John Howard, Obama, Race!

Is there something so intolerable to John Howard about the thought that the next president of the U.S. of North America could be other than of white anglo heritage, that really gets up his skirt and clouds his head with a thick fog of refusal to countenance such a prospect, that he has totally lost the plot?

Michael Gawenda of The Age refutes the suggestion that the imperious little Ceasar is racist, but when it comes to being the chosen Messiah to control the whole planet, I suspect that the thought of anyone other than an Anglo, forgetting the issue of colour, being in charge of the New world Order, the controlling Empire, is intolerable.

Is the superiority complex such that he has descended to the depths of risking his OWN little empire because he can't shut up about the possibility of President Obama?

The irony of it all is that overall Obama resembles a Kim Beazley more than he does a Dr Martin Luther King.

Nice little ANALOG delay....

It's a Crossfire Dly-303 .. made in China, I paid $49.95 at Melbourne Music Centre, you can find them on EBay, but they are near Ormond Station on North Road, (Ormond, of course!)

It's in a sturdy metal casing, I think you could drive a semi over it and it would still work!
Best of all, it sounds quite good and is simple to use. It delays fom 130 to 350 ms., the repeat control isn't oversensitive, (many pedals are hard to dial a single repeat!). The level control seems to be more or less set to max at slightly above unity, where the echo just exceeds the dry signal. The bypassed sound is straight through natural guitar sound, (many effects units, especially multi-effects can't seem to pass a straight signal), in fact the dry part of an effected signal still sounds straight. My Gibsons still sound like Gibsons with repeats. Many other effects destroy the actual guitar's sound, why would you need a Gibson, you could just use any el-cheapo, or one of those toneless Fender Strats!

The unit even comes with a nine volt battery still sealed in plastic wrap.
The battery fits into a removable plastic holder, similar to what is in many of the active pickup control pads on acoustic guitars these days. Quick and simple to access and to change batteries.

Many effects these days supposedly run on batteries, but drain very quickly and lose efficiency almost immediately, to the point where I suspect they are not meant to run on batteries at all.
I have a Behringer Hellbabe Wah pedal which seems to go crap in five or ten minutes max when used with boost when run on a battery, and a Marshall Tremolo/Vibrato pedal which was next to useless when I put in a normal heavy duty battery.
My solution is to use 200mH rechargable batteries which are in fact rated at 8.4 volts and seem to work OK. I've only just started this practice and haven't yet evaluated battery life between charges, however.

The Crossfire works fine on the heavy duty batteries, I suspect it doesn't need as much juice to drive it and will give reasonable battery life because the circiutry is plain, simple, and vintage.