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Archive for the 'Personal' Category
March 2nd, 2006 by Rich
Ok, this is going to be a little bit of a different sort of blog entry. I was actually inspired to do it by Dave’s bit on Bachmann Turner Overdrive elsewhere on this site . I figured I’d blog about one of my own musical favorites, one who should get more attention than he does. So, who is Webb Wilder? Is he a person? A character? Well, to hear him tell it, he’s the Last of the Full Grown Men, and he’s got one foot in Country and one in Rock and Roll (and since they’re both approximately 13A’s, he’s covering a lot of ground). But really, what Webb represents for me is individuality. That’s nice in this world of cookie cutter Wal-Marts and Home Depots and any other mass chain store you care to mention. This prefab world is nowhere more represented than in the music world, which you can all to easily see in the latest bombshell pop tart or ‘bad boy’ rock star. They all tend to blend in, don’t they? It’s rare to find an artist who stands out. Not intentionally; they just stand out because that’s who they are. Welcome, then, to the World of Wilder.
I was introduced to Webb Wilder back in the summer of 1991, he was opening for .38 Special at the Tradewinds up in North Jersey. I immediately went out and bought the album they were supporting, Doo Dad, and it consistently earned a spot in my tape deck. Friends of mine in a cover band played ‘Tough it out’ off of that album, probably the closest Webb’s come to a traditional ‘hit’. I never heard anything else though..until through the magic of the internet I found out he had material before and after. I just had to have it all, and I’ve been a Webbophile since. Living in New Jersey makes it hard to see Webb live as he usually can be found gigging down south, but I finally got a chance to see him again in late 2004 in Delaware. Webb’s music has been called many things; swampadelic is probably my favorite. When it comes down to it though, Webb just rocks, and rolls. You hear country, rockabilly, British Invasion, rock and roll, and more all mixed up into a wonderful feel-good gumbo. Webb hails from Hattiesburg, Mississippi though he now is based in Nashville by way of Austin, TX. He has produced six studio albums and one compliation disc, but Webb is more than a musician; he is an ‘electrifying artist’: part musician, part Vaudevillian, part film actor. His film credits range from The Thing Called Love with River Pheonix and Sandra Bullock to an appearance in Martina McBride’s video ‘When God-fearing women get the blues‘, to his own independently produced Corn Flicks (featuring Horror Hayride and Webb Wilder, Private Eye). Onstage, his banter and dry personality set him apart. Webb is cool. He’s the guy that could look cool walking down the street while trying to scrape dog doo off of his shoes.
I can even bring in a Mopar connection, in “ How Long can she last (Going that fast)” off of 1986’s It Came From Nashville: “Her Daddy bought her a baby
blue Duster when she turned seventeen
Her daddy was a fool to trust her
that was one little mean machine…”
Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it should be to pick up on all of Webb’s music. Webb doesn’t fit into any of the premade molds, and so it’s hard for unimaginative major record company folk to ‘flat out get it’. This has pretty much consigned Webb to a never ending ‘economy with dignity’ tour, although a happy side effect is that he ‘knows every thrift shop and plate lunch joint in town’ as he puts it.
Right now, you can buy Webb’s debut album It Came From Nashville (with bonus tracks and enhanced liner notes), his 2005 studio effort About Time, and the collection Scattered Smothered and Covered. The latter includes tracks from It Came From Nashville, the 1995 covers disc Town and Country, and 1996’s Acres of Suede; both of which are out of print. All three are available from webbwilder.com (with sound samples, artist and album info, message board, and more), as well as from Amazon and the like. Webb’s other two albums, 1989’s Hybrid Vigor and 1991’s DooDad, are still out of print and moldering away in record company vaults. They are, however, fairly easily available via eBay and the like. This year will see the release of a live DVD/CD package. Maybe the remaining out of print records will come back to the Loving Public soon. We live in hope. That’s a phrase Webb uses fairly often, and I find it quite uplifting.
I will close with Webb Wilder’s credo, and the hope that at least a couple Allparians will also become Wilderians:
Work Hard
Rock Hard
Eat Hard
Sleep Hard
Grow Big
Wear Glasses if you need ‘em
Not a bad credo at all, as credos go, eh?
So… who is Webb Wilder? Is he a person or a character?
The answer is yes.
Pick up on it.
December 28th, 2005 by Rich
- Wow. Another year. I’d been told each one seems to go a bit faster than the one before, and for the most part I’ve found that to be correct. It’s been an eventful year Mopar-wise..a dual coolant leak issue on both of our older vehicles coupled with the need for more storage room for my Wife’s business led to getting Plummer, our ‘05 Touring Edition PT in June. A few months later he was joined by Little Devil, our ‘04 Ltd. Combined, the Neon & 5th Ave were in the ‘family’ for about 15 years, so that was a big change.
On a larger scale, it was a year of natural disasters, of no NHL, and of the ECHL’s Trenton Titans bringing a championship to Trenton for the first time in decades.
Overall, it was a good year, I think. We’ve certainly had much worse.
Not long ago, we worked a craft show at my old high school; which I had visited only once since escaping in 1986. It’s a ’70s school; inspired by the then-trendy idea of no windows and few traditional, enclosed classrooms. Lots of 70s decor is still present, and it’s strange to see that mesh with the modern 30″ TVs with DVD players, as well as computers, in every classroom/area. Yesterday and today living uncomfortably together. Which is kinda where we always are I suppose, as those of us in older houses with older wiring occasionally discover when systems not designed for modern electrical draws cry uncle and trip circuit breakers (no microwave and hair dryer at the same time for us!)
As we wrap up 2005 and prepare to usher in 2006, I’d like to wish the whole Allpar community a Happy New Year and a prosperous 2006.
Stay well and stay Mopar!
December 15th, 2005 by Dave
How hard is it to do a decen tjob?
Really, how hard can it be?
We face sheer uncaring stupidity every day, and not just other drivers. My cellphone has no “redial” button. Imagine that! (It does however play ring tones in “superphonic” mode.) Sony’s instructions for hooking up its digicams to Macs, if you can find them, are essentially “you’re on your own.” Nothing in the Knowledge Base, by the way, about the iMovie update that lets their digicams work with Macs… and we’re not even talking about inane software decisions. And then there are cars. Do we really need to go further? Doesn’t anyone drive or test these things? Why did the Volkswagen Phaeton leave its turn signal lights on semi-permanently if you shut off the engine while the turn signal was on - and why did it have a cheap door buzzer with its up-to-$120,000 price tag?
Now, steam.
Geez, you’d think these guys would know what they were doing. Let’s count the ways.
1) Joints glued together…
2) Using gas joints, not steam fittings
3) No real Hartford Loop - a terribly simple device that admittedly I still can’t figure out myself
4) Exhaust stuck into a hole but not all the way into the chimney
5) No horizontal headers
6) No condensate return at the header
7) Wires bulging or dangling
8) No cleaning (as promised, by the way)
9) Haphazard attachment of pipes
10) Steam pipes tilted the wrong way
There are more, I think, but those are enough. I got a bunch of money back - not as much as I should have but enough - and hired an older steamfitter who knows his trade to fix it. That is, to replace all of it and start over.
Lessons learned were stated before, but really - it took them NO LESS EFFORT to do a completely WRONG BOTCHED-UP job. All they had to do was READ THE #@$&*^! MANUAL.
And it’s not as though that never happens at car dealers or independent mechanics…]]>
November 30th, 2005 by Rich
- OK, we just saw the above movie, and it kinda started the mind working a bit. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a Will Smith vehicle; he’s a cop in 2035 Chicago, and humanoid robots do all the menial labor. They are programmed to follow three laws:
1. A Robot must never harm a human
2. A Robot must obey any order given by a human, unless it would cause the Robot to break law #1.
3. A robot must try to preserve itself, unless it would cause the robot to break laws 1 or 2.
These robots do all the “menial” labor; trash removal, bartending…not sure what the people that used to do those jobs now do. They’re all made by U.S. Robotics, who’s HQ is “inhabited” by an artificial intelligence. Anyway, a new, improved version is released, and this version turns out to be controlled by the company’s AI, who proceeds to order robots to round up and corrall humans due to a twisted interpretation of Rule #1: People aren’t good at keeping themselves away from harm, so it must then fall to the Robots to do it for them. This way the silly humans don’t even have to think for themselves and risk coming to wrong conclusions; the Robots will do that for them.
On the surface it sounds really far fetched, but really, is it? We already have cars that monitor tire pressure. That new BMW even ‘calls home’ so BMW service can in turn call you to let you know you’re due for an oil change. Small things, sure, but isn’t that where it starts? It’s a small step from here to having vehicles report your speed and worse, where you go and when you go (all in the name of expediting traffic). Are automated highways then to follow, where you just go along for the ride? Would you trust The System?
I’m reminded (and indeed just listened to!) of Red Barchetta by Rush:
My uncle has a country place, that no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm, before the motor law
And on sundays I elude the �eyes� and hop the turbine freight
To far outside the wire, where my white-haired uncle waits.
Jump to the ground
As the turbo slows to cross the borderline
Run like the wind,
As excitement shivers up and down my spine
Down in his barn
My uncle preserved for me, an old machine —
For fifty-odd years
To keep it as new has been his dearest dream
I strip away the old debris, that hides a shining car
A brilliant red barchetta, from a better, vanished time
I fire up the willing engine, responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime…
Wind in my hair —
Shifting and drifting —
Mechanical music —
Adrenalin surge —
Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware
Suddenly, ahead of me, across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air-car shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires, to run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley as another joins the chase
Drive like the wind
Straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud
With fear and hope, I�ve got a desperate plan
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded
At the riverside
Race back to the farm
To dream with my uncle
At the fireside…
“I commit my weekly crime” - Hmm. Can you envision this scenario as reality?
The other thought the movie sparked was that these Robots were all from one company; there were no competing Robots. It reminded me of the massive cosolidation of banks that we’ve seen for some time now, and of the ‘Walmartization’ of the discount store niche. Not to mention the auto industry, among others. Plus, having one company control, say, the automated highway system, would certainly make things simpler for those who run them.
Of course, we would have the government overseeing this and ensuring the system wasn’t corrupt (chuckle).
Is this sort of future probable? I don’t really think so.
Possible? Sure; otherwise I wouldn’t have brought it up 
Well, I don’t know about the humanoid robots bit…. � ]]>
�
November 27th, 2005 by Dave
We seem to have discovered a bug or inefficiency in Invisionboard’s forums, and it’s pretty serious. At times of high traffic, our iowait times skyrocket, bringing down the entire server. The immediate cure, discovered almost by accident, is shutting off the forums’ search feature, which includes “Get New Posts.” We’ve been doing that on and off for a week, and it’s been working. Otherwise, you don’t get search without a long pause - and you don’t get anything else, either! We don’t need that. We’re researching ways to get around it; reconfiguring MySQL helped a bit. Don’t be surprised, though, if search/new posts disappears during peak times (e.g. weekdays).
Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We’re cold and awaiting the replacement of our boiler to finish. Boiler replacement is a real anxiety provoker because the cost is fairly high - $5,000 in this case - and new boilers may last anywhere from 1 year to 60 years depending mainly on how well they’re installed and maintained; and steam heat can be wondrous or horrible depending on how well it’s installed and maintained. Our boiler was installed in 1928 and was in perfect condition, albeit three times the size it needed to be, but the burner itself finally died after a mere 54 years (this explains why most steam companies are gone now). Unfortunately removal of old boiler took much longer than expected, and now we’re in the cold until tomorrow afternoon… and worrying about how good the installation will be! This stuff is HARD and hideously expensive to re-do, and those of you who have been to a bad mechanic or car dealer (nah, nobody’s ever experienced that) will understand that guys can SEEM competent and still make that little mistake that nets you a failed transmission just after the warranty expires.
Oh, well. Back to work… December’s busy season.]]>
September 20th, 2005 by Bob Sheaves
Now what did I do????
There has been a great upheaval in the automotive industry over the past 20 years. More change, at a faster pace, affecting more and more people, all has conspired to create a general apathy in the motoring public towards their second biggest investment after the home, as change far outpaced the desire to understand and anticipate this change. Change in suppliers, change in techniques, change in processes, change in attitudes and even change in direction, all have conspired to bewilder many that could have developed an enthusiasm for cars. Dr. Zatz and I discussed at length, all of these issues, over the past couple of years and how they have impacted, both positively and negatively, the general American driving public.
This notebook of thoughts and explanations (I dislike the term “blog” for reasons best left unstated) will, in the coming months, provide an understandinng to today’s enthusiast, the reasoning behind the direction of the development of automobiles. Over time, I hope my explainations of how cars, trucks, and other transportation devices, from an engineering and business standpoint, will be of help to you all in aiding your understanding.
I will not be offering my personal views, but instead, concentrating on the “numbers”, such as explaining how and why some “less than thought out” ideas that may make sense to the layman, simply are either flawed, or a positive advancement. Personal opinions will NOT enter into these explainations. Specific subjects to be talked about will be fuel comsumption (how it is calculated), fuel types (why a particular fuel is good or bad), how performance is predicted and tested (I’ll throw out one of the terms now…”gradability”), and other sundry things.
May God have mercy on my soul…..
Commentary
At the end of each article, I will generally include observations and opinions specifically related to the article in a seperate “box” labled “Commentary” to provide visual seperation between fact and my imagination. If you wish to see specific topics covered, please feel free to email me at rwsheaves[at]catnetsolutions.com . I may not answer directly, but I will read all your comments and adjust the explainations as needed. This is not about me, as some may suggest, but it is about YOU!
One final note-this will not be more regular than monthly, usually, due to the time my work schedule allows.
Best regards to you all……
Bob
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