Each country comes with it fair share of eccentricities. The more time you spend there the less you notice them so I guess that kind of explains why isolated subcultures so often spiral into the depths of some really strange shit. Anyway, in the not so strange realm but somewhat useful info angle, it is handy to know that in order to get a proper coffee here you have to know some code words. Now I don't really know what they all are but I do know that a flat white is sort of a foamless latte kind of thing and a long black is really strong fairly good sized cup of coffee, no do cream, no half and half, only milk sir. So that leaves me with a long black with a bit of milk as the local drink of morning choice.

So in my self appointed quest to highlight the curious I thought perhaps a peek at Goji berries is in order. They are not overly sweet, a bit pasty, more mild tasting and way less gooey than a raisin and fairly chewy. It takes a few to grasp the flavor and decide whether you like 'em or not, though it is hard to recall that part distinctly as liking them is easy now. Yumm!

**** Sound Nerd Speak ****

First show and as expected, projects are plentiful with each roadie department immersed in fixing, rebuilding and upgrading some sort of adventure. For me, outside of the normal wanderings, two projects popped into my lap. First is drum thumper. The thumper is a speaker like device that makes no noise because instead of a speaker cone it has a heavy weight. This weight shaker device is attached to the drum throne and sound is sent to it and it shakes the drum seat. If you have not felt one, you really should, they are way cool and give the human seated a powerful impact with each kick drum beat. Well, as things so often are, "a lot" is often not enough and more is so often better. The initial project started as adding a second thumper unit but upon further analysis it became apparent that when the drum thumper shakes the seat, a large portion of the energy is wasted because the seat is so securely mounted to the seat stand and stable on the floor. Sooooo.... instead of adding a second unit, how about remounting the seat so that is mechanically isolated from the tripod floor stand. Here you can see roadie Big Daddy doing mounting the cool wood bracket he made and I put some rubber tubing as a spacer to create a iso-thumper seat. Thump thump good!

**** End Sound Nerd Speak ****

Next project is fixing a really cool electronic trumpet pickup for Flea and with a bit of solder and some scavenger hunting for some bits, check it out

For those of you out here for the gigs, there is a special treat of Flea rocking one of the most crazy sounding fuzz overload delay saturated trumped solos you can imagine. I will take some more pics of the cool little setup at some point.

And finally, here is the gig in test mode

The warm and happy,

Dave Rat