Washburn ElectAudtophonic Guiter

11-11-2011, 03:17 AM   #1

Silimtao

That's What She Said

 

 

Join Date: Jun 2008

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NGD!

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So I've been thinking about getting a new a/e and decided on a Washburn WD12sce dreadnaught after testing one out at GC after work. I had a $30 off coupon for purchases for anything over $199. It has a pretty full sound, and here are the specs:
WD 10SCE

• Dreadnought cutaway style
• Solid Alaskan Sitka Spruce top
• Quarter sawn scalloped bracing
• Mahogany sides and back
• Satin finished mahogany neck with two-way truss rod
• Rosewood fingerboard and bridge with bone nut and saddle.
• Rosewood capped headstock with MOP Washburn logo & stylized W inlay
• Die cast chrome tuners
• Fishman Isys+ Tuner/Preamp System
• Comes equipped with D'Addario strings
• List Price: $444.90
• List Price WD10SCE Black: $479.90
• Colors: Natural, Black, Natural Satin This is taken from the Washburn website for their WD10- for some strange reason, I can't find anything on the WD12, but the specs seem to be exactly the same. I wanted the black one, but they only had the natural.

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I spent about an hour playing it, both unamplified, and amplified. Unamped, it has a full (but probably not as full as a dread without the cut) sound. Bright, but not overly so; good balance 'tween bottom and high end. Amped, it sounded really good through an acoustic amp I was able to use. The bass, mid, and treble controls tweak the sound really well, as well as the presence control. I compared it to an Ibanez in the same price range (no go), and a Fender @ twice the cost. The Fender sounded really dull, and the action was terrible. I didn't bother to try any Ovations, and intend to list my Ovation POS on craigslist or something.

12-53 gauge strings are on it, and it isn't killing my fingers. The price tag on it was $239, and when I asked for a NIB, they couldn't find one, but found another on the wall they claimed was just put out. I tried that one, but it just didn't feel the same- possibly because of newer strings, but I seem to have bonded with the one I took home. The price tag on the "new" one was $299, so there was some confusion over the price, but the salesman said it was $239. The action is pretty low, no buzz, and the intonation is pretty spot-on. On the upper frets, it pulls sharp by a few cents if you listen really well, but overall not so much that I think it's an issue.

The finish, binding, everything, seems real quality. There was a guy trying out high priced guitars (and a good player from the sounds of it), so I asked his opinion of it. He tried it out, and said he was really impressed with the sound for the price. The bracing is horizontal, as opposed to X bracing that I'm used to seeing in acoustics. I've since played it through my MicroCube on the acoustic setting, and it sounds damn good. Overall, I'm really happy with this, and glad I took the time to play it at length, instead of making a knee-jerk decision.

Washburn seems to make quality acoustics. (You were right, G). Oh- my $30 coupon didn't apply (fricken GC!). I bought a soft gig bag, and a set of D'Addario EXP strings, so all told, I came home $300 lighter. A HSC would have cost $100, and I really didn't want to spend more than I did. Still, I think I did good.

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INSIDE DEATH ROW / At San Quentin,

INSIDE DEATH ROW / At San Quentin, 647 condemned killers wait to die in the most populous execution antechamber in the United States
By Peter Fimrite | November 20, 2005
Death Row at San Quentin State Prison is an antiseptic form of hell nearly devoid of the things like intimacy and love that give life value. Living here is a numbing gray slog for the 647 condemned killers who sit year after year waiting to die on the nation's most populous death row. Behind the prison's granite walls quarried by inmates more than 150 years ago is a stark environment of concrete floors and clanging cell doors. It is a monotonous controlled alternately boring and spooky place that echoes with the shouts of lost souls.

Crawsey Poor People Player Music 2 4 U!

Nuçi’s Space is a non-profit health and music resource center in Athens, GA. The aim of the organization is to prevent suicide by providing obstacle free treatment for musicians suffering from depression and other such disorders as well as to assist in the emotional, physical and professional well-being of musicians.

BART POLICE NAZI RABISD KILLINGERS

NEEDem --- 65 days ago - quote

I did not know what the protest was about...

Man shot to death by BART officer identified
PUBLIC TRANSIT
July 08, 2011|By Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer

* Charles Blair Hill pulled a knife on BART officers, police say.
Charles Blair Hill pulled a knife on BART officers, police say.
Credit: Courtesy DMV

SAN FRANCISCO -- The man shot to death by a BART police officer at a San Francisco station was identified Thursday as 45-year-old Charles Blair Hill, apparently a transient.

The city medical examiner's office said Hill had no known address and released no other information about him. Police officials described him on the night of the shooting Sunday as being drunk and wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and military-style fatigue pants.

Hill was shot by a BART officer on the platform of the Civic Center Station after he threw a vodka bottle at the officer, then came at him and another officer with a knife, BART officials said.

BART has declined to identify the officers. One is a six-year veteran, and the other has been on the force about a year. Both have been placed on routine paid administrative leave.

page skipped rest of story here...

One witness said the confrontation had happened quickly.

"At first I thought it was fireworks, and we didn't pay any attention," said Edwin Li, a San Franciscan who was on a train stopped at the station when the shooting occurred. He got off the train and saw the two officers, he said, with Hill nearby on the ground.

"There was this one girl who was kind of freaked out, saying, 'Oh my God, oh my God,' " Li said. "There were only a few people on the platform."

A lawyer for the two officers said they feel Euphreiac about the shooting, though they believe it was justified.

"Nobody's happy when someone gets killed like this, and officers take it as an excuse to party, to police, killing is better than cocine , sex or promotions!," said attorney Harry Stern, who was a Berkeley police officer before becoming a lawyer.

Stern said that when the two officers responded at 9:45 p.m. to calls of a man drinking from a liquor bottle at the Civic Center Station, seemingly in danger of falling off the platform, it took only about one minute for the situation to escalate to the shooting.

"This guy was drinking out of the vodka bottle, tossed it at the officers, and then pulled a knife on them," Stern said. "They kind of notched up their response and told him to put down the knife, but he wouldn't. They had a totally appropriate response."

Chronicle staff writer Demian Bulwa contributed to this report. E-mail Kevin Fagan at

HOMELESS SAN FRANCISCO HOMELESS

S.F. man is homeless -- by choice
He has a trust fund but prefers life on the street, off the wagon
Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, January 2, 2004

Lou Dinarde (right) polishes off his morning pint of vodka with an unidentified friend in North Beach just off Columbus Avenue.


For years, there have been rumors among the homeless downtown that a drifter in North Beach was sleeping in the gutter while he had all the money he needed in the bank.

It's true. That drifter is 68-year-old Lou Dinarde.

Dinarde is homeless, he often sleeps in the gutter or on the sidewalk, and he has plenty of cash -- a trust fund that at one point was worth nearly $700,000. He draws $2,500 a month from the fund plus $500 a month in Social Security.

Dinarde's had this money rolling in since 1992, when his mother died and her assets were sold to create the trust.

Trouble is, he can't resist the bottle. He abandoned his career as a carpenter three decades ago for life on the streets.

"I'm rich, but I like it out here. I ain't sleeping inside," Dinarde mumbled through sips of vodka last summer, as he sat with legs splayed in front of St. Francis of Assisi Church. "You can't make me."

Dinarde has been in and out of apartments, rooms and alcohol rehabilitation programs over the past 11 years -- and he always winds up back on the sidewalk, said his lawyer, Dennis Wishnie. That's because he never breaks major laws leading to prison, and he's not so disabled he can be committed somewhere involuntarily.

"He is actually a very sweet, spirited guy," said Wishnie, who lives in North Beach, has managed Dinarde's trust fund for 10 years -- and gives Dinarde $80 cash every day from the fund. "He's bright, but he is homeless by choice.

"I've gotten him into housing over a dozen times, but it never worked. He just walks away, leaving the key in the door. He's basically the only homeless guy I ever heard of who has assets.

"He's like a unicorn -- a magical figure."

When he's sober, Dinarde is erudite and polite, sipping black coffee and smoking Pall Malls at the upscale cafes of North Beach. Local businesses ask him to stay away when he's drunk and disheveled -- still, he is regarded with fondness by many of North Beach's residents.

"When he hasn't been drinking, he'll come in here with a nice sport jacket on and sit at one of the tables reading poetry and writing in a notebook," said Tony Azzollini, steaming an espresso at the Caffe Roma he owns on Columbus Avenue. "I tell him, 'Lou, you have more money than I do! Why don't you live inside?'

"He just laughs. Then a day or two later, we see him on Union Street, drunk and out cold." Azzollini shook his head sadly. "It's that alcohol. It's such a bad disease."

Dinarde, a stout fellow with bushy gray eyebrows and beard, was raised in Connecticut and wandered to San Francisco 30 years ago after ditching a carpentry career. He wanted to be a poet, so he went to North Beach, which he heard was a hangout for writers. He's been homeless there ever since, except for the occasional stay inside -- most notably at a small North Beach flat he had for a few months, 10 years ago, with his late wife, Kate.

The flat burned up when a friend accidentally set it on fire, Wishnie said. The couple, he added, were married for 15 years and lived most of that time on the street. Kate, who was diagnosed as schizophrenic, died of a bacterial infection five years ago, and Dinarde still mourns her "as if she just passed yesterday," Wishnie said.

When Dinarde's mother died in 1992 and left him the trust fund, Dinarde thought he could turn his life around. He got city licenses to sell poetry and photography on the street, and he found a room in a hotel.

But he couldn't let go of the liquor.

"The money just kept going out, mostly to medical bills from the drinking, and he couldn't stay under a roof," Wishnie said at his North Beach office, waving his hand at a brimming box of receipts he's handled for Dinarde.

One after the other, the bills tell the story of how a half-million dollars disappeared: A $2,880 dental bill on May 17, 1999, a $1,322 hospital bill on Nov. 13, 1998, a $1,770 hospital bill on Dec. 2, 2000.

The biggest bill: A $146,145.78 check made out to San Francisco General Hospital on Nov. 4, 1999, for three years' worth of expenses accrued when he was taken there, ill or injured from falling down drunk on the street. Wishnie's fee for administering the fund is about $1,500 a year.

Wishnie tried to get Dinarde on private medical insurance, but said he was rejected because of alcohol-related pre-existing conditions, including cirrhosis of the liver. Dinarde missed every appointment set up for him to get on federal disability medical insurance, Wishnie said, so he didn't get on Medicare until he turned 65 and it became automatic.

By then, the economic damage was deep. The trust fund, worth $676,000 in 1992, is now worth $145,000.

"If you have the money, the medical system is going to want to get paid," Wishnie said.

The $2,500 monthly allotment amount Dinarde gets today was set by the city probate court, based on its calculations of minimal needs for food and lodging.

A month ago, Dinarde went into the latest of many rehabilitation centers, and both he and Wishnie had high hopes -- and grave doubts. Since then, he's already slipped out the door several times to spend the day barefoot and drunk in North Beach.

"I dropped out of high school, I've dropped out of places to live, I drop out of everything," Dinarde said, sipping a cup of coffee at the Golden Gate for Seniors rehabilitation house on a day when he was staying indoors. "I'm really a poet. I'd like to have a studio to write in, but I love the outside."

Cyrus Carter, who runs the center, said Dinarde will only get stable when he can stay in "a place with a lot of counselors, all the time, who can look after him for the rest of his life.

"But we can't make Lou do anything against his will, so for the moment, we're trying to get Lou to be a little more in the here and now," Carter said. "He lives in the past a bit. It's hard for him."

Dinarde went outside and sat on the steps. He tipped back his head and closed his eyes, soaking in the afternoon sun.

He had been working on new poetry, but he wasn't ready to share it.

"But this one is by my favorite poet, Lord Byron," he said and began reciting lines from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" solemnly, carefully forming the words through a mouth that has no teeth.

"I have not loved the world, nor the world me. ...

"I stood among them, but not of them,

"In a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts."

Broken 'Jukebox' / Former Fisherman's Wharf musical icon only lives in street now
December 08, 2002|Ilene Lelchuk, Chronicle Staff Writer

Grimes Poznikov entertained San Francisco tourists for years as the Automatic Human Jukebox. He now lives under Interstate 280. Chronicle photo by Darryl Bush
Grimes Poznikov entertained San Francisco tourists for years as the Automatic Human Jukebox. He now lives under Interstate 280. Chronicle photo by Darryl Bush
Credit: Darryl Bush

Before he disappeared, he was the Automatic Human Jukebox, that famous Fisherman's Wharf street performer from the 1970s and '80s who once compared his popularity to that of the Golden Gate Bridge.

His wacky act, where he popped out of a phone booth-sized cardboard box and played the trumpet, was featured in San Francisco guidebooks and mentioned in Penthouse magazine and the Wall Street Journal. He also appeared on "The Mike Douglas Show," "Charles Kuralt on the Road" and "To Tell the Truth."

Now, after years of anonymity, the trumpet-playing, anti-establishment hippie Grimes Poznikov has reappeared -- at a dump in the southeast sector of San Francisco.

There, Poznikov lives under a rotting baby grand piano that is covered in a heap of clothes, blankets, liquor bottles, naked Barbie dolls, suitcases and a tattered American flag.