Happy Irish New Year

Redheaded Blacksmith

Howdy invisable readers, just a quick note on this Irish New Year's Eve.

Drinkin' and Leprechaun chasin' is not really what Irish New Year is all about you know. Sure, the greeting card companies and beer merchants want you to think that it is, but in reality it's all about beating snakes with sticks.

You see, Saint Patrick is credited with driving the snakes out of ireland. Now, of course I realize that what they mean by that is that he brough Christianianity to the isle, and drove out the older pagan religions, but I would like to see a more 'merican take on that old parable.

We should have a day where we just send our kids out with sticks to try to find snakes and drive them out of 'merica. Now don't get your trousers in a knot, I am joking of course. Beating on real snakes is not very healthy for the serpents in question, and we need those to keep the rat and mice population down so we don't get a major infestation of ratflu going around again. But in the same vein we have screwed up lots of other holiday rituals, we should make paper mache' snakes and club them like Piñatas. Or at least hide some garden hoses in the bushes and watch the little ones go at it. Why? Cause our parents did it to us, and their parents did it to them. They had often forgotten the reason for the ritual, but they carried it on anyway.

I fondly remember a bright, warm Easter Sunday as a very small child, looking in my Grandmother's flowers for brightly colored Easter eggs. As I was quite young, my understanding of the holiday was a little vauge, and I entertained everyone by finding the largest easter egg ever, and tried to haul a bowling ball sized pink granite rock out of the flower bed and out into the yard. It probably weighed as much as I did.

Would it not have been fun for the wee ones to have been given sticks and sent out to find the bits of shredded garden hose left over from a lawn mower mishap of the past? I think it would have! Then I might have grown up believing that snakes were full of candy well into my adult years, just like I believed that snow came with holes in it for quite some time... but that is another story.

Off to make something!

Soon to be "POD casts"

Let the POD casts begin

Howdy again, etheral readers. Again, we stumble toward the 21st century with bleary eyes and heavy feet. Though I have yet to post my rant on the lowbrow term "blog", I will refer to that here for a moment...

Like "Blog", there is another dumb net word made up by semi-geeks and latched onto by the talking heads of the world. Podcast. It's a friggin MP3 you can transfer into your MP3 player of choice and listen to while jogging, traveling to work or in the bath tub. Sort of like radio shows of old, but on your schedual.

The only reason this word irritates me, is the iPod is a marketing hook for an MP3 player not unlike the hundreds of others out there, including the ones that came before the apple version. Now I wish them luck, and am quite glad to see that someone other than Sony or Microsoft is doing well (though Apple is 51% owned by Bilbo Gates, holder of the One Disk to rule them all). Anyone who has dealt with the happily colored but under useful iMac's was probably a little wary of the iAnything idea...

So why the hell could we have not called this a WebCast or that 90's classic "CyberCast"? I do not know. Oh well.

There is another device out there, made by a company called Line6, called a POD. It is a red, kidney bean shaped box, about a foot wide with lots of knobs and buttons. It is intended to process an electric guitar for recording or a live performance. You have heard this device if you listen to any modern music at all, as they are everywhere in studios being used for guitar, bass, keyboard and even vocal processing. Mostly the POD digitally emulates famous guitar amps, but it does a whole lot more.

So why do I mention this? Soon we will start putting out PODcasts; music and spoken word works processed entirely through our mixing boards and POD's, for people to listen to on their iPod's.

Or any other MP3 player they might want to use.
Stay Tuned!

Bonehead move

Bonehead

Well, well. I learned something else today. That you have to change the title on each post, so someone browsing back over the blog can more easily understand what that entry is about, and have a direct link to send ad infinitium to their friends all over the internet.

So, yea. I was a bonehead to not have noticed that in the last few posts...

However, any day you learn something new and end the day above ground and still breathing is a pretty damn good day.

Still alive and doing fine

Still alive

So much to build, so little time... And who turned the calendar back to Novemburrrr!??!?

I suppose, at this writing, very few people are reading this, as I just noticed that there is no link from the main site to this log... something else to fix on the next update.

Bob Vila has nothing on us

IronAngel Forge

Bah! It's not that I have nothing to say, it is more I have no time to write or my hands will not work well enough to do so. At any rate, we are working on orders, getting stock ready for the upcoming season and trying to remodel the bathroom. Did you ever see the film "Evil Dead"? Well, even if they did not show you what the bathroom looked like, you can imagine, right? Yea, that is our old bathroom. The rusting walls of the aged steel shower made it look like dried blood. Nice touch when you are trying to feel clean.

So at any rate, we are alive and making stuff. And that is the important part of life; living it.