Now Playing: A thumping in my head
It's been a cold week and I've seen foxes out and about in the night and even in the day. Found this doe taking a rest on the yard.
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It's been a cold week and I've seen foxes out and about in the night and even in the day. Found this doe taking a rest on the yard.
Just a Christmas Banner to sit under my posts on the TrueFire forum. All sorts of excitement there these days. We've got Larry Carlton in the forum moderating and answering questions on his new guitar course 335 Improv. Very hot stuff, mostly over my head but still quite cool.
Contributions to the forum for guitar players. An animation.
Greetings Googling People,
Like me you might have searched Google for a proper Fretboard Diagram that you can use and makes sense to you. I couldn't find one that really fit for me so I created one. This Fretboard Diagram is large and colorful and easy enough to understand so you can, like me, make sense of the Guitar Fretboard. The notes you see are the Natural Notes, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. the spaces you see without a note displayed are the sharps and flats. They are there of course but like me you might be getting a case of overload just looking at the Fretboard with every note on it. You can see for instance that the Note A is a blackish shiny dot there. You can look around and see every instance of it at a glance. You'll notice how that A related to the D note in the Pinkish Color, on the Fretboard it's often the next string over and next to the A Note. Relationships you can't see when it'll all in black and white and all the notes tend to run together. Anyways, I hope you find this useful. I've posted it over at the www.truefire.com/forum in the Beginners Section http://truefire.com/forum/showthread.html?t=561
Nothing too exciting to say. I am spending more of my free time working on my limited understanding of the Guitar. I've found a very good forum at Truefire.com/forum with plenty of knowledgable and interesting people. We're discussing Guitar Theory, Practice Tips, Gear and Software and every other topic you can think of. A wide variety of guitar players and instructors there from early players like myself to people who play professionally and who have been at it for thirty years.
I'm watching the Democratic Convention starting in a day or so. I've avoided, successfully avoided any of the Olympics. My own personal boycott of the repressive Chinese Government was quite successful. That and the Olympics aren't what they were. Professional athletes and rigged contests and the whole thing has had a odor of corruption for some time now. I'm not thrilled that some professional basketball players can beat the Jamacian Team, I don't care to participate in the unwarranted hype for some swimmer or for some underage or overage gymnasts. Just a big corporate festival. No thanks. I'll wait for the Professional Football players to start playing in a few weeks.
It's been interesting listening and watching the Political Theater. I got my Obama announcement and have been rewarded with an offer to buy the first magnetic Obama/Biden car magnet for only fifteen dollars and I did get the mass email from Joe Biden complete with the video and the friendly use of my first name on the Email. I like Biden, except for an overly coziness with the RIAA and the entertainment industry he seems like a adult and one not swimming in the usual amount of political corruption. A good choice although it'll get pretty dicey with Obama before it reaches the end. The Republicans are well versed in being able to get the American people see their opponents as liberal anti American pinkos who only want to allow same sex marriage and abortions at will. The Republicans are great at waving the flag and great at getting Americans vote against their own interests in the name of Flag and Country. An interesting Political Season once again. I've got my popcorn.
I was going through a bunch of photos, you know the kind we took before the digital pictures made photos less of a tangible item? Well, I happened across a bunch from the Barrister's Ball some ten odd years ago and I was looking at all the photos of couples and all the folks dressed up and found a picture I had taken of my friend Andy Johnson. Another friend, Mark Messier, had informed me that Andy had been killed in a car accident a number of years ago and it's always been with me. I didn't go to the funeral, I didn't know his family, I lost touch with him after law school. But he died, he was a friend and a person I admired for his kind heart and the true lack of meanness in him. He had survived cancer and was thriving and he had graduated from Law School to boot. Great accomplishments for the man only to have those taken in a car accident on a Freeway in Ohio. Just senseless. To me, it's an example of the lack of justice in the world. A good man gone, for no reason. Evil men live and survive and thrive. Sometimes. Well, I'm fond of saying that you should enjoy your Karma - after all you earned it. I guess even the worst of us gets what is coming to them in the end. We all pass, good and evil. Moral and immoral. Some folks perhaps feel tortured by the evil they have caused, the lives they have ruined. Perhaps. But, regardless, we all get judged in the end. The truth often comes out as to who is bad and who is good and if you're righteous then you sleep at night better more often than those who aren't. Perhaps. I'm a fan of the light of day and the truth. The day comes eventually as does the truth. Andy was good, a good man and that's the truth.
In the biggest non surprise I've seen in a while there was an attempted assassination of Benazir Bhutto today. I predicted that as soon as she got off the plane she would be a target and I still fully expect her to be assassinated in short order. To me it's inconceivable that she could think she could go back to Pakistan and not be a target. Too many people in that country have a vested interest in her not being there and too many people have a vested interest in seeing her dead. They don't play nice in Pakistan and furthermore that whole place is a powderkeg waiting to blow up.
Other interesting news was the Dahli Lama receiving the Congressional Gold Medal and the expected tantrum thrown by the Chinese. Every honor that the Dahli Lama receives is well deserved and he is the highest moral authority figure alive on the planet pure and simple. And this is perhaps the best thing that President Bush has ever done, taking a stand for freedom and standing with the people of Tibet against the half century of oppression brought by the Han Chinese. What Americans fail to understand about the Chinese is that they do not recognise any other moral authority but their own. Over two thousand years of history gives them a belief in their own cultural and moral superiority that is a form of racism. Therefore they do not see anything wrong whatsoever in holding down and oppressing other people in what they consider to be their own territory. Much as Hitler decided that the Sudetenland was and always was a part of Germany, the Chinese think that everything is a part of China and that by right everyone still needs to pay tribute to them. I've said for as long as l can remember that the Chinese are the enemy of the United States, an adversary at the very least and our delusions that we can be friends with them are just that, delusions. So you'll see the Chinese throw a tantrum and bluster and scream and all of that and you'll see some Congress creatures want to kowtow to them. But for one moment, there was standing up for what is right and naming what is wrong.