mdlbear | Saturday wrap-up

After my walk -- a pretty reasonable one -- I did a little shopping. I started with Guitar Center, because I wanted to have a look at a lightweight polyfoam case that they had on sale for $50. This is about half the price of a superficially similar gig bag at Guitar Showcase, so I figured it was worth a trip. Besides, it was the first time since they moved to their new location that I had time and they had any parking.

I should know better than to go in there. It's loud enough to interfere with conversation, and the sales droid who latched on to me was highly annoying. Hint: don't ask somebody looking at guitar cases "Do you know what kind of guitar you have?" Look, you idiot -- don't you think I know what kind of guitar I have? And he seemed totally baffled at my annoyance, too, even after I reminded him of what he'd said. Apparently "do you know" is just his way of starting a question, with no intrinsic meaning to him.

I poked around in different parts of the store, fled when some moron cranked the volume on something up to 11, and got a different salesdroid when I took a second look at the case. Unlike other RoadRunner cases, it doesn't have backpack straps or an adequate front pocket, so it's not an improvement over what I have now.

As I said, I should know better than to go in there. Still, they do have good loss leaders from time.

Next stop was Central Computing, which didn't have anything I wanted, then BevMo, which for once had a reasonable supply of Boomsma Oude Genever. They rarely have more than one bottle in stock, so I bought two.

Finally, I went to the bank to get cash for the Dickens Fair tomorrow, and finished up at the Container Store. Picked up a couple of things there, but the one I was particularly after was a flower-shaped tea strainer called "Audrey". It says so right on the box. I mean, with a name like that... I bought three -- two for us and one for the flower_cat's cousin Audrey. I'll probably have to get a few more next week.

Went out for another shopping expedition -- this time with the Cat -- after lunch. Mainly Trader Joe's for a case of "two-buck Chuck". (eta: the Shiraz, this time.) It's moderately drinkable, and makes excellent cooking wine. We also hit the British shop, which yielded a DVD and some marmalade.

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I have this mental image of replying to "Do you know what kind of guitar you have?" with something like "It's got about half a dozen strings you can pluck to make sounds, and each string has a little thingie you can turn to make it sound higher or lower, and it sounds a lot louder if you plug an amplifier into it but it's loud enough for a small room even without that ..."

Using "Do you know ..." as a generic way of starting a question reminds me that I sometimes phrase a request as a question. I think it's sort of a functional equivalent of "Please": "Can you do X?" = "Please do X." I'm not sure if it's a regionalism, but it might be.

Or "no, I don't know what kind of guitar I have, perhaps you could help me out..." I might have used something like that if I hadn't been stressed out by the noise.

I sometimes use "would you please"; Saying "Can you..." around my kids is likely to get a response like "I could, but I don't want to."

"Well, actually it isn't for a guitar at all. It's for an assault rifle. I just thought it would be cool to carry my assault rifle around in an instrument case, sort of like those legendary big-time gangsters did back during Prohibition. Would it help if I brought the rifle in so we could try various cases to see how well it fits?"

I just ordered a new case for my little travel guitar and they sent back an email asking for the serial number -- apparently people do try to order them for assault rifles!

The first bit of this reminds me why I'm glad we have places like Dusty Strings (http://www.dustystrings.com)... I don't wear advertising much, but for this place I bought the t-shirt... Great people, enthusiastic yet willing to let you take your time and just ... ha ha, I was going to say fiddle around, but I think that's the one stringed instrument they don't carry. And, when they finish the Fremont bridge up next year, it'll be on my way home. Could be dangerous.

Boomsma. Damn, I had to go google that. Yet more, ahh, proof, that you're decidedly old-school. I like old-school. :)

Happiness is good wine for cheap. Hell, happiness is Trader Joe's. And a good British place... thanks for getting my google-fu up; I've just discovered that besides the excellent eatery-cum-grocery in Redmond, there is a little place called A British Affaire downtown on 5th. Cool.

DVD? From a Brit place? what? one is curious...

*sigh* what's the world coming to? Maybe we *should* be putting our "assault rifles" in our guitar cases.

I *hope* the recent voter couter-revolution proves effective and bloodless... we'll see staring in just about a month...

The DVD in question was Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun with Peter Ustinov as Poirot.

Here we have Guitar Showcase, across the street from my dentist, and Gryphon Stringed Instruments, a short walk from the Palo Alto Fry's. I usually only go to Guitar Center when they have something on sale at a deep discount, and even then it's often not worth the trouble.

Brit story all right, but isn't that the American version of it? Peter Ustinov can act ok, but David Suchet just *channels* the little Belgian. IMHO, natch. :)

I agree on Suchet, but I don't think he's done that one. He did do "Death on the Nile", but we saw the Ustinov version first so it's the one we're comfortable with.

The store has a number of DVDs and videotapes related to British series on PBS.

While the ambient music selection at Guitar Center is my coworkers' fault (at least partly), in-store volume is not. :) (I checked -- they use the standard defaults. It's probably cranked at the amp.)

I don't think I've ever heard "ambient music" in a GC -- there's too much noise from idiots testing every kind of amplified musical instrument at full volume. It's probably not anything the staff has much control over, but they don't bother to isolate sections of the store, so you can't avoid the noise no matter what you're looking at.

Saturday wrap-up

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