I Played Guitar Today!

Oh thank heavens, I played some guitar today. I worked on two songs for Record Every Month. My finger tips are sore as hell, but I played my Les Paul Custom with the new frets and it felt really good. Really good.

I seriously over did the obligatory pics.

114/365
114/365
Sorry, I couldn’t resist

1971

Daily writing prompt
Share what you know about the year you were born.
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I was born in 1971. One super important event occurred that year but I am going to make you wait for it. First, I Googled “events from 1971” and figured I’d share a few things that I found.

This site gave a top 10 list. Allow me to share it:

  1. The New York Times begins to publish sections of the Pentagon Papers
  2. The Voting Age in the United States is lowered to 18 yrs old when the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution is ratified
  3. Border battles between India and Pakistan erupt into full-scale war
  4. The Walt Disney World Theme Park is opened in Florida
  5. The Soviet Union launches the first space station, Salyut 1, into low Earth orbit
  6. Ibrox disaster in Scotland when On January 2nd 66 die in stairway crush at Rangers v Celtic football match
  7. A new stock market index called the Nasdaq debuts
  8. Decimalisation in United Kingdom and Ireland both switch to decimal currency.
  9. Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher’s ends free school milk for children over the age of seven
  10. The US table tennis team visits to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) known as “Ping Pong Diplomacy”
https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1971.html

You can click the link to get more details. Interesting stuff. Americans, you’re welcome for the 26th amendment. Also, for Disney World.

This site also gave a short list. There’s a lot of cross over, but I’ll share a few highlights.

  1. The total number of American troops in Vietnam dropped to 196,700, the lowest amount since January 1966. On the other hand, the number of British troops stationed in Northern Ireland increased to 11,000.
  2. The Supreme Court “unanimously upheld the constitutionality of busing as a means to ‘dismantle the dual school system,’ of the South.”
  3. Charles Manson, along with three of his female followers, were convicted of the Tate-LaBianca murders.
  4. Here are some sports facts from 1971: The Pittsburgh Pirates won their 4th World Series, the Baltimore Colts were the Super Bowl champs, and the Montreal Canadiens clinched the Stanley Cup.
  5. Satchel Paige became the first African-American MLB player to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
  6. The first Starbucks opened at the historic Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington. The coffeehouse chain was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl, who later sold the company to Howard Schultz. Today, Starbucks has 32,938 retail locations worldwide.
  7. The South Tower of the World Trade Center “topped out at 1,362 feet, making it the second tallest building in the world.”
  8. In 1971, Amanda Holden, Corey Haim, Denise Richards, Justin Trudeau, Lance Armstrong, Mark Wahlberg, and Ricky Martin were all born.

Yup, my birth year sent Charles Manson to jail for what turned out to be the rest of his psychotic life.

So what is that one huge event that I teased at the start of this post? It’s mega. It’s universe altering.

In July of 1971, Rick Wakeman joined Yes. By the end of 1972 the universe had been granted the musical masterpieces that are the albums Fragile and Close to the Edge.

You’re welcome.

Two Thoughts

Two brief topics for this more-or-less lunch time post.

First:

I screwed up. As often happens, three hours after I finished breakfast my stomach was starting to ache because it was too empty to deal with itself. I had a snack. Peanuts. Lovely. I then… had another snack. Some sugar free cookies. That was a mistake. Not because I had a bad reaction, but because I was stuffed and only about 90 minutes away from lunch time. Now here we are, 10 minutes into my planned lunch break, and I am still stuffed and can’t see myself having a real lunch. Dumb ass. You’d think after a year and seven months I would know what I can and cannot handle in terms of between meal snacks. Nope. I screwed up. 

Maybe I’ll try to eat a lunch-esque something or other about an hour from now. I don’t have any meetings so I won’t have any problems with work scheduling, but I also don’t want to ruin dinner. We’re planning on having some gnocchi tonight and I want that to go really well. I wonder… do we have any meatballs in the freezer? Hmmmm… we’ll see.

Second:

Social media. Shit. Why can’t I just stop with the social media stuff? I mean, I post to this blog 123612764 times a day, why can’t that be enough? What the hell is wrong with me?

I need a twitter alternative. There are a lot of decent platforms, but none of them are quite good enough. I should just back one of them and post there 2496723457 times a day and fool myself into thinking I’m having fun with it. It will be a bald faced lie, but I don’t mind.

So which should I go with? There are three that I am kind of using a little bit. 

  • Mastodon
  • Threads (which makes me sick because it’s a facebook product and facebook is just as slimy as twitter)
  • BlueSky

Mastodon is good because this blog cross posts there. Threads is good (even though zuck is fucking evil) because there are a lot of people that I followed on other platforms that I am following there. BlueSky is good but… I really don’t know why. Probably just because I sort of use it, I guess. 

No… or Yes?

Daily writing prompt
Are you a good judge of character?
View all responses

When I read today’s question I immediately had an answer. A gut response, if you will. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that gut reaction was wrong. Or it might be wrong. 

Am I a good judge of character? No. No way. Or am I? I tried to think of an instance where I clearly misjudged someone. Either I thought a good person was a bad person, or a bad person was a good person, or any kind of error in judgement. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I can’t think of one. I can’t think of a single occasion when I completely misjudged someone. There are times when my perception might have been off a little. A good person with a negative trait, or vice versa. Overall though… I think I generally get things mostly right on the first try.

So is that a good thing or a bad thing? Neither, I guess. What this does point out is that I seem to lack self confidence in my judgements of people. I feel like this little exercise has just shown me that I should have a little more faith in myself. 

Fat chance of that.