7/4

Dig that wacky pickguard. Mother of Toilet seat. Bizaroo shape too.

I want a natural finish with the mahogany body, I think this rare Blue is Ash. Bill Frisell had a blue one when I saw him last month.

I think I'm starting to get reved up for this. I spent a bit of time today looking for info on a Fender Tele '69 Reissue Thinline. I hope I can find one used for less than 500. Of course I'm not holding my breath, but it's the only thing I'm kinda looking for. GEAR LUST!

'ave a good 'un'.

Go ahead - rub it in!

Good thing I caught it before the message got deleted. Dan is so entertaining.

I bought it because Dolphy is on it a long time ago, but I should really give it more spin time.

Yea, I think it's the biggest one in the area. The NY show fizzled out in recent years, EBay killed it. Last time I went with friends and we agreed to meet back at the food area maybe 2 hours later. They were all ready to go home and I had only checked out half of the floor. So I buzzed around and checked the rest out and we split. The next morning my buddy was calling me and suggesting how he was thinking of going back and I was sold...this is a 4 hour round trip for me. Since this was 11/2001, us folks in Jersey skipped a month in the cc bills because of the anthrax scare (the cc folks let us skip). Instead of saving the money for next month to pay bills, I bought a Fender White amp, a '56-'57 special edition narrow face Princeton. I should get it fixed up - new caps and see if I can make my money back+. Hmm...maybe I'll skip the show. and I really should be playing guitar now...

I haven't been to a guitar show in a few years because 1.) I own plenty of guitars and amps, 2.) I'm lazy and it's a bit of a drive for me or 3.) sometimes I'm too busy and can't make the time to go. Right now I'm kinda lookin' for a Tele so I'd be trying a lot out except that a very good friend left a '52 reissue (butterscotch) with me since June. Fingerboard is kinda flat, but for the blues I do own a great Strat. I'll see how I feel the week of the show. They have another show at the same venue in June.

I think it's cool. I didn't know that the technology was so old.

The Antikythera mechanism The clockwork computer Sep 19th 2002 From The Economist print edition An ancient piece of clockwork shows the deep roots of modern technology WHEN a Greek sponge diver called Elias Stadiatos discovered the wreck of a cargo ship off the tiny island of Antikythera in 1900, it was the statues lying on the seabed that made the greatest impression on him. He returned to the surface, removed his helmet, and gabbled that he had found a heap of dead, naked women. The ship's cargo of luxury goods also included jewellery, pottery, fine furniture, wine and bronzes dating back to the first century BC. But the most important finds proved to be a few green, corroded lumps—the last remnants of an elaborate mechanical device. The Antikythera mechanism, as it is now known, was originally housed in a wooden box about the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside and a complex assembly of bronze gear wheels within. X-ray photographs of the fragments, in which around 30 separate gears can be distinguished, led the late Derek Price, a science historian at Yale University, to conclude that the device was an astronomical computer capable of predicting the positions of the sun and moon in the zodiac on any given date. A new analysis, though, suggests that the device was cleverer than Price thought, and reinforces the evidence for his theory of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology. Michael Wright, the curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, has based his new analysis on detailed X-rays of the mechanism using a technique called linear tomography. This involves moving an X-ray source, the film and the object being investigated relative to one another, so that only features in a particular plane come into focus. Analysis of the resulting images, carried out in conjunction with Allan Bromley, a computer scientist at Sydney University, found the exact position of each gear, and suggested that Price was wrong in several respects. In some cases, says Mr Wright, Price seems to have “massaged” the number of teeth on particular gears (most of which are, admittedly, incomplete) in order to arrive at significant astronomical ratios. Price's account also, he says, displays internal contradictions, selective use of evidence and unwarranted speculation. In particular, it postulates an elaborate reversal mechanism to get some gears to turn in the right direction. Since so little of the mechanism survives, some guesswork is unavoidable. But Mr Wright noticed a fixed boss at the centre of the mechanism's main wheel. To his instrument-maker's eye, this was suggestive of a fixed central gear around which other moving gears could rotate. This does away with the need for Price's reversal mechanism and leads to the idea that the device was specifically designed to model a particular form of “epicyclic” motion. The Greeks believed in an earth-centric universe and accounted for celestial bodies' motions using elaborate models based on epicycles, in which each body describes a circle (the epicycle) around a point that itself moves in a circle around the earth. Mr Wright found evidence that the Antikythera mechanism would have been able to reproduce the motions of the sun and moon accurately, using an epicyclic model devised by Hipparchus, and of the planets Mercury and Venus, using an epicyclic model derived by Apollonius of Perga. (These models, which predate the mechanism, were subsequently incorporated into the work of Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD.) A device that just modelled the motions of the sun, moon, Mercury and Venus does not make much sense. But if an upper layer of mechanism had been built, and lost, these extra gears could have modelled the motions of the three other planets known at the time—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. In other words, the device may have been able to predict the positions of the known celestial bodies for any given date with a respectable degree of accuracy, using bronze pointers on a circular dial with the constellations of the zodiac running round its edge. Mr Wright devised a putative model in which the mechanisms for each celestial body stack up like layers in a sandwich, and started building it in his workshop. The completed reconstruction, details of which appeared in an article in the Horological Journal in May, went on display this week at Technopolis, a museum in Athens. By winding a knob on the side, celestial bodies can be made to advance and retreat so that their positions on any chosen date can be determined. Mr Wright says his device could have been built using ancient tools because the ancient Greeks had saws whose teeth were cut using v-shaped files—a task that is similar to the cutting of teeth on a gear wheel. He has even made several examples by hand. How closely this reconstruction matches up to the original will never be known. The purpose of two dials on the back of the device is still unclear, although one may indicate the year. Nor is the device's purpose obvious: it may have been an astrological computer, used to speed up the casting of horoscopes, though it might just as easily have been a luxury plaything. But Mr Wright is convinced that his epicyclic interpretation is correct, and that the original device modelled the entire known solar system. The Greeks had a word for it That tallies with ancient sources that refer to such devices. Cicero, writing in the first century BC, mentions an instrument “recently constructed by our friend Poseidonius, which at each revolution reproduces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets.” Archimedes is also said to have made a small planetarium, and two such devices were said to have been rescued from Syracuse when it fell in 212BC. This reconstruction suggests such references can now be taken literally. It also provides strong support for Price's theory. He believed that the mechanism was strongly suggestive of an ancient Greek tradition of complex mechanical technology which, transmitted via the Arab world, formed the basis of European clockmaking techniques. This fits with another, smaller device that was acquired in 1983 by the Science Museum, which models the motions of the sun and moon. Dating from the sixth century AD, it provides a previously missing link between the Antikythera mechanism and later Islamic calendar computers, such as the 13th century example at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford. That device, in turn, uses techniques described in a manuscript written by al-Biruni, an Arab astronomer, around 1000AD. The origins of much modern technology, from railway engines to robots, can be traced back to the elaborate mechanical toys, or automata, that flourished in the 18th century. Those toys, in turn, grew out of the craft of clockmaking. And that craft, like so many other aspects of the modern world, seems to have roots that can be traced right back to ancient Greece.

I'm lookin' forward VV reissue. My order from CD Universe is being held up by another disk that should come out next week.

That's where Apple lifted it from.

Man, those were the days.

The endings of both those pieces are absolutely joyous. There's some darkness along the way, but the endings are pure sunlight. For me anyway. ← One man's darkness is another man's joy.

Pagemaker was around in 88-89. The problem was the machines were not fast enough to run Windows.

We're cool.

And what else could you say to her beyond that? Not much. But I can offer is my sympathy, I don't know what it's like - I came close to passing nine years ago so I know something about what it's like, but hang in there.

Don't know what to say other than I'm sorry.

Are you sure that isn't a Motherwell? ← Looks like Kine to me. ← You sure? Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 70, 1961 Robert Motherwell (American, 1915–1991) Oil on canvas; 69 x 114 in. (175.3 x 289.6 cm) ← I guess not!

Man, I love that disc.

It's classic. I'm glad someone saved it.

Yeah, I saw this on the Zorn list this morning.

Are you sure that isn't a Motherwell? ← Looks like Kine to me.

Yeah, I was wondering what's up. I need help in the sarcastic remarks dept. ← That's an understatement. ← We try harder.