I’m not a musician, but I love the ukulele chord finder. Just the chords I need when I need them. What would be cool is if I could “queue” up chords and have them repeat.
Also awesome is The Ukulele Underground. I learned a lot about scales and it’s entertaining. At the same time, even!
I remember when I worked retail at the now defunct EBGames. They’re all GameStops now, and they’re all glorified pawnshops. But I’ll always have fond memories of store one seven six.
It was just about the raunchiest store ever. And crazy things would happen. The worst part about it was, I only worked one day a week on Saturday mornings.
There were just so many characters. It was like a wacky sitcom just waiting to happen. One guy was an artist. We had a guy with a prosthetic leg because he lost one jumping trains as a kid. There was a police officer. The guy who always spoke in a falsetto high pitch voice when talking to customers. Then of course, me, who was snarky all the time because I only worked one day a week and I wasn’t afraid of getting fired because it wasn’t my real job.
Case in point. I am assisting a woman at the register. She looks lost.
“I’m looking for a game.” She asks. ” I’m not sure of the title, but I think it has a robot in it. Yes, I’m looking for a robot game. Do you have any of those?”
I blink. She’s going to have to be more specific. “I’m sorry Ma’am, but can you maybe be a little more specific?”
She stops to think for a while. “Well, I’m not sure, I think it has a robot and the word drive or. . .”
“Oh,” I say, interrupting. “You mean the robot game.” I yell to the back where my manager is unboxing copies of Robot Alchemic Drive. “Rob! Get met a copy of the robot game!” The game comes sailing through the air and I catch it one handed and scan it in one motion. “Fifty-two dollars and twenty-four cents. Will that be all?” I ask.
For some reason, she looks angry.
I had this idea about while every time you go into a corporation, you actually leave the United States and enter into the sovereign space of that particular corporation.
I was wondering how long it would take before I became persona non grata in the Wal-Mart territories.
Probably not very long.
This was brought on today by actually going to a shopping mall today. I stopped by the old EBGames today in Pentagon City. Old store one-seven-six. Lots of good memories in that store, but it’s been rebranded and now it’s fully a GameStop.
For some reason that makes me just a little bit sad.
What’s interesting about the failure is that it’s not binary.
There’s an analog variance to it that I would normally find fascinating.
Except for the fact that my shower now requires a constant adjustment of the taps in order to maintain the balance between outright freezing and scalding.
About one week ago, my building had a “catastrophic” failure of the main hot water boiler. This was attributed to a leak in the primary coils (in the warp core, no doubt) which led to some sort of minor implosion. We’ve got a standby boiler, but it doesn’t have the capacity that the primary has.
So showers are sort of hit and miss at the moment. High usage times, such as late at night and early morning are right out. Even then, outside of those times, the hot water pressure varies. I almost think that a total failure would be better, but then I remember that it’s one degree outside with windchill.
Our management company has released a statement about the boiler, stating that it’s going to be about 14 business days in order to get the boiler repaired. Fortunately, we’ve got a decent reserve, but I’m mainly concerned about a special assessment. We’ll see.
“In all seriousness, I’m waiting for you to bring that up to the counter, and the register girl to take one look at it, at you, and then shake her head, ‘No’ and then slide it back across the counter.”
He scrutinizes the chart on the back of the box. I’m relieved when a salesman finally approaches us.
“Do you gentlemen need help?”
“Yes,” I say and point at Homer. “This man needs lots and lots of help. Preferably yours.”
Twenty seconds earlier.
“So, what do you think?” He says, holding up the plastic container. “Large? I mean, the chart on the back seems to indicate that I’m right on the border.” He points to the location on the chart.
“I think,” I say, taking a step back. “That this is a very personal decision that every man needs to make on his own. Or get your wife involved.”
Thirty seconds earlier.
“Seriously, I think I may need a codpiece for the costume this year.”