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Overview
Al traveled to Detroit to see Extreme and Living Color in concert. And we both saw baseball games – but we switched cities. Stephen traveled to Cleveland for a Guardians game and Alan traveled to Akron for a Rubber Ducks game.
There is actually a lot of tech involved with going to a concert or seeing a ball game. It’s mostly good tech and makes our life easier when dealing with an event that we can purchase quickly from our phone, or transfer tickets, or order snacks and have them delivered to us.
And Al got his new TV. He decided on a HiSense and talks about the features.
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Transcript
Alan: So what’s going on? If you can hear me, I can. I’m a hitting start video and somehow I’m not getting that guy to be. I wonder if I have to.
Stephen: I’m hearing you. Do you hear me?
You’re, we’re going back to Pulp Fest. You’re the shadow.
Alan: Exactly. I’m I might have to get outta Zoom and come back in because I suspect it doesn’t have that connection. So sorry about
Stephen: this Miracle Tech. We can edit Exactly.
Alan: I’m okay. Much better. Alright.
Stephen: Yay. So Alan, it’s been like two weeks. We skipped last week. There’s been a lot going
Alan: on. You. Exactly. We, you, we were both schedule constrained and busy boys and stuff like that. Yeah. Sorry about that. And of course, as usual, the accumulation of what, how are we gonna get through all this?
Stephen: It’s just talk like those used car salesman guys.
Alan: Exactly. So let’s see what last week I went to see Extreme Yes. And Living
Stephen: Color. Tell me that, that sounds
Alan: wonderful. It was, I really like both of those bands. They’re from, like eighties going into nineties. And but they were still it’s for both of them, all the members of the original band, or at least so far as I could tell.
And most important, it was the lead guitarist who are both amazing. Vernon Reed and Nuno Betencourt and the lead vocalists, which is, let’s see, to state corresponding let’s see Cory Glover and Gary Sharon. So include. They played all the songs I wanted to hear. They had enough new material that it was, and it isn’t the, oh God, new material.
Please go back to what I already love. No, it really, they were, there was good, vital stuff. It was they’re still making good music. So much, a lot of what they had to say back then is still true today. A lot of how hard they rock still matters, even if they’re in their fifties. I nowadays, I always wear earplugs because I worry about, my old ears getting tinnitus and stuff like that.
But just the And it was just me, Colleen doesn’t tend to like the strangle, the guitar kind of guitar play, strangle the neck of the guitar. But that just gave me, I made a point of getting a seat. I didn’t keep my assigned seat. I went even further back so I’d have some room around me so that I could play my air guitar in my eor just bop around ’cause there’s a lot of the al the human eclipse.
I’m in people’s way anyway, why not get out of their way and give myself a little bit of dancing in my seat room and stuff. And so just had the greatest time with some people really have skill and it stays with them. You know what I mean? There. I have slowed down as much as I know a lot of different tech.
I am nowhere near current on everything I could know about how we design apps and databases and websites and how they all come together. And I that’s the last thing I was doing was convergence like that to make sure I knew all that work. And yet there’s so much. Continual advancement and the world got to.
We used to have releases were a big thing that you tested the heck out of everything and made sure it was good. And nowadays things really seem to go out all the time, on the fly. They do ab testing and not only on the basis of which feature do you like better, but does the feature even work.
Stephen: So they’re doing that with movies now too.
That the Spider-Man, spider Verse movie for the theater or the streaming release, they altered, I, there’s a lot of talk about all the stuff they altered from the original theater. So it’s, branching into other avenues and video games. They. So they’re so big and so many people, and they’re so rushed that they shovel ’em out and they know it’s look we’ve got three months.
It’s gold, but we got three months until it’s actually live. We’re gonna make some more fixes. You’re gonna get like a three gig day one patch. It’s just the nature of it
Alan: all, it seems, and nowadays, because everything is digital, you really can send out an update instead of having to have we’ll print new films in cans and send them out to the other a thousand theaters or whatever like that.
So it, and it segues one of the things I wanted to talk about. There’s so many things nowadays where. They don’t even have to make it like perfect or foolproof. They make it so that the user is in control. A lot of how they access their data, whether it’s updating an appointment or whether it’s paying a bill or something like that, and they can’t make it, that it really screws up and doesn’t accept your credit card or you can’t make a connection.
But all the things you used to put in place for data entry, for cleanup of things. So you couldn’t put bad data in. They just make it, if you spell your own name wrong, you’re responsible. If you don’t know from one side to another that you’ve been consistent as to whether you were street or st or all the things that we used to do to make sure there was data cleansing that it really mattered, especially when.
Memory was an important, that is, storage was like a limited thing on a, when you’ve got terabytes of data everywhere, it really doesn’t matter that you rationalize things down to the most efficient way of saying things, except that they when we first had text, it was very much you saw people saving characters everywhere they could.
So there’s a whole subset of language that’s based on all those abbreviations and all those, and like leaving off punctuation. And then of course, in order to be righteous about it, it’s not just leaving off punctuation, it’s now, if you use it, you’re being angry, you’re being stuffy, you’re being old fashioned.
And what I love how that works in society. That was once was necessity becomes, preference, becomes righteous. Do you know what I mean? So there’s a whole discussion I guess, to be had there. But one of the things I love is, so while we’re up in Detroit, Like it used to be. I’ve done trip planning for all the time that Colleen and I have been together, and you put together the little, what are the addresses of all the places you’re gonna be staying or we’re doing a cross country trip.
And nowadays you can really just go to Detroit and you’ve got mapping software that’ll let you find wherever you’re going. And I know this isn’t like a revolutionary thought to all the kids that have grown up with smartphones and stuff. And pardon me for saying kids, all the adults that have indeed grown up in a different world than I have. But I really do love the fact that I can find my way around. I can find reasonable breakfast, lunch, dinner places. I can look at all the different museums in Detroit and find out that, oh, we’re there Monday, Tuesday, but the Motown Museum is closed Monday.
I wanted to go, you don’t have to go to the place, see that it’s dark and go fuck me. Who would’ve thought that any museum would be closed except for holidays? I really love the fact that you can interact with all those things on the fly and sometimes you’re paid the penalty if you don’t get tickets beforehand.
Then you can also go where it’s just sold out. You didn’t realize it was so popular that it might be sold out. And I’ve been, the number of times I’ve been disappointed by that compared to all the cool things that we’ve been able to do on the fly. You make a list of possibilities and then you just kinda go which one do we feel like doing?
Oh, it’s raining. Let’s not do the hike. We were gonna do, let’s go inside and we’re gonna do a hike or not. It used to be look at the sky and yell. Hope that you understand what’s going on with the weather. Nowadays, you can pull up the weather app and say, oh, rain is expected at 2:00 PM we can still do a whole hike from nine to one and get back to the car in time.
So I just really do love all the modern conveniences of that and the smartphone and that, I don’t know. I. It isn’t drinking from the higher host. We’re very good about selecting exactly the data that we want. And you learn hey, for a restaurant review, maybe you check a couple sources because people can stu stunt that, where you get a whole bunch of your friends to say, yeah, this pizza place is the best ever. I like that there’s a new discipline in being able to consume that data smartly so that, to look multiple sorts places for what’s the best price on a hotel. And some places you learn which ones like Southwest isn’t included in kayak ratings or whatever else it might be.
I know I’m talking a little bit about it too much, but it’s really cool to be. The discipline of learning how to handle that ocean of data that you’re in. And I know I’ve even done a talk about this, about, drinking from the fire hose is you can’t just say, I’m gonna pick the first one in hope.
You learn which ones to trust. I really trust consumer reports ratings for things nowadays. There’s lots of other review sites, but you can tell by reading them which ones seem disciplined, which ones seem more colloquial, which one seems to be like, wow, do you have like a brother-in-law that works for Hitachi?
And that’s why you keep recommending all the, it’s, it I like being a smart consumer of data in the ways that it used to be even harder to do the research. Consumer reports. You had to get the magazine in the mail. You had to go to the library and look up old car reviews and stuff like that.
And now it’s so easy to do smart choices quickly. Having said that, it really boggles my mind when I still know that people are like, so you just went on the lot and pointed at a car and said, I’ll take that one. You didn’t try to find out what its safety rating was, or it’s reliability, or it’s gas mileage,
Stephen: any of that.
Alan: It’s amazing. Was all this available that some people, they brush up against it and they’re like, oh, I don’t wanna bother with that. It’s is all your life like that, that everything has been eh, I’ll take the first thing. Eh I don’t know. I. It matters to me like when we shop for our new tv, I didn’t want to get a TV that crapped out in three years.
That wasn’t compatible in all, wasn’t current, wasn’t the right thing for the money. So it was Okay. Hold
Stephen: that. Hold that thought. Before we get on to tv, ’cause I wanna hear about your new TV because, okay. My TV is a, it’s a three D tv. I’ve got a three d Blu-ray. I’ve still been able to watch three D movies.
I’ve got a whole stack of ’em. I watched. That’s very cool. Yeah. And I still love three D movies, but the three D Blue player I think is dead. And we’re starting to see some artifacts on the tv, so I’m like, oh, it’s. Getting very close, but I was gonna make a comment on extreme. We’ve talked about sellouts, we’ve talked about music and how it changes over on artist’s lifetime, our lifetime, stuff I listened to changes and, the artist changes.
They get older, like we said a week or two ago, the rap artist. Yeah. I really don’t believe you’re the gangster running from the police when you’re in a $5 million home.
Alan: Extremely, right? You can’t be angry for 40 years. You just can’t.
Stephen: And I think the artists that change with that, and their audience changes with them is, sometimes some good stuff.
It, rush changed a lot in its career, but extreme right. Is that oddball surprise that everybody knows them from the more than Word song. That, that was like, oh, extreme. And that’s right. Not them at all. Go listen to the album. It’s shred and it’s heavy rock, guitar, rock. And they still do that and pull it off.
It’s like exactly one exception to that rule,
Alan: I agree. Yeah. It, that’s there’s, that song Wholehearted and more Than Words. Yes. And also sing The Song of Love. They have a couple things that are really beautiful, but they’re in between all of that great crunch, shred, rock and roll.
And I like the fact that. That they can be in both camps, and in fact, one, they did things back in the era of M T V. That doesn’t seem to be a factor anymore. But they, even their video for more than words made fun of, the other two guys in the band that really aren’t involved in a vocal and acoustic guitar type song.
They’re the ones that are like holding up the lighter because this is such a great song that the crowd will love and stuff. So the fact that I’ll tell you, Nuno Benor has been a guitar hero of mine for a long time. And people talk about how, because there you live in a world where there’s Eddie Van Halen, how do you break through?
You live in a world with Jimi Hendrix and every, a lot of great guitarists. Yeah, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton and a whole bunch of people said, I knew I had to become more bluesy. ’cause I wasn’t gonna win the guitar hero thing with Hendricks in the world. You know what I mean? It, I think that like even the way he played on stage, He kept, he’s so amazing that while he’s doing the, his songs, he’s throwing in political little snippets of classical music or like just going off track and then coming back with even more crunch to it and stuff like that. So he threw in some flight of the Bumblebee and anybody who can play like a full orchestra’s worth of music on their guitar, that’s an amazing thing. Yeah. Yeah. So I and let me digress for a moment.
I wore my Paul Banovich t-shirt. To Costco yesterday. He’s the guy that can play Emerson Lake and Palmer keyboard parts on the guitar, right? Nobody knows who he is quite yet. He so much deserves a claim, but he’s been playing with Carl Palmer in their e l p re-experience band for a bunch of years, and just we saw him at Visible Voices books.
He doesn’t seem determined to become the state stadium arena level crowd guy, but he’s just an amazing player. While I was at Costco, someone came up because that’s so obscure and said, oh, did you see them? And we had this wonderful conversation. You know when you get people that you wear the odd t-shirt and you hope that someone will know what the hell you’re talking about, it’s very much a geek thing that if you’re like, that’s cool, a high math t-shirt, or a science, or an obscure rock band thing.
Really a nice conversation on that basis. And then back to pen court, I used to always talk about you gotta listen to this album just for that. The fact that he can play like, like Eruption was Eddie Van Halen’s thing, right? When you hear what he does with Flight of the Bumblebee, it’s just amazing.
And I know I’m going on too much. I know what you’re saying about, he really has been consistent. I don’t know where they went for the last eight or 10 years. The time between album five and six and this latest album is called Six and by the way, a great APE logo on the big backdrop behind the screen.
A big gorilla face looking all aggressive and stuff like that. Nice. It, they didn’t just I don’t know, go relax on an island, get soft, and then come back because the money was good for the reunion tour. Sure. Sounds like they’ve been crafting songs and that six album is a near perfect album.
Every single cut on and is strong. It’s, they’re still rocking out. It’s, I’m so glad that they’re still around. And same thing, hearing Cult of Personality Live.
Stephen: Oh, I would’ve, oh my God. Would’ve seen them maybe even more so actually, honestly,
Alan: They, especially the opening chords to that song are one of those I get chills.
I get, my, the, I get the hair on my arms is opening and it just, that this burst of
Stephen: energy is coming. Wow. He was the Basis Mutt Sculling or something like that. He was one of my idols that I listened to a lot back in the nineties when I was playing a lot. Fantastic. Yeah.
And you mentioned the shred and all that, but what I loved about this new album with Bentoncourt is you get the solos. If you listen to ’em and a lot of people look at me like, huh, what are you talking about? And you can always tell the music people versus the non-music people.
Okay. Because I’m like, what I love about the Bettencourt solos on this new album is they fit the songs and they don’t go too long and they’re different. I said, I go here, or I’ve heard bands, I’ve heard songs, I’ve heard live things. They’re playing this gr, grungy nice song. And then you get the guitar player goes.
What the hell was that? It doesn’t fit the song. Yeah. Where did that come
Alan: from? Yeah. And how do you get back into the song from hearing that?
Stephen: You do the next song and the next song’s, more bluesy. The first one was a crunchy rocker, and the guitar, playing the chords and the guitar player gets to the solo.
He goes, eh, it’s that’s the same freaking solo dude. I don’t care that you do every solo as fast as possible, as high a note as possible and just as many notes as possible. That does not impress me or care when exactly when the solos fit is when it matters to me. And that’s one of the things I always like about Leopard.
If you go listen to Def Leppard, they Okay. Especially hysteria and the Iro Romania. Before, no py not Pyromania so much. Okay. Hysteria and after they had almost dueling guitars, they didn’t just strum crunchy chords. Okay. So much. Interesting. Alright. They had dueling guitars and you don’t hear a lot of strum guitar as opposed to melodic notes going on between the two guitars forming the whole,
Alan: Chord.
That’s very cool. I’ll have to go re-listen with new ego. Yes.
Stephen: More appreciation. Okay. And you’ll hear that. And now Pyromania definitely a classic great rocking song or album, but they are, pyromania and hysteria are different albums and you have people say, oh yeah, they were good in Biman, but after that hysteria sucked.
And other people are like, got better into ’em at hysteria, yeah.
Alan: I really, I love that musicality. In fact, so many of my fa favorite guitarists are not the ones that are like, wow that burst of energy in the middle of the song. And but I dunno. David Gilmore is great. Steve Hackett is great.
That they really, they are melodic. They write Steve how so many good things where it’s like it doesn’t disrupt it. It actually, maybe it’s a an energizer to the song or that they put the guitar solo at the end when you want it to be that big crescendo and then drop the guitar ’cause you’re done.
It isn’t that. You have to go back into
Stephen: the song. Alright, that song, thank you. Goodnight.
Alan: I’ll tell you, love to love by U F O. With Michael Shanker playing. Yeah. That’s one of those songs that it does close with that great ending guitar solo. And it really, that’s what I used to live to listen to, to get ready for intramural football games in college.
It just gets amps you up so much. And just that when it comes to the end of the song, you’re like, oh, I’m ready to go. And you get, you run out the door, you run out a locker
Stephen: room a thing. So here, let me relate a story. Years ago when Colin was still teen, he played a summer rock school over at Woody’s music.
Cool. And basically kids sign up and they put ’em together and they have an instructor that works with them and they play some songs and then they get to go play at one of the clubs in Kent. Yeah. That sponsored it. And it was, I thought, great. He loved it. He had a great time, but the guitar player came in and said, oh yeah, I’m good.
And that’s what he did. He played like four solos of other, people’s solos that he had memorized. And four of them. The guy in charge of it was actually a bass friend of mine from back in college days, and he is okay great, but we’ll get to the solo. Let’s play the song.
Alan: And he said we’re gonna be a band here. Yeah, everybody gets to play, not just stand back while you shred. He goes, okay.
Stephen: Exactly. He’s let’s just play this. He goes, I don’t know how to play chords. What do you mean you don’t know how to play chords? He is I don’t know what a c chord is.
What’s that? Do you know the frets? He’s no, I just watched YouTube and, memorize the hand placement until it was muscle memory. And I’m like, you’re not a musician. I’m sorry to say that you are not a musician.
Alan: It’s good that you’re here in school, but don’t think that you’re, like, in the AP class, you’re actually just starting off to
Stephen: understand what needs to, you’re not even started off yet.
You, you don’t know the basics. And he couldn’t keep time. He could he knew the fast shred stuff and then the rest of it he didn’t know how to keep time. He kept getting off. And if he got off, Even on his own solo, if he got off, he had to start all over again. He couldn’t just pick up, and it caused a lot of problems.
Of course, the singer was a girl that was younger than the guys. And her father thought she was the next Whitney Houston and came in and said, okay, I’ve picked out the three songs for them to do and here’s what they’re doing. And Dave goes, just showcase her remarkable instrument. Exactly. And Dave’s no, everybody gets one song.
He’s my daughter, she’s not gonna sing the earth song. He’s yeah, you sing all the songs. That’s how it is. It was an experience. Wow. Colin did good. He had a good time, but man, yeah. One song that she picked jar of Hearts by somebody Perrin, I, I forget, it’s a good song.
I’ll get that. But there wasn’t really a drum bar, so he just kept time, on the edge of the snare whole song. He is I’m falling asleep here. It was an experience. Let
Alan: me tell you. There’s a great if our fans wanna look up. PA Bell’s Cannon is a, a relatively famous piece that Rob Haronian, I think I just talked about.
This has done an actual, a cool YouTube video about he was a cello player way back in high school because that’s how cool he was. And they had a, the place for them, the piece that they play in pocket bowls, cannon is like 54 quarter notes just, again and again. And he makes fun of that because it’s not only did he hate it while he had to do it, but that it’s following him around.
There’s so many songs that include exactly that note or chord sequence. I think it’s notes. Yeah. That he can kinda can’t get away from it. And so he goes on this, it’s, I think it’s called Ale Bell Rant. You know what I mean? It’s,
Stephen: I’ll try and look it up and put show notes. Yeah. Have you heard of axis of Awesome?
No. You need to look those guys up. They’re a band. But they so musicians learn this, that 80% of the songs on radio, 80% of the songs you like and listen to have the same chord structure. That there’s very few that don’t even, progressive hard rock, whatever. You, you hear people that go, oh no, my band’s unique.
They play, no. If they played same under unique chords, it would be probably Jazz or Fusion, and you probably wouldn’t listen to it. That the thing is, the reason you like them is because they have that same structure and non-musicians don’t get it. But musicians, it’s great because I know this four chord sequence, okay, na name a song and I’ll probably be able to play with you.
Let’s
Alan: go. You can play that song Yes. On the cruise or at the wedding.
Stephen: Oh God, yes. Or awesome. Bring this to the forefront in a parody fashion. Okay? So the keyboard player is oh, that’s song. And the guy’s no, that’s this song. He’s no, it’s the same song. And he starts playing chords and it’s the what is it?
1, 6, 4, 5 sequence that he plays just over and over and over. But they sing like 45 songs over top of it. And they exactly work. Exactly. Yeah. So you should look that up. I’ll look for link in the show notes ’cause it all, every now and then I’ll just put ’em on. ’cause they crack me up and it’s so true.
That’s funny. You could look up lists of songs for beginning guitar players. You, you like the blues, the 1 4 5 progression of the blues. You can look up, alright, here’s the 375 songs that you can play. Just learn the lyrics and you’re good. And you got a repertoire
Alan: already.
You’re an accomplishment. It’s very funny. Mensa used to have a feature at many of their annual gatherings or at some of the bigger gatherings like Halloween, where the Stein Heiss and there was, there were four siblings. They did a thing called the Stein Heist Capades. And what they discovered was that you could sing the tune Amazing Grace With all kinds of lyrics from all the songs that it’s been made use of, because the rhythm of it, like Gilligan’s Island works if you sing it along the way of Amazing Grace and any number of other things, and they, them finding that out, that it really was, once again, whatever that particular sequence works for enough songs to fill an hour performance and how witty they were with sometimes it speeds up and sometimes it slows down and, but it’s embedded in so much music. That’s something I don’t think the rest of the world got a chance to see.
’cause it was very much a Mensa quirky cool thing. But I was lucky, I think one of my very first ags, maybe St. Louis or something like that, they did it at, and I was just, this is what MINCE is all about. Yeah, exactly. People with this cool talent and they discover this and then they’re playful about it.
I just, hats off to Charlie and Eileen and I hope I can remember Kim. Why am I Miss Jessica? I think are, were the four. I’m, boy, I apologize to the Stein heist as if I don’t, and they’ll, it’ll never be done again because I think that one of them has passed away and that really, you know how it is.
They don’t want you, you might be able to replace somebody in a van. You kinda can’t replace the sibling. It’s exactly that. Brought it to a close. But, wow. So
Stephen: Have you looked up any of the mashups videos that are out there?
Alan: Oh, a, a number of, in fact Emily, a friend has thrown a whole bunch my way where it really was, people are very clever at being able to detect how one can segue into the other abc.
They’re unlike things. Yeah. The, exactly, the Saturday morning cartoon show and the hardest treadmill you can imagine. And yet they worked together somehow. Yeah.
Stephen: Very fun. I saw one that was was it Parliament Funkadelic? No, that doesn’t sound right. It was one of the funk, like hip hop bands in the seventies.
They mashed up with Kiss. Boogie Wonderland with okay. A Kiss song. And Colin was listening to it. He is oh my God, that is so perfect. It’s just, you can’t unhear it after you hear it. And the songs by themselves almost sound bare without that mup anymore,
Alan: cool. One of the reasons that I love jam bands, and that’s a whole sub genre of rock, it’s formerly Grateful Dead and all the offshoots of that Phish.
And there’s a whole bunch of mo and pigeons playing pgan pong that I’ve heard of and I’ve seen a couple of them live. But there’s a whole jam cruise and a friend of mine, Robert, might have an extra ticket laying about the place, so I might actually get to go on this thing. Nice. And I just, I love the musicality of, sometimes when you see a jam band, they look, they sound like they’re psychic, that there’s a hive mind going on, and when they turn abruptly on, on a dime all together into a different part of the song, or just the fact that they can build the groove, the funky groove that they’re all just enjoying and the whole crowd is just swaying and enjoying it.
There’s. It’s not about how many notes can I play by any stretch? Even though all of them are incredibly accomplished musicians, we’ve talked about this with weird Al’s band as well. They can play anything. Yeah, so it sounds just right, but to also be able to play and then goof off, diverge, go over here and then come back to the main theme or mo motive motif.
It’s very cool to see people that can do that, that know music so well that they can be playful and random about it, but always come back to the through line. I love that. There’s just something really magical about that and
Stephen: jamming. I played jazz in college and a large part of jazz is everyone getting a chance to solo if you want that just that extended jam is part of the song when you learn it and you got your background rhythm, guys, me and the drums, I.
And you guys all work together and like you said, those changes like, okay, after solos we’re gonna take it up, three steps. We’re going to, do this, whatever. And it adds more energy to it. But some of the best soloists again, they don’t, they’re, they don’t just go for 20 minutes as fast as they can, what makes the live version of Freebird so good? Is it’s a musical song just in the jam. That’s the thing. It’s got so much in there that’s not just them crunching guitars for 20 minutes. Yeah.
Alan: I think we might’ve just talked about this, a previous episode. Things are getting a little bit jumbled in my mind ’cause we’ve done so many of these and I don’t remember what we talked about.
I used to go to and it’s also having just had musical conversations with multiple people over these last couple weeks. Often I’m thinking it’s you and I talking. ’cause we talk about wonderful things like this. Often it might’ve been with the guy, with Paul BVI that I just talked to. I used to go to see the G three series.
They had three great guitarists, all each of whom got to do like a 30 to 45 minute set. And so various different combinations of Steve V and Joe sat, and Eric Johnson and Robin Trower and Alan Holdsworth, great guitarist. And one I saw was like the last, I think it was Eric Johnson, Alan Holdsworth and Robin Trower.
Wow. And I thought that I was gonna enjoy Alan Holdsworth the most. ’cause he’s really a great technical guitarist and a lot of other guitarists talk about how he can just do things that nobody else can do. And yet he played beautifully and it was a little math rocky, but it’s really absorbed me.
’cause what he can do, the guy I ended up enjoying the most was Robin Trower
Stephen: because he’s amazing.
Alan: He’s amazing and doesn’t try to do the guitar pyrotechnics a lot of like he doesn’t even look at his guitar while he plays. He’s just kinda like cleaning the back away and letting the music transport him.
And a lot of bendy notes and just His songs all, instead of all sounding fast and shredding, he really does things with dynamics with fat, loud and soft. Oh yeah. And with the various different speed ups and stuff. And so just to see that someone can really do a grammatic song and then go into a kind of a ballady easy song it’s the way that he was able to structure his concert.
She’s man this guy is such a, like an accomplished guitar player. He doesn’t, I think that he plays of course, for the crowd, but mostly he just seems to be up there enjoying himself. Yeah. And he found out that other people enjoy what I do too.
Stephen: He’s, I was so good. He’s only one of those guys that he’s not playing music so much as it’s flowing through him from some other dimension,
Alan: exactly. Robert Tripp talks about that. Yeah. And I don’t that, I hear that in his music as well, because his is still quite technically complex, often lots of notes, and yet he talks about how it really, he’s an interpreter, a vessel for the music coming into him. And when the show’s over, he can’t go out there and necessarily do two encores because it’s over.
The music has moved on to its resting place and he can’t bring it back in. So I, I don’t know that I, I. Agree with the mystical aspect of that. And yet, if some of my guitar heroes really say I, the mindset that I go into is, I’m open, let the music enter me and then be beautiful. Things happen and that when they’re done it, you can’t get, you can’t grab that beautiful creature.
Let, lemme on them.
Stephen: It’s cool. Lemme say, so Fripp is s very well studied and very technical, but he knows when to play that fast, when to play it slow, when to play a little chord and let it hold, he, it’s very studied. Yeah. But the mystical part, unless you’re a musician and you actually experience it, how do you describe that to somebody?
I can say, I totally get what they’re saying. There have been times playing, you get the guys that you’re playing with. You’re at the right setting, the right mindset, and it’s almost like you’re an out-of-body experience. Like you’re not even thinking of what you’re playing and the notes are coming out and you’re like, who the hell just played that?
And it’s oh, that was me. Yeah, but you don’t even realize it till later. It’s like you’re watching it from afar. I totally get what they’re saying. Now, does that mean it’s otherworldly? Does that mean it’s supernatural? Define otherworldly and supernatural in that context, and we’ll see. But I’ll tell you it, it’s you have to experience it because you cannot describe it and it does happen.
And you know when it happens, it’s not oh yeah, I think it happened. No, you don’t think it happened. When it happens.
Alan: My experience with that, ’cause I’m nowhere near an accomplished musician as much as I enjoyed listening and I tried so hard to get better at keyboards while I was in college with my one in the morning studio time and stuff like that.
Where I experienced it is a different things like coding. Then I will sometimes just and, I always bring flow. The concept by Chick sent me high about how you just, you summon that uninterrupted, all the things you’re working together, state time fades away. Yeah it, when I solve puzzles, it’s at.
This kind of odd at one point, like we had a gaming group that got together and they handed me like a burb puzzle that was supposed to be a really tough one. And honestly, while I was like talking with them about how I’ve always loved puzzles and then I solved it like Robin Troll, we’re not even really looking at it.
And then when they were like, what? What did you just do? It was like, I don’t know man. I’ve always had a facility with these kinds of things. I look at it and I see what are the parameters that you’re gonna have to operate within? And then your mind goes into this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deep ply as to is there a sequencing which this has to happen?
How is, what is the end product like and how do you work your way outwards backwards from that? And then you just do it and un unthinkingly. And for people that. That really brute force it to figure it out. I understand how it’s real work and energy and triumph when they get it.
But, and I’m not magic. I can’t do this all the time, but I’ve done this any number of times. I think I mentioned working with Kaydon puzzles at Halloween, the big Mensa gathering that I take a break and I go sit down at the latest version of one and she’d go nobody’s solved it yet, but Alan’s here now.
And you get really puffy pride from that. But it was really true that I’ll just say, Hey Kate, so how are we doing? Let’s catch up. And you know how it is, you look at it, A lot of those things were like pieces in trays, puzzles. So you look at it which are the ones that are the trickiest?
So you put the big rocks in first and you save your easy will fit multiple places for the last, and you work your way through, okay, finish this corner and then keep working around and then boom, you’re done. And once in a while there’s like maybe having to undo a couple steps but not having to dump the tray where you have to start all over again.
And who knows how my mind works. It’s a little bit of. Whatever that amazing thing is that people that can do encryption or music or other things, a very complex thing, but the human brain is mighty. Yeah. They can do amazing things without you really realizing why is it, my mind isn’t quantum, but it sure does things faster than the average bear.
And I love that, that it, I can let it go. Working
Stephen: in the background. Not even consciously doing it. And it’s the coolest thing. Maybe it’s because the parts of your brain that do that are closer together a little bit by a couple cells and maybe the sheaves on the ganglia between them is thinner or it’s not as curvy in places so it moves faster.
And maybe that’s the scientific explanation, but it doesn’t really change it to be as fascinating and mystical to us. Exactly.
Alan: Do I have more connections? Do I have deeper fissures? They’ve studied, like when they studied Einstein’s brain, part of it was let’s figure out why.
He could think thoughts that nobody else had ever thought before. And maybe I got some interesting things going on there. I know that we’ve talked about this a little bit. Everybody takes the standardized tests and for guys and gals, it’s often very disparate between math and verbal because they are a little bit.
Trained that way by their experiences in school, but also maybe there are slight differences between male and female brains. I know that my scores, like on the a c t, were all within two points of each other and usually there’s like a 10 point difference. So whatever it is, and what I haven’t read a little bit about it.
Your two lobes of your brain are connected by the corpus callosum and that’s how things that are, that more abstract versus concrete, more verbal versus mathematic, there’s a certain amount of moving back and forth. And music is one of those things that it makes use of multiple sides of your brain, many artistic or creative endeavors do.
And I got a nice thick corporate callosum, I guess I got something that lets their g just more transport back and forth and instead of only brute forcing it or instead of only waiting for inspiration, it does things that they kinda co work cooperatively. And we’ve talked about this way long in a long ago episode when you’re.
Debugging. When you’re troubleshooting, you’ll learn how to attack the possible solution space to get it so that you carve out half of it to start with. And what’s the test that I can make that I’m gonna eliminate half of the possibilities? And you do half and half, and all of a sudden you go from 1 28 to 64, to 32 to 16.
You’ve really narrowed what kinds of things you have to think about. And I think that my brain does that kind of naturally. Like when I’m looking at the maze, it doesn’t just look at the path that I’m on. It does this little survey of okay, I can see that this whole section of the maze seems to come to an end over here.
I don’t have to go down on a single path leading over there. There’s no way out. I see the wall to the outside wall and you just, and you’re doing that while you’re actually taking a walk. You’re looking at in, in secondary attention mode, how you can say, when I get to this next thing, I don’t just have a random choice.
I’ve already done a little bit of what’s my better bet. And then you’d do it right, and you get so like just regular two D mazes are no fun for it in many anymore because that facility really springs up and they, if you break it with that, there’s three D mazes or there’s mazes that have an island that there’s no left hand rule that you could automatically solve it, or that kind of thing.
I, I can be baffled by that. It changes the rules a bit enough that then it becomes interesting and challenging to me. But no matter you can have a whole, there’s, they have maze books that are a whole big thing, and yet if it’s a two D a two dimensional maze, it just is It’s a walk.
It’s not even a difficult thing. Yeah. Oh, oh,
Stephen: okay. So you also brought up we’re getting back to the TV ’cause I want to hear about what you got because if I’m looking for one, but you mentioned in our chat ear earlier the tech with baseball, because the interesting thing is Sunday you came down to my neck of the woods to see baseball and I went up into your neck of the woods to
Alan: see baseball.
You came off, isn’t that funny? Exactly. The the eCom, east, wait, please. Oh no, please. No, it, we I love seeing minor league for my birthday, we had gone to a, like Erie Crushers game, which is in the Frontier League, which I think isn’t even like triple or double or single a, I think it’s independent.
We went to a Triple A game, which is the Akron Rubber Ducks. They actually have the farm team for the Cleveland Guardians. And what a, it’s right downtown Akron, but it’s, and it’s a beautiful field. It’s real professional baseball. The. I just can’t tell you how, what a nice time we have.
And by not being Major League, it isn’t oh, 10 bucks for parking and 10 bucks for a hotdog. And if you want a t-shirt that’s 50 bucks or whatever, prices are ridiculous in Major League terms. But here, when you go down to any AAA or under, the kids get to run their base pads after the game. They have a, they have t-shirt cannons that shoot things out into the crowd.
They have funny things going on the main screen and the little vignettes of, Hey, we’re gonna go talk to these people and do a trivia, and if they win, then they get a free baseball hat full of ice cream. Or that kind of stuff. And I’m just, that’s America. To me, it doesn’t have to be just a big money machine.
It really should be the America’s pastime and that it’s. Everyone’s having a nice time. We’re all singing, take me out to the ball game together. All that fun, silly stuff. You’re still a nice experience up with the
Stephen: guardians. Yes. Yep. Yeah. The high prices we have to pay those million dollar salaries for those guys to run around chasing balls.
That’s a whole discussion right there. But we did have a good time. I do agree with you though. It’s, you feel more not as connected. When it’s pro you have more security, you have more of the fencing up the field’s further away, the rubber ducks game. You can sit right behind the dugout.
Alan: Yeah, exactly. We were maybe 10 rows off right behind home plate and just, it felt like you were in the game, when a fall tip came back, it hit the net and it looked like it was heading for your face. And so you rear back, it’s not oh, that happens far away.
No. And you can hear the infield chatter. You can hear the, I’m going, ah, you can hear the call of the balls and strikes. It’s very cool. Instead of being if I wanna watch this game, I better watch the Diamond Vision screen. Can’t, ’cause that’s how I can’t see. I can really see, can’t see what the battery pitch put.
And we had good seats.
Stephen: We were like, that is
Alan: not ants. It’s really
Stephen: up close. And we have good seats. We were right at the end of the first base line, right field level. So it was great seats, but it was like we were playing in space because I’m like, this is a baseball game. Without sound, I don’t hear the ball hitting the bat.
I don’t hear the ball in the glove. I don’t hear anyone chattering. ’cause we were far enough away. I just couldn’t hear it. Okay. And I was like, it just doesn’t seem as basebally. Wow. Okay. But you mentioned the tech with baseball. Yeah, and I was thinking about that because my buddy has season tickets and that’s where we got these.
He’s look, I don’t go to all of these and we’re allowed to transfer, whatever. So he transferred tickets to me. Now, way back in the old days, that would’ve meant physically meeting up and him handing me the printed out tickets that he had and and taking them.
Alan: But now I’ll meet you at the alkaline statue or something.
Exactly, yeah. Yeah.
Stephen: But now he emailed it to me, I got on an app and it’s whoop, there it is. And the good thing about the tech with this is how backed up it really is. My, we could get into a car wreck and my phone could get destroyed, and all I gotta do is get on somebody’s phone with the app and log in or get onto the cloud and there’s my tickets.
That’s a benefit. Definitely.
Alan: Yeah, I love I’ve always loved this, I have friends that are really into the baseball abstract stuff where they have just tons of statistics that have been collected over the course of the years. And so nowadays
Stephen: It’s sports Dungeons and Dragons.
It’s sports d and d RPGs. It
Alan: really is. You know what I mean? Where they like, yeah. They had, we, we kept making funny references to Moneyball. If you’ve seen that movie Red Pit they it’s about, the baseball team. And I should know this right? The, maybe the Cincinnati Reds it’ll come to me that it was How did they put together a great team?
Because instead of looking at the Million Dollar Home run hitters, they looked at all the stats and they said, we can get this guy who draws walks and hits singles. He always gets on base, but we can get ’em for 300 K instead of a million dollars a year. And they put together a team of, they’re not has beens, they’re not at all bad ball players.
They’re just the guys who get it done instead of the guys that bring the crowd to their feet and strike out two thirds of the time. You know what I mean? So it we kept whatever. We had one guy that was the guy that did that, he gets on base. We had the hero, we had Corey Holcomb, who hit two home runs and got five out of the six runs.
Wow. For the, OR ducks unfortunately in an eight to six losing effort. They, that it was. It’s very cool. They have so much stuff going on as to all of the stats about a player and stuff like that. Then I’m like looking on the screen going, so where’s the count?
Stephen: Yes. Where are the ball and strike?
How many outs are there and
Alan: outs? And I finally found it in the middle of the bottom of the screen because there was just so many numbers about, hey, they’ve had three triples against left handed hitters and all those cool little things. I like that. But it was also, that was a lot of data overload, if you will.
Stephen: Yeah. Fantasy I’ve worked with a fantasy football website for about 15 years now, and they cracked me up because they have all the stats. They, the players, the people getting in their leagues and teams, they have the stats and they sit there and they have all the runs and the numbers and I’m like and you guys wanna make fun of nerds.
Come on, gee, you’re sitting there with all these lists of numbers. That’s the nerdiest thing about a sports game. And you, and then they play fantasy football. If I put my pitcher in and I’m go get these points, I’m like, you guys are just playing a very map, intensive Dungeons and Dragons game.
Alan: You just sent your magic user in against the, you know what I mean? Yes, exactly. D and d. Okay. Something I, a couple of people had tablets instead of phones because they were keeping track of the box score. Hardly anybody seemed to be doing it on paper. That used to be a really standard thing, is to buy the program three bucks or whatever like that.
And then, the kids learn, oh, that was a real base hit, or that was a fielder’s choice. Or that was an unearned run because it was a past ball. And they learned all the terminology behind that. And when I was saying some of those things more at the crushers game, ’cause there were more errors and more interesting things going on I don’t know that the crowd has that anymore.
Another way in which I’ve aged outta the program. That was a big thing to be able to call the game accurately instead of saying good swing on that, Mr. Yeah. You
Stephen: know, you’re right. Oh, that’s one of the thing with the more minor league bowl is they aren’t they’re definitely better than me.
They’re definitely professional, but they’re not as smooth as the million dollar professionals playing up on the big field. And it, and that’s maybe why I like the, non-professional ball the minor leagues more, because we sat there and was like up, he hit the ball up, he caught it up, he got it straight to the second basement up, they tagged him out.
It was almost like a chess game in how precise things moved. There was very few misses or, there was some unexpected events. Yes. Yeah. It’s great. We had a perfect indie 500 race. It was boring as hell,
Alan: right. One of things In minor league ball, you really start to, maybe aaa, you still have some really good hitters.
But at the Frontier League game that we went to, the pitchers are much stronger than the hitters. In many cases, the pitcher is still throwing like a 92 hour fastball and the batters are only like singles, hitters. They’re not necessarily R bi guys, they’re not necessarily Right. For, I don’t think I saw anybody that was out of the two hundreds in terms of percentage, and batting average. So it’s overwhelming. Our game was like a one, one tie going into the 10th. Then we had a cool thing because they do the thing now where you put the guy on second base and it’s to end the games without going into 17 extra innings or whatever else it might be. So our game for with was won by sacrifice Fly.
The guy threw it into third. It got away from the third baseman. The guy hit. He not only made it safely to third, but then scrambled into home close play at the plate. He’s safe and oh the game’s over. He won. He, the guy made it in. So it hardly ever would you get a bad throw in Major League ball.
A lot of times they really do throw people out while they’re trying to advance. A lot of times they really do tag them out, whatever else it might be. In this case, they sistant enough. Not quite ready for the big show, not quite fully professional. That mistakes compounded and led to a run. And that was enough to win the game.
So that was cool to be like, oh,
Stephen: right. Hey, you know what I was thinking of? ’cause they put the stats of the player and stuff and there were a couple of them that they said just came up from down in the mins. They brought ’em up July 27th and something like that. So this is only his Okay.
His fourth pro game. Or whatever. And here’s his stats. And I was thinking about it. I’m like, man, if they’re like moving these people around, midseason going down the miners pool, new guys up, that must really wreak havoc for top baseball cards. Having to print news cards with the new players all the time because it’s always changing.
Alan: That’s really true. And honestly, that must be a tough life. You know what I mean? To be traveling from little city to little city. And I, they, I know they have a program for the crushers that people like stay at fans’ homes and stuff like that. You’re not making a lot of money right.
On the Frontier League circuit. You just love playing the game, there’s a whole bunch of Bull Durham going on there where there’s people that just, that’s what they wanna do more than anything else in life. They know it’s never gonna turn into them being a big league star, but there’s nothing more they want to be doing for two to three hours an afternoon than being in the gang.
And that’s cool, okay. So that America has room for that.
Stephen: Yeah I love that. I think before the season’s out, we might make it up to a rubber ducks game. I keep wanting to say arrows. We might make it up there. ’cause like you said, 20 bucks. I can get in, I can sit almost anywhere.
I can get a hot dog and ice cream and,
Alan: Yeah, exactly. That’s another quick side I’ve gotten. Colleen was listening to the radio one time and she heard a minor league game being talked about and that the one of the guys goes the most productive rumble pony of the night is, bill bla like Rumble pony.
She was so amused by that team name that she mentioned it to me. And then I went online and I found out, you can buy tickets not at the Rumble Pony game, but from the minor league clearinghouse site that has all of those team names. So over the course of the years I’ve gotten her the Rumble Ponies and the Sea wolves and, like the yard goats, all kinds of fun shirts.
And then when she wears them, people always ask like, where do the yard goats play out of it? Of course it usually says, I try to get it where it’s self-explanatory, but I, that’s another way in which America is wonderfully goofy and creative. There’s banana slugs, there’s isotopes, there’s mud hens right here in, Toledo, Ohio is the mud hands.
Yeah. And I, rubber ducks was one of those things. The arrows were a cool name, but the rubber ducks is memorable. That’s very cool. That’s true. You know what I mean? That Yeah. And all the logo merchandising with, the little rubber ducky for the bathtub or just the angry rubber duck, where almost on the ducks got biceps and stuff.
You, he’s got guns. Agreed.
Stephen: Alright okay, lay us on us about this tv.
Alan: Our TV died like really, we were watching it and a big pop tank type bang. We luckily did not burst into flames, didn’t set the electrical system in the house on fire. Yay. We were very good and careful about immediately unplugging stuff.
So I went shopping and there was all kinds of, not only consumer reports, but I did check multiple because sometimes consumer reports really is like lowest common denominator. But I really am looking for an even more technical view for certain things, and I end up buying a high sense, and it’s like the sixth largest in the world without my ever having heard of it before.
It’s a Chinese concern, but they’re made four places around the world and they’ve done a great job with what’s the current technology, how I. Dependable, but inexpensive can we make it? So we looked at LG and Samsung and Sony and various others, and this one really seemed to have a great combination of features and like we, it turned out to be maybe a thousand dollars TV for 800 bucks by shopping around and stuff like that.
And boy, that’s a ton of money, but it’s 65 inches instead of 55. We figured if we’re gonna get a new TV and ours would last 10 years, you know the difference between. 800 and a thousand dollars is only gonna be $20 a year or something like that over 10 years. So why not try to get the, and it really has U L E D technology electronics, as we’ve talked about, continus, to be one of those cool things where you keep getting more for less, whether it’s stereo equipment or computers or televisions or dishwashers for that matter.
So far so good. It really is so much better. A picture that it looks like unreal. It’s that they’ll there’s three D effects just from seeing how crisp the edges are Yeah. For people walking through a scene and stuff like that. It’s a smart tv so it has its own operating system.
In this case it was Google TV
thing,
Stephen: so it’s kill you in your sleep.
Alan: It could do that, I mean it’s and we made a point of getting, okay, what’s the one that I can easily turn off the little camera that otherwise, watches me eating Cheetos and, scratching myself during the course of the game.
It’s. Everything hooked up just like it should. We didn’t just stay with the Google TV and a new operating system. We really like our Roku box. We have a Roku Ultra that gets all the channels and has all the four K and Ultra HD and all. There’s always new technology. Terms for me to learn and which of those are marketing hype and which of those really matter.
But like I said, now that we get, we’ve always had that things coming through the Roku box had the capability and then your TV would scale it down as to what it could handle. Now it has Doby, AVOs, and Doby vision built in. So you get great sound and great picture. It has ultra four D and ev.
Everything is as, so far as I can tell, high resolution and high quality. There’s things you can tune to, like depending on whether you’re watching movies or sports or things like that, you can get different levels of motion blur and get rid of it or, and sometimes it can be jarring if you have it or don’t have it, depending on the context.
Like sometimes things in the movie, they really want you to have the motion blur because that’s how fast that thing was going. You know that, right? That fast and furious race car or whatever else it might be. Whereas in the baseball game, you want it to be that you can really see the ball all the way in instead of it stuttering, circ on the way into the catcher’s.
Mit we seem to have it tuned so that for each of those various different things, we go into the mode that it wants to be. The blacks are black, the colors are vibrant. Another thing is the colors really boom, they pop out at you. We look at our TV straight on. But they have some things that, depending on the viewing angle, if you have a whole family around the tv, that they’re really good upfront, but that they fade to the sides.
And ours seems to be that it’s good where we wanted, but it’s also supposed to be good at the sides and it’s heavy. So it took a while to okay, we’re gonna put it on. Yes, it fit our existing TV stand. We got it stable. We did like the. Kinda like what you’re supposed to do, instead of I attached cords to say, okay, this is in and the TV works, look, we have picture.
Okay, let’s put, we have an antenna in for what we want local. So then we do the channel search and look, we got 73 digital channels that are being broadcast from, a tower down in Parma. And then you, the biggest thing of course was attaching the Roku box and easy as pie, you go to that, it’s got four different H D M I ports, right?
And you go to that port and the Roku box says, I’m here and takes over. So that all worked. We got our, we have a combination D V D and V C R player and that guy seemed to work except the out it is H D M I, but also the three Cable things for like red, yellow, white. And that doesn’t, they don’t have that on the back of this tv.
So I to see if there is, yeah, it went away. That re recom it, re composites it back into an H D M I or something like that. Might be that we’re not gonna be able to do whatever it did with the picture and the sound and the sink or whatever those three guys are about. So there are some things like that particular guy might be left behind, but our more modern Blu-ray, d v d player hooked right up and easygoing.
It was a big thing to be like, oh, I hadn’t counted on spending that kind of money, but it we’re very happy with what we got and the bigger picture, the better picture. It’s just I don’t know. I find myself like, what’s something that I really, I knew I wasn’t getting all of it, so I’ve been Rero Sandman, the graphics on that are amazing and fantasy type stuff.
And so I really want to get all of what they were trying to show me, and it really is a much better experience to have the midst of when he throws sand and it makes little cyclone and they go to hell or something like that, it looks fantastic. Instead of just being blurry blob, oops, teleport effect, that kind of thing.
They really, so many places have been embracing these newer technologies for a while, and now finally I’m seeing them in their full form. So I don’t know. We’re very happy. Of course, it’s one more remote, so we’re trying to figure out can I use my universal remote to handle everything so that I don’t have to have kind of a rack or most of what I need of remotes.
Oh, most of what I need. Exactly. We didn’t install the soundbar because the sound from the TV is really good. That’s good. And I might actually do without it. It’s weird to have a nice Oh, wow. A big piece of equipment. Wow. That’s, yeah. And the only thing I might be missing is a soundbar, but it also has a little subwoofer and I think with the base thump, it really might be better, but Colleen doesn’t like that.
And so maybe we’re gonna. Have trimmed back to that this TV is gonna be good enough for everything we want it to do.
Stephen: So keeping keep your eye on something and report back because not all streaming services stream at the same quality and different times a day you get different quality also.
And I’ve noticed some things mostly in the horror movies, like when they’re black, which they probably don’t put as much money into the horror movies as maybe some of their movies, but you get more artifacting because it’s trying to compress it and digitize it. Got it. And it’s not doing it necessarily at the highest res.
So just, keep an eye on, if you notice a certain station always seems to have more artifacts or on Yeah. Scene transitions that it’s blocky or anything like that. ’cause that’s what I’ve noticed, Mostly it doesn’t really harm anything. It’s just more of a pet peeve. It’s
Alan: a distraction though, if you’re trying to immerse yourself in a movie I remember we just, I just finished watching all the cold sha the Night Stalkers, and I’m willing to bet that the new TV would’ve made it look like, wow, this is old and blurry. It would’ve even more that this was captured on, I don’t know, what’s the previous technology to, hd?
Stephen: D V D quality has been a lot of those work. Video drink
Alan: quality. Yeah. Not so proper quality. ’cause that actually has always been more heightened than regular movies. So I’ll have to see. And actually a quick throwaway, hey, for our fans if you’re a Netflix subscriber, they’re closing down the Netflix D v D subscription thing.
Yeah. But. The sad thing about that is that I’ve been using that all the time. I’ve had it. There’s a hundred thousand plus things through D V D, and at most there’s 10,000 from the streaming services. So you really have more depth and if you wanna watch all the old XFiles or whatever else, it might be all the old B C Dr.
Who’s, you’re not gonna get it on the new streaming services. Or they’ll bring it around for a quarter or six months and then they take it away. Again. Having said that, I just got a cool email from Netflix saying, Hey, thank you for being a longtime subscriber. September 29th, if I remember right, is our last day.
You know what? We’re gonna do the top 10 movies in your queue. We’re gonna send ’em to you. You get to have this little treasure trove of. Those movies and I’m sure it’ll be, there’ll be conflicts. There’ll be bumps as to everybody wants more of the worlds or whatever else it might be. So I’m really, I’m now I have to have a di little discussion with Colleen of, so what is it that we really want to have like in-house so that we can watch it whenever we want something?
’cause you’ve already bought, we have all the Mel Brooks movies ’cause we love to be able to young watch Young Frankenstein whenever we want and Pink Panther and certain ones that just crack me up. I, we used to have a copy of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and I don’t know, I think that went away and I’m not sure how, but if that isn’t the case, that’s one of the ones I’m gonna bubble up to the top of my queue so that as of that magic date set and I’m, I think that for us it’s gonna be not a lot of what everybody finds popular.
I might get all my top 10 choices. ’cause we’re gonna go for the more quirky,
Stephen: unique to us. Exactly.
Alan: What I mean? But what a nice. What a decent thing for Netflix to do. Yeah. Is not just Yeah. All those DVDs. We put ’em in a landfill and buried them, absolutely what
Stephen: Yeah. That’s pretty cool. I jokingly said when they announced that, I’m like, Hey you feel like buying DVDs and going into the DVD shipping business because, it’s just dying. It’s not necessarily worth it. And which is exactly why they’re getting out. Yeah. It’s a shame.
Yeah. It’s,
Alan: it is one of it. It is. I’m hoping that for some of the things we want, like we, we did, I think I mentioned this before, we did a thing called aficionados. By that meaning eight of five. The American Film Institute has their list of top a hundred movies ever made American, and we watched them from 100 up to one.
A bunch of us got together and watched these two movies once a month on a Sunday, and what a great filmic. Education course and an appreciation for great movies, great actors and actresses in their roles. I guess it’s just actors nowadays. You could really see the growth of various different directors as they got better at their craft anyway.
I think it’ll be harder to do that kind of thing. You gotta find ’em at your library. You gotta find it perhaps from another D V D mailing service. But I don’t know of one. I was so dependent, I was so happy with Netflix. I never looked into an alternate to that, so maybe they’ll still be out there. But I also know everything we’ve gotten from the library, D V D or V C r Boy, has it been chewed on.
Yeah. Some kid like wrote on it with a pencil or they spilled a whole malted milkshake
Stephen: into it or something, or somebody just left it sitting on the floor for people to walk on for three months before they
Alan: brought it back like that. They had it in the the back of their car, in the sun window.
So it’s all so it might be that there’s gonna be some things that are gonna be really hard to find soon.
Stephen: So here’s. A slight hope tub, B tub Btv. Yeah. If you’ve maybe seen that streaming service. Okay. They are growing and getting huge each year they’ve been growing. They did 720 million last year.
They reported, I believe. Okay. But they have a lot of the, not the top brand, not the newest stuff, not the biggest blockbusters. It’s, quirky stuff. And Reese and I for our horror podcast, we find a lot of movies there because they have a lot of those horror movies that you can’t find anywhere else, literally.
So I’m wondering if two go start trying to pick some of these up if they’re even available. That’s the problem. A lot of these D V D movies are not available in digital in any format. Nobody’s spent the time and money to transfer it. To digitize,
Alan: to transfer. Exactly. If they’re, I don’t know. Like I said, we, I hope.
Even if it was still only on V C R, they still have a whole V C R section at the library. And if you still got a V C R player, it’s limited, but it’s like that’s the way to see spartacus, if you really can’t get Spartacus in a digital version, but you wanna watch what was an Oscar winning movie, 50 years ago or something like that.
I’m sure there’s all kinds of things. I would be curious about what Tubi has to offer. I don’t know that I’m that big of a nostalgist, but for those kinds of things, I wanna watch all the Alfred Hitchcock’s, I think I’ve mentioned all the Woody Allens, all the Coen Brothers. And if you’ve been making movies for 50 years, those are the ones might not be easy to find.
Blood simple. I just watched from the Kone Brothers and I could swear it hadn’t been available ’cause I had looked for it a couple times on any of my Netflix, Amazon Not Tubby, Hulu. Nobody had it and then it did appear. So I think that there’s contracts and licensing agreements that get signed and they have it for a year, or like I said, three or six months and then it goes away again.
Disney did that very purposefully by managing their collection so that when they put it out, everybody had to watch Dumbo. ’cause it wasn’t gonna be around forever, you had to watch it in the three, three months window that it was in and then boom went back into the vaults. I think that
Stephen: there’s gonna be a lot of, but Disney does that for corporate greedy reasons, not something else.
Yeah. And for
Alan: read reasons. Exactly. I will check into Tuby because there really are, again, not on the nostalgia, but I sure have an appreciation for, there’s old Perry Mason episodes that are really good. There’s old Colombo. There’s old things that I, not only when I was growing up, I would love to be able to watch like your show shows from Ssid Caesar and Imogene Coca and that watch all of them.
Ernie Kovac was a hero of my father’s. And I would I actually have bought a collection of his where I really did watch every single episode and their fifties and their cornball and their misogynist, and they’re still funny as hell if you can just kinda let it go. That’s what it was like everybody smoked.
Yeah. And here we’ll, I know we’re getting close to time. Yeah. Here’s my thought for the day. You know what smoking might’ve killed more people than misogyny. I’m not sure about that, but like that whole acceptance of various different things in our culture about smoking culture, about war culture, about ev there are various different things that have to be corrected in our world, and yet there’s still maybe a priority order in which we have to pursue them.
So I hate the fact that my friends can’t get married or they couldn’t until a few years ago. And yet, is that the same as genocide? I don’t think so. You know what I mean? It isn’t allowing them to be treated like a full human being. That’s terrible. And a tragedy and absolutely unfair.
Yet, sometimes you have to make the choice of, but maybe we should be saving lives, not just bettering lives. I don’t know where to draw that line. I know that it’s more apparent nowadays because sometimes we really seem to go off into the weeds about what’s the most important problem we should be working on and we could fix everything about constitutional rights and still all die when our planet overheats.
Yeah. You know what I mean? There, there’s a so cleans everybody. Don’t take this. And I’m saying, no, back to the terrible 1860s, I don’t want that. And yet you have to start saying there’s gotta be a priority. If we only have a certain amount of time and money and attention, you have to start doing it for fix the planet.
Fix. We just had a typhoon, they’re calling it a hurricane, but I’m pretty sure that it’s the typhoon ’cause it’s the Pacific hit, the coast of California. It hit Nevada the first time they’ve ever had a tropical storm hit. Nevada. Yeah. Like when is, when are people gonna wake up that we have really screwed the world up?
And that’s not gonna be a Warner, that’s gonna happen with increasing frequency. And I don’t know it, people are dying and there’s billions of dollars of damage. And I’m willing to trade that off for, I don’t know I don’t know what I’m willing to trade it off for. I know that’s an important thing.
Someone told me, I swear a lot. Fuck. And if someone said, we’re gonna criminalize that, and you can’t do that anymore, but in exchange for that, we’re gonna fix the planet. I would be, I will be happy to be Pollyanna in my speech if you really. I guess exactly that. I’ll just, I’ll be a pretty little parasol bearing
Stephen: girl.
I’ll be happy to, and to make it worse are the people that want the power that are confusing the issues by saying, they’re doing this. It’s genocide. No, look up the definition that’s not. But you get people going, yeah. Genocide. It’s oh my God. And it’s, you’re fight and they’re purposefully making it rough to get their way because you can vote yes, you can vote no, or you could not vote.
Essentially not voting is no, then they’re, they know that’s,
Alan: and I dunno, an overall awareness of that. That’s absolutely part of the cowardly asshole parties. Way of doing things is find the wedge issue that’s gonna get people inflamed about nothing and harp on that so that while they’re doing all the corruption and all the damage and all the forever gerrymandering evil, so they can’t be gotten out of power.
They’re distracting you with transgender bathrooms. And it’s just the weirdest thing about how we like, yeah. Yeah. That’s a big issue. It isn’t in the scheme of are
Stephen: you gonna have democracy? It’s a big issue, but not in the way that climate change is
Alan: like that. And I don’t know, not everything is big.
Not everything is the most important, maybe that’s everybody that had a job that said, these are your three number one priorities. It’s I’m gonna need you to learn how the English language works, that you can’t give me three top priorities. And, but everybody so accepting of that the hysteria that goes with the crazy issue of the week instead of.
Keep your eye on the ball. Where’s the money going? Where’s the real evil happening? You know what I mean? There’s war in the world and it didn’t happen because we decided to focus on this endangered species being saved. But that’s the distraction they continually use about we. It’s just terrible. It’s just terrible.
Go
Stephen: look up that we see, go look up the history of Harry Jeanie and David Copperfield and learn what the term misdirection means.
Alan: Misdirection. Exactly. And I don’t know. I’m as guilty as any others. I have multiple news sources and I try to not get distracted by celebrity gossip or the latest outreach engine that’s trying to crank up.
It, I try not to be distracted by that, but it’s hard when the entire world knows that gets eyeballs and attention. And that’s how the various different social media keep me looking. I have to become a monk to not be subjected to all the terrible online stuff and newscast stuff like I thought I was being all noble by.
I’m not gonna watch TV news anymore because it’s just, 30 minutes of horror. And then I go online and I look at Google News or Reddit or anywhere, and it just is what bubbles to the top is all the things that are terrible, but don’t really matter. That’s a weird way to put it, but the outrage machine is really good at cranking that kind of stuff up.
Yep, yep. And we lose sight of but. Even beyond global warming, if we just fixed pollution in the United States, how many lives we would save. And that, there’s a great cartoon about that. What if we did all these things and oh no, it wasn’t about global warming, but it was about making sure that we had clean air and clean water and by loosening all the monitoring and the prosecution of those crimes, we’ve let that happen.
More people are dying of cancer. More
Stephen: people and I think there are many things we can do and many steps, and I think everybody helping is definitely, good. But this is the misdirection thing again, people are like, oh, we’re saving the planet because we’re recycling, we’re doing this.
It’s that’s great, wonderful. But you’re letting the other stuff go. And if you look at it, is recycling, maybe 1% of the overall problem. So we could get everybody recycling and it’s 1%, it’s really not even gonna be noticeable. Unfortunately. I’m throwing these numbers out, making ’em up.
My point of it is, People should look at what is causing the problems and where do we need to put the biggest focus, get the biggest change right away. We talk about it in games all the time. I can move here and get this or that, but if I move there, I could wipe this whole thing out and I could get a bigger, stronger position.
That’s, our type of move
Alan: that we need. It’s strategic thinking instead of tactical. I just saw a good example of this, I think in the uk they just passed a rule that says they’re not gonna give out paper receipts anymore because it causes pollution. And someone said maybe there’s a group being disadvantaged here because the elderly really depend on paper receipts.
They’re not into the smartphone things. But really it’s the entire issue is if you’re gonna stop something from being produced. How about plastics? How about paper is one of the most renewable compostable, it’ll degrade into the environment. Whereas you have 10,000 year plastics nowadays that they are sitting there in the landfills or in the oceans, and they turn into microplastics and everything is swallowing them.
And now we’re getting results from that. And having said that, Every time that they pass a law about, Hey, we gotta make sure that we stop the use of spray paint because that’s causing crime. It’s wow, how about if we do something that really has an impact on crime and public safety and public health and not, you get to have the illusion of, wow, you’re the crusader that made progress with nothing.
And instead, like that focus on the plastics, focus on the big deals that happened that made hundreds of billions of dollars go away. Not the one court case where someone spilled coffee in their mouth. Yeah,
Stephen: I agree. You know what I just I agree. Kids running around spray painting box cars.
Okay. It might be a crime and illegal. But compared to some of the other stuff that politicians and the uber rich do that doesn’t seem that bad to me. Besides if I’m at a train crossing, I like watching all the graffiti tags go by. I’m getting some entertainment out of it, at least, honestly, if I had train cars, I would say look, I don’t want you guys here at night when you could get hurt and then I’m in trouble or my dogs are here and you get ripped the shreds or you’re stealing something because it’s dark.
Our trains will be here at this time. You guys have spray paint, you wanna tag them, come and do.
Alan: So now what’s gonna happen is the mustache twirling evil guy is gonna say, Hey, all you guys spray paint my car is all you want. So now it’s a public spirited thing. The contents of those cars are of course, illegal munitions and pollution crap that I’m trying to ship far away from where I am.
And for all I know, human trafficking. But don’t worry, as long as we gussy up the cars, you’ll not suspect the evil that’s going on in these various different cities.
Stephen: We’re much too cynical. And that’s the note we’re gonna end on Cynical guys.
Alan: Okay. As always, a pleasure talking and we’ll see you next week.
And let’s see, next week it’s already, no, it’s not labor Day yet. So we still have okay. You
Stephen: need to go see Blue Beetle though?
Alan: Yes. In fact, we haven’t seen Barbie nor Blue Beetle yet. And that’s, we really do have such an open schedule and just haven’t made it to like the matinee where it’s us in the movie and some popcorn.
Nobody else is in the place.
Stephen: I haven’t seen Barbie. My son’s seen it a couple times. Okay. He loved the Turtles movie too. He is seen that for the fifth time this weekend. Oh yes. Yeah. I will probably watch Barbie, but when it comes on streaming I gotta pick and choose what I want and I’d rather go see Blue Beetle and it was well worth it.
I had a great time with Blue
Alan: Beetle. I really liked that version of the comic book where they totally put outside Ted Court and older things and made it the young Latino and all the wonderful family componentry of that. It just,
Stephen: I’m looking forward to it. Yep. Colin’s a very tough critic on this stuff and he loved it also.
Alan: So that’s a great recommendation. Tell Paul and all. Okay. Alright man. Have a good, take care. Always a pleasure. Okay.
