Perfect Pitch

Posted on 22 May 2021 by Larry Russwurm

“I want you two to hear my latest musical fave,” I said to Mr. And Mrs. Tunic.

I began playing Heat Above. Keyboards started the song. “It’s Greta Van Fleet. Their latest song. It doesn’t sound like Led Zeppelin but it’s good just the same.”

Drums came on and that led to guitars, where rather obviously, Mrs. Tunic’s face fell flat. Then she spoke, “I can’t listen to this music. It has screeching guitars.”

“What’s wrong with that?” I asked rather innocently.

“I have perfect pitch. Guitars are almost never tuned fully and completely. And even when they are, the strings have to be bent to change notes and that makes the notes off from perfect even further. It’s very irritating when you have perfect pitch like myself.”

Not knowing what to do with my music being insulted in this way, I just let the music play some more. I thought to myself if it’s that irritating she will just leave.

Mr Tunic spoke up. “And I have perfect time which is irritated by guitar music as well.”

“How so?” I asked, stunned that there are two afflictions that are irritated by the simple guitar.

“Guitarists seem to think that they strike the chord notes at the same time. But it’s not instantaneous. They may be correct at the first note hit, but the rest of the chord is off from the time of the song. This bothers me to no end. At least when music uses arpeggios, they bother to keep the time correct. Not so in strumming. It bothers me.”

It was at this point that I started to think about the third basic parameter of music, other than pitch and time.

“And my husband has perfect timing as well,” said Mrs, Tunic. “He knows when to back up his lady.” The pair then broke into a kiss.

I waited for them to finish then said. “And I have perfect volume.”

Mr. Tunic started, “That’s not a thi-”

“That’s where I slowly increase the volume of my music until it reaches that perfect volume that drives away pretentious A-holes.” I slowly turned up the music.

They took a minute to gauge what was going on. Then, “Fine, fine,” said the couple and left the room.

And that’s how I found the perfect volume for Heat Above. Now I only play it at that volume.

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The Ontario Whale

Posted on 15 May 2021 by Larry Russwurm

Take a look at this drawing of Ontario. Doesn’t it look a bit like a whale. Lake Nipigon is it’s large almost cartoonish eye. Perhaps the western part looks too angular to be a head but squint your eyes and you will see it like I do. Then Southern Ontario becomes its tail.

It mostly makes sense, too. What other beast would you use to describe Ontario which has a full one third of all Canadians? It is the massive whale of the country. And the part that propels it along is the tail. And indeed Southern Ontario has the massive population to propel this rather large beast along.

Negative Nellies in Northern Ontario might say that Southern Ontario is the $#!++!&$+ part of the province. But that only strengthens the position of Ontario being a whale.

Naysayers might postulate that Ontario is just a fish with its tail being broad in the same plane as the head. I say it is a whale, just that it is twisted and accidentally looks like a fish from this 2-D view.

What about the Southwestern Ontario elephant? Well it is still partly visible, even in this primitive sketch. Perhaps the Ontario whale swallowed this smaller beast long ago and it is now mostly in its tail region.

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Practice Makes Perfect

Posted on 8 May 2021 by Larry Russwurm

We’ve all heard the saying practice makes perfect. And we all mulled on it for a few seconds and thought well that makes sense. But have we elevated the saying to be the prime directive of sports? Why no we haven’t. This site believes that we should.

Let’s take 5 pin bowling. A so called perfect game is 12 strikes in a row. Only 12 shots. Whereas a person that gets no strikes or spares takes 30 shots. Obviously the person with no strikes or spares gets the most practice. If practice makes perfect, we must somehow elevate them to be the winner. We can’t have the bowler with the least practice winning the game with their show off 450 points. So I suggest we do something different.

The person that gets the most shots is ranked highest. So thirty shots with no strikes or spares is the best. After that we decide by the most points. The best you can do with thirty shots is get 150 points. So after calculating the most shots, then the closest to 150 points, wins.

The bonus of this new bowling is finally I will be able to compete with some of the best bowlers at this game. I suspect they will grandstand and throw two gutter balls each frame so the third has to be a strike. I’ll just plod along and hope I can get close to 150.

With practice makes perfect being the prime directive, games with a goalkeeper like soccer and hockey might now be decided by which team gets the most shots on net. That ought to change things up. In fact they might as well get rid of their goalies. A warning though. The scores may now be almost as high as a basketball game. This has the added bonus of making soccer fun to watch.

Most racing will have to change. For example the fastest car in most races spends the least time on the track. In other words it gets the least practice. So races will have to change to winning by distance. Like Le Mans, the winner will be the car that goes the furthest in a set amount of time. In the case of Le Mans that is 24 hours.

The fastest sprinter in track and field might now measure the distance they run in 10 seconds. The high jump is one of the few sports that would not have to change much. You’d get 3 tries at each height regardless of succeeding. But you would only move on to a higher jump if you were successful in one of your three tries. The highest jumper would have more turns than any other.

Golf would have to do something similar. They would be given a set amount of shots and the player who got through the most holes would be the winner. This way not every golf course in the world would have 18 holes. Par for the course might be set at par for 18 holes. The best golfers might get 21 or 22 holes.

Obviously we have made a world where practice doesn’t make perfect. But if we elevate practice makes perfect to a prime directive of sports, things will change. Some changes will be for the better, like me being able to compete with the best bowlers. Some changes will just be weird.

But, if you’re sick of the same old games with the same outcomes, this new prime directive ought to keep even old pros on their toes.

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The Ontario-Wide Financial Paradox

Posted on 1 May 2021 by Larry Russwurm

Ontario-Wide Financial has been advertising on television quite often lately. Their ad doesn’t apply to me so mostly I tried to ignore it. But then I accidentally watched it with discernment one day.

They declare in the voice-over that they are not a bank. On the screen it says, “Ontario-Wide Financial isn’t a bank.” Then a line strokes out “isn’t a bank”. Which means that Ontario-Wide Financial is a bank. But the voice-over said they weren’t a bank.

Normally I would just have fun with this. I might say it is a modern day paradox whether Ontario-Wide Financial is a bank or not. Or that it is like Schrodinger’s cat which is simultaneously alive or dead until you collapse the wave function by opening the box. Or I might finally end with: usually a verbal agreement (you believing the voice-over) is superseded by the written contract (what you saw written out in front of you), so Ontario-Wide Financial is indeed a bank.

But this is Canada where there are specific laws for the rights and obligations of banks. For instance, when Toronto Dominion Bank bought out Canada Trust years ago, Canada Trust had a large real estate arm. TD Bank was obligated to sell this arm because banks, in Canada, aren’t allowed to own property. Indeed this goes so far that the brick and mortar branches of banks are leased from real estate companies.

Anyhow, Ontario-Wide Financial should have some explaining to do to the regulator of banks. Claiming they are a bank when in fact they will not act like one, is a serious offense. They should be advised to clear up this misunderstanding immediately. Maybe it was just a mistake by their marketing division. If so, I would expect a retraction of the ad posthaste. Or a new version without the strike through of “isn’t a bank”.

And maybe just maybe, if they don’t clean up the confusion of the ad, I could hire a lawyer and perhaps make some pocket change from them in court. Maybe their ad does apply to me after all. And it’s not a paradox at all – just a money making scheme for me.

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Tan and Other Racial Things I Didn’t Know Were Racial

Posted on 24 April 2021 by Larry Russwurm

It just came to me the other day that the colour tan is racial. I just thought it meant light brown as a colour. It never occurred to me that this name had anything to do with the concept of getting a tan. It is whites who get a light brown tan. Brown people get dark brown tans. So tan for a lot of people would be dark brown.

Then it occurred to me that band-aids are tan. In other words they are the colour of whites in the summer time. I can’t believe this racial colouring wasn’t used to sell more band-aids in the winter time, especially years ago to the white majority of the first world. They could have made a soft peach colour for these other band-aids so vain whites would have on hand twice as many band-aids.

Since band-aids have been outed as racial in colour, I think the band-aid companies should solely make colourful designs. They could become the stamps of the body with packages aimed at collectors of all stripes. People could tell each other why they chose certain band-aids. This on top of making the world more colourful.

So what am I to do now that I’ve lost the colour tan? I could call the colour camel, but is this just painting the colour of camels with one brush? Are there no other colours of camel in the world? You would think there would be if something as drastic as a hump can come singly or in a set of two. Tentatively I will use camel as my word.

I am reminded of being a kid and never having a clue of any ethnic differences or stereotypes. Yet I was unknowingly using slurs. Gypped was our word for ripped off. When you went back on a deal, you welshed on the deal. When you bartered someone down in price you chewed them down. When you loaned something and the other party said they thought you gave something forever, you were an Indian giver if you said you wanted it back.

These are all ethnic slurs and notice that they all have something to do with money. Don’t use these slurs. I have managed to avoid these for decades because first of all I did know all were slang and just stopped using slang at a certain point. Now I will knowingly avoid these words.

Here I happened to be reading a Far Side collection from 1989 called Wildlife Preserves. On page 93 Gary Larson uses the word gyp. I’m not sure if he realized it was a slur – the big clue that it is racist is the spelling.

I can just see certain members of the right wing saying “Don’t cancel Far Side for one slur.” In fact, some of these people might search out Wildlife Preserves in order to “save” it.

I just think it telling that the whitest of the white used to name negative transactions after ethnic groups. Usually when whites had more money. Were they like Trump, trying to take the little money that group had away so they could swim in it?

By the way, the spellchecker I am using to write this recognized “welshed” as a verb and not welched as I originally spelled it. It also recognized gypped. Are spellcheckers racist? They have some power in this regard and I would say, yes, they are racist.

Regardless, those words have more or less fallen into disuse. Progress may be slow in racial matters but it is progressing.

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Superman Clothes Under Clark Kent’s Suit

Posted on 17 April 2021 by Larry Russwurm

How many times have I seen Clark Kent start to leap into action by pulling back his suit on his chest revealing the Superman S? Many times is the answer. I bet you’ve seen this before, too, dear reader. I never questioned it until recently.

Does Clark Kent wear this double suit home from the office during heat waves? That would be brutal. And before someone says that he has an alien physiology, remember this alien has been posing as human for decades with no one being any wiser. Surely Clark Kent has had many opportunities to sweat. I bet Superman can sweat and might have to sweat in order to avoid overheating.

Even if he doesn’t sweat, his body would become overheated in the heat. Surely Lois would have noticed this in the hundreds of times Superman has picked her up while rescuing her. She would have said something like “Superman, you’re so hot!”

Maybe the Superman suit has advanced technology to prevent the wearer from overheating. But could it cool under the conditions portrayed in all the Superman stories? Air conditioning creates more heat than cooling. The reason air conditioners work is because the heat is made outside the volume to be cooled. That suit stuck inside another suit is not going to provide any cooling. It’s waste heat would be trapped by Clark’s business suit.

So Superman would likely cook if he wears a double suit. I think we have enough knowledge now to call BS on the idea of Superman wearing his suit under a suit.

Even if we couldn’t, there is the little problem of wrinkling. If he is wearing a superman suit under a business suit the question is how does the cape fit in? The answer is that it doesn’t fit neatly inside. Instead it must be getting wrinkled in some obvious way. Obvious enough so people would notice.

The people around might start making jokes. “Superman’s good but he’s no Ironman.” Or “He’s like Dorian Gray. He’s been around since 1938 but all the wrinkles that should be on him are on his cape instead!” Or if a case is taking a long time to solve, “This case is going slow because of all the new wrinkles Superman finds.”

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Scourge of the Twenties

Posted on 10 April 2021 by Larry Russwurm

I guess I should have known that no good would happen when I let off some long pent up steam in one of my posts years ago. That post, Scourge of the Nineties, aimed to show modern people the problem with living in the nineties. That’s because car alarms weren’t installed properly and would go off at inopportune times. I naively thought this had been fixed everywhere simply because I hadn’t heard one for years.

Then someone moved in to the building next door with an improperly installed car alarm. I am well aware of this because my apartment overlooks their parking lot. I have heard it many, many times. And the owner can’t be bothered to get to it right away so it goes on for a couple minutes every single time.

I’ve racked my brain for a solution but haven’t been able to come up with a good one easily. First of all, I thought of assassination. But with the owner dead, that car alarm is going to just go off for an ungodly amount of time before someone figures out how to stop those horrible noises it makes.

My second idea would be to break in and disable the car alarm itself. What an ironic response to a car alarm. I was thinking of wrecking the alarm and leaving the car alone. It’s just that I don’t know that much about cars or car alarms. So even though the owner takes a long response time, undoubtedly they’d be on time to see me and my wrench working away on the car. I’d have to run to avoid being caught.

Remember I wanted to leave the car alone. But the irresponsible owner has painted me into a corner. I have to get the word out on the street that despite the car alarm it will be an easy to steal car in that parking lot. Yes, it has an alarm but everyone who might be able to stop the act of theft will not, as per usual, act. You see at this point, the car alarm is like white noise to the listeners, since they have heard it so frequently.

Anyhow a professional car thief will be able to turn off the car alarm and drive away with their prize. Long before Mr. I’ll Turn My Car Alarm Off When I’m Good And Ready gets to the scene.

I just hope the car thief doesn’t leave the car alarm installed in the car and leave my problem to a new neighbourhood. One where the paranoid, alarm loving owner buys hot automobiles (more irony). But hey, the problem will be out of my neighbourhood.

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The Space Escalator

Posted on 3 April 2021 by Larry Russwurm

By now, many people have heard of the space elevator. It is basically an incredibly strong cable that is attached to the earth at the equator, that goes past geostationary orbit and has a counter weight at its other end. The force on the counterweight matches the force of gravity pulling it down so the cable remains taught and goes straight up from the earth. To finish the space elevator, just put a car on it that is capable of climbing the cable.

Now, if we make the car see through, those that fear heights even slightly will be petrified of the ride. Considering the ride is going to take a couple of days we can’t allow the sheer terror of the ride.

Similarly, if we make the elevator car opaque, people with the slightest bit of a tendency toward claustrophobia will be rendered almost catatonic. There must be a better way.

I propose a space escalator.

A space escalator would be a stairway. The stairway wouldn’t have to extend all the way to the top of the cable. Nor would the stairs even have to move. As long as the stairway itself moves up, relative to the cable, we have our space escalator.

For efficiency sake, I suggest we make the stairway just one story high. It would have its own power source and could climb the cable.

I must admit, when I first thought of this I was a purist and thought that the passenger and payload would have to hold on for dear life. But I realize now that it is better for the stairway to have a floor and some walls to hold the payload in. At first I imagined the passenger in a space suit holding on to the hand rails.

I have rethought this. Since we are already using a floor and some walls, why not make those walls clear and also have a roof. Yes the whole opaque stairway would be fully enclosed with air to breath for the passenger. They wouldn’t need a spacesuit now, just for an emergency.

Notice how the opaque or see through elevator car has been solved for by the space escalator!

And many of you did not realize that this stairway to heaven was first proposed to us in the sci fi song Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. The only down side is that someone might play the music to this song in a loop for the whole couple days it takes to ride this space escalator.

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Meat For Vegetarians

Posted on 27 March 2021 by Larry Russwurm

By now everyone has had a Beyond Meat burger or other plant based replacements for meat. The taste is wonderful and I think meat finally has an acceptable alternative. My only problem with Beyond Meat’s offering is that you can tell it’s not as many calories as the meat, so you need more food to finish off the meal.

I imagine many vegetarians like this product. All those years of hating themselves for liking the smell of cooking meat can finally make sense. They were just preparing themselves for the dawn of true meat alternatives. Now, when they have a craving for meat, they can drown their sorrow in a meatless alternative.

Many vegetarians who are looking down the road, see the day when they can even have as many calories as with a burger. It of course will taste exactly like meat because it is meat. I’m talking vat grown meat. Scientists are sure they can produce meat without a mother, it’s just a matter of getting the cost down. That is likely in our future.

All that true meat flavour and calories – mmm mmm. But what if I were to tell you there was a way to get the meat taste, along with all the calories? And you could get it today!

The meat I’m talking about does indeed have a mother but the baby is never killed. Which ought to make it literally palatable to vegetarians. Some types of lizards can regrow their tails. Why not farm the creatures?

You wouldn’t even have to harm the creatures while harvesting their meat. There is a process called autotomy where the creature is scared so badly that it drops its tail. The tail then squirms and moves for a while which is supposed to distract predators as the rest of the creature gets away.

Imagine harvesting these tails every couple months in a farm situation. You could breed them for ease in scaring their tails off. You could place a giant gong in the barn and every couple months (because that’s how long it takes them to grow a tail) you could hit the gong as loudly as possible and then just harvest the tails.

This ought to satisfy most vegetarian concerns about killing or hurting the animals. There might be some risk of the gong causing so much fear it leads to post traumatic stress disorder. This, too, could possibly be bred out of the creatures.

And because eating the meat doesn’t kill the owner, you could introduce different diets to its owner until you get just the taste you want.

Then you could advertise with some famous vegetarian philanderer. He might say, “That’s the best piece of tail I’ve ever had!”

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Larry Russwurm – the Rapping DJ

Posted on 20 March 2021 by Larry Russwurm

I’ve always wanted to be a part of the music industry and now I think I have solved the mystery of how to be signed and trendy. I will call myself ‘the rapping DJ’.

Before watching the Ellen show a couple weeks ago, I would have hesitated to use the word ‘rapper’ to describe my style. But they had a young fellow on there and introduced him as a rapper and he sang a song. As he started to sing I said to myself ‘oh he’ll rap a a chorus or maybe a stanza’. I listened to the song all the way through and he didn’t rap anything.

Then I got to thinking about Drake and that he has put out music without any rapping whatsoever on it. He has complained that it is put in the rap category regardless. Since Drake outsells normal singers 2:1, I think this is a bankable injustice.

DJs also get caught not DJing. Moby made a lot of money selling his music. As did Fatboy Slim. As did the late Avicii. Ostensibly these three were DJs who ended up making millions off of normal music.

I guess, to the young ear, DJ is just a buzz word meaning cool. Rapping, too, has come to mean cool as well.

Just like Drake, those DJ musicians outsell normal musicians at roughly a 2:1 rate. So I think I will combine the two titles and hopefully outsell good musicians at a 4:1 rate.

Some might ask about my rapping skills. I will just say that I have been an unmetered, non rhyming rapper for 52 years. As for my DJ skills, I have, of course DJed with two turntables, a mixer and the whole bit. Because it wasn’t in public means nothing at all. I will say that I don’t wish to sully my skills by showing them off.

Then, to make sure no one is judging my rapping abilities by song lyrics, I will make sure I have no song lyrics. That is, I will put out instrumentals.

Really I think the sky is the limit for my music. I will make it true with my new titles.

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