The Off Topic

Top pair is walnut and maple. Bottom two boards are ziricote and bocote.

Walnut and maple are a classic paring, but I’m concerned about paring the bocote + ziricote match. Both are way too expensive for me to want to ruin $170 in boards on a project that doesn’t look good.

Thoughts? Keep in mind, the bocote darkens a little once a finish is applied.

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That Ziricote though! I have Ziricote/brass Aeolus coming from ZMF in the next couple weeks… I can’t wait!

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I love my ziricote Aeolus. Mine is black gimbal/grill though, and I think it might look better in brass. When you get that thing, you def gotta post pics man!

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You know it!!!

What’s the project?

Originally planning on a few BH Crack bases. Might do a headphone stand or decorative valet box as well / instead.

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Personal opinion - for the amp, I’d use the more textured bottom two as the amp deserves some attention of its own. For a headphone stand or valet box, I’d use one of the smoother top pair to avoid drawing attention away from the headphones themselves.

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It’s not very off-topic …

But after a week of being thoroughly beguiled by the ZMF Vérité, I decide to fire up the AB-1266 Phi CC (in light of all the talk coming out of CanJam about the new Phi TC version).

I’ve had a stupid grin on my face ever since.

It’s just a different stupid grin to the one the Vérité has been inflicting on my cheeks for the last 14 days …

(These are two entirely different headphones … so don’t take the above as any kind of value/quality judgement on either).

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Alas. Peter Tork has taken The Last Train to Clarksville.

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When they formed The Monkeys, it was for the sitcom, totally shocking everyone that they could actually sing and play.

Edit:
As for Peter Tork, he was recommended for a spot on The Monkeys by Stephen Stills. Stills had originally tried for the spot on The Monkeys but when he didn’t make it, he recommended Peter Tork audition for the spot, and Tork got it.

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I was about 12, and enjoyed the first run. Both Tork and Nesmith were real musicians, Nesmith from the folk music side of things. Davey Jones was an actor, but one who could sing. I showed some clips of The Monkees to my admin, who is about 30, but comes from Cuba, so although she knows the song Daydream Believer, she wasn’t at all aware of the show. She laughed every time Davy Jones and a girl looked at each other and the studio put in the eye twinkle.

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And that is why boy bands were/are successful every single generation.

I can’t think of any in the 40s or 50s. There were some young singers - Frankie Lymon comes to mind, but can’t think of early boy bands. Not Doo-wop, they seem to be in their mid 20s or older.

The “Off Topic” — you asked for it and got it today:

IMO and in my understanding, popular culture changes have been a function of technology for at least 500 years. Humans have morphed into something new (and this has yet proven to be sustainable versus the very stable medieval and tribal systems).

  • 500 years ago the printing press contributed to the breakdown of religious control and growth of science and technology. It allowed the wide distribution of knowledge (i.e., the Renaissance). Newspapers and printed sheet music became possible. Modern media was born.

  • 125 years ago radio and record players began to shift events and facts away from a space and time. One could reliably ‘witness’ past events with reasonable accuracy.

  • 100+ years ago silent movies hinted at visual interaction, but were basically novelties

  • 90 years ago (~1927) talking movies transformed and ‘virtualized’ key parts of human experience. Girls and women began to swoon at the ‘silver screen.’ Groupies and pop culture FANatics arose → a substantial percentage of people started losing the ability to distinguish between real and fantasy experiences. Wealth and technology facilitated the ability to live in a fantasy world all the time.

  • Post-WW2 children were raised on TV and a relative handful of newspapers/radio stations. The Baby Boomers are better described as the Broadcast Generation, as they all moved lock-step in response to what they were fed by a narrow entertainment monopoly. Unique in their minds only. Rebels in their minds only. “Aren’t the Rolling Stones dangerous?” The Fender electric guitar (1950; low cost, meant for pop music) was called the ‘Broadcaster’ and then later renamed the ‘Telecaster.’

  • 1970s-1980s cheaper media production led to punk rock and cable TV. In turn, this supported sustainable alternative pop cultures and far less uniformity than was common in the 1960s and before. College rock, alternative rock, heavy metal. The Sex Pistols, Clash, Metallica, Slayer, The Smiths, and Pixies were hard to find on the radio in the 1980s!

  • 1990s-2007 computers started to allow people without any resources at all to be heard, and effective censorship was no longer possible

  • 2007-present the iPhone and later smartphones have resulted in a proto-cyborg culture (or an emerging species) where a large percentage of people have no clue about being alone, reading a map, staying focused on a novel, or creating music without technology. Babies use tablets now. Mental babies now control big segments of Facebook, Twitter, academia, industry, and government.

Boy bands: not possible before the publicizing central power of TV and radio (circa 1930s-1950s). As technology always flows from upper incomes to the masses, broadcast technology hit the mainstream in the 1950s. The boy band formula came to commercial fruition with the Beatles (1960), and has since been robust (at least until Justin Bieber). Any recent declines follow from the rise of micro-stars on social media. The teen market today produces their own selfie-videos and continues to fracture away from media companies.

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Well!

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lol makes me feel good about an old log cabin we have in the UP of Michigan. Until 10 years ago, no electricity or running water, so it was lanterns, candles, and bringing water in, cooking on coleman stoves. Electricity helps but there’s still no cell service so when we go there, we put our phones in airplane mode or just shut them off. The kids build fires in an fire pit, build “houses” from branches and sticks, and they play games in the woods. I taught them how to take “dip-n-pours” (a lost art) outside and now even after getting water into the camp, they still like doing the dip-n-pour during the summers. Two Christmas’s ago, the family met up there for Christmas. It was packed and the grand kids had a ball, falling asleep on the floor in front of the fire. Yes they have their tablets and electronics, but they also know another side. It makes me smile to hear them talk about the cabin and wanting to know when they can go back again.

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As someone who works in censorship circumvention, I can tell you that censorship is definitely possible. In practice, the infrastructure of the Internet is not nearly as decentralized as we’d like to think and there are points of control that give censors a lot of leeway.

Collateral Freedom is one of the few factors that keeps the Internet from being completely censored for many people.

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a favorite saying of mine…no matter how paranoid you are, you are not paranoid enough! Most people don’t realize how much our lives are directed and controlled, monitored and recorded. Censorship is practiced everyday and most people are never even aware of it.

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I’m in full agreement with both of you and overgeneralized using the word ‘censorship.’ That’ll happen when I compose early Saturday morning historical missives…

What I should have said:

"Within the Western democracies that maintained relatively lax attitudes toward creative expression in the 20th century, the expansion of low-cost and user-generated media channels led to increased divergence of cultural interests and the marketplace. The traditional media companies lost tight control over the mass market as their costly production and distribution networks were no longer necessary. The taste makers could no longer dictate taste – even as the mass market often gravitated toward banal, lowest common denominator entertainment (I’m talking about you Kim Kardashian and most YouTube stars).

In those societies that did not permit political or creative expression before the PC era (e.g., China, Iran), there was only a modest change from prior censorship practices. Furthermore, news quality and fairness standards in ‘free’ countries sharply declined as the traditional media channels struggled to remain relevant and financially viable. Standards for publication fell after NBC censored the Monica Lewinsky story (1998) and leaks directly led to the rise of the Drudge Report. The media today is so sharply polarized and echo-chamber oriented that left and right wing sources cover entirely different topics. This can be seen at the “purple” news aggregation page below:

http://polurls.com/purple/

However, I’ve now digressed many miles from boy bands."

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agreed…the thread took a dark turn. back to lighter bliss. Who remembers their first big concert???

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