Baseball Begins

Just prior to the beginning of the pandemic-shortened MLB season, I happened to start watching the baseball-themed comedy series Brockmire, and was taken with this quote from the third episode:

“So let’s not make baseball out to be any more important than it really is.  It’s just a diversion that keeps us from pondering our own personal hells.”

I love this, and while I’d never admit that I when I watch a ballgame I’m avoiding my own personal demons, I must confess that I’ve missed the diversion of baseball.  I’ve missed having that little no-think something to look forward to at the end of the day, or – lately - in the middle of a frightfully unscheduled weekend.  A little light that says, “Hey, even if you’ve got nothing else going on, baseball starts at 1:20,” as it did yesterday. 

I grabbed a Pabst from the refrigerator (because it’s $7.99 for a 12-pack and it’s good on a hot summer’s day, that’s why), lay down on the couch, petted my pooch, and listened to Bob Uecker call the game for his fiftieth-straight season.  Perfect. The diversion and it’s accompanying mid-day nap were lovely pastimes indeed right until Peralta gave up four runs in fourth and basically ensured that the Cubs would take two of three from the Brewers to start the season.  At that moment it was baseball frustration as usual.  I turned the TV off and went back to work.

Ah, but there’s another game tonight, another diversion, another glimmer of hope.  And that’s one of the beauties of baseball.

And while I don’t exactly hold out a lot of hope for the Brewers during this season like no other, or for the baseball season in general in light of the horrific number of COVID-19 cases reported each day, I can imagine the following scenario:  after a lifetime of making a silent prayer (okay, sometimes not so silent) to let my Brewers win a World Series title (just one – I’m not being greedy), I can imagine the All-Powerful Creator up in the sky saying, “You want a World Series Title; I’ll give you one,” and THIS will be the year I’m granted my request.  This asterisk-marred joke of a season.  THIS will be the year the Milwaukee Brewers win a championship.  Craig Counsell and his crew will come home to Milwaukee for a parade down Wisconsin Avenue on a chilly November afternoon, and fans will come out in droves to celebrate the stunning achievement of the city’s first title since the erstwhile Braves in 1957, and I will be one of those delusional fans. But I and all of my cheesehead brethren will know…we’ll know that none of it counts.  Nothing counts in what is basically a 60-game exhibition.  And God will say, “Hey, what do you want?  I gave you a World Series.”

Because never once in all my years of praying did I specify, “Please God, let the Brewers win a World Series in my lifetime, but only if it’s a legitimate 162-game regular season.”

Dummy me: I forgot to include the proviso.

Is "Defund" the Best Word Choice?

Words have meanings.  If the words you’re using mean something other than the message you’re trying to convey then you’re likely going to anger and confuse people.  If I were an umpire at a baseball game and cried “Safe!” when a runner slid into home plate, the runner would have every reason to believe that he was, in fact, safe.  But if I were to qualify my remark and say, “When I say safe, I actually mean you were really close to being safe, but you’re actually out,” a shouting match would ensue.

Similarly, a word being used in the recent racial protests is leading to anger and confusion: defund. 

Here is what I know.  Defund doesn’t mean reallocate or restructure.  It means to stop funding.  I’ve been told otherwise by several people, but saying it doesn’t make it so.  I scanned the internet for definitions just in case I was missing something, and here’s what I found.

From merriam-webster.com:
to withdraw funding from.

From Dictionary.Cambridge.org:
to stop providing the money to pay for something.

From TheFreeDictionary.com:
to stop the flow of funds to.

These definitions are consistent and clear.  So why are people telling me that it doesn’t mean what I think it means?  Matthew Yglasias provides part of the answer at Vox.org, whose article does a nice job of explaining the phrase “defund the police.”  He writes that although “in congressional budget-speak, to ‘defund’ something normally means to reduce appropriations to zero dollars, thus eliminating it” that in practice “the ‘defund’ slogan dances ambiguously between abolition-type schemes and just saying officials should spend less money on policing at the margins.”

But if you’re trying to convince people to support your cause, ambiguity is the last thing you want.  I personally wish protesters would change the slogan, but I guess “Reallocate a portion of resources from the police to mental health initiatives” is a bit cumbersome.  My fear is this: a movement that has very legitimate concerns and goals is unable to attract a large number of voters because “defund” doesn’t mean what they want it to mean.  Perhaps a different tactic is in order. 

Or, more likely, perhaps in a year the word “defund” will have an additional definition added when searching online dictionaries:

Defund:
1)  to stop the flow of funds to.
2)  to take a portion of funds from.

Build Your Own Record Rack

I’m not a naturally handy guy, but over the years I’ve managed to take on some modest home improvement projects with a degree of success, mostly the result of YouTube videos and frantic emails to my exceptionally handy friend, Rick.  Last March when it became apparent that the pandemic would result in a lot of unwanted time at home, I decided to overcome my typical trepidation and take on a new project, one I’d been grappling with for some time:  building a few shelving units to store my growing collection of vinyl records.  I’d been searching for a replacement of my plastic-bins-scattered-around-the-basement approach for quite some time, but nothing on the market satisfied my three criteria:  forward facing, attractive and inexpensive. 

Enter, the Google search.  Actually enter dozens of Google searches. And lo and behold, several pages deep into one of my explorations, I came upon a marvelous blog post called “I Built a DIY Vinyl Record Shelf, And you Can Too!”  This sounded right up my alley.  The post was over seven years old, but the concept was timeless:  build a great-looking unit that holds around 500 records with one sheet of 8x4 plywood.  Fantastic.

The author of the blog got his idea from what is now a decade-long thread on AudioKarma, a website I’d never heard before but whose entry is a treasure trove of information from dozens of helpful contributors.  It all started with a great concept and has since evolved to include every possible variation you can imagine, with multiple draft designs that accommodate different needs.  If you’re interested in building your own rack, I strongly encourage you to read the entire thread before you begin.  I did not, and wish I had.  It may take you several hours, but it’ll help you determine in advance which features are important to you and which design works best.  Had I read these comments in full I would have avoided a few mistakes along the way.  As it is, I built two identical racks, and then a third of my own design that includes record storage on the bottom and bays for a receiver and turntable on top.  None of my three projects went perfectly, and my lack of craftsmanship certainly reared its ugly head from time to time, but I learned a lot about woodworking and ultimately made decent-looking alternatives to the plastic bins I’d been using for years.

Along with screws, glue, casters, sandpaper, and polyurethane, lights, etc., I figure each unite costs somewhere around $100.   Not too shabby!

Above: records will fill the bottom eventually. Far left: speaker stands that I built to practice using a pocket hole jig. Left: extra support for the bottom shelf.

Here are a few things you may find helpful:

1)     Beware cutting your plywood at the store.  The guys at Home Depot were well-meaning, but their cuts of my red oak plywood (around $53) with a dull an imprecise cutting tool ended up shredding my wood something fierce.  It took a lot of energy and frustration to work around the most dreadful-looking cuts.  If you have a friend with a truck or a van, consider doing this at home.

2)     Buy or build a square jig to hold your plywood together at right angles.  I built one very similar to the one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPA8FDTcfcE

3)     Get a table saw or borrow one.  I did not and it showed, because even though I used a guide with my circular saw, I was never able to make my cuts absolutely perfect, resulting in slight gaps and mismeasurements that affected the final project.  I’m still happy with my units, but they could have been a bit better. 

4)     Since being able to move your record rack once it’s filled with records is key, definitely include casters in your design.  I purchased reasonably-priced 90-pound casters from Home Depot and they work fine.  Don’t forget to include a few that swivel and lock.

5)     Use a counter sink to hide your screws or use a pocket hole jig.  I did the former from the first two racks I built and pocket holes for the third unit along with a set of speaker stands I built (these actually turned out the best of all of my work).  I loved using my Kreg Pocket Hold Jig 320 and will find new uses for it in upcoming projects I’m sure.

6)     Use wood glue for all of your wood joints.

7)     Buy a bunch of clamps, including a few trigger clamps for ease of use and a few clamps that are long enough to accommodate your record bin.  I think mine are 48 inches, and they were hugely helpful.

8)     Consider adding supports for the shelves.  Records weight a lot, and though it might not have been necessary, I did add a cross-bar support for the lower shelf and perimeter supports for the top shelf.   If nothing else, they give me peace of mind.

9)     Be especially careful with the top shelf as this is the most visible.  On the last rack I made that’s housing a turntable on top, I ended up with gaps along the edges that required the use of wood putty, and it looks pretty bad.  So bad, in fact, that I decided to purchase a bunch of rock band stickers from RedBubble to hide my work!  I love the stickers, but they were not part of the original design.

10)  Which reminds me, consider decorating your racks with stickers!  This was a helluva lot of fun, and it requires no carpentry skills.

11)  If you don’t want to stain, don’t.  I personally hate using stain because I never like the way it turns out – just another one of those handyman skills I haven’t yet mastered.  I kept my red oak plywood bare and used three coats of polyurethane to protect it and give it a bit of a sheen.  Looks great.

12)  Don’t fret so much about how to best apply polyurethane.  I stressed out about this because everyone had an opinion and almost none of them were consistent.  Put a few coats on, sand lightly, put another coat on, and you’re good to go.  It’s just polyurethane.  It’s not life and death.

13)  Consider using real wood iron-on veneer.  I had no idea this product existed, but it’s another one of those great tidbits offered by the AudioKarma gang.  It’s an absolute bitch to work with in my opinion because it’s wider than the edge of the plywood and therefore needs to be trimmed.  Nothing I used – a trimmer designed specifically for this task or just good old sandpaper – worked well.  It either just folded the veneer or disrupted it enough to lift it off the plywood despite the adhesive.  I eventually got the job done and it looks great, but it was an unpleasant process. 

14)  Install LED lights for the bottom racks or your records are going to be hard to see.  This part of the project was easy!  I purchased these stick-on lights from Amazon and they work great. 

15)  Use record dividers for a professional look.  There are a bunch of options out there, mostly overpriced or formatted incorrectly, but I like the option I found at Amazon along with a white ink Sharpie.

I’m probably missing a few additional pieces of advice, but by scanning the AudioKarma thread you will have a lot of great ideas that people of shared over the years.  Happy building!

Logging Films and Music

Early on in the film High Fidelity, the character Rob says, “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”  I laughed out loud when I first heard this quote because for many of us there’s a grain of truth to it.  How many times has your opinion of someone shifted based on their collection of books, music or sports memorabilia?  Does someone’s comprehensive Bob Dylan collection impress you or turn you off?  Does a person’s room decked out in green and gold as a sort of shrine to the Green Bay Packers repulse you or enthrall you?  Have you ever started to fall in love with someone, only to learn that her favorite books are romance novels?  Or that his are comic books?  Or vice versa?  Sure, judging someone on what they like is shallow, but really, if you were to quickly sum up who I am to a stranger, you could do worse than providing him with a list of my top twenty books, movies and albums.

With this in mind, I was excited to learn about a couple of apps that help nutjobs like me log the art they consume.   I was even more excited after I learned that I’d be more-or-less housebound for three months during the pandemic.  Finding fun ways to kill time has been paramount.

Enter Letterboxd and Discogs.

At their most basic level, these apps allow you to log the films you’ve seen (Letterboxd) and what music you own (Discogs), and that’s essentially the level I’ve chosen to engage in.  If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but for me just logging things was a lot of fun, as it helped me to remember that small 1988 movie starring Joe Mantegna and Don Ameche (Things Change) or that I shouldn’t buy a copy of Pretzel Logic, but rather it’s successor, Katy Lied.  Any app that helps jog my aging memory is a tool worth considering.

First, Letterboxd.  This couldn’t be easier to use, though I’ve found the desktop version superior to the phone app.  You can look up films by director, actor, year, decade, genre, title – you name it – and a click or two will allow you to choose “watched” “like” and “watchlist,” the latter a list of movies that you want to view.  You can also create lists of films, as my kids and I did when we chose the best twenty movies of the 2010s (note: the only film to make all four of our lists was Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World).  Rather than go through the trouble of reviewing or ranking the films I’ve seen, I chose to use the “like” button more as a “love” button.  I only included movies that truly resonated with me a significant way.  Case in point, this month I watched two movies that were both were very good, but only one really got to me.  Molly’s Game didn’t get checked as a “like,” but Doubt did.   As of today I’ve logged 1388 films watched, and I’ve “liked” 260 of them, some probably unwarrantedly so, others probably overlooked.  Love of art can be a finicky thing.

For Discogs, I avoided logging my records for a long time because I felt overwhelmed with the process. For example, when searching for Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, 308 different versions of the album appear, based on format, country, pressing, release date, etc.  It’s enough to make even a devoted logger give up.  I didn’t particularly care about what pressing I owned for each album – only that I owned some version of the album – and I didn’t want to work hard at this endeavor, pandemic or not.  To make things far easier and far more enjoyable, the only three categories I worried about were format (obviously), country and the unlikelihood that I owned an original pressing for most of my records.  When narrowing down the aforementioned Supertramp album using the above filters, I was left with a more manageable 33 versions to choose from, and I simply picked one at random.  Of course, if you’re a very serious collector who’s buying and selling, you may need to go the extra mile, and for that you have my sympathy.

I currently own 823 albums and I’ve compiled a list of another 122 that I’m actively looking for.  Discogs includes a rough estimate of your collection’s worth, averaging the last ten sales of each album you own.  What I’ve learned is this: record collecting is an enjoyable and relatively inexpensive hobby, and that all of my records wouldn’t pay for even two months of my son’s college education.  Oh well.

Of course, all of these records need to be stored somewhere, and this leads me nicely into next week’s blog post, about building functional and attractive record racks for your collection.  Stay tuned, and in the meantime, have some fun with Letterboxd and Discogs.

Delving into the Harpejji (scales and fingering)

It had been in the back of my mind ever since watching Stevie Wonder tear into one during his Songs in the Key of Life tour back in 2015.  The harpejji.  This amazing, awe-inspiring instrument that seemed to be a godsend for keyboardists – a stringed instrument with an enormous expressional palette that’s played much like a keyboard instrument, with hands in a piano-like position.  Being the genius that he is, Wonder appeared to master this relatively new instrument created by Tim Meeks of Marcodi Musical Products in no time flat.  As for me, after finally taking the plunge and purchasing a beautiful G16 harpejji last winter, I found myself floundering after several months.  I’d thought that I could approach the instrument intuitively, eschewing the formality that accompanied my piano instruction decades ago, and to some degree, I succeeded.  But after months if piddling around and coming up with a few nice motifs and learning a few songs, I realized that I had to approach things in a more systematic way. 

A big challenge for me was fingering and how to best approach notes quickly and comfortably.  I kept on second guessing myself when viewing tutorials on YouTube, as the techniques they displayed seemed anything but efficient, offering one-octave scales that required sliding into notes and that didn’t allow for multiple octave movements.  Even the newly-added charts on the Marcodi website don’t achieve what I’d like to see.

In the midst of my exploration, I happened upon a blog entry by Matthieu Amiguet of Switzerland through the “harpejji hangout” forum, and this cracked the door open for me.  It confirmed my suspicions about what I’d been viewing online, and it inspired me to really nail down fingering for the most useful scales.  The fingering that Amiguet decided upon for the major scales are exactly what I settled on, and I’ve since (mostly) settled on fingering for minor, harmonic minor, blues and pentatonic scales. For all of the examples below, I’ve written fingering that assumes you’ll continue to go up the scale. You might end up using slightly different fingering once you reach the end of your run.

Here is the fingering for major scales as I originally viewed at Amiguet’s blog.

After some additional exploration, I decided that for natural minor scales I’d use the same fingering as above, but starting on the scale’s 6th note.

For harmonic minor, it’s easy to adjust the right hand to accommodate raising the 7th note.  For the left hand, this isn’t as easy.  I’ve offered two solutions, the first without a sliding note, which would normally be preferred, the second including a slide.  Although the first solution requires a bit of a jump, it actually works pretty well. with a little practice.

For pentatonic scales, the following fingering allows for quicker movements than what you’ll find at some of the online tutorials.  It looks a bit awkward at first, but really works well once you get the hang of it. I’ve also included an alternative right-hand version that may come in handy sometimes.

For a variation of the pentatonic scale – the blues scale – once again the right hand fingering is easily achieved, fast and efficient.  This is a blast to play using only the first three fingers.  For the left hand, the fingering is clunky and hard to manage.  I’ve looked for other possibilities and just can’t find one that I like.  Fortunately, the times when I would rip through a blues scale on the left hand are few and far between.

That’s what I’ve come up with so far, and it’s helped me navigate the harpejji much better than I was able to before.  I’ve still got a long way to go, but thanks to Matthieu Amiguet I’ve been able to at least start cracking the code.

If you’ve got your own preferred fingerings for these scales or others that I haven’t yet address, please consider sharing them with me or adding them on the Harpejji Hangout forum.  And if you’re a harpejji player in the Chicago area, I’d love to meet you and exchange ideas.  Give me a shout.