xxmikexx

Years ago when our home was bursting with life -- two kids, two dogs, five cats, and a squirrel that like to hang out on our deck to pick up the seeds that the birds visiting the feeder would drop ... Ahem ... Years ago my wife named one of the canines Mildred R. Dog. (Get it?) Ever since then our pets have all had first and last names. If you're a cat person you will understand when I say that, unlike dogs, cats do not have owners, they have servants. This is especially true of our black cat Clawdette LaClaw. (Get it?) I am her valet. She tells me in no uncertain terms when I am to make a lap for her, and when I do she expects a full body rubdown, becoming huffy and demanding if I don't respond immediately. Anyway, The Claw (get it?) has taught me a new trick. Having gotten accustomed to sleeping in the hall bathroom sink sometimes, she now tells me when to turn on a trickle of water so she can lap the cool, clean stuff rather than the grungy warm water she would otherwise share with her fellow lifer, Fraidy Cat, aka Freddie. And when The Claw has drunk her fill she lies down outside the bathroom door, guarding it against intruders in the same way that the beautiful statues of the black Nubians once guarded the entrance to the inner shrine of Tutankhamen. That's the only place she will sleep now, that and the sink. Before this she had a dozen different sleeping places and would rotate among them, rarely sleeping in the same place on two successive nights -- a feline Sadaam Hussein avoiding ... ... well, avoiding boredom, I suppose. And when I enter the bathroom now, she talks to me. "Turn the water on" she says. And I do.

dobar, Somebody (me) IS going to be telling the site membership about the blogging feature. I have a feature article in the works even as we speak. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Your avatar looks like a Spit but it also looks like a grainy wartime photo. Would you care to comment? And tell us about Beccles Airfield -- I've not heard of it.

You know, guys, many people would be interested in what you might have to say. All we're doing is having conversations in public. The only difference between this and talking in an airport lounge is that, because everything's in writing, we can't pretend later that we didn't say what we actually did say. So you must have friends, and you must enjoy talking with your friends, yet you don't question why they would want to chat with you. Same deal here. In the immortal words of comedienne Joan Rivers, Can we talk?

Summer ended ten days ago, and winter began yesterday with the first snows in the high country. In a previous blog I suggested an early winter. Now I'm sure of it. It's been raining for the past two days, almost unheard of for August. I'm not talking about thunderstorms, I'm talking about the monsoon that should have occured in June. When the first REAL blast of polar air collides with this moist air coming up from the Gulf we are going to have ... (and I'll commit my prediction in writing here and now) ... eighteen inches of snowfall sometime in late September. And if it isn't eighteen inches of snow then it will be four inches of hail. I've seen both though not in many, many years. That's it, I don't have much more to say. My wife and I had been hoping to get some sun over the past few days but it didn't happen. It's not going to happen till Monday, which is when she starts her new job, so for her the season of the sun is now effectively over.

So ... The rug is tourist kitsch of the worst kind -- because it's a joke, like a T-shirt. (As in "My grandparents went to Cairo and all I got was this expensive but meaningless rug.") The inscriptions mean absolutely nothing, and the artist probably planned it that way, perhaps as some kind of subtle Colonial Getback. But it's an attractive rug, so the Egyptologist grandmother and the Cairo native grandfather bought it -- because they liked it anyway. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx P.S. RGB and I having discovered that we both speak French, I turned my talents to writing Limericks for her in her native language, a crime against nature. :D Here's my best ever ... La reine Francaise nom de Marie Antoinette avait dans belle Paris Une palais ci grand que Le Peuple demand ce mais "Let them eat cake" elle a dit. RGB calls my writings of this kind "Francais Torque" -- twisted French. This Limerick means ... The French queen Marie Antoinette had a palace in Paris <Versailles> so opulent that The People <of the Revolution> demanded to take it over. Here reply was, "I've got mine, Jacques, f-word you."

From the intro to "Make It Funky" ... Bobby Byrd: What you gonna play now, JB? James Brown: Bobby, I don't know. But whats'ever I play, it's got to be funky. So ... Me: What you gonna write about tonight, Mikey? Myself: Mike, I don't know. But whats'ever I write, its got to be a) different, and b) something I feel strongly enough about to motivate me to want to write instead of running the next round of AirBoss carrier landings tests, or taking a nap, or watching Wings Of The Red Star. Something like ... ... ... ... ... ... Ancient Egypt xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I've gotten fairly deep into Ancient Egypt, deep enough that on and off for the past two years I've been trying to learn to read hieroglyphics. I haven't succeeded yet but the effort certainly has been educational. For example, I now know enough about the culture to be able to compose a perfectly plausible tomb protective magic spell ... "He who enters my tomb will be torn apart by babboons and then eaten by hippopotamuses. Crocodiles will feed on his entrails." This may seem comical to you but in reality this would give pause to even the most greedy tomb robber. You see, all Ancient Egyptians, whether of royal blood or simple peasant commoners, could expect continued existence in the afterlife, but only if their bodies were intact. Pharoahs were buried in fantastically costly elaborate tombs, because they could afford it. Commoners might simply be buried in sand, not even wrapped in a shroud. But whatever the manner of burial, the body would usually be preseved somehow and the soul thereby protected. Thus to tell a person that they are going to have their body torn apart and eaten (by animals no less) is to condemn their ka (roughly their soul) to annihilation, a very harsh punishment indeed. I can also compose a perfectly plausible magic spell to be recited to Osiris regarding whether the petitioner should be granted an afterlife ... "I am a good person. I fed the poor and I gave clothing to the naked. I was kind to the crippled old man and I gave much beer and bread to his family. I gave money to the temple priests." xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I've been interested in things Egyptian for fifty years, but it's only in the past ten years that the interest has become intense. Now ... Three years ago I re-established contact with a girlfriend of my pre- and early teens. Shortly after that discovered a mutual interest in Egyptology. In fact, it turned out that she had a grandfather who was Egyptian, with a Parisian grandmother who was an Egyptologist. Well-to-do, the grandparents split their time between Paris and Cairo. (Aside: Not until three years ago did I learn that my girlfriend had been born in Switzerland, and that French was her first language. We were both products of dysfunctional families and we lived in the present, not the past, so we knew very little about each other's backgrounds. It was simply too painful for each of us to bring that stuff up, and anyway none of it mattered. We accepted each other for who we were, caring nothing about who we had been.) So my girlfriend, the infamous wealthy RGB about whom I sometimes write because we came very close to becoming a permanent item, sent me the most wonderful postcard. The card has to do with Ancient Egypt, it was a prized heirloom of hers, yet she gave it to me as a token of what had existed between us so many years before. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I had the card laminated to arrest the ravages of UV light. As I write this piece the card is mounted on the spine of a very wide notebook, where it has been for two years, so I can look at it several times a day. The front of the card is an excellent picture of the famous Tutankhamen death mask on display in the Cairo Museum. (I consider the mask to be the most beautiful art object in the world. I had the privilege of seeing it at the Fields Museum in Chicato thirty years ago when the traveling Cairo Museum exhibit wended its way there.) While I display the card with the artwork side out, it's really the back of the card that holds my interest -- because the card, purchased from the Cairo museum, was sent by RGB's grandmother to RGB's mother in NYC in the spring of 1955. The handwritten inscription says, simply and in French (which I speak too) ... ... Cairo, the 19th of March, 1955. RGB had asked her mother for the card because she loved the picture on the front, and she kept it through all these years, only to give it to me. When she did she wrote several things on it that are of interest only to me, the most important thing being "Michael, this card spans our time ..." And it does. I had known RGB for only about a year when the card was written. (We were ten when we met.) Now I am its custodian, the card sent to me by the RGB I had not laid eyes on since 1957, when we were thirteen and had to go our separate ways as we left the boarding school where we had spent 3.5 years together. Now we were in contact again after a radio silence of almost 50 years. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I met my wife after boarding school, when we were 13, and we've been going steady :) since we were 16. As my feelings for her grew, the enormous hole in my heart that the separation from RGB had caused began to heal. But the hole never fully closed. As I said to RGB three years ago, I had thought of her at least weekly over all these years. As I said to my wife, under only slightly different circumstances I would now be married to RGB instead of to her. You see, my wife knew about RGB. She has always known that RGB existed, but she didn't know the depth of my feelings for RGB because I rarely mentioned her. But when RGB and I began to correspond after all these years she (RGB) invited my wife and I to visit her at her east coast home. (RGB has homes on both coasts. She winters on the seashore near a city in Southern California and she summers on the mid-Atlantic seashore.) I decided to risk explaining to my wife what the real situation had been with RGB so she would be able to understand our conversations, and so she would not feel left out somehow. We spent a wonderful week with RGB, the two women getting along really well, which came as a pleasant surprise because for many women this visit would have been a potential marriage-breaker. When we got there I immediately spotted a piece of Egyptian tourist kitsch, a rectangular beige rug with embroidered hieroglyphic writing. As usual with such things, the arrangement of the words is just as important as the content of the words. In fact, just as there are many different words in English that one can use to express an idea, so were there many different words in Ancient Egyptian that could be strung together in different ways to achieve the same meaning. So a scribe, or a tomb painter, had a lot of latitude in the specifics of the texts he created, and the best of them created visual poetry at the same time that they were creating sequences words to be spoken aloud. Anyway, this rug seemed to be a good example. The modern artist had arranged the symbols attractively and in a way that was entirely plausible. RGB and I agreed that the rug had to be saying SOMEthing, expecially because it too came from her grandparents. I then assigned myself the mission of deciphering the writing on the rug. After six months of casual Internet-based study I hadn't made any headway. I then sent a jpeg of the rug to a couple of scholars, including the famous Zahi Hawass, Director of Egyptian Antiquities, but I never heard back from either of them. Okay, it was time to take by the horns the bull, an animal almost as sacred to the Ancient Egyptians as the cat. I spent a couple of hundred dollars on a number of books about learning to read hieroglypics, and I spent a good part of the summer of 2007 sitting out by our condo pool trying to make sense of what I was seeing on the rug. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx It finally dawned on me that the reason I couldn't read the rug was because it was gibberish. For example and oversimplifying, prominent at the top of the rug is an oval cartouche containing the name of, presumably, a pharoah. (The oval cartouche symbol means simply "name" so in principle it can be that of a noble or high commoner, but that would be unlikely.) I searched for the name very carefully in every Egyptology book that I own. It is not the name of any pharoah known to Egyptologists today. Not only could I not find the name listed anyplace, I couldn't identify a single word in any of the inscriptions. Not one. As single characters the symbols have meaning. For example, a figure of a bent-over person hobbling along with a cane with a curved handle means "old person", or sometimes "wisdom". There are several dozen different characters that make up the rug artwork, and they are all legitimate root words with known meanings ... But I couldn't identify any two-symbol words, or any three-symbol words, and I stopped trying there. You see, one of the books I own is a dictionary of written Ancient Egyptian, organized exactly like Modern Chess Openings, as in ... "Here's an initial symbol. Here are all the second symbols that could follow the first one if we are talking about a two-symbol word, and here are the meanings of all those two-symbol words. And if you consider three-symbol words, here are all the possibilities." ... And so on. I was not able to link any part of the text to any part of the dictionary, or to anything in any of the other books.

My apologies, skylab, but when my memory fails, as it obviously did in this case, I have no way of knowing it. I hope I'm not getting Alzheimer's but it's a fact that my wife can tell me something and two days later I'll remember nothing about it. Another thing is the classic senior moments, for example an everyday word that's on the tip of my tounge that I just can't retrieve and for which I have to use a circumlocution. The good thing about a failing memory is that you can't tell when it's failing, so it's really not a problem at all. :D xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx EDIT: Sometimes I can be quite dense. I didn't get your joke till just now, eight or so hours later. So I didn't forget anything here after all.

Almost certainly you're right about it being the shotgun. More than most guns, because of the large powder charge it puts out a huge square wave of sound. It's the fast rise time that does the damage. Tell us about Viscounts. I've ridden them here and abroad, and twice had the privilege of riding up front (in England in 1960), but I have no idea what it's handling characteristics are like. I would guess that it's lighter on the controls than a Connie or DC-4/6/7, but you tell me.

I meant that my blog post was finally ended. As for ringing in the ears, it does count if it's a ringtone. :D xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Seriously, I sometimes get ringing in my ears too, and while it bumps the music sometimes, it too is a curse. Yet I can tune it out much of the time. In fact, I can overlay it with music and push the ringing to the back of the mix. So in that respect I guess I'm lucky compared to you. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx EDIT: What IS always in my background is the high-pitched pink noise hiss of , I assume, blood flowing through my ears. But it's been there so long that it doesn't bother me the way the ringing does.

And now to try to get to the point … I was forced to become our producer, a job I had not realized would need to exist. I thought that I would be able to simply give an assignment to the keyboard player of a band (who was typically the MIDI guy) and get a finished sequence back 2-3 weeks later, his having worked on it in his spare time, as the spirit moved him, which wasn’t very often. (As the leader of a duo once said to me with complete sincerity, and in his exactl words that I will never forget, “If JJ and I had wanted to work for a living we would not have become musicians.”) But things didn’t work out that way. Experience soon showed that the only way we were going to get a good sequence back was for me to study each and every part in tiny detail so I could issue cautions and warnings to the guy who would be doing the sequencing. Because I had learned that there is a difference between note-for-note and sonically perfect. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx For example, in Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour” there’s a faint triangle part that runs through the whole song. Even I had missed it in casual listening, but as I began to analyze the piece the part suddenly leapt into my consciousness, where it remained. Now I could hear how the triangle interacted with all the other instruments. And then I realized that at a subconscious level I had been hearing the part all along, as would the audience listening to the original recording. So it was my job to identify not only the note-for-note stuff but also all the subliminal stuff, and to bring it to the foreground so that our musicians would now be able to hear and sequence the parts. Even then it was common for me to have to replace whole tracks in the delivered sequences because, as it turns out, even musicians with golden ears have selective weaknesses in their hearing. Even though I play bass, one of my weaknesses is background bass parts. So in George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex”, my ace sequence guy had to point out to me that there were actually five different bass parts way back in the mix. He could hear those parts, but he had to show them to me before I could hear them. Yet I could hear every nuance of a Larry Carlton guitar solo, which he could not. And so I would do his guitar tracks for him – bar by bar because I can’t play lead, only hear it. (I should mention that we did almost every track live. I wouldn’t allow any quantized parts though I would allow looping in drum tracks. Later I created software for enhancing the live feel of our sequences, another story for another day.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx So that’s how I got back into the business of listening to music over and over again. I simply HAD to, whether or not I liked the music that the marketing part of me determined that we needed to be selling. So I learned to listen analytically, and I learned to appreciate music from a whole new viewpoint. In particular, I quickly became able to sort music into four boxes – I like/dislike it, versus it’s good/bad music. So … Walkin’ On Sunshine -- Katrina and the Waves -- bad music, and I hate it. Shotgun -- Junior Walker and the All-Stars -- bad music and I absolutely LOVE it. Every Breath – The Police – terrifically good music, but I absolutely HATE it Pick Up The Pieces – Average White Band – great music and I simply LOVE it. I made these assessments after listening to the pieces we might cover 50-100-150 times. It takes that many listenings for even golden ears to learn to stop hearing only the foreground parts and instead dig deeply into the mix. My job was not done until I was hearing everything that the original producer had put into the recording. Today I still listen to music that way. So, for example, 2-3 times a year I’ll listen to “Get Down Tonight” by K.C. and the Sunshine Band. And I’ll listen and listen and listen until very tiny nuance of the solo guitar part is once again in my mental playback of the song when I’m away from the computer. Until I can hear the exact way Harry Casey (K.C.) mic'ed the drums. And so on. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I have to do stuff like this even today because otherwise the tape recorder in my brain takes over. You see, I hear music all the time. ALL the time. Even when I’m asleep. 99.99% of the time it’s other people’s music. 0.0001% of the time it’s original music that I suddenly hear but that’s gone again after one hearing. But I’m not crazy, and I’m not alone. About 15 years ago I caught a 60 Minutes interview with Miles Davis. He said the same thing – that he hears music all the time. Ed Bradley then asked him “Are you hearing music now? While you’re speaking with me?” “Of course” said Davis, and I knew exactly what he meant. “What are you hearing?” asked Bradley. Davis’ reply was roughly “I’m listening <note that he said ‘listening’, not ‘hearing’> to a James Brown piece. I’m listening to the way he arranged the instruments spatially, and to the way the instruments are interacting in the stereo field.” Well, I knew immediately which JB piece he meant – When You Touch Me – because I listen to it from the exact same viewpoint. And now, as I write this, the piece has begun to run in my brain. I will not be able to stop it, it will stop of its own accord when it is good and ready to stop, thank you very much. Trust me, this business of always hearing music is a curse, because I can’t control the playlist. I never know whether the song I’m hearing is going to stop in an hour or a month. I can override the playlist, but that requires constant attention, and it usually makes me unable to code or write. Worse still, it's sometimes music in the bad-and-I-hate-it category. It's my brain's way of saying "Look, Mike, there's no such thing as bad music. Every piece has some kind of redeeming qualities, even "Walkin' On Sunshine". xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx And with that I declare this blog to be ended.

The full story of my pioneering company Golden Midi Music And Software is for another day. Here it is sufficient to note that we were the first, and the best, to create cover music sequences that were note-for-note faithful to the original recordings, the business having opened its doors to the public early in 1988. A number of well-known bands used our sequences as intermission music, including Aerosmith, Steve Miller, the German group Kraftwerk, and the mid-west perennial group Hat Trick, but our bread-and-butter business was working two-man bands that wanted to sound like 6-8 man bands, plus amateur "closet record producers", in a ratio of about five to one. There are many technical problems in constructing sequences that will work across a wide variety of sequencers and tone generators, and the issue of drum machine incompatibilities is a big one, but I don’t want to talk about that stuff today either. What I want to talk about instead are the musical aspects of a cover music sequence, and the impact this has had on the way I listen to music even today, twenty years later. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Again compressing a lengthy presentation, one of the things I found is that most musicians – the overwhelming majority of musicians – are deficient in one respect or another when it comes to musical hearing. Now you can’t sequence what you don’t hear, so to make a long story short, I found that only one musician in twenty could hear what I needed to be heard, and therefore only about one in twenty sequence creator wannabes could do what I needed done. This all surprised me because it turns out that I have what are known as “golden ears”, and until starting the business I assumed that everybody else did too, which 'tain't so. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx As a kid in NYC, every day I rode the subway to a prep school, and later to NYU. As often as not I would entertain myself by playing music in my head. This was a lot of fun because I would be able to play entire records note-for-note, the only difference being that the playback in my head is being run through a notch filter so that it all comes out sounding like it would on an AM radio, which was effectively my only source of music at the time. You see, I didn’t own more than a half-dozen carefully selected LPs, and I owned almost no 45s. Only if I felt the need to hear certain things repetitively in high fidelity would I spend my money on recorded music. Most of the time the recording was right there in my head with sufficient frequency response to satisfy me, my interests being in rhythm, harmony and melody in that order, with sonic quality being a very distant fourth. (I spent my money instead on my girlfriend. We are still married, having been joined at the lip since age 16.) Note what I said in the preceding paragraph – “hear certain things repetitively in high fidelity”. When it comes to music that I really really really like, sonic quality suddenly becomes important, and listening to the music over and over and over again also becomes important, because I want to hear everything that the producer put in the recording, and I want to enjoy all the hooks that I’m hearing whether or not the original producer was conscious of them. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I thought everybody was like this, except that they simply spent more money on records than I did. Yet the signs of trouble were already there. As I mentioned elsewhere I played semi-pro rhythm guitar for many years while I was a student. But I also worked as an arranger for the bands I was in, and for other bands too. You see, people were constantly coming to me and saying things like “I can play the chords for ‘The Wiggle Wobble’, but somehow the second chord in the progression doesn’t sound right. What’s right here?’ Whereupon I would show the questioner what the correct chord voicing was or, in some cases, what the correct chord was. That’s right. Most working bands, especially frat house bands, have to be Top 40 cover bands. That’s what you need to do if you want to get paid for playing, which was fine with me because I loved Top 40 stuff. In fact I loved all of it, and I knew most of it note for note. So I was the go-to guy for what was going on in the various Top 40 records of any given moment in time. On more than one occasion I was called in on an emergency basis to teach a band how to play a new record that was just breaking out because they would be working a wedding that weekend, or they were playing at some frat party that night, or whatever. So I was an arranger in the sense that I could tell every musician how his part needed to go. I couldn’t play drums, but I could hear them and I could tell the drummer how to play his part. Ditto for bass (which I do play), and for rhythm guitar (which I do play), and for lead parts (which I don’t play), and for keyboard stuff, and horn riffs, and horn section chords, and on and on and on. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I hear it all, and I hear most of it simultaneously. I had a very interesting experience a few years back reading an interview with Henry Mancini. He got his start the same way I did, by showing people how to reproduce what was on recordings. He said that he could take a set of 78 rpm disks for the recording of a big band piece and track each of the horns through the mix with no problem at all. Well, of course. I can do that too. Can’t everybody? No, not everybody can. In fact, as I learned at Golden Midi, hardly anybody can. The ones who can are the arrangers and the producers. They may or may not also actively play, but they all have golden ears. You have to.

P.S. Your posting profile says "Dark Side of The Moon". Does this mean you're a Pink Floyd fan?

That's an interesting point, Bob, let's talk about it. However, it then gets us into the question of what constitutes music. Here's my problem ... I certainly agree that the music of the west, and of Polynesia, is mathematical. We have octaves, thirds, fifths, harmonies that can be discussed analytically. We have rhythms which even more clearly can be described mathematically. We allow ourselves much more freedom for melodies, variations in timing timing and pitch control being the essence of singing styles, but the singing always takes place with a backdrop of mathematics. But then we come up against something like Tibetan music ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I can relate to Chinese and Japanese music. Their ideas of pitch interval are different from ours but I believe they still have octaves. I certainly can relate to Egyptian music, which is one of my favorites because they have 8-bar music patterns, something that we can relate to directly. I can relate to Greek polyrhythms too, the most famous western example being Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", which is in 5/4 time, easier to comprehend than 13/4, which is very interesting indeed. I can relate to the music of India with its 100+ ragas because we have ragas too, as in 12-bar blues, technopop, country swing, and so on. (We call them "bags", not ragas.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But when I bought my first and only album of Tibetan music, I was both floored and stumped. I couldn't believe it. To me it did and does sound not like music but instead like a cat fight. Obviously it's a form of (religious) communication, and it uses things that we would recognize as specialized musical instruments (like bells), but there was only "melody" -- no discernible trace of harmony or rhythm -- and there seemed to be no rules for the melodies. Certainly there was no concept of octave. I didn't analyze it at the time but the monks' voices (I don't recall any chorales) probably were simply wandering around within the span of, perhaps, a fifth. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Never before or since have I encountered music that I could not identify as music. There might be other such human music -- music with no rules that would be apparent to the western ear -- but if so I have not heard any. So aliens might communicate the way Tibetan monks communicate with the gods in their "melodic" chants, but there would be no mathematical content to this kind of thing, as far as I can tell.

Okay then. Herewith, a link to one of my favorite (but very obscure) music videos, Bootsy Collins as Bootzilla in "Party On Plastic" ... My kids can't believe what I listen to either but my younger grandson can -- he got the music genes and he too loves James Brown.

The original artist is War themselves, the same folks who did "Cisco Kid" ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgZVnamjEsQ and "Slippin' Into Darkness" ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3lbsEfwhK4&feature=related Along with Eric Burdon they also did "Spill The Wine", but I really dislike that number and will not provide an URL. :D xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Well now. If we can only get together on jazz funk that is still a very large universe of music. How do you feel about ... James Brown Herbie Hancock We3 (I think that's their name) Sly Stone James Brown George Clinton Bootsy Collins (Rubber Band) (Did I mention James Brown?) And not in a funk vein but how do you like ... Sugarloaf Steve Miller Band Cannonball Adderly Steely Dan Isely Brothers Doug Kershaw

Doc DeHaven -- I've heard of him so I guess that's why I didn't list him. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Booker T. and the MG's ... I don't own a lot of music but in what I do own is the 8-CD Stax/Volt set -- the complete catalog as of when they shut down and sold themselves to Atlantic. Of course "Low Rider" isn't in there because it hadn't been written yet when Stax closed. Do you have a URL for the Booker T version? As for Mulligan, I find berry sax just as boring as bass solos, and that comes from a bass player. The only baritone sax playing that I've ever liked is the back-up playing by Saint Claire Pinckney, Jame's Brown's musical director. Spartan and tasteful -- just like bass should be.

I'm familiar with many but not all of the names on your list, but I did notice the Dukes of Dixieland ... My sister was seven years older than me and my parents favorite. So she got neat stuff, like a nice early model stereo record player, and the first 33 that she bought was the original Dukes of Dixieland album. (This was in 56, I think. I don't know what happened with the group after that, you will have to tell me.) I remember the jacket saying that those guys never improvised -- that all the arrangements had been worked out down to the last note and were played the same way every time. That was my introduction to Dixieland jazz. It's not the kind of music that I would ever buy, but I can listen to it from a producer's viewpoint and admire it even if it's not my cup of tea. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx In terms of likes (as opposed to simply familiar with), we are on the same page re Dave Brubeck Bill Doggett Aretha Franklin Jimmy Smith Pinetop Perkins Santana Dukes of Dixieland Louis Prima Now … You can’t stand polka, I can’t stand Gerry Mulligan. I’ve never heard of the following people, I sure hope you’re not going to tell me that Google is my friend … Richard Holmes Hank Crawford Ray Prysock Prayful Bryan Shanley Lighthouse Allstars Gene Ammons Cal Tjader Keiko Matsui Everybody else on your list I know, and I'm familiar with their music, but if I didn't list it under our common likes then it means I don't care for their stuff. (Though again, I can listen to anything from the viewpoint of a producer.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Now ... If you like Santana then you might like Latino jazz funk as exemplified by the group War. Check out "Low Rider" ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6c3emqC6aw You likee yes or you likee no? <Did we have this conversation a few months back? I have a strong sense of deja vu here.>

The dearly departed member is Paxx. He said that he was going to Avsim, which is fine, he'll be happy there because nobody at Avsim will be capable of calling him out when he's wrong, and I don't go there very often, certainly not to pursue anybody. Apart from the Microsoft people there is one other person in the FS community who knows more than Paxx, and that person is (drum roll) ... ... ... ... Pete Dowson of FSUIPC fame. I don't think there's anybody else. Pete truly is a remarkably strong technical programmer. I admire him in the same way that Keith Richards admires Chuck Berry. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Okay ... Re the oil stuff, you've reacted to what I wrote, now I'm not going to write anything more about it on this site. Re the pay of airline pilots, I would like to see us re-regulate certain aspects of airline operations, including raising the pay scales for flight deck crews so as to reduce the airlines' incentives to promote people to the left seat simply because they're young and cheap. I want to know that the guy in the left seat has years of experience and thousands of hours, and I'm willing to pay for that assurance. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Re music lessons, like you I took piano lessons at an early age, in my case five, and at my mother's insistence. The lessons didn't go on for very long. As I was being taught to read, the confines of the written music (Bach preludes) were getting to me and I wanted to swing out and play the pieces my way. :) The teacher was having none of it, and so the irresistible force met the immovable object -- and I refused to go any more. I didn't touch another instrument till I was ten, which was blues harmonica, self taught. Then I taught myself to play guitar (and mandolin and ukelele, which are really all the same thing). I'll write more about this tonight but I played semi-pro late in high school and throughout college. I was the best rhythm guitarist I knew (can't play lead at all) but I wasn't the best that I was hearing on the radio. So I gave up all thoughts of becoming a studio guy ... ... And I never did learn to read. Got a mental block for some strange reason. :) And anyway, 80% of session guys can't read ... ... And I absolutely LOVE polka music. Who can't love "In Heaven There Is No Beer?" ... In heaven, there is no beer. That's why we drink it here. And someday, when you're no longer here, Your friends will be drinking all the beer. Courtesy of Frankie Yankovic. By the way, it turns out that even though they have the same last name, and even though they both play the accordion (well, Frankie's dead), Frankie Yankovic and Weird Al Yankovic were not related. They did a couple of gigs together just for fun but they had no relatives in common that they knew about. Inquiring minds want to know about stuff like this. :) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Anyway, for the sequenced cover music business I had to learn to fake it on keyboards. I'm really not very good at all, but thanks to punching in I can sound like Jimmy Smith if I need to. And I had to do that once -- the Jimmy Smith B-3 organ solo for an obscure piece called "Walk The Dinosaur". I played it into a sequencer 1-2 bars at a time, one hand at a time, with the other tracks running in parallel, and the result sounded fine. But I can only finger in the key of C so I had to get a MIDI keyboard that would do transpostion. (We needed a good one anyway, I just didn't want to pay $2,000 for a touch sensitive 88-key Yamaha or whatever it would have been.) Anyway, I can make a MIDI track do whatever I want it to do, I just can't play the instruments in real life. :D xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Now ... Tell me about Ragtime. Who did/do you like?

Well, some people are basically analytical of the natural world, like me, and other people are basically accepting of the natural world, like you I suppose. I'm happy doing engineering type stuff, you were happy to simply fly the aircraft that engineers had designed. It's essential to the human race that we have both kinds of people. So maybe this article will appeal only to the analytical crowd -- to the people who would like to tweak their aircraft but don't know how to go about it. That's fine. You read it and that's sufficient for me as an author. But you know, because of my musician background, and because of my short career as a producer of MIDI sequenced music for computer bands, I'm both left brained and right brained in my approach to music. I guess I'll make that the subject of tonight's blog. (As I said two weeks ago, for me a blog a day keeps the doctor at bay.) In the meantime ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx People are posting to the Energy Independence thread in The Yard after all so perhaps the problem is simply the mods plus rgarber, all of whom are leaving me alone today. Why don't you read it and see whether you want to chime in. As for Ready For Pushback, I'd just as soon do the politics, religion and discrimination stuff at The Yard rather than at my PC Game Controls site, though I'll certainly do it if it's the only way to get a free speech platform for me and for people of all viewpoints who are willing to be civil, and tolerant of even the most extreme viewpoints, even when the discussions get vigorous. (My feeling is that most people are smart, not dumb, and that really stupid ideas and positions will be seen as such by most people, hence there's no threat and no need to try to censor ideas and attitudes, only a need to intervene on civility matters now and then.) xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I don't know about you but I find that I learn the most from people I disagree with because their attempts to bring me around to their viewpoint invariably result in information that's new to me. (And sometimes people will actually cause me to change a position, see below for an example.) I find this to be just as true in technical matters as it is in politics etc. So for example I often try to get debates going in the PC Software Tech forum because I figure that if I'm learning stuff from people who won't get with my programs, then the readership will too. But there's a fundamental difference between somebody disagreeing with me for sound technical reasons, versus somebody disagreeing with me because they're speaking out of ignorance and/or providing misinformation. In the latter cases I correct them, coming down hard if they won't accept correction. (Like a certain arrogant member who departed this site the other day because, I do believe, he suddenly realized that when it comes to operating system principles of operation there's a new sheriff in town -- and always has been.) Yet member loki caused me to do a complete 720 degree change of direction regarding my approach to system backups. The debate got vigorous, I explained the crux of my position, he showed me that I was wrong on that particular point, and as a result my whole view of the issue changed on the spot. That's why I love forums. Never a horse that couldn't be rode, Never a rider that couldn't be throwed.

I told webmaster Nels Anderson yesterday that I would like to write a series of short How To ... articles regarding making simple changes to Aircraft.Cfg for the purpose of overcoming common nuisances. He likes the idea because he would like to see more of the technical kind of How To ... articles. But how did I come to be able to make such changes? After all, the common perception is that when it comes to FDE, only experts can make such changes because "Everything interacts with everything else." Yes and no. Yes, to a certain extent everything does interact with everything else, see below. But no, for many common problems and annoyances you don't have to be an FDE expert. All you really need is an understanding of basic arerodynamics, which will be covered by the first article in the series. In advance of the article I'll give a short summary and a simple example ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx You will be way ahead of the game if you understand that, in straight and level flight at constant airspeed, lift must precisely equal the weight of the aircraft, and engine thrust must precisely equal the sum of all the drag forces acting on the aircraft. If lift didn't equal weight the aircraft would either climb or descend. If thrust didn't equal total drag the aircraft would either speed up or slow down. Common sense, nothing more. No requirement for wearing a beanie with a twirly thing on top. Now let's talk about drag. It isn't immediately obvious, but when you think about it there must be basically two kinds of drag actiing on the aircraft. The first kind is obvious -- so-called "form drag". Form drag results simply from the aircraft moving forward through the air. The aircraft has to force the air aside as it flies. The higher the airspeed the more air needs to be shoved aside per unit time -- and therefore the greater the retarding force. Thus form drag clearly must depend on airspeed -- very high at Mach 3, nearly zero at taxi speeds. Again, common sense. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The other kind of drag is "induced drag". As you already know, to generate lift the wing must maintain a non-zero and positive angle of attack. Remember sticking your hand out the car window when you were a kid? Edge on and there was relatively little drag. But when you tilted your hand it would climb -- and be forced back. The rearward acting force is induced drag. It comes about because the airfoil has a positive angle of attack when it is generating lift -- and this positive angle of attack causes the lift vector to be tilted away from the vertical. The result is that the vertical component generates the lift while the rearward component generates the induced drag. You can't have the one without the other. Now ... If you think about it, to maintain constant lift a fast-flying aircraft will need a shallower angle of attack than it would at low airspeed. As the angle of attack becomes lower with increasing airspeed, the reardward component of the lift vector becomes smaller. That's right -- as airspeed increases, form drag decreases, and conversely. And now for the part that is a bit less obvious but just as easy to understand ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Clearly the total drag on the aircraft must be the sum of form drag and induced drag. Again, common sense. But what isn't immediately obvious is that if you were to make a graph of total drag versus airspeed you would find it to be shaped like a U or a bathtub -- it would have a minimum value at some particular airspeed. And now you will just have to take my word on something. (If you don't want to take my word on it you will have to study fluid dynamics.) At faster than that minimum airspeed, the form drag component of total drag will increase somewhat rapidly at the same time that induced drag is gradually decreasing. At slower than that minimum airspeed, induced drag will increase somewhat rapidly while form drag slowly decreases. Therfore total drag will be higher on BOTH sides of the minimum drag airspeed, and this is why the graph of total drag versus airspeed is bathtub-shaped. And that's almost everything we need to know about aerodynamics to be able to solve problems like the following ... xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx When I inherited the Erick Cantu 727-200 airframe with the Charles Fox FDE I found that the aircraft, when slowed at cruising altitude from .81M to .60M in preparation for descent, was taking about 10 nm to slow. I happen to know that real 727s are "slippery" and require more nearly 20 nm to slow than 10 nm. So the question on the floor becomes, How do you make the aircraft take more distance to slow down? Well, in principle you could artificially increase engine flight idle thrust, somewhat lessening the effect of total drag on the slowdown process. There is a parameter in aircraft.cfg that would allow you to do exactly this. Trouble is, it would increase thrust in all other situations too. ("Everything interacts with everything else.") So we're not going to do that. Instead we're going to think about the problem ... ... ??? ... ... ... ?!? ... ... !!!. Go to the head of the class if you said that we need to decrease the form drag. This will allow us to leave the engine thrust parameter alone, and it will have little effect on the low-speed handling characteristics of the aircraft, where the drag forces are dominated by induced drag rather than form drag. So if we make a modest reduction in form drag, something like five or ten percent, we should find the aircraft slowdown distance increasing ... And so it does. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx But now we have created another common sense problem. The lower form drag means that at cruising airspeed the aircraft will require less thrust to maintain airspeed. Less thrust means lower fuel consumption, and it also means an artificially lower reading of the fuel flow gauge. But those are the only important interactions. It isn't EVERYthing that is interacting with EVERYthing here, it's form drag interacting with thrust and therfore fuel consumption. The situation is actually very simple when you think about it, and all that we needed was an understanding of basic aerodynamics in order to see which aircraft.cfg parameters need to be modified ... form drag engine thrust fuel flow So that's what these articles will be about. Not about how to achieve the utmost in realism in all parameter behaviors in all flight regimes, but instead HOW TO MAKE THE SIMULATED AIRCRAFT DO WHAT YOU WANT IT TO DO. Once more, common sense prevails. It's not black magic and we don't have to be beanie-wearing propellerheads to make the right things happen. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Gee ... I guess I just wrote that first article, didn't I? :D That's fine, when I want to release it I'll know exactly where to find it, and in the meantime almost nobody will have read it, except perhaps for my good friend skylab.

Let's now treat this thread as locked, and we'll find other things to talk about. I'll do my daily blog in a few hours, not that I have the slightest idea what I'm going to write about.

P.S. It's goodbye Yard for me too. I received a PM from a different moderator making it clear that I am most unwelcome there ... Which is fine. I'm a tremendous site traffic builder with a large readership that likes to follow me around. If the mods are unable to see the business value of that, or if they don't care about the business value, it's their loss, not mine. Of course if somebody actually does post to that thread I left then it might be a different story. But they have a double standard now. One set of rules for the people the moderators like (like posting political, religious and race topics is okay), and another set for me (like This Is A Train Simulator Site And Don't You Dare Come In Here Again Making Trouble With Your Posts About Political, Religious and Race Topics). :D An aside: Folks, when I posted about race over there it was from the perspective of someone who grew up with parents who were active in the civil rights movement of the late 1940s, when it was REALLY dangerous to be involved with that stuff. I'm not a racist, I was simply talking to people who ARE racists. But that's all I'm going to say here about anything like that. I will make no further posts here at FlightSim that really belong in the old Yard or the pending Ready For Pushback. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This is why I need "Ready To Push". Without stepping on anybody else's toes it will be my playground and my rules, which will be very few rules other than politeness required.

You might also check out http://www.airnav.com They have a lot of stuff beyond the simple portal into the NACO/FAA charts database. But no, I didn't see your question. I wonder how I missed it.

By the way, I'm working with Asad Studios to get a preliminary PC Game Controls website going. It's going to have forums plural, I think I'll set one up called "The Runup Area", or "Ready For Pushback" :D, or some such thing.

"Cheers" sounds like "Goodbye". Does it mean that?