Author: Larry Jones

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HugeCorp Blues

I really, really, really need to get a new job.

It’s Friday night, approaching midnight, and I feel like I have just finished a week of running in front of the bulls at Pamplona. I don’t want to complain abut this too much — after all, at least I have a job. It’s a steady paycheck and subsidized health insurance. But since we were bought out by HugeCorp things have gone from bad to worse. I have tried to maintain some sense of balance, and after almost fourteen years at this place I have seen a lot of self-annointed bigshots come and go and I know that no matter how bad things get it’s just a job and my real life starts when I walk out of there each day.

But money touches everything and HugeCorp, like all corporations, exists only and purely to make as much money as possible, and it is like a giant machine, whirring in the basement (or the penthouse), grinding out new schemes and initiatives and procedures, blissfully unaware of what it’s like to be me, trying to implement them and still find time to get some work done. Some of the schemes make some sense in theory, or at least it’s possible to discern the good intentions behind them. But when they are brought into the workplace and start bumping up against reality all their flaws are exposed and eveything the planners didn’t think of takes place and there is chaos, anger and frustration.

I usually like chaos, but I am angry and frustrated because I am starting to see that I am a square peg and I will never fit into any of these HugeCorp round holes. For years we could both ignore this incompatibility, because they paid me and I efficiently did their work. But they are losing interest in getting work done. What they want now is to seem to be getting work done, so investors are impressed by the prospectus and the stock value goes up.

Another thing investors like is cost-cutting, so this week all the office supplies were moved to a warehouse a block away from the building where they are used, where they are being cataloged and shelved. This started without warning or explanation a few days ago, and by today most of our day-to-day stuff we need to work was gone from our premises. So when I was in the middle of a print job on the main laser printer and it ran out of paper, there was no fucking paper anywhere in the building. I asked the woman who had previously been in charge of supplies, and she told me to go to the other building and ask for a ream.

Really. Do I need more of a hint than that? Not only am I getting reamed, but now they want me to ask for it.

OK. I get it. It’s a huge corporation and they want to be as efficient as possible. They want to enhance the bottom line by saving money on supplies by making people accountable for what they use. But because of the stupid, arrogant, thoughtless, haphazard way they went about doing it, I – and the other twenty people who use that printer – had to stop everything and wait for someone to hike down the street and ask for a ream.

It was me, of course, and I didn’t ask. I took four reams of paper and hiked back to the office. I loaded the printer and asked the former supply-woman where she wanted the rest of the paper, and I asked her to call the warehouse and let them know how much paper I had taken, since no one had been there when I arrived. Just helpful Jones, trying to keep all the wheels turning.

For this rogue behavior I got to have a special, ten-minute closed-door meeting with the (new) general manager and the (new) controller, who together have worked there a total of six months. I won’t go into the grisly details of my reprimand, except to say that even though neither of them could refute my logic that I was just trying to get the whole fucking office back to work and ensure that another such delay didn’t occur in a couple of hours, they insisted that I had to play by the new rules (which had never been revealed to me, but that didn’t matter), that there could be no exceptions and it was too fucking bad if I didn’t like it. And, oh, yeah, neither of them was responsible for the new rules – they just happened spontaneously. (I actually used the word “spontaneously” in our conversation, and it appears that neither of them know what it means.)

So, to summarize:

  • Stoopid rule.
  • Productivity suffers.
  • Circumventing the rule and actually working gets you in trouble.
  • No one is responsible.
  • I really, really, really need to get a new job.
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Conspiracy?

Clearly I have waited too long to post again.

Tin Foil Hats
If you doubt this, go back and read the last comment on the previous post, posted by someone called “Enlightenment.” I published my post way back on the 15th of this month, so Enlightenment sure took his/her sweet time to get here. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait. I think I’ll get some coffee. It will take you that long. Because it’s really long, maybe the longest comment ever on revision99.

Back already? Did you read the whole thing? OK, you don’t really have to read the whole thing. You can get the idea after four or five sentences. For you non-readers, let me summarize: The attacks of September 11, 2001 on New York City and Washington, D.C. were not the work of Islamist terrorists, but rather some combination of United States government, military and (possibly) commercial interests, and the evidence for this is so blatantly obvious that we must all be stupid or blind not to see it.

Frankly, I don’t know how to respond to this. I wouldn’t want to brush the whole tirade off as nonsense. I haven’t trusted the government or politicians in general for decades, so it’s not like these ideas don’t have a bit of traction with me. But what the hell? My instinct is simple: The suggested conspiracy is too complicated, and would have to involve too many people. Certainly “they” could pull off a bombing or a few hijackings, but nobody could keep it secret for five minutes, let alone five years. With hundreds of people involved in the plot, it’s inevitable that somebody would go for his fifteen minutes of fame and spill the inside scoop to Bob Novak, or Bob Woodward, or Bob Scheer, or maybe Bob Seger, and then there it would be, plastered all over the Washington Post, or maybe featured in a song.

In any case, whether the Bush administration was involved in the attacks a lot or a little, or even if they were completely taken by surprise. it’s for sure that there will be no serious look into Enlightenment’s claims until they are out of office, at which point it will have been seven and a half years since the events, and the trail will be pretty cold. Maybe some facts can be uncovered at that time, maybe not. But since I am trying to turn over a new leaf on revision99, and get away from grumbling about politics for a while (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I am biting my virtual tongue and choking back an angry rant, and I’m proud of myself. I hope you are proud of me, too.

I will leave this discussion to you Precious Few, and to you Enlightenment. What happened to us on September 11, who did it, and what – if anything -Â is being covered up?

____________________________________

PS: Food for thought along these lines is available aplenty at Loose Change.

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A New Leaf

Hey, I’ll bet the Republicans in Congress are glad now they didn’t invoke the “nuclear option.”

You remember — that was when they were holding confirmation hearings on President Bush’s right-wing Supreme Court nominees, Roberts and Alito, and the Democrats, in the minority and with no other choices if they didn’t approve of the nominees, were saying they might filibuster the appointments. The filibuster, for you nonparliamentarians, is a tactic whereby you talk and talk and talk, refusing to end the “debate,” until the other side can’t stand it any more and makes some sort of compromise with you, or just gives up.

The Republicans, who had control of everything in DC at the time, said they would change the rules so they could stop the filibuster, thus not only getting their way, but taking away the only way for a legislative minority to have any influence in government for all time. At first they called this “the nuclear option,” apparently because of it’s potential to scorch the political earth, but then they backed away from that unsavory metaphor and started calling it “the constitutional option.”

Then one day they woke up in the minority.

________________________________

So now that the Democrats have won, I am learning to relax a little. I used to be a fun guy. I wrote about possums and persimmons and kinky sex. Six years of a demagogue in the White House and his pre-emptive war and other criminal behavior and his rubber-stamp Congress made me a little cranky. It seemed that the only time I had the energy to post here was when I was pissed off or scared about something the neocons were foisting on us. Most of my blog friends went away, so I know it must not have been all that interesting, but I couldn’t help it.

Look, I know that the Democrats (my side) didn’t win a Great Victory last week. I know that voters were just sick and tired of the war in Iraq, thought it wasn’t working, we weren’t winning, it was costing too much money and too many lives. I know they were just sending a message to Washington that they were dissatisfied.

It was an election the Republicans lost, rather than one the Democrats won.

I’ll take it, but I have no illusions, and the Democrats shouldn’t either, if they know what’s good for them. Now that they have gained a little power and they have a voice, I hope they will take strong and moral positions on the great questions of our time, and show us why they should be given a further mandate in 2008.

I hope they’ll be honest, hard-working, inspirational, effective and worth voting for again. They only have two years, and there is a big mess to clean up, and the Republicans will probably try to block a lot of their efforts, but today, at least, I have hope.

And so, in the spirit of reaching out, and in the hope that some of The Precious Few who used to read here and sometimes even participate will return, I hereby pledge to knock off my tedious and cranky political rants and start having good old bipartisan, meaningless fun.

For as long as I can.

But really, that might be a long time.

__________________________________

Now, have any of you space travelers seen this really large image of The Colonel? I saw it when I was in orbit the other day, and I had to go around a few more times to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. An 87,500 square foot KFC logo. Gotta get me some o’ that Popcorn Chicken.

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Next Day Musings

It’s November 8, 2006.

I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for six months. I was up late last night watching the amazing election results. The voters returned the U.S. House of Representatives to the Democrats, and even the Senate might go Democratic. It is widely seen as a repudiation of Bush (and, I’ll add, the whole neocon agenda).

  • 8:30 AM — Tom Delay says the Republicans will take it all back in the next election. He sneers at the electorate and predicts the first thing they will notice is a $2,000 higher tax bill.
  • 9:06 AM — Rush Limbaugh opens his show quoting Nancy Pelosi: “Now we can return to civility in Washington.” Rush asks “Is this an admission that the Democrats went over the top in this campaign?”
  • 9:49 AM — From KFI-AM640 (Fox radio in Los Angeles): Administration officials are saying that Donald Rumsfeld will be stepping down. Limbaugh is exasperated and sputters “Why didn’t they get rid of him last week!?”
  • 10:19 AM — George Allen still won’t concede in Virginia. It’s close there, but he hasn’t had the lead for 12 hours, and 99.9% of the precincts have reported. The state will pay for a recount if the margin is less than a half of one percent, which it might be. If Tester wins in Montana (looking likely) it all comes down to Virginia, just like Florida in 2000. I expect Jim Baker and a thousand Republican lawyers will show up down there with about a billion dollars to spend, trying to save the Senate. The recount, by the way, can’t even start until the Commonwealth certifies the results on November 27, so we may be in for three or four more weeks of suspense, unless Allen gets his head out of his ass.
  • 10:30 AM — Woops, I’ve been missing The Decider’s press conference. Just turned it on and he was saying he doesn’t think there’s a civil war in Iraq, and that, unlike during Vietnam, these U.S. troops are volunteers, and therefore knew what they were getting into.
  • 10:39 AM — Continuing the Republican blame-the-stupid-voters theme, Bush says “I thought the people would understand the importance of security, but I was wrong.” His way of saying “I wasn’t wrong, it was the voters.”
  • 11:19 AM — Tester has won in Montana. Democrats need one more state to control both house of Congress. I didn’t even allow myself to hope for this much.
  • 11:20 AM — Is it just me, or does the sky seem bluer this morning, and the air fresher?
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VOTE 2006!

UPDATE: If you don’t think you’ll be able to make it to your voting place today, read this.

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I’m sure by now the Republicans must be sick of hearing us liberals warning each other about tomorrow’s midterm election:

  • Take nothing for granted.Hope Not Fear
  • Don’t let them steal this election, too.
  • Vote early and often (just kidding).
  • Get paper receipts.
  • Videotape the goings-on at the polls.
  • These Republicans don’t care about the Republic. They’ll do anything to win – voter fraud, machine hacking, vote suppression, intimidation, lying, SO BE ON GUARD!

We seem to take for granted that chicanery and deception is the only way the morally bankrupt GOP can trick the voters into keeping them in office, and we state as if it is undeniable fact that all they really want is to stay in office, not so they can make the country and the world a better place, but so they can remain bellied up to the public trough for as long as possible, the better to steal all the money and violate all the tender young pages. What a snotty, elitist attitude. It’s gotta piss ‘em off.

To you moderate conservatives who don’t think you fit into this description, or who know you are not guilty of these offenses, where the hell have you been for the past ten years or so? You stood back and let this happen. The neocons looked like they were winners, and you didn’t have the balls to stand up and yell “You don’t speak for me!” You let the extremists set the tone, you rode into (and stayed in) office on their energy, on their dirty tricks, on their nutcase agenda. You let them have the keys to the engine, and now you are riding on a runaway train, desperately holding onto what’s left of your honor and your jobs.

Because the radicals in your party don’t have a plan other than to take the money and run, because they have been hiding this behind their false messages of piety and compassion, the wheels are starting to come off. You have let the wingnuts, with their street-fighting style of political thuggery, create an atmosphere of distrust in the land — distrust going toward flat-out hatred — and now you think you can avoid blame by running away from your president and his brutal henchmen at this, the last possible moment.

It won’t work, because the hatred you have spawned is turning back on you, even though in your hearts you know you don’t deserve it. Maybe you don’t, but you’re going to have to spend a long time earning back the trust you have squandered, and that’s only if the voters in your districts aren’t so disgusted with you that they throw you out with the rest of the hypocrites, liars, cheaters and bums.

To The Precious Few who read this blog, and to all good people who stumble on this: Let’s make today the last day of the neocon darkness that has fallen on the United States and the world. Get out and vote. Vote your hopes, not your fears.
Things are gonna get better, but first let’s stop the bleeding.

_____________________________

[Thanks to Michael Bains for the link to the Image Chef campaign button fabricator.]

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Teddy Boy

I would personally like to welcome the “Reverend” Ted Haggard over to the dark side.

Ted HaggardSome will suggest that covert dalliances with a gay male prostitute by a man who presumes to the leadership of 30 million evangelical Christians and who preaches that homosexuality is a sin could be nothing less than the very pinnacle of hypocrisy, arrogance and hubris. But here at revision99, the Blog of Love and Accceptance, Pastor Ted would be an honored guest, and to heck with the name-calling and the finger-pointing.

Remember when Jimmy Swaggart got caught with a hooker? Man, that was some good television, Jimmy all humble and repentant in his white three-piece suit. “Ah have sinned,” he intoned, and he actually wept. How could you not forgive the guy, no matter how much money you had sent in to the ministry? And hookers! I mean, if women are evil temptresses, hookers must be the shock troops, the painted and perfumed Special Forces. Of course they would target men of God like Brother Jimmy, and use his natural manly impulses against him and all that is holy. And then after he did penance and got absolution he went out and met up with more hookers like, within a year. You just can’t ever turn your back on hookers.

But really, we could have seen that one coming. Jimmy was, after all, cousin to legendary hellraiser Jerry Lee Lewis, who married another cousin when she was just thirteen years old. Just growing up with a guy like Jerry Lee has got to bring you into at least a passing acquaintance with Satan. So Swaggart’s fall from grace was really more like stepping off a steep curb and almost twisting your ankle. Haggard’s fall is shaping up to be much more dramatic, the stuff of tragedy.

Pastor Ted has said that he went to the gay male prostitute for a massage while he was in Denver, but he didn’t have sex with him. But then while he was being massaged, the topic of snorting meth came up, as it will do, and Ted decided “Well, why don’t I buy some meth from this man?” And so he did. But then after he had the meth, he saw that it would be wrong to ingest it, so he changed his mind and threw it away, unused. And did I mention – no sleeping with the massage guy?

Come on Ted. You don’t have to tell these lame stories. No one believes you anyway, and really, we would be so proud to have you join us and embrace our San Francisco values. If you’re gay, or even if you’re just open-minded, you’re all done with the Christian Right. They will be dropping you like a smelly gym sock. We, on the other hand, could use a man like you, with good organizational skills and leadership qualities, not to mention charisma up to here. We on the left are not so judgmental as those rigid old fundamentalists. As for your very important White House connections, I understand it would be hard to give that up, but when you think about it, after this next election, are you really going to want to be bothered with all those Monday morning conference calls?

And Ted: We’re liberals. We have better drugs.

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Common Good

Dave Johnson, writing on the Commonweal Institute Blog,

…has a pretty good thought. You might want to check it out.

How many Americans have ever even heard the positive case made for the underpinnings of our government — democracy and community? When was the last time you heard that one-person-one-vote is better for people than one-dollar-one-vote, or that sticking together and standing up for each other is better for people than the conservative vision of everyone being on their own and in it only for themselves? And what do you think the country could be like if more Americans were exposed to those ideas?

He suggests that conservative claims over recent decades – the “Market” is all-knowing and beneficent, government is inefficient, regulation is bad, etc., etc. – have gone so completely unanswered that we’ve been brainwashed by never hearing a differing point of view. Thus the results of this CNN poll.

I’m personally kind of sick of the greed-is-good gang, and ready to see if we can make a better world.

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The Hot Rod and The Twin

I went out last week and bought a new guitar amplifier.

The last one I bought was in the 70’s. I bought it used, it was old even then, and I still have it. It’s a Fender Twin Reverb, pre-CBS blackface, a true classic. Jones with his Twin Reverb It runs on vacuum tubes – no transistors. It was built in May of 1964, in the days before printed circuit boards and integrated circuits (“chips”), at the Fender factory in Fullerton, just about ten miles from where I live now, and where I lived then.

I’ve lived in a lot of places in between, and the Twin has come with me everywhere. I put a new set of tubes in it about twenty years ago, and I had the two twelve-inch speakers reconed in 2003 (yes, they are the original Jensens). Mostly, though, I just plugged in and played, and it has never falied me. My Levi’s have worn out, I’ve blown several engines, replaced a dozen televisions and suffered through countless hard drive crashes, but the Twin just soldiers on, no matter what I throw at it, or what I throw it in.

It’s been thrown in the backs of trucks, the holds of airplanes and even into a couple of ferry boats. Mostly, though, it goes in the trunk of my car, and therein lies the problem. The damn thing weighs too much. The tube design requires a big heavy transformer, the hard wiring is done on a steel chassis, the speakers have huge magnets and heavy frames and the cabinet itself is, to put it mildly, built to last. It weighs 69 pounds, and you practically have to hold it at arm’s length to wrestle it into the trunk of my car. To some, this might not seem like such a big deal. To you I say go move your own amps. I have to move this one, and by the time I get where I’m going with it, I am out of breath, my arms hurt, my back is sore and I don’t feel like playing happy songs.

At least that’s what I told myself as part of my campaign to convince myself that I needed a new amp. I am cheap, you see, and that cheap voice in my head kept saying “You are no longer a working, traveling musician. You don’t need a lightweight amp.” To which the Little Boy Who Wanted a New Toy would respond “If I had something a little easier to move around, maybe I could get out to some gigs, restart some old relationships and make a little money – enough, perhaps, to pay for a new amp. So it would be a wash. So shut up.”

This debate went on for a couple of months. Remember, it was way back in the previous millenium that I bought my beloved Twin Reverb, so I was not about to take lightly the prospect of getting a new one. In the end, the side of me that really wanted a new amp struck a deal with the cheap side: “We’ll just go look. We won’t buy anything unless it’s really cheap, really light and sounds bitchin.”

So off we went, one of us thinking “Heh, heh, we’re just looking,” the other fondling the wad of cash in my pocket.

And we were both horrified at what we found. Talk about sticker shock. Workhorse amps like my Twin were now selling for a thousand dollars. If we wanted something affordable, there were a whole bunch of solid state amps, cold, elctronic boxes with little or no personality and complicated control panels that made no sense to me. Some of these amps actually had buttons on them that you could press to make the amp simulate an old Fender Twin Reverb. (Note: The simulation might have fooled someone who hadn’t been actually plugged into the real thing for decades, but to me it sounded exactly like, well, a simulation.) There had to be other choices.

And there were. There were “vintage” amplifiers, new amps made to look and sound old by small boutique companies, hand-wired to fifty-year-old specifications, all tube, covered in tweed Tolex and purposely “distressed” so they looked like the real thing. They had style, they were small and lightweight, and if you wanted to play edgy, chunky blues-rock, they sounded great.

And they were priced like diamonds. I played one, a perfect little gem, a five-watt amp with a 10-inch speaker, and it was $995! If you’re not sure about this, be advised that most rock bands would drown out a five-watt amplifier with the first power chord. Considering this and the fact that the engineering was done more than fifty years ago by Western Electric and Leo Fender and must be public domain by now, I’d say that $199 per watt is just a bit much. “Don’t they get it?” I thought. “Musicians are poor.” Amps from this company that were powerful enough to cut through a real band start at around $1500, and you can easily spend twice that. The cheap side of me waited in the car while I tried these babies out in the store.

In the end, even the Little Boy could not pull the trigger on that kind of money, no matter how much he wanted a new toy. Those “reissue” type amps looked great and sounded fine, but every time I thought about the price tag I found myself unable to shake the feeling that someone was trying to make a sucker out of me.

I shopped and pondered for another couple of weeks. I decided I had to have a tube amp, despite the added cost and weight, so my choices were somewhat limited, as the majority of guitar amps on the market today are solid state. But here’s the thing about solid state: A solid state amp, used correctly, will amplify an electric guitar. As long as you don’t overdrive any stage of the circuitry, it will reproduce more or less faithfully the signal you put in it, and it will do this coolly and efficiently, and without any coloration. If you step over the line, though, and give it too much level at any stage, it will freak out and distort, and transistor distortion is not a pretty thing.

But a vacuum tube is like a living thing. It gets warm when you turn it on (don’t we all?), and it responds emotionally to the signals you give it. The pickups of your guitar convert your fingering and picking and hammering and sliding and bending of the strings into electrical impulses that are a picture of these gyrations, and the tubes in your amplifier receive this information and work with it in intuitive ways. The tubes talk back to the guitar. The attacks, sustains and vibratos become a conversation between the guitar and the amplifier, and the amp becomes a part of the instrument. If you push it hard, it will distort, but smoothly and musically, thickening the sound, adding harmonics and overtones that are as unique as your playing style.

So yeah, it had to be tubes.

I was on a budget, so I had to try out amps that I might not have considered in the past: makers like Peavey and Carvin and Crate. Some of them sounded pretty good, but buying one of these would feel a little like buying a Hyundai. I rented a Sonata a few months ago, and it actually seemed like a pretty good car, but I can remember when – not too long ago – Hyundais were falling apart before you could get them home. Eventually I went back and tried one of the first amps I tested. It was more money than I had planned to spend, but not as much as the breathtaking price tags on the custom-made “retro” vintage-look units. Looking at those made me wake up and adjust my thinking to 21st century reality, which is everything costs more than you expect except DVD players, which now come free if you buy a movie on DVD.

I took my guitar and a thing I use called The Pod (another story) into a store and asked them if I could play this amp that I was considering. I messed around with it for about 45 minutes (thank you, Guitar Center!). I still had my pocketful of cash. The amp sounded way cool. Really clean on the clean side, gritty and bluesy on the dirty side, responsive and LOUD. I put all my stuff away, and asked the nice kid who was helping me if he would consider an offer that was somewaht below the asking price. I made my offer, we went back and forth for ten minutes, I got to the end of the line (actually the very edge of my budget) and the kid was saying, in effect, that he’d dig a hole and bury the amp before he’d sell it to me for that, so I thanked him politely and headed for the door. They held me up at the door for a moment, because I had a guitar with me and they had to make sure it wasn’t one of theirs, and while we were doing that the manager caught up with me and agreed to my deal, somehow twisting it around to make it seem as if it had been his plan all along. I didn’t care how he framed it. I got my amplifier. And this is what I got:

Hot Rod Deluxe

A Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. After all that shopping and thinking, I went back and got a smaller, modern version of the amp I’ve been using for much of my playing career. All tube design (so not that modern, I guess), one 12-inch speaker, half the power of the Twin, 45 pounds. I’ve only had to lift it into the trunk of my car once so far, and that was while it was still in the shipping box, but I have high hopes that I’ll be able to toss it in there at least as many times as I did the old one, without sustaining injuries, so that should give me something to do with my spare time for quite a while to come.

So, to review:

  • All tube
  • Sounds bitchin
  • Weighs less
  • Looks cool
  • Got my deal
  • Louder than a thousand banshees

All I need now is a band. Call me.

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Dropdown Menu

I’m all puffed up and pleased with myself because finally,

…after about a year of thinking about it, I have made the revision99 Archives list into a dropdown menu. You can see it in the sidebar, under the heading “Archives.”

I’ve been thinking “Jeez, that list is so long, no one will ever see what’s at the bottom of the sidebar. I have to think of a way to shorten it.” In the end, which was just two days ago, I didn’t excatly “think of a way.” Instead, I looked at the page source of someone else’s WordPress blog (someone who was using just such a dropdown menu) and found the code that makes this happen. Then I copied it and stuck it in my own sidebar template.

Cool, huh? Forgive me. I am easily excited. Go ahead. Click on it. Read something from my past. All my best writing is there. All my commenters are there, too.

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