Posts for: dtucker300
Oct 3, 2023 01:22:03 #
(Main)
JFlorio wrote:
California would be better off if wengave it back to Mexico.
How about we trade it for Baja?
That would be easier to t***sform from a failed state.Oct 2, 2023 19:16:26 #
(Main)
publican wrote:
Can you provide some references as to the IQ of the Democrats ?
Yes, pretty much anyone who is a member of the Democrap Party or a RINO.
Just off the top of my head:
Barack Obama
Joe Biden
Hillary Clinton
Kamala Harris
Chuck Schumer
Hakeem Jeffries
Nancy Pelosi
Gavin Newsom
Beto O'Rourke
Bernie Sanders
Elizabeth Warren
Cory Booker
Jimmy Carter
Al Gore
Sheila Jackson Lee
Harry Reid
Barney Frank
Jerry Brown
Tim Kaine
Robert Reich
Donna Brazile
John Kerry
Barbara Boxer
Rashida Tlaib
Michael Bloomberg
Diane Feinstein (posthumously)
Andrew Cuomo
Karine Jean Pierre
Amy Klobuchar
Julián and Joquin Castro
Al Franken
John Lewis (posthumously)
Ilhan Omar
Cori Bush
Adam Schiff
Pete Buttigieg
Maxine Waters
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Elijah Cummings
Gretchen Whitmer
Stacey Abrams
Laphonza Butler
Raphael Warnock
Mitch McConnell
Eric Swalwell
Ted Lieu
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Jamie Raskin
Ayanna Pressley
Bennie Thompson
Jamaal Bowman
Jerrold Nadler
Henry Cuellar
Pramila Jayapal
Katanji Brown Jackson
Sonia Sotomayor
Elena Kagan
Lisa Murkowski
Mazie Hirono
Dick Durbin
Bob Menendez
John Fetterman
Rahm Emanuel
To name a few!
Oct 2, 2023 18:30:33 #
(Main)
[quote=Riley]I will bite on your most fundamental right
The [b]right[/r] to be anonymous.[/quote]
In other words, you have not the slightest idea. I said it was not a trick question.
The [b]right[/r] to be anonymous.[/quote]
In other words, you have not the slightest idea. I said it was not a trick question.
Oct 2, 2023 18:28:45 #
(Main)
Blade_Runner wrote:
Our 1st Amendment rights are numero uno, the 2nd Amendment is there to enforce those rights.
And, for the leftys, in spite of Creepy Joe's proclamation on Bill of Rights Day in Dec. 2021,
our Constitution IS NOT a "living document".
And, for the leftys, in spite of Creepy Joe's proclamation on Bill of Rights Day in Dec. 2021,
our Constitution IS NOT a "living document".
B-I-N-G-O!
Oct 2, 2023 18:23:33 #
(Main)
crazylibertarian wrote:
Just read any of the postings of OPP's iberals.
I've noticed, more recently, that aside from the limited assortment of the resident OPP l*****t POS trolls there is a lot less l*****t tripe posted these days because even they have a hard time believing the crap they spout.
Oct 2, 2023 18:16:01 #
(Main)
dtucker300 wrote:
enjoy br br br Sunday Strip- Are We at a Turning... (show quote)
Oct 2, 2023 18:13:14 #
(Main)
enjoy
Sunday Strip- Are We at a Turning Point, USA?
And just like that, suddenly there was a shift
ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
OCT 1
I spent the last week in trendy, downtown Tampa Bay. The neighborhood was full of young people, with a gym, gigantic pilates studio, trendy restaurants and lots of Uber drivers.
However, there wasn’t a yellow/blue f**g anywhere. A lot of the guys seemed pretty focused on h*****g in sports bars. But politics and news stations -well, there didn’t seem to be much of that anywhere. Lots of dog walking, and quite a few baby strollers.
It all seems so very … healthy and normal. Which of course is a good thing. As Jill and I watched people buzz by, it was pretty easy to figure out that down in that part of Florida - the Millenials, Gen X and Zers aren’t taking to the state sponsored narratives. Sure, there were plenty of tattoos on the kids, but there wasn’t much in the way of cross dressing, budding breasts on young men, blue hair, masks, nose rings or any signs of Trump derangement syndrome. They all seemed pretty darn normal.
When we were in Phoenix last week, we noticed the same trends there. It seemed to be a little pocket of normalcy. The fact that Charlie Kirk came out of that area in Arizona makes complete sense. The airport was full of young men in normal clothes, no baggy pants or weird hair styles and young women without blue hair, nose rings and/or masks (nose rings and masks - that is a gross combination - shudder).
So my point is - and there is a point.
They may be shoving the c*****e c****e, non-binary g****rs, Ukraine war-dances down their throats, but these younger adults in red pockets throughout the USA are quietly, without much noise, kindly shoving that stuff right back up the dark sides of the powers that be. They aren’t drinking that kool-aid.
Sunday Strip- Are We at a Turning Point, USA?
And just like that, suddenly there was a shift
ROBERT W MALONE MD, MS
OCT 1
I spent the last week in trendy, downtown Tampa Bay. The neighborhood was full of young people, with a gym, gigantic pilates studio, trendy restaurants and lots of Uber drivers.
However, there wasn’t a yellow/blue f**g anywhere. A lot of the guys seemed pretty focused on h*****g in sports bars. But politics and news stations -well, there didn’t seem to be much of that anywhere. Lots of dog walking, and quite a few baby strollers.
It all seems so very … healthy and normal. Which of course is a good thing. As Jill and I watched people buzz by, it was pretty easy to figure out that down in that part of Florida - the Millenials, Gen X and Zers aren’t taking to the state sponsored narratives. Sure, there were plenty of tattoos on the kids, but there wasn’t much in the way of cross dressing, budding breasts on young men, blue hair, masks, nose rings or any signs of Trump derangement syndrome. They all seemed pretty darn normal.
When we were in Phoenix last week, we noticed the same trends there. It seemed to be a little pocket of normalcy. The fact that Charlie Kirk came out of that area in Arizona makes complete sense. The airport was full of young men in normal clothes, no baggy pants or weird hair styles and young women without blue hair, nose rings and/or masks (nose rings and masks - that is a gross combination - shudder).
So my point is - and there is a point.
They may be shoving the c*****e c****e, non-binary g****rs, Ukraine war-dances down their throats, but these younger adults in red pockets throughout the USA are quietly, without much noise, kindly shoving that stuff right back up the dark sides of the powers that be. They aren’t drinking that kool-aid.
Oct 2, 2023 17:59:40 #
(Main)
California, the Great Destroyer
Leave a Comment / October 2, 2023
In 1996, the California legislature created the high speed rail authority.
In 2008, v**ers passed a $33 billion bond to build an envisioned 800 mile project eventually to link Sacramento with San Diego.
Fifteen years later, a scaled-down plan from Bakersfield to Merced remains not even half finished. Yet the envisioned costs will exceed that of the original estimate for the entire project.
The rail authority now estimates that just the modest 178 mile route—only about a fifth of the authorized distance—will not be completed at least until 2030. Past high speed estimates of both time and cost targets have been widely wrong and perhaps deliberately misleading.
Total costs for the entire project are now estimated at nearly $130 billion. Many expect that figure to double in the next quarter-century. Planners also concede there will likely not be much high speed rider demand from San Joaquin Valley residents willing to pay $86 to travel at a supposed 200 mph from Bakersfield to Merced.
Nine years ago v**ers amid drought and water shortages also passed a state water bond, authorizing $7.5 billion in new water projects and initiatives.
Some $2.7 billion was targeted for new dams and reservoirs. The current water storage system had not been enlarged since the early 1980s, when the state population was 15 million fewer residents.
So far not a single dam or new reservoir has been built. And Californians expect more water rationing statewide anytime the state experiences a modest drought.
In 2017, a $15 billion bond authorized a complete remodeling of Los Angeles International Airport—recognized as one of the more congested, disorganized, and unpleasant airports in America.
Now the cost to complete the project has grown to an estimated $30 billion, with a proposed finish date of 2028—11 years after the project was authorized.
And the ongoing LAX remake is considered one of California’s more successful public construction projects.
In 2002, California began construction on the eastern span replacement of the iconic San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge—less than half of the bridge’s total length.
It was scheduled to be finished in five years at a cost of $250 million.
The job in fact took 11 years. And it cost $6.5 billion—a 2,500 percent increase over the estimate.
In contrast, original construction of the entire Bay Bridge began in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Yet the job was completed in a little more than three years.
The list of such delayed, canceled, or prolonged projects could be expanded, from the proposed widening of the state’s overcrowded, antiquated, and dangerous north-to-south “freeways” to the now inert Peripheral Canal project that would have allowed the California aqueduct to t***sfer needed water southward by precluding the present inefficient pumping into and out of the San Francisco delta.
So what happened to the can-do California of former governors Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson? They had bequeathed to the Baby Boomer generation a well-run state, renowned for its state-of-the-art infrastructure.
All four governors, a Democrat and Republicans, had ensured the nation’s most sophisticated higher education system, iconic freeways, and model water t***sference systems.
The current disaster has many parents.
A coastal culture of globally rich elites began passing some of the most stringent environmental and zoning regulations in the nation. Such Byzantine roadblocks deliberately stalled construction and skyrocketed costs—all of little concern to the “not-in-my-backyard” wealthy in their secluded coastal enclaves who had ensured the virtual end of infrastructure investments.
The state’s public unions and bloated bureaucracies guaranteed Soviet-style overhead, incompetence, and unaccountability. The more California raised its income taxes—currently the nation’s highest topping out at 13.3 percent—the more it borrowed, spent, and ran up huge annual budget deficits.
The nation’s highest gasoline taxes along with steep sales and property taxes—coupled with unaffordable fuel and housing, a homeless epidemic, dismal public schools, out-of-control crime, and mass, i*****l i*********n—soon all led to a bifurcated state of rich and poor.
The middle class either became poor or fled.
Indeed, businesses and millions of the middle class hightailed it out of California over the last three decades in one of the greatest state population exoduses in our nation’s history. But they also took with them the very prior experience, expertise, and capital that had once made California the nation’s envy.
In contrast, millions of impoverished i*****l i*******ts arrived over the last 30 years without legality, English, or high school diplomas.
And thus millions were immediately in dire need of costly state-supplied health, education, housing, and food subsidies. Currently well over half of all California births are paid for by Medi-Cal. Well over a third of the resident population depends on the state to provide all their health care needs.
Twenty-seven percent of California’s resident population was not born in the United States. That reality created a vast challenge of civic education to ensure assimilation and integration. Unfortunately, millions entered California at precisely the time of a new tribalism and racial essentialism that has taken hold of the state’s government, media, schools, and universities. Tribalism, not the melting-pot, is California’s paradigm.
California is a one-party state. There are no statewide Republican elected officeholders. Progressive Democrats also enjoy a supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Only 12 of 52 congressional seats are held by Republicans. And almost all of California leftwing politicians are funded or influenced by Silicon Valley—the richest corridor in civilizational history, with $9 trillion in market capitalization.
In sum, a now broke California became a medieval society of Leftwing ultra-rich and Leftwing ultra-poor. On one end, there was no longer the sk**l or expertise to modernize the state. And on the other, an elite became more interested in dreaming of heaven on earth for itself as it ensured a veritable hell for others.
There is one thing, however, that California does quite well: demolition.
Currently it is destroying four dams on the Klamath River that had provided clean hydroelectrical power, water storage, flood control, and recreation. The media, the bureaucracy, and the politicians acted with unaccustomed dispatch to obliterate the dams and thus supposedly to liberate salmon to swim better upstream.
And the state is blowing up these dams partly by directing hundreds of millions of dollars v**ers had allotted for reservoir construction—adding insult to the injury of state v**ers.
A haughty green California also regulated timber companies out of business. It ceased traditional selective logging and clearing of brush from its forests.
It also limited cattle grazing of grasses and shrubs. And it embraced new “natural” forestry initiatives that postulated that rotting dead trees, dense brush, and tall summer grasses—dry kindling for devastating forest fires—created a rich “sustainable” ecosystem for wildlife. Letting nature be would prompt occasional “natural” corrective fires as in the nineteenth-century past.
The predictable results were massive, destructive—and once preventable—forest fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills. During California summers, their vast plumes of soot and smoke have polluted the skies for months and sickened residents, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and wiped out billions of dollars in valuable timber even as lumber prices soared.
And California’s lesson for the nation?
If you want to topple a statue, re-label an historically named street, burn up millions of pine and fir trees, blow up a dam, turn parks and the public square into dangerous and toxic squatter cities, then the state can do all of that and in record time.
But try building something to ensure Californians can travel quickly and in safety, or have affordable power, homes, and fuel, and assured water?
All that is simply beyond the current state’s comprehension, ability, and desire. So like modern Vandals or Goths, contemporary Californians are far better destroying the work of others than creating anything of their own.
And what is next? We await the 2024 national e******ns, when a few California politicians may run for our highest offices, no doubt with the campaign promise, “I can do to America what I did to California.”
Leave a Comment / October 2, 2023
In 1996, the California legislature created the high speed rail authority.
In 2008, v**ers passed a $33 billion bond to build an envisioned 800 mile project eventually to link Sacramento with San Diego.
Fifteen years later, a scaled-down plan from Bakersfield to Merced remains not even half finished. Yet the envisioned costs will exceed that of the original estimate for the entire project.
The rail authority now estimates that just the modest 178 mile route—only about a fifth of the authorized distance—will not be completed at least until 2030. Past high speed estimates of both time and cost targets have been widely wrong and perhaps deliberately misleading.
Total costs for the entire project are now estimated at nearly $130 billion. Many expect that figure to double in the next quarter-century. Planners also concede there will likely not be much high speed rider demand from San Joaquin Valley residents willing to pay $86 to travel at a supposed 200 mph from Bakersfield to Merced.
Nine years ago v**ers amid drought and water shortages also passed a state water bond, authorizing $7.5 billion in new water projects and initiatives.
Some $2.7 billion was targeted for new dams and reservoirs. The current water storage system had not been enlarged since the early 1980s, when the state population was 15 million fewer residents.
So far not a single dam or new reservoir has been built. And Californians expect more water rationing statewide anytime the state experiences a modest drought.
In 2017, a $15 billion bond authorized a complete remodeling of Los Angeles International Airport—recognized as one of the more congested, disorganized, and unpleasant airports in America.
Now the cost to complete the project has grown to an estimated $30 billion, with a proposed finish date of 2028—11 years after the project was authorized.
And the ongoing LAX remake is considered one of California’s more successful public construction projects.
In 2002, California began construction on the eastern span replacement of the iconic San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge—less than half of the bridge’s total length.
It was scheduled to be finished in five years at a cost of $250 million.
The job in fact took 11 years. And it cost $6.5 billion—a 2,500 percent increase over the estimate.
In contrast, original construction of the entire Bay Bridge began in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. Yet the job was completed in a little more than three years.
The list of such delayed, canceled, or prolonged projects could be expanded, from the proposed widening of the state’s overcrowded, antiquated, and dangerous north-to-south “freeways” to the now inert Peripheral Canal project that would have allowed the California aqueduct to t***sfer needed water southward by precluding the present inefficient pumping into and out of the San Francisco delta.
So what happened to the can-do California of former governors Pat Brown, Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, and Pete Wilson? They had bequeathed to the Baby Boomer generation a well-run state, renowned for its state-of-the-art infrastructure.
All four governors, a Democrat and Republicans, had ensured the nation’s most sophisticated higher education system, iconic freeways, and model water t***sference systems.
The current disaster has many parents.
A coastal culture of globally rich elites began passing some of the most stringent environmental and zoning regulations in the nation. Such Byzantine roadblocks deliberately stalled construction and skyrocketed costs—all of little concern to the “not-in-my-backyard” wealthy in their secluded coastal enclaves who had ensured the virtual end of infrastructure investments.
The state’s public unions and bloated bureaucracies guaranteed Soviet-style overhead, incompetence, and unaccountability. The more California raised its income taxes—currently the nation’s highest topping out at 13.3 percent—the more it borrowed, spent, and ran up huge annual budget deficits.
The nation’s highest gasoline taxes along with steep sales and property taxes—coupled with unaffordable fuel and housing, a homeless epidemic, dismal public schools, out-of-control crime, and mass, i*****l i*********n—soon all led to a bifurcated state of rich and poor.
The middle class either became poor or fled.
Indeed, businesses and millions of the middle class hightailed it out of California over the last three decades in one of the greatest state population exoduses in our nation’s history. But they also took with them the very prior experience, expertise, and capital that had once made California the nation’s envy.
In contrast, millions of impoverished i*****l i*******ts arrived over the last 30 years without legality, English, or high school diplomas.
And thus millions were immediately in dire need of costly state-supplied health, education, housing, and food subsidies. Currently well over half of all California births are paid for by Medi-Cal. Well over a third of the resident population depends on the state to provide all their health care needs.
Twenty-seven percent of California’s resident population was not born in the United States. That reality created a vast challenge of civic education to ensure assimilation and integration. Unfortunately, millions entered California at precisely the time of a new tribalism and racial essentialism that has taken hold of the state’s government, media, schools, and universities. Tribalism, not the melting-pot, is California’s paradigm.
California is a one-party state. There are no statewide Republican elected officeholders. Progressive Democrats also enjoy a supermajority in both houses of the legislature. Only 12 of 52 congressional seats are held by Republicans. And almost all of California leftwing politicians are funded or influenced by Silicon Valley—the richest corridor in civilizational history, with $9 trillion in market capitalization.
In sum, a now broke California became a medieval society of Leftwing ultra-rich and Leftwing ultra-poor. On one end, there was no longer the sk**l or expertise to modernize the state. And on the other, an elite became more interested in dreaming of heaven on earth for itself as it ensured a veritable hell for others.
There is one thing, however, that California does quite well: demolition.
Currently it is destroying four dams on the Klamath River that had provided clean hydroelectrical power, water storage, flood control, and recreation. The media, the bureaucracy, and the politicians acted with unaccustomed dispatch to obliterate the dams and thus supposedly to liberate salmon to swim better upstream.
And the state is blowing up these dams partly by directing hundreds of millions of dollars v**ers had allotted for reservoir construction—adding insult to the injury of state v**ers.
A haughty green California also regulated timber companies out of business. It ceased traditional selective logging and clearing of brush from its forests.
It also limited cattle grazing of grasses and shrubs. And it embraced new “natural” forestry initiatives that postulated that rotting dead trees, dense brush, and tall summer grasses—dry kindling for devastating forest fires—created a rich “sustainable” ecosystem for wildlife. Letting nature be would prompt occasional “natural” corrective fires as in the nineteenth-century past.
The predictable results were massive, destructive—and once preventable—forest fires in the Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills. During California summers, their vast plumes of soot and smoke have polluted the skies for months and sickened residents, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and wiped out billions of dollars in valuable timber even as lumber prices soared.
And California’s lesson for the nation?
If you want to topple a statue, re-label an historically named street, burn up millions of pine and fir trees, blow up a dam, turn parks and the public square into dangerous and toxic squatter cities, then the state can do all of that and in record time.
But try building something to ensure Californians can travel quickly and in safety, or have affordable power, homes, and fuel, and assured water?
All that is simply beyond the current state’s comprehension, ability, and desire. So like modern Vandals or Goths, contemporary Californians are far better destroying the work of others than creating anything of their own.
And what is next? We await the 2024 national e******ns, when a few California politicians may run for our highest offices, no doubt with the campaign promise, “I can do to America what I did to California.”
Oct 2, 2023 14:58:28 #
(Main)
What is the most important right that we have as Americans that the totalitarian authoritarian f*****t g*******t elitist tyrants in the Democrap party are eliminating here and in other countries of the world? Once it is gone there is no getting it back. What other right do we have to back up and preserve this right?
(This is not a trick question)
(This is not a trick question)
Oct 2, 2023 14:51:50 #
(Main)
Thank you Gov. Newsom for woke identity politic virtual signaling by appointing a lesbian black non-resident from Maryland to be the replacement senator for Diane Feinstein's vacant seat; this dumb ass wants to be President?! As goes CA, so goes the country.
Oct 2, 2023 14:45:47 #
(Main)
proud republican wrote:
What do you think Democrats' or MSM's reaction would be???... In jail with J** 6th prisoners...
Absolutely. Isn't interfering with an official congressional proceeding an I**********n according to the J*** 6 c*******e investigation? However, on J*** 6, people who walked through open doors have been convicted. No one in the history of Congress has ever mistaken a fire alarm lever for a switch to open a door. Hakeem Jeffries is an i***t as is Jamul Bowman and the other Democrats. These people have single-digit IQs. But nothing will happen to them because we have a f*****t authoritarian one-party Democrap rule in the DOJ.
Oct 2, 2023 14:35:56 #
(Main)
fullspinzoo wrote:
And that this guy can say this with a straight face is just amazing. https://www.dailywire.com/news/merrick-garland-claims-doj-does-not-have-one-rule-for-republicans-and-another-rule-for-democrats
Nope! We have a one-rule totalitarian authoritarian f*****t Democrap party rule. Welcome to the American Police State.
Oct 2, 2023 13:41:52 #
Big dog wrote:
I see a future employment opportunity, space junk wrangling.
Oct 1, 2023 19:04:01 #
(Main)
https://youtube.com/shorts/2n_jg4EuHSs?si=qwNP7bLhpuMy_mOE
WHAT A SHAME AND DISGRACEFUL PEOPLE🤮 THE RUDENESS, THE FRESH FACE, THE IRRESPONSIBILITY, THE INCOMPETENCE, AND THE FACT THAT THEY DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT ANYTHING OR ANYONE WHILE THEY LIVE THE GOOD LIFE ON THE RIBS OF OTHERS. THEY HAVE NO FORGIVENESS👿
Back in the days when REAL MEN existed, these people would've gotten the rope, the chair, and the squad😒 Nuff said😠 I knew the slimy bstrds were going to clean their hands from the "non crisis" they were creating. We fkn told you but you v**ed for this crap anyway to take a dump on all those people's heads and ours. But you don't have those mean tweets that wouldn't let you sleep at night, right? YOU ARE AN IRRESPONSIBLE M○R○N!😡 Btw, where are the 85,000 kids you lost? And the ones from Maui? Or is that another conspiracy? Yeah we've been conspiracying so much, kids just keep on disappearing in front of our noses and all you do is TALK BULLSH¡T
WHAT A SHAME AND DISGRACEFUL PEOPLE🤮 THE RUDENESS, THE FRESH FACE, THE IRRESPONSIBILITY, THE INCOMPETENCE, AND THE FACT THAT THEY DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT ANYTHING OR ANYONE WHILE THEY LIVE THE GOOD LIFE ON THE RIBS OF OTHERS. THEY HAVE NO FORGIVENESS👿
Back in the days when REAL MEN existed, these people would've gotten the rope, the chair, and the squad😒 Nuff said😠 I knew the slimy bstrds were going to clean their hands from the "non crisis" they were creating. We fkn told you but you v**ed for this crap anyway to take a dump on all those people's heads and ours. But you don't have those mean tweets that wouldn't let you sleep at night, right? YOU ARE AN IRRESPONSIBLE M○R○N!😡 Btw, where are the 85,000 kids you lost? And the ones from Maui? Or is that another conspiracy? Yeah we've been conspiracying so much, kids just keep on disappearing in front of our noses and all you do is TALK BULLSH¡T
Oct 1, 2023 11:45:29 #
Road Signs: Embracing Imperfections
https://rvelectricity.substack.com/p/road-signs-embracing-imperfections?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
SEP 30, 2023
Road Signs: Embracing Imperfections
By Mike Sokol
Once again, school is starting where I was an adjunct professor teaching live-sound mixing one day a week. My task was to take a bunch of highly talented musicians and singers and teach them how to mix music that will make lots of listeners happy. The only problem is, their playing is so perfect from years of regimented practice that their music often sounds boring. It really does.
Too perfect isn’t always perfect!
I was thinking about this when one of my former students sat in on our pre-semester meeting with the other department heads on things we were planning to do the coming year. And this student, Danny, was discussing experiments he was doing on sound effects for mixing, specifically a reverberation chamber he had built from an empty room.
A reverb chamber makes sort of a big cave echo sound that’s popular with modern music. His observation was it didn’t sound “perfect” like a computer program that “simulated” a reverb chamber, but he liked the imperfect sound a lot better than the perfect simulation of the computer. And he was right!
Perfect drummers don’t exist
That began the discussion of “soul” and “feeling” in music, as well as life experiences. In music, we really don’t like the sound of a computer playing drums and say that it lacks “feeling,” which is very true. Human drummers have imperfections in their playing, often on purpose, which makes the music sound more alive or have more soul. And I teach that while we expect a certain level of perfection, beating yourself up to be perfect at the cost of losing the soul or groove of the music is counterproductive and detrimental to the art form.
What about paintings?
The same can be said for other art forms, such as painting and sculpting. While a photograph can offer a perfect image, it often lacks the soul of the subject. That’s why a great deal of effort and expense often goes into painting a portrait of an important person. A perfect photograph just won’t do the subject justice, but a painter can use artistic license to create a portrait with soul or feeling. Just look at the enigmatic painting of the Mona Lisa, which my wife and I saw in Paris during our last trip. Everyone who looks at it wonders just what’s behind that tense smile. We can actually get a little glimpse into her soul.
Monet knew it…
Consider the Water Lilies paintings by Claude Monet. Linda and I saw them up close and personal in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, where they occupy two entire circular rooms. We had no idea that these paintings, which show up everywhere from screen savers to your credit card, are HUGE and were painted in Monet’s actual gardens at different times of the day.
By standing in the middle of the room and rotating you can see what Monet saw (and felt) in the morning light, or afternoon sun, or at the evening sunset. My wife, Linda, who is herself an artist and considers Monet her favorite painter, actually started shaking and crying when we walked into the Monet’s Water Lilies room for the first time. We had no idea of the size and impact of his most famous series of paintings. Standing up close they look like nothing more than a bunch of blobs of paint. But step back into the center of the room and you’ll see that all those imperfect brush strokes by Monet add up to something way more powerful than any photograph could possibly be.
Mistakes can lead to new experiences
So what does this all mean for you, a traveler? Well I think it means to embrace the unexpected. Sometimes your trip may not go as planned and you can end up on a strange road or in a strange town, doing something you never planned to do.
While my own parents would plan our camping trips down to the letter, knowing exactly where we would be on what day, I find it more enjoyable to not sweat the details as much and be more tolerant when something goes a little wrong on your trip.
For example, my parents had their RV rear-ended by a drunk driver out west and ended up staying on a friend’s ranch for a month while their trailer was fixed. Because their carefully planned itinerary was wrecked, there are pictures of my dad riding on a 4-wheeler helping to herd cattle (really) and my mom visiting places and museums that she would NEVER have put on her original “flight plan.” Rather than sit in a hotel and complain about their misfortune, they got out and did things that made their down-time, fun-time.
Try something different next time
Just like the great, late Tom Petty, who couldn’t play a guitar lead the same way twice, be willing to experiment and embrace the imperfections and different experiences in life.
Maybe it starts with something as simple as ordering Huevos Rancheros for breakfast when you’re in New Mexico instead of your usual pancakes. Rather then the perfect circles of perfect batter, much of what was considered to be peasant food (in this case, rancher’s eggs) has a lot to offer, in spite of all its rustic imperfections. If you don’t like them, or you put on too much hot sauce, then that’s another life experience you didn’t plan for.
But if you don’t try to step out of your comfort zone you’ll never experience a bunch of imperfect things that you might REALLY like. So, enjoy the mess. It’s what makes us human. - Mike
https://rvelectricity.substack.com/p/road-signs-embracing-imperfections?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
SEP 30, 2023
Road Signs: Embracing Imperfections
By Mike Sokol
Once again, school is starting where I was an adjunct professor teaching live-sound mixing one day a week. My task was to take a bunch of highly talented musicians and singers and teach them how to mix music that will make lots of listeners happy. The only problem is, their playing is so perfect from years of regimented practice that their music often sounds boring. It really does.
Too perfect isn’t always perfect!
I was thinking about this when one of my former students sat in on our pre-semester meeting with the other department heads on things we were planning to do the coming year. And this student, Danny, was discussing experiments he was doing on sound effects for mixing, specifically a reverberation chamber he had built from an empty room.
A reverb chamber makes sort of a big cave echo sound that’s popular with modern music. His observation was it didn’t sound “perfect” like a computer program that “simulated” a reverb chamber, but he liked the imperfect sound a lot better than the perfect simulation of the computer. And he was right!
Perfect drummers don’t exist
That began the discussion of “soul” and “feeling” in music, as well as life experiences. In music, we really don’t like the sound of a computer playing drums and say that it lacks “feeling,” which is very true. Human drummers have imperfections in their playing, often on purpose, which makes the music sound more alive or have more soul. And I teach that while we expect a certain level of perfection, beating yourself up to be perfect at the cost of losing the soul or groove of the music is counterproductive and detrimental to the art form.
What about paintings?
The same can be said for other art forms, such as painting and sculpting. While a photograph can offer a perfect image, it often lacks the soul of the subject. That’s why a great deal of effort and expense often goes into painting a portrait of an important person. A perfect photograph just won’t do the subject justice, but a painter can use artistic license to create a portrait with soul or feeling. Just look at the enigmatic painting of the Mona Lisa, which my wife and I saw in Paris during our last trip. Everyone who looks at it wonders just what’s behind that tense smile. We can actually get a little glimpse into her soul.
Monet knew it…
Consider the Water Lilies paintings by Claude Monet. Linda and I saw them up close and personal in the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, where they occupy two entire circular rooms. We had no idea that these paintings, which show up everywhere from screen savers to your credit card, are HUGE and were painted in Monet’s actual gardens at different times of the day.
By standing in the middle of the room and rotating you can see what Monet saw (and felt) in the morning light, or afternoon sun, or at the evening sunset. My wife, Linda, who is herself an artist and considers Monet her favorite painter, actually started shaking and crying when we walked into the Monet’s Water Lilies room for the first time. We had no idea of the size and impact of his most famous series of paintings. Standing up close they look like nothing more than a bunch of blobs of paint. But step back into the center of the room and you’ll see that all those imperfect brush strokes by Monet add up to something way more powerful than any photograph could possibly be.
Mistakes can lead to new experiences
So what does this all mean for you, a traveler? Well I think it means to embrace the unexpected. Sometimes your trip may not go as planned and you can end up on a strange road or in a strange town, doing something you never planned to do.
While my own parents would plan our camping trips down to the letter, knowing exactly where we would be on what day, I find it more enjoyable to not sweat the details as much and be more tolerant when something goes a little wrong on your trip.
For example, my parents had their RV rear-ended by a drunk driver out west and ended up staying on a friend’s ranch for a month while their trailer was fixed. Because their carefully planned itinerary was wrecked, there are pictures of my dad riding on a 4-wheeler helping to herd cattle (really) and my mom visiting places and museums that she would NEVER have put on her original “flight plan.” Rather than sit in a hotel and complain about their misfortune, they got out and did things that made their down-time, fun-time.
Try something different next time
Just like the great, late Tom Petty, who couldn’t play a guitar lead the same way twice, be willing to experiment and embrace the imperfections and different experiences in life.
Maybe it starts with something as simple as ordering Huevos Rancheros for breakfast when you’re in New Mexico instead of your usual pancakes. Rather then the perfect circles of perfect batter, much of what was considered to be peasant food (in this case, rancher’s eggs) has a lot to offer, in spite of all its rustic imperfections. If you don’t like them, or you put on too much hot sauce, then that’s another life experience you didn’t plan for.
But if you don’t try to step out of your comfort zone you’ll never experience a bunch of imperfect things that you might REALLY like. So, enjoy the mess. It’s what makes us human. - Mike