Rants

MENTAL GYRATIONS

I work on an "if . . . then" algorithm. If I can make a particular part, then I can fit a shape to it. Next I "figger" out the stress it has to stand up to, what xx elevation and xx angle will work best. Then it has to be this thick and wide and long, and I gotta have room for "this" and "that" and the bracing should be carved more here and less there. I want this color to compliment or contrast with that color. Then . . . IF I can remember what I was thinkin’ about, it might actually get made.

In my frequent travels to various festivals, I happened upon a Celtic festival where I heard a Cittern for the first time and loved it. Since retiring (fixed income), I couldn’t afford to buy one or have one made; so I decided to make my own. In searching the web for how to make instruments, I found one of the best luthier sites online, Kathy Matsushita's site.

I made a tailpiece out of a chunk of stainless steel that in its former life was a kickplate on a bathroom door at a giant fascist corporation, HAL; then designed the rest of the cittern from that tailpiece.

While waiting for the cittern to dry in the molds, I found Wendell Powell’s site and made a bouzouki. So the bouzouki was actually my first axe completed.

Then the open mike acoustic woo-woos inspired the Electric Cittern.

UKE HISTORY

So I’m slightly bonkers. One day, while I was at Sylvan Music, someone said I was crazy enough to belong to the Santa Cruz Uke Club, so I got a banjuke on evilbay….and started going to da club.

I started listening to the different sounds of the ukes being played there. A uke club member, Norma, had a particularly woody-sounding "Akulele" and I liked its sound. It has a spruce top and a monkeypod body… hmmm—so I went online looking for the ‘m’ wood.

On evilbay, there magically appeared a salad bowl with treble (fine grain) and bass (wide grain) wood. I spent a whole $8 on the bowl but was told by a friend that I paid way too much. Oh, well! That bowl was the inspiration for the Monkeypod-Salad Bowl uke.

Because of acoustic feedback problems when playing at open mike, my Tiki-dog electric uke was born out of frustration.

Then I thought, okay . . . bluegrass hula . . . thus the 5-string banjo-ukulele creation.

An amazing ukulele and guitar player, Del Ray, played at the uke club on Ron Phillips' resonator instruments— the guitar sounded like a Taylor on steroids because of the metal he uses—so I ordered a tenor that I made a fretboard for….coming soon.

NAUGHTY POLITICAL RANT

Invalid questions:

What makes the port light green, the lense or the bulb?
Gong! The port light is RED.

True story… a girl who is the daughter of mormon parents, (the father is a genuine son-of-a-bishop) said, "I can’t believe in science until somebody tells me what came first, the chicken or the egg." This idiot has two kids already, duhh, and doesn’t know how to research. Wants to be told. Can’t think to question. Pathetic.

So the chicken and egg answer is lizards. She was never told about Pteradactyls?

A-n-nnnd since she can’t believe in science, how can she turn on the lights, drive a car, cook or shower? All of those things work via science. So who do you think might just barely be able to say "Would you like fries with that?"

Of course, they have to be ‘Patriot fries’, because the French got seriously un-pullitically correct due to not going along with the yeller-belly punk bush bullshit. Weren’t the French the people who helped the American revolution?

Idiot bush/christer/ limbaugh theocracy:

Our god is a god of love, and we’ll kill you to prove it. Whether it is stealth bombers or body bombers, our gods are gods of love…….yeah, they love death. You have an abortion clinic? Boom. You are a muslim converting to christianity in afghanistan? We gonna do a kangaroo court…Boom. It even gets down to "my scientology is better than your post-partum depression"….Media Flap. Amurrikkans are addicted to watching grown men playing with their balls in public, on the TV. A few years back, da gummt intervened in a baseball strike, so the peoples would watch professionals entertain the fools ‘cause the gummit fears that if the fools look at the gummit instead of the almighty Tube, changes could happen.

The gummit, being secure in their positions because ammurrikkans are stupid enough to elect lawyers, have demonstrated increasing levels of abuse of ‘power’.

Idiots….lawyers got a degree in lying, distortion, and obfuscation. They are the biggest union in the world. When you elect a lawyer, you have hired a known child-molester to babysit the kids. Get a clue! Child molesters are only out to screw kids, lawyers are out to screw Everybody.

Now we have da bush-punk, whose daddy bought him a Yale law deegree,

Ducked out of the 'nam thing, failed at and ruined every business he was put in control of.

And then got ‘elected’ by not being elected, started a war by not listening to facts, and invaded Iraq because of a personal piss-off with Sad-dumb…

When Hitler did that stuff, he was a Bad Doggy, but bush-punk does the same shit, and he’s a Good Doggy. I can’t wait to see him put on trial for war crimes, seeing as how little yeller-belly is the mass murderer of this century. Wussy Uber Alles?

FASCISM

A political system based on a very powerful leader, state control and extreme pride in country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed….

Hmmm…..does that sound just a wee bit like ‘thou shall have no other gods……..’

Allah….the name of God for Muslims

Judaism….the religion of the Jewish people, based on belief in one God and on the laws contained in the Torah and Talmud

Christers…a religion based on belief in God and the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and on the Bible. of or belonging to the religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ: Someone who believes in and follows the teachings of Jesus Christ…describes a person or action that is good, kind, helpful, etc. oh, yeah, lets try the inquisition, or the plague that was instigated by ‘the church’ eliminating witches, by destroying their ‘familiars’, aka cats, allowing the propagation of rats, with the well thought out result wiping out most of the european population. We’re talkin’ beaucoup body bags, thank you pope.

So ya gots about 10 ‘mainstream’ christer based religions. The funnest ones are the jehovas witless, 144,000 of those guys get to go to heaven, but they have around 2,000,000 members….so who’s gonna get left behind? So, how can one be a ‘witness’ if one didn’t see the accident?

The catholics like to pay child-molester priests with moneys ‘donated’ by the poorest people who have made the ‘church’ rich.

The kkk uses the bible as their excuse for pure aryan hate, although none of them good ol’ boys are ‘aryan’, duuhh.

The mormons won’t allow octoroons to be mormons, but they're not racist.

The irish protestant ‘christians’ hate the catholic ‘christians’, with a nice body count as a result.

The religious world uses nazi tactics, while denouncing hitler as a ‘bad guy’.

The thing with 'born again's is that they have had problems in their lives they couldn't solve until they got religion. then they claim that god saved them. They are unclear that they are the ones that turned their lives around. they are unwilling to give themselves credit for their accomplishments.

If they believed in themselves, they wouldn't need a comic book hero. In the jungles of 'nam, i figured out that prayer wouldn't work, I had to do the do to get back alive, as in I was the only I. All the other I's that didn't do, died there. When you get back, what you hear is, 'thank god yer back'....I never heard 'thank god for the war'.....after all, god pre-ordains your whole life. duh.

Anybody thanking god for katrina? If so, then there must be idiots thanking god for bush-punk.

Personally, I believe in The Great Cheeseburger, but not The Great Cheeseburger with Onions and Pickles.

Oh, and a big thank you to the people who are giving up the constitution...all the people who died to get and keep those rights, would be way grateful. If only they could know.