Month: March 2021

Test Beds Part IV

Music

Finally, the acoustic guitars.

I’m going to exclude the “classical” / nylon-stringed types, because quite frankly I know nothing about the type, never having played classical guitar nor even been a fan of the genre.  (Yeah, John Williams, Andres Segovia, Julian Bream… I have a few of their albums but mostly for background listening.)

Let’s talk about the others.

I’ve always been a fan of “big box” a.k.a. “dreadnought”-style guitars such as the Martin D45 (D for dreadnought):

…which are the Rolls-Royce, if you will, of box guitars.  The Gibson J200 (J for jumbo, geddit?) is the Bentley of the same:

Myself, I prefer the Gibson Jumbo shape (those curves remind me of a recumbent Sophia Loren hubba hubba).   For those who care not for the shape, Gibson’s squared-off dreadnought style should do, e.g. the Hummingbird:

I should point out that Gibson acoustic guitars are not made in the “regular” Gibson plants in Tennessee etc., but at their custom shop in Wyoming.  As far as price goes, they are only marginally less expensive than Martin.

Changing gears a bit, I have to confess that while the booming sound of the dreadnoughts and jumbos are a personal liking, I also enjoy the compact, compressed sound of the Ovation round-backed acoustics:

As a rule, they’re also a little less fragile than your regular-built acoustics because their back shell is shaped plastic and not flat wood.  Also, they’re a generally lot cheaper than the Gibsons and Martins.

.I’ve never been able to play 12-stringed guitars.  Even when my left-hand fingertips were calloused from 6-night-per-week professional bassplaying, 12-string guitars always beat up my fingers.  I like the sound of a 12-string, though;  and I have to admit, if I played acoustic guitars more often, I could be tempted into an Ovation double-neck:

…even though this particular model is a little too Hank Williams Shirt for my liking.

Next, we come to Taylor, but I must confess I don’t know a great deal about them other than that the ones I’ve heard have sounded wonderful.  (Taylor guitars were a rarity in my South African yoof.)  The ones which did catch my fancy were the Grand Auditorium line, whose sound and resonance blew me away:

Finally, we come to Yamaha LL guitars, and I really like the sound of the 16:

As with all guitars, once you’ve got a baseline sound — the kind of sound that appeals to you — it all comes down to feel:  how the neck feels to your hand and how the box “sits” against your body.

And you don’t have to spend a ton of money on your box guitar, especially if all you’re doing is strumming away on your own, or at most playing it for a family & friends singalong.  Hell, I taught myself to play on a 3/4-scale Hofner nylon-stringed guitar, and it served me well in the above functions for over a decade.  And even when I “graduated” to the big time and played little solo gigs in bars and such, an Ibanez Artwood model worked just fine:

Nowadays, they run about $300, and they still sound fantastic.  (The “ordinary” Ibanez acoustics are about half that price.)

One last thing:  I preferred a “dark” sound on my box guitars, so I played using really heavy strings (D’Addario Medium Baritone 0.16), which also didn’t lose their tuning as quickly as the lighter ones.  If you are of the same mind, make sure to get a guitar with a well-constructed neck, or else you’re just going to bow or warp the thing.  Don’t ask me how I know this.

That’s the end of the Test Bed series.  Sadly, I can’t do keyboards or drums, because technology has improved so much in recent years that I’m now hopelessly out of touch.

Story of my life…

The Divine Harry

Men & Women

…Harry Enfield, that is (video via Mr. Free Market), and not the ginger twat married to that Hollywood strumpet.

“Over-education [of women] leads to ugliness, premature aging and beard growth.”

Not too sure of the “beard growth”, but if he means masculinization, he’s perfectly correct.

I find these women only marginally more attractive than the ones that Harry depicts.

And if you want to see how Our Betters regard us Deplorables, his take on the working classes is priceless.  For us, it’s comedy;  for them, it’s social commentary.

Pecking Order

Crime, Funny Stuff

Now we have yet another way to make criminal acts still worse than the acts themselves:

Misogyny will now be recorded as a hate crime with police asked to identify whether offences are motivated by ‘hostility based on sex’

So it’s not just bad that you kill a woman;  calling her a “filthy bitch” as you stab her to death makes the crime that much more reprehensible.  But it gets better.

Police forces will be asked to record and identify any crimes of violence, including stalking and sexual offences, where the victim believed it to have been motivated by ‘hostility based on their sex’, a Home Office minister said.

Ummmm I thought that stalking, for instance, has always been solely motivated by hostility based on sex — unless he’s following her around to see who she’s bonking now that they’re no longer a couple, maybe?

Damn, it’s confusing.

Okay, let’s see if I’ve got the order of badness right.

Killing a Black person is bad;  killing him while calling him a filthy nigger is terrible, the worst, unforgivable.  (I think we can all agree that thanks to the Burn/Loot/Murder pressure group, that action is pretty much at the top of the Evil Hate List.)

Next, I would imagine that calling someone a fucking Paki / towelhead / Meskin / [insert brown-skinned ethnic group here]  as you shoot them in the face might be next in the pecking order.  (Not included:  Chinks, Japs, Flips, dot-head Indians and other East Asian types, who somehow seem to be excluded from this shitfest — probably because they’re not whining as loudly, and good for them.)

Now we come to wimmyns, as noted earlier.  (Killing one of the “protected” species of women — e.g.  a  Black woman — while denigrating her race would elevate the evil standard straight up to Group 1, of course.)  Anything at all that hints at some kind of animus towards a female victim (by a man — women are of course completely blameless in this little game, bless them) is now going to feel The Full Force Of The Law.  (Not quite sure where genital mutilation or honor killings fall in this order — my guess is they’re not included because delivering ad hoc  clitoridectomies seems to be the sole preserve of Black men — a protected species — and honor killings are okay because We Don’t Want To Offend Muslims Lest They Hate Us Even More. )

Jews — once the most protected species because Auschwitz — seem to have fallen down the table.  Killing a rabbi while calling him a filthy Jewboy probably has some cachet, even, among certain Muslim asshole groups e.g.  Al-Qaeda and/or Nation Of Islam.  But a Black man murdering a “Jew bastard” in Hymietown (thank you, Rev. Jesse Jackson) would probably be punished with a light slap on the wrist nowadays, because Jews are asking for it because they have too much money and control the Bilderbergers or some such.  And Jews don’t murder too many people of any group other than Jews, unless they’re Supremely Evil Mossad agents who kill Pore Ayrabs without rhyme or reason (I’m told).

Way at the bottom of the Evil Hate Scale are MPPs — Male Persons of Pallor — because everyone knows that we are the root cause of all the world’s problems e.g. through systemic racism and ingrained misogyny, therefore it’s open season on us and we can be murdered, raped, stalked or beaten up pretty much at will, by any of the above, without too much in the way of consequence.  Insults delivered during the murdering etc. are probably not necessary because, annoyingly, nobody has yet come up with a pejorative nickname that actually causes offense to MPPs — “cracker”, “honky”, “chauvinist pig” and the like are fairly innocuous, and are actually quite cute, really.  Just being a White man per se  is sufficient motive for blameless murder.

Frankly all the above reminds me of something… wait, what is it?

Oh yeah, now I remember.  It’s just like Apartheid South Africa, only with the groups inverted.