Amazon.Com: Today Amazon announced a mongo extension to their book search, because now you can search for words appearing in the text of the books.

Naturally, humbo as ever, I mediately searched for “Traktor Topaz” (my stage name), and by gosh there in American Basses, by Jim Roberts (former editor of Bass Player magazine), you find described the Mobius Megatar touchstyle basses that I make!

You can do a search on Amazon for ‘Traktor Topaz’ or ‘Mobius Megatar’, to see a nice picture of the page along with a picture of the instrument, but here’s what it says …

“MOBIUS MEGATAR”

“A mobius strip is a one-sided surface that was discovered by German mathematician August Mobius in 1858. A Mobius Megatar is a 12-string instrument that was conceived by musician Henri DuPont in 1997, and put into production by a team that included Col. Reg Thompson (RAF, retired), Bruce Sexauer, and Traktor Topaz.

“It has six bass and six melody strings; the bass strings can be tuned as a standard six-string bass (BEADGC), or in the inverted-fifths system used on the Stick, for players familiar with that system [see Stick]. The melody strings are usually tuned in fourths.

“Unlike the Stick, the Mobius Megatar is modular, with a small body in which a variety of pickups and bridges can be mounted, and a separate neck. It incorporates the Buzz Feiten intonation system, which uses nut and saddle offsets to created a compensated, or “stretch” tuning that sounds better than conventional tuning.

“Instruments in the TrueTapper series are made of alder and maple; MaxTapper models have a mahogany neck with rosewood fingerboard and a sapele body. The ToneWeaver series features the Ralph Novak fanned-fret system, with scale lengths ranging from 35 1/2″ to 31″ for the highest [see Novax]. On the MidiTapper model, an optical pickup provides MIDI-interface capabilities. All models are equipped with the patented MegStrap, which holds the instrument in the preferred near-vertical playing position.

“Whether or not the recent proliferation of two-handed tapping instruments signals the “Touch-Style Revolution” proclaimed by the Mobius Megatar company remains to be seen, but these instruments do open up new creative vistas for some bassists.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself!

Mount Shasta: The pines and cedars are ever green, of course. But the birch on the front lawn has burst into a pale yellow, and now a million tiny perfect leaves swirl in heaps upon the lawn. The dogs root and sniff, suspicious.

In the back yard, the apple tree is turning, and the pear tree close behind. The leaves on the holly are still deep green, and the bright red berries say Yule must be on the way.

What is Brother North Wind’s secret?

(Brother North Wind’s secret is revealed in the best novel in the world, which is “Little, Big” by John Crowley. Think ye some other novel better? Humppf! Indeed. How little big you know.)

One thinks of the mountains as filled with pine and cedar and spruce, and sure they grow tall above the homes in plenty. But the hills and the yards are aflame with thousands of trees whose names I do not know.

One thing sure: It’s fall.

Mount Shasta: I’ve tinkered with the layout of “Adventures of Bloggard”, but the design is still flawed: If the browser is too narrow, the grey column on the right gets squeezed down to the bottom of the page, which is nigh on useless.

If you are a CSS-layout guru and think you could improve the stability of this layout, I’d love to hear from you. I keep saying I’ll go study CSS some more, but I’ve become caught up in the challenge of writing a new story every day.

And here I’m clearly losing ground.

In the Nucleus weblogging system used here, there is a ‘draft’ feature, which permits you to write up a mini-story and file it as a draft so that it doesn’t appear until you want it.

Using this draft feature, as I think of events and people from the past I write these notes into a permanent draft called ‘story ideas’. I keep another permanent draft called ‘timetrack’, which is notes on when different things happened. I’m now 59 and have never had a great memory for dates, so dating an event from my youth is kind of like “back in the winter that the pond froze over, that was when Old Man Sweeney …”

Kind of tedious. Inexact, too.

So far, the ‘story ideas’ file keeps expanding faster than I can write the stories! I wonder if some day I’ll pass away with more stories still untold than written down? Of course the challenge is to keep finding time to write one for every day. My life is full, and it’s much too easy to skip a day. Catching up is difficult.

But the fact is, as far as I can tell, this is a completely new artform: writing interlocking stories of the people and places of a life and therefore of an era. I call this art-form “the Autoblography“.

This reminds me that some years ago when synthesizers were just become popular, and affordable for musicians, I got an Ensoniq Mirage sampling keyboard. And I thought up a way to create new sounds on an Apple II computer, using a C-compiler to make on-screen software oscillators which could be linked together to add waveforms or to calculate waveforms using Frequency Modulation and other methods. To create this composite waveform (sound), the Apple II had to chug along all night, and the next morning I would pass the completed soundwave from the Apple II to the sampler, and then I could play that sound. This was very cool. It took me a year to write this software.

That same year, out in the world, the Macintosh became very popular, eclipsing the Apple II, and a guy named Donny Blank wrote the same kind of thing on the Macintosh. My idea was left in the dust, and I never bothered trying to market it.

But the point is: sometimes ideas are in the air. “It steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time.“

I suspect that the Autoblography as a new art-form is in the air. I expect we’ll see more of these … not the eternally boring drivel of diaries (“I went to Burger King and had a real big burger, and now I’m really full, and I’m worried about my girlfriend, and I got a B in History …“), but a more crafted, polished view of life and living, sometimes crafted in real-time, though I expect perhaps better crafted in retrospect. (It gives you more perspective, and you feel more creative freedom to tell lies about details as art demands.)

I suspect that within ten years, there will be a hundred thousand Autoblographies on the net.

That’s ten years and counting. We’ll see.

Denton Texas, 1964: At the Holiday Inn, my roommate Pat was the dining-room host, and I was the bellboy. We both took Spanish class, so we practiced by insulting the guests sitting in the booths. (“Yo pienso que este hombre es un burro con arreyos largos.” … “Si, yo tambien.”)

This generally worked pretty well, as the guests generally didn’t speak Spanish. One day, however, the guest spoke Spanish very well and, well, that was the end of our Spanish practice.

But back to the dangerous payphone in the lobby. The first dangerous thing was that it was installed only a few steps away from Pat’s station in the coffee shop.

The second dangerous thing was that its phone number was very similar to the phone at McConnell Hall, the large women’s dormatory.

Because if the payphone rang, it meant somebody was trying to reach the front office at the girls dormitory, and that also meant that Pat could answer “McConnell Hall,” and the callers believed they were speaking with the girl’s dormitory. After all, they’d called the dorm, and the dorm office had answered.

This was a source of endless delight to us.

Ring, ring! went the phone, mid-day. Pat answered, “McConnell Hall.”

“Is Gracie Smith there?” asked the caller, an older-sounding woman.

“No,” Pat said, “She checked out to return home due to an illness, a week ago.”

“What?!” exclaimed the caller. “This is her mother! She’s not here! What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry,” Pat said, “That’s what she told us. Do you want to leave a message, in case she returns to school?”

“You bet there is!” said Mom, “You tell her to call her mother immediately!”

“Will do,” said Pat.

Or, in another case, early on Saturday night, Ring, ring! went the phone. Pat answered, “McConnell Hall.”

“Sally Jones, please,” a guy asked.

“Sorry,” Pat said, “She went out on a date.”

“What?”, screamed the boy, “What do you mean a date? Sally Jones?”

“Yes,” Pat said, “Some very handsome guy pulled up in a Corvette and off she went, wearing a long scarf!”

“A long scarf!” choked the unfortunate lad. “A long scarf?”

“Yes,” said Pat, “She looked really pretty. Is there any message?”

“Ask her to call Larry,” said the guy.

“Will do,” said Pat.

My roommate Pat was a real will-do kind of guy. But I’m not sure those girls ever got those messages.

Clement Street, San Francisco, 1973: After living on Ulloa street, and before the North Beach Apartment from Hell, I lived on Tenth Avenue at Clement Street, with a roommate named Pat Q. At that time he was a photographer with a darkroom behind our kitchen, and was maniacal taking and developing pictures of the San Francisco Ballet. (Later he became a contractor.)

I was attending San Francisco State, in the Creative Writing department, or that is, I was for a while. I discovered that the classes interfered with my writing about as much as they helped. And at about that time, my mother, from whom I sponged funds for this education, lost most of her money in the stock market, so I had to stop the school, which was fine with me.

Every morning, I had a routine.

Every morning, before writing on my novel for 2-3 hours, I went to the doughnut shop across the street. There I consumed coffee, doughnuts, and the newspaper.

I’d never been really interested in the newspaper, but I figured that since it was full of news stories, maybe there would be some stories that I could turn into short stories and novel material.

I read the newspaper every morning for one year, pretty much from front page to back page. I skipped the international news, and skimmed lots of things. What I learned was that there is precious little of dramatic interest in the news.

Oh, sure, there was lots of stuff that happened: This guy shot, that building burned, that automobile wrecked. But generally, though the stories were of tragic happenings, and written so as to be upsetting, so what?

In the year, I found one story about an old man who became confused by some hooligans, and shot a teenager with a 22 rifle by accident. This was an interesting story; nothing else was interesting during the year of stories.

Finally, one day as I loooked at the newspaper in the vending machine, the penny dropped. I realized that the folks who operate newspapers intentionally make the visible front page as alarming as possible.

In other words, these are people who are willing to upset the hell out of you for twenty-five cents.

When I was a kid, and later, I saw movies, I saw television dramas about the noble profession of journalism. It seemed important, and good. Now I’d ask: why?

What’s noble about it? How does the (upsetting) news help you? How is your day enriched by knowing that The Mauler has struck again on 23rd Street? Are these people telling the actual news, or are they just upsetting you for twenty-five cents?

I say the hell with it.

Fernwood Street, Hollywood, 1970: My old ex-roommate John Hill, the Rock and Roll bass player, and I decided that we’d move out of the house at Third and Western. As I remember, we decided this right after Lamont and Carolyn decided that everybody else should move out.

We found an inexpensive place with one bedroom in the back. John took that. I took the living room up front for my room. There was a kitchen and a bath in the middle. Perfect!

I had only two pieces of furniture: a thin mat on which I slept, and a wooden desk from the second-hand store. But when we moved in, I went to the rent-a-couch store, and there I rented a television.

That’s how the trouble started.

John, of course, asked me if he could watch it. I said that when I was watching it, of course he could, or if I wasn’t home of course he could. So he did.

One evening I came home from somewhere, and John and a couple of our friends were there, sitting on the floor, watching the television. I was walking across the room to fetch something from my desk, but the program looked interesting, so I flopped down on the floor. This program might have been a Jim Croce special, or the Sonny and Cher show, I don’t recall.

I do remember that, after that show, something else came on. You may have noticed how the television does that.

As it was, it was three hours when I got up, fetched whatever I’d wanted, and left. But as I left, I came to a realization:

I hadn’t really decided to spend that time. I’d been caught like a fish. Actually the way it struck me was that an alien force had somehow pinned me to the floor for three hours.

That was it. The next morning I returned the television to the rent-a-couch people. John sulked for a while; then he got over it. I was 26 at the time.

I then lived without television for many, many years. Didn’t miss it, either. Saved a lot of time.

I say the hell with it.