Ibanez SR505 BM 5-String Bass

This is easily the sweetest bass I’ve ever played, although it took some time to get that way. It was cool right out of the box, but I needed it to do something other than what it said on the box.

Traditional electric bass guitars are somewhat limited instruments, especially for six-string guitar players, in that they only know how to deal with four strings. In playing bass, I often find myself running out of strings – my fingers clearly anticipate finding two more of them. The bass equivalents of the high B and E strings of a conventional guitar are notably absent on a bass.

A five-string bass addresses the absence of one of these missing strings – or at least, it can – and it expands the range of the instrument. The direction in which it expands said range is a matter of some contention. Most five-string basses are tuned with an extremely low B below the low E. Such a string is just this side of subsonic, and it can probably set off near-by seismographs if you play through a sufficiently powerful amplifier.

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DeWalt DW920 Cordless Screwdriver

Just about everyone owns a cordless screwdriver… this being a cordless drill with a screwdriver bit clamped in its chuck. While the versatility of an electric drill is not to be underestimated – they can be pressed into service to mix drywall mud, pump water and probably to prepare smoothies if you travel far enough into the bush – driving screws is a task that arguably calls for dedicated hardware.

Battery-powered drills are both too powerful and too heavy to be ideally suited to the task.

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Boardwalk Empire on DVD Season One

Compelling, nuanced and engagingly lurid, Boardwalk Empire on DVD is a week and a half of the best television ever made – unless you drop into maximum video gluttony and burn through the entire box set in a couple of nights. Rare indeed is the series more likely to tempt its viewers into viewing it all at once.

Boardwalk Empire chronicles the fast life and dangerous times of one Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, a fictionalized shade of politician and gangster Enoch Johnson, who ran Atlantic City, New Jersey during prohibition. Like his real-world doppelganger, Nucky Thompson has risen through the power structure of the east-coast Republican party, and there isn’t a mouse sneezing in Atlantic City he isn’t aware of, taking bets on or shaking down for protection money.

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IPod Nano Generation 6

The sixth-generation iPod Nano is a brilliant bit of technology, and even more so if you don’t have to pay for it. Our Nanos began their lives as first-generation iPod Nanos, which Apple recently recalled after almost a decade of faithful service due to some concern about their batteries catching fire. The recall promised that these ancient players, once returned to Apple, would be replaced with equally ancient refurbished first-generation Nanos… having decidedly less infernal batteries.

One can only surmise that Apple seriously underestimated the number of first-generation iPod Nanos still lurking in the drawers and glove compartments of the known universe, because by the time our old Nanos trudged through the recall process, the supply of replacement first-generation iPods had clearly been exhausted. We received shiny – and apparently factory-fresh – sixth-generation iPod Nanos instead.

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Motorola Xoom Tablet

Tablets appear to be just this side of useless until you own one, after which they’re just this side of indispensable. Unquestionably the hot device of the past year, a tablet can become a walking web browser, a personal video player, a game console no one else has to know about, a two-way video communication terminal and the known universe’s least compact MP3 player… pretty much all at once.

In that you can download innumerable applications to a tablet, it can also be a lot of other things I haven’t thought of. You can largely make one into whatever you need it to be.

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Rogers Rocket Hub NetComm 3G10WVR-2

There are a number of aspects of living in rural Canada that give city people pause. No one delivers pizza out this far. It takes three days of acting lessons and a nine month wait to get a gun to defend yourself against the wrath of coyotes – who don’t need a permit for their teeth. Few of the politicians who make the laws that govern rural inhabitants have ever been here. High speed internet is something everyone else has.

I could abide all these issues, save for the last.

For much of Canada that lies beyond the scope of pizza delivery, Internet access has traditionally been available either through dial-up, which doesn’t bear thinking about, or satellite broadband. The latter, while unquestionably preferable to a modem and a very, very long wait, is still far from affordable, far from reliable and far from quick.

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GE SmartWater Water Softener GXSF30H

Hard water is something of a nuisance – it can fur your pipes, make you itch, cause your dishwasher to become the frequent recipient of profanity and physical abuse, prompt your faucets and fittings to corrode and increase your consumption of soap. Fortunately, it’s not something you really have to put up with.

While a complete understanding of the insidious nature of hard water would require that we’d all stayed awake during high school chemistry – ya, right – it’s arguably worth noting that its hardness derives from calcium, magnesium and other ions in your water. A water softener exchanges these troublesome little beasts with sodium ions, resulting in a cheerful splash of water from your household plumbing that’s responsible for none of the above. Soft water is a guilty pleasure.

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Taylor 914ce Guitar

Looking like it just time-warped in from the middle of the high renaissance, the Taylor 914ce is breathtaking to stare at, and a bit daunting if you have a credit card in your pocket while you’re doing so. Its superb choice of tone woods and ornate decoration, however, will seem as naught once you start actually playing one.

Subtle, nuanced and intricate, the 914ce is stunning, especially if you favor fingerstyle playing.

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The Borgias Season One

As guilty pleasures go, The Borgias on DVD is seriously evil. Nine episodes of treachery, mayhem, murder, intrigue and every imaginable sin – all in one easy-to-open package – it’s addictive, compelling, remorselessly watchable television.

The Borgias recounts the tale of Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1492 successfully bribed his way onto the throne of Saint Peter and became Pope Alexander VI. Surrounded by his scheming offspring, he extended the grasp of the papacy, and he managed to survive for the next eleven years as the de facto ruler of Rome and head banana of the Catholic church.

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Stargate: Universe

The shortest-lived of SciFi Channel’s Stargate adventures, Stargate: Universe ran for a brief two seasons before it had its plug pulled, its gate deactivated and its spaceship repoed to an undisclosed location. Most viewers of the series during its original broadcast run will likely have considered that it deserved its fate. It was all but unwatchable.

In retrospect, it was all but unwatchable because of the incessant commercial interruptions, constant promo graphics engulfing the lower third of its screen while it was running, weird pan-and-scan camera movements, periodic time-slot changes and sundry other distractions wrought upon it by its parent network. Viewed on disc, it’s an entirely different universe.

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Ten Great DVD Box Sets

Broadcast television is far too much like reality – frequently depressing, perennially disappointing, ruinously expensive and pocked with commercials. We rarely watch it.

Television on DVD is a taste of broadcast TV from an alternate universe. Through the alchemy of small polycarbonate discs and modest departures of cash, it’s possible to watch only the best of what airs – or has aired in ages past – with no advertising, no program reminders creeping up from the bottom of the screen and no lame episodes of a poorly written three-camera situation comedy about sexually-ambivalent camel ranchers living in an unnamed suburb of Cleveland.

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Scotts EcoSense Weed B Gon

I hate weeds, and I enjoy a significant degree of satisfaction in ending their mean little lives. We have fifty acres of back yard, of which about four are reasonably civilized. Any weed that can’t confine itself to the remaining forty-six deserves whatever it gets.

For a long time, the most effective broadsword to be unsheathed in the ongoing struggle against the barbarian hoards in our lawn was 2,4-D, a venerable weed killer that conveniently nuked anything green except grass. I suspect that 2,4-D got a bad rap largely because it works well and smells funny. Having an unusually long history as agro-chemicals go – it dates back to the second world war – 2,4-D has been tested within an inch of its life by very nearly every government with at least one scientist on its public payroll. It has only been found to be demonstrably toxic to higher-order lifeforms which insist on swimming in it in its concentrated form.

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Neater Feeder Dog Dish

The Newfoundland dog is a remarkable creature – huge, affectionate, huge, laid back, huge, amusing, huge, strong and huge, it has the killer instincts of a sofa cushion and the table manners of a hand grenade. At least, ours does.

The wall behind her food dish has been repainted annually since she arrived, and the trim replaced on several occasions. It’s unclear which of the constituents of dog food mixed with canine saliva can decompose wood, but one of them’s really quite effective.

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CorelDRAW Home and Student Suite X5

CorelDRAW is among the best of the vector drawing applications. It’s considerably easier to master than Adobe Illustrator, and it comes in a cooler box. It is, however, grotesquely expensive. The full X5 package – that’s version 15, if you’ve been keeping score – has a street price of about three hundred dollars.

Capable though it may be, CorelDRAW has long been priced out of reach for most non-professional users.

The CorelDRAW Home and Student Suite X5 package is CorelDRAW without the traditional credit card outrage that has long attended this software. It has a street price somewhere south of eighty dollars. Costing less than a tank of gasoline – admittedly, that would be our hugely overpriced Canadian gasoline, with about half the bill consisting of various taxes – this incarnation of CorelDRAW should be accessible to pretty much anyone.

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Coleman All In One Cooking System

Conventional gas barbeques represent just about everything that’s unspeakable about eating outside. Huge, rattling, rusty machines dripping with gobbets of last year’s burger grease subsequently calcified into obsidian stalactites; crawling with eyeless, Pleistocene insects; and connected to enough pressurized hydrocarbons to launch the whole works into low orbit if the igniter fails on the fourth try, they make microwaved TV dinners look quite appetizing by comparison.

This is not to say that grilled food isn’t tasty, or that the aromas of its preparation aren’t savory, tantalizing and ideal for luring most of the local black bears into viewing range. I’ve long felt, however, that the whole experience would be somewhat more prepossessing if the resulting food didn’t include a substantial corroded iron component.

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Coca Cola vs. Orange Juice (Coke Wins)

Chronic obesity is a much beloved issue for both the authors of newspaper columns during a slow news cycle, and for politicians who have come to the disturbing realization that they’ve taxed all the extant sins to the limit, and had best set themselves the task of vilifying something new. In that summer looms as I write this, it’s a safe bet that the idea of taxing soda pop to deter people from drinking it and gaining weight will get another lashing of ink… pretty much as soon as the beaches open.

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The Great TomTom Battery Adventure

The TomTom automobile GPS receivers are a wonder of very small technology. Accurate, easy to use and upgradeable so they sound like Homer Simpson when they’re telling you to turn left in five-hundred meters, these are the expensive little boxes to have suction-cupped to your windshield when you’re hopelessly lost.

We have a TomTom GO 630. Despite the occasional spate of bad press these things engender when someone drives through a shopping mall having blindly followed their instructions, we’ve never found ourselves in a lake, demolishing plate glass or mowing down sheep as a result of its navigation.

In fact, of late, it hasn’t even interrupted our conversations, in that several months after its warranty expired, so did its internal battery. In the space of a few weeks, it went from holding a charge for a fortnight to holding a charge for something less than the duration of a quick trip into town for snacks.

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Yamaha P155 Digital Piano

My acoustic piano is one my favorite toys. At least, it is for a few weeks after Tim the piano tuner’s been by to sort out its workings and make it sound like a piano again, rather than a sack of ferrets. After the first change in the weather, however, it gradually loses its grip on reality, a few beats work themselves into its keys, the odd screw comes loose and it becomes increasingly objectionable again.

Tim suggested that the best remedy for this would be to have him ‘round every few weeks. Sadly, at a hundred dollars a throw, this wasn’t wholly practical.

Wooden pianos are inherently unstable, no matter how well they’re made and how expertly they’re serviced. Temperature, humidity and the general perversity of the universe all conspire to detune them. This is not to say that mine was particularly well made. Tim continues to refer to it as “the nicest cheap Chinese stencil piano I’ve ever seen.”

In fairness, this is probably higher praise than it deserves.

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ART V3 Studio Preamp

A very long time ago, before there were megapixels, WiFi, microprocessors or white LEDs, electronic stuff ran on vacuum tubes. An iPod built around vacuum tube technology would occupy an area roughly the size of Nebraska and require a dedicated nuclear power plant to light it up, so the disappearance of these quaint articles of pre-history isn’t a bad thing, for the most part.

At least, it isn’t a bad thing unless you play guitar.

Electric guitars and vacuum tube amplifiers go together like liberal politicians and mendacity, save that electric guitars are more fun. Solid state amplifiers, while a lot less likely to glow bright blue during power chords or explode unexpectedly part way through a gig, lack the tonal warmth of their distant and more treacherous ancestors. Vacuum tubes, being largely mechanical devices, imposed a measurable level of distortion upon whatever they amplified. While this resulted in really disturbing specifications for the audio equipment that used this technology back in the day, vacuum tube distortion actually sounds really sweet.

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Downton Abbey

An historical costume drama for the ages, Downton Abbey is more fun than would have been respectable during the period in which it’s set. The locale for the tale – and perhaps its most ubiquitous silent character – is the Edwardian estate of Downton, complete with a sprawling house, innumerable servants, a titled family and enough intrigue, gossip and brooding scandal to measure on the Richter scale.

Fusing elements of Upstairs Downstairs and Gosford Park – with which Downton Abbey shares its writer, Julian Fellowes – the series weaves a tangle of subplots and quirky, irascible characters. Attempting to summarize its story lines would be both an undertaking of dubious efficacy and something of a spoiler. You’d pretty much have to watch this one to properly appreciate it.

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