Blue Strawberries

Your love is like  hitting your finger with a stapler

• WARNING: It's that time.. pumpkin spice is back. Keep your kids off the streets and ask Dr. Fauci if we need to be vaccinated against it. If you're still using last year's pumpkin spice tires, you must keep your car six feet from all other cars.

I think it's the house. Everything turns blue eventually.

The worst is bread. Given about a day, it turns blue. Everything has to be refrigerated, including the strawberries. The only thing that doesn't grow hair is the top of my head. If it were blue, it would go unnoticed these days. Blue macaroni and cheese is the worst.

Today in Olympic News:  Something not involving a ball came close to a record in something

Today I identify as  Ultraman

• Know what's interesting? Stats show that adding more lanes to highways doesn't help.

It was a gray, rainy Saturday. The forecast was Generally Ugly.

I was (more) unpleasant, having been awakened at noon.

We took Mom out on Saturday, so Wife had the unpleasant duty of waking me. Things were even worse than normal because the ten foot pole was in the shop for a tuneup, so she had to get within arm's reach of me to get me moving. She established, long ago, that it's best not to be near me when waking me. Or when living with me.

Time is weird when being dragged, painfully, from sleep. I feel my eyelids drifting closed and want to fully support them in their efforts, but realize I can't, just before they slam shut. This usually results in one eye open and one eye shut. It takes roughly 20 minutes to fight the Waking War and actually move a centimeter. Then, with my legs hanging off the bed, it's another few minutes for them to apply themselves to the floor. Socks take a while, though. I have to generate the energy to get one on, then rest for a bit, while I consider if I want two socks that morning. It occurs to me that I should have my coffee before I wake up, making dressing so much easier.

I woke up with a headache - it was my Saturday headache. The Saturday headache is drastically different from my other headaches. I think it's my body getting even with me for getting more than six hours of sleep. It's revolting. I've been told my body is revolting for years. Normally I feel the headache and combat it by going back to sleep.

But I had to soldier on. The problem here was that the headache had invited a few of its friends. They were taking up places in my head and causing clanging noises off and on. I've never had more than one headache, so I was a bit flummoxed. After a while, the headaches started arguing. When Mom asked what I wanted for breakfast, she too was flummoxed at the small motions and tics on my face. She was concerned, because she's never seen me short of words. I'm reasonably certain one of the headaches ordered pancakes when we got to the restaurant, cuz that's what was on the plate. I have to hand it to him - he has good taste - the pancakes were great.  [IHOP Tres Leches]

One thing that pissed off millions of people at the start of social media was the people who went out to eat, took pictures of their food, and described it in detail. They became Foodies. Foodies were only slightly more popular than Furries. The reason I mentio
n this is that this blog is kind of an anti-foodie service. One reads along and sees what I like. Then one strenuously avoids it due to sugar, calorie, or fat content. This is like a free public service. Ihop had a promotional hot chocolate last year that had something like maple syrup in it. I think they called it French toast hot chocolate. It was delicious. Unfortunately it's no longer here and the waitress had never heard of it.

It's not that coffee outside my house is bad, but I prepare large travel barrels to take on the way to the restaurant. The Coffee Police should come down on Ihop and Waffle House in a serious manner.

Temporarily almost caffeinated, I ate. This calmed the inter-headache sparring. Some of them even took the rest of the afternoon off, while some came and went. It was near 5:00 when I got home, without my first nap. Sometimes my first nap comes as I transition from the bed to the couch, so this was a glaring problem, as reinforced by the headaches. They stopped arguing and decided to work together for evil, teaming up to sing some current hits. I threatened them with "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" and they quieted down. Stuffed for the next seventeen hours, I did what was right for my body and started my first nap. When I got up, a few hours later, the headaches were gone. Let this be a lesson to me... if I take naps, the singing stops? Was this a cluster headache, because there were so fsking many of them? And to stop getting up before 1:00 on weekends.

• Yes, the food and culture are great, but why live in New Orleans? The entire city is without power due to Hurricane Ida. No matter what happens, New Orleans gets it. It's like the state flag says "Hey hurricane - come get me - nyah nyah!" 
• some areas won't have power for weeks

How are broken clouds different from scattered clouds? Or mostly cloudy? Or mostly sunny? I've obviously been checking the weather today, in a last ditch effort to avoid.....  mowing.  On the other hand, it's more difficult to mow wet grass and it grows faster due to too much rain. When I first visited the southwest, I noticed few lawns. It was a life-changing experience for me.  [notice I didn't say g*me ch*nger]

Every other house on the block has nice grass. I mow weeds, that grow while I'm cutting them. My grass is the kind that doesn't need sun - only rain. It's perfect for the climate. It's called Philly Raingrass.

• is it funny that I can't even get my own relatives and friends to read this blog? I feel really weird about sending out an email, asking them to check it out. Got any suggestions?

I just saw a listing for "Politics Nation with Rev Al Sharpton."

Remember: the two people who watch it vote and their vote counts as much as yours.

• President Taxes called on leaders to mandate vaccines
• #ImpeachBiden

I'm not suggesting you get your shots or not - that's your decision. I will not have mandates, especially the kind that come from government. The shutting down of businesses by state government was a disaster. Nanny State needs to be stopped. You're old enough to make your own decisions.

• Faceyspaces has trackers in 25% of its websites and 61% of the most popular apps
• I don't use Faceyspaces, but I'd advise using 'private browsing' windows for all browsing. When you close them, everything gets deleted.

Moderna Vaccine Shipment Crashes, Prompting Hazmat Cleanup and Shuttering of Airspace

Huh?

And we put this in our bodies?  

• Federal government to expand use of facial recognition despite growing concerns
• They don't care what you think, they don't care if it's illegal or unconstitutional - they're the government

 

With all that's wrong with Google and Gmail, I have to give their spam filter credit. The worst I've had is a few false positives.

• Ok, we all have musical guilty pleasures. Right now I'm listening to Slade. What's yours?

 

[Guitar Only]

I have no idea what possessed me, but I bought a Vox VBM1, the Brian May model. It's small, white, and looks like an AC30 put in a dryer and shrunk down to roughly 12" across.

It has just a few knobs, which is good for guitar players, who can't handle complex equipment. It has a switch too. Save the limited space in your brain and leave the switch depressed (or you'll be depressed).  The knobs are GAIN, TONE, and VOLUME. GAIN controls distortion, you should know the rest. The switch is a gain switch. There is a preamp output, as well as a few others.

How does it sound? Depends on how long you've been playing and what you're looking for out of an amp. The thing is much louder than it looks. The clean tone is... among the most recent clean tones I've ever heard. The fun here is with the GAIN switch depressed (not depressed is lower gain, which didn't sound at all good). You can control the GAIN by degrees with the GAIN knob. This is a real powerhouse of a gain box. It can take you over the top, where there's too much gain (did I say that?). 

Let's be real: this will not make you sound like Brian May. It was put together to emulate his Deacy amp, built by bandmate John Deacon, out of an old transistor radio. The Deacy was used on several older Queen songs (none of which I remember). As it is, it's a really fun toy. The hidden key is the preamp output. Brian uses a treble booster to overload his amps, so this is allegedly the same circuitry. You can plug the guitar into the Vox, run the preamp output to your real tube amp (Brian uses 9 Vox AC30s live) and punch the hell out of the front end of the amp(s). Hang in for a review using the amp this way. May isn't the only famous player to use a booster in front of his amp. Jimmy Page used a number of Tone Benders. If you look closely, Ritchie Blackmore used a reel to reel deck into his Marshalls. Tony Iommi used a sledgehammer.

OVERALL: it's another cute living room toy. The amp itself is cheaper than some of the current treble boosters, so consider that. It's a decent, cheap practice amp. I don't have a lot of use for it. Will probably sell or trade. It's between $250-$300 used. For May enthusiasts, there's also the Digitech pedal that gives you a bunch of his signature tones. That's going to cost you around $300+ used at this time. Unless you sing like Freddy Mercury, it's unlikely to get you laid.

kudos to me for reviewing something put out years and years ago.

I will not be reviewing the mini Marshall stack because someone bought it before I did.

Think of the money I saved.

• Oh poop - right-wing NRA hottie Dana Loesch is married

Taliban militants stormed a Kabul tv station to demand anchor praise the terror group

Over here, that's just network news (without the storming).