#meacenas

[meacenas]

Old School. Hot cars back in the day

Now, if you want one of these hot rods, just turn on your computer. You just have to go to any of a hundred websites and pick and choose what parts you want to ‘build’ a hotrod. You can build dozens of different styles and years, coupes, sedans, convertibles and just about anything in between. There are even complete kits that will set you up with a finished car, all you have to do is buy a set of tools and in a month, your rolling down the street.

‘Back in the Day, it was a lot different and I mean different as in difficult and rewarding. Take a look at the hotrod above and it looks like many others, but look closer and here is what you see. Its powered by a 401 cid Buick Nailhead engine. 

You can go to car shows today and see an unbroken line of Chevy 350s because they are easy to find (open a box and done) plentiful and cheap. but...’back in the day’ you actually had to build an engine like this. You went to a junkyard found a greasy monster like this in a wrecked Buick. It came home in the back of a truck, dripping its life blood all over your garage floor. You spent months, busting apart greasy, rusted parts. Those parts got cleaned by you with a brush, up to your elbows in stinky solvent. Each single engine part was checked, balanced, perhaps replaced with a ‘hot part’. A higher cam, machining the heads for higher compression, a new intake manifold, port matching exhaust headers, more carbs.

Each part had to be balanced with the other parts, Too much carburation or too small headers would work in reverse, too short con rods or piston height would negate the increased compression you paid for. You had to understand what you were doing every step of the way. Today? You dont have to know the difference between a wrist pin and a cam key. You open a box and  there is a complete engine, done. ( boring, noneducational and not rewarding  )

Every single piece of this car above was brought to life, one piece at a time by a person that spent the better part of two or three years building it. He was rewarded by a UNIQUE, a real one of a kind car that reflected his skills and pride in workmanship.

Something that is so lacking today in a mass produced instant reward world.

We know things.

[meacenas]

The Sea King. ....part . 24 More detail sanding and shaping. I cannot sand this material indoor, the plastic sand is too gritty and fine. It gets in everything. Even sanding outside, I am careful to pick up as much of the dust as possible. ..there is enough plastic in the environment already. I store the dust until I get enough to mold something of it. # the sea king #artworks, #meacenas (at Norfolk, Virginia) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtGvwFLH_T5/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1mlsf0ceg0to8

[meacenas]

Halloween is going to be here soon.

So here are some Googie cats in Orange and Black, cool huh?

[meacenas]

Wanna make some easy money?  Sell speaker cables.

I like to think. I think about a lot of things that most people don’t. Guess I was born that way. As an audiophile, ( I even get my ears checked every year). One thing I was thinking about was speaker cables. How do they affect my really nice old school stereo system. Do bigger cable work better than small ones, ( they do) and as I was doing a bit of research into speaker wire. Just ordinary speaker wire. Annnndddd,...I ran across this top of the line seller of ‘cables’.

The company, Dark Energy, claims that by selling you wires that are all stranded of ‘single crystal’ OCC wire (continuous cast) wire that runs in the same direction, then dipped in their special ‘sonic tonic’ and then ..blah blah lots of hyperbole that you cannot decipher without a degree in physics, another in audiology and a bigger degree in BS.

9 feet of these speaker wires will set you back  ( wait for it).....$1270.00 dollars. One thousand two hundred and seventy dollars for 2 wires less than 10 feet long.

You can only hear so far into the spectrum and that was reached by industry years ago. Any more is wasted. Gold plated cables, magnetic levitation turntables, super sized speakers....all too much for your ears.

These days there a lot of people selling ‘things’ online for those who want ‘the best’. But then are those who are using ‘Dark Energy’ and do well, selling ego boosters.

“ really, thats nice, but I spent 1300 bucks on two cables for my system” does envy set in?

How good can you hear?

[meacenas]

Since 1978, Music has never been the same..... Heroic !

Social Distortion

As an audiophile, I listen to many different kinds of music. Even music from other countries because music crosses all languages. No matter where you are in the world, the common speak is the music note. Its understandable so that no matter what country you pick, there is music that can be understood for music sake, even if you cannot speak the language.

But this one is about an America band that is so inherently American in its roots and works, you can set these almost genius works besides some of Americas best rock and roll music.

I was looking through Youtube a few weeks ago for something new, something a bit of more powerful than the stretch of moonshine rockabilly I had been spinning for the last few weeks. Hey, looky looky what I found !

Its 2018 and this band started in California in 1978. The lead man and prime mover, Mike Ness has been writing and playing straight up rock and roll songs, ( as opposed to churning out moneymaking ‘hits’ for media congloms) for 40 years. Not every song he write is a blockbuster, but the catalog of songs that he and his bandmates have turned out contain a mass of music that continues to hold uncounted people spellbound. Wit and simplicity of lyrics, the range and depth of his understanding of rock story telling, and then combining those words with some of the genres best driving rock and roll you ever heard. Makes for some listening that keeps you riveted in awe.

The one thing that really strikes me in YouTube, aside from the usual fandom, is the amount of people that give Mike Ness and Social Distortion credit for actually saving their lives. They claim that SD has helped them through all manner of personal life crisis. Not one or two people, hundreds! These people say that Social Distortion has saved them from drugs, drink, jail, dang, Mike has been credited for even understanding death and helping people cope with the loss of loved ones. Its truly amazing!

Mike writes songs that we understand and can relate to on a very personal basis. From.... death, drinking, love, drug addition, jail time, suicidal thoughts, sex, Mike has been there and then put his thoughts into his music. Hundreds. perhaps thousands of people have left their heartfelt thoughts on his music and how he has changed their lives for the better.

I can say for myself, that after 50 years of listening to music ( critically), Mike Ness and Social Distortion has got to be one of the best rock and roll bands I have have ever heard.

Mike Ness and his band are true American heros singing for the world where we need them most.

[meacenas]

Folk Artists Extraordinaire......The McGarrigle Sisters

A favorite..

Kate McGarrigle (February 6, 1946 – January 18, 2010) and Anna McGarrigle (born December 4, 1944) were a duo of Canadian singer-songwriters from Quebec, who performed until Kate McGarrigle's death on January 18, 2010.

Folk music in the 1970s was very popular with musicians like Bob Dylan, The Carter Family, Emmylou Harris, James Taylor and boatload of others great artists turning out chart topping hits. It was a time when people wanted to explore the debacle of the Vietnam war with music and words. These pop artists were for the most part American.

It was not until the early 1980s that the McGarrigle sisters were brought to the forefront of the folk music scene. They had been performing since the early 1970s but when they performed the music for a  Wade Hemsworth's song, "The Log Driver's Waltz" and grew famous as the soundtrack for a 1979 animated film directed by John Weldon at Canada's National Film Board.

Anna and Kate McGarrigle were born in Montreal of mixed Irish- and French-Canadian background. They grew up in the northern suburb of Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts, where they learned piano from village nuns. Kate McGarrigle was married in 1971 to singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III. Their children are Rufus and his sister Martha, both singers. The two divorced in 1976. Kate McGarrigle died in 2010, aged 63, of a rare form of cancer.

Today they are globally acknowledged as one of the top folk duos of the late 1970s.

RIP Kate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUr8MJYAjRk

[meacenas]

What kind of Computer owns the man?  .... The Apple

Its 1980 and the computer revolution is just getting revved up to take off but good. Apple has ads in all the major magazines and you are out there looking at them like they are the second coming.

This ad, from Apple, uses one of Americas best iconic leaders, good old Ben Franklin hisself, one of the early major proponents of freedom. Good Franklin traveled across the pond during our war for freedon from the tyranny of .England.

Keep in mind for a moment, this is the early 1980s. From a marketing view, there are at least two major points to this ad. First and foremost, you are to be credited with a life of freedom using an Apple, secondly, its an affordable computer that a wise person would buy.

Fast forward to today, October of 2018 and look at the news.

A news item today shows that Apple is now using proprietary software to lock their new computer out for third party repair shops. That means that only Apple shops can fix them....when they get around to it and whatever they want to charge for that. In other words ..they own your computer, even if you bought it.

A new Apple Pro with  decent RAM (32GB) is over $4000.00 with taxes. Thats almost double what you will pay for a comparable Windows based computer.

Apple users will talk all day about how they paid big for a stable platform with blazing speed, but thats all it is today, talk. Windows based systems are just as stable and just as fast....at half the cost. The difference is only the icon on the front that proclaims that money is no object and as a mindless cucumber, consumer,  you don mind being used by a great marketing department to feed a greedy corporation.

Apple has become the exact opposite of what their original core values were. Now they are an expensive, marketing driven elitist icon.

[meacenas]

The Big ‘News’ that finally made the news.   

The Chinese are in your back pocket looking for your goodies.

Prequel....There is a push by Amazon and other companies to get the American military to store ALL their information on cloud servers run by private companies like Amazon.

Now for the Very Bad news.....

Around 2009, the CIA received a ‘secret’ notice from an insider at one of the large Chinese computer chip manufacturers on mainland China. The message was that the PLA, ( the Chinese army, The Peoples Liberation Army) , was considering installing slave chips in exported computer components destined for the US with the intent to infiltrate American technology and military designers and suppliers.

At the time the CIA could not do anything because it was just hearsay, they decided to keep tabs. Over the ensuing 5 years they were able to track the progress that the PLA made towards the spy chips implementation in global markets. Is 2012 there was definite progress as the CIA and the FBI was able to find these ‘backdoor’ chips in servers that were being shipped to American technology companies like Amazon, Apple, and other large companies  that used thousands of dedicated servers.

These companies engineers also picked up on the problem because they were experiencing glitches that should not happen. Boards were examined and sent to the FBI.

In some cases the chips were allowed to stay in place and were monitored for traffic. Due to the chips architecture, it was possible for the Chinese to completely open the ‘door’ ( bypass any passwords) to these servers and change software to allow more active use of the servers. The CIA determined that most chips were ‘plants’ that were checked for operation by the PLA every month to maintain contact but were not used. They hypothesize that the Chinese were waiting until there was a good reason to use the chips. A new fighter plane, ( how did the Chinese copy our newest fighter plane, the F35 in less than two years anyways?) a new style computer CPU, high value items.

Most of the compromised computers have been replaced, and the Chinese owned company that is based in California, SuperMicro,is being investigated for complicity.

You can read all about it at Bloomberg Business News who broke this story yesterday.