Okay, I’m just testing the RSS feed again, but I thought I’d try to make it more interesting. Besides, check out the mirrors on that Tele! Syd Barrett had more mirrors than Jimmy Page here; maybe there was a mirror arms race among 60’s British musicians. The man with the most mirrors wins!
Anyhoo, the rest of my day will be at the dentist. Bridgework. I feel old saying that.
New Wanderlost page up tomorrow evening.
This blog’s been purty quiet lately. Too much to do in meatspace.
Like, say, a recent 11-day road trip from Portland to Great Falls, Montana, with detours through the high desert lands of central Oregon to hike 50 million years of lava deposits and fossils near John Day. Giant rock formations rise in mounds, revealing the twists and stretching and warping that tectonic action, erosion, and the occasional catastrophic event can impose on the land. In Oregon’s case, the land itself arises from a collision — slow motion, over a 100 million years or so — between the North American continent and several island chains now making up the Blue Mountains and the Klamath range. And lotsa volcanoes.
We stopped over in Kennewick, Washington, hoping to see Kennewick Man, but forgot that museums don’t open on Mondays. Durh. So we moved on to Spokane, where we gave the kids a break: they played in the Mobius Children’s Museum and Manito Park. Then on to Missoula. There we saw buffalo roam on the National Bison Range. We tried to see the Garnet Ghost Town, but too much snow blocked the mountain pass, so we had to turn back.
In Great Falls my kids and I watched my wife receive her BSN — bachelor’s degree for nursing. She was nominated for an award for outstanding leadership, but lost to a woman who coached a basketball team. It’s hard to top that.
Montana is a beautiful state. What it lacks in culinary variety, it makes up for in topographic diversity. The most interesting thing I ate there was a deep-fried Twinkie with Shrek green filling, topped with whipped cream and vanilla ice cream. Based on the menus I have seen, I would assume the life expectancy in Montana is about 55, around the time when coronaries cull the herd.
We returned yesterday after two days of solid driving. I am still sore, but it was worth it. I enjoyed the trip, but I missed things like decent coffee and vegetables.
Atrios doesn’t get the controversy over the iPad — which one of the comments likens to the rivalry between aficionados of Gibson Les Paul guitars and those of Fender Stratocasters. Something about technology invites people (mostly men, it seems) to go deep tribal, grab their crotches and bellow insults at their rivals.
“Some people might think it useful, others not,” Atrios admonishes, thinking reason might prevail. In the guitar shop the other day I made a similar statement to a guy who puzzled about the longstanding rivalry between Les Paul and Strat players: “Real guitar plays like Jeff Beck don’t give a shit.” Beck played most of Blow by Blow, his seminal jazz rock album, on an oxblood Les Paul (imitations of which sell for $25,000 — which is a steep price to pay for Jeff Beck cosplay); nowadays Beck tends to play a pearl white Strat (for which there are two imitations, custom and standard — for thousands less than the Les Paul, btw…though still thousands more than they are worth).
Indeed, the Gibson-Fender rivalry parallels the Mac-PC rivalry: Macs and Gibsons tend toward higher standards of design, interactivity, and aesthetics, entailing higher prices; PCs and Fenders tend to cut corners (Fender uses a bolt-on neck, which is cheaper to make and replace than the Gibson favored built-in neck) and, while sleek and pretty in their own right, can be more mundane, aesthetically.
But so what? Gibson players like to sneer at Fenders as a bunch of “toys” (a comment you will find in almost any YouTube video of someone playing a Fender or an Epiphone, Gibson’s down-market brand.) But what guitar did Jimi play? And for all of Jimmy Page’s association with the Les Paul, he recorded the first Zepplin album with (gasp) a Telecaster! That’s right, the twangy slab of wood so cheap only Country, blues and punk players could afford. Oh wait — that’s most of pop music right there. It’s hard to be a snob when so much cultural evidence is against you.
(Sidenote: On that link to Page’s gear, I find it funny that Page didn’t have to buy his main guitars — Beck gave him the Tele you see in the pic above, and Joe Walsh gave him the LP most identified with Page. That’s what happens when you are a professional player, you and your friends have so many guitars that you try to fob them off on one another.)
By the same token, most cartoonists I know, myself included, prefer Macs. Everyone, really, except Barry Deutsch, who uses a PC. Despite his horrible lack of taste in technology, he has gone on to create beautiful work as a cartoonist and is currently under contract with Abrams to publish a graphic novel. Yes, he’s a PC loser, but a cartooning winner!
The iPad so far looks like a glorified iPhone, a product I rolled my eyes at when it came out. But that’s because the iPhone cost $600, as does the iPad; now you can get an iPhone for half that price, a cost slashing that Apple will likely do for the iPad once the hype cools off. I still can’t afford either of them; if I ever had a job that required it, I would get one. Until then both products are just “toys” to me. However, if I ever get the money, I’ll happily plunk it down for both a Les Paul and a Strat.
And a Tele. And an SG.
Against type: Hendrix with a Gibson SG.
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