This weekend I finally got around to overhauling my guitar. There wasn't really anything wrong with it, per se, but having recently begun playing it more often I've been feeling a bit frustrated with the tone I was getting. So I decided to make the single most simple yet effective modification possible: change one of the pickups.
This is what my ("primary") guitar has looked like for about the last ten years:
Yes, it is a Squier strat. It's all very well being snobbish about this low-end Fender-lite range, but here's the thing: I sat in the shop for an entire afternoon and played just about every guitar they had that retailed for under £1000, and this is the one I liked the most. It had really great sustain, a nice action, a good clear tone, and the neck felt right to me in a way that many just don't - a combination of the width, profile and finish, I guess, although it's hard to pin down. Anyway, it felt and sounded excellent, and I loved the colour, so I bought it.
And it served pretty well. But at the end of the day, it's a strat, which means it has three single-coil pickups. On their own they have plenty of twang, but can sound a bit tinny - and they buzz like crazy when you plug them into any reasonably high-gain preamp. So I found I spent most of my time playing it with the bridge and middle pickups connected in parallel (pseudo-humbucker style). That's fine, except it can get a bit muddy at the bottom end. And the output still isn't as hot as a real humbucker, meaning that it just doesn't quite cut it for heavy metal (or even blues, for that matter).
Fortunately, many manufacturers of guitar pickups make a thing called a mini-humbucker, which works and sounds just like a regular humbucker but is half the size - and therefore fits into the same space as a regular single-coil pickup. I got myself a Seymour Duncan "Little '59". I've used their piezo transducers on acoustic guitars before and never been disappointed, and of all the options available from them, this one seemed closest to what I was looking for. But it's been sitting in a drawer for the last four months because I've been too busy to do anything with it.
So first of all, the old strings go in the bin (they were getting old anyway) and the scratchplate comes off. For the uninitiated, the inside of an electric guitar looks a lot like this:
The wiring is a pretty straightforward affair. Single-coil pickups just have a pair of wires; one for the signal and one for the ground. Humbuckers tend to be more complicated, particularly if they support so-called "coil-tapping". But in this case all I needed was one signal wire, two ground wires, and the other two get soldered together and taped off. Ah, but how to know which is which? It's a similar dilemma to that confronting the spy who's trying to disarm a ticking bomb. The red wire - no, green! GREEN! Actually it's important to get it right. In the case of an individual pickup it doesn't matter if you get the signal and ground wires the wrong way round: all that happens is the signal comes out the other way up, which sounds identical. But when you connect two pickups together, which the 5-way switch on the guitar's front panel allows you to do, they have to agree on which way is up. Otherwise most of the lower-pitched harmonics that make up the sound of the vibrating string will end up cancelling out, and you're left with a nasty nasal noise. Fortunately the little leaflet that came with the new pickup advised that to match the phase of Fender pickups, the green wire should be used for the signal and the black wire for ground. So that's what I did. I figured that if I got it wrong, I'd soon find out about it.
A bit of stripping (of wires!) and soldering later, the insides looked like this:
While I was at it, I decided to do some sleight-of-hand with the switch wiring. I figured that I'm unlikely to want to use the remaining single-coil pickups very much, so I moved the middle pickup to the switch position where the bridge pickup used to be, and soldered the new bridge pickup to the middle position. This has two advantages to me. Firstly, it means the lower of the tone controls now applies to the humbucker (which otherwise would have had no HF rolloff at all). Secondly, it means I can combine the humbucker output with that of either the neck or the middle pickup; that is, there are three out of the five switch positions where the humbucker is in use. The only downside is that the switch doesn't behave like you might expect. This only really matters if someone else is playing it, though, which rarely happens.
Closed back up again, the finished project (sans strings) looks like this:
I took the opportunity to clean everything up a bit and oil the fretboard while I was at it. One new set of strings later, and it's playable again. I plugged in, half-expecting to hear nothing at all due to dodgy soldering, but immediately I could feel a real difference. (It occurs to me that I probably should have made some before/after recordings, but it's too late for that now!) The sound is much punchier, and has plenty of top-end bite which was often lacking before when playing in the dual-single-coil configuration. The output is much more powerful, meaning more distortion when I want it and more warmth when I don't. It also means it follows hammer-on notes much more cleanly, opening the door to those exciting tap-heavy solos that I used to know but haven't been able to practice properly in ages.
Rock on! \m/
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His cat is getting older. You can't tell really because she's still as plush as a kitten, bright-eyed, agile, but he knows her age to the day and at her next birthday she'll be nine years old. Senior cat is senior. Has special fuds. The new fuds are mostly the same as the old fuds; they come in little clinical sachets and smell of fish and saline. Of course she'll still get tuna, sometimes, straight out of the can. For some reason she loves this stuff as much as she hates citrus peel, although he's not performed a controlled experiment to demonstrate that because it might be considered borderline cruel, or at least a bit weird. Yet every fourth pouch of her old fuds bore the label "With Tuna", and these were the meals she would always turn her nose up at and go eat crunchies instead until he threw away the uneated "With Tuna" and replaced it with "With Salmon" or something that looked and smelled pretty much the same, all things considered, which correlation-stroke-aberration he noticed only after a few months of non-rigourous emperical observation. Fortunately the new fuds are superior in some inscrutible way, and the new version of "With Tuna" is now the firm favourite; a state of affairs that makes perfect sense given everything he knows about his cat.
But what didn't make sense was the fishy smell in the cupboard next to the bathroom. The cat herself does not, as a rule (unlike many others of the same species) smell like fish, except when she has just had fuds, and even then, it's only if she actually breathes out. He eats fish, too, but mostly buys it frozen or buys it fresh and freezes it and then cooks it quickly, and the smell of baking Haddock Boulangère is not really fishy at all. You could never suspect a Haddock Boulangère of any crime. Anyway he doesn't cook or serve up fish suppers in the cupboard next to the bathroom, and nor does the cat spend any considerable length of time in there, as far as he knows, which is reasonably far; furthermore her fuds are right up the other end of the kitchen and round the corner, and they don't smell quite the same, and the kitchen doesn't stink, nor the bin into which uneated "With Tuna" until recently used to be deposited every few days. It seems premature to blame the cat. Yes she did go through that phase of presenting them with a dead goldfish every other day for a week but that was a long time ago, and besides, back then she had a catflap and could bring her prey indoors whenever she pleased. On the other hand, they do keep their bags and coats and moreover their shoes in the cupboard. Sweat, not to put too fine a point on it, can smell fishy sometimes. They buy air-fresheners. He swore he never would. People whose houses smell are, intrinsically, doing it wrong. The scent of meadows mingles into the musty air, a sort of satanic surf-'n'-turf.
And then again maybe (just being paranoid for a second) the landlord did something to offend one of the tradesmen and they left frozen prawns in the burglar alarm control panel or something, or one of the bags had some stray food (or fuds) left over from when they moved and it's gone unnoticed until now, but really that's quite a stench developing. He pries off the lid to the burglar alarm electronics, cursing as said burglar alarm registers his well-intentioned tampering and starts sounding off at Jesus-God decibels which inhibits his memory of the actual code to turn the damn thing off, for a few seconds. No prawns. And, now, the smell certainly wasn't there when they moved in, so it can't be the paint or the plaster or anything, he'd have noticed ages ago. He sniffs shoes, individually. Opens every pocket of every bag, turns them inside out. Nothing. Takes every last thing out of the cupboard and dumps it in the conservatory to air, opens the windows, leaves the cupboard door open and lets the stink dissipate. Either it's the stuff, or it's the cupboard. Occham says it's not both and he's inclined to agree.
He stands on the piano-stool and sniffs the ceiling. The smell definitely seems worse towards the top. But there's nothing up there. Perhaps the flue from the cooker's extractor hood runs over the top. He wafts out the smell, boils beans, runs the fan. No new scent; not fish or beans. The cat wonders what the hell he's doing. He expects she wonders that a lot. Life looks illogical enough when you're standing in the same frame of reference as all the crazy stuff. Now there are rucksacks all over the floor and coats in the wrong places and a guy standing on a stool in a dark confined space getting more and more confused by the messages he's receiving from his inferior sense of smell and all the while seemingly unaware that her fuds bowl is currently running on fumes.
It's only when he comes out of the bathroom after his shower and the smell is back with a vengance that the true connection suddenly springs to his mind, and he quickly dries himself off again and snuffles at the switch on the wall between the bathroom and the cupboard, right next to the prawn-free burglar alarm, just a little square box with a neon lamp but now reeking like a polystyrene cup bonfire doused with PVA glue and puréed herring; and he kills the neon by throwing the breaker and goes to the cupboard that does not smell to get his toolbox, plucks out a screwdriver and teases the switch out of its casing, and yes, that's what was fishy, all along: the terminal block is warped and melted, cracking like an old chestnut and the wires around it bubbling out of their insulation, the supply-side neutral wire the worst of all, oxidised and almost crumbling into fishy black powder, the whole thing probably this close to catching fire. He takes photos, closes it up. The breaker stays off.
At which point he feels vindicated, not least about the judgement regarding air fresheners whose floral fragrance might otherwise have masked a growing danger of actual, you know, death. And also science won the day, and there was nothing wrong with his cat, and the tradesmen don't have a chip on their shoulder. But he can't help but wonder what chemicals molten synthetic insulation compounds and rotting fish have in common, exactly, or indeed why so many unpleasant things smell fishy in the same way that so many cooked animals taste like chicken; and also why something suspicious would be described as fishy in the first place since fish on the whole are quite placid and straightforward creatures not much given to deception, except perhaps that they are slippery - which, he thinks, he probably would be too, if it helped him to avoid being turned into fuds for domestic mammals - or unless there is some deep-seated connection between smelliness and trustworthiness, between odour and honour, in which case he will really need to get the wiring fixed so he can have a shower again, no matter how ridiculous the cat thinks he is for doing so.
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...is one of the world's most underrated musicians.
Just listen to what he's doing on tracks like Play The Game, for instance. It's so graceful and inventive but also dead tight, almost unobtrusive. In fact, try listening to the bassline on just about any Queen track - particularly their early work. You'll probably find that after a few bars you've completely lost track of it. But it's not because it's boring, it's because it blends so well with the rest of the instrumentation. That's the mark of a master. He's putting in the most intricate hooks but they don't snag on anything. Genius.
But most people just think of Another One Bites The Dust and writes him off as another dull, solid rhythm section filler. Shame.
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Historically when the Royal Mint decided to change the UK's coinage it was in an attempt to devalue the currency by diluting the quantity of precious metal used in the manufacturing process. Nowadays our money is a joke and to devalue the currency the Bank of England just need to tap a few keys on the Credit-o-Lax 5000 to begin the Quantitative Easing process and get us all moving on the slippery slope towards joining the Zimbabwe-zone. But as it happens, the Mint went ahead and changed the coins anyway. You know, just because.
Since the end of last year I've been hanging onto the new coins as I've come across them in the hope that I'll finally collect a complete set and be able to reassemble them like the incredible coat-of-arms jigsaw that they are. Actually it is kinda neat.
It took me ages to find a 50-pence piece. The ones and twos circulate much more rapidly and retire early so those were the easiest to come across. Ditto the pound coin. It's the silver ones that are the most hard-wearing and thus stick around for years.
Hopefully everyone will be distracted by the shiny shiny objects and fail to notice that a litre of milk now costs £1 when it used to cost about 35p a few years ago.
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A street in Rome.
Lucius. Good even, Favillus. What ails you so
That redden'd as by fire thou walkst this night
And sweat, like Neptune's ocean fills thy veins
To overflowing?
Favillus. Ailment? Nay, my friend
This heat is mine - and would it long remain
To warm my weary nights and light my days
I'll wager now I'd be the better for it.
Lucius. Now come, what is this tiresome talk? Be plain!
For time's bright arrow spans but little space
Between each bow and shield of man's attention.
Favillus. That's as may be; yea, truer than thou thinkst.
And yet mayhap it bears upon my tale
Wherein but just the briefest time ago
I sat amongst a crowd of common men
In Pompey's Theatre. There we saw a play
The like of which I scarce can recollect
Despite my many years. It did portray
That coldest curse of stunted intellect
In quite the most imaginative way.
Lucius. Ah! This must be the work, I do expect,
Of Master Will! A genius, they say -
Though well ahead of his appointed time.
Favillus. The same. And that which raised in me this flame
Is what occur'd in one peculiar scene
Before the Forum's long-enduring steps
Amid a morning mark'd by mourning's maw
And riven hotly through with oratory.
Lucius. The funeral of Caesar, then?
Favillus. Indeed.
Lucius. And what of that? What mischiefs doth he weave
That cruelly vex so calm a soul as yours?
Favillus. Ah! Ask not what this mischief's makers leave
But what th'inducement of those leavings draws!
Forsooth, it happen'd in the thirdmost act
When Antony's exhortions find their mark
The citizens of Rome provoked to arms
Declare their steely will, and vow to burn
The homes of those who dared to strike their king;
They cry out: "Fire!"
And from the walls return'd
An hundred thousand echos, whose bright ring
Awoke the sleeping dullards in the crowd
Whose ignorant and injudicious ears
Did think the word a warning, and take flight!
Ho! Baying and proclaiming as they fled
This scorching scourge that follow'd on their heels!
In chaos' wake I watched it, sore amazed:
The auditorium erupt in fear,
Its life, by but the sound of fire, was razed.
Lucius. Thy tale is all of woe! Come, give me cheer!
The players: did they carry on their play
And leave those doltish wastrels to their lot?
Favillus. Aye, there's the rub! The actors would not stay
To act, for that same fright which gripp'd the crowd
Sore shook them too, and threw them from the stage!
And thus the vicious circle that Will wrought
Saw that his show, the greatest of its age
By fate's familiar sword was cut off short.
Lucius. This was the most unkindest cut of all!
And thinkst thou that the theatre's arbiters
Will suffer it to be performed again?
Favillus. If not, then freedom's felt a grievous blow;
And yet it is that very worst I fear
For even now the court's convened to hear
The cretins' case. And that way too I go.
Lucius. No cretin you! So how then will you plead?
Favillus. I go not there to plead. I go to burn!
Or, leastways, minds with burning words to turn.
(exit)
Lucius. This is the way of fire; that subtle snake
Who curling at our feet doth seem no wrong
But by his poison pierc'd, no man can slake
The flame of fury at his forkèd tongue.
(curtain)
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Well it's that time of year again - finally, for just one day I can feel totally justified in munching my way through a nutrition-free fry-up in the name of tradition. But this year, prompted by a friend of mine who brought cake into the office to share, I thought I'd try something a little different. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... the Battenburg Pancake.
We'll do a quick pancake lesson while we're at it. Here's what you'll need:
Apart from milk, and possibly some other stuff.
First, toast some almonds over a medium heat until lightly browned and delicious:
Next, beat two eggs until, well, beaten, really. (If you for some reason can't or don't eat eggs, I really can't help you. This is all I know!) Add a pinch of baking powder and a pinch of salt as you do so. This is basically superstition but it doesn't hurt.
Then, add a bunch of plain flour. How much is a bunch? Well, some. Usually about four heaped spoonfulls per egg is enough. Sieve it to remove the lumps, and add it a bit at a time to the eggs. Mix it in with a fork. Don't use the whisk, it'll just get clogged straight away and you'll feel like an idiot.
At this point you should have a big stodgy lump of what is essentially dough. The next step is to thin that out into a batter using milk and/or water (I use about half and half). How much do you need? Enough to get it to the consistency of thick cream. Add it a little at a time. To be honest you can't go far wrong - if you add too much, you can sieve a little more flour in to compensate.
Now, for the inventive step. (Actually I'd be surprised if I was the first person to think of this, but it felt inventive to me.) Divide the mixture into two portions, like so:
Now add a few drops of red food colouring to one batch, and stir well to mix:
You can probably see where this is going now. The next thing to do is heat some oil in a decent frying pan. Lots of people go wrong here and use too much oil. Initially you might need a bit extra to coat the pan, but once it's up to temperature (which should be pretty hot) you can discard most of the oil. Hot oil isn't very exciting so I don't have a picture of it. But the next step towards your Battenburg Pancake is to make a cross in your frying pan out of batter, by pouring out two very thin lines:
Then you can fill in the four quadrants of the pan with the coloured batter, like so:
Then just treat it like a normal pancake - give it a quick flip once it's done on the first side, and maybe flip it back to finish off. Once on the plate, add the toasted almonds, a copious sprinkling of sugar and some citrus juice (I happened to have a Seville orange, but you could use lime or lemon with equal success). If you're feeling grown up, slosh on a bit of Amaretto Disaronno for an extra marzipan kick. Voila!
There are plenty of other variations on this theme you could try. For example, the "just munge it all in the pan together" version:
...and the Spiral of Archimedes:
I don't think Shrove Tuesday can ever coincide with Valentine's day, but if it ever did you could try this:
Go on! Impress your friends!
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As some readers of this august blog already know, and others may have guessed from the subject matter of the previous post, the hard-working staff of One Way Pendulum are shortly to be moving house. So shortly, in fact, that by the time you actually read this it may have already happened.
And because the server hosting said blog is well known to reside in the attic of the current domicile of said staff, you can also expect a certain amount of downtime as the whole things gets disassembled and thrown in the back of a van, then reassembled at the other end and reattached to the Internet connection which I have been assured will be made promptly available.
This is all going down tomorrow; which is to say that the server itself (a machine called "large", for reasons best known to myself) will be going down sometime later this evening, Wednesday, and then re-appearing tomorrow evening, Thursday, hopefully none the worse for wear. There may be some subsequent disruption as I faff about with the network cables (or whatever the wireless equivalent of cables is; I forget, which is kinda embarrassing since knowing stuff about wireless communications is how I make my living).
Now if you'll excuse me, I have things to put in boxes. Later!
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Worried, a woman rests
Weary on wooden steps
Cornered, a creature casts
Webs of acquaintance
Around and about her
Boxes and cases
Of cardboard and cellophane
Sneer at the empty shelves
Waiting impatient
For motion, for movement
Holding their memories
Still beneath spiders' threads
Draping ephemeral
Dust over everything
And her eyes water.
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I want you to read this, not because it's important, but because it's true, and because it's beautiful.
It's about infinity. Oh, there's more than one kind. You probably don't care too much about infinity. Neither do I, really. I mean, I've never been there (but the brochure looks nice). Anyway. It's impressive enough that our tiny finite minds can conceive of the infinite at all. But that a man could stare into that endless abyss without flinching, long enough to see shapes and forms there - that's intense. One of those things that brings you closer to the meaning of life.
You know you can start counting at 1 or (if you insist) at 0 or wherever and just keep on counting, adding one each time, until you get tired, and no-one will ever hit you with a lightning bolt and say "You there! Stop! That number's too damn big!". The numbers go on forever. We call it infinity mostly so we don't have to think too much about it. It probably scared you, the first time you found out about it. And you tried to think about infinity-plus-one, only to discover that that's infinity too.
But then you see there are some questions you can't answer. Think of the even numbers. Every other number is even. So there must be half as many even numbers as there are numbers, right? What is half of infinity? Still infinity? How so? Infinity doesn't seem to work like a regular number? Ah, but you can see why it is, easily enough, if you twist it around a bit. It's like counting socks. You can pair them up, because for every number n there is an even number 2n:
1 : 2 2 : 4 3 : 6 4 : 8 ...
There's an even number for every number. Infinity equals infinity again. Isn't that neat?
You can play a lot of tricks like that, if you have a mind to. Cantor did. He had a mind and a half. And he tried it with "real" numbers - things like 0.5 and 3.1415926 that sit there in between the counting numbers, the integers. There seem to be many, many more of these. Perhaps there are an infinite number of real numbers between each integer? That would be, what, infinity times infinity? I wonder what that could be?
Well, it's different. It's another kind of infinity.
Another kind!
And you can understand why, easy. It's a beautiful proof - probably my favourite of all. A child can understand it. It makes my heart bounce a little every time I remember it. And it goes like this. Let's pretend we can play the sock-pairing game again, and match every integer up with a real number. Doesn't matter how. Assume we can come up with some rule so that each pure innocent integer gets its dirty dance partner. And let's imagine this table we thus draw up, in all its infinite glory. It goes on infinitely downwards, and infinitely to the right (because many of our real numbers, like Pi, have representations that go on for ever). But we can handle that. A small portion of that table might look like this:
1 : 0.120000... 2 : 0.234566... 3 : 0.314159... 4 : 0.454545... ...
There's a real number for every integer. Or is there?
You might have spotted that some of the digits in that table are in bold. This is the key to the other kind of infinity. It's called Cantor's Diagonal Argument. Imagine taking the numbers of that never-ending diagonal, incrementing them by one (with 9+1 becoming 0) and building a new real number out of them. In this case, it would start 0.2456... (because 1+1 = 2, 3+1 = 4, 4+1 = 5...). Now, we have an infinite table which, we thought, contained every single real number. This one we just made up - where does it fit in?
Clearly, it can't be the first number in the list - because they differ in the first digit.
Clearly, it can't be the second number in the list - because they differ in the second digit.
Clearly, it can't be the third number in the list... Damn! It can't be ANY number in the list, because by the very method we constructed it, it's guaranteed to be different from all of them! It must be missing from the list: the list wasn't complete after all. We've contradicted ourselves. And tracing back through our reasoning, this means that the shakey assumption we made - the idea that we could ever construct this kind of table - was false. There just aren't enough integers to to index the reals. Put another way: some numbers are more infinite than others.
Put another way: there is more than one kind of infinity.
How many kinds? I could hazard a guess.
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Next
The Vengeance of Rome by Michael Moorcock. That Pyatnitski chap is at it once more - blundering through history in a stupendous fog of self-delusion and sleeping with anything that isn't nailed down. Possibly including Hitler.
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