Cat giving a massage

I had lunch last week at a local eatery and I noticed this sign on the table:

How is it that a pizzeria in San Luis Obispo knows anything about Barack Obama’s favorite “pie?” Maybe he mentioned it in an interview. I suppose it makes sense. Cheese and sausage. It’s a classic combination. Especially for a Chicagoan. And for a politician, it makes a good statement. It’s simple. Elegant, almost. Not too decadent or overloaded with toppings, but also not too left-of-center. Like say, a Hawaiian pizza or (gasp!) a vegetarian pizza. Cheese and sausage. That’s a working man’s slice, right there.

I’d still like to know if it is indeed true. Or did Woodstock’s just make it up so they could cash in on the Barack Obama merch craze. Maybe it was just a clever way to sell inexpensive pizzas to the restaurant’s primary clientele, cash-strapped college kids. Kinda makes me wonder what John McCain’s favorite pizza is. Actually, I doubt pizza is a regular part of his diet these days.

A conversation I had on Twitter got me to thinking of all of the guitars I’ve owned in my life. I started playing as a thirteen-year old, which means I’ve been playing for almost 20 years. In that time, I’ve owned quite a few guitars. The thing about being a guitarist is, it’s easy (if not natural) to become obsessed with these instruments. A(n apparently not-so) brief history:

Christmas, 1989: I received a Harmony Stratocaster copy as my first guitar. My parents probably bought it from the Fingerhut catalog. It came with a cheap little amplifier that sounded pretty awful. I was happy to get the instrument, but I had been saving up to buy an Epiphone Flying V from a neighbor kid. I remember wishing that my parents had just bought the Epiphone, even if it was used. The Harmony had horrible action and it wasn’t very much fun to play. But I learned the basics by playing the instrument, so I guess it served its purpose. A few years later, I sold it to a friend for something like $50.00. He later painted it black. I wonder whatever happened to that guitar?

January, 1991: One of the kindest (and probably dumbest) things my parents did was let both me and my sister cash in some savings bonds they had bought for us when we were born. My sister eventually put her money towards buying a car. I used some of my bond money to buy my second guitar and amp setup from Guitar Attic in Island Lake, IL. The guitar was another Strat copy, this time made by Lotus. The Lotus probably wasn’t much of an upgrade from the Harmony, but I did pick up a 75-watt Fender combo amp, and that was a big step up from the cheap little Harmony amp I had been using. In the following months, I really began to “get” the guitar. I spent hours almost every day, locked in my room, listening to albums and then trying to replicate the riffs I’d heard through my stereo. It was during that time that I began buying guitar magazines and playing along with the tablature sheets printed inside.

Spring, 1993: I was outgrowing the Lotus/Fender combination. Through reading guitar magazines, and playing other peoples’ guitars, I was beginning to have a better understanding of what I really wanted in an instrument. I eventually convinced my dad to take me to the Guitar Center that was then on the north side of Chicago. I wasn’t necessarily looking to get a new instrument. I just wanted to go to Guitar Center, as it seemed like this kind of mythical place I’d been hearing about. I went into the store and pulled a guitar off the rack and plugged it in to a nearby amp. My dad could tell that I was really enjoying the guitar and the amplifier, so he offered to buy them both. I had mixed emotions about this, as my dad had lost his job the previous year, and it seemed to me like this was a pretty frivolous expenditure. He didn’t seem too concerned about it, so I wound up taking the new gear home. This time, it was a slick Barrington (a short-lived instrument company, based out of Barrington, IL) electric guitar and a 60-watt Crate amplifier. This was a pretty big upgrade, as the guitar had a Gotoh locking tremolo system and (as I learned later) an EMG humbucker in the bridge. That, combined with the Crate’s pure solid-state gain made the metal riffs I was constantly hammering out sound pretty awesome. (As a side note, I had no idea at the time how much Guitar Center would figure into my future musical purchases.)

Summer, 1993: I had saved up some money and was taken by an ad in the paper for a “Strat-like guitar” someone was selling for only $100.00. The guitar wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great, either. It was a Harmony. Not a pure Strat copy – this one had an Igniter II (!) humbucker in the bridge. I grew tired of this guitar pretty quickly and eventually sold it at a flea market.
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My kids at school put
Ranch Dressing on their pizza
As a topping! Eww!

Antibiotics
First round didn’t work for me
My sinuses cry

Things are looking up for this year’s RPM Challenge. I’ve completed my guitar repairs (scratch that off the to-do list), though they didn’t go quite like I’d hoped. Back in 2007, I purchased a Line 6 Variax electric guitar because I was intrigued by the instrument’s capabilities. Of course I could only afford the low-end model, and the low-end model comes with an equivalent neck. I loved the guitar’s electronics, but hated the feel of the neck. Never shying away from an opportunity to destroy two perfectly good guitars, I removed the neck from my old Fender Telecaster (loved that neck!) and made some DIY modifications that allowed me to swap out the stock Variax neck for the Tele neck. I learned later that this isn’t really an advisable move, as the Telecaster has a different body design than the Variax. But, I had already made the switch and things seemed to be going OK. And then I started getting dead frets on the guitar’s low-E string. I made some adjustments to try and fix the problem, but nothing worked. I did some research online and found a great video tutorial on how to do electric guitar setups. I was particularly interested in the video about fret filing, as I believed that’d be the solution to the dead fret problem. It looked easy enough! I ordered some special fret files from Stewart MacDonald and picked up a few other things from a local hardware store. Once I had everything together, I began filing down the frets, and it seemed like I was making progress. The initial dead fret problem was clearing up. But then, other frets started to go and no matter how much I filed, I couldn’t get them to sound properly. Figuring that I had probably hit overkill with the filing, I decided to give in, and swapped the Tele neck out for the original Line 6 neck.

Line 6 Variax with modified Telecaster neck, on the operating table.
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I got this book as an unexpected gift, from a friend of mine. She started reading it, only to find that the author’s writing style was driving her insane. Frustrated beyond belief, she skipped to the end, and handed to book to me, wondering what I would think of it. Not the most positive way to be introduced to an author whose work was new to me, I admit. My friend told me the book had vampires in it, knowing that this would catch my attention. I do read a lot of books that include vampires. So, I decided to give it a read.

I must admit, I have mixed feelings about this book. The author has a unique writing style that I, like my friend, found to be confusing. It’s kind of hard to explain without directly plagiarizing large sections of the book here. McKinley’s main character, a woman nicknamed “Sunshine”, tends to start a thought, and then go off on tangents that lead in several different directions. By the time she returns to the first thought again, I was lost. I also had a difficult time keeping the many characters introduced in the first few chapters straight. Their descriptions were mere pencil sketches, and there were so darn many of them. Some of McKinley’s sentences use the same word twice, one immediately followed by the other. After tripping over several of them, and having to go back and attempt to sort out the meaning, I found myself getting very frustrated. Nothing about this book can be described as “an easy read”!

What kept me from just giving up on this book was what I could make out of the story line. The universe this story exists in fascinated me. Magic exists, and is not only well accepted, but depended upon. People make money by selling charms of protection, and everyone has several of these magic protections in their homes, embedded in their cars, and, often, tattooed on their bodies as well. They need all this protection from “The Others” : demons, incubuses, vampires, were-beings, and things not yet defined. Vampires are especially hated, because they have taken over the world (especially the finances), and also because, well, they eat humans. Anyone suspected of having any magic or “other” in their blood is someone to be suspicious of. There is an entire police unit that keeps track of these people.
I found this interesting, and wanted to know more about how this all worked.

Nothing in this book is as it seems. Sunshine has a background that she barely remembers, and does not know the full meaning of. She gets kidnapped by a group of vampires, as a temptation for another vampire, whom they have also kidnapped. There is a complex story line involving vampire politics, which somewhat explain what was really going on at that moment. This event takes place early on in the story, so, as a reader, you know that Sunshine survives…. just not how, or as what. This was enough for me to want to read to the end of the book. Sunshine finds her world turned upside down, and ends up having to make some difficult choices. In the process, she discovers who she really is, and what she can do. I realize this description is a bit vague, but, so is the book, in parts.

Overall, if you really enjoy books about vampires, and magic, and all of that sort of thing, then you might want to venture through the tangled writing style, to read this book. The story hidden within is a good one, if you can stick with the book long enough to piece it out. I think most people, however, are going to find themselves as frustrated as my friend was with McKinley’s prose, and giving up on it as well.

Whoo! One parrot expresses his happiness about the U.S. President.

This one can say the whole name

Listen, and the parrot will tell you.