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Stephen Fry as Huffy Jeeves.
Jeeves is amazingly capable of radiating disapproval and offence in total silence.
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So, the gig stand I got yesterday came with a warning that, if used for ongoing holding of an electric guitar, risks burning the polyurethane [edit:] nitro-cellulose lacquer [/edit] finish by reaction between the rubber and the finish.
So, I wrapped the rubber on the gig stand with paper tape I had in the house.
However, today I found that the paper had let glue through, which was marring my guitar.
CAN NOT BE BORNE.
So, I congratulated myself on my decision not to throw away some soft flannel pyjama pants that tore a few weeks ago, in case I needed rags. The guys at the guitar shop use pieces of cloth to protect the guitars. I cut pieces off one leg, and wrapped them around the supports. The tape is indeed tacky, and is holding it in place within reason, and I've got some safety pins (carefully placed to avoid touching the guitar ever) to hold them there as well, just so I don't have to worry about them falling off when I'm trying to put the guitar away.
A different piece of the soft cloth was also useful for polishing off the glue that was already on it.
Sorted!
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So, they're closed today, it being a Sunday, but tomorrow I need to call my guitar dudes, because I'm wondering if there's something wrong with the electronics on my guitar.
If the pickup selector switch is in the middle, so both pickups are on, and you turn down the volume control for the neck pickup, it turns off *both* pickups. But both pickups work fine if checked separately with the selector switch.
Meanwhile, I read the owner's manual this morning. Gibson appear to produce a general manual for all guitars - so half of the booklet on mine is about the Robotic Guitar, which is apparently self-tuning.
It looks really complicated, with many, many pages of instructions and so on, and special instructions for restringing the damn thing... all for a self-tuning guitar.
Tuning a guitar is not that hard, especially these days, with electronic tuners. I tune my Gibson by clipping a little widget to the headstock, plucking the strings, and having it tell me what note I'm playing and how far it is from the correct frequency on a cute little display. Certainly it seems an awful lot easier than dealing with this robotic stuff, plus it means you get to pick the rest of your guitar's features at whim. I can maybe see a use for it if you want to get heavy with a tremolo arm (that wah-wah bar that some electric guitars have), which can push the strings out of tune... except the Gibson Robotic Guitars don't appear to have tremolo arms. (Also, Brian May managed to overcome that problem with some ingenuity about bridge design decades ago.)
Hmm, lunchtime. (I slept late.)
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Okay, so, here's the thing: I want to post about a pet peeve. However, the term I'm going to use is problematic for several members of my readership, guaranteed.
See, the pet peeve is: women who hate feminists.
However, there's a certain amount of term-definition required for "feminists", because there are a lot of feminists who also totally suck, and who are very loud in their sucking, and can, I know, seem to be What Feminists Are.
The problem here is not feminism, the problem is them.
See, feminism, to me, is kind of a legacy term, in some ways, not exactly an accurate representation of the movement to advocate equality between the sexes, and problematic in the way it's become linked, for some people, with some seriously problematic behaviour by some feminists. Some people argue it neds to be retired, as a term, but I dislike "womanism" pretty strongly - it's heading in the wrong direction, if you ask me. Possibly I should talk more in terms of, say, anti-sexism, because my view is that the social structure we live in, with its assumptions about gender that, overall, privilege men is nonetheless deeply harmful to men as well as women.
The trouble with a lot of feminists is that they don't recognise intersectionality, and even if they do, nonetheless privilege advocacy on behalf of middle-class able-bodied cisgendered white heterosexual women, arguing that it's a distraction from the Important Issues to concentrate on issues that only affect non-white women, or disabled women, or trans women, or lesbians, etc.
Which, to me, is bullshit, because it's either for all women or it's just a substitution of oppressive hierarchies.
(I'm also irritated by so-called feminists who are anti-men in general. Individual men are not the problem.)
But a lot of women who identify as feminists identify as my kind of feminists - recognising that the other forms of oppression are important too, if only because these things feed into each other - you either take them all on or none of them, because even if you take on sexism full force, racism is going to be shoring it up even as you do so, because sexism feeds racism and racism feeds sexism.
(Yes, obviously you also do it because it's the right thing to do, but I'm trying to stay in the area of pragmatic reasoning, rather than abstract idealism.)
And when you bag on feminists, and make snotty remarks about the very idea that feminists could also be good people, then you are, in fact, not helping - if anything, you're aiding the existing power structure, aiding the Patriarchy.
The Patriarchy isn't just misogynistic, you know - the hierarchy of personal worth that it represents is also racist, classist, intolerant of anyone who isn't a cisgendered heterosexual, and hostile to anyone who doesn't conform. It also hurts men, enforcing gender norms that are bad for men.
That shit has got to go.
So where feminism is doing you wrong, okay, call it out. Demand that feminism be better. Expect more. But don't bag on the very idea that feminists could have a sense of humour, that feminists could be making a good point, that feminists could be people worth knowing. Constructive criticism, like, say, "feminism is unresponsive to the issues of non-white women, which is both racist and exclusionary," can only make feminism better, but if your ultimate point is only, "feminists are man-hating humourless ugly bulldykes with hairy legs", then shut the hell up.
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A wetlands bird, taken at Perth Zoo.
( Image cut. )
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