Not Rated for a Full Flap Spin

After McCain's people watched the show last night from Mile High Stadium, they did the closest thing to forfeiting the election. If only such a mercifully quick end to this 18 month nightmare could take place. Instead we must endure the charade of the RNC parading this ex-mayor of a rural town of nine thousand misfits as fit to be a heartbeat from leader of the free world. They will pretend she is a great choice and a handful of people will believe it. These would be the same ones who think America Does Got Talent as displayed on the Jerry Springer train wreck NBC bookended coverage of the DNC with. You have to congratulate Obama's people who built a little White House back porch for him to come out from and chat with us, then go back in with all the kids, wife and Joe and Jill. Like the election is just a formality to validate what we all know can and must happen. The subliminal effect was masterfully crafted but missed by everyone I heard on MSNBC who could not see past the classic greco-roman motif.
If the McCain-ers try to pass off this woman as comparable to Dan Quayle, and just as worthy of serious respect as he was, it will only prove we have stepped completely through the looking glass and into a twisted parallel universe of fun-house mirror distortion. You watch, it won't take them 48 hours to draw the comparison like it's a good thing. The scariest thing about that tack is that Bush-Quayle did actually win. Or were they just secretly testing their electronic vote rigging before anybody had even thought it were possible? We will never know, and we must be very afraid because electronic manipulation of computer voting is the only method by which Barack would appear to lose against this cartoon team of Yosemite Sam and Betty Boop.
What must happen instead is that this woman I cannot even bring myself to characterize as earnest go down in history alongside William Miller. He was the Congressman tapped to run with Barry Goldwater. They join a string of unknowns who are unwittingly strapped into the copilot seat of the doomed test plane that has water in its fuel, bird nests in its intakes, rust on its control cables and a narcissistic psychopath for a captain. Maybe the fifth crash in McCain's logbook will finally silence him forever.

Sound Ideas

I warned you I might talk about vacuum tubes occasionally, and we are overdue. Plus the fact my friend Colin wants to build an amplifier from scratch using tubes, and many possible ideas are swimming in our heads like the synchronized Olympians. Only not synchronized at all. Imagine a class of special ed kids with attention deficit disorder being herded into a pool and given a choreography routine to perform. Colin and I are right there, and dragging our other friends into the water. To help sort my thoughts, I am logging them here on the web.
In a room with a musical instrument or a singer, the amount of air is constant. The music is heard not because the amount of air in the room and reaching your ear is increased or decreased. Rather, the pressure of that air changes rapidly in waves of varying intensity and frequency. In the realm of electricity which is the medium we have used for about eighty years to duplicate music artificially, pressure is represented by voltage and amount by amperage. So the first device men made to assist in this pursuit was the vacuum tube which operates best and primarily in the realm of voltage though it can be made to control and manage current or amperage. The tube flourished and matured for exactly one human generation, about thirty years. Then its offspring, the transistor came along; operating almost entirely in the current or amperage realm though it can be applied in the voltage realm. In a computer, the only issue is a one or a zero. You don't care how big or how nuanced the one or the zero is; it just has to be what it is. A batch of electrons is either on the transistor junction pin or it isn't in your computer. Operating this way, the computer works quite well several billion times a second with only five volts of pressure. Now do you consider your computer to be a high fidelity music machine? It might be a convenient way to manage and manipulate music. But it can not make anything like beautiful music. And it never will in its current state of development.
The reason the vacuum tube is not going to go away is that a certain percentage of the population is more sensitive to stimulus than the average person. Some people drive sporty cars because they feel more control and feedback from the car and the conditions. Some people watch HDTV because they get more emotional bang out of a show or event as a result of the increased visual details. And some people want the clearest, most real music they can get in their home without paying $50 to hear a single performance across town at an inconvenient point on the calendar. To achieve that, they must use equipment with tubes. Because the tiny pressure wave the microphone picked up in the studio must be made very much bigger to pressurize air in the living room, an amplifier is needed. To boost the tiny pressure wave accurately with current manipulation is foolish and wrong headed and fruitless. To boost a tiny pressure wave accurately with a voltage sensitive and voltage controlling device is inherently sensible and rational. The big pressure wave coming out of a tube is going to be closer to the original sound wave than a big current blob coming out of a transistor is to that same real sound. It can't help but be.
One issue Colin and I are debating is whether to use tubes that operate in the current realm like fake transistors or tubes that are skewed more to the voltage realm. The problem is the speaker itself has evolved into a high current device when it should have been developed and perfected as a voltage pressure device. Until it gets reinvented, we must use an adapting transformer to convert the amplified pressure wave to a varying current stream at the last possible point in the chain. I say that is acceptable while others disagree. What is your view?
Why anyone even bothers to continue defending transistors for audio as audibly superior to tubes is mystifying. The only good thing about solid state is the reduced carbon footprint they make. I invite comments about that issue as well.

Scarred For Life, And Well-Deserved

Notice how there is not even a whisper about somebody taking a shot at mcCain? Only Barack is assumed to be a target. I have not quite figured that out but it is creepy that ABC news highlighted Obama's misstatement when he introduced Biden as "the next president. . .uh, vice president of the united states" yesterday in Illinois. Maybe because the assumption is mcCain will drop dead of natural causes before anybody can penetrate the phalanx of body-built gorillas that surround him. We can only hope. He is a scurrilous, whining, martinet of an apologist for long failed policies. But the MSM has succeeded in managing his lighting oh so well with rising poll numbers to prove their success. He never met a lie he could not finesse into an attack on the person calling him on it. And he has gotten more mileage out of having his airplane shot out from under him than Dick Rutan got from his solar powered gossamer that circumnavigated the planet. The latest was today on Face the Nation; Katie Couric asked him for a rational explanation for his ignorance of the number of multimillion dollar homes he has. His defense of the indefensible included a rambling sermon on the little woman's daddy who managed to corner the beer market in the post war boom that brought young thirsty men to the parched desert. Yeah, that sure takes a lot of brain power. But I digress. Or he digressed in somehow trying to link his days as a POW to justifying Cindy's immense wealth. I am just following his digression. Don't blame me. And it's OK he dumped his first working class wife to take up with this plastic witch. Katie did not have to ask about that; the Reverend doofus from Orange County threw him that softball last week. Anyhow, the answer he gave cut no mustard; though the fog in which he shrouds all statements does seem to appeal to the foggy headed in the electorate. Barack is being criticized, like Kerry before him, for being too analytical, too professorial, too nuanced and just plain too smart. The US being populated with so many dumb people, it is little wonder that winners of political contests are tending to be those who pretend to be dumb. Or who really are.
A friend who appears to be smart stated he does not want a Black person in the White House. I guess it is a color scheme thing. Or a racist thing. Either way, it spells doom for what should be a historic candidacy. I will say again that I think mcCain will win because he is a shameless and dishonest cur, and Obama is too smart and too dark for the dumb white masses to accept.
Socrates and Hamilton pretty much had it nailed when they warned against letting working class boobs call the shots. This country is living proof their fears were valid, and it is going down the drain with a big flush set for 4 November 2008.

Now If They Played Naked, I Might Watch

Please don't pay any attention to China or NBC for the next couple of weeks. They are going to be insufferably smug and pompous as this idiotic quadrennial spectacle plays out again and all too soon. It seems like only two years ago we had to put up with this claptrap. Oh wait, we did have to put up with it two years ago for the winter olympics. It's all a blur; I can't remember where it was or who was thrown out for drugs or who disputed the findings or who the tear-jerking hero was supposed to be who choked out big time in the early going. I do remember the jingo-ism and the maudlin emotionalism and the generally stomach-turning aspects of it. But this one is going to be even worse if such a thing is possible. The host country is a gang of thugs, assholes and fascists; and no it is not being held here but in that far eastern country where most of our hard currency is now stockpiled. Thank you Wal Mart, K Mart, Target and Costco.
It is really hard not to be a racist in this world and time where social darwinism is being writ large across the board. Everyone wants their culture to be the best; everyone thinks their culture IS the best. But unless you are carrying a Danish driver's license, you need to be ashamed of your flag and your government and your jungle minded behavior. And it is really hard to point fingers at the Chinese for being the most repugnant people on the planet when the civil wars in Africa and the petty sniping and killing of Palestinians by Israelis and vice versa and of course the ongoing train wreck caused by our stupid POTUS person in what was a perfectly decent country (as dictatorships go) shine as examples of crimes against humanity that go unpunished.
I have known lots of good decent Chinese people; most of them second generation US citizens born to parents who fled the strife and war of the early 20th century that left their feudal nation a dark and dangerous place to think any independent thoughts. But I don't really know any of this current crop other than what is portrayed on TV. And try as the US media might to paint a rosy and complimentary picture of this horde of voracious and rude and ornery and selfish people, the characterization is anything but flattering. I don't like the way they are taking over commerce or polluting the air and water or coveting oil or making way too many babies or-- wait: the USA has done all that already. How ironic that our rude behavior is now being modeled back to us by a country four times the size of ours and who is sitting down at the banquet table to carve up the last of earth's resources in accordance with its gluttonous appetite. I hope we are very pleased with ourselves for creating this monster who is going to have us for lunch. After they let us win a few medals to show off on TV for the home crowd.