Still playing after an accident

I now have a USB microphone along with my USB guitar cable. Hopefully I will soon have new recordings available of my original songs. I am currently singing and playing guitar better live than ever before, much better than anything yet recorded or posted anywhere. Wish me luck on my recording myself using my notebook computer's sound card. Maybe someday I'll be recorded by professionals using professional equipment!

I had a bit of a spill on June 1 riding home from playing at a local bar. The accident was caused by catastrophic equipment failure. What I think happened is the old brittle plastic of the clamp to my bicycle lock had a hidden crack that was split by the tightening screw acting like a wedge. The clamp split, the lock tangled with my pedal, and my face hit the pavement a second later. My glasses were smashed, my face was torn and required stitches, my guitar took a hit but still plays (although I worry it seems to not stay in tune as well or as long as before the accident), and my bicycle required two hundred dollars of repair costs in parts and labor.

I didn't ride at all in June and didn't play as much publicly either, but I practiced more at home while waiting for bicycle parts and new glasses. In July I played many places, especially the Till It Shines coffee shop and the Kodiak bar. My practice seems to have paid off because I am getting more compliments than ever on my playing from total strangers walking up and telling me I sound good. Yay.

The Bicycling Guitarist on BrickLink

Now you can get your very own models of The Bicycling Guitarist! All parts are genuine Lego except for the double-cutaway electric guitar made by BrickForge. Visit The Bicycling Guitarist store at Bricklink.com!

It's been more than five months since my last blog post!

That's longer than I had thought. I still perform my music some Tuesdays at a local "open mike" night (the Jersey Lilly), but no longer every Tuesday there as I did for most of last summer, fall and the first half of winter. I still play other places too such as the Mystic Earth metaphysical bookstore and Till It Shines coffee shop.

For the first time in thirty years of bicycle guitaring, beginning in February this year I have a place to ride and play indoors when it is too cold and wet to play outside. To watch me doing this, check my most recent YouTube video. A local middle school let me use their gymnasium for one hour a night, two nights a week. Then they cut me back to one night a week, but allowed an hour and a half. This may end soon, but the weather is becoming nice enough for me to start riding and playing outdoors again. Hopefully next winter I will be able to ride and play indoors again.

Last Saturday (April 7) I played my guitar along to the selections of other customers on the jukebox at a local bar (the Kodiak, formerly known as The Beaver Den). After a while I went up to select a few songs myself to play with, and to my delight saw that The Beatles finally have their songs available for digital jukeboxes! For the first time ever I played along to Help! and Blackbird from a jukebox and the crowd loved it. Later I found out a lot of The Beatles' music was released to 50,000 jukeboxes starting April 1.

My ancestry

My family tree has been traced back quite a ways, much farther than some people admit. I didn't do the genealogy work myself though. I had thousands of scientists working the past hundred fifty years or so do it all for me. Much has been learned especially the past twenty years about the cladistic relationships of my ancestors. Some of the old descriptions about my family history still often quoted (fish to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, reptiles to mammals, etc.) are actually wrong.

I don't know too much from before my ancestors became vertebrates, but about 375 million years ago, maybe as long as 400 million years ago, some of my fishy ancestors evolved to "fishapods", perfectly intermediate between fish and tetrapods. Others of my fishy ancestors remained fish. Many died out but some evolved to become the fish of today. Relatively soon after tetrapods made their way onto land, some of them evolved to become amphibians, while others became amniotes.

Some of the amniotes became synapsids and some became sauropsids (leading to reptiles and birds). Some of the synapsids evolved to become mammals. Some of those mammals eventually became monkeys. Some of the monkeys became apes; many died out, others evolved to become the monkeys of today. Some apes became hominids, many died out, some evolved to become the modern apes other than the great apes. Most hominids died out, but some of them evolved to become the great apes of today (Orangutans, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Humans). Modern humans are a species of ape but still a highly-derived fish if you go back far enough.

Two of my most famous ancestors are Tiktaalik, one of those "fishapods" from the late Devonian period, and Australopithecus afarensis, much much much more recent (only about 3.5 million years ago). Now it may be that neither of these are actually my direct ancestors. They could have been side branches of my ancestral family tree that died out without leaving any descendants. However, they are most definitely family.

My quotation had changed!

I just discovered that for some of my site's web pages and multimedia files I had accidentally written "When you run over sharps, you get flats!" instead of "When you ride over sharps, you get flats!" One little word difference. Now I can't decide if I like the changed version better. I suppose the original "ride over sharps" makes more sense to emphasize that I play guitar while riding a bicycle, instead of "run over sharps" as if one were in a car or something.

Even the title in the html code of the new album's web page had the name wrong. I changed all instances back to the original form to be consistent, but I may have missed a few places on the internet besides my web site. Oops.

Worst season for bicycle guitaring? Fall!

Jest kidding. Actually Fall frequently has good weather for playing guitar while riding a bicycle. The title of this post is a bad pun. Here's another. In a songwriter's forum on the internet a few years back Mike McLaughlin quipped "What's the hardest thing about playing guitar on a bike? The pavement!" To which I replied: "Ouch, Mike. My asphalt to the ground!"

For a while recently I was posting every week about what songs I played at various public places. Even posting every week wasn't enough to describe all the places I've been playing the past seven weeks. For about six or seven weeks I have been participating every Tuesday in the open mike night at Charley's BBQ followed by the Jersey Lilly bar later that night. I haven't played the coffee shops or bookstores as much the past couple weeks as I had a few weeks further back, but I have gone to the city park more often and many people have seen me there.

I am saddened by the recent tragedy at the Reno National Championship Air Races. Last Friday one of the most awesome Unlimited racers ever built apparently suffered a mechanical failure and nose dived into the ground at high speed near VIP box seating on the tarmac. The Galloping Ghost was going nearly five hundred miles an hour just before the accident. It shattered into a million tiny pieces and a big cloud of dust. At least ten people are dead and fifty more injured (my numbers might be off a bit).

While this is a tragedy, I hope it does not lead to the end of Air Racing as we know it. Yes, the crowd fatalities are unfortunate, but that is the risk one takes when going to such an event. Also, these are the first spectator casualties in the forty-six year history of the event. A mechanical failure of a plane going five hundred miles an hour a hundred feet above the ground could result in the plane going anywhere. Odds are it would go down in the desert, but not this time. I offer my condolences and best wishes for the victims of this tragedy, including the friends and family of Jimmy Leeward, the pilot of the doomed Mustang.

Rocking the Jersey Lilly

At five p.m. I started the evening at the open mike night of Charley's BBQ, as I have the past few Tuesday nights. I was first on the list because I got there early, and after the house band played a while I performed Freedom and Logger Rhythm. Later I got another turn and performed Early Morning Hours. I asked for adjustment to the sound for the last song (some distortion, less bass), and it went better than the first two, but all were good.

Afterwards I went to the Jersey Lilly for their open mike night that starts at nine p.m. I got there shortly after eight, and rode around a bit in their parking lot playing guitar on my bicycle before going inside. Again I was first on the list. I started with Legalize. A drummer joined me for that song, then I asked him to let me perform solo and he did. I played Logger Rhythm and Early Morning Hours here too, and Dust in the Wind by Kansas.

Then I got some distortion and played Long Hair (another of my originals) and closed with Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith. This was one of the best public performances of my life so far, and it was very well received.