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Sonny Meets Hawk! by Sonny Rollins (1963) https://album.link/s94wfwvvrgh6z Example: Sonny, Hawk. Hawk, Sonny. Nice to meet you. Good colab. They play with themes and sounds back and forth the entire album. With some experimental things going on as well.

As others have reported, a bit of a heat wave here yesterday. What better time to stand in the sun and eat funnel cakes at a county fair (elephant ears were sadly out of stock - damn you West Coast)? In a sign of the times, about half the animals on display as normal due to the bird flu. As a stabilizing influence, every band still knowns Tom Petty. if you’re curious about the disadvantages of using an old lens without modern coatings…

I'm not sure this was ever mentioned (search comes up empty) and it kind of came and went without substantial buzz outside the LGBTQ+ community, but Gentleman Jack (Max),from way back in Covid Daze, is worth a watch. Props for not always going the pleasing route. Criticism for occasionally going the ridiculous direction.

In 1996, a then 19 year old woman founded "Haven" a goth night hosted at Club Metro in Northampton MA. I was there in the first year. I still have a flyer from a 1997 event ...somewhere. Club Metro became Diva's at some point, and was the biggest gay nightclub in the area. Space-wise it was the biggest nightclub period. In 2006, Haven celebrated their 10th anniversary and it was insane. I have alluded to the fact that I have taken a fair amount of shit for the nightclub photos I took in the mid 00s. This got stuck in my craw and I (as I am wont to due) overrated a bit. There's a lot to unpack here and most of it is, to be frank, fucking irrelevant. The bottom line is that a lot of freaky shit happened at goth night, I gleefully took photos of it and posted them online. I got rather puritanical reactions from a number of people in the local nightclub scene, earning me a reputation as some kind of leering pervert. In the fall of 2007, I made ~1500 photos private because I was tired of hearing about it. As I have said before my edits to many of the photos I took were crap, primarily because I thought it was a good idea to crop in super close, with zero regard to aspect ratio and framing. Bad editing definitely made the situation worse. Now with nearly two decades of reflection, I've concluded that yes many of the photos were without merit, the reaction against them was primarily from assholes, and I am remarkably bad at not taking things personally. With that said, here's Haven's 10th anniversary. There will be some titty. When I get to a later photo set from Haven, there will be a lot of titty. You have been warned. Diva's had remarkably crap lighting. They had a bunch of flat mirror scanners set to "synchronized spaz" and two 1000W strobes that went off irregularly. The combination made for the worst imaginable source for available light photography. This shot is 1 second with the camera placed on a railing. I should add that all of these photos are ISO50, because at this point I didn't know how to adjust the ISO setting on my PowerShot(!) See the woman in the far left? In '06 I cropped the image to just be here ...resulting in something that would barely be a thumbnail today. She's still the subject of the image, now she just has some context. This is The Enigma. He's a heavily body modified performer. He's actually quite a showman. The goths ate up his schtick. He hammered a nail up one of his nostrils. He ran a drill up the other one. He blasted himself in the face with an angle grinder. He pumped a bottle of what he said was Windex up his nose. People went back to dancing. This guy is not the founder of Haven, but he was the main DJ for many years. He's like 6'5 and rail thin. I used to call him "The Alpha Goth." I know him a bit. He's dedicated to his craft, but we have some ...philosophical and creative differences. The two main people behind Haven. They had a falling out as some point. This photo is absolutely terrible from a technical perspective, but documents the moment in time. I did say there would be titty. 1/8 second handheld. 2 second exposure of discarded Champagne glasses. I really like these two shots. My friend Felicia has been a belly dancer for decades. She did a performance. None of these shots are very good, but they do capture he abilities. Back to dancing. 1.6 seconds with the camera on a railing again. I think someone bumped it. Neat effect. There was one guy with a pair of glowsticks. I took a number of long exposures of him with the camera on a railing. To the credit of Diva's, they had all sorts of places to place a camera. The Enigma is back. Now he's got Peaches with him. Things are about to get interesting. She's got a bed of nails. They also smashed the watermelon Gallagher style, and I utterly failed to capture it. Part of the act was "force feeding" Peaches some of the watermelon. I missed that as well. Thank you for attending Haven's 10th!

Last night we saw Simple Minds....super show. Really impressed with how strong Jim Kerr's voice still is and how good a shape the gent is in. Modern English was the first act and did a great job. Soft Cell, unfortunately, was a bit of a disappointment. Can't help but wonder if they need a better sound engineer. Overall, great show and nice to run into some old friends. HS

Yessssss! HS

Good to see audio gear still outranks practical realities like space.

A simple breakfast, however, one of the high school boys that works at the store on weekends brought me fresh eggs from his chickens. He wanted to bring something, because he really appreciates the food I bring on Saturdays. There really is a big difference in taste. These were layed yesterday. More than I can say for myself.

Aliexpress r-core turned up. It will fit between the tubes and even the original capacitors in the vertical orientation. Barely. The primary is marked "0-115v-230v-CN" which is a little confusing compared to western transformer standards.If we were dealing with common western transformers, it would be reasonable to assume that there are two primary windings, and they should be wired in series for 230v or in parallel for 115v. But that is not the case. For whatever reason, the chinese trafo factories prefer autoformer style primaries, so the 0-115v part of the winding is beefy enough to supply the whole VA rating, and the 115-230v part is wound with smaller wire. "CN" is meant to be tied to the chassis / earth. So in my situation, i am folding over the 230v primary lead and securing it with heatshrink, in case i some day sell this amp to someone overseas - don't want to just cut it impossibly short like Stax would have. Undecided how i will deal with the CN lead yet. The next concern is that both of the secondary voltages have two windings as well, and the phase is not marked. I view this as a dereliction of duty. But at the same time, no western vendor seems to have a similarly equipped transformer on the shelf, let alone at such a reasonable price. So the 220v secondaries have to be wired in parallel, and you have to match phase for that. It's best, at this point, to connect all of the leads on the transformer to terminal blocks. So they aren't just flapping around in the breeze and potentially shocking you or shorting to each other. Also, if you're a cheap bastard like me, sometimes you scavenge from broken junk. In north america, some small appliances - particularly fans for some reason - have cords that have an integrated fuse in the plug. Combine that with an inline cord-mounted power switch and a terminal block, maybe some wire ferrules, and you have a reasonably safe line cord for experiments. Anyway. Connect the secondaries to a terminal block and add a jumper between one lead from one secondary and one lead from the other, and measure the AC voltage between the leads that are not jumpered. If you measure roughly the sum of the volts of those secondaries, that means that you have connected them positive-negative-positive-negative (or reverse of that), so you can mark the first and third leads in that configuration as being the same phase. If you measure roughly 0 volts, that means you have connected them positive-negative-negative-positive (or the reverse of that), so you can mark the first and fourth leads as being the same phase. Works the same for the 6.3v secondaries of course. If you have a need to know whether dissimilar secondaries have the same phase or need to match phase to the primary, it's best to have an oscilloscope so that you can actually see the difference between positive and negative phases, but i expect that in this application we don't really need to know that much information. I think i will cut the 220v secondaries short, and solder them in parallel with one set of wires to connect to the power board. I may wire the 6.3v secondaries directly to the tube sockets. I will have to read up on the pros and cons of letting the heaters float vs. tying one side to 0vdc directly or through a resistor. The published schematic shows one side of the heater power tied to 0vdc.

Cut some big pieces of wood into smaller pieces of wood, which will then be made into bigger pieces of wood in the end. Been a while. Felt good

Just picturing some poor mastectomyed and liposuctioned duck wondering what the hell is next... Foie gras?

Getting ready for a trip to the Perigord by trying some local recipes. Grilled duck breast and duck fat fried potatos sarladaises.

Why not drink a cold beer at 10:20am on a hot Sunday?

I'll get my coat.

Cuck Dynasty Matriarch Dead at not soon enough https://people.com/phil-robertson-dead-duck-dynasty-star-was-79-11741649

Speaking of weather, we're now 11º above the mean for this date in the maximum temperatures, and 9º above in minimum. It feels like late July 😰. It's 10:20 am and I'd be drinking a cold beer.

Thank you guys! Wow we have some amazing visuals. Thanks for the cake and the message @swt61, for the card @skullguise, and damn, @Grahame them pics include everything I like, Audio Gear, Book, RPG elements, my flag and CATS! lots of them. Thanks a lot to all of you! Glad I'm back into the "case"

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!

Asian Mango Salad 🥭 🥗 But because: Poolside with extra 🐔

Happy Birthday Özgür. V1.0 V2.0 V3.0

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/may/30/loretta-swit-actor-dead

Cheers - happy birthday