Category: Generic

Deflategate

You know what pisses me off the most?  After a number of years of not paying the slightest inkling of attention to the National Football League, I decide to sort of jump back on the Patriots bandwagon for the playoffs.  I watched quite a bit of their two playoff games, and actually watched the first half of the Colts game on the tube before listening to the second half on the radio.

And what do I get in return for starting to almost think about caring again?  Why the Patriots get accused of cheating again.  Oh thank you so much, Bill.  I really wanted to hear this crap.  They provided 12 balls to be used by their offense.  11 were under-inflated.  Now forgetting the fact that as methods of cheating go, this one is just stupid.  Come on, Bill.  Can’t you come up with a better scheme than this?  Couldn’t you have gotten all super villain and done something maniacal like putting Ambien into the other team’s Gatorade?  Why cheat at all?  Wasn’t the fact that Indianapolis doesn’t know what it’s like to play in freezing rain while you play in snow and hurricane horror on a regular basis competitive advantage enough?

I was this close to having fun with football again and boom, my team gets called out for cheating.  That’ll teach me a lesson, eh?

Tonight’s Events

Tonight has been interesting. After work I went to a spelling Bee. Both kids won their English class spelling Bees and earned the chance to compete for best in the school. They did not win, but they both did a great job. My step daughter the eighth grader made it through three rounds, and my step son the sixth grader made it through five. I’m very proud of both of them.

When I got home Jen was working on her computer in the living room so I went down cellar to watch a bit of the Bruins game. There I found a bit of a surprise…. Water. Three large puddles. It seems that while the Patriots and their deflated balls were beating the Colts in the pouring rain, some of that rain came in through the cellar window. I shop vac’d up the worst of it, but I can only imagine how wet it was on Sunday night.

And that, loyal readers, was my Tuesday night.

Ceres

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is approaching Ceres.  Ceres is considered a Dwarf Planet as well as an asteroid.  Not only “an” asteroid, but the original asteroid.  It’s full name is 1 Ceres because it was the first object classified as an asteroid.

Back in 2006 when the whole Pluto-is-not-a-planet fiasco happened there was talk of Ceres being included in the list of planets. It was discovered in 1801 and for a number of years it actually was considered a planet before getting demoted to asteroid. Then in ’06 it was classified a dwarf planet instead of a planet. I felt bad for the little ball of ice. It was like it had been kicked in the teeth twice. I vowed at that time that I would be the first red head to walk on its surface.

How’s that working out for me?

Old Music

Say hello to the first demo of 2015!  RPM starts in just under 13 days so it’s time to start blitzing you all with new demos of old songs.  This is a Prime Meridian song.  One of the last we wrote.  It comes from 1999 (or so) and was more or less forgotten about.

It’s kinda groovy, isn’t it?

What was I Thinking

I’ve been warming up for RPM by digging out old songs and recording new demos.  I have done this the last two years as well.  This year most of the focus has been on 1997-2000 when I was in a band called Prime Meridian with Mike and Maria (and John and Dave and Leah and Tracey all at varying times).  I’ve got six of those songs ready to mix and I think I might try and crank out two or three more as well.  I have three old RPM songs left over from last January, and both last March and April had songs that qualify as well so I’ll use those as well when the time comes to make a playlist out of this stuff.

I’ve also started digitizing old cassette tapes and I’ve found a few decent sounding songs there as well.  I started working on two of them today.  They were both written and recorded in the MIDI room at Northeast Broadcasting School, probably in 1994 or 95.  Those two along with another that was actually used by Prime Meridian (and might have been used by Break Even too if I’d been up for it) were things I’d written on a keyboard and pieced together with other random things to make songs.  Kinda like what I do now with RPM.  Actually, there were probably 20 such songs before I left that job, but only 3-5 or so are worth listening too.  Back then though I wasn’t thinking in terms of actual songs.  These were arranged many months after they were recorded in the sequencer.  I also had never really been a singer before.

One thing I learned a couple of years ago when I was messing with demoing songs from the band I played in back in high school is that we never took little things like breathing into account.  Well, that was still the case in the mid-90s too.  I just finished tracking one of those songs and OH MY GOD MY HEAD HURTS!  I have been doubling all of my vocal tracks this time (rhythm guitar too) and the vocal lines are so long that they all cram in together without any room for breathe.  I’ve been breaking things up so that I sing one line on one track and the next on another, and then I double everything.  I don’t know how I ever could have considered putting something like this together as a song.  It’s so ridiculously difficult to sing.  No one could ever do it live.  Ever.

All of the singing has literally given me a headache.

Ouch, babie.