Boogaloo Nights on Funky Reggae Broadway

We need a good, old-fashioned argument. No holds barred, with nothing at stake. Like a power trip in a teacher’s lounge, or a coup d’etat at a sewer commission meeting. Let’s argue about the best song about Broadway!

Which Broadway? I suppose it doesn’t matter. I understand that we should surrender early to the New York crowd, and argue about something else. I’m pretty sure Philadelphia has a Broad Street, and could beat up anyone on Broadway in New York, but that’s a hockey game for another time.

On to the contestants!

That’s the Fantastic Johnny C, back in 1967. Great little R&B hit. I hope Johnny kept his day job, because that was it for him.

Next up, Johnny Nash!

If Johnny Nash ever had a day job, he certainly could quit after I Can See Clearly Now hit number one in the seventies. He was the first non-Jamaican to make some real scratch with reggae songs. Bob Marley did Reggae on Broadway first, for instance, but Johnny cashed the check.

On the extreeemely other hand, The Bee Gees:

Their falsetto disco singing always went through my head like a railroad spike, but like what you like, like I always say. You can vote for Nights on Broadway if you don’t mind a little snickering emanating from Maine.

Any prog-rockers out there? Well, I’d be shirking my duties here if I didn’t find some sort of Gentle Giant or Yes song or something. Here’s Genesis, from so long ago Phil Collins didn’t have his hair on inside out yet:

I guess I should have warned you that the last one was almost five minutes long, huh? If you made it past all that, how about some Shaggy, doing a sort of reggae rap song about Broadway? On second thought, let’s not. I’d like some readers to make it all the way through this thing.

How about George Benson and AC/DC? We had them on here a while back. Refresh your memory here, if need be: The Scylla and Charybdis of On Broadway.

But we need fresh material here. We could all mock Broadway Girls from Lil Durk  and Morgan Whalen. It’s an autotune, tuneless catastrophe, it’s true, but one can’t help but cast a jaundiced eye on the hit counter. It got 110 million views on YouTube in two years:

One hundred and ten mil. Why yes, I do think the United States is doomed. Why do you ask?

Let’s refresh the palate with Doris Day:

Maybe it’s the dress, but all I can think of is Jiffy Pop.

Well, as you might have guessed, there can be only one. Wilson Pickett can’t even get halfway through it before he’s sexually assaulted. Case closed:

Remember: no wagering.

When The Tractor Cab Looks Like NASA, Find a Good Terranaut

I know I’m supposed to be some kind of impressed with your college degree from Flyover Directional State University, but there must be something wrong with me. I’m not. It’s nothing personal. I don’t have a college degree. Feel free to look down your nose at me, if you can see past your nose ring. Me? I try to take people as I find them.

I guess I should qualify that opening remark a little. I assume there are still future thoracic surgeons floating around out there. People are still graduating with degrees in electrical engineering, industrial engineering, or computer science, aerospace engineering, or something similar. They make things like that tractor in the video and the satellites it’s talking to. But we’ve recently seen exactly how superfluous a PHD at the end of your name is in the soft sciences, never mind a BA. And yet, there’s a pandemic of snootiness from college grads towards guys like you see in the video. Ick. His hands are dirty. He can’t be too bright.

Listen to how intelligent, productive, and articulate this farmer is. He never hesitates, never stumbles, never mumbles. He understands everything going on in that cab, and outside it, too. He is feeding thousands of people with his efforts. He even tracks the decreased yield per acre when the seed placement goes out of tolerance. The video is a 19-minute soliloquy of resourceful, worthwhile activity.

There’s an old joke in Caddyshack, I think, a movie I’ve never seen. A nasty person makes a cutting remark to an average guy, “That’s OK, the world needs ditchdiggers, too.” I’ve heard it spoken many, many times. Each and every time I’ve heard it, my eye twitched, because I’ve worked cheek by jowl with plenty of ditch diggers. Even twenty years ago, they were laying out those ditches using a satellite and lasers. I can assure you that no person I’ve heard repeat that remark would be remotely qualified to be a ditch digger, because they weren’t smart enough to start with, never mind physically and mentally tough enough.

People should have some respect for things they don’t understand. The modern college education makes damn sure you don’t understand damn near everything. The fellow in the video might even have a college degree, who knows? If so, it doesn’t seem to have hurt him any.

Heavy Mental

Look, Loki, we’re going to be talking science here. Not “The Science,” like people who are gulled by articles in regular newspapers. I mean honest to goodness science. Hard evidence. Statistics. Here it comes, so to speak: Heavy Metal is for wankers.

Let’s plow right into the data. Wander on over to Psypost.org, and peruse Extreme metal guitar skills linked to intrasexual competition, but not mating success. It’s just a summary of a hardcore paper over at the American Psychological Association, but it’ll save you from having to read one of those pdfs with scatter plots and bar charts and control group flim flam and other assorted massage techniques for statistics. The “Impact Statement” over at the source material is a hoot, though, and drives right to the basket, as it were:

This study explores the idea that heterosexual male metal guitarists are motivated to invest heavily in getting good at guitar to primarily impress other men. The study’s results provide some support for this idea. Additionally, metal guitarists also seem to be somewhat motivated by a desire for casual sex. (link)

Please note that they’re motivated by a desire for casual sex. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna get any. As my friend Shaky Bill might say, it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance, due to a performance that features shredding. Heavy metal guitarists are mostly in store for the most casual kind of sex, the kind with no one else present. It’s science!

This is very old news to anyone who’s actually worked in the regular cover band music business. Once, on a lark, I tried to explain to people why playing guitar hero songs like Sultans of Swing was a bad idea if you wanted a female human still  present when you finished up. I had a hard time making myself understood. That isn’t even in the neighborhood of Heavy Metal, but the phenomenon is exactly the same. I’ve gone over this ground before:

Sultans of Swing is just Freebird for people who’d rather watch My Dinner with Andre instead of NASCAR on TV

“Making myself understood” with people reading on the internet, I mean. We had plenty of luck making ouselves understood back in the day. We played in bands that performed covers of stuff like the following instead of Sultans of Swing. Believe you me, girls understood exactly what we were after:

Now, I’m not claiming you could get Helen Reddy to panty drop just by playing Funky Music. You’d probably have to play Funky Music and get two or three Sloe Gin Fizzes in her, too. But covering a Black Sabbath number is definitely not going to get you home without duct tape, rope, and rohypnol. God, we all knew that back in the day. Did you really think we played disco because we liked it?

There’s no joke so wild that you can make these days that events won’t overtake it. For example, Spinal Tap was a great parody of the genre. Here’s the script:

MARTY: Let’s talk about your music today…uh…one thing that puzzles me …um…is the make up of your audience
seems to be …uh… predominately young boys.
D AVID: Well it’s a sexual thing, really isn’t it? Aside from the identifying the boys do with us there’s also a re-reaction
to the female…..of the female to our music. How did you put it?
NIGEL: Really they’re quite fearful—that’s my theory. They see us on stage with tight trousers. We’ve got, you know,
armadillos in our trousers. I mean it’s really quite frightening…
DAVID: Yeah.
NIGEL: …the size…and and they, they run screaming

And here we are, back to THE SCIENCE:

Although there is evidence that playing music increases male attractiveness, the sexual selection explanation may not be mutually exclusive to all types of music. Extreme metal is a genre that is heavily male-biased, not only among the individuals that play this style of music, but also among the fans of the genre.

Do tell. Of course being scienticians or psychomechanics or whatever the capital letters after their names mean, they get the right data and then bollix up the conclusions:

Therefore, it is unlikely that extreme metal musicians are primarily trying to increase their mating success through their music.

There’s wrong, and then there’s the wrong like that sentence. You need a map to travel far enough out into the wrongness to deal with that begged question. The stats and your humble narrator says playing metal guitar doesn’t help you one whit with the ladies, and may actually hurt your chances. Good so far. But they extrapolate that the men who endlessly practice two finger barre chords with the fuzz box on eleven must be doing it for some other reason than getting chicks, because they can’t get any.  Says who? Assuming that rational people would discover that metal music checks exactly zero female boxes, which would lead to self-awareness and a change to performing Marvin Gaye covers, has nothing to do with metal players. They’re simply failing, over and over, and never figuring out why.

I’ll give you a much more trenchant example of the phenomenon. I double dog dare you to find any metal band, anywhere, at any time, getting over better with a room full of hot babes than this dude:

You just know what that guy is swimming in, and it ain’t due to Blue Oyster Cult covers.

But there’s one more data point I can let you all in on. In a way, it’s borderline anecdotal, but I gotsa lotta anecdotes at my disposal. Here goes: It doesn’t matter what kind of guitar genre you learn. She always goes home with the bass player anyway. Deal wif it.

 

Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, Loud, Loud Music, and a Rebel Yell

Over the years I’ve noticed that people with a steel backbone of talent often have a sense of humor about themselves that others lack. It’s people who are unsure of themselves that are deadly serious about everything. When you doubt your own ability to “get over” with an audience, any distraction, any ad-lib, any hiccup in the proceeding can lead to a total breakdown. The most virulent forms of this phenomenon leads to actors who demand that no one even look them in the eye when passing them in the hall at the movie studio, or maybe demanding that their M&Ms get sorted before they’ll eat them.

I’ve played in bands for money. Lots and lots of bad things have happened during shows. I’ve seen performers literally freak out if a string breaks on their guitar. The audience never would have caught on if they hadn’t pitched a fit in the middle of a song instead of soldiering on. I was very lucky that some of the people I worked with would just use whatever happened during a show as fodder for humor or entertaining seriousness, the best kind of humor.

So here’s Tennessee Ernie Ford, Molly Bee, and Merle Travis singing the hell out of a country standard, Dim Lights, Thick Smoke, and Loud Loud Music in 1960. It’s before my time, but I’m familiar with the principals. Ford based his TV career on a kind of offbeat, corn pone humor and good music. Like Dean Martin, who also had a teevee variety show later on in the decade, he seemed to be having fun the whole time, and be self-deprecating and nearly disorganized. Of course nothing was disorganized in the slightest. Both were consummate professionals, and would know what to do if anything from a heckler to a world war broke out during a number. Ford always used to close his show with a hymn, which was a novelty at the time, and since. Everyone loved TEF, or at least his public persona.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the rebel yell halfway through was a put-up job from a stage hand, and planned by Ford well in advance. Seeming spontaneous takes a lot of preparation, generally. But it also wouldn’t surprise me if it was a happy accident, someone in the audience just transported by the singing, and Ford didn’t miss a beat, and simply used it to get a laugh and carry the performance along.

The Middle Ages Version of Tank Battles

Suits of armor can seem kind of silly to the modern eye. We’ve been weaned on entertainment about the Middle Ages, not a lot of it very flattering, or based in historical fact. Every once in a while you see a fairly accurate depiction of a heavy cavalry charge with knights in armor, and you get a sense of how terrifying it must have been for the average soldier standing facing one, who couldn’t afford much, if any of that stuff.

If you weren’t heavily armed and armored and met up with one of these fellows, I wouldn’t like your chances. Watch the next video, and see what a direct blow from a broadsword does to an armored combatant. And if you’re planning on Jackie Channing them without armor and using light weapons, while they lumber around blind in their iron skinsuit, you might want to rethink it after they demonstrate their mobility in the stuff :

More interesting stuff at the Royal Armouries.

Who says there’s nothing good on YouTube? Oh right, I do. Oops.

Well, even Ivory Soap is only 99 44/100% pure. That ratio sounds about right for the internet as a whole, only reversed. I guess the Royal Armouries are part of the 0.56% remainder of the good parts of the internet.

[Update: Many thanks to Bob for his generous hit on the tip jar. Thanks for supporting Sippican Cottage!]

All Saints Day

I’ve been in a lot of churches. If you study architecture, they ladle their floor plans on you like gravy, so you get familiar with all sorts of churches from around the world. I’ve never been in a church that could compare with the chiesa di San Salvatore di Ognissanti in Florence, Italy. All Saints.

It’s got a lot of competition in Florence. Some of the most notable churches ever built, really. The big draw in the city is Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (St. Mary of the Flower), i.e. the Florence Cathedral:

The exterior of this cathedral looks like a giant wedding cake made out of marble. It’s staggering to look at, and really brightly colored. It’s more famous for its duomo than anything else, though, and for good reason:


Photo credit

If you’re wondering about the scale of that thing, if you look closely you can see people standing on an observation ledge up near the top. We stood there ourselves. It was fun unless you thought too hard about the railing, that was no doubt installed by the low bidder in the middle ages. You get up there by climbing a narrow stone staircase between the inner and the outer dome. You can’t stand up, really, and have to lean your hand on the inner wall to steady yourself the whole way.

It’s still the largest dome in the world made out of bricks. They worked on the building for more than a century with no idea how to build the dome on top of it. Brunelleschi, one of the smartest ginks I’ve ever heard of, said he could do it, and he could do it without the usual timber form work and scaffolding to hold it up during construction. Oh, yes, he also invented linear perspective. That’s like saying you invented fire or the wheel or something.

But the interior of the church is sorta drab in comparison with the exterior. There’s a big mural on the underside of the dome that depicts people who put premium gas into rental cars ascending to heaven, and the seven circles of call waiting, and other biblical scenes. It’s ugly and hamfisted compared to the interior of Ognissanti.

Ognissanti is on an out-of-the-way street. I knew in my heart I would only have one trip to Florence, or anywhere else for that matter, and I used to roam around the city very early in the morning while my wife and our traveling companions slumbered. I happened upon it completely by accident. I remember it had a strip painted about chest high on the exterior wall by the door that marked the high water line of some flood or another they suffered in Florence. Like Mark Twain before me, I couldn’t picture the Arno causing a big flood like that. Like Sam said, it would be a passable river, if they pumped some water into it. But then again, he was used to the Mississippi.

There was a Mass of some sort going on in Ognissanti. A few dozen people were in attendance. It was held in Italian, which I learned for the trip, and it was so close to the Latin from my childhood that it brought a tear of remembrance to my eye. A Catholic Church Mass used to be a serious business. They’re competing with Unitarians, now, I gather.

I sat there in that church and it blasted my eyes out. I’ve never seen painting like that in my life. The trompe l’oeil on the ceiling and the walls was mesmerizing. It’s all just painted plaster and oil paintings.

But look who painted the stuff: Giotto, Domenico and David Ghirlandaio, and Sandro Botticelli. The church had been rather plain inside, too, but the locals liked the religious order who ran it, the Humiliati, and started delivering works of art and relics to the place, and remodeled it to a version of Baroque grandeur. They’ve got St. Francis of Assisi’s scratchy bathrobe, for instance. There are a series of chapels that fan out from the main altar you see in the picture, and each one is more astonishing than the last.

Boticelli is buried there, and so is Amerigo Vespucci. They named our country after him, so I thought I should drop by his bier and asked him, sotto voce, if he’d like to take his name off it, out of embarrassment. He was cagey on the point. Amerigo’s cousin Simonetta is buried there, too, near Botticelli who used her for a model for a lot of his paintings.  So did Piero di Cosimo:

That’s probably her rising out of the waves on a clamshell, too.

It was maybe twenty five years ago when we went. I assume the church is an Arby’s or something now, because that’s the way of the world. But for a brief moment, sitting on a bench in the back, alone but not lonely, with the Italian words washing over me, it made me remember that architecture wasn’t always a contest to see how ugly you can make something. And it has always been fun to be afraid you’d be struck dead by lightning if you turned around in church during the service, because the nuns told you so. Nuns wouldn’t lie, would they?

My Mind Is Kind

There are certain interactions with other humans that stick in your mind. Sometimes they stick in your craw and your mind. Their indelible nature doesn’t seem to be closely related to their actual importance. They could be really minor episodes, trivial really, but perhaps they represent some theme or trend that captivates your memory in some way.

My poor wife is always trying to remind me of fairly notable events that I can’t recall clearly. Some contretemps we had in the car over directions, or the exact date a human being exited her womb. Stuff like that. Women are weird, and recall the darnedest things, instead of important stuff like whether Flutie was on his own 35 yard line, or the 40, or where my largest flat-blade screwdriver is currently located. He was on the 37, of course.

I chalk most of this up to a phenomenon I call “My mind is kind.” I notice a lot of things other people don’t, and if I didn’t have some sort of trash collection going full bore in my head, trivial offal would be leaking out of my ears by now, instead of just out of my keyboard.

I remember this one evening about 25 years ago. We were on the main drag in Dartmouth, Massachusetts in a bookstore that looked like an old English Tudor-style building. Baker Books, I think it was called. It had a strip-mall parking area to the right of the entry door. You entered into a vestibule, where they piled lots of heavily discounted coffee-table-type books. I think they wanted people to shoplift them on the way out, to get rid of them. As you entered the store proper, on the left was a little seating area and a coffee bar, which was more or less a novelty back then. It was always closed, but you could sit in the chairs if you wanted to.

We didn’t want coffee anyway, because we had eaten in a restaurant a few doors down. The eatery was decorated in what Angelenos dubbed the Googie Style, a kind of George Jetson motif, along with a healthy dose of postmodern color scheme. I remember a lot of purple and yellow. I had a plate of meatloaf wrapped in bacon, which doesn’t seem like what you’d order on a night on the town, but it was obviously cooked by someone who really knew what they were doing. I can’t remember what my wife had. See, there’s that problem again.

Anyway, the bookstore hosted book signings and similar foofaraw in that little coffee area, but nothing was doing. There were racks of books by local authors or about local topics arranged around the seating. Straight ahead from the entry door were the majority of the book stacks, with their butt ends facing the door. There was a long wall of books on the far wall, too, perpendicular to the interior store stacks.

Directly on the right as you entered you’d find the checkout counter. It was a riot of tchotchkes and bric-a-brac. I remember they used one of those translucent white Apple computers that looked like a giant motorcycle helmet or something. Apple computers make terrible point of sale machines in my experience, but no one asked me. There was a young man behind the counter wearing a T-shirt two sizes too small for him, and four sizes too small for anyone who ate any meat. I don’t remember the slogan on it. He had eyeglasses that looked like $500 versions of shop glasses.

If you kept going right, there were more book stacks grouped in a kind of grotto. They had a lot of good books about woodworking and architecture and other things I liked there. Further on, there was a step down into a children’s book room, with a toy castle in it that our children liked a great deal, although it was quite plain.

We got some books and went back to checkout desk. We had to wait our turn. There was a middle-aged woman in front of us. She had an I Want To Talk To The Manager hairdo long before that was a thing, and she actually wanted to talk to the manager. She was heavy set, bottle blonde, and wearing a puffy vest. The clerk was visibly afraid of her.

“Where are all the Feng Shui books? I don’t see them.”

“They’re right there, ma’am, one aisle over. There’s a little sign on the end of the row.”

“I saw those. That’s not many Feng Shui books. Why don’t you have more Feng Shui books?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t buy the books…

“You should have more Feng Shui books!”

“There’s a whole section of Feng Shui books.”

“That’s not many.”

“If there’s a particular Feng Shui book you’re looking for, we can order it for you.”

“I DON’T WANT TO BUY A FENG SHUI BOOK. I JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU DON’T TAKE ANY OF THEM AWAY BECAUSE PEOPLE COMPLAINED ABOUT TOO MANY FENG SHUI BOOKS!”

Then she stomped out of the building, and didn’t even have the decency to shoplift a coffee table book on the way out through the vestibule, about Feng Shui or otherwise.

Perhaps I remember it all these years later, because even back then, in my heart I sensed that someday the entire world would be run by women who wanted to make sure no Feng Shui books were taken away because people complained. I haven’t been disappointed in that regard.

Or maybe the meatloaf was that good.

Ghost Notes

There’s no point in trying to explain what James Brown is doing. Er, does. Er, did. In Moby Dick, Ishmael asks Stubb, “Who is Ahab?” Stubb replies, incredulously, “Who is Ahab? Ahab is Ahab.”

Well, James Brown is James Brown. Here, I’ll draw you a Venn Diagram to explain it better:

Well, I hope that helped. The drummer in that video is Clyde Stubblefield. He’s pretty well-known in drumming circles. You’ve heard his drumming scores of times because it was sampled and used in umpty-nine hip-hop records. He passed away in 2017. He was, by all accounts, a nice man. He played with James Brown for six years or so. You’ll also notice there’s another drummer in that video. That’s Jabo Starks. Everyone in James Brown’s band was a drummer, although they played drums on different instruments, so having two trap sets isn’t that weird.

He moved to Madison, Wisconsin, of all places, after his stint with James Brown. He played in a nightclub in Madison every Monday for more than twenty years, until he got sickly.

Stubblefield never had a drum lesson. He said he liked seeing drummers in parades, and thought it would be cool to try. He liked listening to rhythms in everyday things, like trains passing by and and machines banging away in factories, and incorporating them into beats.

Unlike James Brown, Clyde could explain what he was doing. He’ll even show you, if you’ll pay attention:

He says, “They call them ghost notes. I’m not sure I understand what they mean by ghost notes. Notes that’s not there, but I put them there.”

There are only a few musicians in any generation who hear things in their heads that aren’t there yet, so they put them there. Clyde was certainly one.

Git Er Dun

I don’t know the provenance of this image. If I did, I’d drive to wherever this guy is, and shake his hand. I’d probably want to wash my hands directly after, but by gad this guy needs an attaboy.

If you’re unfamiliar with the gewgaws in the image, I’m here to help. As far as I know, a Vortec engine is from a Chevy of some sort. I’ve never owned a Chevy anything. I supposed I’d drive one if you gave it to me and asked nicely, but for the most part I’ve never been interested. I could just about put up with a split-window ’63. If you have an extra one lying around, feel free to mail it to me. But my affection for that model is only because it was one of the cars that came with my Aurora slot car set.

I don’t know what that pipe is doing on a Chevy. It looks like some form of exhaust gas recirculation or something similar. Well, this dude didn’t have a replacement part, or is just my kinda guy, I don’t know, but he’s used several PVC plastic plumbing fittings and a couple of Fernco fittings to replace the original.

It brings a tear to my eye. A Cuban mechanic would approve of that, and might even try it himself, or would if they had indoor plumbing down there. Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got. Words to live by.

Babes in the Woods

We were in an antique store yesterday. I’ve needed a new (different) chair for my office for quite some time. I’ve tried lots of different butt busters and padded fanny slings, but none suited the task. I even bought a modern “ergonomic” pneumatic job with more levers than a bulldozer and cloth that left marks in my leg like a smallpox victim’s face. It was about as comfortable as a bulldozer seat, too.

The antique shop had an old, broken down, wood swivel office chair. Mrs. Cottage spotted it and said it was just the thing. It had a heaping helping of His Girl Friday vibe. My wife is confused and thinks I’m a real writer and should at least sit like one. Could I fix it?

She went off to find the curator, as there was no price on it. I looked it over. It was too low, and the legs wobbled like a drunken writer’s, which I assumed was at least part of its pedigree. She returned and said it was twenty-five bucks, because it was busted and they wanted to get rid of it. A solid birch swivel office chair with arms, and all the casters in place. Someone had re-finished it, and the varnish still looked fresh. Twenty-five bucks.

The owner and I were locked in the embrace of asymmetrical information. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, you can visit the Wikiup and get the skinny:

In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other.

Information asymmetry creates an imbalance of power in transactions, which can sometimes cause the transactions to be inefficient, causing market failure in the worst case. Examples of this problem are adverse selection, moral hazard, and monopolies of knowledge.

The piquant part of our asymmetry was that both of us were working on imperfect information. The owners knew the chair intimately, because they had probably cracked their shin on it numerous times, and cursed it, and wished they’d never bought it. They knew it was busted and wanted to get rid of it, hence the twenty-five buck lowball. They still thought they were taking advantage of me, I imagine, because they based her assessment of its bustedness on the shop’s ability to fix it, not mine.

My portion of the asymmetry was a form of educated guess. It’s hard to refinish a chair like this. It has a lot of metal parts. There’s a tilting mechanism under the seat, with a big screw dial and hefty springs to tighten or loosen the amount of sproing in the tilt. There chair seat has a big, threaded rod that allowed you to spin a heavy metal plate to adjust the height. It was seized, and held by a set screw, at its lowest possible adjustment. That’s why if felt like you were sitting on the floor when you plopped your brains on the seat.

There were four gussets between the four legs. They were the same wood, and nicely refinished like the rest of the chair, but they rattled around. One hung precariously on a simple brad hammered through a metal plate on the base of the chair legs.

So knowing what I know, I surmised that the owner-husband had taken it apart to refinish it, and couldn’t quite put it back together, and the owner-wife had been riding him over it. They were hoping for a payday, but had come a cropper, just wanted to be rid of the thing. It was a mute reminder of something unpleasant to both of them, and not something good.

It’s a common thing. Taking things apart to fix them and not being able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I know I’ve done it with things a lot bigger than a chair. A Toyota, for instance. Lots and lots of people in my neck of the woods watch a couple of teevee shows, buy whole houses, take them apart, and can’t figure out how to put them back together again, and eventually wander off. The next realtor helpfully mentions that all the hard work is done, it just needs some touches, and many of the materials are still onsite. The auctioneer who follows the realtor after they give up is usually of a more practical mind, and simply admits the place is gutted, and you have to clean it out.

So we plopped down the money, and I put it in the back of the car knowing one thing, and the owner went outside and took down the OPEN flag and kind of smirked at me, knowing another.

We got home, and I flipped the chair upside down, drove four self-tapping wood screws up through the plate that holds the swivel base legs together. Those are always the first thing to go missing when you take a chair like that apart, because they’re the first thing you remove. Since the metal plate wasn’t flexing anymore, I could (re)bang the tacks that held the wooden gussets in place. I used a flat blade screwdriver to release the heavy adjustment disc on the threaded center column and it spun easily to adjust the height. I hand-tightened the spring tilt assembly to avoid the feeling of scuba diving water entry when you tilted back. I plopped a cushion on the seat, and I’m sitting on it right now, typing this essay.

If you poke around online, you can find a find a fair approximation of the chair. Here’s one that’s almost identical. It’s 350 bucks.

The entire economy of the United States seems to be based on asymmetrical information at this point. You’re at a disadvantage in almost every transaction you could name. Well, I know I am, anyway, and I imagine there are plenty of people like me out there. Guys like Warren at the shirt company that doesn’t make shirts anymore based their whole career on the concept.

Everything on the internet spies on you all the time. Everyone in a position to fleece you knows everything about everything about you at this point. They know how much money you have, and what you’ve been browsing online (you really should have cleared the cache memory after looking at that girl wearing only a pillbox hat and steeply inclined shoes, gents), and where you drove, and what you bought at the supermarket five years ago. You’re fish in a barrel to someone like a bank manager with a gleam in his eye.

Your only hope is to wander into a place where no one knows you, and doesn’t know how much money you have in your pocket, or how badly you need an office chair like that one, or even that anyone still walking the earth could fix something as simple as a chair with machine-made parts.

Then all you have to do is stand still and let them take advantage of you. You know, for twenty-five bucks.

Month: January 2024

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