So you think that’s Smooth-er

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This promises to plod along the same tedious route as the last (So you think…..). But WILL IT? You might well ask. Or maybe not, if you have some fascinating alternative pending. Say, sorting out your sock drawer, for instance.

I had a sudden, and alarming brainstorm. A very bad thing to happen if you’re in carpet slippers; your sock drawer can become a thing of the past. No bad thing in my case.

I’ve been drawing symbols for things like resisistors and capacitors, diodes and the like, and we don’t actually know what one looks like. This sort scatterbrained thinking can be VERY DANGEROUS. Frank Zappa said so in ‘the Dangerous Kitchen’. For instance; let’s say you’ve been taking notes about a symbol for a dog. You go to pat said dog in a friendly manner, and it takes your arm off because it turns out to be an alligator. Come to think of it, it could also have been my grandma. In the interests of a full complement of limbs, here’s a picture.

The Problem with Cathode Bias….(RSC valve amp)

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Here’s a picture of something you don’t want to see in your amp.

The grey tube in the centre of the pic is (was) an electrolytic capacitor. The silver foil stuff used to be inside the tube.

This is an example of a cap that has exploded. It’s part of early ’60′s RSC amp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Needless to say, it doesn’t work anymore. So what did it do, what is it there for, and why doesn’t it do it anymore?

Here’s another picture.

 

 

 

 

The destroyed capacitor in the pic is the bypass capacitor in the schematic diagram above.

The purpose of bias voltage in any valve circuit (and also in semiconductor circuits) is to control the current through the valve (or transistor). The grid 1, which is also called the control grid, is held at a negative voltage to the cathode voltage. So if the cathode was at zero volts (ground) the grid would be held at around - (that’s ‘minus’) 36 to 40 volts.

The effect of this bias voltage, which is d.c. and is set to a predetermined value, is to ‘pinch’ the current through the valve, to say, a few tens of milliamps, though this varies considerably and sets the ‘class’ of the valve operation. Class A has least bias volts, Class AB, AB1, AB2, have different levels of bias voltage. But elsewhere on this blog there are more details about biasing and the class of operation of amps.

Associated with this capacitor is the cathode bias resistor.

There are two different ways of applying the control grid bias voltage. One is to apply the negative voltage from a source straight to the grid. This kind of bias is adjustable and often has a preset pot to vary the bias voltage.

The other way of doing it is to put a resistor (the cathode bias resistor) between the cathode and ground. This does effectively the same thing, that is produces a grid voltage that is negative to the cathode, but it does it differently. The current through the valve develops a voltage across the cathode resistor which means that, by raising the cathode voltage, and leaving the grid at zero, the grid is effectively at a lower voltage than the cathode. The bigger the cathode resistor, the more the bias voltage. The capacitor bypasses the signal (sound component) of the current through the resistor.

This is known as ‘fixed bias’ or ‘automatic bias’.

And now we get to the reason for the blown cap. If for some reason the valve goes soft (also known as red plate or short) the current through the valve multiplies. This often because the internal elements (often grid/cathode) distort and short within the valve.  The cathode bias resistor is in the main current path of the valve and the voltage across it increases beyond the working voltage of the bypass cap. The cap doesn’t like this at all, and does what it did.

Another cause of this symptom is the bias resistor itself which can open circuit (as this one did). But the result (and the reason for it) is the same.

The best know amp to use this kind of bias is the Vox AC 30 (and also AC 15) , but there is a difference. In the Vox’s all the output valve cathodes are connected together and have a common bias resistor/bypass capacitor arrangement. In this RSC amp, each output valve had its own seperate circuit.

 And this is the replacement bias network.

After a a blowout like this, it’s a good idea to check for tracking and burning on the valve base.

 

Tea time.

On the Air

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Well, this is a blog about something I know almost nothing about.

So that should be something of a challenge from the kick off, you might think. This, coupled with the fact that most of the letters on this keyboard are vapourous (the stuff that comes out of it is pretty vapid, so maybe that’s no real inconvenience), all adds up to the very real possibility of this making perfect sense to the illiterate extraterrestrial fraternity, but few others outside a zoo or asylum. I refer to the way that ‘T’ looks remarkably like ‘-’ ; U is nearly an ‘I’ ; and ‘R’ is also, confusingly and to my mind unnecessarily, nearly another ‘I’. Everything else I can’t see anyway, having the eyesite of a slug.

hbhskjvnjeh 945u8oi; nve98.

I just wrote; ‘Aside from the tree-creeping grass trailer, the political arm of the Metropolitan Bakers and Brewers Inc. is top of the tree at sucking for woodlice.’  You see from this simple expedient that we are in a lot of krjnjnfkrk. Sorry; trouble.

So why, after a break in proceedings of several months or so, should the motivation to pick up the pen once again, come from such unpromising manure?

Think of it in terms of an experiment in iurhc38n. Whatever that is.

Being a person of limited interest in virtual matters, I was surprised to find a pop-up thingy….popping up (is that right?) to tell me that I had been invaded by massed hordes of Greeks in wooden Trojan outfits, the like of which are freely available off the shelves of Billy Ball’s Bargain Basement, and doubtless fit about as well. One suit I got from there required me to grow an extra leg slightly shorter than a sleeve. But I digress.  

These Trojan hordes had no manners, it was plain to see. They invited themselves in; no invitation nor nothing. Had they been real and not virtual, the dogs would have had the arses out of their wooden designer underpants.

For three months my little blog languished (not having barrels of real cash to chuck at folks I would never see to sort out problems that didn’t exist.) Then the wonderful Captain Dan came along, made various invocations and incantations and ripped the arses out of those Trojan horses in their badly fitting chests of drawers.

So far, so incomprehensible. Why, wondered this backwoodsman, would anybody go to that much trouble? Poor home life? Designer stubble an unfashionable length? Stuck for something to do between fixes? A religious thing? Money?

Well, the last one is the most mystifying, my little blog’s profitability ledger still hanging around for its first red penny-farthing.

It seems that, in the great cyber-space of the non-existent, nonexistent robots with nonexistent Trojan horse underpants comb the nonexistent web for opportunities to suck off real money for doing fuck all that’s useful.

I did say I didn’t know anything.

Servicing a fader ?

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I recently read (on an audio problem forum, I think) not to use contact cleaner on faders. Generally speaking, I’d go along with that, or at least say ‘If it works, don’t fix it’.

One of the reasons that the advice was given on the forum, was that contact cleaner attracts dust. It doesn’t, but it can help it to collect. And also there are different contact cleaners. Some have more or less oil in than others. Servisol 10 has a light oil in it, which is not sticky and provides a slight lubrication against carbon track wear. Something like pure acetone or a petroleum-based fluid, cleans very well, but isn’t much help for the track wiper on a pot or fader to get it to slide easily without wearing the track. At the other end of the scale WD40-type stuff is a bad idea on any electronic equipment (it’s great stuff on high current gear of the sort you find in auto stuff) that does go very sticky after the suspension fluid has evaporated.

If you’ve ever squirted contact cleaner into a fader you’ll know it feels like sliding over grit afterwards. This is because the slot in the metal chassis of the fader has a light grease applied to it during manufacture, and a sprung plastic sledge device runs on the inside of this. This grease has no physical contact with the electrical part of the carbon track. But spraying the fader will usually clean the grease off, and your fader becomes the gritty component we’ve described.

The technique for servicing a fader: first, just try whacking it up and down the full length of its travel a few times. They tend to be used in same positions, often; so they wear in a particular spot, and also collect dirt there. If that doesn’t do it:- get your servisol 10 spray with the plastic nozzle, and poke the nozzle right down to the track as far as it will go. Then just twitch the button on the can to let the tiniest drop of fluid out. Do it in three places, top middle bottom of the track. Then whack it up and down. If it feels bad, you used too much, or got a drop on the greased slide on the chassis.

If that happens, you get a very small, flat blade screwdriver with a drop of light grease on the end, just dip it into the fader slightlyand pull it out again, sliding the blade against the slot in the middle and leaving a tiny blob of grease under the slider. Then slide the fader slowly up and down (gently; you don’t want to splat grease onto the track). That should feel like new again, but if not, repeat the process.

If your fader is suffering wear, then this is not a cure. The cure is put a new one in. But plenty of faders sound really bad and its only dirt. So the cleaning thing is worth a go, as you don’t even have to take anything to bits.

The Philosophy of Shouting

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Anybody misguided enough to follow these blogs, might find themselves a little bemused by the title. Forgive me for not running out to jump off a bridge in shame, but there really aren’t enough of you to warrant the effort of burying my hamster. That’s if I had one, and if it were dead.   

“Am I going to fix my amp by shouting at it?”  ”Is it going to take any notice of me?”  ”Will it shout back?” All these things and no doubt hundreds more will flood your mind. Unless you’ve just got up, in which case there will be three. “Where did I leave the toilet?” “When did I last use the toilet?” and “Is it too late to bother to use the toilet?”

Anyway, onward and upward. If I knew what I was doing (re- internet-things) I am told (mostly by people I’ve never seen in my life.) (And probably wouldn’t want to even if I had. If you take my point.) that I should put a reference to the TITLE, VERY EARLY IN THE BLOG. (No I haven’t accidentally put the ‘caps lock’ on; that was meant to be SHOUTED.)  And then there are allsorts of folks telling me about H1 and H2 and H3, none of which convey anything at all. I know a bit about the H-bomb, and I don’t like that at all, so I imagine that I don’t like the other ‘H’s’ either.

This is where we get to the PHILOSOPHY OF SHOUTING. (See, I can do internet things!) The point I make is this. If I know about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, and VERTICAL SEARCHES, and HORIZONTAL SEARCHES (you lay down for them) and SEAWARD-SKYWARD SEARCHES (I just made them up), then, without knowing anything else at all (in other words being a vacuous old git; so what’s new?) I could disseminate this absolute dearth of brain activity to millions. And much good might it do them.

On the other hand (that’s the one I have my jam sandwich in) if I happened to be the possessor of the Infinite Clue, the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything; and put it on my blog, the chances are that my dog might get a read of it. Eventually.  That’s if my dog could read and if I had one.

I don’t actually see much difference between knowing the in’s and out’s of the processes of promotion on the internet, and SHOUTING.  How can I put my point more succinctly?

Let’s say we have two perfectly reasonable human beings sat next to each other on their little computers. That might be a problem depending on the day. Monday is a bad day to look for these two perfectly reasonable human beings, as they are outnumbered by an astronomic number of unreasonable ones. Friday would be a better day. Let that go. We will, however unlikely, have found two perfectly reasonable human beings to sit in front of two perfectly reasonable computers.

The first one (who we will call Dufrace Moribund, for no good reason actually) writes on his computer:

               I AM VERY GOOD SO PAY ME A LOT OF MONEY. He then gets all his tags right, employs SEO websters and all the other stuff, and gets paid millions per click. Or whatever.)

On the other hand (at this time free, because I’ve been eating my jam sandwich) Fountainburg Slurry has just invented a matter tranporter that can be built from a shoebox and two bits of elastic, and is happy to give it away on the Internet. Except he only knows about matter transporters you can knock up from a shoebox, and nothing about SEO’s etc…etc… 

Centuries later, this is discovered by the remains of the human race (which is a rock on Planet Grunt) the rest of it having been decimated by ravages of global warming that everybody could have avoided by knocking up their own shoe-box matter transporter. Instead they (we) all fried shouting……

                                     “I AM GOOD SO PAY ME A LOT OF MONEY”. If you see what I mean.

Marshall, Fender, Mesa, Ampeg.

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So your amp was once a Marshall, or a Fender, or a Mesa, or an Ampeg. But right now, you’re standing on this stage, in front of a lot of people, who want to be amused. And your amp (whatever it is, in this situation, it’s going to be a ‘Bastard’,) doesn’t work. What next? A variety of entertaining ideas spring to mind.

         1) You are dismembered in nasty ways by an audience who finds a load of folks on a stage not doing anything at all, disappointing. 

         2) Thoughts of hammers, axes and (admittedly a little extreme) chainsaws, mincing your nice amp into a sackful of bits the size of an oxo cube, rush unbidden through your steaming brain.

            3) Possibly worse than those improbable alternatives, you reach for a screwdriver.

            4) In order of prospective danger, figuring out where you might stick that screwdriver ranks high on the list of ‘Dont’s’

            So might we find some useful alternative to panicking like a headless chicken? Shouting at the drummer is usually a good start; just to ease the tension, you understand. After that, here’s few things that might at least feel positive.

Let’s concentrate on the amp.  Concentrating on anything at all at least alleviates the ‘Black Hole’ syndrome. That’s where you wish that one would turn up and spirit you away to another galaxy.

Does it light up? No? Is it switched on? Don’t pull your hair out; it happens.

Is the wall socket switched on? Is the multi-block plugged in? Is the IEC socket (the kettle plug) fully plugged in? That’s an easy one to miss.

The IEC mains inlet in the amp might be fused. If so it will have a little slot-in plastic section moulded into the IEC socket. You can get to this without opening anything. 

UNPLUG IT!!!!!!!!!!! Then you get a small screwdriver (I’ve done it with a fork, a toothpick, a cocktail stick) and lift the slot-in section out. Inside there is usually two fuses. One at the bottom which is the operative one, and the one nearest the surface plastic that is a spare. They’re usually glass, 20mm things, and if it’s blown you’ll see that the wire inside is either broken or non-existent. Then you take that one out, and put the other in that slot. Hey presto! Done!

No? Oh dear. Check the fuse in the plug. You can’t see whether these are blown or not, so it’s either swop it, or put a meter on the ohms scale, and check it reads zero. Failing that showing anything, borrow somebody’s lead.

Beyond that, you’re struggling. There may be two more fuses in the back of the amp, usually of the same (20mm) type that we found in the mains socket but installed in screw-in fittings, usually not far from the IEC socket.  Either of these blown could be due to a surge at switch on, or you could have big problems. If you have spare give it a go.

On switching on valve amps:- Always use mains first and then standby after. Give it as long as practical to warm up before switching on the standby. Otherwise surges can occur as the bias voltage builds up. This is especially true with solid state rectifier design. Leave it as long as you can before you move a valve amp that is hot. The elements within the valves distort slightly when hot, and can give you faults (particularly heater-grid-cathode shorts which are very bad news on power valves, and unpleasant on preamp valves).

What if everything seems ok but it just doesn’t sound? Is there anything from the speaker if you wind the master volume up? No? Have a look at the spade connectors on the back of the speakers. Make sure the amp is off, if they’ve drifted loose slot them on again and check they’re a tight fit. If all looks ok, concentrate on the front of the amp, as there’s nothing more you can do at the back.

A lot of modern amps have a relay that switches off the input stages of the amp. This (I think) is because modern amps tend to be noisy because of the high gain stages, and by effectively disabling the input stage it makes the amp tick over at the same sort of noise levels as an old Fender Twin. Which were deathly quiet. How does that help?

Well, if the switching at the back of the input sockets is bad, you’re amp won’t work. Blast some switch cleaner in there (if you have any) and then shove the jack in and out. If no switch cleaner, do the jack thing anyway. DON’T USE WD40. It has a sticky oil base that although fine on electrical things, is not good on electronics.

Still nothing? Use the same trick on FX loop send/returns. You could also try a patch lead in them, instead of your pedal system. A bad lead/ dud pedal could easily be the cause.

What about buzzes? Loud hum/buzz can be as bad as your amp not working at all. Check the daft things like instrument leads. Is it affected by control settings? Spring line reverbs can make nasty noises. If you turn the reverb down and it goes away, get to the phono leads that plug into the amp and pull them out then plug them back in. Contact cleaner also, if you have any. You can’t always get to the amp outs to the reverb, they’re sometimes hard wired. But you can get to the reverb tray which is often screwed to the inside of the amp cab (Marshall, Mesa, etc) or in a black plastic case in the bottom of the amp. Same thing as the other phonos. Otherwise just switch it off. 

Last of all, and this is a bit extreme; a very loud buzz that won’t go away if you turn all the controls off can be a soft output valve (red plate is the modern version of the terminology). Have a quick look in the back for a glowing red valve (that’s one of the power valves. Big; EL34 or 6L6 or 5881; or maybe EL84 or 6V6 if it’s a Vox or a nice little Ampeg. Anyway, if there is a soft output valve in there, it will be GLOWING. SWITCH IT OFF.

There’s not much you can do. But if you have a hundred watt amp (ish) you’ll have four in the back. If you take out the two inner valves (or the two outers, depending on where the red valve is) you’ll have a fifty watt amp, that works; rather than a hundred watt one that doesn’t. This won’t bother your amp, but it’s best to get it sorted out at your earliest opportunity.

You can’t do that trick with an old AC30. The biasing arrangement is quite different.

One other possibility on the buzz/hum thing is a heater/cathode short on a preamp valve. Unless you have somebody pretty familiar with taking the back off an amp, it’s probably best left alone. If you have a spare ECC83?

Check if the hum can be turned off at the master volume. If yes, the fault is in the first stages of the amp. The preamp valves are usually furthest away from the power valves. So progressively swop those for the good ECC83 you have.

Watch how you replace them. They’re a nine pin base with a locating gap. The gap is usually marked in some way on the chassis of the amp (might be a little tag or a v-shaped nick). Make sure any screening cans go back over the valve. 

If the master volume doesn’t affect the hum, the fault could be on the phase-splitter. This will be the nearest small valve to the output valves. It’s usually an ECC83 (12AX7) but it might be an ECC82 (12AU7) or even ECC81 (12AT7). Either way, your ECC83 won’t hurt anything in there, but you might find a difference in overall gain and it might distort. All this you might just get away with by adjusting  the master.

Sounds like a lot of messing about, but the first bits you could do in less than ten minutes, and the whole lot in maybe a half hour.  

If all else fails there’s always the rear exit. Time for tea.

Boots Morgan and his Horse

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Having revealed the inner truths of the Universe (Not this one. None of this one makes any sense.) in my silly piece on marketing my book, we shall now soar amongst the more remote (and less preposessing) extremes of my sock drawer in search of the meaning of something.

This is a plug (sorry; marketing stratosphere; or something;) for another of my books on Amazon, as if one weren’t far too many. I’ll get back to something useful when I’ve got this off my chest.

It’s a sort of cowboy/western/humour/whodunnit/lookingafteryourdonkeymanual/investigations into paranormal transmigrations/DIYlogcabinbuilding/how- to- dream- up- tags- that-appeal- to-the- majority- of- the- population- of- the- solar-system- excluding- the- Earth. I think that more or less covers it.

Oh, yes; and all the ‘Tols’ like it. Tolkien, Tolstoy, Tolpuddle martyrs, Birmingham Tollgate. I think it’s the big words that do it. I got ‘Wednesday’ in it, somewhere, and you don’t get much bigger than that.

You could, at the furthest reaches of the imagination, even read a bit of it. For nothing. Here’s a review of it. Nobody has actually reviewed it, because nobody has actually read it. All that fascinating information about how to grow your toenails fast, just wasting away.

Here’s an unbiased review of it, then, by me.

I like it, because it makes me laugh. It’s also very erudite because it has big words in it, like Wednesday. 

Anybody who’s just come out with a word as big as Wednesday, deserves a cup of tea.

WEM Teiscord Organ

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The little Teiscord is still favoured in some surf music circles, even though it dates back to the Ark. Well, nearly. Early ’60′s at a guess. This one is the fourth I’ve seen in a year or so, and the technology is utterly different to current keyboard offerings. The fault in this case was that there were frying noises at the output, and the Bb range of keys had lost the low octave.

The condition of this instrument was stunning. It seemed unlikely it had been used much, and certainly not ever gigged.

However, time had taken it’s toll, and the faults described above rendered it unuseable.

The major (practical) difference between these keyboards and the latest from Yamaha, Technics, etc. is that they are eminently fixable.

A fault on a current keyboard will generally involve unplugging a monumental pcb, which will constitute most of the insides, and plugging in a new one. Easy job once you’ve unscrewed half of B and Q’s stock of self-tappers. But the price of the component itself is unlikely to be cheap.

This organ is full of transistors, which are now obsolete and not easy to get hold of. 2sc536 or 2sc537 or 2sc538 to be precise. There are still plenty of devices that will substitute for these however. I used BC183, whch involved swapping the pins around. I’m sure there will be other possibilities.

The box on the bottom left of the pic, houses the generator/divider pcb’s. Twelve in all, one for each note. Above that is the pcb that the tabs are mounted on. The little marked off bit at the left of it has three transistors on it. Two of them work together to form the oscillator that supplies the vibrato effect, and the third is the preamp, the output of which is applied to the master volume pot. If you’re thinking about taking this to bits, make sure that the insulators under the mounting screws go back where you found them, or it can short signal paths etc., to ground.

This is a closer view of the generators; you can see that each one is marked on the retaining bracket. C,D,E etc. 

The way the note generation is achieved is by a circuit called a multivibrator. It uses two transistors and produces a square wave, which is a complex wave having a lot of  harmonics that can be filtered to produce different sounds. There is also a preset pot to adjust the tuning of each note, but, unless you’re very patient or well versed in the art of tuning in equal temperament they’re best left alone if the tuning is tolerable. 

This is what a generator pcb looks like. The two transistors next to the big green capacitors on the right generate the tone, and after that each pair of transistors, moving to the left, divide this first frequency progressively through five octaves, using a circuit similar to the one that does the generation.

It’s very rare to have bass octaves present and top octaves not, and if this is the case, it’s almost certainly contact problems which are situated under the keyboard. A good squirt with contact ceaner (NOT WD40) will often sort this out. If the lower octaves disappear, it will likely be one pair of the divider transistors. Count them from the right, down to the faulty octave.

One other thing; there is a schematic stuck to the bottom of the case. What a great piece of common sense!

Time for tea.

Fender Hot Rod Deluxe

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Fender Hot Rod Delux. This was a rush job, and I thought  it was going to be a brain crusher. Not that there’s much left in there to be crushed. A decent-sized garlic press would be ample.

The sympton was that the channel switching didn’t work, and the LED that shows the condition of the overdrive channel (drive/more drive) didn’t do anything.

There were a few possibilities. I have to apologise for the absence of any pics. I am camera-less at the moment.

When the back is off the amp, you see the flat face of the component side of a pcb, that takes up most of the chassis. There’s another one across the bottom that houses the valve bases. In the top left corner of the main pcb (near the preamp output socket)  is a wirewound ceramic resistor. It’s a white-ish oblong thing, and it’s marked R97. This is a cause of problems. It’s function is to supply an ac voltage/current to the channel switching relays, etc., and it’s designed to run hot. Underneath that at the back of the pcb, are the tracks and soldered joints that carry the 35 volt ac from the transformer.

These are no problem in the first place, but after a year or two’s heating up and cooling, the solderjoints dryout and the constant vibration from the weight of the resistor itself, cracks the tracks. If you’re unlucky it might have blown the chip that drives the relays and LEDs. This one had. It’s a 4558 chip, but a TL 072 is fine and easier to get hold of.

Fixing tracks under a hot resistor has to be done in a particular way, or it will come up with exactly the same fault, in the not too distant future; as this one had, it having been repaired at some time previously.

Solder bridges across cracks in tracks are not a good idea. You need a piece of copper wire of a suitable size and diameter, and that needs soldering across the track break to a centimetre or so either side the break. If it’s under a hot component, it’s best to step the component away from the pcb by a few milimetres and use a higher melting point solder, like, say, solder with a silver content.  

Any job that involves removing the pcb is fraught with trouble. At the bottom of the chassis is the flat pcb that houses the valvebases, mentioned earlier. A number of flat ribbon cables connect it, and they are of hard drawn copper, and they don’t like to flex much. Beware if they are moved around much because they’re rigid and the cores tend to break off flush with the pcb surface.

You really have to be very handy inside an amp to attempt something like this. It’s very easy to finish up with a lot more trouble than you started with.

Time for tea.

And what about Einstein, then?

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I figured if I constructed a post so devoid of any sense and reason, I ‘d be able to single out the robotic/semihumanoid at a stroke. For anything to post a comment that starts “truely, the philosophy of this site is such that I was moved to inculcate, nay opinionate, my devout respect for the ….blah, blah….” having just read such a total toadful of bollocks as I am about to insult this screen with, would be a dead giveaway, and I could metaphorically slit its throat with little more  reflection than a slight belch of satisfaction.

Were my name Einstein, I could guarantee that my other name would be Dinglebury. And it would undoubtably be hyphenated. So; Einstein Smithe-Dinglebury. What, you might rightly wonder, has that got to do with anything at all?

This would, at a stroke, and from birth, relegate all my researches in relativistic physics to the shelf marked ‘Music Hall Scripts’  and everybody at the ‘Queen Vic Variety Revue’ would be rolling in the aisles to ‘E=MC squared’ gags. You see? Contrarily, had my name been ‘Bertrand Reactionary’ I would have been guaranteed a seat on every subversive commitee this end of The Wash. Not that there are that many.

With a name like that, I would have been the recipient of vast fortunes from New Labour (that’s the same as Old Labour insofaras no member is even remotely related to anybody who ever did any) just to say “Ya Boo!” to anything that might look like a conservative. 

Were I a  ’Tony’ or ‘Anthony’ Something-or-Other, I could start my own political party (called ‘The Tony’s’ of course), in which all members would need to sign a subs card that effectively pays the founder (me) in perpetuity, regardless of whether I’m any good or not. Not unlike buying a box of firelighters that only work in the rain, when you happen to live in the middle of the Sahara. A lot of politics seems to be founded on that principle.

In normal walks of life, the fact you can’t do a job at all, more or less assures that you won’t get to do it for very long. Politics doesn’t seem to work like that. If one finishes up with an Amin or Gadaffi or Hitler, (etc. etc. ) you get somebody who is probably exactly right for some other job, but incompetence is such an inbuilt seam running throughout the profession itself, they stick in there  like shit to a blanket. 

I’m just wondering how many robots have stuck with this, on the subject of sticking.

Were there such a name (there’s bound to be somewhere) as Bigsby Syntax I would want it, as it would bestow at least a knighthood on its possessor, and probably an earldom. Or is that Earl Dumb. Oh well, let it pass. I do have a funny hat, which is bound to be a good start should I wish to sink to barristership; hood; whatever. The name to have for that one has to be one of those that looks like ‘Trimblsnout-Jinkinstrop’ and sounds like ‘Penelope Glass-Blower’.

“Robots on the port side, Cap’n”.  “Assemble the crew bosun”.  “Crew assembled, Cap’n”. “Altogether then lads”

“YA BOO!!!!”  Alright, so it’s not great as a piecce of scintillating repartee; but I’m not wasting any of my emaciated supply of scintillating repartee on a robot. Time for tea.