PrairieDog

I once was driving down the freeway right behind a panel truck with a loose roll-up door. I watched as the door gradually lifted up until we could see inside the empty box, except for the unsecured forklift that was now slowly shifting its way towards the open door… guessing what was about to happen, I began to put as much room between me and that truck as I could, without making the folks behind me try to pass around. unaware of what was about to go down, literally. sure enough, the machine finally tipped out onto the pavement and bounced/rolled across the lanes. Luckily it was midday, and my maneuver was enough to slow traffic so that the jack made it all the way over to the far right lane without hitting anyone, and where folks could get around it. good thing there was an exit just ahead and all our honking and waving clued the driver in that something very bad had just happened. Something that could have been a helluva lot worse. My mom in the car turned to me and said “It was like you knew that was going to happen.” I just shrugged. Always assume the worst when driving in the Twin Cities.

Man, I have a whole tool bench full of road tools. I always feel sorry for the sap that got back to the shop missing some bit of kit. My fave is a 5lb sledge. I use it all the time. Nice heavy chisel is another excellent piece I nearly got rear-ended for.

Yeah, I cut my crummy Home Depot brand in half and my electron microscrope showed me the molecular structure was only cubically packed instead of Greco’s Hexagonal pattern. Man, I wish I hadn’t blown the 1.29.

Ettu, jdgm? 😂

Of course you didn’t, because union folks back in the 19th and 20th century literally laid down their lives so we could have weekends off, 8 hour days, and safe(r) job sites. People have mostly forgotten the bloody history behind fair wages and livable work conditions. The Italian Hall Massacre is just one instance where anti-union folks went to extremes. 75 people died, many were children, when an anti-union activist shouted “fire” at a Labor sponsored Christmas party. Strikers were often shot upon by militias and police, The blood was shed on both sides, but in the end, it was the union strikes, and egregious deaths, that ended the robber baron stranglehold on workers and exploitation that I mentioned above. It is partly government protections that arose out of the strikes and part pure market forces that cause non-union shops to toe the line with union benefits. Owners know if you don’t treat your workers fairly, they can always walk out. This is why efforts at union busting is so dangerous for even non-union employees, and why we have seen slips in protections over the past few decades. Once the owners get the idea they can squeeze their employees a little more, without repercussions, there is no reason not to see how far they can push it. I’m not a union shop, but I treat our employees as if we were because they could always either jump to one, and I want to stave off the disruption if they felt they needed to start one here.

Touché

You know, just saying, if you don’t want to play by the union impacts, you are free to work on Labor day, then for 12 hours a day for 6 or seven days a week, for 1 dollar a day, with no insurance, vacation/sick leave, overtime, unemployment, or workers comp protections. Your employer will adore you. (And I’m writing this as a business owner who is perfectly happy being “forced” to offer my employees a livable, modern work life.)

That was great, and nice to see massive bare-finger picking. That’s my pref, and I get some grief for it.

Hi Dennis, nice to meet you. Just mentioning, I recently bought and returned a Songbird Deluxe, the early name for the SW, to the GC near me here in Minnesota. It’s priced a bit less than a new J 35, and being 20 years old, has a nice open tone. Depending on old yours was, it may sound similar? I liked it in the store, but when I got it home I found it just didn’t bring anything new to my group, and went a different direction. It does have a faint pick stain low on the bout, but I was going to call it “patina.” Anyway, it was still there yesterday when we were looking around. https://www.guitarcenter.com/Used/Gibson/SONGBIRD-DLX-Acoustic-Electric-Guitar.gc It looks like there is another in Washington, that just price dropped to match, perhaps without the stain.

Congrats! For the new guitar, and having a great boss!

PrairieDog ceremoniously hands the shiny, “BeeGee,” gold-plated, bisected-guitar to Dub-T-123. The crowd roars with approval. A murmur of outraged dissent emanating from the dumpsters in the alley is not heard in the auditorium.

Nod, yeah, I get it.

Hey folks, I just realized Pepper never got into the scrum which seems…. unusual. Curious to see if he was just exercising admirable self-control and avoiding the thread, I checked his profile and saw he hasn’t been on since Friday? That usual for him? He’s gonna be bummed he missed the party.

Ohhh, big thank you…. It was amusing, for a while. Then it just got tiresome. Now, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled dust ups on the merits of of relic-ing 😄

Well, since AI only learns from what is out there… rueful chuckle.

Good to hear. Don’t know about you, but I thinks it’s pretty cool how our spidey sense can pick up on warning signs that we aren’t even consciously seeing. Keep up the hunt!

Aww, heck, you are giving me way too much credit. You already run circles around me. But I will ask my buddy, he’s got the encyclopedia in his brain. I only have bits of very specific knowledge/memories. I was there when he “polished” off the medallion plating, so that trauma is kinda fused in my brain. And I know metals… so it gives the illusion of a bad case of all “strings, no guitar.” 😄 Way back in the last century I just was lucky to be hanging out with some folks who had some cool guitars. We also hung out at a couple super cool music stores and the owners liked to show off the hot/rare things that came through. This, and it was the 70s or so, and much of it didn’t make it into the distracted braincells 😆 TTYS

I’m dying here folks!! (Prairie dog digs out a handkerchief and wipes away tears of laughter) You all are the most hilarious, creative and good hearted folks I’ve come across in a loooong time on any forum. And, @Sparquelito, you win the biggest heart trophy, good on you for trying to turn things around. I vote bot, since the replies stopped once folks stopped directly quoting him. The wife and I are off for a spin in our ‘modern’ ride built better than a crummy (52) Corvette… it’s got a real long… muffler. 😆

I wouldn’t be caught dead in a poser ‘Vette. If that is what you think is quality, we may pinpointed the disconnect right here. Off to dinner, rant on without me.

You might want to slow down? Where did I say it was Gibson forum? Just observing you aren’t doing much to refute the now pretty apt troll label, though, 😄. You might want to take a breath, you are about to pop a blood vessel… really, life is really short, why waste any of it getting more and more worked up, shouting on a board where it has been made clear no one really cares about your easily disproven theory? I’ll just point at all the wealthy and not so wealthy money-making artists playing all those crummy Gibsons. What’s your point, Grasshopper? It’s not like you are going to convince anyone now. Now, Rabs and Dub-t, at least they are amusing.

Oh, completely agree, I realize I left out the snipes were often irrelevant in this type of product, that nobody would have, or common sense would say “don’t do that.” Our product actually had *better* Xs and Ys than the brand he was comparing to, because they cheaped out. But he was doing the old mind-game of insinuating the other guys had something different, that he wanted, so it would encourage eyeballs off our product onto his. Most folks would come back after seeing how low end the other product was compared to ours. Like Gibsons, expensive, but it showed in build quality and performance.

I used to be a moderator on a forum that had this one guy that would put up “fan” posts with hidden snipes or veiled jabs at the product. Posts like, “oh, great product. I did my whole project with it, turned out perfect, and even though X disaster happened and I had to do Y, it worked out.” Or, “Yeah, it has these leading edge features, but I wish it did X or had Y, like these other guys do.” Guess who he worked for? We kept kicking him but he’d just pop back up with a new nick. It got to be a total joke. And man would he get nasty and insulting too when we just started calling him out on his BS.

Well, maybe having some hearing would help? My bro is pretty much totally deaf, that was why he couldn’t function going hearing-aid commando. I don’t know about the medicare thing, they paid for his implants?

Phenomenon UFO Schenker had just joined, what 19 here? Geeze. I also have the Euro copy of Force It here someplace, but saved the moderators the grief.