As I mentioned back in February, I am again playing in a band (Note: In the updated version of the link to the band, it is me in the photo). I feel particularly fortunate, having fallen into a band that plays music from the Sixties — Poifect! Great fun, doesn’t begin to describe it. There are, however, some downsides and upsides when it comes to equipment, and those depend on whether the particular piece of equipment in question is simply “old,” or whether if has managed to slide through “old” and enter the world of “vintage.”
For example, the guitar I’m using in the band (this one looks like mine) qualifies as “vintage.” It is a Paul Reed Smith unit that I bought new back in the mid eighties. It sounds great. I naturally thought that my Shure Microphone, purchased in the Sixties, was also “vintage,” until I heard our keyboard player’s mic. I immediately realized that even though my mic sounded good, it was not “vintage. It was just, plain old.
I bought myself a new mic, one just like the one the keyboard player uses. I am stoked to put it through its paces this coming Saturday. Yo! Elvis is in the room!
Of course, all this got me to thinking. Am I “old” or “vintage?”
I’ll keep my fingers crossed and hope Door Number Two is the answer.
When I was a little boy, my father was the smartest man on earth. He stayed that way until I reached high school, which is when he began to become not so smart. By the time I was in college, he had become hopelessly dumb. That remained the case until I was approaching my mid-twenties, when a strange thing happened. He somehow began to become smart again. Amazingly, he became smarter with each passing year, until at the time of his death, he was again the smartest man alive.
Yes, sports fans. It’s again that time of the year when the Usual Suspects assault Southwest Florida. As in the past, there will be many cocktails, lots of laughs and a constant gator watch.
In February of this year, a blogger posed a question to the Punk-in-Chief about transparency in general and Benghazi in particular. Here is his response.
Check out this video of people doing amazing (often, quite crazy) things. I figure that it must be a combination of brain chemistry and autonomic nervous system soup that drives people to do this stuff.
Special note to my buddy Denny (the other half of the Elderly Brothers): Pay special attention to 3:46 in the video. I think I saw you do something a bit like that in Helen, Georgia a couple years ago. Yo, I figure that, with a little practice, you could pull this one off.
Hey mom and dad, do you really want to invest the small fortune in tuition necessary to send your kid to this retirement home for 1960’s domestic bombers?
Airships have not fared well in New Jersey. Of course, when one thinks of airship disasters, the fiery crash of the Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 immediately comes to mind. We all have seen the frightening film and listened to the iconic “Oh, the humanity†live newscast.
By contrast, we never hear of the crash of the Airship U.S.S. Akron, which went down off the coast of New Jersey’s Barnegat Light, in 1933 killing 73 of the 76-man navy crew, making it the worst airship disaster in history.
Finally, after eighty years, the event and the crew have been officially remembered.
A ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the deadliest airship crash was held in Manchester Township, Ocean County, in front of the Grand Army Memorial Park’s Civil War monument, which has a piece of a USS Akron girder affixed to it. The names of the 73 dead from the USS Akron — plus two more men who were killed on a Navy blimp that tried to rescue the Akron survivors — were read aloud before “Taps” was played.
More here, including photos of the incident in which three line handlers were pulled into the air when the Akron accidently climbed while attempting to land near San Diego in 1932. Two of the men fell to their death.
