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return of Bad Rhymes
Monday, March 26 2012
I'm still waiting on a replacement for the seemingly bootloaderless Extruder Board on my Makerbot, which is useless without it. In the meantime I've been making little fixes here and there. There were, for example, several pieces of lasercut plywood that I never remember the instructions telling me to install but which were leftover after the build and whose places in the machine were now obvious. Then there was the matter of the power supply (a conventional stock unit for a PC) and how it was attached to the Makerbot. It had only been attached on one of its vertical faces to the plywood chassis, an arrangement that seemed a bit flakey to me. So yesterday I'd drilled a hole through the acrylic "mid-panel" of the Makerbot and used it to install a fifth screw to support the power supply in a third dimension. Today, though, I looked at that hole and saw three cracks spiderwebbing out from it, the longest a half inch in size. What the fuck, is acrylic really that brittle? Concerned that the cracks might continue to grow once I start printing out objects, I did some research and found that the best way to keep those cracks from growing was to drill tiny little holes at their ends. So now I had four holes instead of one, none of which could be used to support the power supply.
Over nine years ago there was a guy named Darren who hung our upstairs drywall for cheap. As part of the deal, I was to help him with his computer for some unspecified number of hours. I did those hours many years ago, and Darren (who, as an urban white man, aspires to be a hip hop artist) eventually moved to Florida, which was then in the midst of a housing-bubble-related building boom. Eventually he moved back and some years ago he managed to get me to fix his laptop. Normally he likes to pay for services in bags of marijuana, but that time he gave me a crisp hundred dollar bill. More years passed and I pretty much forgot about him. But then today, without calling, he suddenly materialized again. I don't think I'd seen him in five years. I had Gretchen field him this time, telling him that I'm super busy these days and there was no way I'd have time to work on his computer. When she came back inside, Gretchen announced, "You owe me big time." Later, when discussing this with my Facebook friend and fellow Big Fun alum Sara Poiron, she suggested I give Darren a "Bad XXX" type name, which was the nomenclature for unwanted people who used to show up at Big Fun unannounced. In keeping with Darren's hip hop aspirations, I chose "Bad Rhymes."
The day was so cold and windy that I needed to make a proper fire, the kind with chunks of wood as opposed to old phone books and cardboard. At some point Gretchen and I watched a PBS special called Women Who Rock, a spotty, subjective tour of women in pop music, starting in the 1940s. It wasn't all that good, but what was good was to see all the great live footage of the various women as they, well, rocked. It was also interesting to see the range of humility expressed in the interviews, which went from none (Cynthia Weil) to various forms of "some" (everyone else).
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