When I was in college we got hold of one of those reader boards (with the white letters that push into grooves in the fabric) like they have at funerals. We stuck it in the dorm room and every time someone walked past it they'd rearrange the letters. It produced some pretty strange text, the most memorable of which was:

DESI "Q" CHELANI BLATS PIE

WONGO WONGO HEEBIE JEEBS

DELLA BONA SITZ AT THEBES

RAP A RONDO, RAP A RAP

BRING A FRIEND AND BE A SAP

HA HA

A day or so later, the second to last line was changed to:

DIG A FIEND AND BE A SAP

Anyway, for some reason we wondered what this Desi "Q" Chelani looked like. I drew a picture of a burly guy with work boots and jeans, and a long-sleeve football jersey with the number 41 on it. His head was a giant eye, and he was holding something that looked like a pikestaff with two wicked looking barbed points (one on each end). Don't ask me how that image came to be, but one influence may have been a line from a song by the Incredible String Band ("...His eye is single and his whole body is filled with light.")

Anyway, Ol' Desi was standing on a little hummock of land in the middle of a river, with pies sitting nearby on other little chunks of land sticking out of the water. I had to figure that "blatting" the pies would leave a real mess, judging by the size of that pikestaff. The whole scene looked like one of those old photographs from the Depression.

Anyway, when I saw the "make your own card catalog website, I had to make reference to Desi. By the way, I once created a screen name of "DesiQChelani" on AOL, and for a couple years all I got was e-mail about Indian-American dances, or rave events, or something.

The link is:

http://www.blyberg.net/card-generator/

My trip to Sam Ash

I thought I'd describe my one and only experience with Sam Ash Music, which at this point will probably be my last. As I've described here, I'm a fiftyish guy who's played guitar since grammar school, both acoustic and electric, and used to be pretty geeked whenever I got to go to the music store to look at all the neat stuff. I was still running on excitement about the idea that I could record the jam sessions with the guys I met in November. Mind you, my last trips to music stores were in the days of Vox wah pedals (had one, sold it in 1983, dummy me, kids needed new shoes) fuzz tone boxes, phase shifters, and tube amps.

After my son gave me the Boss Micro BR pocket recording unit for Christmas, I decided that the built in monaural microphone wasn't enough, especially if I wanted to record this bunch of guys jamming. I'd had a Radio Shack stereo electret condenser microphone that corroded away over the years (wasted an hour trying to get it apart to replace the battery, only to find it was dead), and was looking to get something along those lines as a replacement. Unfortunately, the owners manual for the Boss unit wasn't too helpful, saying only that the external microphone could be supplied with plug-in power of up to 3 volts from the jack, but that the Boss unit couldn't supply 48 volt phantom power.

Yesterday I went to the Sam Ash store in Burbank, Illinois, and said I was looking for a microphone to use with the Boss Micro BR unit. The head honcho in the microphone department, a rather imposing guy who seemed to be more familiar with the needs of DJ's than amateur old-time musicians like myself, pretty much told me I was out of luck and that the Boss unit wasn't what I needed for what I was doing. He tried to sell me a $299.00 digital recorder with built-in stereo microphones and 4 channels. (I don't even remember the brand). He told me that all the condenser microphones at Sam Ash require phantom power of 9 to 48 volts and that a dynamic microphone wouldn't work, and that was about it. He said that all the microphones they sell are meant to run off mixing boards. He unwrapped a Boss Micro BR (Admitting he'd never really looked at it before) and looked at the manual, and kind of dismissed it saying that it was mostly for guitar players and not really for a jam band. I left feeling like I'd just been talked down to. Other than trying to get me to spend 300 bucks, he offered no assistance.

After I got home and looked on the Internet, I found out that the kind of microphone that this unit needs is the type that's used with mini-disk or DAT recorders. So I looked them up, found the Sony ECM-719 for $54 at B&H Photo, and ordered one. I also happened to see that the same unit was available on Sam Ash's website for a little more, but I'd already ordered it from B&H. It plugs right in, no adapter needed, and even offers the choice of plug-in power or running off a built in battery.My point is that -- even though Boss was less than informative about what kind of mic to use with this unit -- Sam Ash should have been able to help me since they carry both products; and even if the salesperson didn't know that much about the Boss unit, he could have done some checking and found out that Sam Ash also sells the proper microphone. And he could have done it without making me feel like an idiot.But if I ever inherit a lot of money and for some reason decide to start a DJ business, I'm sure he'd be my go-to guy.