I would characterize the quality as “cheap” to the touch. An old cassette I bought worked in it, played through the speaker but sounded “weird and slow and bad”, so I “took it out” so as “not to ruin it.”
Cassette recorder functionality so far seems pretty serviceable. Built in mic, no line input. Headphone out, which I plan to connect to my car as an audio source. Hopefully it will not eat all the tapes we’ve been buying at the flea market.
I honestly haven’t driven my car for any distance since buying it though, so I have yet to test it out.
Curiosity has gotten the better of me, and I finally broke down and bought a practice chanter (to learn to play bagpipes) from Amazon. It’s a cheap one, and every bagpipe site I have ever seen likes to write, in all caps, warnings like:
DON'T YOU DARE BUY A CHEAP ONE!!!!
Which is all well and good if you’re sure ahead of time you’re going to make this plunge and commit to it forever. But starting with a $15 trial balloon over a $100 experiment seems like a good idea to me. What do I know!
The more I’ve gotten into researching the types and history of pipes though, the more compelling it actually is. I mean, as far as “windbags” go…
This is one of my favorite piping videos for a lot of reasons:
Oddly, it turns out that goats and bagpipes seem to have been intimately connected for quite some time.
If you delve into piping history (at least the online sources I found), they put the first officially recognized mention of bagpipes to a Roman source sometime in early AD. But there’s an elemental pattern you can see behind the pipes if you look with the “eyes of the goat.”
I’m not going to pretend to be any kind of expert, but I found a bunch of different traditional forms of bagpipes which are not only made of goat skin, but which explicitly seem to reference the form of the animal, with either heads included, or else with drones, chanters and windpipes in place of the limbs of the beast.
“…there were many legends about bagpipes that could play themselves when hung from the wall on a nail or about pipers summoned to Witches’ Sabbaths to perform for satanic hosts.”
So my hypothesis, for the moment, goes something like this:
Bagpiping is a secondary cultural artifact from raising goats (or sheep, variously–just using goats as a catch-all here). In French, we have this handy word for goat-raising, Capriculture.
Moreover, the evolution of the “windbag” is simply an augmentation of pre-existing reed flutes, like this German dude (assuming he’s German–maybe I’m wrong) makes in the Youtube video below:
Bagpipes are basically this attached to a pipe you do your fingering on – chanter – which sticks out of a bag, and which has anywhere from typically 1-3 drones, which are reeds on pipes each tuned to sound at one continuous note.
So there’s a precursor invention, the reed pipe, which is more or less a “natural” human invention from naturally-occurring material. Which is over time grafted onto this other invention: an animal skin or bladder which can be inflated or deflated with air or liquid.
Taken in this light, the instrument becomes less a strange oddity, and something more elemental, and perhaps very ancient – as ancient as the human relationships with the plants and animals from which the craft originally descended.
https://youtu.be/03Ok98XorcA?t=32s
That’s the theory anyway. Not sure I’m ready to start keeping goats, but I’m warming up to giving piping a shot. Will keep you posted!
PS. I love how that last video shows the pipes mixed with the sound of sheep’s bells
I’ve never liked Blink 182, so cracking the lead singer, Tom Delonge’s (pronounced da-long) strange fascination with all things UFO is a bit of a chore since there seem to be a bunch of bad quality Youtube videos on the subject which are gently serenaded by the group’s irritating tunes.
Putting that prejudgement aside, I’ve been vacationing down the ? ? which I keep seeing come up on /r/conspiracy related to Tom Delonge’s quest for UFO disclosure.
Anyway, I watched a bunch of bad videos on the subject so you don’t have to – or maybe so you can two. idk. Either way, I recommend starting here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_96N-w74xE
This video is often referenced elsewhere. Basically, in the Wikileaks DNC dump, we can find references to emails between John Podesta (then presidential advisor) and Tom Delonge about high-level talks around possible UFO disclosure. Here’s one such email from Wikileaks for reference.
So take this for whatever it’s worth. Anyway there is a Reddit thread which basically summarizes the video here.
“In a recent interview UFO researcher Grant Cameron claims to have some info regarding Tom’s upcoming announcement.
The goal of the operation is to get the story out through Hollywood
It’s a billion dollar project backed by one of the richest people in the world
100-episode series that will run for 5 years, directed by Spielberg amd J.J. Abrams
“It’s not gonna be full disclosure, but it’s going to be massive.”
By ‘disclosure’ we’re talking about public announcement/acknowledgement by the US government that extraterrestrials exist, and we’ve been in contact with them as a species since… whatever date. Roswell? The 1950’s? Not fully sure here and doesn’t really matter, as each researcher seems to have their own ideas.
Anyway, I’ve also found some bizarre mentions of Delonge on Reddit within the last week or so. Something about some predatory behavior (of others) and possibly human trafficking? It’s all pretty suspicious, taken as a whole.
Apparently Delonge’s media company which he wants to pin all the possibly-real/possibly-misinformation disclosure stuff onto as a franchis is To the Stars, and he has a book series with Peter Levenda, called Sekret Machines — the spelling of which “drives me nuts” but oh well.
But yeah, that’s basically that. Now you know probably everything you might ever need to know on the subject — and then some!
I’ve been ? investigating what it takes to become a licensed private investigator in the province of Quebec. Kind of just for fun, really, as an extension of a burgeoning interest in privacy and data protection. Apparently there is a 135 hr training requirement, but no one seems to be able to point me to an equivalent training that’s both available in English and online.
Okay, fine. So sue me for living in a French province in a bilingual country and asking for resources in English. I get it, there’s a charter to protect the French language from being overwhelmed in a predominantly English-language culture. But still. We can do both, right? I think that’s the ideal.
Anyway, I’ve been simultaneously querying a variety of agencies for help: from associations, to training providers, to provincial authorities in neighboring Ontario. My hobby is emailing people I don’t know, with some weird questions. So I’m actually pretty used to this now.
Ontario has, by comparison, an only 50 hr training requirement which is significantly less than Quebec. Unclear still if you have to actually *be* a resident of that province to be licensed there.
I don’t know though what your practice would conceivably consist of though. If you’re licensed in one province, but operating in another. Maybe I’m going about all this in the completely wrong direction. One possible pathway would be to have the operating province recognize the license given in the other. But for what benefit and to what eventual end?
I’m really not an expert on these things. I’m just someone with a lot of questions. ? ❓ But here’s the thing you find when you start asking the people or the agencies, or the people who are out there and who *are* the experts: no one necessarily knows the answer. The questions may never have been asked before. A specific pre-built answer may require interpretation and invention.
And few people acting in official capacities are comfortable being publicly wrong. So it’s a natural human response, I’m sure, to just not to want to answer weirdos with questions. At least that’s commonly where I end up on these hare-brained tangents of mine where I end up emailing a dozen different people for help or answers with a specific question or problem.
There exists, a certain, I guess we could call it ‘tenacity of research‘ which one may possess or perhaps develop as a personality trait… such that following through with it in fullness, and learning to harness and direct it, may actively create answers that didn’t exist before through a radical act of questioning. In the course of asking and answering certain questions, you may through patience and persistence become the eventual expert. You might just invoke an unthing into being.
I don’t know what any of this means, though vis-a-vis where we started. Except, if you gotta ?, then ?. If you look and you find there’s no answer, you make one out of what’s available and what you can dream up.
