MT100
Care to guess what this is? A primitive Time Machine? A Brain/Personality Transfer device? A Mind Control apparatus from the former Soviet Union?

Sorry, time's up... it's a multi-track tape recorder!

I had occasion to take this out of the box and use it again. I bought it back in 1989, and it still works, with the exception of one of the line-outs that you use for mix-down. It could probably be repaired fairly easily, but there's no good reason at the moment. I can listen to my old tapes just fine through headphones, and that's good enough. I had a multi-media project recently, and I did the narration. I recorded my voice on this machine, and then into the computer and that worked pretty well. Now it's sitting in the corner of my room, and I occasionally listen to old recordings, which actually go back to 1982. I bought this machine to replace a TEAC Portastudio, which I managed to wear out.

In case you don't know, this device allows you to record a track, i.e. a keyboard or guitar, and then go back and record another track, and so on. In this way you can become your own combo. I also have recordings of my friends playing along -- a wide variety of material. Much of it reeks, but some of it was surprisingly good. It's just another repository of my personal creative endeavors.

Truth
I went to see Al Gore's flick this week. Wow, that's pretty scary -- but there were no real surprises. It's pretty easy to believe that the Earth is getting hotter if you live here in New Mexico! Seriously, there has been a drought here for a few years, and it hardly rains or snows anymore at all. I can remember when I was a kid, somewhere there in the 60's of the last century, when the seasons were a pretty regular thing. It rained when you expected and then got warm in the summer and then the rains came again and so on it went. Somewhere in the intervening years I started to notice that there was less and less predictability in the weather. Now it seems to be completely out of whack with severe conditions all around us. For my part, I try to keep my consumption at a minimum.

I've always liked Al Gore. In 2000 I had some strange idea that it didn't matter all that much who ended up as President so I was too busy to vote for the guy. I had faith in our long cherished system of checks and balances, and I was pretty sure that the Executive Branch would have some respect for that. I was mistaken of course... Congress seems to be in the role of either a rubber stamp on one side, or an ineffectual bunch of squabblers on the other (at least to hear the media talk about it). The Supreme Court is stacked, and all other courts are full of "activist judges" who must be opposed and thwarted at every turn. The news people have apparently been ordered to refer to Bush as Commander in Chief at every available opportunity, and he's the only one that gets to decide anything anymore. I'm sorry, I don't want a Fuhrer in charge -- I liked the set up the Founding Fathers came up with. I was among the tiny percent of voters in the last primary, and I plan to at least be an informed participant from now on. And that's the truth.

A Head for a Head
There's been some good news for the war-makers recently. Our guys managed to bomb Al-Zarqawi and take him out. He deserved it -- a second rate thug making a name for himself. He especially deserved it for his ghastly propensity for decapitation. I have often thought about Mr. Nicholas Berg, sitting there with his hands tied behind his back. He seemed to me to be pretty confident that he could make it through if he played it cool. After all, he hadn't done anything against the Iraqi people. Then the asshole Zarqawi pulls out a big knife... I've never seen the entire video, and hope to never see it. I have since often wondered what would be going through one's mind as your head is being removed.

So that Zarqawi guy is gone. We don't like to boast, so we just took a big glossy picture after he was good and dead and showed it off in a ghoulish display. We dig that. Forgive me if I am unable to rejoice over-much in all of it. I am naturally resistant to anything that makes a war such as we have seem any more palatable.

I am always reminded of one of the reasons given for Noah's flood -- "The Earth was filled with violence..." God gave Noah time to round up some critters before he flushed and gave the human race a new lease on life. Still, Righteous Causes, Religious Wars, and Jihads continue; and the Earth is filled with violence.

Happy Birthday to Me...
Actually it was last Monday, when people were celebrating Memorial Day and everyone was buzzing about Branjolina's offspring. I happened to be in California, celebrating a graduation and seeing a nephew off to the army and various family activities. I also got to reconnect to some old friends and acquaintances. It was a good trip but I came back to discover that my car had been towed away and impounded. They pick the one week I'm gone to do some dubious work on the parking lot. I retrieved it at my expense, thank you very much.

If you bothered to count the candles you see here, you would find that there are 48 of them representing the years of my life. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president on candle #1, followed by JFK, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, and Bush2. You can associate various historical events with those names, and conclude that I saw much of it happen on a TV screen. So much for almost half a century of living.

I suppose the good news is that I don't mind getting older. I didn't like it when I turned 25 -- that sounded old to me, which is of course laughable in retrospect. As it is, the time seems to pass more slowly than it used to. There's plenty of time for towing my car away, for example.