As to the particulars of when and where, as soon as we've got that all sorted out we will let you know.

It's a tiny bit geeky to setup, but it is worth it.

Also, I've written up a little rant on guitar equipment in the Wayward Packet on rock and authenticity, if you can bear to hear me go on and on about all that, go ahead and give it a read. Maybe next week I'll rant about guitar tablature on the Internet, who knows.

Sadly, the song's got no real guitar part in it and the damn thing starts out in the key of F major — which means barre chords in standard tuning, which are a bit difficult for a hack like me to play. Hopefully The Little Goth One will take the lead and swing out some great violin, otherwise we're sunk. Does anyone play bass around here, sax maybe? No?

Oh well, that's the challenge of it all, eh? Good times.

In the mean time, instead of practicing my F#maj's, I've been toying around with the fiddle intro to the song (the first seven or eight seconds) arranged for guitar — which is the kind of one note at a time guitar wankery I'm really best at. If I get to the point of actually bothering to set the mics up, I'll post an mp3 or something.

And oh yes, I know Save Ferris used a guitar on their cover of the song, but that version is even faster and it loses the violins (and I do want to jam with TLGO, the crazy kid).

Oh, joke of the day:

I like my women like I like my scotch, 18-years-old and mixed up with coke.

Happy Mothers Day!

• Learn how to play standing up
• Learn how to play at least one real song the whole way through

Because, for serious, sitting down all the time just doesn't bring the rock and saying "Okay the rest of the song is really fast and hard to play ... do you guys want to hear the intro again?" gets kinda old after a while.

So, for those of you who actually read all this and know how to get in touch with me -- what should I play?

Hey -- not that I'm actually going to practice today ... the weather is nice, so I've got the windows open and I'd hate to torture the neighbors :-)

So I've started to clean up the Toyota and putting some thought into how to write an ad to sell her.

I've just gotten back from the Bronco's shakedown cruise, a run out to Cedar Island, NC — right were they stopped building bridges and still rely on ferries.

And if the observer creates, and if nothing is new under the sun, who or what are we all plagiarizing?

Perhaps the laws of physics, as they actually exist and beyond what we can comprehend, are really just some gross hack — lashed together for a rigged demo — that we are stuck with now, just like we are stuck with SMTP.

That is a lot to think about, but we should remember:

He is Babycakes

We are Babycakes

He is the World

I may never become a musician, but I have to recommend messing around with an instrument and/or music software. At the very least it will give you some idea of how difficult it must be to get a good song recorded, even for lo-fi and punk bands. There are a lot of variables to control or play with and you could spend the rest of forever trying to get something "just right."

As for me, well I'll just bang out 14 seconds worth a half-dozen times, pick the best take, call it a ring tone and post it. :-)

But, of course, Jefferson wasn't around for World War II. So what was Jefferson writing about? The Revolutionary War, perhaps, with Valley Forge and George Washington?

There are a few things I have planned, like talk about my little M-Audio audio interface and my new Fender Jaguar and maybe even post some ring-tone length tracks of me trying to play guitar.

I've also added a little sticky to the right of the front page, so you can get to the other websites in the RouseWorld family (OMG MySpace!).

So bear with me, but I really do plan on updating this thing in 2007.

And of course I couldn't just download an obnoxious ringtone, heck where is the fun in that?