I just have to say, because I am aware and I want to make sure you are as well: We in America in 2025 live in a terrible time of death and ignorance, of cruelty and racism masquerading as Christianity, of a crowd of very misled if not actually evil people trying to undo decades of what most of us really hoped was progress. Please vote against Republicans, if they ever let us again, because at a time when climate change and inequality are more threatening than ever, they’re going the wrong way.
Whew. That said, I want to be writing more things for this website. I used to write here daily, but I’ve decided daily is a bit too often for me at this point. So I’m going to try putting something up weekly. Here’s a few interesting things I’ve learned about lately.
- I am fascinated by this company called Chase Bliss. They make really beautiful and apparently well-built guitar pedals (which I am nurturing a latent obsession with — despite playing guitar for the better part of a decade, I am only now realizing just how vast and wild the universe of things you can plug your guitar into is), which I assume sound great. They’re all a bit too expensive for my skill level.
But also, their story is pretty incredible — Wikipedia says that the founder named the company after a brother who was killed by a drunk driver. They started out building guitar pedals by hand (!) but it sounds like their process has really advanced.
Advanced so far, in fact, that they’re now building up some interesting partnerships. I first heard about the company when they acquired another group called Chompi Club, so named because they had a very successful Kickstarter to create a music creation and editing device called Chompi. It’s also a bit too expensive for me, and you can tell just by looking at it that it’s a bit complex if you’re not used to those types of things. But what a charming device, clearly made by incredibly charming people, who have now made a charming deal to work with Chase Bliss.
Yesterday, Chase Bliss announced another partnership — they’ve been working with yet another little audio device company called Analogman, which is essentially a guy who also makes guitar pedals, many of them by hand. Analogman, or Mike, as his real first name goes, makes a fairly lauded (and also charming) device called the King of Tone, which is a guitar pedal that, in layman’s terms, you plug your electric guitar in, and make your wah-wahs sound like ratch-ratch, or whatever you want to do. The King of Tone is slow to make, however, meaning there’s a long waitlist for the pedal, and it sells for four figures online.
Anyway, Chase Bliss announced yesterday that the company has teamed up with Analogman to basically take his very powerful, very expensive and hard to make pedal, leave it as is, and allow them to make a similar pedal (called Brothers AM, which I admit is a strange name but which I promise has a good explanation that I won’t get into here) that’s much cheaper and connects up to some really powerful control elements. The guitar pedal vloggers are calling it “the pedal collab of the century,” but if you watch the mini-documentary that Chase Bliss made and released about it, you can see the truth: This is just the guy behind Chase Bliss connecting and hanging out with the guy behind Analogman putting their extensive knowledge of and experience with guitar pedals into action to make something that’s going to benefit everybody. Everybody who buys their pedals, I guess, but you can’t fault a company for serving its customers.
I love that. That’s how business should be — not a scam or a shakedown, but two people agreeing to make cool things, and especially to make them more accessible and expansive. I’m really impressed by the thinking and work behind Chase Bliss — it’s inspiring. And clearly they’re having a great time doing it. - I found a book at a used bookstore recently that is basically a tour guide for a bunch of English pubs. I like looking at it — there are some fun, very specific pictures of long-standing pubs and the country lanes that they have stood next to since the times of the Romans, and I like going through it and pretending I’m touring pubs in the backcountry of the UK.
But other than becoming literarily familiar with the dingy alehouses of Britain, I also learned a few things about pubs, and specifically about pub names.
The Hollybush is one of the original pub names in England, the book suggests, and it reminded me of how humans literally have a section of their brains designed for 2D mapping — early humans (and perhaps late ones as well) understood the world in terms of locations rather than names. Danger was “by the tree” or “by the lake” and the holly bush was probably near to home, but not at it. A perfect place to hang out and drink a bit.
I also learned that the “Goat and Compasses” was another common name — poking fun at the Puritans walking around saying “God encompass us.”
As history has moved on, pub names have adapted — originally, there were Lions and Horses and Eagles and Bear’s Heads. Then there were Pope’s Heads, which the book says “became King’s Heads almost overnight” when Henry VIII decided he didn’t want to deal with the church telling him who he was married to any more.
Then as time went on there were lots of pubs named after saints (“the George” is common, apparently), but also The Green Man (which is a reference to a pagan spirit) still hangs over a lot of pub doors there. Once we hit the current century, there were pubs named after Soldiers. The Railroadman and the Coach and Horses, when those things became ubiquitous.
The name I liked the most was a place called “The Three Chimneys,” which has stood for 600 years, so named not for any amount of smokestacks on it, but because it stood at the intersection of three country lanes, which served as a boundary for French POWs from the Seven Years’ War who were basically given the lay of the land to move about. The French were told not to go any farther than the “trois chemins” — the three lanes — and apparently thus the name. - Another discovery while I’ve been studying music: Hertz is a measurement of cycles per second — if a note is 220 Hertz (Hz), then we hear it as an A. A3, to be precise — the A in the third octave of the MIDI note structure. Interestingly, if you double that frequency to 440 Hz, you get A4 — the A an octave above. So the notes on a piano don’t go up in frequency linearly (as in 1,2,3,4, which most people probably assume, as the keys are in an even line on the piano). They go up in frequency exponentially (2,4,8,16 and so on). Each note’s higher octave is twice as many Hz as the previous. When you go up one key down in the bass, you’re only going up a few Hz at a time, but when you go up a key on the left side, you’re sometimes jumping up hundreds of extra cycles per second. Cycles per second of whatever’s vibrating to make that noise — a piano wire, a guitar string, the little membranes in your Airpods vibrating the air that your ear picks up.
None of that is the interesting part about this. The interesting part is that even though humans have used different frequencies to make rhythms and melodies probably since before we could talk, the Hertz unit is named after Henrich Hertz, who studied electromagnetism in the 1890s. He was studying the fields and cycles of current around wires and magnets, and needed a way to describe frequency. His measurement was internationally adopted by electricians in 1935, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that science essentially agreed that Hertz would mean “cycles per second.”
That’s fascinating to me — that music has flowed around us as long as the human race has existed, but only since the 1970s have we been able to accurately describe what makes an A sound like an A.
And don’t get me started on why we call the note an A, but already this post has run too long. I’ll try to be back next week.