so beautiful and so dangerous

the fresh-dishwater load (before & after).

for preference, the first pass… or first
*few* passes… with fresh soap will be *glass*.

whose praises can hardly be sung enough.
clarity is beauty, baby. hardness, too,
has much to offer. (but they break just
like a butcher’s cleaver if you’re not
looking. and sometime the tiny little
shards come back *weeks* after having
swept up.)

then, who knows. silver if it’s been rinsed.
whatever big pieces would look better on the
other side with very little fuss. certain
items should *never* be soaked; others should
*usually* be soaked. i don’t have a routine,
really. just a process for *finding out* a
routine. everything, all the time; life in
the batplane. but, you know, nothing in
excess.

homegrown… ie, here in columbus by friends-
-of-a-friend… eggs for a couple of days. i’m
still lacking in anything you’d call short-order-
-egg-cookin’ skills. unless “fun to eat” counts.
scramble-fried is the way it should be. for today.

remarks on 3-string guitar

(1) the high three would’ve been easier.

but it’s the “3rd” string—one of
“the high three”—whose tuner (the
gizmo that tightens a given string;
aka, more elaborately, a “tuning
machine”) is actually busted on this
actual guitar (a “rogue”; the logo
didn’t make it into the photo…
SO-069-RA1000-SN, if you must know
[made in china]).

with three strings in the *low* positions—
as shown here—one has good reason to attack
the strings “from above” (also as shown here).
usually if i do that at all… and i do, some-
times… i’ll come at “from above” frettings
with my thumb (as *not* shown here).

usually i use an ordinary “from below” grip
on the guitar, though. in any tuning. (so
only certain low notes get played with my
thumb; more often they get “damped” [so as
*not* to sound when strummed]).

(2) anyhow. message of the day. there are three
“obvious” tunings for three strings (once one
has learned the “standard” EADGBE tuning learned
by every beginner-guitarist): eadGBE, eaDGBe,
and eADGbe, one might call them… or, better,
GBE, DGB, and ADG.

or, still better: 0-4-9, 0-5-9, and 0-5-10.

(the apparently-missing possibility for
“three strings together from a row of six”,
namely EADgbe is accounted for in the “digits”
notation… it’s just *another* 0-5-10).

these number-codes reflect the *process of
tuning* the instrument and so are *very*
easily learned and remembered (once one
has learned a few chords & the “standard”
guitar tuning).

one more revision.
let X=10.
now we have 049, 059, and 05X
(and this last is pronounced
“oh-five-ten”). and typing ’em out
won’t be a problem.

the photo shows a major chord in the
059 tuning (isomorphic to strings 2
through 4 of “standard”): “barre”
all three strings.

anybody that can feel a beat and endure
a moderate amount of pain in their hands
can strum out a song in this tuning:
open strings, fifth fret, seventh fret;
jam around ad lib (these three chords
are, among many other things, the heart
of the blues [for at least one player]:
12-bar “boogie woogie” was the first tune
i ever picked out note-for-note [and, alas,
also one of the last; this’ll change some-
day if the guitar-gods spare me].).

(3) boogie-woogie for absolute beginners.

tune three strings to an open chord.
0 denotes “strum the open strings”
5 is “strum all three, fretted at 5”
7 (exercise)

(for a one-count; how many actual
*strums*—and whether *up* or *down*—
is here left to the player’s imagination
(never let your right hand know what
your left hand is doing).

0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
5,5,5,5,5,5,5,5
0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0
7,7,7,7
5,5,5,5,
0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0.

yep. that’s it. the arrangement that won my heart.
it looks pretty naked all spelled out like that.
this must be what they call “over-analyzing every-
thing”. (even when you actually only ever do it
from time to time.) go and do likewise.

nothing else’ll get you there like speed’ll

if it’s “gold’ll buy more friends
than chicken-feed’ll”,
it might as well be “tweedle-
deedle-deedle”.
but if it’s “grains’ll feed a
lot more folks than meat’ll”,
or, “camels can’t pass through
a sewing needle”,
they’ll treat you like you shot
their favorite beatle.
oh, tweedle-dee, dl-dee,
dl-deedle-deedle.

stirfry of the day

with bacon, onion, & carrots,
all cut up by me. plus, one
cheat: frozen peas. pigfat,
soy sauce, sesame oil. serves,
in this case, one. the trickiest
thing is cooking different parts
of any given slice of bacon for
different amounts of time (& hot-
ness of the pan); the point here
is to get turn as much fat into
cooking oil as one conveniently
can. oh, and yesterday’s rice.
prepared by madeline, of course.

in other news, yesterday’s chicken
has now been cut up even more. one
review has appeared for that post
in my “facebook” feed. here it is
in full: “yuck”. my next one will
be *better*!

cutting up chicken again

in the first panel, most of the big pieces
have been broken… or cut… off of the
central skeleton of the chicken (an enormous
factory-farm specimen). the breast not seen
here has been cut up and served, with rice
and the buttery sauce at the bottom of the
pan (madeline did everything up to putting
it in the oven and setting the timer; i did
all the cutting-up and dishing-out and so on).
there’s a bunch of skin… and bacon… in the
pan.

then, about to be covered up & put away, a dark-,
and a white-, meat bowl. the rice is invisible
behind ’em (and’ll be put away in another vessel).
there’s some done bacon and the wishbone (probably
too blurry to see) in one of those indispensable
plastic gizmen; this is a cheat in the sense that
i prepared it deliberately for the camera. really,
sure, i try to make it look good. but this is
supposed to be *without regard* to whether or not
i’m going to make a photo or post it at the diner.

then, the end. where wishes go to die.

before, during, and long after. actually, one is almost always “during”, as it seems.

make that coffee a double

& get back to work.
here’s a typical “before” shot
to partly upset the many “after”
shots already posted here (in
the DAADD category; mostly in
2014 i think).

vlorbik unstrung, part n+1

the serial number was evidently stickered-in
or something; you can kind of see the shadow
of the glue over the line under the plain-as-
-day model number (DR-212NA; this here is an
epiphone 12-string). by the end of the day,
there’ll be some rainbow-geometry graphics by
me covering up this label. & there’ll be, as
i imagine it now, four strings where the middle
four strings go. four *low* strings; i’ll’ve
strung this Twelve as if it were a Bass. then
i’ll go on to tune it in any of three “obvious”
ways (“as if” any of the [high-, middle-, or low-]
sets-of-four-strings that occur in “ordinary”
tuning EADGBE [thus, “as if” EADG, ADGB, or DGBE]).
yep. that’s the plan.