@lukedsico hello luke, dsico. can I please have an invite to This is my Jam?

It’s the start of month-long festivities here at Sunny Breaks.

Seen at Homeplus.

Caption Holland’s beloved impressionist for your chance to win, win, win! Here, I’ll start.  “I’d cut my ear off to get to this month’s low low prices!”

And so, unpopular as it may be, I wanted to mention a few apps of note that I’ve come across lately.

First one, just yesterday, is google translate which could potentially be a game changer in that it will change the game I play weekly to get money. The one called teaching english as a second language. I just speak right into the phone and it uses voice/word recognition, then via the internet connection translates up to a whole sentence into the 2nd language and shows it on the screen in that language, but you can also click to have it come out of the speaker as a computer voice.

I may need to practice and adjust how I talk when I talk to it because when I said ‘people in this country are idiots’ it thought I said ‘people in the country of India’.

Second is, as recently mentioned, Angry Birds, which only just recently became available to buy in korea. I know I’m wasting time with it but in any given day there are minutes which if they are not wasted in one way, will surely be wasted in another. There’s not much to say about angry birds. It’d be a challenge to write an essay on the narrative underpinning angry birds, but I’m sure someone will try. One thing I did find interesting was that a couple of the green pigs’ structures were adorned with a little swedish flag and I thought it might be a sign of some light ribbing toward their scandanavian neighbours, but then there was also a finnish flag in the same place in one screen as well.

Third is an iPad app, put out by the people who run the Ultimateguitar.com website. Very crafty on their part. The app itself is free, and you buy a subscription (8 bucks for a year) and it serves up the data from the website in the form of guitar chords and tabs. They have thousands and thousands of songs on there. Again, crafty because all of those song chords were submitted by people ‘the community’ and now the website is making a pretty penny from it. And of course you don’t really have to pay—you can still use a web browser and see the songs that way. One neat thing the app can do is transpose chords up or down however many keys you need.

I figured it was worth paying for because sitting around learning and playing songs is infinitely more constructive than playing computer games. We were playing Ziggy’s Rock And Roll Suicide last night.

the only thing to have brought on ‘that christmas feel’ in years is the background sounds loop on the new Angry Birds Seasons, that people can play for free by using google chrome. The combo of wind-whipping, sleigh bells, harp and other glassy tinkles is just right. Angry Birds is a Finnish creation and real christmas sits best in that almost no sun time of year and that part of the world.

@ArborealMammal ahoy there me matey! I’s slow getting to it too. 80 characters is about tanka size.

I don’t know how long ‘movember’ has been around, several years I suspect. But this was the first year it caught my attention. It seems to be getting rather popular. If I was the CEO of Gillette I’d be concerned. Yes it’s for a good cause, as they say, but I didn’t hear much about the money being raised or what it was being raised for. Mostly I just saw a whole lot of images of guys with moustaches who were not necessarily best suited to be sporting moustaches. Like V8 Supercar driver Craig Lowndes here:

Maybe they should be shut away for a month before november so that they can look half decent when it kicks off.  But anyway, I’m wondering how many guys participated in the month long facial hair experiment then decided they liked it and won’t go back. Is this this the beginning of the moustache renaissance? Even James Courtney here could pull off an Airport ‘75 moustache if he left it another month.

Airport ‘75

It’s been a lean month at the sunny breaks. Not for any particular reason, and again it’s not as if I’ve been especially busy. But hey, there’s always December.

I got a new guitar. Here’s a rather flat little foto of it.

I really like it. It’s a fender Squier in the telecaster style and with the ‘classic vibe ‘50s’ model name. Like the tele deluxe I have, the colour is rather unassuming, but the sound is very nice. Both pick-ups are fairly lightly wound giving a clean sound. The body wood is pine. When I first heard about pine being used for guitars, a couple of years back I sniggered, thinking that anything that bunk beds are made out of couldn’t be good for making sound. But as is the idea with the classic vibe series, they did actually used to make some guitars out of pine way back when, And I was surprised that it’s quite light to sling around the neck and doesn’t hinder the sound at all.

Anyway, so I’m trying to play country songs. I’m dipping very slowly into country, and still only around the edges. Like Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, and a bit of Marty Robbins—a few of his songs I really like. Country-rock sits a lot better, or “cosmic american music” like what Gram Parsons called what he did. I have a real affinity with Gram. The two Burrito Brothers albums he was on, the byrds Sweetheart of the rodeo album and I’m starting to listen to Grevious Angel and GP but they haven’t grown on me the way the Burrito’s stuff has.