The Mandela Effect and WTF?

I was born in 1974 and therefore grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. There are a lot of things I remember very clearly from my time growing up (and some that I don’t). What I do know is that all of these memories are real. I can remember the color of the first telephone we had in our house… and how it had a long, dangling cord that I would sit on and swing back and forth when I was a wee, little child. I can remember the brand name of the flush valve handle that was on the toilet in that house, the tile pattern in dad’s den, the color of the carpet dad bought at the local hotel when they remodeled (I think it was then a Best Western and still is), the phone numbers as well as addresses of all of my local friends (y’know, within Continue reading The Mandela Effect and WTF?

Pain don’t hurt

I get bored when I’m not home incessantly fucking with my wife about every silly thing (I still have no idea how I tricked my wife into marrying me) so I end up looking up equally silly stuff on the internet instead. Today, I was wondering why I’ve never had a headache… I need to caveat that by saying that I don’t have a lot of memories of what went on in my youth and I may have had headaches then, but I don’t now. Also, I do experience sinus pressure in the mucus membrane when I have a cold or the flu, or other viruses, but that’s just pressure right behind my face. I don’t consider that a headache. In the broader term, I don’t get headaches. It turns out that the “never getting headaches” thing goes a bit deeper. It’s most likely not that I don’t get headaches, Continue reading Pain don’t hurt

So this sucked

At about 8:30pm on Tuesday 3/8/2022, I was viciously attacked by this coat hanger. I don’t care if this coat hanger has an alibi or tries to shift the blame elsewhere, I will always know that this little fucker did it maliciously and with forethought. This coat hanger should be in prison. Thinking back, I should have known something was wrong. When I first opened the door to the hotel room, I heard that sound that you hear in those Friday the 13th movies when Jason is in cold, slow pursuit and could pounce at any moment. Sort of a tch, tch, tch, ack, ack, ack sound, but very quiet and with a lot of reverb. Yeah, I should have known shit was going to get real. But, I slept one night in the room before going to a store to work with one of my employees a bit and Continue reading So this sucked

Music is universal, but not generational…

I know that I have I have 100% been ‘That Guy’ in relation to this particular subject. The music I heard when I was between about 12 and 18 years old rules the Goddam world. Nothing before or since has ever even come close to it. I would swear that on a bible! Every other person that lives on planet earth would swear the same, but based on the music they listen to. For at least a decade, I thought that those who didn’t appreciate my music simply hadn’t heard my music. If they had heard it, I reasoned, they would fucking love it. … Not so much. The image below shows some other guy (with a youtube channel) reaching that same realization: He’s way into it, she’s doing her best to force her frown the other way (and not making it happen). She just doesn’t like this music. In Continue reading Music is universal, but not generational…

Return to Oregon – 24 years later

In October of 1993, I pulled up stakes and got the fuck out of Oregon. My father had died on Christmas Eve of 1990, and I really tried to soldier on up there, but it just wasn’t in the cards. Without going into too many details… Suffice it to say that once my long term girlfriend dumped me (we’d been dating for about 4 years, which was over 20% of my life up to that point) and I found myself homeless, jobless, aimless, and with a number of legal and fiscal issues pressing -and in a way that would likely have resulted in a fair amount of jail time- my feet were hot to move! All that is not even getting into the fact that my circle of friends were even more homeless, jobless, and aimless than me. So I hopped on a bus with GTFO as my only destination. Continue reading Return to Oregon – 24 years later

Dunn’s River Falls, Jamaica

I have to admit that I was absolutely ecstatic when my wife suggested this as a trip when we went to Jamaica. Mostly because I had read the fine print that she obviously ignored. This excursion is a bus ride to the middle of nowhere, followed by trekking up a waterfall (hiking up said waterfall. About 900 feet, but straight up, and in water). I was on board from word go. The wife, on the other hand, became less excited with every passing second. Our marriage was at it’s strongest when this photo was taken: That photo, incidentally, was taken just before she realized that we were about to march up a waterfall. The first stretch of the climb is pictured here: If you’re searching for the word, I will throw it in here: terrifying. There is something about the natural beauty of waterfalls that allows you to forget that Continue reading Dunn’s River Falls, Jamaica

Refinishing a guitar – the hardware

I posted about actually trying to strip and refinish an Ibanez G10 guitar a while back, but I recently found this post regarding the hardware I put into it was still in draft state. So here is the how and why in regards to the pickups I put in the guitar. They cost more than the guitar did. When I was refinishing that G10, I realized (shortly after the first coat of blue -you know, well before it started to look really cool) that it wouldn’t matter how awesome it looked if it didn’t sound great. The stock humbuckers really sounded pretty good as far as stock humbuckers go. I wouldn’t call them ‘meaty’ but there was definitely some well-designed, whey-and-soy-based-product there which simulated meat fairly well. They sounded resoundingly okay, but okay wasn’t good enough. Now that I have a guitar that I’ve taken down to bare wood, I Continue reading Refinishing a guitar – the hardware

VIPAttractions.com Jamaica — Fraud

Update 4/24/17 After making this post and sending a link to the company with this post, links to my social media posts, and my review on Tripadvisor (where I am slowly becoming an actual voice… level 4 reviewer with over 10,000 reviews read) they relented. They sent me an apology email this morning as well as a refund. That’s great. But they were still relentless cunts through the entire process so the reviews on all sites will stand. Stop jerking around your customers, assholes! Original post 4/23/17: VIP Attractions is evidently an airport service offered to those who arrive in (and depart from) Montgo Bay and Kingston, Jamaica. It is purported to be a ‘rush service’ through customs on arrival, and a bar to sit in while you wait for departure. All of that may be true, but I wouldn’t know. I paid for the service, but never got to Continue reading VIPAttractions.com Jamaica — Fraud

My first full guitar build: Semi-hollow body

So, after some promising but lackluster results with my attempt to refinish a damaged Ibanez G10 guitar I figured why not go whole hog and do one from the ground up? To add a ton to the degree of complexity, I decided to go with a semi-hollow body guitar for full build number one. To further add to the difficulty, I chose to dye the wood grain rather than paint over it. Because seriously, when you’re learning to ski, are you going to learn more on the Bunny Slopes or on K12? (and kudos to anyone who got that reference without clicking the link. So I ordered up a kit and set to finishing it. The body looked like this coming out of the box: The front had a beautiful grain that I figured I’d be able to finish without much of an issue. Seriously, it looked like I could Continue reading My first full guitar build: Semi-hollow body

Refinishing a guitar – a work in progress

A few weeks back, I had the brilliant idea to try to use one of those websites to print out a ‘guitar skin’ to try to finish a guitar with some of the imagery from one of my book covers (no link to the site because the resulting image sucked so incredibly hard). Let me say here that I had absolutely zero percent confidence that it would work, and that confidence was not misplaced. Do not try any of these services for a photo-realistic image. The image I used was one I created specifically for the project. That image was the full-sized version of this image (I am using a screen-friendly 2500×2000 version of it here, but the image sent to the manufacturer was a much less reasonable 10000×7800 @ 300dpi -which should have been suitable to print an image roughly 50×40 inches with reasonable detail): It turns out that Continue reading Refinishing a guitar – a work in progress