Watch Terriers or Else!

The or else is that, if they don't get more viewers, we won't be watching them at all. The show is in danger of being cancelled at the moment.



If you don't yet know about Terriers, just let me say that it's the most clever and witty dramatic show on TV right now, yet at the same time it's down to earth and gritty (in a good way). It's about a pair of pretty regular good ole boy types, Hank and Britt, who start a private investigation firm called "terriers." Hank is an ex-cop who did some things that got him booted from the force, and Britt is an ex-crook who's determined not to go back down that road. They're both broke, living job to job while working out of Hank's beat-up old pickup truck. In fact, you might say they're broke and broken. Hank's recently divorced and we see him struggle with his ex getting remarried. Britt decides he wants to marry his girlfriend, but she's suddenly getting a wild streak. And into the mix comes Hank's brilliant, but disturbed, sister recently escaped from a mental hospital and hiding in Hank's attic until he finds out about her.

It's a strangely intriguing show on many levels. Just reading that last paragraph, you probably are thinking it's pretty bland. What makes it work is the dialog and underlying feel of things. I've never watched a show in which I felt so much like I was actually inside the character's heads. The chemistry between Hank and Britt is great, and that's undoubtedly due to the fact that Michael Raymond-James and Donal Logue are best pals in real life. And there's plenty of offbeat literary referrences, which seems kind of bizarre coming from these two guys, at least one of which we know never attended a day of college.

It's on the FX network. You can also catch it on Hulu.

Now I'll Really Have to Stop Judging Books by Their Covers

There are two actors I've seen for several years, but just this week found out some things about their personal lives and history that just floored me.

First up is... well how bout I let you try and guess who this singer is. If you don't already know, I'm confident you'll never guess:



His name is Ken Curtis. You'll probably recognize him best in this next video sporting a scraggly beard and dressed in the attire you know him best in:



Yep, that's the feller who played Festus Haggen for over a decade on Gunsmoke. Turns out he was a singer and actor long before Gunsmoke. He even took over Frank Sinatra's old job singing with Tommy Dorsey's band for a while. He was also the son-in-law of John Ford and had small roles in many of his best films. If you look close you'll see him sometimes singing in them too. He was a member of a famous western group called The Sons Of The Pioneers. Here he is singing lead with them in Ford's movie--The Rio Grand--with John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara:



That was fun! Would you have ever thought.... Let's do one more. I bet you've seen this face in a bunch of old TV shows and B-movies but didn't know the name that went with it:

That's William Smith. Don't worry if you don't know the name. I guarantee you've seen his work. He did a string of motorcycle films in the 60/70s. Before that he was known for playing Joe Riley on Laredo. Actually, he's been acting in films since he was eight. (He was born in 1933, so you do the math). In real life he was a sports fanatic and body builder. He was a terrific amateur boxer (he only lost one fight), and held the Air Force Weightlifting Championship. He also won the 200 pound arm-wrestling championship of the world several times over.

With the notable exception of Laredo, he almost always played a bad guy and did a bunch of fight scenes, some of them quite famous. You may remember the one between him and Clint Eastwood in Any Which Way You Can. His most well-known one was probably with Nick Nolte in Rich Man, Poor Man:

Unfortunately I couldn't find any video of it, but I did find a few stills from what I (and apparently a few others) consider to be his portrayal of the best bad guy character of all-time, and that was in the role of Jude Bonner on a special 2-hour episode of Gunsmoke entitled "Hostage". If you watched Gunsmoke, then you probably remember this episode as the one where Miss Kitty gets kidnapped, raped, shot in the back, and left for dead because Marshall Dillon wouldn't turn over Bonner's younger brother who was sentenced to be hanged after being found guilty of murder. The show ended with Marshall Dillon taking off his badge (the only time he ever did) and going after Bonner with the strict intention of killing him. The fistfight between Dillon and Bonner (Smith) was probably the best fight scene ever in a western. Dillon nearly tossed a boulder on Bonner's head at the end, but his streak of decency brought him to his senses, and he relented from killing him. It was truly a great, maybe the greatest, episode in the annals of TV Westerns.

Well, if you're like me and used to seeing William Smith in almost nothing but tough guy roles, usually playing a rather doltish sort (often a downright idiot), then you're going to be as surprised as I was to find that this guy went to Syracuse; was fluent in English, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, French, and German; taught Russian at UCLA; and was a Russian Intercept Interrogator during the Korean War who flew secret ferret missions over Russia. He had both CIA and NSA clearance. Turns out this guy is like a freakin' genius....

Sometimes you just never know about people.

"Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?"

That's the name of the new documentary that's out now about Nilsson. I've been waiting a long time for this. It was actually shot a few years ago but I guess was held up for monetary reasons. (It's cheap to make a documentary but expensive to distribute it). As far as I'm concerned there were many good singers during the last century but only three great ones--Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley, and Harry Nilsson. he was a darn good writer too.

Finishing up on "Till We Have Faces"

I've been re-reading the old CS Lewis classic lately and should finish it in a day or two. There are some places where the writing seems a bit clumsy to me this time. Certain phrases he uses that don't read particularly well or that sound a bit corny. And I must say that I've always felt that the second book the queen writes seems a little outlandish, and I find myself thinking she couldn't have been so wrong about things in the first book. Her second youngest sister really is a selfish trouble maker. Lewis wrote her that way, and now he wants us to believe the queen was just terribly confused. But her sister did taunt her and say terrible things to her. There's no mistaking that. She truly did mistreat her queen-sister. I tend to believe now that Lewis wrote the queen's second book almost on a lark--that he changed direction from something else he had originally planned, and so, the queen's two books don't always make sense when comparing them. At least it's my only explanation. I still like the story very much. But I now consider Perelandra to be his masterpiece of fiction. I don't think there's a word in it I would change.

Tomorrow I will try to put into thought the kinds of things I like to see in writing, and why these things work for me. Of course I'll also exemplify things I don't like. I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

So I Rebuilt My Computer Today

Okay, it's 12:48 AM, so I guess I should say I rebuilt it yesterday. Anyhow, it's always a great joy to do a major undertaking like this and have everything actually work when you put it back together. I did have one scary moment. After installing Windows 7, I got to the registration page, and after filling everything out including the key #, I got a message saying that my software was out of date. At first I thought maybe I needed to reset the clock/year in BIOS, but then it suggested that I go online and try to register it there, but wouldn't you know that W7 couldn't detect a modem or a driver for one. I use AT&T DSL along with a D-link N 300 so my laptop can go wireless. I figured Windows would have a driver for the ethernet connection. It didn't. Strange. Fortunately the utility disc that came with the new MOBO had the driver on there, so after installing it I was able to get online, and W7 somehow did the registration automatically. Funny that just a few minutes earlier it was flashing a message saying my copy of W7 "may be illegal." I don't really know what that was about.

I just bought a new Antec case a couple of years ago, so I re-used that and also kept my DVD burner which is only a year old. So I basically got a new MOBO, CPU, HDD, RAM, and the new pro version of Windows 7 64-bit. Oh, and I kept my Firewire card because there's no FW on the new MOBO. My new laptop didn't come with any FW either. I guess it really is on the way out, and USB has won the war. The FW built-in to most MOBOs is junk anyway most of the time. The only thing I really use it for is transferring MiniDV footage.

For those interested in the details, I use a microATX case because it fits perfectly under my desk and I don't need a lot of slots. I went with an ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 MOBO. It looks to be a great one (ASUS makes some of the best), and comes with some terrific overclocking tools. I hate to use the term "overclock" because no one really overclocks anything anymore. You never push anything past its prescribed limits. They should really call it re-clocking. I'm continuing my love affair with AMD chips and used one of their best quad cores--the Phenom II X4 965. It's rated at 3.4GHz, but I've been... umm-umm... re-clocking it to nearly 3.9 with no problems at all. I can't wait to get my audio and video programs running on this tomorrow since they're smart enough to know how to take advantage of all four cores. I also went with one of G-Skill's 8G Ripjaws RAM sets. This machine ought to smoke!

And hard drives... man I can't believe we're seeing 2-terabyte units out now. That's an amazing amount of space. And some are running at 10000rpm! I went with just a 1-TB Western Digital unit at 7200rpm. You can get them fairly cheap, and it's still a lot of space.

I'm thinking of switching from Adobe Premiere to Sony Vegas for video editing. I'll probably be blogging about that soon. I would love to get away from the evil giant. Adobe is a longtime funder of the Planned Parenthood baby killers and is on just about every abortion watchlist out there. I also can't stand one of their video personnel.

Juan Williams Was Railroaded

Unless you're a hermit (a hermit with a web connection if you're reading this) you've undoubtedly heard by now that National Public Radio recently fired Juan Williams for making the following comment on a FOX News program: "But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

How does one get fired for expressing his apprehension about being on an airplane with people who are dressed like Muslims? It was people dressed exactly like that who brought down four planes in one day causing the worst single day civilian air disaster in American history. Other Muslims have attempted the same stunt several times since then only to have been stopped by quick thinking people, all of whom (thankfully) were keeping a leery eye out for... you know... people dressed like that.

Alicia Shepard, world's worst excuse for an Ombudsman at NPR, wrote in her online column:

One reason he was fired, according to Vivian Schiller, NPR’s CEO, is that the company felt he wasn’t performing the role of a news analyst:

“News analysts may not take personal public positions on controversial issues; doing so undermines their credibility as analysts, and that’s what’s happened in this situation,” said Schiller in an email to NPR member stations, some of which are upset about Williams' firing.

“As you all well know," she continued, "we offer views of all kinds on your air every day, but those views are expressed by those we interview – not our reporters and analysts.”

Miss Shepard agrees with this and says the firing of Williams was justified.

There are many things wrong with this position. Williams was a commentator in his roll at FOX News. Commentators are paid to have opinions. NPR should know; they have 37 commentators issuing just as many controversial opinions on a broad range of subjects. A week doesn't go by in which Terry Gross doesn't say something controversial and inflammatory. In 2006 Frank Deford said of Barry Bonds, "...Bud Selig should announce today that if and when Bonds passes Babe Ruth's old record of 714 home runs and Aaron's 755, baseball will offer no congratulations, participate in no ceremony. If the Giant franchise had any honor, it would do the same." The trouble is that Bonds hadn't been convicted of anything yet! This fact did nothing to dissuade Deford's opinion on the subject. I believe Bonds took steroids. I have no problem with Deford having his say about it. Williams is nervous to be on the same plane with people dressed in Muslim garb. Williams is right to be nervous. But when's Mr. Deford's firing?

Nina Totenberg once said about General Jerry Boykin's views of Islam and the war on terrorism, "I hope he's not long for this world." Is that an example of NPR's ethical guidelines? I ask you, was the remark Williams made even half as controversial as hers? Miss Totenberg still has a job.

Miss Shepard in a rather arrogant manner wrote about the "balanced news analyst on NPR." She went on to mention the "collision of values: NPR's values emphasizing fact-based, objective journalism versus...notably Fox News, to promote only one side of the ideological spectrum."

Aside from the uppity attitude, I find her outlook very weak and thoughtless. I'm no fan of Fox News, but NPR fairs no better. NPR has very few conservative commentators at all. Fox News is certainly conservative leaning, but they have several liberal commentators: Alan Colmes, Greta Van Susteren, Mara Liasson, Kristen Powers, Susan Estrich, Pat Caddell, Mort Kondrache, Bob Beckel to name a few they've had over the years. And did I fail to mention Juan Williams himself? Sure he's more of what we might call a centrist, but he's still much more liberal than he is conservative.

Juan Williams displayed common sense when he said he was nervous being on a plane with people who dressed like, or identified themselves as being, Muslim. Most of us feel the same way. It has nothing to do with racism or hate and everything to do with a desire to live a long and healthy life.

NPR should have immediately fired Nina Totenberg for her remarks about General Boykin. It should now consider firing its CEO, Vivian Schiller, along with their Ombudsman—Alicia Shepard, both of whom are among the worst decision makers a news organization could possibly have if it's their goal to have an intelligent, unbiased news station. And they should give back the 1.8 billion dollars donated by liberal kingpin—George Soros if they want intelligent listeners to believe them when they refer to their craft as "objective journalism" that does not "promote only one side of the ideological spectrum." "Balanced news" on NPR might just be the biggest oxymoron since "summer snow."

Rebuilding the Perfect Telecaster

I bought a 1995 made in Mexico Telecaster last year. The guy who had it before me relic'ed it. If you're not a guitar player then you may be unfamiliar with the term. Relic'ing is when you take a newer guitar and try to make it look like a really worn old one. It's become such a popular thing to do that Fender started making their own relic'ed guitars a few years back under the moniker of "Road Worn." Personally, I don't much care for the practice. I mean, I love to see an old guitar that's really been played to death and looks like it. All those scratches and missing paint chips are just part of the love. An old guitar that still looks new... well to me that's a guitar that ain't been loved enough. But to take a new guitar and try to fake an old look... that's phony love. That's Anna Nicole Smith love. I just don't dig it. The aging process should happen naturally.

The guy who relic'ed mine did a fairly good job in several respects. He got carried away though and managed to knock out a couple of pretty sizable wood chips from the body. (You can click on most of the photos in this post to enlarge them). I just hated that! And there was no way to satisfactorily cover those missing hunks of wood. Fender makes a really nice replica of their old 1952 Telecaster in the original butterscotch color. I love the look of those guitars for the most part—at least the color scheme.

They're expensive though at $1600 (street price). And there are some things I definitely don't like about them. Fender used flathead screws on the pickguard and other parts during that year, and they really stick out like a sore thumb. The 52 tele also had a more curved fretboard than later years, and I don't care for that either. They also had pickups that were very so-so compared to some of the more modern pups you can get. In fact, there's no single year for teles during the 50s (or since) that had every feature I like. Each year had something to offer and something to take away. So... I decided it was time to build my own and get exactly what I was after.

I really liked the neck on this Mexican made tele I had, so I decided to keep it. I would have to make some changes on it, but it wasn't a big problem. I first unbolted the neck, then took off all the hardware, and finally stripped the finish off the body. I was very disappointed to find that the poly finish had seeped so far into the wood grain that it would be impossible to sand it all out. This left me with only two options. 1) Paint the guitar. 2) Get a different body. Well I wanted a 50s butterscotch stain, so I sure wasn't gonna paint it. I began scouring the net for deals on tele bodies—both new and used. I found a really good deal on a new one that was listed as having a "warm butterscotch" color. The picture they showed of it looked a tad dark compared to a real 50s tele, but it was darn close. But when it showed up in the mail it was this color:

Now I ask you, does that look anything like the butterscotch Fender? Man, the one they sent me was way darker. Brown even. Well... at least the price was right, and it seemed very well made. It also looked very nice even if it wasn't really the color I wanted. So I decided to keep it. The old Mexican made body was alder. The new one is made from swamp ash just like the early 50s teles. And no, it sounds no different whatsoever. Almost all of a solid body guitar's sound comes from a combination of the pickups, bridge, and neck (actually the density of the neck effects the tone much more than the wood type). The body hardly vibrates at all and simply has very little effect on things. Both bodies weigh around 5Lbs.

Fortunately, the guy who had the guitar before had already swapped out the saddles for the older 3-barrel brass ones I like so much. They produce a thicker, bluesier tone than the old steel saddles. And the newer style saddles Fender makes are pathetically wimpy sounding. I rubbed them down with some Brasso, and they shined up pretty good. I had to buy a new vintage style bridge plate though (and yes, it says Fender Patent Applied For on it just like the old ones) along with new volume/tone knobs and a control plate. You'll notice here one big departure from original tele stock and that's the pickup selector switch. I never could stand the ones Fender made and have swapped them out for a standard Gibson style on every tele I've ever owned. Fender makes great guitars, but their selector switches leave a lot to be desired.

I ordered a control plate that only had holes drilled for the two small screws at each end that secure it to the guitar body. I drilled out the holes for the tone, volume, and selector switches myself so I could put them in the order I wanted and have the correct size hole for the Gibson switch. So now I have the volume in front, the tone behind it, and the switch at the back. This makes manipulating the volume and tone controls much easier while I'm playing.

I found an original 50s style bakelite black pickguard on Ebay really cheap from a guy who makes them himself. It has only five screw holes just like the old teles did. It also has no holes for mounting the front pickup like newer teles do, so you have to mount the pup to the body. This looks much better and cleaner to me than having screws all over the place they way new teles do.

I found a used, but new looking, set of Texas Special pups on Craigslist for a fair price and installed the front one. (As far as I'm concerned there are no better sounding pickups made for a tele). I wanted to install the rear one too, but the brass plate on the bottom of it was a little too big to fit through the hole they routed for this body. I could have routed it out some more but decided not to. The guy I got my old tele from had some after market pups in it. The front one was a dog, but the rear had a lot of bite. There's no writing or numbers on it, so I have no idea who it's made by, but I've gotten a lot of compliments on it. Anyhow, it fit the hole (just barely), so I kept it. (I was probably going to end up going with that pup anyhow, but I would have at least liked to have heard what the Texas Special rear pup sounded like in there)! I kept the old pots. I'm not sure if they're original or not, but they work fine and are the electrical values I wanted. I also like the more modern tone circuit fender started using in the 60s. The 50s circuit gave you a typical rear pickup when the selector switch was in the rear, but when you moved it to the center position you didn't get the combination of the front and rear pickups together like teles made after 1960 or so do. You instead got the front pickup. Then in the front position you got the front pickup with a capacitor in the circuit that took out some of the highs leaving you the sound of the front pup with the tone control rolled back. They did this because jazz was so in vogue at the time. Almost nobody liked this pickup configuration though, and even by the mid 50s people had started rewiring teles to get the typical front-middle-rear type of switch action we know today. I kept things modern in that regard.

I bought some new string ferrules too, but they were too big for the pre-drilled holes in the body. I ended up drilling out the holes a bit to make them fit. Then I put on a set of strap locks and a shiny new neck plate, and the body was done. Now on to the neck.

Unfortunately, I never thought to take a photo of the old Fender logo that was on the headstock. Aside from the fact that it said Made in Mexico on it, for the last several decades Fender has placed the logo further up toward the top of the peg head. They also switched from the circular string retainer to the butterfly shaped one in the late 50s. I much prefer the early 50s peg head look and decided to replicate it. I was going to try and design a logo myself in Flash, but after searching the net I found somebody selling a 50s replica. (You can make your own since it's your guitar, but Fender doesn't like it when people make copies of their designs and then sell them to others, so they threaten legal action whenever they find someone online selling these copies. As a result, dealers only keep websites up for a short period, and then change their name and move on, so it's hard to find these logos sometimes. You have to hit the net at just the right time. Anyhow, I didn't have any reservations about buying one since it was for my personal guitar. It's not like I'm planning to sell this guitar to somebody and represent it as being an original 50s Telecaster)! You can find replicas of Fender's original circular string tree all over the net, so that was no problem. And in case you're wondering, Fender licenses manufacturers to make replicas of their hardware. It's just the logos they don't want people to make in order to sell.

I didn't mess with the back of the neck at all. It looked good enough to suit me. The fretboard did have some very grungy looking spots though, so I sanded it down here and there when I sanded the peg head. You'll notice that the old string tree left a hole. When I put the new circular one on I wanted to place it exactly where fender did in the old days, and that was further up the peg head a bit. So I had to fill the hole with some wood filler. After I refinished the peg head, that wood filler would stand out, but fortunately the new logo would be placed right over that old hole, so you'd never know it was there.

Fender tinted their necks with an amber shellac during the 50s, so they were a little darker and a bit reddish compared to later necks. I found an amber shellac called Bull's Eye at Lowes that's made by Zinsser.

It looks to me like an absolutely perfect match for Fender's old shellac, and I'm really happy with the way it came out. By the way, the logo Fender uses is a water-slide type. What you'll want to do when applying these is to apply one or two coats of shellac to the peg head first. After it dries, lightly sand it with very fine steel wool. Then put your decal on. After the decal dries you can add as many more coats of shellac as you need. This way the decal gets placed between coats of shellac and doesn't come off. It also makes the edges of the logo harder to see than they would have been if you placed the logo on the bare wood. I should also mention that the frets were getting pretty old on this neck, so I had it refretted by a luthier friend in St. Louis. I've done refrets before but didn't feel like messing with it. He didn't do the best job in the world though, and I still spent a couple of hours filing down rough ends. Obviously I did this before I began any finishing work on the neck. I applied some of the amber shellac all over the front of the neck after roughing things up a bit. There was no real need to take off all the old finish because it was so worn anyhow. It worked out pretty well I thought. The only other problem I had with the guitar was that the holes in the new body didn't align with the holes in the heel of the neck. I was able to just drill out some new holes in the heel, so it came out okay.

I also kept the original tuning machines instead of opting for a vintage set. From the front you can hardly tell the difference, and it's just not a big deal to me. As long as they say Fender on them it's all good.

Well, I finally have the tele I always wanted at less than a third the price of a 52 reissue. And what's more, it's got every good feature any tele ever had, and none of the bad stuff.

If Fender would just put out a tele that looks like the 52, but with Phillips screws, Texas Special pups, a modern tone circuit, a Gibson style toggle switch, a modern C-shape neck with a flatter radius (oh, and maybe slightly wider at the nut) they'd finally have the perfect tele. In the meantime, you'll have to roll your own.