That's much better!

If you've been reading this blog the past few days, you know I've been having woes with my bass tone (or, to be more specific and/or honest, with the sound man).

Well, Saturday night I changed my EQ to something closely resembling a bass sound, and turned the volume to a reasonable level. The first comment I got was from Miss Amy, who was standing right in front of me on stage. "Your bass sounds really good tonight," she said between songs the first set. I asked her if my bass was too loud. "No," she replied. "It sounds good - don't change anything."

During our first break, I talked to a fellow musician in the audience who had been at the show Friday. Before I said a word to him, he said, "Geeze, your bass sounds MUCH better tonight! I can actually hear it for a change. It sounds good. You must have changed your EQ a little..." As he said that, I glanced back at the stage. There was the sound man, changing the EQ on my bass. Sure enough - he'd changed it back to the way it had been the night before. He did that on every break the band took. And every time I changed it back to the way I wanted it. I'm bringing some duct tape to the next gig - I'm going to get my settings the way I want, then I'm gonna put duct tape over the whole thing to keep prying fingers out. The only negative comment I had was from our guitar player, and half of that comment was positive, actually. There was a song in the end of the second set or beginning of the third set that he didn't have to play his guitar on, so he was free to wander around the stage a bit. As he came closer to my side of the stage I could see his eyes get wider. "Wow," he said. "The sound is really 'tight' on this side of the stage. That sounds pretty good... But can you turn down just a bit? There's a low-frequency rumble coming from somewhere that's making it hard for me to hear myself..."

So, I feel much better about Saturday night. Friday night left me wondering if I was cut out for the music business after all, but Saturday night reassured me quite a bit.

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Blogger is having problems today. I just lost two hours of writing, and I still can't upload photos. I've cleared my cache and all that nifty stuff, to no avail. Oh well... Hopefully they'll get it all figured out.

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Here's a statistic the Bush administration can be proud of... The number of poor people has risen by 17% since Bush was appointed. (I got that from an Australian newspaper's web site. Now that I wanna cite them as a source, I can't find the site again.) The gap between rich and poor continues to grow, and that makes me sad.

That reminds me of an article I read in Reader's Digest (pp. 38-44, October 2005 issue) about Stephen Crawford, a man who was co-president of Morgan Stanley for a little over three months. For those 100 days of work he received $32 million. That works out to $54,000 an hour. It's obscene that Mr. Crawford accepted (and felt he rightfully earned) that money, but it's even more obscene that Morgan Stanley gave him that amount of money! I wonder what the poor schmuck who mops the floors in the corporate lavatory 50 hours a week for minimum wage thinks about that. I wonder what their investors think about that. I'm pretty sure that if I had money invested in a firm that pulled that kind of stunt I'm think awfully hard about letting them use MY cash...

(Side note: Reader's Digest seems to me to be naught but a shadow of the fine magazine it was in the 1960's and 1970's. My grandparents, and my mother as well, encouraged me to read the magazine when I was a kid - and they had a LOT of back issues for me to pore over. In the 1980's I noticed that Reader's Digest was becoming more and more political, so I quit reading it. The past few years I've been reintroduced to the magazine, and while I do end up reading it eventually, I'm constantly disappointed. The writing doesn't have the clarity and insightfulness it used to [perhaps because they no longer rely on reprinting outstanding articles, but now use articles written in-house], and there is so much advertising in the magazine it's hard to find the real articles. Disappointing. The "old" Reader's Digest magazines seemed to be like Walter Cronkite, whilst the "new" Reader's Digest seems to be more like "Fear Factor" or, at best Fox News - two facts [one of which is usually wrong] and a lot of noise dressed up and wearing a tie.)

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In other odd news, Cindy Sheehan, the lady who camped out in front of our appointed leader G. Walker Bush's ranch while he was on vacation this July and all of August, has been arrested. Apparently she went to Washington D.C. and sat down on the sidewalk in front of the White House with "several dozen" supporters (one newspaper mentioned the number 300 instead of "several dozen"). source I guess it's illegal for an American citizen to sit on a sidewalk now. Maybe I should start calling the police to come investigate every time I see a homeless person in my neighborhood.

I'm sure Ms. Sheehan must have broken a law, and I'm sure she knew about the law (whatever it is) when she broke it. But it seems odd to get arrested for sitting down in a public place.

According to one poll I saw recently, two-thirds of Americans now think Presidential Appointee Bush has mishandled the war in Iraq, and over half think we should end the war now before any more lives are lost. Mr. Bush is directly responsible for the loss of 26,092 Iraqi citizens source and 1,904 American soldiers, and is indirectly responsible for at least some of the thousands of American casualties of Katrina through inept administration. President Bill Clinton was nearly hounded out of office for showing his privates to a government clerk. Appointee Bush has actually done harm. Why is he still in office? It baffles me...

Here's an example of Mr. Bush's disregard for human dignity... (This will take a minute to explain.) A company named Kenyon International has been contracted to set up a morgue in Louisiana. Kenyon International is a subsidiary of Service Corporation International (SCI), located in Mr. Bush's "home" state of Texas. (From what I understand, there was no bidding for this service - SCI was simply chosen to do the job.) Source.

It turns out that the head of SCI is a friend of Mr. Bush, and of Mr. Bush's father, legally elected President George Herbert Walker Bush. In fact, SCI has donated something like $150,000 to the Bush family's political machine in the past few years. So, it's another case of Mr. Bush handing a lucrative government contract to one of his pals. But it gets better...

SCI subsidiaries have recently been implicated in "illegally discarding and desecrating corpses." In fact, they've already paid $100 million in settlements to bereaved families. In 2001 investigators found that a SCI-owned company had been removing bodies from cemeteries in Florida and dumping the bodies in the woods to make room for more bodies. In 2000, fifteen different SCI-owned funeral homes were sued for piling bodies outside or stuffing them in sheds instead of cremating the remains.

Investigators also found that SCI companies were being creative in their use of vaults. They found the remains of 67 individuals in a vault made for just one person.

When presidential Appointee George W. Bush was governor of Texas, Texas Funeral Service Commission Director Eliza May filed a lawsuit against Mr. Bush accusing him of obstructing investigations into SCI methods. Oddly enough, Ms. May was fired and the case never came to trial.

So, our government has not only given a big government contract to a company that has close ties with the Bush family, that company is itself inept. And, to add insult to taxpayer injury, according to one mortuary professional, volunteers would have done the job AT NO CHARGE.

What is our government doing to us?