That’s Kizzy Crawford. Something of an exotic, being Bajan/Welsh. I’m not sure I could form any connection between Wales and Barbados that isn’t Kizzy. There are worse things to be in the entertainment industry than sui generis.
Only a Fool Would Say That is one of the numerous Steely Dan songs that sounds kinda peppy and sunny but really isn’t. It’s a pillow fight with a rock in the pillowcase.
I heard it was you
Talking ’bout a world where all is free
It just couldn’t be
And only a fool would say that
Everyone assumes they know who Steely Dan was talking about, but I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you. They’re pretty obtuse. For example, there are about 700 theories about what Rikki Don’t Lose That Number means, but according to the songwriters themselves, none of them are in the correct zip code of the topic. It’s apparently just a song about a girl they couldn’t make time with back in the day.
Only a Fool Would Say That is a workhorse tune. I’m surprised more people haven’t taken a cover run at it. There aren’t many on the TooYube, anyway. Here’s a Steely Dan tribute band giving it a go:
Back in the day, we played in cover bands. The audience expected you to play more or less like a series of bands they favored, but not do anything slavish to reproduce the originals. They simply recognized the songs, and wanted to hear how you’d adapt yourself to the material. My brother used to play in a trio that played several Hendrix tunes, for example, and they didn’t have a guitar player. If you know what you’re doing, you can make the familiar fresh that way.
Somewhere along the line, the audience demanded that bands morph from cover bands into tribute bands. My sons were a cover band, and played at agricultural fairs in Maine. The headline acts were all tribute bands. I’m not sure who would want to see Billy Joel at this point, never mind a Billy Joel tribute band, but they did.
There’s a danger with tribute bands that cover bands never had to deal with. You’re supposed to play just like the record. Any change, whether it’s an improvement or not, and the band ends up plunging into the uncanny valley, where the Brooklyn Charmers live. They’re all really good players. Maybe they should move to Wales, and do covers instead.
Many moons ago, I used to read Fine Homebuilding magazine. I’m not that interested in building fine homes anymore. This Old Hovel would be my kind of publication, but it don’t exist. But I got to wondering what was going on in contemporary home building, and what sort of new techniques are being used in new house construction.
Because the intertunnel is functionally retarded, asking for contemporary anything, or modern whatnot, just delivers a deluge of SEO-infected drivel sites with pictures of “modern” or “contemporary” house plans, because those adjectives have been debased beyond recognition. Modern-style houses aren’t, by the way. The style is basically as old as Arts and Crafts. It’s barely more modern than a Victorian. And contemporary just means a 60 or 70 year old house idea.
But Fine Homebuilding appeared from the scrum, and lied magnificently when they claimed that “The Future of Framing Is Here,” and that “Smarter strategies can save money, speed construction, improve energy efficiency, and cut down on job-site waste.”
You can read the whole thing if you want to. But to save time and your eyeballs, here’s a graphic depiction of their ideas:
I’m fairly obtuse on a good day, but today I’ll be unequivocal: You don’t want any of that.
As you all know by now, I have a modest and unassuming personality, so I think everyone should just do what I tell them and I shouldn’t have to explain myself, because I’m, you know, me. But just in case you need some ‘splainin, Lucy, I’ll list my objections forthwith.
No header in non-bearing wall
The headers in wall framing do more than carry loads from above. Part of their job is to stiffen the opening. Windows really, really don’t like any deflection in the framing in the rough openings, and get jammed shut pretty easy if the opening doesn’t stay square. And lots of interior things like to be nailed to that header you don’t think you need, dudes.
Header hangers eliminate jack studs
Super duper bad idea is super bad. I’ve already explained why almost everything in your house is a bendy thing atop two crushy things. This can’t be improved upon, but it can be wrecked. The author thinks steel is stronger than wood, so he’s making things better. He ain’t. The hanger brackets can be stronger than a fat girl’s ice cream scoop, but it doesn’t matter. You’re hanging the brackets on nails. Things hanging on nails sag over time. A beam on top of two posts doesn’t. And framing brackets cost more than the bits of 2×4 you use for the jack studs anyway. And nailing off brackets is time consuming and uses a lot of fasteners, which aren’t free, you know. And the opening is less stiff, and might bow out or in in the middle because it’s a bearing wall. So the window might bind. And there isn’t enough wood around the window to nail interior trim to. Other than that, I have no opinion about the practice.
Single top plate
No, no, no. To use a single top plate, the author is forced to place all the roof framing directly over the studs, which is very fussy and time consuming. And we’re back to having a very small target for interior finishes. And the ceiling is 1-1/2″ lower. And framing lumber isn’t all made from old growth trees with grain like railroad tracks anymore. A single top plate will wander under snow and wind loads, and just plain warping with humidity changes. Double it up, and it’s stiffer, and the two pieces sort of average out any lack of straightness.
Place windows and doors on stud layout
This is akin to telling your wife not to deliver your baby on Super Bowl Sunday because you won’t be home. Cart, meet horse. The proper placement, proportions, and total size of windows is really important. Treating it like an afterthought to avoid using an extra wall stud or two is el stupido.
Rigid foam sheathing improves thermal performance
This is called petitio principii. Begging the question. It’s assumes without evidence that bowdlerizing your sheathing to improve thermal performance is an absolute good. It isn’t. Your sheathing has a lot of work to do. Your insulation has other work to do. Stay in your lanes, people.
2×6 at 24 in. on center
Nope, nope, nope. A 2×4 is 3-1/2″ wide. A 2×6 is 5-1/2″ wide. The author is desperate to stuff more insulation in the wall, so he makes it deeper. Then he figures he’s using bigger studs, so he can space them out wider, and stuff in yet more insulation. It’s all dumb.
If he bothered to do the math, he’d take the 2 extra inches of framing and multiply it by the linear footage of all the exterior walls in the house. There’s about 240 linear feet of exterior walls in a small cape. That means that the interior finished space is 40 square feet less because you used 2×6 instead of 2×4 studs. Why not just make the house design 40 square feet smaller, and use the less expensive lumber? You’ll probably save $6,000+ on the deal, even on a small house. It’ll cost less to cool and heat because it’s smaller. Oh yes, and you won’t have to pay a premium for deeper window jambs and sills. And you won’t have to have as much glass in the house, because the rooms aren’t dark because the windows aren’t set in niches. And if you’ve got a single top plate, too, the ceilings are slightly lower, and less light makes it into the room, so you need more or bigger windows.
Single stud at rough openings
I thought we put a surveyor’s stake in this thing’s heart already, but I’ll bite. You want all the openings in your walls to be as stiff and strong as possible. This is simply cutting corners any way you look at it. Walls do interesting things under unusual loading conditions, like high winds and not enough structure around openings. You do not want your house to do interesting things.
For point loads, the rim joist acts as a header
Jayzuz, no. I thought we were “cutting down on jobsite waste.” It’s vanishingly easy to go to the cutoff pile and find floor framing lumber scraps to double up at the rim joist where point loads are carried. Once again, the author doesn’t understand the problem. The floor joists are not going to be crushed by a point load. They’re going to rotate. The only thing keeping them from rotating if you don’t double them on the inside with a block is the toenailed fasteners through the rim joist. The nails are pounded into the end grain of the joists, which is inherently weak, too. It would take a gopher/helper an hour to go around the site with cut-offs from the scrap pile to fix all these. What is the point?
Stacked framing transfers load directly
Once again I say brethren, “So what?” It’s fussy and time consuming to line up all the framing just to save a few framing members and a top plate. You’re also letting structural concerns completely lord over things like the size of the rooms. So the windows go any old place the framing likes, and the floor framing can’t accommodate things like stairwells where you want them, lest you use an extra 2×10 or something. Silly.
Minimize stud nailers at intersecting walls
Oh, I’ve had to work on drywall in this sort of carpenter’s houses. There’s nothing to screw into in the corners and around the ceiling, and what is there bends like a Comăneci even if you can find it. There’s a reason why so many framing problems are solved by strongbacks. Strongbacks are framing members nailed perpendicular to one another. They’re straight in the first place, and don’t bend easily.
Properly sized header with foam on interior
I’m not sure if the author doesn’t know how to frame, or how to write. Headers have been made for many moons by sandwiching a piece of rigid foam in between two pieces of lumber. The insulation acts as a thermal break, and makes the header the right thickness for the wall framing. And you can nail stuff to your heart’s content inside and out.
No Cripples under ends of windowsill
We’ve been over this, haven’t we? Two cripples under the sill use maybe 4 lineal feet of 2x4s. You can usually find them in the scrap pile, but even if you can’t it’s about a buck and a half of lumber per window. I built two houses without using a single dumpster, so I know this stuff by heart. Skipping cripples is just shoddy work, no matter how hard you try to call it economical. Remember the crushy things, people!
Two-stud corners won’t compress batt insulation
We’re begging questions again. Who the hell is still using batt insulation? Blow in cellulose. Or loose fiberglass. Or if you don’t like money, and would like to get rid of a lot of it in a hurry, spray foam. Good luck fishing a wire in your house forevermore if you go that route, though.
Smarter strategies, huh? Well, what do I know? I’m just some guy on the intertunnel. You’re free to follow Fine Homebuilding’s advice if you like. They’re like, important and official and whatnot. You won’t save any money, the work will go slower, your energy efficiency will be worse, and you’ll have a dumpster full of framing cut-offs instead of jack studs and cripples in your walls. Other than that, I’m sure you’ll enjoy living in the fourth little pig’s house. It’ll be restful to sit outside it, and watch it sway in the breeze.
That’s Eumir Deodato tickling the plastic horse teeth. He’s from Brazil. He’s been around for what seems like forever, doing his thing. He was mostly an arranger and producer of records. He made records with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Kool and the Gang.
He eventually got around to making his own records in a serious way. In 1973, his first album sold five million copies and won a Grammy. It had his very funky version of Also Sprach Zarathustra on it, which was notably featured in Being There. If you thought using Also Sprach in 2001: A Space Odyssey was brilliant, well, using this version of it in Being There was genius.
The TooYube clip is just the song laid over a truncated clip from the movie, but in the original, it weaves in and out of the dialog and street noise, and lasts a lot longer. It’s the most effective melding of music and film footage I’ve ever seen.
The first video is a performance of Super Strut. It’s much less recognizable than ASZ, but it was a modest hit in the US, too. It’s on Deodato’s second album, which is delightfully odd, with jazz covers of Knights in White Satin, Rhapsody in Blue, and a Ravel piece.
I gather that Eumir tours like a lot of old Blues musicians used to. He travels on his own, and expects whoever puts on the show to assemble a band for him to play with. Chuck Berry used to do that, too. In the first video, Deodato is playing with the Euro Groove Department, who are definitely up to the job. There are many videos of Deodato performing the song online with less capable musicians.
The drummer is terrific, but one can’t help but notice that Deodato gets up and goes to the john or something until the drum solo is over. I cast no aspersions. The audience mostly does the same thing during drum solos, so why can’t the other musicians?
Welcome to the Sippican Cottage Trash Day Rodeo. Yippee. Yeehaw. Etc.
I’m really not qualified to host a rodeo. Or participate in one, even. I’m not even capable of rodeo clowning. If I was, I would have gone into politics. So take all this hooey with a grain of salt:
The gap in comprehension wasn’t due to a lack of ability but rather a gap in prerequisite knowledge. So here’s a gentle reminder: You’re not dumb—you just might not have all the prerequisites yet.
Public school administrators have taken a turn-out on teaching any fundamental information that must be learned by rote to allow you perform any higher level intellectual work. So you go up against the bull on day one, and get freight trained. It’s starting to dawn on the younger generation that there was a reason why students used to memorize multiplication tables.
I often use sleek, small-screened ultralight laptops, so I find dual-screen laptops intriguing. The dual-screen laptops I’ve used up until this point have come with a huge caveat, though: no integrated keyboard. That’s what makes AceMagic’s X1 stand out to me. Not only does its secondary screen swing out from the system horizontally (instead of vertically), but the laptop manages to include two 13-inch screens and a traditional keyboard and touchpad.
A Millenial will go to any lengths to avoid admitting that a desktop computer with huge screens is the only sensible way to get any real work done on a computer. Laptop coding is mutton busting.
Is your boss texting you on the weekend? Work email pinging long after you’ve left for home? Australian employees can now ignore those and other intrusions into home life thanks to a new “right to disconnect” law designed to curb the creep of work emails and calls into personal lives.
Erm, Australian employees always had the right to ignore work emails. What they didn’t have was the gumption. Acting ring sour is now the law of the land, so they’re off the hook.
The clever bit is to vastly simplify the design and do without all that ultra-expensive civil engineering by lowering the reactor down a drill shaft a mile deep. A pair of pipes would be attached. One to send down water and another to bring back steam from the reactor’s steam generator.
The word “promise” in the headline is doing a lot of heavy lifting, n’est ce pas? I can think of a few things that might go wrong, right out of the gate. But honestly, why not just keep drilling? It gets pretty hot down there with or without the nuclear reactor.
What was more surprising than the fact we couldn’t match names to (once) famous books was that many of the authors themselves were completely obscure, especially to the younger people present. We were writers and professors. If we didn’t remember these authors, who did? The conversation moved on but I think everyone came away with a reminder: literary fame is fickle and fleeting.
Most books rank a no-score in their own time, never mind the long run. And tastes change. But I went to a good used book store yesterday, and asked for some Dostoevsky and Tom Wolfe. They didn’t have either. They had a whole wall of Stephen King, the literary rodeo clown, however. This proves one of two things. No one will part with good books, and if they do, they’re re-purchased right away. Either that, or they really, really like Stephen King. But if the latter, wouldn’t the King shelves be empty?
Hanania argues that most books are a waste of time. “One would like to think that if someone has written a 300-page book, it means that they have 300 pages worth of things to say,” says Hanania. “My experience is that is rarely the case.”
Sorry, I already argued that. The author also attempts to bulldog the idea that Boomers were the truly self-absorbed generation. Apparently he’s never seen a tween girl between the shafts of her iPhone.
In recent years, organizations have begun using software that analyzes large amounts of activity log records and communications data for purposes that go well beyond cybersecurity. A variety of software systems promise to help them prevent employee misconduct, whether it be criminal, negligent, inappropriate or otherwise undesirable.
Don’t forget to put a cover sheet on your TPS reports, and don’t leave a copy of The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism on your hard drive at work, people. You’ll be branded a hat bender.
The entire concept of work that we have had for thousands of years was a temporary model that was required to solve a temporary problem. Namely, people who are trying to build or sell something that required work they were unable to do by themselves.
Please notice the category error in the subtitle, right out of the chute. A job that makes you happy? There’s a reason they call it work, you know. If this guy isn’t careful, his employer will think he’s nothing but a risk. The author points out some interesting things, however. But he doesn’t even understand that the majority of the world does real things out in the landscape to make their bread, not just shuffle some javascript around on a virtual desktop. AI isn’t going to pick any lettuce, or pop any rivets.
Creely remembers one conversation with a senior director at an automotive tech company with locations in California, for instance, who didn’t want to hire any laid-off workers because he saw them as “damaged goods.” No matter how hard he tried, Creely couldn’t change his client’s mind, he said.
I’m trying to keep up on my HR bingo card. When do “damaged goods” become “table scraps,” and what does it take to get them hired so that they can burst their chrysalis and morph into plain old “risks”? And how long do they need to be unemployed until they’re sent to the glue factory?
In today’s competitive market, every square inch of your venue needs to work harder—restrooms included. Traditional faucets rack up water bills and offer nothing back. Isn’t it time your restrooms became more than just a maintenance checkpoint?
Enter VODXs—our cutting-edge LCD screen faucets not only save up to 70% on water usage but turn your restrooms into dynamic advertising platforms. Imagine every handwash generating revenue and enhancing guest experience with captivating, customizable content.
I’m imagining other things, like meeting the people who think this is a good idea in a dark alley. I checked all over to see if this was satire. It isn’t. I wonder if they’ll eventually make a version of the hand dryer that screams the advertising over the jet engine noise. Man, I wish we could rein in the advertising monster.
Well, that’s the roundup for this Tuesday. Hi ho Silver, and away…!
Month: August 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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