Daniel The Prognosticator

I was telling a lot of people about my premonition that the "best team in the NFL" New Orleans Saints were likely to lose in Dallas last night.
I initially had to agree that the Saints, being a better team than the Cowboys, should be able to beat them. And, I am pretty sure that if the Saints were given the ball against them with the same score and same amount of time on the clock, then, they would move down the field and at least tie the game nine out of ten times; and win the game probably eight out of ten times; but not every time.
I imagined having money, then thought to myself: Imagine having a hundred bucks and being foolish enough to bet the whole thing on the Cowboys, wouldn't that be stupid?
But this made me consider the opposite extreme.
From what I could tell from listening to the game, it was like a contest of "rock, paper, scissors."
The Saints came out throwing the scissors.
The Cowboys, through the grace of whatever occurs when everybody thinks you are going to lose, threw the rock, which everyone can guess, crushed the scissors.
The Saints, being stubborn, kept throwing the scissors, because surely the Cowboys were going to start second guessing the validity of the early lead that they gained, by crushing scissors.
Then, as the game neared the end, and the Saints had a last opportunity to seize victory, it was they that started second guessing everything.
"Are they going to just throw rock the whole game?!?" the Saints might have wondered derisively.
"No, they know they aren't as good as us and are playing with house money. They've got to be thinking of switching to paper, let's just throw scissors again, they won't be expecting it!"
And, so, they did, and the Cowboys crushed them with the rock, and so, the game ended.

The Week Without A Post

 Shit, Dan, I was getting worried about you there with your long absence from the blog.

I don't know about NOLA, but other than offering CD's for a DONATION, selling merch isn't considered a constitutionally protected free speech right like busking and usually requires a separate vendors license. Craig Nelson, blog reader.

The idea, I'd think, would be to busk a bit more, make/sell some paintings, drawings, CD's, hell guitar picks, anything, so your living is as an artist rather than as a skeezer who sells their plasma. -Alex in California, blog reader.

My understanding is that artwork can be sold in the French Quarter, but it must be original, no prints, photocopies, or photographs of your work, etc...

I imagine, though, that if I set some of my drawings by me for sale, and if people thought they were good, I would then probably get more inquiries about the "commissioning" of me to make drawings of their loved ones, rather than offers to buy drawings of people they've never seen before that I drew out of magazines and yearbooks. How would they know how good a likeness it is, for example?
This, I would be amenable to if they would give me a photo of the individual that I could take home and draw where nobody could see how many balled up sheets were in and around the wastepaper basket.

I don't know if I could bear to have someone looking over my shoulder as I drew, or, especially, making comments like, "the nose is too wide," while the poser became fidgety, having fished the limit of her modern day attention span.

And, what would they think if I were to approach the model to measure the distance between the pupils of her eyes, and then the distance from the bridge of her nose to the top of her head?

I shudder to think that developing the ability to draw like that might be one of those things like snatching the pebble from the master's hand that I might have been lead to New Orleans to learn.

I guess I'm like the people who come up to me and tell me that they could never just sit somewhere and play their guitar, in that, I could never draw someone while they sat there, waiting for me to finish, looking forward to it coming out incredibly well...

But, I suppose if I practiced on a couple hundred random faces out of magazines until I could knock them out in under a half hour...but there is still the problem of me seeing something that needs improving every time I look at the "finished" work, and wanting them to let me fix it before they go off with it.

Hopefully, I will have a CD for sale soon, with maybe seven songs on it. One thing about working with Jacob Scardino is that a year of me fiddling around with a song can be condensed into a couple of afternoons in his studio.

For example, I could ask him to change the beat of a song, and within a few seconds know if I like the way the chords sound over it. Before, I would have had to stop and spend probably twenty minutes programming the different beat to play, only to decide that, nope, the first beat was better..

It has been raining off and on on this Friday evening and is sprinkling lightly now at a little after 10 PM as Chris, the new barista at Uxi Duxi prepares to politely inform me that the place is now closed...

I made it to the plasma place to cash in on my "twice in one week" bonus.

The fine print indicated that, should I have went tomorrow, I wouldn't have gotten the bonus, because, even though it would have been my second visit in a week, it would have been the first of December, starting a new month, and making it so my donation wouldn't be the second one of the week, but the first one of the month -no bonus.

If a person goes on Saturday, December 1st and donates, and then comes back 2 days later (because you can't go on consecutive days) and donates, he won't get the bonus either, because it would be Monday, and Monday starts a new week, so it wouldn't be the second donation of "the week," it would be the first donation of the new week; even though, two donations were made only two days apart...