Overheard at convenience stores

I was in two convenience stores yesterday.

Conversation 1, two guys behind the counter.

Yeah, so I guess you can’t even find it on the internet anymore.

Oh, I dunno, I think it’s still around.

Yeah, I guess they just have people reacting to it now.

Yeah.

Just how people react to it.

Yeah.

Is it real or….

Man, it’s pretty real!

Yeah?  So it’s just…like with a cup and everything, they….

Yeah, man.  Yeah.

Conversation two.

Clerk:  Can I help you?

Customer:  [taps display of scratch-off lottery tickets]

Clerk:  How many?

Customer:  Five hundred.

Clerk:  …uh, well, heh heh, you got to go downtown, then, and….

Customer:  How many you got?

Clerk:  You serious?

Customer:  [nods]

Clerk:  [starts counting]

Mastering

I leave for London tomorrow.  I am going to master the new record at Abbey Road, my 2nd favorite recording studio in the world.

With any luck, Andrew Lloyd Webber will not prove to be in vulturelike evidence.  I do not know if EMI is trying to sell the place after all.

Mastering records is straightforward in its purest form.  Take a stereo recording and transfer it to formats capable of easy reproduction.  The lacquer or copper master for an LP.  Whatever the hell they use to make CDs in their last dying iteration.

It is not long at the mastering studio, however, before the arcane nature of the proceedings is evident.  To optimize a recording, much may be done.  Often quite more ‘optimization’ is done in mastering audio than is necessary, but such is the story with recording music, making music, and indeed making art in general.

Steve Rooke at Abbey Road is an able craftsman who has yielded nothing but excellent results at previous sessions.  I trust his ears are still sensitive and his work environment intact.

Hawaii #2

OK, I could live there.

An interesting combination would induce the desire:

1. A desire to enjoy the natural pleasures of life above all else

2. A lack of desire to engage with the rest of the world to any great capacity

Not now. We need money, and I love our life. But the kid will not be in school forever. And maybe we’ll have the money.

Waikiki is crowded, but that didn’t bother me. It is commercial so transparently that it is almost guileless, not a little like the Japanese tourists who populate it.

We spent plenty of time driving around.

Kailua is the natural beach town that Haleiwa may have been at some point.

The surf at Waimea Bay was up the day before and the day after we went there to watch surfers.

We missed the tsunami warning by half a day.

Hawaii

In Waikiki.

I look like a homeless guy who used to own a boat.