the craft out, but I am eager to try it out this year.

Getting By Giving Back

Posted by anachostic on June 7, 2018 No comments

A while ago, I was reading a forum thread about why record stores keep closing. The majority of commenters posited that it was either Amazon killing them off or that physical media was dead and gone. But among the “hear hear” for the majority, there were a few anecdotal stories of local stores that were doing well and those voices were defiant. They made the point that a well-run record shop is a prize to the community, nearly on par with a library, as they both serve the artistic needs of a town.

I am lucky to have a very robust music store in my general area, with two locations that constantly have new stock to browse through. My downtown used to have a used CD store, which closed, then another opened, with a half-hearted selection, then closed. Recently, another music store has opened, which I have visited occasionally and each time, I do find something to buy when there. That’s a pretty good sign. Their CD selection was relatively slim, but always had interesting items.

So after reading a lot of these posts about how your local store is to be treasured and valued, because honestly, they do have it rough, I decided to stop by my local shop after work to browse around and maybe throw some money. When I got there, I saw they had greatly expanded their CD section, which was good for me. I ended up picking out a few albums. As I was browsing the CDs, I was reminded of one of the sub-topics discussed in the forum. If a store’s inventory becomes stagnant, the store is not going to make it. They must have fresh new inventory to attract return customers, and there needs to be enough diversity of existing inventory to capture new customers. It’s a difficult balance to keep.

While considering that, it dawned on me that I could help this store in more ways than just buying from them, I could sell to them and increase the quality of their inventory (I’m actually a modest person). On one of my other blogs, I do comparisons of different CD masterings, which necessitates duplication. I have a few duplicates in my library from that side project. As I paid for my new CDs, I asked the owner where she sourced her CDs from. She replied that it was just people selling their collections. So I told her I would bring in my dupes for her to evaluate.

Today, I took them in. Probably about 80 CDs in a large canvas grocery bag. She pulled out the first handful and flipped through them. I said, take what you want, skip what you don’t, I won’t be offended. After the first handful, she said, this is a very good start. So I left her to see the rest and browsed the CD racks.

Shortly, she calls to me, “I’ll take all of it for $80.” I said, there’s nothing in there you don’t want? I’m thinking, you really want 3 copies of Van Halen, two copies of Heartbeat City and that other unknown stuff? She said there was some stuff she didn’t recognize, but that was fine. The price was more or less a dollar a disc, which is actually much more than I expected. I would expect a buck for the well-known stuff and maybe 50 cents for the unknown or hard-to-sell stuff. So we had a deal. I walked out with $80 (Well, I bought a $3 CD anyway) and an empty bag. I said I hope they move quickly for you and she said it wouldn’t be a problem, there was a lot of great music there. Intentional or not, it made me feel good about my collection.

And I do hope they sell. The prices at that shop are usually $3-5 for a used CD – a fair price, so she has the opportunity to make a few hundred in profit if she can sell them. And I couldn’t have made a dollar a disc on EBay with all the effort of photographing, posting, mailing and the materials and postage. It should be a win-win for everyone, and I supported a local business in the process.

It was a good day.

The Long Lost Tail Of Rump

Posted by anachostic on May 31, 2018 No comments

It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve become petless. Last night I had a browse on the website of my local SPCA, which was sad – reading the stories of how these cats came to the shelter. Then I followed that up with a browse of my county animal control website, which was sadder in that the pets didn’t really have backstories, just how old the cat was and how long they’d been at the facility. I concluded with browsing the “lost pets”, which left me rather broken, because these cats had no story at all and only a single portrait taken in their arrival carrier, looking despondent and/or scared to death.

Part of the reason the “lost pets” section affected me so much was that I have a personal experience with it, which reminded me that I have yet to write my tribute to my lost companion. So without further delay, here is her story.

On Halloween of 2005, I went outside on my way to the neighbor’s house for a small holiday get-together. Just outside, in the driveway, was a cat. My neighborhood has many stray cats running around, so it wasn’t anything too unusual. I squatted down and called to the visitor and to my surprise, she came running right over and pressed against me. None of the other cats have ever been interested in attention before, so I found this strange. She let me pick her up, so I did and carried her across the street to show my (now ex-)wife. A dog that was at the party scared the cat out of my arms and I just shrugged the whole incident off.

The next day, my ex tells me the cat is now hanging around at the house. I wasn’t interested in another cat, we got one for free when we bought the house. But unfortunately, the ex had fed the new cat already, so I suppose she’s ours now.

We made plans to get her all caught up on her shots before we brought her into the house with the other cat. I made the vet appointment for later in the week. However, the next day, the new cat stopped coming around. The food went untouched for a couple of days and my ex started getting worried. I was less worried, thinking the cat had just gone back to her original family, or someone else adopted her and took her inside without the same level of preparations we were making.

The ex couldn’t be talked out of this, so she started going out and looking for the cat and talking to people she met, asking if they’d seen a cat around that had no tail. A couple more days of this and someone tipped her off that a house at the end of the street traps the neighborhood strays and turns them in to animal control. The ex calls animal control and asks about the tailless cat. Unsurprisingly, they are of no help on the phone and say we have to come to them to find out if the cat is there. So that becomes the priority for the next day.

We arrive at the animal control shelter and they take us to the incoming cages. In these long cages are numbers of cats. We see the first cage, not there. The next cage, not there, just some kittens climbing the chain link. The next cage, not there. We get to the last cage (the one I assume is the last stop before the back room) and call her hastily-chosen name, “Rump”, and one cat, in the back of the cage, gets up and quickly trots to the front, shying away from her hissing companions.

To say we were happy is quite an understatement. To look back and consider the situation, it was really miraculous – that we got there just in time to prevent Rump from being euthanized, that Rump recognized us immediately after only spending a couple of days with us, and that Rump knew we were there to get her.

We were then shown into an office where an officer discussed the case with us. The officer asked if Rump was our cat. We said, no, she’s a stray, but we have a vet appointment for her. The officer told us that we can’t adopt her because she’s feral. This perplexed us. How did they make that determination? Apparently, Rump was not very pleasant with the impounding officer. Her intake photo (the one that ends up on “lost pets”) showed her screaming at the camera through a cage. The ex indignantly told the officer that’s how any cat would feel if she was being manhandled by a stranger. I tried to be a bit more diplomatic and asked if there was any other way we could adopt her. There was no adoption route for Rump, but we could claim her as our pet and we would have to pay fines and fees for the impoundment. We would have to provide proof of vaccinations and neutering. Additionally, I would have to attend a “responsible pet owner” education class. I agreed to all of it.

I signed a lot of paperwork and paid a fair amount of money to release Rump from prison, then it was off to the vet. As it turns out, the vet appointment I had made earlier was that actual day.

I found out Rump was already spayed and she got her shots, which kind of doped her up for the rest of the day. But she was now allowed inside and was given a soft bed to sleep in, closed in on the lanai. This was her space for a while until the vaccinations settled in and also until she got used to seeing our other cat.

The existing cat, Bubbles, was never very fond of Rump, and the feeling was mutual. Rump would stalk Bubbles throughout the house and worst of all, when she was in the litter box. This went on for a very long time, despite the few times where they would actually tolerate each other enough to be on the bed at the same time.

Rump’s experience with being a stray, combined with sharing the house with another cat caused her to do a lot of stress eating. If there was food, she was going to eat it. Bubbles used to be fine with leaving dry food down all day, but with Rump in the house too, Rump would eat it all. I assume Rump was constantly in fear that there wouldn’t be another meal or that Bubbles would eat it all, leaving nothing for her. It was impossible to convince her otherwise. As you would expect, Rump became very plump.

Time went on, and my ex moved out and moved on with her life, and Bubbles eventually became old and had to be put to sleep, leaving Rump as the sole queen of the house. Without Bubbles, her diet became normal again and she went down to a less obese weight, but remained flappy.

Rump was always a dog-like cat, as most Manx cats are reported to be. One of her most distinct behaviors was leaning her haunch against your leg, like a dog. She was a rough-and-tumble cat, playing rough was enjoyable for her. She could get mad at you, but would make up with you the very next second.

Rump loved everyone she ever met. She was very kind, friendly, and outgoing. She enjoyed being the center of attention; the more people that were around, the more she would show off – racing in and out of the room or leaping between countertops to get attention.

Rump was a loving companion for 13 years and had a personality that showed two cat-skeptics that cats can be affectionate and trusting instead of aloof and brooding. All in all, a good life for everyone involved.

I dig a well / I dig it deep / And for my only love / I plant a cedar tree / The best / The best we ever had
Cedar Tree – Indigo Girls

All Things Must Pass

Posted by anachostic on May 10, 2018 No comments

It was a little over a year ago that I knew my phone was obsolete. I was one of the few, brave Windows Phone users remaining and Microsoft had announced that there was a Samsung Android phone being sold as a “Microsoft Edition”. That simply meant the phone was preloaded with all the MS Android apps and you could get assistance on using it at a Microsoft store. Whee.

And this change was a surprise, but not really so, since there was a Microsoft division that was doing nothing but writing nice software for Android and iOS and not writing anything for Windows Phone. The up-and-coming mobile powerhouse apps hadn’t been developing for Windows Phone for a very long time. But none of that was a concern for me, since all I needed was a way to call, text, read email, and browse the web when I was bored. And play Solitaire. A Windows Phone did all that just fine. Until it didn’t. And that became infuriating, because I don’t ask much from my phone.

Early in my WP days, I used to visit Yahoo’s news site, but then Yahoo changed something and the pages started locking up, where I couldn’t scroll anymore. So, I switched to MSN and happily used their news site for many years. Recently, though, an odd bug started happening. After a minute or so on a page, the page would reload, sending me back to the top of the article. And it would happen again a minute or so later. And again. Then the browser would literally give up. It would display this message:

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Now, there’s a message to piss off your users. “We’re having trouble so we’re not going to try anymore.” And when you clicked Back, you didn’t return to the previous page, your history was wiped out and you went back to the Start page. Keep in mind, this is a Microsoft device, using a Microsoft web browser on a Microsoft website. And it doesn’t work. I’ve determined the root cause of the bug is the advertisements injected into the page by script, but without any ad-blocker or other customizations, a fix is out of my control.

Another recent shutdown Microsoft did was of Zune>XBox Music>Groove Music. I don’t use streaming services, so I didn’t think it was a big deal. But I also didn’t think it was going to affect Cortana’s music search feature (which is like Shazam). I searched for a song recently and I got:

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Good job finding that song.

So that’s it. I made up my mind I’m going to do what Microsoft wants me to do, switch to Android. Now, where before I had a few available models of Windows Phone, I now have a choice of probably thousands of phones. Which one should I get? As a creature of habit, I chose a new model from an old company. The Nokia 6.1.

Soon, I’m going to be able to be up-to-date on all the apps. I can start collecting rewards from stores and restaurants. I can start tracking this and that through apps. I can use any fitness tracker I want. I can play games – all the games. I won’t have to get all pissed off and feel left out when I see:

And hopefully, I can browse a goddamn web site without the pages reloading until the browser just shits the bed.

I ordered the phone on Amazon for all of $287, which I think is pretty cheap. What do current phones go for now? A good place to buy Android phones is the Microsoft Store. Let’s see. 5 models for sale: 1 Windows Phone (out of stock), 3 Android Samsungs, and 1 Android Razor. They are priced from $699 to $929. Nope, I will not be getting any of those. I don’t need a $1000 Solitaire game device.

It Must Be Said

Posted by anachostic on May 8, 2018 No comments

Grief is a strange phenomena. It’s more than strange, it’s insidious. It lies in wait and pounces when you least expect it. And sometimes it refuses to come out no matter how much you demand it to.

The grieving process is exceptionally singular. No one can do it for you. No one can tell you how to do it properly. There’s no training for it, it’s simply a core emotion. It would be hard to say grief is instinctual, since it’s closer to an expression of our individual personality.

So indulge me for a short while as I try to work through some of this difficulty and achieve some closure. As much as I would love to write the tribute first and deal with the messy circumstances afterwards, where they could be reviewed sans emotion, I feel that ignoring the details of the experience might be akin to letting a wound remain sealed up to fester, instead of opening it up and airing it out to heal.

The grief I am processing is the loss of my cat of 13 years, Rump. Her actual age is unknown, but she was an aged cat and had been showing signs of slowing down. But with each of my three cats I’ve had in my life, the end is always brought about by a sudden physical disability that requires euthanasia.

Rump’s first sign of trouble was a few weeks ago when I noticed she was becoming very picky about what wet food she wanted to eat. Around the same time, I noticed she wasn’t eating as much, or any, of her dry food. She lost weight rapidly and her sides became sunken in. She also became less social. These symptoms also happened with my first cat, Mess, and although I’d never had it diagnosed, I assumed it was kidney trouble.

Very soon afterwards, Rump could not stand up on her hind legs and her right rear leg seemed weak. Thinking the end was near, I started the golden treatment. She was fed tuna fish twice a day, which she enjoyed immensely. The fresh intake of food started filling her out and her leg strength came back. This inspired hope, so I scheduled a vet appointment to see if her current condition was treatable.

The vet said that the hind leg issue was simply arthritis and the lack of eating was due to pain from an abcessed tooth. They would need to extract the tooth, which was a fairly routine procedure and cats typically bounce right back after 12 hours. So the surgery was scheduled and performed. Along with the tooth extraction, Rump was caught up on all her shots.

When I picked Rump up from the vet, I was told she shouldn’t eat or drink for a few more hours, and that she was probably still a little dopey from the pain meds and anesthetic. I followed their directions for that night. Later that night, she got a little food, which she devoured. I was a little concerned about the unsteadiness she was exhibiting. She walked very unbalanced and was very distant.

Before bed, I checked up on Rump again, since she wasn’t coming to me, still being anti-social. I was told the meds should wear off by 11 or so and it was around that time. But when I comforted her and gave her attention, she just had a distant gaze. One moment she turned sharply and stared down the hall, like she saw something. Then she walked away from me and sat in front of the sliding glass door, staring at her reflection. It was the most foreboding behavior I’d ever seen from her. It was when I started to worry.

Rump did not come to visit me that night in bed. When I woke up, she was sitting in the bedroom doorway, guarding the room. Before leaving for work, I gave her a full portion of wet food, which she cleaned up in a hurry. Her gait was still unstable, her back legs were weak. I was happy to see her eat enthusiastically, but was concerned about her legs.

When I came home from work, Rump did not meet me at the door. I called for her and she didn’t come. Remembering how Mess began hiding when his legs started giving out, I started searching the house, dreading what I would find. I found that Rump had been in the bean bag, because there was a puddle of urine in it. Incontinence is a death knell, so my worry started settling into emotional preparation for what was to come. I looked under the bed, I looked in the closet, then I noticed that Rump was curled in her bed in the bedroom, right behind me. She didn’t make any sound of acknowledgement.

She had also urinated in that bed and had no interest in climbing out for me. I picked her up, which brought out a pained meow and stood her up on the floor. Her front right leg was paralyzed and her back legs were extremely weak. Rump immediately went back into her bed and curled up. So, this is it.

I called the vet, who told me to call a 24-hr vet hospital since their doctor had already left for the day. I called the vet hospital and briefly explained that I needed put my cat down. They set me up with an appointment in an hour. It would take me about that long to drive there, too.

Rump was loaded up in the cat carrier because she proved mobile enough to jump – jump – out of her bed as I was carrying her in her bed to the car. A stubborn bitch to the end. The drive was long and somber. Rump was quiet the whole way and rubbed against my fingers that were poked through the cage door. At one stop light, I thought I could open the cage door and get my whole hand in there to pet her. Nope, as soon as the door opened, Rump started pushing her way out. Stubborn!

In the exam room at the hospital, I opened the carrier. Rump charged out and I explained to the assistant that Rump just had surgery yesterday. The assistant said, “And this is the result?” It’s something I will probably never forget because of its (probably unintended) insensitivity. I never intended to blame anyone for this. Rump is an old cat and there are certainly risks with surgery, plus getting a heavy load of booster shots. You can only hope for the best.

Rump and I waited for the vet to come in seated on the bench seat. At times she was docile, other times, she wanted to roam. I kept her by my side and tried to keep her calm. The vet came in, checked Rump out and confirmed what we were going to do. Then he took Rump back for weighing and installing an IV catheter to administer the drugs.

She was brought back to the room and I continued holding her on the seat. The vet came back with a wee pad and a large pink towel that I could wrap Rump in. He explained that they would be taking care of the billing soon, which is something I felt down about. The last couple of times I’ve put my cats down, they perform the procedure, give you your time, then you leave and you get a bill in the mail, after a respectable period. This paying in advance stuff was slightly hurtful for me.

At this time, Rump was alternating between sitting at my side against me and lying on her side on the bench. I leaned down and listened to her chest. No purring and a quick, light heartbeat. She didn’t exactly seem “with it”, just dazed and staring. On some level she was probably happy for me to be there, but I don’t think she was able to be interactive. Rump then decided she wanted to be on the table, so I hoisted her up to the table onto the towel and she laid down right away. I wrapped her up in the towel, to which she did not protest. It’s not something she would ever have allowed before.

Once on the table and wrapped up in the towel, Rump fairly surrendered. She stayed motionless and occasionally, I would check her heartbeat. It seemed to be fading quickly. I thought if the doctor doesn’t hurry up and get in here, Rump is going to go all on her own. Then it struck me. Maybe I had misheard everything. Maybe this was the euthanization and Rump was going to fade off to sleep slowly. That’s radically different than anything I’d been a part of before. I stepped out of the room and asked if that’s what was going on. A vet tech came back and clarified that no drugs had been administered yet.

When I went back into the room, Rump had her head raised, but put it right back down when I came back to her side. She stayed still as the doctor eventually came in to clarify once more the procedure and the choices I had made. And we went forward with it, what’s more to say?

The procedure itself was quite peaceful, since Rump was already so close to the end. There was no struggle, gasp, or sigh. And of course the immediate mourning came on, but it was relatively brief. I headed home with an empty carrier and waves of tears.

Which brings me back to the grieving process. In this case, I never really have had a total breakdown. I will get a wave of sorrow, which brings on the sobbing, but then I straighten back up again and continue on. Relating to current events, it’s more like the Kilauea volcano and less like the St. Helens volcano. And until the pressure subsides, there will be unexpected lava flows.

Something I’ve been trying to keep in mind is a concept explained in Theosophy. The phrase I use for the concept is slightly crass, but is meant to reduce the seriousness of death: “back to the bucket.” To impossibly simplify the lessons of Theosophy, there are two things to consider. First, humans have a soul that evolves over many lifetimes through reincarnation. Souls are unique personalities, shown that every human on earth is unique. Second, animals are still evolving into unique personalities and until they reach that point, have a “shared soul”. The analogy is that animals are born and a portion of a single soul is instilled in them from a “bucket”. The animal lives its life and when it dies, all that it has learned and experienced is returned to the bucket for all future incarnations to learn from.

So, when you comment that your pet “has personality” and you notice how your pet forms relationships with humans and seems to genuinely care for humans, you are witnessing the evolution of an animal soul. If you have participated in that growth, by showing care and compassion and demonstrating trust and forging that relationship, you are contributing positive experiences to your pet’s next incarnation, when they go “back to the bucket.”

Considering that Rump found and chose me 13 years ago, which was about a year and a half after losing Mess, it’s not unfathomable that she chose me based on experiences from the same bucket as Mess. It’s also not unfathomable that I will see her again in her next life.

Stop This Shit

Posted by anachostic on April 25, 2018 No comments

https://blog.cheapism.com/lies-teachers-told-17314

I don’t do many commentary posts, but this article really dug at me and it came on the heels of a response I had given somewhere about Mike Rowe. The commonality in both of these is that there is a line, and it’s not exactly a fine line, where information becomes inflammation.

To start with, the title is “50 lies you learn in school”. Before you’ve read anything, the article is implying that teachers, the people trained to educate you, are purposely lying to you. In order to lie, you have to know the truth. So the article is saying that your teachers know the truth and have intentionally told you otherwise.

If you go through this slide show, you will start with moments of, “Ok, I didn’t know that”, and “Huh, neat” but then, less than halfway through, you’re hit with “You can’t end sentences with prepositions.” Whether or not you agree or not, does this sound like a lie? By the definition, yes, it is a lie. However, that statement is not what is taught. You would be taught, “You should not end sentences with prepositions.” And that is not a lie, because it is not being presented as a fact or a rule, merely a guideline. The same thing with “You can’t begin sentences with conjunctions.” A style guide is just that, a guide.

The other type of tactic this article uses is on display with “The tongue map”. The slide says “The tongue map drawn back in 1901 is a lie.” And this is what REALLY pisses me off. It is not a lie when you do not know any better. The slide immediately says, “Scientists now know…” which means they were not intentionally hiding the truth back in 1901, they just had limited information at the time. This is repeated over and over with “facts” that had to be revised as more information became available. That does not make the original facts “lies”.

Another tactic is playing with words. “There’s no gravity in space” is clearly a lie. Why? Because the proper statement is “There is not a substantial amount of gravity in space.” The article proposes that not being explicit enough is a lie. Then the slide show starts to get into fringe medicine, such as “You need milk for strong bones” which cites as a reason some potential cronyism by an executive. There’s a couple of “facts/lies” I have never heard before in my life. “Blood is blue in the body”?

All in all, this is a terrible article, and let me now explain the Mike Rowe connection. There is a growing wave of anti-intellectualism here in America. It is dangerous as fuck and since about 2016, it’s been blowing up everywhere. It is the absolute proof that Idiocracy is coming to pass. It’s not enough that people are not taking the time to educate themselves, which is damaging enough, but now there is an active effort by some people to discredit other people who are intellectual.

Here’s the gist of how it works. You find some information that used to be considered factual, but now, because of additional study, is not considered wrong. And that former information is not labeled “obsolete”, but is instead touted as a “lie”. The argument is that the “smart people” lied to you all these years with that incorrect information. But the insane part of that argument is that it was the “smart people” who corrected the mistake.

The goal of this article and other examples of it (like Mike Rowe’s position on science) is to cause people to distrust information from learned sources. They want people to ignore “best practices” because they are not completely proven yet. Even if they are proven, what is proof? They want everyone to live in a “We just don’t know enough yet to make a decision” mindset. Conservative to to the point of regression.

Florida, The Bakery

Posted by anachostic on April 24, 2018 No comments

I’ve been seeing a lot of billboards lately with a new slogan: “Drive Baked, Get Busted”. It just kind of appeared out of nowhere and suddenly, it was everywhere. Ok, yeah, police want (stupid) people to know that driving after getting high is a bad thing.

I looked this promo campaign up and yes, it is new this year. Supposedly, it’s because of the new medical pot law in Florida. If we’re going to have medical pot, we need to let people know that you can’t take your “medication” and go for a drive. Here’s the funny part. The ad campaign is primarily targeted to 18-34 year olds. Exactly the ones that would need medical stoning plants. Secondarily, the ads target 55-74 year olds. You know, the ones that smoked pot all the time when they were… 18-34. But anyway, fuck yeah, Gen-X! You’re not targeted as pot smokers. And I find that really dumb, because everyone I knew growing up was perpetually high.

It kind of got me thinking about the whole PSA campaigns for any sort of impaired driving. First of all, what idiot doesn’t know that driving under the influence of anything is bad? (Anything but driving under the influence of Jesus) Second, if the person doesn’t know naturally that it’s bad, is a billboard really going to educate them? Sometimes, I see messages on the traffic warning signs that say, “DUI – Decide before you drive” and I think a lot of people are like, “Already done.”

You just wouldn’t believe the frequency I see impaired drivers on the highways. If it’s not some drug, then it’s probably tiredness. Tiredness is an impairment that doesn’t get enough attention. Maybe a billboard or two would help: “WAKE UP, MOTHERFUCKER!”

The 80’s Synth Invasion

Posted by anachostic on April 19, 2018 No comments

As my music collection grows exponentially, I find it doesn’t grow in any sort of order. It grows opportunistically. For example, I don’t particularly buy what I want, I buy what’s available. And that’s fine, because my tastes are broad enough (and always growing) that there’s always something I’m willing to buy.

It was a little while ago that I picked up my first album by Survivor. You know, Eye Of The Tiger and all that. Actually, that was the album I got. When you’re familiar with a band’s hits and you want to become invested in them, you can take the easy route and buy the greatest hits album, or you can be a man and just buy an album. At thrift store CD prices, being a man doesn’t cost a whole lot, so that’s where I went. And I liked it. They had a good sound and I put Survivor on the list for future album purchases.

That day came a bit later when I picked up another of their albums. It was my morning commute CD today. And my experience with the album really led me to thinking deeper about music in the 80s. Eye of the Tiger was released in 1982 and the album I was listening to came out in 1986. My thoughts led me to create a shitastic “comic” to express my thoughts.

The80sInstruments

The initial point I was trying to make is that the ‘86 album had 10 songs, and 9 of those songs were all keyboard, with the guitar relegated to chunking out 8th notes for rhythm. The closing track was guitar-driven and really felt out of place with the rest of the album.

Something clicked with me when I listened to each song as it started out with synthesizer chords. I felt really sorry for the guitar player – well, main guitar player. The keyboardist also played some guitar. I suddenly understood the huge pushback against synths from rock acts, which, being a keyboard player myself, I never really appreciated.

Survivor isn’t the only recent instance I noticed this, although it was the most visceral. I had recently picked up Europe’s album Wings of Tomorrow. Everyone knows The Final Countdown, sure. And if you heard the rest of The Final Countdown album, it is also very synth heavy, but it is also well-balanced with guitar work. But on Wings of Tomorrow, which is the album just before The Final Countdown, there are hardly any synths at all. The change is remarkable. Also from the 80’s is the band GTR, a band that was formed by two guitarists who wanted a guitar-driven album. That’s how bad it was back then. I didn’t grasp how much of a statement they were making.

Then the Linn drum machine came along and it started to put the pressure on drummers. Now they could be replaced with rock-solid precision that could be edited at will. Gina Schock had to fight with the producer to play on The Go-Go’s Talk Show album. And Mutt Lange, I love his sound, but his reliance on drum machines really grates on me. I still remember when my innocence was broken when I realized the ZZ Top album I loved so much had no real drums on it. And then it began a real-or-not hunt on every album I had, which is not how music is supposed to be.

But there is an infinite palette of music out there for consumption. I can lament Survivor softening up into a synth ballad band or I can just put on any hair metal from the same era and hear guitar. There is always something on offer from some band, even if it’s not the band you want to hear it from. Guitar songs never really went away, they just spread out. And with my ever-expanding collection, I still find them.

The Flippers

Posted by anachostic on April 16, 2018 No comments

You know what really grinds my gears? Family Guy. And other things, too. One of the things that really gets my goat (Whatever the hell that means… actually the all-knowing Internet says that goat used to be a slang term for anger. So, there you go.) Yeah, so anyway… You know what really makes me angry? Flippers. Middlemen. Value-adders. Brokers. Leeches.

The most obvious case of this is in real estate. HGTV should be ashamed at what they have wrought upon the world. The glorification of gentrification. And while the rest of the country is freaking the hell out about wage gap and the unaffordability of housing, these shows are the most popular AGAIN. I mean it’s not like one “Flip or Flop” is enough, now there has to be regionalized versions so we can see how fucked up things are getting in multiple places.

I shouldn’t have to explain the problem but I will, because otherwise the post will be too short. In brief, someone buys a house that is distressed (a polite term for shitty) and fixes it up so it can be purchased by people who could not do the repair work themselves or who could not afford to buy the house outright at all.

As a brief aside, let me explain a case where I tried buying a foreclosure. I was in a bind in my personal life and wanted to get a separate residence. I found a foreclosure for cheap and scoped it out. The problem was, the house had no kitchen and no water heater. It was gutted. Because it was gutted, I was unable to secure a loan to buy the property. Despite all my financial plans for affording the place easily, I just couldn’t get it because I didn’t have $50k in cash sitting around. So I lost the property and everything worked out fine for me in the end, but it irks me that I missed out on that place to an investor.

So anyway, these investors/flippers/whatever. It should be a noble thing they are doing – cleaning up a property and making it habitable for normal people. But it isn’t. Because, gotta get paid. And there’s no money in selling to normal people. You need to sell to richer people who can give you a bigger profit. The problem is, richer people are fewer people. And as more of these houses get improved on, the fewer the number of buyers are.

But I’m sure you know all of that. I wanted to point out that this flipping situation is not exclusive to real estate. On a forum I frequent for music collectors, there is a regular bitchfest about “Record Store Day”, which was supposed to be an event to drive customers to small-town record stores. The incentive for this is that a collection of albums are released that are extremely limited edition or have been out of print for a long time. For music lovers, that’s pretty cool. But, the flippers smell a buck, here.

Inevitably, the flippers mob the store and buy up all the limited editions, then within the same day, resell them on EBay for huge profits. So, regular people just avoid the crush and Record Store Day is just another disappointment. Did the record store make any money? Ironically, not as much as the flippers do. One has price controls, for the other, the sky’s the limit.

Did you know this also happens with beer? A co-worker of mine flips craft beers and makes decent money at it. The investment for him is time – standing in line at small breweries, waiting to buy a single bottle of beer. Sometimes he will bring the girlfriend along so he can get two. And wouldn’t you know it? He’s reported that sometimes a flipper will “hire” a bunch of homeless people to wait in line to buy a bottle of beer each. It’s absolutely disgusting.

And at the root of all of these cases is the great American dream of “something for nothing”. Inject yourself into the middle of a process and take a little off the top. You add no value, you only add cost. Some may argue that the value they add is the knowledge of the source and the skill at marketing it to a broader market. That’s bullshit. It’s one thing to market a product to a larger audience. It’s quite another to scoop up everything of a limited quantity and sell it because you can’t get it anywhere else. It’s a self-made monopoly.

And here’s something that I’m currently fighting with myself about. I have two very valuable CDs that I was fortunate enough to find for very cheap. I am sure there is a collector out there that would prize them for their rarity much more than I do. I don’t need to make a 100x profit on my purchase if it would make someone happy. But how would I be sure that the buyer wasn’t a flipper?

And that is the problem with everything. Let’s go back to real estate. Let’s say you were altruistic and rehabbed a house and sold it for a fair dollar. Who’s to say the buyer isn’t a flipper who would add a single upgrade and sell it for a profit? All you’ve done is made someone else’s job easier.

Light Music, Heavy Music, Light Words, Heavy Words

Posted by anachostic on April 13, 2018 No comments

With 1,200 CDs in my collection, it’s probably an understatement to say I have a broad taste in music. Yes, I do have concentrations of genres and time periods, but I can wander pretty far away from center. And because of that, I feel sorry for people who are stuck on the same band or the same type of music, or who only know things that are on the radio.

Some music is challenging to me, that which I call avant-garde. The Residents fall into this group, because I typically hear their music as a bunch of noise, or as music constructed so simplistically I can’t take it seriously. And because of that difficultly to connect with the music, I consider that music to be heavy – even if they’re playing three notes over and over on a toy piano. I say it’s heavy because it takes effort to listen to it.

I also have a liking for death metal. but not all death metal. Death is one of my favorites because I find the whole thing hilarious. Like there’s no way you can take the idea of someone vomiting up their own internal organs seriously. It’s the audio equivalent of watching a horror movie. But then there’s Sepultura, which is a Brazilian death metal band. English isn’t their primary language, but they try. And when I hear the broken English about the topics they write about, I just get the feeling they mean it a little more, because after all, they did try and translate it. And that bugs me.

But then on the other end of the scale, I do like Indigo Girls. But Indigo Girls, to me, is heavy, too. I suppose you’re probably thinking: your evaluation of music is so fucked up. But hear me out. Indigo Girls isn’t heavy music, it’s heavy lyrics. And I don’t mean heavy as in they make you go, “Whoa, man, that’s deep.” (Yes will do that well enough, thank you.) I mean that their lyrics are SO weighted with metaphor it becomes unbearable to listen to for a long time. I mean, I can handle a few metaphors in a song, but when you have to squeeze one in every verse, or god forbid, every stanza, well, it’s gonna wear me down.

Indigo Girls is nothing like Sammy Hagar, who I don’t think would ever get kudos for being a deep lyricist. That’s not entirely fair, because there’s some of Hagar’s stuff that actually has some potential emotion in it. But I consider his lyrics to be light and breezy. Don’t think about them too much and just go with the vibe – usually partying and sex. It doesn’t take a large vocabulary to express that stuff.

I was once talking with a woman about music and she told me that words were everything to her. Well, that was kind of a problem because I really like instrumental music. She was really, really into 38 Special, which isn’t bad, but it’s pretty light on both music and lyrics. And there’s definitely a place for it. I like 38 Special when driving because I don’t have to think much about it.

But my point was going to be that words themselves aren’t “everything” to me. A lot of times, I can listen to a song for years and never know the lyrics. I’ll know the important ones, but I may miss out on whole concepts in the verses. I recall one time, I looked up the lyrics for a song I loved and the story wasn’t anything like I thought it was. It ruined the song for me.

Because of my non-reliance on the lyrics, I shouldn’t really have a problem with foreign music, and in many cases I don’t. I have some German punk rock and you can probably guess, you don’t need to know what they’re saying. It’s just aggression from start to end. And that works for the song.

I suspect for some people, the thresholds of light and heavy, whether musically or lyrically are much lower, so their breadth of music consumption is more limited. On rare occasions, I daydream about being a teacher in school teaching Music Appreciation. My experience in high school for Music Appreciation class was kind of a joke. It was people bringing in tapes of songs they like, we all listen to it, then the teacher makes some commentary on it. One time, we were listening to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”. We all knew the song well enough since it was playing everywhere at the time, and just when the chorus changed key, the teacher jumped up and stopped the tape. “You hear that! That’s a key modulation and it’s used to generate more excitement in the song.” Yeah thanks, you just killed the excitement we all just got from the key modulation. Me, being one of the few musicians in the class, did the outrageous. I brought in Rush’s La Villa Strangiato and drew out all the themes on the blackboard and pointed out how the themes entered and reprised throughout the nine minute song.

My approach to music appreciation would literally be a class on how to listen to music. Start with rhythm – learn how to count a beat, learn odd time signatures. Learn how songs are structured, so you can say things like, intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and coda with confidence. Learn about instrumentation, so you understand the application of sparse arrangement and dense arrangement. Probably some other stuff as well (like minor/major keys), but after the foundations are laid, then start with genres, and break the songs down based on past lessons. That’s how music appreciation should be, teaching you how to appreciate a wide variety of music.

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