Well, Blog People, your hunt for a suitably elegant gift for me continues. Let's press on with the theme of short-scale archtops.

I could always use another ES-140, especially if it has interesting features. Of course, the full depth model in natural finish is preferred, but only 36 were ever built, so that might be a difficult acquisition. For you. For me.

So your backup plan will probably be an Andy. It doesn't have to be the Elite series, one from the original production line in condition VG or better would do nicely.

I hope you guys are holding the meetings and trading the emails necessary to make this happen in good time. None of us are getting any younger, right?

This guitar longing for yours is kind of adorable.

On another note, the new blasphemy "laws" in America.

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/05/27/this-weeks-witch-hunt/

Crid, that reminds me very much of my old 1957 Guild T-100. Single P-90 (well, Guild's version). The previous owner had the sunburst stripped down to natural maple. I played what was left of the frets down to the fingerboard, and then wore the fingerboard down to divots.

You'd think I could play after all the time and effort. Nope. Brain stubbornly refuses to cross-connect hemispheres and make it so.

Stupid brain!

Gog, me being talented, or worthy of such extravagant tools, was never part of the discussion here.

I'm to be provided with an elegant, and perhaps classic, mid-century archtop guitar, at zero cost to myself... That's all.

Focus.

Crid, you may have to start your search in the 1980s or so if you want a small-hipped full-depth archtop.

And of course if you're willing to move up to a modern Benedetto you have a number of drool-inducing choices!

http://benedettoguitars.com/guitars/guitar-guide/

Side note: I once spent a disappointing afternoon mauling a shop full of gorgeous antique hand-made D'Angelico (and his successor D'Aquisto) archtops.

Shockingly inconsistent quality, but that's what happens when you actually carve the neck and top out of blocks of wood - and do everything else by hand as well.

All this guitar talk has caused a Reverb.com ad to appear on the left column of this blog. Probably because I clicked on one of Crid's links.

A humorous 20-minute history of the whole world.

"Hamptons bachelors getting vasectomies so..."

http://nypost.com/2017/05/27/hamptons-bachelors-are-getting-vasectomies-so-golddiggers-cant-trap-them/

I suspect a hoax/exaggeration somewhere, but only because it's a tabloid, after all.

Comparison of how quickly a BS tweet versus a non-BS tweet from the same person spreads:

https://twitter.com/FrankLuntz/status/868596817251803138

No, the weird part was that at the end, I wanted to hear more from the drummer.

Via Cait Flanagan.

That photo makes me want to smoke dope again. Back in 1976.

Aw, this is golden:

"Jessica" was an attempt to write a song that could be played with just two fingers, in honor of Gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who played with two left fingers due to severe burns. Betts had crafted the main melody of the song but became frustrated with its direction afterward. Jessica, Betts's baby daughter, crawled into the room and began bouncing to the music. "I started playing along, trying to capture musically the way she looked bouncing around the room," said Betts, who named the song after her.

Just another wonderful holiday in Lotusland!

Amy asks what's that smell, and now you know.

That same mountainside a week ago, acting as a shoreline for the fog.

'Tude case.

One last Allman link.

Wooooeeee-kay, it's time to talk about da jooz:

Here’s something interesting: every single person I mentioned above is of Jewish descent. Every single one. This isn’t some clever setup where I only selected Jewish-Hungarians in order to spring this on you later. I selected all the interesting Hungarians I could find, then went back and checked, and every one of them was Jewish.

An applicable passage from E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, by David Bodanis.

By the summer of 1941 Briggs was out, and group of more effective leaders including Lawrence was in, and by December--when Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war--the project really took off. It came to be called the Manhattan Project, as part of the cover story that it was simply part of the Manhattan Engineering District.

The refugees Briggs had scorned were indispensable. Eugene Wigner, for example, was a remarkably quiet, unassuming young Hungarian, who came from an equally quiet and unassuming family. When World War I had broken out, Eugene's father had stayed away from political discussions, pointing out, quite sensibly, the he was pretty sure the emperor was not going to be swayed by the views of the Wigner family. But this caution meant that when Eugene, a superb student, was facing university choices, the father had him take a practical engineering degree, as the odds on a career in theoretical physics succeeding were very slight.

Wigner did succeed at physics, and after he was forced out of Europe in the 1930s,he ended up centrally involved in the American duplicate of Heisenberg's calculations, detailing how a reaction could begin. But his engineering training meant that he handled the subsequent steps far better than Heisenberg, What shape, for example, should the uranium be that would go inside a reactor? The most efficient possible design would be a sphere. That way the maximum number of neutrons would be deep in the center. Next best--if a sphere was too hard to cut accurately-- would be an oval shape. After that comes a cylinder, then a cube, and last, worst of all, would be to try building it with uranium stretched out in flat sheets.

For his Leipzig device, Heisenberg had chosen the flat sheets. The reason was simply that flat surfaces almost always have the easiest properties to compute, if you're advancing by pure theory. But engineers with enough practical experience are never restricted to pure theory. There are many informal tricks of the trade for how ovals and other shapes work. Wigner knew them, as did many other similarly cautious refugees, who'd also been advised by their families to take engineering degrees. Heisenberg did not. That was of central importance. Professors in general tend to be hierarchical, and pre-World War II German professors were at the of peak such confidence. As the war went on, a number of junior researchers in Germany found that Heisenberg had been mistaken in one engineering assumption or another. But Heisenberg almost always refused to listen; would angrily try to keep them from even daring to mention it.

Even so, nobody could be confident the United States was going to to win the race to make the bomb. America was just coming out of the Great Depression; much of its industrial base was still rusted and abandoned. When Heisenberg began his research for army ordnance, the Wehrmacht was the world's most powerful fighting force. It had entire army groups supplied with equipment that surpassed that of any other nation. The United States had an army that, if you included a lot of generation-old World War I artifacts, could just about supply two divisions, thus placing it below the tenth rank in the world, at about the level of Belgium.

Germany also had the world's best engineers, and a strong university system--despite having expelled so many Jews--and above all, they had that head start; two precious years when Heisenberg and his colleagues had been working full out, while Briggs had mostly been musing at his desk. These were the quirks of fate that would influence who ended up using the equation first, E=mc2 was far from the pure reaches of Einstein's inked symbols now.

Los Alamos (U. S. A.)
– Uraim, most magukra hagyom önöket – búcsúzott el Einstein Szilárd Leótól, Neumann Jánostól, Wigner Jenőtől és Teller Edétől. – A többit beszéljék meg magyarul.
(Anekdota)

Los Alamos (U. S. A.)
"Gentlemen, I leave you now," said Einstein as he parted from Leo Szilárd, János Neumann, Jenő Wigner and Ede Teller. - Discuss the rest in Hungarian.
(Anecdote)

Coney- That's a nice piece! It has the aroma of FZ's musique concrete. Give this two or three minutes, until the fretless guitar starts. Then enjoy the fretless guitar. Or just listen to the whole record, because it's fantastic.

Consider this guileless guitar effects playtime, which cuts to a moment of 'improvisation' at a live show in London.

Also, the hats and the kitchen.

(The guitar is Vai, who transcribed and doubled the vocal.)

Aw Coney, I gave you the wrong link. Here's the good two or three minutes of concrete.

This was clumsily-released set of records during a storm of lawsuits with his management and record company, but those little trinkets were scattered throughout. He liked sound for his own sake, and he wasn't unserious about their inclusion. Because they're adjacent to a few formal pieces of music that meant at lot to me, as with Down in De Dew here, they have genuine musical power in my memory.

An entire album of them might not have worked that way, just as I doubt the excellent cartoon you linked could ever be appreciated purely for its musical strength, which is considerable.

But I wish every artist of our generation and those that followed could have been so playful (and skilled).

Some of them tried, or at least their producers did. Janet Jackson always annoyed the shit out of me, like most every other pop star... But the industrial exhaust heard from :17 to :33 is really charming.

Crid, your post got me wondering whatever happened to D'Aquisto Guitars. I checked and it seems that they are now owned by Aria. Sigh.

But if you happen to come across a PPG Wave 2.3 with a Waveterm B, I wouldn't mind a birthday present either. Or, if you really want to go over the top, there's the Yamaha GX-1... you can pick one up at Keith Emerson's estate sale.

I'm not sure anything good was ever going to come from licensing the D'Aquisto and D'Angelico names other than mundane laminated pieces from Korea.

I watched this last week and learned that Manzer had studied under D'Aquisto. Should she have purchased his name for her own work? Well, no, she now has a respected peghead marque in her own right.

PPG is an unfamiliar name. Zappa was a Synclavier guy.

I think these things are like TV production equipment, or even desktops. I still feel an impulse to get Compaq or a Fat Mac from 1985, because I want to be 25 again. But old gear is, as a rule, useless and no fun to own & dust. Apparently that PPG has a nonstandard interface....

In the seventies, guys would slip into their jackets to work on musical instruments.

So then I spend the next hour watching old videos about 1980's music computers.

It's like, terrifying. Computers were hideous. Their printed documentation was an atrocity. Music was hideous. Television was a shitbath, and my marriage was a nightmare.

And then comes a clip with Stanley Jordan, humble and brilliant, and we're reminded how we made our way through difficult times... Oliver North buying underwear for Fawn Hall or whatever it was.