The Once and Future Lemur

Kill Bill lives.  We didn't know if he would as his nutrition kept falling and we didn't know how to get him to eat.  But the cracking good medical support team (i.e. Silas and Cat) brought him back to health and now his nutrition is just fine.

After all that, of course Kill Bill needed a nap.


In fact, all of the lemurs needed a nap.

This is like Lemur Nursery School in which all take naps at the same time and pretty much wherever they are at the time.


But later it was time to dance

Karneval mit Lemuren ... nür mit SL!

"All About Cat" - Silas Scarborough - Live at Cat's Art MusikCircus

"All About Cat" is a looper bit from last night and it runs for about nine minutes.  As I was wading into it I was thinking, yep, there's a groove in this and I know Cat hears it.  At first it's kind of precious in trying to be jazzy but then it will kick it up and hopefully you'll like the difference.

It's on the Ride the Dragon podcast or you can link directly to play "All About Cat."

I also like doing the slow anthem tunes at 60-80 bpm as that deep mournful stuff is the ultimate singing guitar to me.  "All About Cat" is not that as it's 120 or 130 bpm to get some pop to it.  "I Love Rats" is 160 bpm and I've tried it faster but that just makes it sound ridiculous.  Beyond a certain point, speed isn't music anymore and becomes an auto race.  Maybe you'll find it interesting that the same thing happens with square-dancing.  By itself, it's a silly and pleasant way to spend an evening ... but ... when they start competing, it gets faster and faster, and turns into a total drag.  Dali knew it best as what damn good is something if you can't eat it.  Anything really good he would call 'delicious.'


Gratuitous plug:

Voodoo Shilton will be playing tonight and he very well understands the balance between speed and melody.  Words alone can't explain that, you've got to come and hear him.  He will start at 3pm SLT / PST.

About the Plane Crash in the Gig

There was a Tweet I sent out earlier that said there was a bad sound that ended the gig, the sound you get when you try to land an aircraft without putting the wheels down.  There was nothing for it but to stop but this fortunately didn't happen until after I'd been playing over an hour anyway.  I was all set to keep going ... but then the plane crashed.

Just a brief explanation:  the problem was caused by a dirty slider on the mixer.  Always cover your gear with a cloth of some kind when you won't be using it as this will help keep the dust out.

After wiggling the slider a bit, the connection is largely restored.  I've toyed with the idea of taking the mixer apart to clean it but that would be a monumental bitch.

This audio problem was an example of an SMF (Spontaneous Machine Fault).  I was nowhere near the mixer when the audio went bad.  I did not touch it.  I did not even look at it.  However, a slider on that mixer magically changed itself and the plane crashed.  Do not ever think machines like us.  They don't.

There was a tune of some unknown substance in the gig but it felt like a Cat groove as I was in it and that really went flying.  I knew she would know that I was onto it and that I hadn't done it before so that added a very special ingredient.  I'll review the recording later and hopefully have something to upload.

Lefty and his Work with Frog Hair

lefty Unplugged plays every Monday at Cat's Art MusikCircus and his set has been different in recent weeks.  Previously he would sometimes do improvs in his show in which there was no telling what he would play but they would invariably be excellent.  He has been more focused lately on polishing his existing songs and that is working beautifully but what happened to the improv.

In lefty's blog you can read about his struggles with learning to play a violin, his 'secret' weapon.  It's not really secret as he has even put videos on Facebook about it.  When it's also on his blog, it's safe that it isn't a secret anymore.  (lefty' Blog:  Diary of a 55yr old left handed violin beginner part5)

Yep, it looks like lefty's soul has been stolen by a violin.

(Ed:  what about the frog hair?)

the more you play, the more you respect string players for precision fine as frog hair! 

Read the whole article to really get the feel of it.


lefty's respect for the difficulty of learning violin has gone up tremendously as he knew it would be difficult but not this difficult.  It's only half facetious that I wonder if the violin has stolen lefty's soul as he would never have learned how to play guitar as he does without being determined.  It really does look like this woman has taken him and you can see from the article that she owns him.

The article was written three weeks ago so I don't know how things go this minute but I suspect that secret weapon will show up in lefty's show one of these days.

Equal Time for Slashing Atheists

The reason people want to punch atheists isn't so much what they believe but rather they are so fucking smug.  The Atheist has got everything figured.  He understands the cosmology, the Higgs Boson, and every kind of scientific gimcrackery known to the "Popular Science" magazine.  There is no God.  No God.  Got it?  You dumb fuck.  It's obvious there is no God.

There are any number of ways to wreck an Atheist's life and the easiest is to keep pushing the model of the Universe bigger until their explanation of it explodes.  Say there, Satchmo, there are patterns of movement of galaxies that are so large that they could only be explained by the influence of external Universes.  How does that work in your precise world of dials and knobs.

Without logic, an Atheist flaps his arms and gasps for air but there is no logic in a Universe of stars appearing for no particular reason and there's damn sure no logic for quite a number of Universes doing it.

But the biggest counter to the Atheist isn't that there are billions of stars but rather that there are billions of stars and they work.  If you're God in your Heavenly metaphysical place and you decide to create a Universe, it's got to have all manner of Laws of Physics or it plain won't work.  The damn thing will blow up and then you need to make another Universe.

You can play Intelligent Design all night long as any other explanation requires the Universe to 'invent' the Laws of Physics as it goes along after the Big Bang and this is just another form of determinism.  The Laws of Physics could not have existed prior to the Big Bang as there wasn't anything there.  Either God invented them or rocks did and you've got to ask yourself which is most plausible.

(Yes, there's the Noise in the Woods When No-One is There situation in the question do the Laws of Physics exist even if there is no matter affected by them.)

If you've got one of those Prizefighter Atheists on your hands, he may not have cracked yet as he'll respond that invention of the Laws of Physics is irrelevant.  They are defined by the nature of matter and space so invention has nothing to do with it.

Here again, the existence of the Laws of Physics isn't that interesting but it's very interesting that they work.  For example, you take maybe a pound of uranium and pound it in whatever esoteric ways.  This pound of stuff will blow up in one monumental explosion thus showing the astronomical power in a very small amount of material.  Looking around you and understanding just how much material is there, why would you not ask why it all doesn't just explode.  It's not just interesting that it works, it's absolutely amazing.  Do you not think it would take multiple tries to get a Universe right.

Note:  you get the big win if you can get the Atheist to say 'miraculous.'

Good luck.

The Lord of the Lemurs

And so a small party of the lemurs went out to investigate.

Others decided to sleep and do nothing.  We call these ones politicians.  They sleep right by the food bowl and politicians do this too.

Here is Cat with Bill who is otherwise known as Kill Bill.  She won't eat and we even tried feeding her asparagus.  Kill Bill seems a little confused.  You are now confused also as she is not Cat, she is Kill Bill.

We also have Justin Lemur and he, naturally, is the singer.  There's Boudika Lemur in case the Romans come back and Franzi Lemur, Paprika Lemur and Schnitzel Lemur hang out looking pretty.  Schnitzel sometimes catches fire and explodes ... but he recovers quickly.


Two mornings ago, we had no lemurs.  This morning, we have nine of them ... and they aren't even mature for breeding yet.  There's a good chance of a lemur population explosion once they start mating.

Coolest MusikCircus Pic of the ... well, Ever

Reis is at the center of the explosion and I would like to emphasize that I didn't do it.  Aldo is in the back but he exploded too.  It was very sad but it made for a wild picture.  Cat and I are dancing in the bottom right where we are just outside the blast radius.  Sadly, it doesn't look like it went well for Paris.

Reis uses the most tremendous displays when she and Aldo play and I have no idea where she gets them but you can see the result.  Now imagine it moving.  I very much believe the lights enhance and are part of the music so I get a big bang out of these performances.

Reis and Aldo will be back next week and again the following week when they will do their Carnival show.  We don't tell any guests about clothes but Carnival is special and you can definitely expect to see some really mad outfits for this show.

You can find more about Reis and Aldo on their Artist Profile on Cat's MusikCircus Web site.

In the Midnight Hour at Cat's Art MusikCircus

There is usually not much happening at Cat's Art MusikCircus during Yankee hours ... but that needed to change last night.

I sent out very few messages about playing and somehow Voodoo Shilton heard about it.  He came and he sent a very cool message offline to me about the jams and it's most appreciated as the man knows the subject of music upside-down and backwards.

Sister Julie came over with LuLu and Chris was levitating in and out of there too.  I couldn't really tell very well who was there as I was pushing buttons and chanting arcane spells at the equipment.

If they're really good, maybe I will take them to see the lemurs sometime!

(Ed:  lemurs?)

Long story!


Voodoo, I did see that about clippage and you know the infuriation of changing a knob over here only to need to change more knobs in twelve other places.  Perhaps I exaggerate a wee bit but you know how it goes.  I'm thinking it might be time for the GAR ... Global Atomic Reset.  That would give coolness in forcing reset of volume levels everywhere and that would be annoying but could yield much goodness.  I would lose existing loops but really I need to re-record them anyway as nothing else will really, really get the levels rights.

As to key changes, most of the time I really don't even think about it so much.  I'll find some notes the chords like and things will evolve from there.  But lately I've been looking for getting more elaborate and to how to pull off key changes with a looper.  I mentioned previously that a huge problem is there's no way to modulate. You can be in A and then you can be in B but there's no good way to be anywhere in-between.  This is not even in any faint way an excuse; it's the way loopers work.

(Carry the above through a little bit.  How about a looper that permits ten phrases so then you can be switching back and forth between bits in tremendous complexity.  Think long on a device as sophisticated as this because you could very well find yourself spending more time playing the device than playing your instrument.  I don't mean in terms of hardware hassles but rather that you could easily find yourself making a whole lot of loops just because you can.)

It would turn into a lengthy bit to go into detail on the structure of a song using an RC-50.  The main things needed to picture it are that there are the three independent musical phrases, all of which are probably but not necessarily at the same tempo.  At present, they will probably also have the same associated drum pattern.  You will be tempted by that third phrase as it's not such a deal to come up with two phrases you can use and switching back and forth between them is entertaining ... but what will you do with that third one and how will you handle juggling now that you have three balls in the air.  Know all the while that the audience doesn't give any kind of a tinker's damn about how you do this.  Just don't suck.  And, of course, why should anyone need a PhD in Electrical Engineering to understand what you do.

Key changing is where there's a huge potential for drowning in artsy-fartsy as what reason do you have to change a key.  The key change adds musical interest but it just becomes an exercise if there's too much interesting and not enough feeling.  Maybe you could jazz up a love song by playing in a sweetness and light key and then shifting to the key for being attacked by flying monkeys when the relationship breaks up.  (There's a previous article on keys and emotions or feelings associated with each one.  I don't see much point in memorizing it as the important thing, in my view, is to fully consider that the different keys really do have significantly different 'personalities.'  If you know why they have different personalities then you are probably just about ready to pick up your degree in music.)

Something that's of huge interest to me but is, I think, beyond current looper technology is that there's no elegant way to deconstruct a loop.  That is, you can't take parts out of it after you have recorded them.  There is one level of Undo on an RC-50 and that has musical coolness and application but hitting the Undo button again will put that loop bit back into it.  What I would like to do is to keep on peeling off levels.  I imagine Voodoo has the same interest as he often goes at least five or six or more levels deep in adding instruments to his loops.  If it were possible to peel those levels off then one can make a graceful exit from a song rather than bringing it up to a full boil in a loop and only to find the only way out of it is to run it into a wall.


On one thing I get more and more clear:  I only want to play for friends and Cat's Art MusikCircus is the best place to do it.  I will likely go to Avination and do something similar over there tonight as it's similar.  Zaphod and Ichi are in Germany so I would do that more toward Euro time but we'll see what's best as the day goes along.  They're very good people and surprising them with some jams would be quite nice.

Urgent Medical Update

My deepest apologies for failing to keep you apprised of the status of my toe.  I'm sure many of you wish you could only forget the moment of the toe injury in Italy and, truly, it is the same in my life.  If only I could forget.

There were some who doubted and thought, verily, this is a mere cut to a toe which is nothing more than a subsidiary appendage, a digit of insignificant measure or means, a mere trifle of an extension.  What possible news of any value could be contained in such a report.

In some small ways, their critical assessment of the situation was as accurate as someone with little vision can perceive.  Yes, it was a toe.  Yes, it was cut.

However, that was not the beauty part.

Nooooo.

After some while of exquisitely enervating pain, the whole fookin' nail came off me big toe.  It must be about six months later now and the good Lord has given me back some kind of mutated toe nail but it doesn't have the glorious strength and form of the other one.  Someday, when the toenail fully grows back, I hope to feel whole again.

It probably will not be necessary to post any further toenail updates unless there is a critical medical need ... or if that li'l piggy goes to market.

Praise the Lord and Pass the String Theory

A discussion took place recently and the only consideration was whether one can request miracles through prayer.  Yep, if you just believe in God and what's in the Bible, here's what you'll get.  But don't ask for Lotto numbers as only the tacky hoi polloi do that.

Johnny, tell 'em what they've won.

Hey, hey, you've not only won the Love of Jesus but you ... have ... won ... a ... BRAND NEW CAR!

I love you, God, because I want to get free stuff.


And, Lord, I want to go to Heaven.  I know I get bored on Sunday afternoons sometimes but I really, really want to spend billions of years with you, doing nothing but being blissful or some shit like that.  Maybe we could get together sometimes and make stars or new diseases or something.


The rampaging hypocrisy just gets insufferable at times.  One of the oldest rules of all is Thou Shalt Not Kill as this is Old Testament stuff that came down to Moses.  However, there are all sorts of escape clauses in the New Testament to make it alright.  People get really angry about this one as they'll insist that God will still love them if they kill people.  And, sure, that makes sense.  It's only bad when other people kill people, not when you do it, honey.

This has some similarities to the United States Constitution in which it says that all men are created equal.  Later on it says that a black man is 3/5 of a white man and that was the part that prevailed.  To some extent, it still does and those who support that thinking are just as self-righteous as a mountain preacher with a bottle of moonshine.

Those who think God loves them and consequently loves executions will frequently point to abortion as if that's ok then executions must be ok.  That they don't have anything to do with one another is irrelevant, the purpose is to assuage the troubles in their hardened hearts and it really doesn't matter if the deflection is performed through a sideshow debating trick.  Stick to the point or sit yer ass down, Sylvester.


And then I mentioned Zoroaster ... but that's when the One Who Knows really went berserk.  Zoroastrianism is the philosophy that was very strong in Persia prior to the religions which have survived to the modern age.  Much of the Judeo-Christian beliefs came from Zoroastrianism just as Christianity drew from the Old Testament and subsequently Islam did the same.  Mormonism came after that and much of that was drawn from some scribbles on the wall of a Texaco restroom in Illinois.  Scientology most likely came from a bad acid trip.  Judging by Hubbard's sci-fi, it must have been pretty cheap acid too.

I should have backed off at that point as the One Who Knows was obviously bluffing but sometimes it's almost irresistible.


But none of that has any particular value at all and certainly doesn't prove anything.  Where religion gets interesting is with regard to any notion of determinism.  In other words, do you have control of your life or is it preordained by God.  Sure it's possible there's some mix of the two but that seems quite a lackadaisical way to run a Universe.  Sometimes God will make the call, sometimes you will or sometimes we'll just leave it up to cute li'l Suzy Parker at the end of the street to decide what will happen next in your life.

Determinism pops up frequently in gambler thinking.  If the roulette wheel has come up with 35 three times in a row then that makes some difference to whether 35 will come up on the next spin.  In the Laws of Probability, there is no difference to the odds.  Gamblers don't think that way, however.  Determinism also plays massively in music but that's a thesis in itself.

As one goes back in time, religions get more deterministic and free will doesn't get much play.  Why would anyone even give a thought to free will during the course of the Black Death during which maybe half of the world's population died.  People use the word 'horrific' today and it shows little so much as an egregious lack of knowledge of history.  How can there be free will when everyone is dying in horrible ways all around you.  Free will means nothing.

Prayer has some bearing on this as say you ignore Jesus' fervent request and you do, in fact, pray for winning Lotto numbers.  When you win there's a Eureka moment in which you are filled with the Love of the Lord.  See, God really does love me.

However, God knows you will buy a boat with that money and you will use it to catch fish and those fish will go to feed starving African babies.  God wasn't answering your prayer, he was giving you a job.  Either this truth or Eureka, God Loves Me may be real and possibly even both if you like a Monty Python Universe.

A)  God loves you and he would like it if you feed African babies.

Maybe God let you win that Lotto because he loves you and he just hopes you will see that buying a boat to catch fish and feed African babies is good.

B)  God loves you and he doesn't give a rat's ass about starving African babies.

Sure, you prayed for the Lotto.  God let you win it and now just go ahead and blow it on hookers and cocaine.

C)  God doesn't give a rat's ass about you and you're just a tool to feed starving African babies.

If total determinism is real then the person who buys the boat and catches the fish doesn't really matter that much as God's actual purpose is to feed African babies.


Whether you can get free stuff through prayer isn't of much interest to me as it seems much on the order of whether Santa Claus is real.  That's cool if you're hoping for an electric train set but it doesn't mean much beyond that.  However, whether you have any real control of your life is, in my view, a very big deal.

You can see various forms of determinism all over the place.  Maybe somebody driving a car splatters a motorcycle rider and then tells the cop he didn't see the bike.  That makes it ok as obviously God put the bike there and it was meant to happen.  Or maybe young Billy and Suzy Parker get busy behind the barn.  They say they couldn't help it.  The only answer left is God made them do it.

Christianity has an escape clause in Satan as any bad thing that happens can be tagged to Satan's influence and that gives God a pass ... but that doesn't really work as an omnipotent God could over-ride anything Satan did.  There's all manner of theological pandering on the matter but omnipotence is pretty clearly defined.  You are or you ain't.  I therefore reject Satan as an explanation for anything.

So when Bad Things Happen, God owns them.  Say there's a plane crash and maybe you think God killed them all and, sure, He did.  That either makes him a vicious bastard or someone who was sitting and watching the aircraft while he thought, "Damn it!  That is NOT how I told you to build that aircraft.  Now it's going to crash and all those people will die.  Start over and build it right this time."

If you're looking for an answer behind all this you may not be quite understanding the game.  It's maybe like thinking something will change if Obama is not President.  That shows an amusing faith in democracy.  Nevertheless, if things really are preordained then it's God's Will that Obama is President.  So, uh, how do you like determinism so far.

It's amusing insofar as America has two deeply-separated personalities.  There's religion more extreme than most other developed nations and this form of it demands a fairly high order of theological determinism.  However, it's the same country in which at least half strongly believe in the power of democracy and electoral process.  They can't have it both ways so they spin around in circles a lot.

(Ed:  where is the string theory?)

It isn't anywhere.  What sucked me into the original discussion was a statement to the effect of I have studied Taoism and string theory.  I thought that would be funny and it was but now (cough) you have been sucked into it the same way.  Praise the Lord.

Untolerable Bohemian and Lefty Unplugged at Cat's Art MusikCircus

This report is very late from last week ... or just in time for the shows tonight at Cat's Art MusikCircus.

1:00 PM PST / SLT - Untolerable Bohemian

Last week Untolerable Bohemian was focusing yet more on his electric work.  There are mechanical aspects to that like pushing buttons and how long does it take to set up each song but the important thing is that he's doing it.  I have a strong bias toward improvisation but it's not like I hide that feeling and I really hope Bo keeps on doing more of it.

Bo is very much like two performers as Electric Bo does songs quite different from Singing Bo.  Come to find out what he does tonight.


2:00 PM PST / SLT - lefty Unplugged

The biggest news lately has been when Lefty brought out his Fender Telecaster to play as the sound is a delight.  Going back and forth from acoustic to electric is quite difficult unless you do like Mark Knopfler and fingerpick everything.  There are many arty reasons for making a decision like that and you could fill a book with them so we'll stop right there.

Lefty seems to be working on polishing and crafting his songs more than coming out with new ones just now.  He makes exceptionally well-crafted songs and he's one of the best for the dynamics of a song.  The dynamics are much more than whether a song is loud or soft and this seems to be getting a lot of attention from him lately.  It's tough to spot as these kinds of changes are often so subtle that you feel them more than hear them.

Ranger Rick and the Singing Beagles

This was the show that almost didn't happen as we tried to get up a collection for $100 US plus a case of Mad Dog wine to get Ted Nugent to play in the barn this week-end.  It turned out that no-one thought he was worth it.  We did get $50 US and we called to try to make the deal but were told that Nugent only feeds off politicians these days.  So be it, we called Ranger Rick.

Fifty years ago, "Stranglehold" was cool but what's cool today is Ranger Rick with his Singing Beagles.  No matter how much you love music, hearing these singing Beagles will make you love it even more, particularly when they do "Oh my Darling, Clementine."  This was the opening number and the Beagles owned the crowd from the start.

What makes it even better is that Ranger Rick has trained the dogs to do tricks.  During the performance he will ask if any kid has a birthday.  Sure enough, there was one on Saturday night and Ranger Rick wanted the dogs to make it special.  The dogs went over to the kid and then one after the other stood on the back of the dog below it.  When they were all in position, the dogs sang "Happy Birthday" to the great delight of everyone.

After the gig, Ranger Rick asked if we might like to do it again and, sure, of course we do.  He suggested asking Miley Cyrus to play first as it's always cool following her show with the dogs because their tongues hang out of their mouths the same way as hers.