Thursday, March 27, 2014

3 Chords & the Truth: Freeform saves


I'd like to think that God hates both sin . . . and corporate radio. Which, of course, is in the business of devouring souls.

Corporate radio and souls is kind of like Hitler and the Sudetenland -- you can't assimilate just one. And after sucking the soul out of radio, outfits like Clear Channel have their eyes on. . . .

You figure it out.

But this isn't about Clear Channel or any others among the corporate media soul-suckers. This is about the Big Show -- 3 Chords & the Truth. You see, here is where radio has taken refuge from the corporate invaders.

Here is where freeform lives.

Here is where somebody puts a little thought into what goes into your ears, because "here" is where your Mighty Favog loves your ears like he does his own. OK, that sounded a little creepy, but you know what I mean.

LET ME be perfectly clear: 3 Chords & the Truth good. Corporate radio bad.

You're going to hear something new to you on the Big Show. You're going to experience true musical diversity. You will not experience crap. This is where radio has taken refuge from the corporate and cultural storm.

We live in a world where people now pay to have others "curate" music mixes for them -- another case of folks paying through the rear for things that once were free and plentiful. Music curators? Really?

I am old enough to remember what we used to call that -- FM radio. Pull up a chair, relax for 90 minutes and get yourself curated for free . . . right here. 3 Chords & the Truth is freeform FM radio, only on the Internet.

Don't get taken. Don't get soul-sucked. Do listen to the Big Show, which will help to fend off that other stuff.

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Wednesday, March 26, 2014

What it looks like when newspapers give up

   
The local newspaper, just in time for March Madness, got the bright idea of having a championship bracket for "the Nebraska-est Nebraska celebrity."

Put aside our culture's idiotic obsession with "celebrity" for a moment. Forget even the apples-vs.-oranges stupidity of pitting William Jennings Bryan and Willa Cather against has-been alt-rockers 311 and "the Maroon 5 guy."

No, consider instead that when you start out with an unserious premise that elevates celebrity over all else, then put it all to a vote by those readers (and given how the voting's gone, "readers" might be too generous a description) who didn't think this was just too dumb to take seriously. . . .  

Well, let's just say you're going to get what you get.

Good and hard.

SO BRYAN and Cather and Malcolm X and Ted Sorensen are s*** out of luck. As are Gerald Ford, Johnny Carson, Fred Astaire and Marlon Brando. And Bob Devaney, Tom Osborne, Bob Gibson and Scientology nutbag L. Ron Hubbard. (Actually, I was counting on Scientologists stuffing the virtual ballot box on this one. I was wrong, alas. The sheer inanity of the Omaha World-Herald exercise must have fried their E-meters.)

Hell, Henry Fonda didn't even make the tournament. "Yours, Mine and Ours" must have totally screwed his RPI. 

Well, either that . . . or this:


NO, facing off for the "the Nebraska-est Nebraska celebrity," we have 311 and investing guru Warren Buffett, whom we all love for having craploads more money than we do. That, friends, is "journalism" today.

Good and hard.

I hope 311 wins. Not only would that be the most absurd outcome possible, but the World-Herald would mercifully be spared having to explain why the boss won.

Between this sort of thing and its steamin'-hot love affair with "charticles," I wouldn't be surprised if some day soon, the hometown daily becomes the first American newspaper to break through the Pictogram Barrier and become wordless altogether.

And to think that we thought in 1982 that USA TODAY was as dumbed-down as newspapering could get. There are none so naive as those who think things can't always get worse.


Huh. Huh-huh-huh.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Because there's one born every minute


I'm an audio geek.

OK, I'm an audio geek who likes to look at this kind of stuff on eBay. Anyway, I know a little about what old hi-fi equipment is worth -- particularly the stuff that's so coveted that folks will pay insane prices for it.

But a starting bid of $650 for a Sherwood tuner and amplifier? That strikes me a a little bit, shall we say, outrageous. Then again, a sucker really is born every minute, and there are people out there for whom price is no object.

A VINTAGE McIntosh tuner or amp is fairly valued at an astronomical figure because that's what the market will bear based on quality and popularity. A mid-1950s REL Precedent is fairly valued at an insanely astronomical figure because it's even better than a McIntosh and many times as rare.

But for pretty much anything else not a vintage Marantz amplifier or tuner, not so much. You can buy a lot of good stuff for the $650 you'd be spending on this "good but, oh, come on" tuner and amplifier.

Money doesn't grow on trees, you know. When it does, you can pay that kind of money for this kind of vintage hi-fi-gear.

This has been your Revolution 21 Geek Minute for today, March 19, 2014.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Sign of his times


The foremost proponent of divine hatred of "fags," America, Israel, Catholics, Ireland (no, really) and the rest of the world, too, reportedly is about to leave this accursed coil for an encounter with divine justice.

I wonder what the Rev. Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church might think of finding one of his own signs at the end of the glory road.

After all, if God hates me, what would keep the Almighty from hating Fred, too? To presume otherwise would be the height of false confidence, don't you think?

And if God is the enemy of thee, what's to say he's not also the enemy of me? To presume otherwise is . . . presumption.

The two things we know about God are the two things we just can't keep straight about Him -- first, that the Almighty is all-merciful and, second, that He is perfectly just. We tend to presume upon one characteristic or overemphasize the other.

IN THAT RESPECT, the theology of God Hates Fags, America, etc., and so on isn't that much more screwy than what we hear about the supreme being from the rest of our culture, media or Father Feelgood. It seems to me that the theology of Fred Phelps -- the one he's about to have to defend under the glaring spotlight of Divine Truth -- is just more concentrated . . . and consistently negative.

If I'm Fred Phelps of Topeka, Kan., I'm worrying that I just might be screwed even if I'm right, because my God is a God who's spoiling for a smite. And I'm about to be in the crosshairs of the Holy Flamethrower. If I'm Fred Phelps, I'm thinking "I made myself and everybody else miserable for a God I can't even trust?"

What the hell kind of god hates everybody and everything? The answer lies in the question -- the "god" of hell.


And the problem Rev. Phelps will find himself hard up against is not the seething hatred of God for "fags," America, Israel, Catholics, Ireland, the world or . . . if the bad reverend has miscalculated . . . him. God does what He must and what He will, but hatred of his children isn't in the divine equation. God hates sin; God loves sinners.

NO, the problem Rev. Phelps soon will confront is that one of his scary band's whacked-out signs might actually be spot-on . . . and that it will be the one marking the end of his road.


This one.

Lord, have mercy.

Saturday, March 15, 2014

3 Chords & the Truth: Stand by me



"I'll take Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Boogedy Shoop for $1,200, Alex."

Alrighty, Favog. Here's the answer for $1,200: "Although The Marcels technically put the 'bomp bomp ba bomp, ba bomp ba bomp bomp' into popular music, you would be "Searchin'" from "Spanish Harlem" to "Kansas City" to find anyone who could make a "Jailhouse Rock" more than this songwriting duo."

"Who are Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller?"

"That's right! But you lose."

"HUH???"

"Our new sponsors are Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Favog."

"I thought it was 3 Chords & the Truth."


"We USED to be sponsored by the Big Show. Tough break."

"Oh, yeah? Meet me behind Smokey Joe's Cafe in an hour and tell me that to my face. I'll open up a can of Rama Lama Ding Dong on yo' ass."

DON'T end up like Alex. Play it straight, stay on my good side and listen to this week's excellent adventure that we lovingly call the Big Show.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.


Thursday, March 13, 2014

A what player? Porno player? What? Pono?

An old friend sent me an email to ask my thoughts on Neil Young's Pono Player.

My first thought was that the last thing I ever want to see is Neil Young nekkid.

My second thought, after a second look, was "Oh. Pono Player. That's completely different, then. Never mind."


I actually hadn’t been paying attention to the Pono Player in the slightest -- I guess when you get off the what’s-new-in-music bus, you get off the bus. I guess that was a bad thing for a guy who does a music podcast to admit, wasn't it?

Oops.

Anymore, I find that I inhabit the old-fart universe where we daydream about how good the buses used to be before all those little pimp-wannabe a-holes got on and ruined it with their f-ing hip-hop crap. And I frankly find little contemporary music that excites me enough to run out and buy it, either in the store or online.

About half of that dwindling amount is either a new jazz recording I fancy . . . or the latest Rosanne Cash record. Hell, I haven’t even bought the new Springsteen record yet.

I guess that was a bad thing for a guy who does a music podcast to admit, wasn't it?

Oops redux.
  
What I do now is scour the used-vinyl bins at Homer's and at  Goodwill, looking for treasures. Usually, those are albums that my generation's parents would have liked, back from when our parents were much younger than us . . . and often from before there was an us.

One advantage of this kind of record-picking is that “old people” took care of their LPs; teenagers didn’t. Unless the teenager was geeky ol' me. Anyway, I find that a pristine LP from 1962 -- say, on RCA Victor before they began to cheap-out on material and quality control in the late ‘60s -- is a sonically transcendent experience, and that’s an all-analog deal from the vintage ribbon mic in the studio to the vintage tape recorder in the control room to the turntable right next to me.


OH . . . right. About that Porno . . . uh, Pono Player thingy.

I’m probably the target audience for the Pono Player -- me and some wealthy audio freaks (all 487 of them), along with some hipsters who just discovered vinyl and have deemed it hip, happening and now. I -- we -- already have our Pono Players. We call them “records.”

Often, we also call them CDs Not By Rock Bands, who all have turned the compression and hard limiting up to not 11 but instead to 479 in the mastering studio.

Right now on my iMac's hard drive, I have 18,585 songs. That probably represents less than a third of what I have on LPs, CDs, 45s, reel-to-reels, cassettes and 78s. A not-insignificant amount of those hard-drive music files came from iTunes. But I digress.

Anyway, my default quality for the MP3s on the ol’ iMac is 320 kbps, which maxes out that encoding scheme. One might reasonably ask why 320 kbps MP3. The reasonable answer is that the MP3 format is ubiquitous and that, at 320 kbps, I can’t tell the difference from a CD. And to be so honest as to be completely unhip, unhappening and very un-now, a well-recorded, competently mastered CD (as allegedly compromised as it is in the geriatric-rock-star ears of Neil Young) sounds really good, though a little less “warm” than analog.

AND THAT, basically, is what Young, Bruce Springsteen and all their Kickstarter investors are betting millions on with the Pono Player -- absolute subjectivity. Really, once you manage to transcend low-bitrate MP3s of music that’s been so compressed, limited and clipped that the audio file looks like a green 2-by-4 on your digital audio workstation, “better” is as much in your imagination as it is in your sound system.

Remember SACD players? Better still, remember the studies showing that “Super Audio” CDs didn’t really sound better than regular CDs? All the “technical superiority” in the world really doesn’t matter if studio microphones can’t achieve it and, at any rate, only your dog could hear it. 

So my worth-what-you-paid-for-it verdict is this: If you bet the farm on the Pono Player, don’t be surprised if you end up feeling quite (ahem) “Helpless” as your investment gets Zuned.

Saturday, March 08, 2014

3 Chords & the Truth: Don't let it go

Dit dot dit, dit dot dit dit ditta ditta! Dit dot dit, dit dot dit dit ditta ditta! Doodle oop! Doodle doodle doodle oop! Milly Freezmaz is te ta te ta ta!

And Theo Cloirk Alfred Thompseen is de do do do de da da da! That because is Milly Freezmaz wickedly talented as Adele Dazeem!
-- John  Travolta
What's all the fuss about?

Well, I guess it's about the Big Show, and apparently Hollywood is pretty excited about it.

Why is that? Well, I guess you'll have to listen to find out.

BE FOREWARNED, though. If you do, you won't be able to let it go. And if we're lucky, the attention will do for 3 Chords & the Truth what it did for Adele Dazeem . . .er, Idina Menzel.

It's Theo Cloirk Alfred Thompseen 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there.  Aloha.


Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Old-school high fidelity geekery


The speaker: A mid-'60s Electro-Voice "Wolverine" 8-inch, full-range driver in a new Gough speaker enclosure built by a friend who has a custom furniture business from the original 1960 plans sold by Jabez Gough of Cardiff, Wales.

https://books.google.com/books?id=VSEDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA168&dq=popular+science+nov.+1961+gough&pg=PA168&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
The hi-fi: A 1956-57 Realistic amplifier and FM tuner. The glory of vacuum tubes!

The result: Pretty dadgum amazing . . . and all in glorious monophonic sound, being that stereo was awfully new-fangled in 1957.

Now, what you can't feel is the floor shaking -- all from a 10-watt tube amp. What you can see is that our house is undergoing a never-ending remodeling. This dining room here is due for a new floor next week . . . then on to the painting and whatever else.

I'm sure there will be "whatever else."

Saturday, March 01, 2014

U.S. to Putin: Do as we say, not as we do


"What?" people across the Western world are asking today. "Is Putin nuts? Has Russia gone mad?"

Well, when you've been pushed to the breaking point, you usually don't act in a rational manner. This is just as true for nations and presidents as it is for Joe Schmoe.

But I remain to be convinced that Vladimir Putin is acting irrationally. It depends on how far he takes it in Ukraine.

The United States, NATO and the European Union have pushed Putin and Russia up against the wall -- not in East Germany or Poland, but right on its own border -- twice in recent years, first in Georgia and now in Ukraine. But Ukraine is no far-flung Georgia; you can drive from Kiev to Moscow (530 miles) in a day. That's hitting close to home.

Then there's this from a remarkable piece in The Nation by Stephen Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University:
But the most crucial media omission is Moscow’s reasonable conviction that the struggle for Ukraine is yet another chapter in the West’s ongoing, US-led march toward post-Soviet Russia, which began in the 1990s with NATO’s eastward expansion and continued with US-funded NGO political activities inside Russia, a US-NATO military outpost in Georgia and missile-defense installations near Russia. Whether this longstanding Washington-Brussels policy is wise or reckless, it—not Putin’s December financial offer to save Ukraine’s collapsing economy—is deceitful. The EU’s “civilizational” proposal, for example, includes “security policy” provisions, almost never reported, that would apparently subordinate Ukraine to NATO.

Any doubts about the Obama administration’s real intentions in Ukraine should have been dispelled by the recently revealed taped conversation between a top State Department official, Victoria Nuland, and the US ambassador in Kiev. The media predictably focused on the source of the “leak” and on Nuland’s verbal “gaffe”—“Fuck the EU.” But the essential revelation was that high-level US officials were plotting to “midwife” a new, anti-Russian Ukrainian government by ousting or neutralizing its democratically elected president—that is, a coup.

WHO ARE the imperialists here again?

Under these circumstances, if I were Putin, I'd probably invade the historically Russian regions of Ukraine, too. Certainly, I'd forcibly repatriate the Crimea, which was "given" to Ukraine by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, when. But is it really "forcibly" if the inhabitants are happy as hell you're there?

That's what we kept pointing out when we rolled into Baghdad, after all. In Iraq, they were happy . . . until they weren't, because we were both foreigners and "infidels." In eastern Ukraine, it's not the Russians who are foreigners, it's the folks in western Ukraine.

Ukraine not only isn't our fight, hell, I don't even think we're necessarily right or that Putin is necessarily wrong. Check that. I think we're absolutely wrong for meddling in a sovereign country on the border of another nuclear-armed sovereign country that has every reason to be paranoid about our meddling.

The United States' "because freedom" act has grown old over the decades, mainly because it's always been more "because market capitalism." We've always been, globally, sort of like that fella who first gets religion and makes everybody's life miserable with all the ham-handed proselytizing, just like the old Soviets were in trying to spread their communist ideology.

MORE AND MORE, though, we look less like the sincere, overeager Bible-thumper and more like Elmer Gantry. Don't think Putin doesn't see that much more clearly than we do -- being a saint often is a hindrance in spotting hypocrites and con artists.

Or as one Russian legislator aptly put it:
But the parliamentary session roundly dismissed western criticism in advance. Senator Nikolai Ryzhkov said Russia should be prepared for the west to "unleash their dogs on us". "They ruined Yugoslavia, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, all in the name of western democracy. It's not even double standards, it's political cynicism."
ALLOW ME to paint the broad canvas of American hypocrisy with a historical brush: If the Russians had their own Monroe Doctrine, we'd all be soooooo H-bomb vaporized right now.

Really, it would all just be so much more honest if President Obama would call regular press conferences to threaten the Rogue Nation of the Day with annihilation if they, for whatever reason, fail to do as we say, not as we do.

Because Cuba 1898.

Because Dominican Republic 1965.

Because Vietnam.

Because Grenada 1983.

Because Panama 1989.

Because Iraq 2003.

Play realpolitik if you must -- though I really wish you wouldn't play it while drinking . . . or with John McCain on your team -- just dispense with the moralistic bullshit.

Friday, February 28, 2014

3 Chords & the Truth: A fool for music


Let me tell you about this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth before I succumb to sleep deprivation.

It's good. Right tasty, in fact.

 
Let me tell you something else -- it starts out with tractor punk, then moves into disco and doo-wop and '60s pop. And then the Big Show gets interesting.

THAT IS ALL. Except that there may be a little something in there from one fool to another. And if you aren't already a fool for the happeningest musical spot on the Internets . . . what the hell is wrong with you?

I pity the fool who ain't a fool for this here podcast.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

(thud)
 

Thursday, February 27, 2014

Conditional adorability

 
Awwwwwwwwwwwww.


That's the adorable word from WECT television in Wilmington, N.C.
Try not to smile after taking a look at this picture!

Shantee Johnson from Wilmington shared her most recent ultrasound picture and you can see her prenatal daughter is all smiles.

3D and 4D ultrasound technology is giving a lot of future parents the opportunity to get a quality glimpse of their children. Johnson got her ultrasound done at Wilmington Maternal-Fetal Medicine. She's due in mid-March, but was induced Wednesday and is currently in labor. She's expecting a girl.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=639712066039804&set=a.579483858729292.1073741826.531683143509364&type=1&theater

MEANTIME,  "forced ultrasounds" are a Nazi plot against the autonomy of the blah blah blah blahblahblahblah. That's the outraged word from the NARAL Pro-Choice America website:
Imagine this: you're facing an unintended pregnancy. After talking about it with your partner and your family, you decide that abortion is the right choice for you.

You call the doctor, and are told that you have to make two appointments. At the first appointment, you are forced to undergo an ultrasound and have the images described to you. You don't want an ultrasound, and your doctor does not recommend one—but you and your doctor have no choice. Your state has a forced-ultrasound law. 
The Challenge

Many states have some type of ultrasound-related law. Some give women the option; others have forced-ultrasound laws that don't give women a choice.

The people behind forced-ultrasound laws claim they just want to give women more "information." But really these laws make women go through invasive medical procedures against their will.

In a free country, we don't force anyone to undergo medical procedures against their will. Women considering abortion—a safe, legal, and constitutionally protected procedure—are no different. Politicians have no place telling a woman she has to have a procedure she does not want and her doctor does not recommend.
ACTUALLY, ultrasound examinations are absolutely routine for pregnant women as a means of screening for birth defects, as well as the age, position and number of fetuses. Ironically, it's also not unusual for abortion clinics to do ultrasounds before terminating the baby . . . er, pregnancy.

Besides, if this study of abortions at Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles is indicative of what happens across the country, it's not like NARAL Pro-Choice America will be fending off a plague of "unwanted" children. According to the Reuters Health story, when women really don't want to be pregnant, they really don't want to be pregnant.

And in a free country, when women really don't want to be pregnant and others can profit from that, it's absolutely fine to have forced -- legally -- almost 49 million in utero human beings "to undergo medical procedures against their will" from 1970 through 2010.

Which resulted in their deaths.

Because adorability is in the eye of the executioner.

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Cartoon of the year, Louisiana edition

http://www.theneworleansadvocate.com/multimedia/walthandelsman/8477682-171/walt-handelsman-for-feb-25

Bobby Brady would have been grounded for life had he pulled such a stunt. Maybe Carol Brady needs to have a loooooooong talk with Louisiana Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, being that the gub'na loves him some Brady family and Mrs. Brady might be one of the few people he'd listen to.

Or maybe she should just ground him for life -- no TV until he learns to mind his manners, and no governoring, either. And you can just forget about running for president right now, young man!

At least Edwin Edwards acted like a grown-up. A horny, crooked grown-up, but a grown-up nevertheless.

I miss Edwin Edwards. Never thought I'd ever write those particular words, but the Gret Stet has found out the hard way that there are worse things than having a felonious horndog in the governor's mansion.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman occasionally acts like a 3-year-old, but never in front of the national press. Tender mercies have we cornhuskers when it comes to chief executives.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Why they hate us. And should.


I've seen some repulsive TV ads in my 50-plus years on this media-saturated earth. This ad for Cadillac may top them all.

Combine out-of-control materialism, hubris and a generous helping of smugness, and you have a television-commercial graduate course on Why They Hate Us. This ad is the audio-visual representation of the Ugly American, and when Americans are ugly, we are ugly indeed.

Advertising, as a rule, is the art of selling people stuff they really don't need -- of convincing folks they desperately need stuff they really don't. You don't need a damned Cadillac, and something is wrong with you -- namely, the profoundly broken human condition -- if you think you really, truly need a Cadillac ELR . . . or anything else apart from your health, food, shelter, love and God.

This ad -- which ran over and over and over again during the Winter Olympics, during which the United States famously underachieved -- takes it a step further and tries to do so while convincing you all those other inhabitants of the earth who aren't citizens of the United States are, in fact, losers if they don't sacrifice heart, soul and all those things money cannot buy to the great god Greed. In Cadillac America, the 1 percent are demigods because they have done just that, and if you don't aspire to material wealth at the expense of all else, you are, too.

SO GO out there and give yourself an ulcer, leave little Johnny to shift for himself while you're putting in 80 hours a week at a job you probably hate not for food, shelter and health insurance, but instead for an effing luxury vehicle. Which you will spend hours in while commuting to that 80-hour-a-week job to which you've offered up your soul . . . for what?

Your wife may rarely see you, your children may not know you -- who may, indeed, loathe the materialistic bastard who's thrown them to the wolves of neglect -- and all this wreckage you have left in your wake for . . . a Caddy? Screw you, and screw the America that's made this sort of materialism the sum and summit of it's earthly existence.

This America deserves whatever may befall it. And will, in time.

But at least we'll be going to hell in not a hand basket but, instead, in a really sweet ride. Right?

For the America of stuff, hubris and over-the-top arrogance, that will have to do as small consolation. No, you can't take the Cadillac ELR with you when you go to your richly deserved reward (or richly deserved lack thereof) but perhaps you can be buried in the damned thing.

The "losers" of the world will be greatly amused at that.

Friday, February 21, 2014

3 Chords & the Truth: Beats shoveling a giant Icee


This edition of the Big Show didn't turn out too badly, considering right beforehand I was shoveling the World's Largest Icee out of our driveway before it could freeze over tonight.

The World's Biggest Icee is what you get when it snows hard when it's above freezing. A major case of This Sucks is what you get when you're shoveling slush.

Let's just say this week's 3 Chords & the Truth is a big improvement over that. I mean, what would you rather do? Shovel tons of a flavorless, melting slushie spilled across the landscape by a meteorological 3-year-old, or sit in a warm diner, listening to the best jukebox in the world?

HEY, KID! If you don't know what a jukebox is . . . come on in and get educated. The coffee's fine and the music's better.

Yep, come on in to the Big Show. It beats the hell out of the alternative.

Especially when the alternative is shoveling slush in February. (Really, the show's exceptional this week. And every week. But especially this week.)

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Party like it's 1959


This is your audio-geek moment for Thursday, Feb. 20, 2014. Today, we'll party like it's 1959.

Above, the 12-inch, Electro-Voice full-range speaker of -- more or less -- that vintage. I got it via eBay, the best Internet friend of vintage-audio geeks like yours truly. The last part of the previous sentence, I suppose, also could be written sans hyphen and be just as accurate.

Anyway, this "Wolverine" driver from the venerable company is what folks bought when they embarked upon building themselves a "hi-fi" speaker. Basically, it's a woofer, mid-range and tweeter all in one.

Folks back then often got fancy and added a "crossover" and separate mid-ranges and tweeters just like what prevails today, but I'm lazy. Besides, a speaker enclosure with just a good  full-range "coaxial" or "triaxial" speaker was pretty common back then.

Combine something like that with a vacuum-tube amplifier, and that's what you call "vintage sound." I do love me some vintage sound -- probably because I'm a vintage audio geek. No hyphen.

BUT TO GET a vintage speaker for my vintage tuner and vintage amp, I needed an equally vintage cabinet. One, it must be noted, that wouldn't permanently disfigure our checking account. (You'd be surprised at how much a nice, half-century old hi-fi speaker can monetarily disfigure.)

Hello, eBay!

And hello to a Wharfedale W-60 speaker cabinet that's about the same age I am, sans guts. Or a woofer and tweeter, to be technical about it. Fifteen bucks . . . plus some rejuvenating oil, a black marker, a little wood stain and some elbow grease, which turned scuffs and worn-away veneer into gorgeous "character."

Of course, with old speaker enclosures like this, the only thing that's meant to come off is the back. That's bad when the screws that hold the speaker in are too short . . . and in the wrong places for the new-old Wolverine you bought to go in that box.

I had to do something that wasn't pretty . . . but it worked. And nobody will see it, so who cares?

Breakage of particle board and application of duct tape may have been involved.

Is what I am saying. Don't judge me.
AND VOILA! The finished product, voicer of "vintage sound" from my vintage hi-fi setup.

I think it's happy. See?

Monday, February 10, 2014

Pearls among the online swine


The Internet is a land of treasures and trash. Mostly trash, it seems, most of the time.

Slutty trash. Angry trash. Snarky trash. More angry trash. More snarky, angry trash.

Seems to me that living life online as we do today can be like eating Gummy Bears for breakfast, lunch and supper -- it might be rather satisfying at the time, but. . . .


WELL, this ain't that. Pete Seeger's mid-'60s, low-budget show, taped in glorious black and white at a little UHF station in New York, is a treasure lurking amid the trash. It's meat and potatoes in a Gummy Bear online world.

How can it possibly get any better than sitting around the kitchen table with Johnny Cash and June Carter, swapping stories and playing music? How can it possibly get any better than sitting in the living room with Revon Reed, keeper of Louisiana's Cajun culture and the French language when the odds were stacked against it amid a tide of assimilation at les mains des americains just as Seeger was a keeper of American culture amid a rising tide of materialism and superficiality.

And not only that. Irony also comes a' callin' in the meeting of Messrs. Reed and Seeger.

YOU SEE, one of the saviors of Cajun culture in south Louisiana was, by profession, an English and chemistry teacher. Cajun music and his weekly radio show from Fred's Lounge in Mamou, those were his hobbies. The keeper of what was most authentically American, meanwhile, was blacklisted for years for allegedly being "un-American."

Uh huh.


Eventually,  the forces of "Americanism" left Pete Seeger alone after growing bored by red-baiting. Eventually, they moved on to more fertile fields . . . like doing their part to f*** up the Internet.

Saturday, February 08, 2014

3 Chords & the Truth: The canon of Pete


This edition of the Big Show starts with a big set -- which is just a small portion of the Canon of Pete.

And the canon of the late Pete Seeger is a big part of the lexicon of American popular music . . . and American folk music . . . and American protest music.

Or, to be succinct, American music.

Period.


I knew that first long set would be good. What I wasn't prepared for was how good it is in the actual listening. I mean, you know, but then you hear what you've pieced together and . . . you know.

NOW, there's lots of other good stuff on 3 Chords & the Truth this go around, but I think I'll just let you listen to find out what that might be.

I prefer not to think of the Big Show as just a music program on the Internets. I prefer to think of it as what it really is -- and what radio ought to be, once was and rarely is anymore -- and that is an adventure.

I think Peter Seeger would have approved of that.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

No shelter at all


This was the view Friday of the homeless camp just off Omaha's Keystone Trail.

Sometimes, a crude shelter is no shelter at all -- no good against the cold and worthless in the snow. It looks like whoever was camped here is long gone . . . thankfully.


THE HIGH on Friday was 13. That was a big improvement over Thursday, which started out at 10 below.

If this is all the shelter you have, there's a word to describe you. That would be "dead."

Still, consider there are folks out there . . . in the cold. In rough camps not much better than this. It's what they call "home."

Ours is a society of cracks, through which "the least of these" fall, much like the snow through the gaps in this lean-to.


Lord, have mercy.

Frozen in time


When it's this cold, "frozen in time" isn't just 
another expression. Just so you know.

Thursday, February 06, 2014

Disappearing in plain sight


This is the Keystone Trail, right in the middle of the middle of Omaha.

You'll find yuppies and bobos and DINKs and hipsters and bikers and joggers and slackers and workers and old folks up and down its paved pathway beside the Little Papillion Creek whenever the weather isn't totally unfortunate.

Sometimes, you'll find idiots like me there even when the weather is unreasonably unfortunate. Not today, however. Too much snow, too damned windy and cold.

Some things . . . some folks whom you might find there, you'd probably rather pretend aren't there -- there right under our reasonably affluent noses. But evidence is evidence.

Like this. Right under our noses.


IT'S QUITE easy today to routinely ignore what's right under our noses. In our society, we all live in our own little worlds, and we all live by those whose worlds are a lot like our own.

No longer are we forced to exist cheek and jowl with the great unwashed, so we don't.

And they become invisible, even when they're in plain sight. Or, as the case may be, tucked just into the tree line.

Would that all our failures were as out of sight and out of mind as the homeless, some of whom -- beset by mental illness, addiction or whatever -- never come in out of the cold. Even when it's snowy and 10 below, like it is this harsh February night in Omaha.

I hope whomever this encampment belongs to gave in to the siren song of central heating at a local shelter. A lean-to this crude can't keep out the snow, much less the subzero cold.


MAYBE WE fail to notice what's right under our noses -- or pretend we don't notice what's right under our noses -- because we're just overwhelmed. We are so overwhelmed by our own problems and clutter and, yes, demons that we figure we can't afford the luxury of contemplating or acknowledging those whose problems and clutter and demons have left them wandering through the Nebraska deep freeze.

As opposed to merely being distracted and stressed out.

Me, I don't know. I'm just spitballing here.

Whatever is the case, the evidence is clear that none are so blind as those who will not see. "Those," of course, being you. And you. And you.

And, by God, me.