New Guitar, Agile AL-3100 (Les Paul clone)

I don't talk much here about playing guitar, mainly because I'm not very good.

I'm a competent strummer, and can get nifty sounding licks down OK if I practice them a billion times.

There's just no substitution for talent, no matter how many hours I practice. Maybe Santa will bring me some talent this coming Christmas.

I had a real Gibson Les Paul for a number of years, but, well, I'd rather not talk about having to sell it. Imagine having to sell a beloved pet.

While I love my cheap clone guitars that are like Fender Stratocasters and Fender Telecasters, I really missed playing that Les Paul.

I finally, after much searching found a guitar brand that makes less expensive versions of Gibson Les Pauls.

The guitar brand is Agile, and they are made in Korea and imported and sold in America by Rondo Music in New Hampshire. (Rondo music and their people are AWESOME to deal with, and all of their guitar brands are amazing, amazing values.)

So about three weeks ago, I ordered an Agile AL-3100. I can say with all honesty, that this guitar is absolutely every bit as well made as the "real" Les Paul that I used to own. I just cannot put this guitar down. I play it unplugged while we watch TV!

Anyway, here are some photos...
The top photo has the most accurate color of the front of the guitar, the others have too much of an orange look, but they were taken with flash and not natural light.




Oh, and the price? Literally one-sixth the cost of a Les Paul Standard ($400 vs. $2400). So even a no-talent hack like me can own a really fine guitar without selling a kidney.

Large Hadron Collider Finally Smashes Some Atoms!

You might not care about CERN's Large Hadron Collider that has been under construction on the Swiss/French border for over ten years, but as a dye-in-the-wool science geek, I'm excited that this collider, by far now the largest in the world smashed some hydrogen protons together this morning.

The collider is an elliptical tunnel of 17 miles in length in which atom protons are whizzed around the circuit by superconducting magnets until they are at 99.9% of the speed of light and then their paths are crossed at certain points to where the protons collide.

They then fly apart like cars in a head-on collision.

These collisions are carefully controlled to happen inside what are essentially many-layered digital cameras about the size of a three storey house and then the images are examined to see exactly what the constituent parts of these protons are.

This collider, the largest ever built, was designed to be able to hopefully see some sub-atomic parts that have long been theorized but that scientists had never had the right tools powerful enough to actually capture one's image.

For example, one sub-atomic particle, the Higgs Boson, is perfectly provable with mathematics, but in science, theory must be followed up with an actual test that allows the theories to be proven empirically, or with the five human senses.

Theoretical physicists believe the Higgs Boson to be the sub-atomic particle that causes material to have mass, and is the only particle in the present standard model of particle physics that has yet to actually be measured/seen with scientific instruments.

The initial collisions of the Large Hadron Collider that were successful today will hopefully be the first experiments that allow the physicists to make some long sought after observations.

Rock on LHC!

Yeah, I understand that probably no one reading here gives a hoot, but hey, it's my blog.

Lee Majors, the Bionic Man

or, How My Life Has Come Full Circle

My back is in pretty poor shape, hence the conspicuous lack of posts over the past few months.

One of the current issues I deal with, and have for many months now, is that my back pain will wake me up at 2-4am most nights. And with the kind of pain I have, there's no going back to sleep.

So I have consequently been getting to see all the eye candy offered for sale on late night infomercials.

But the other morning, I saw a commercial - a regular one, not a 30min infomercial - that had Lee Majors on it.

When I was a boy, in about 6th or 7th grade, around 1974 or so, the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man came on.

I totally dug the whole NASA/Space Program stuff as a kid, so a show about a former astronaut that is nearly killed in a crash, who is rebuilt with "bionic" parts that make him able to run along with cars at highway speeds, and an artificial eye that allowed him to zoom in on distant bad guys sans binoculars was pretty much tailor made for this guy when he was young.

Later, there was a "Bionic Woman" who was similarly pieced back together with a few different but complementary bionic parts than was Steve Austin.

He had the bionic eye, she had the bionic ear; get my drift?

So the other late, late night, or early, early morning, take your pick, what did my eyes see but a commercial starring none other than Lee Majors. The Bionic Man hero of my youth.

What was Steve Austin, astronaut, on a commercial for?

Well, ol' Lee Majors has gotten kinda old.

Now I'm no longer a spry young lad either, I'm 48 with a really bad back, so me and Mr. Majors could sit and compare ailments I'm sure.

So I was sitting there waiting for my pain medicine to kick in and ol' Lee starts to tell me about...

The Lee Majors Bionic Hearing Aid!

The Lee Majors Rechargeable Bionic Hearing Aid combines digital hearing aid technology with the ultra convenience of a rechargeable battery, so you can enjoy noticeable, digital quality hearing improvement without the hassles of traditional battery-operated hearing aids.

Which is basically a rechargeable, non-prescription hearing aid for us no-longer-faster-than-a-corvette type broken-down humans.

Now I've had tinnitus all of my life. As a kid I remember at quiet moments sitting and listening to the high-pitched whistle in my ears. Then working for years around jet airplanes at DFW and ATL airports only added to the problem. Now, at middle age, I'm getting the normal hearing loss on top of the tinnitus.

But even at the age of 48, there's ol' Lee Majors, still trying to be my hero by offering to sell me a bionic ear to help me better hear his commercial with.

And I thought, man, life has come full circle for me.

Lee Majors gets to be a hero to me in my youth, and then many years late to be my loss-of-hearing savior in my steadily less well heard middle age.

What's next, over the counter Bionic Knee Replacements for when my knees give out?

It's hard to grow old enough to find out your heroes have gotten old and sad enough to hawk hearing aids on late-night TV.

And also, since the Bionic Woman was the one with the bionic ear, shouldn't it have been the aged, but still lovely, Lindsay Wagner who was trying to sell me on a hearing aid at 3am?

How Drunk Do You Have To Be...

...to try to resuscitate a dead opossum?

You just can't make this stuff up, folks.

PUNXSUTAWNEY, Pa. – Police say they charged a Pennsylvania man with public drunkenness after he was seen trying to resuscitate a long-dead opossum along a highway. (Opossum photo taken by Rex Lisman)

I know the old song line, "the girls get prettier at closing time" but man, this is some kinda drunk to do this.

I'd love to see the cop car's video of the man and opossum, if there is one.

To Me, This Is Just Plain Funny...

I keep pulling this up and I laugh at it every time.

Michael Crichton on Global Warming

A great quote by the M.D./Author

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Does this quote remind you of someone?

Maybe Al Gore? He's big on claiming scientific "consensus" in defending the man-made religion of global warming.

Here's more of Michael Crichton's quote on the anthropogenic global warming hoax. (anthropogenic = man-made):

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Just thought I'd share that.

If you want to read the whole speech, just Google: "Aliens Cause Global Warming" A lecture by Michael Crichton

Copenhagen Climate Summit: Gathering of Hypocrites

The headline of the following article pretty much says it all for me:

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges
Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

These self-important jerks don't even realize how pathetic they seem to the average person.

They say we must change the way we live and then proceed to live in such an extravagant way as to make us look like the greenest of the green in the way we live.

Scumbags and fakes on the make for more power and money.

These people don't care for the planet, they cynically live the high-life and expect us normal folk to follow what they say.

I remember when Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in the early 1990's.

The reports, describing the immensity of the eruption, said that this one eruption alone injected more greenhouse gasses into the earth's atmosphere than man had in totality since the dawn of the industrial revolution.

And that was just one of many volcanoes that have blasted in my lifetime of 47 years.

Then the Al Gore's of the world expect me to believe that man is causing global warming?

I went to Louisiana public schools, but even I'm not THAT stupid.

Al Gore and the man-caused global warming believers and promoters are simply liars out to make money and increase their power in this world.

The many massive volcanic eruptions, and the sun itself have done enough to make man's efforts look tiny in comparison.

Don't get me wrong, the wanton dumping of chemicals in rivers and other harmful pollution shouldn't happen, but that man is causing any global warming?

Nonsense.

If these men and women at this conference really and truly believed their own lies, they'd live much different lives than the ridiculous extravagance of carbon production that they actually live in.

Liars and hypocrites, all.

Something's definitely rotten in Denmark.

How Engineer's Think

Someone at work has a sign on his office door:

Dear Santa,

Define good.

Pretty much sums up the mentality of engineers.

We always want more data.

Veterans Day 2009

I know it has been a ridiculously long time since I last posted, but I wanted to today.

To all American veterans, those who have served and those still serving, THANK YOU!

I think America is in real trouble right now, huge deficits and an administration bent on borrowing more and more money from China, putting us even deeper in the hole.

But our women and men in the various armed forces are out there doing what they can for this country, and I love them for it.

Plus, lovely wife reminded me that we were in Hawaii a long time ago on this day. Veterans Day also reminds she and I of that all-too-brief time on Oahu. The beauty of Hawaii still looms large in my memory.

This has always been my favorite photo from the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl Crater above Honolulu on that Hawaii trip.

Thomas Sowell, Amazing Random Thoughts

I read this editorial by Thomas Sowell and was blown away.

He's my kind of guy, plain-spoken and to-the-point.

Here's a quote from the editorial:

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Moammar Qaddafi, and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama’s many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America — Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, and so on — at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots?

The whole editorial is well worth your time.

Former Confederate Soldier's Grave

This gentleman survived the Civil War, and is buried in Powder Springs, Georgia where we lived for a few years. (We LOVED it there.)

I've always kind-of liked this shot, but decided to see how it would look in B&W.

I like it, and since I haven't written or posted in over a week, I thought I'd share it with y'all.

Picture Post, Sunday, September 27, 2009

Lilly, one of our poodles. She's afraid of thunder and has several favorite closed-in places she likes to get. This one is under our bed.


I was photographing the Indian River Lagoon that ended up as the black and white shots from a few posts back, and looked across to another part of this vacant lot and saw little blurry spots of intense red-orange. (I wasn't wearing my glasses, hence the blurry spots of color.)

So, I moseyed on over there, it being WAY too hot a day for anything more strenuous than a mosey. When I got these on my computer, I actually dialed down the color saturation in this photo because the original colors were so intense that it looked fake.

These are the kinds of colors seen around here with all the rain we've had this year.


Our piano. It serves now only as a picture holder. I liked the light in there, but the room is small and I had to zoom out to a wide angle to get even this cropped view, hence the distorted (bent) picture frame and the bottom edge of the piano. My new version of Photoshop Elements has a feature where I can correct some of that type of lens distortion, but haven't gotten around to playing with it yet. I liked the warmth of this one anyway.


One of Lovely Wife's flower pots out back beside the pool. I looked out our back door the other day and the late evening sun made this pot glow, so I grabbed my camera.


Have a great Sunday!

Up To Speed (Bought Some New Stuff)

We've had Roadrunner broadband internet service in our home for years now, with an older 802.11 -B wireless system.

We've always avoided watching most videos on our computers, the link was too slow and the stopping and jerking of the videos drove me crazy.

But over time, Roadrunner has gotten faster and we upgraded to their fastest home service.

But our older wireless system wasn't capable of using all of that new speed.

So this past week we've bought a few new electronic gadgets for our computers.

I bought a new Linksys wireless router that is 802.11 -N, which is the latest, fastest system available.

Lovely Wife's laptop already had a -N wireless adapter in it, so as soon as I hooked up the new router to the cable modem, she was instantly super fast. She could watch streaming movies from Netflix and so forth on her computer for the first time without all the skipping and jumping.

I bought a -N wireless adapter for the desktop computer I use, and it's now super fast with internet videos now as well.

This just totally changes the whole internet experience, we're finally fast enough for all kinds of videos now and pages load almost instantly; no more waiting for images on pages to slowly trickle in.

We also bought a blu-ray DVD player (LG brand, BD390 model) that has built-in wireless capability and since were subscribers to Netflix, our new wireless router sends us streaming movies across the house to our DVD player.

In other words, our DVD player plays hi-definition DVDs as well as connecting to Netflix so that we can watch movies via it's wireless connection to the internet.

It's all a neat setup and it was super easy to get it all hooked up and working.

I can therefore highly recommend the following gadgets:

- Linksys by Cisco WRT400N Dual-Band Wireless-N Router
- LG BD 390 Network Blu-ray Disc Player
- Linksys WUSB600N Dual-Band Wireless-N USB Network Adapter

---

I also bought the latest version of Adobe Photoshop Elements, version 7.0. I have used version 4.0 for three years and needed to upgrade to have the ability to work with Nikon RAW files from my D90 digital camera.

I have loved Elements, it's a really great program, and the upgrade from version 4 to 7 is a big difference and the program has many new features when compared to my older version. Well worth the upgrade for me.

So I can highly recommend Photoshop Elements 7 and The Photoshop Elements 7 Book for Digital Photographers book by Scott Kelby.

If you have fooled with image processing programs a little, like Elements, Photoshop, or GIMP, then this book by Scott Kelby is the perfect companion to Elements 7. The book assumes some basic experience with imaging programs, but he explains each topic step-by-step, and is simply the best Elements book you could buy.

Picture Post, Sunday, September 13, 2009

A look at Florida in Black and White.

I took these photos on Friday afternoon. It was such a beautiful day, and I knew that the light and the clouds would end up making photos that were more interesting in black and white as opposed to color.





Have a great Sunday!

Expensive Hobbies

My Brother in Law has a real dry sense of humor.

When Big Sis comes home from shopping, he looks at her and asks "How much money did you save us?"

The net effect of shopping for ANYTHING is that money leaves your bank account, never to be seen again.

For me, both photography and guitars tends to be pretty expensive hobbies, but, I must say, the guitars I have are nice but really inexpensive as guitars go.

At a guitar show in Tampa a few years ago a representative for Paul Reed Smith guitars tried to hand me a Carlos Santana model electric guitar to try out. (I got to meet guitar designer/builder Paul Smith himself and talk with him, which was really cool, but another story.)

It truly scared me and I quickly backed away. Too timid for that kind of outrageously expensive guitar.

I was still very much a beginner at guitar at the time and was not prepared to try out guitars in public, a very crowded guitar show, and on an amp. But what scared the heck out of me was the price tag on the Santana guitar.

The list price of a PRS guitar made exactly like the ones Carlos Santana plays was $10,000 at the time. Even if the "street price" was a mere $8,000, I backed away from the man while holding up my hands in denial. I couldn't even get myself to hold the guitar, much less try to play it.

Really, really expensive things has that effect on me.

In the world of photography, today, Leica, the super-expensive but absolutely fantastically built/made German camera maker, released a new digital rangefinder camera called the M9.

The street price of the M9 is estimated to be around $8,000 to $10,000.

That's for the camera body only. No lens included.

Add one of the equally precious new Leica lenses to the M9 and you'll be paying out around $13,000 to $15,000.

One camera body with one lens or pay cash for a new car?

Rich people have such tough choices. Though I realize that if one can easily afford a $15,000 camera/lens, then they won't be driving a $15k car, but you get my meaning.

A couple of months ago, I bought a new Nikon camera body, and once I was satisfied that it worked well in all respects, I sold my older camera body on ebay.

Total price for the new camera body after subtracting what I got for the sale of the old one, about $450.

I still feel guilty about that too.

Then Leica comes along and releases a new $8,000 camera body.

And I suddenly don't feel so bad about spending the $450-$500 on my own new camera.

Thanks Leica!

Like when we were kids. If one of us said, "My arm hurts." one of the other kids might stomp your foot and say, "There, that takes your mind off of your hurting arm doesn't it?"

Same principle.

Texting and Driving

I NEVER text while driving.

Not because I'm all that safety conscious, it's mainly because even sitting in a quiet room with no distractions it takes me about 15 minutes to poke in a basic text message and send it on my cell phone.

For me, texting while driving is pretty much an impossibility.

I am, however, guilty of photographing while driving.

But at least I don't put the camera to my eye. I just hold it out over the dash and shoot through the windshield.

Not real dangerous, unless the leaning photos make you dizzy or something.

Amazing Miracle Flying Earthworms!

We might be getting some unwanted visitors later this week. (Tropical storms Ana and Bill, though they're still way out there.)

So on Saturday I got my dual-titanium-rod-reinforced and fused spine out there on a ladder, assisted by Lovely Wife, and cleaned out our home's gutters.

Well, precisely because of the dual-titanium-rod-reinforced, fused spine, I haven't cleaned the gutters in a LONG time.

How long, you ask?

Long enough that the bottom layer of leaves in the gutters had turned to something almost like soil, and these layers were home to an impressive population of EARTHWORMS.

Not kidding here, big, fat, juicy, perfect-for-fishing earthworms. Living 8 feet off the ground in our home's rain gutters.

How long has it been since you cleaned YOUR gutters?

Y'all might have some critters living up there like us and not even know it.

It was quite a job, and by the time we were almost through, I finally got weak from the work and climbing up and down the ladder 400 times. Plus my back was screaming at me by then, so Lovely Wife took over the dirty duty.

Much to our delight, the last section we were to clean, the gutter above our screened front porch, was devoid of leaves (and worms) and we joyfully washed the ladder and put everything away.

Then I had a nice shower and a couple of Lortab, the screwed-up back's best friend.

But really, how in the heck did earthworms get up in our gutters? Fly? Gotta be a miracle, right?

SOME SUNDAY PHOTOS:
Since it's Sunday and I used to faithfully post photos on Sunday's here's a couple to hold you. (But I just couldn't wait with the miracle earthworms story.)

Some of y'all might want to take off your shoes and wiggle the warm white beach sand between your toes...


Or maybe take a stroll by Crane Creek and, on the way, admire one of the local city beautification projects. (I actually like this one.)

Lester Polfus (1915-2009)

You may know him as Les Paul.

Even if you don't know about the man Les Paul, chances are you would know one of the most immediately recognizable guitar shapes in the world, the Gibson Les Paul solid-body guitar.

Les gained some fame as a radio performer with his guitar while still in his teens at the tail end of the 1920s. His stage name then was Rhubarb Red according to an interview in a book on electric guitars that I have.

All throughout his life he tried to perfect a good sounding solid body electric guitar.


He loved Gibson guitars, and went to the company head in the 1940s with a 4x4 inch plank of wood that formed the neck and center of the body of a self-made solid body electric guitar, but was turned away. The Gibson executive called his guitar a "broomstick." (That's a picture of "the Log" there, along with some sides he made to make the log look more like a real guitar.)

But a couple of years later, Leo Fender, another imaginative tinkerer and maker of amplifiers and lap steel guitars for the 1940s hawaiian guitar craze, set the music instrument making world on its ear with his solid body "Broadcaster" and "Esquire" guitars. Fender was sued because the Broadcaster name was too close to the "Broadkaster" set of drums that Gretsch was making at the time. Fender changed the Broadcaster name to Telecaster, and made a killing.

Gibson got the message that people were willing to buy solid body electric guitars and they went looking for "that kid with the broomstick," Les Paul.

Les Paul claimed he was involved in every detail of the design of the guitar that has born his name on and off since 1952, while Gibson people from that time said they basically designed it and would let him nit pick the design in a few details, but the end result was a guitar every bit as iconic as the Fender Telecaster and the Fender Stratocaster which appeared in 1954.


In 1957, Gibson put a new invention by one of their electrical engineers, Seth Lover, into the Les Pauls. This new invention was the "humbucker" pickup that contains twin coils of wire that resisted electrical noise from entering the guitar signal that plagued (and still plagues) Teles, Strats, and Les Pauls with "single coil" pickups.

It then took Eric Clapton and the British-made Marshall amplifiers in the 1960s to generate the classic rock guitar tone that has sold many thousands of Les Paul guitars and Marshall amplifiers.

The sound of a Les Paul guitar with humbucker pickups played through a Marshall amplifier with closed-back cabinets is my favorite musical sound.

I love the sound of guitars of all types, but the Les Paul/Marshall sound is by far my favorite.

Les Paul and his then wife, Mary Ford, another wonderful guitar player herself, topped the music charts with their lush guitar songs in the 1940s and 1950s.

Les Paul is responsible for creating multi-tracking still used in every music studio in the world, even home studios, to allow a guitar player, or singer, or drummer, to play track after track on top of themselves to create complex musical arrangements.

He was one of the first, if not THE first to use flanging, echo, and other effects to give extra dimensions to his guitar sounds. To this day, a HUGE market in the guitar world is in guitar effects electronics, most of which replicate Les Paul's early basic guitar effects.

As a young man, Les Paul had a arm crushed in a car accident, and he had the doctors set his arm bent in such a way as to allow him to play guitar when the cast came off. That arm never worked quite as well afterward, but since it was set for comfortable guitar playing, he was able to play guitar the rest of his life.

94 years is a good long life, and Les Paul was a very outgoing person who loved life.

Thanks Les, for some killer guitar tunes and for helping release the Gibson Les Paul into the world; my favorite guitar.

If you care to, you can learn a little more about Les Paul at Wikipedia.

Phew! I'm Relieved That Those Headlines Were Wrong

I had read that the new Dallas Cowboy's stadium was going to sell single-topping pizzas for $90 each (20 inch pizza).

And I thought, "$90! For a pizza!"

As you can tell I was some-kinda upset.

Then I read a correction today.

The pizzas aren't $90 each.

They're only $60 each.

I am SO relieved to know that.

Peeing in the Shower Helps the Environment

Boy, oh Boy. Ya gotta love this headline:

Brazilian environmentalists: If you've got to go, go green - by going in the shower

Um, maybe I just can't deal with the idea of stepping around in my own urine. To me, the shower is my best shot each day of GETTING CLEAN.

No thanks, I'll just keep using my toilet for that and "waste" that 1.5 gallons.

If a cat can use the toilet, so can I.

Which reminds me, I wonder how Cheryl Crow's "one-square-of-toiler-paper-per-number-two" idea is working out for her.