I’m not interested, exactly, in what the USA makes. We make all kinds of stuff. For instance, wander into any convenience store, and you’ll find 40 kinds of beef jerky to go with your Brawndo and snuff purchases. We make plenty of locomotives that masquerade as pickup trucks, too. Just printing Taylor Swift tickets employs millions.
No, I’m more interested in what we sell to the rest of the world, not what we sell to ourselves. I know we sell hot pockets in Peoria. Do we sell any in Pretoria? Stuff like that.
The Wikiup to the rescue! What’s the number one export of the United States from 1991 to 2021? I’ve attached an amended chart. By amended, I mean I’m also relying on my own personal input. The chart at the Wiki uses statistics from the World Bank, but those guys don’t know everything. They’re still lending money to a smoking hole in Eastern Europe, for instance. They don’t keep up with the times the way I do. So I’ve added some first-hand knowledge to the the chart, in order to make it truthier.
I remember Columbus Day because I used to play music in a hundred and one bands anyone that would have me and try to make money to eat and get cigarettes and I don’t smoke and there still was never enough money and I played at a tee-totaling biker association party for two members’ wedding not gay a man and a woman that arrived on a motorcycle with the woman I think wearing a white Wedding Dress and no helmet and we played for one hundred sober bikers and ninety-nine of them were like accountants and one was like a serial murderer but they all looked exactly the same so you had to assume they all would kill you if they got the chance instead of the more likely thing that they’d do your taxes if you asked nice and I never played Born To Be Wild for a Wedding Song before and the bride’s father was in jail I think so she had to dance with the groom twice and the whole thing was held at the Italian-American Club on Gano Street in Providence but everybody calls it Guano Street for a joke haha and it’s a real long time ago but it might have been the Portuguese-American Club I don’t remember but I do remember it was Columbus Day and I went into the bar to get away from the sober biker accountants and that one serial murderer that were in the function room and it didn’t matter if it was the Italian-American Club or the Portuguese-American Club or the Knights Of Columbus Hall haha that would be funny but I don’t really remember but I distinctly remember a guy with a knife a real knife not a just a knife a dagger that came to a perfect point and didn’t fold or look like you could do anything wholesome with it it just looked one hundred percent like it was designed and made to gut a bass player and that guy held that knife right under my chin and explained to me in Portuguese that Cristobal Colon was Portuguese and don’t you forget it and my Spanish was very sketchy and Portuguese sounds like Russian to me not Spanish anyway but believe me I understood every damn word he said and I advise you all to answer the question did you know Cristobal Colon was Portuguese in the affirmative at all times.
I’ll add something right up front here: It’s not my fault I notice things. In a way, it’s my job, if I’m going to blog. I guess this form of interwriting is a very loose form of journalism. Er, maybe not journalism. Epistles? I dunno. I’ve been accused of birthing more screeds than Savonarola, but I don’t see it like that. Like I said, it’s not my fault I notice things.
Noticing things can get you into big trouble these days. Or more to the point, noticing the wrong things. But I can’t help myself. No matter how many times you do it, I’ll always notice when allegedly educated persons no longer know the difference between vice and vise, or mislead and misled, or ken the similarity between a tattoo and a port wine stain. Oh well.
So let’s watch a video, shall we, and I’ll ruin it for you properly by noticing things afterward. What it’s like to manufacture stuff in China:
It sure is interesting to me, and I’m grateful to Maneesh for filling me in about something I don’t know much about. I’ve worked in a factory or two, so that’s not what I find informative. I’ve made quite hi-tech stuff in those factories, too, much more so than the plastic trifles made in the video. But it was a while ago, and while it was mechanized, it wasn’t robotized like that.
Some things I noticed: Maneesh, who is intelligent and informative, appears slightly unhinged. Most everyone does these days. His clothing and general demeanor is childlike, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. He’s shopping around for a factory to make a product he’s going to sell in the US. That’s a serious business, or used to be, or should be, anyway. Those people sitting there making the stuff, and people everywhere just like them, depend on management to act rationally, in order to keep sitting on those chairs and getting paid. Please note that the workers aren’t dressed like half a clown, and mugging for the camera. I know when management got rapacious, but when did management get silly? I’m not sure, exactly, but Maneesh and his cohort are just mimicking the slide-deck, rah-rah, go fast and break things, ruthlessly dogfooding, key learnings, boil the ocean zeitgeist adumbrated by techbro jerks like Steve Jobs.
I found the first ten seconds of the video as interesting as the rest of it. Bombing along the Chinese highway, looking out the window. Not enough people simply point a camera at their surroundings so you can see what’s going on in a faraway place. Well, not enough people who know enough to turn their cellphones sideways, anyway. The official media never points their cameras at anything anymore. They’re 100 percent into the not-noticing phase of information delivery. They point cameras at themselves, and tell you what they fantasize is happening instead.
So I got curious about what Maneesh was going to make in the factory he’s trying to find in China. I got to poking around, and noticed this:
Speaking of noticing things, I can’t be the only person who notices how profoundly weird everyone wants to look in this video. The women look like they go to a funeral parlor to get made up, and the only person wearing a tie to talk about a half-a-mil calls himself “Mr. Wonderful” to dispel any seriousness he might be saddled with.
Maneesh is nervous, and they pull at him like pitbull/poodle hybrids at a toddler. He gets a slap for his troubles, but he toddled off somewhere else, and makes and sells the thing anyway.
If you click on the image, you can visit the website and see what’s on offer, but I’ll save you some time. It’s an obedience shock collar you wear on your wrist instead of your pencil neck so that people only get a slightly disturbed vibe from you, not the full dose of your emotional delirium tremens. It’s an invisible fence for you instead of your pitbull/poodle mix. It’s a Timex wearable Skinner Box. It gives you an electric jolt every time you start to badthink. The punchline of the joke is that it doesn’t know anything, so if you’re trying to quit smoking or something, you have to remember to give yourself a shock when you want a coffin nail. So I gather that you don’t have enough willpower to close the refrigerator door, even though you weigh two bills already, but you’re expected to have enough willpower to shock yourself when you reach for the fourth Klondike bar you had today. I can’t help noticing a personality disconnect there.
However, I quibble. I’m glad to support this product in any way I can. Although there will be some ground rules, people. You’ll all wear these things, but I’ll press the buttons for you. And fair warning: I notice a lot more of your bad habits than you do.
Ah. Irish Setter hairdos and braless babes in hot pants. What’s not to like?
I’m too young for the first go-round of this song. I played in an oldies band many years after this, and it was plenty popular then. The pretty girls all danced in front of the bandstand just like that — just like their moms and aunts and big sisters did for the original. There’s no reason for it, really. The song would have to get a lot more sophisticated just to be considered a trifle. It’s a three-chord raga with lyrics about as compelling as a self-addressed stamped envelope. So what? Soap bubbles wouldn’t float as well if they were made from steel.
That’s the McCoys from Union City, Indiana. They got their name from the extremely B side of the Ventures Walk Don’t Run single. I’ve been in a lot of bands that spent more time trying to come up with a witty name than they did practicing. I’m right there with the McCoys here. Use whatever’s handy and get on with it. Hell, people used to name their children random things by opening the Bible to any old page, placing an unseeing finger on the text, and using the words under their digit. Of course the modern method of using a Boggle game or spilling Scrabble game tiles on a Ouija board is much less silly.
There’s two brothers in the band. The Zehringers. Brother Rick eventually changed his name to something easier to spell, and became Rick Derringer. That song might be as simple enough to be played by a chicken pecking a toy piano, but Rick is no slouch. He played guitar on several Steely Dan records. If you’re familiar with their coterie of session men, you know that they didn’t settle.
This is Rick playing the guitar solos on Chain Lightning:
The McCoys were marketed as a bubblegum pop band by their record label. Sloopy made it to Number One on the Billboard chart, sold a million copies, and was named the “Official Rock Song of the State of Ohio.” I’m not sure if that last one is an encomium or an unintentional diss, but it sure is something.
Most musicians can’t handle that kind of success. The McCoys wanted to make heavier rock and psychedelic music. They quit their music label over it, and signed with Mercury Records, who let them make two unlistenable flopparoos before cutting them loose. Two of the original band members didn’t make it to fifty years old by living the serious musician lifestyle a little too seriously.
Rick Derringer hooked up with a bunch of interesting people like Edgar and Johnny Winter and Steely Dan. He eventually had a hit of his own in the mid-seventies called Rock and Roll, Hootchie Coo, which rivals Sloopy for pedestrian lyrics and a general kind of enthusiasm.
Everybody, yeah, tries to put my Sloopy down, but sometimes the simple things are best.
That’s Hank Mobley on tenor sax, with Tootie Heath on drums, Kenneth Drew on the horse teeth, and a very young Niels House of Pancakes on the upright bass.
Mobley charted a middle course in the 50s and 60s. John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and similar players were doing the caustic stuff. There was a crop of sorta cool jazz guys like Stan Getz who played it very straight. Mobley wasn’t square, and he wasn’t weird. Eminently listenable, but not wallpaper, either.
The internet and the bookstores are full of lists of the habits of “great” men, most of who are just lucky, shameless, and greedy businessmen, with the occasional scientist or author who holds the correct opinions about things outside of their areas of expertise. I gather you’re supposed to get up a half hour before you go to bed, gobble Vitamin C, use a Cross pen, ride a recumbent bicycle thrice daily, eat only tofu or twizzlers, meditate over your bank accounts, or whatever fad hit some midwit when they were young and it stuck. It’s cargo cult thinking that if you eat what Einstein ate, at the same hour he did, that you’ll get smart.
Most of the famous jazz players were the musical descendants of Charlie Parker’s groundbreaking career. Unfortunately, they figured that Charlie Parker did heroin, so lots of them tried it, figuring that’s where the originality came from. That sort of thing never ends well. The drugs ate Hank up. He died young and homeless, of pneumonia, which is easy to get and hard to get rid of when you have lung cancer from smoking, and a habit.
Listen to the records. Ignore the examples, except as a cautionary tale.
Month: October 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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