2020 - Corona, Corona, Corona

NAMM

Sometimes less is more. Two short term acquaintances who had nothing to do with guitars, for example a hummingbird on a tree in front of Mimi's cafe and a Mexican hotel employee named Edith who was happy to speak Spanish with a guest. It should be noted that this woman has been living in Anaheim for over 20 years without official papers and has not been to Mexico once since then. That's how the Americans are!
And the longer I live in Spain or in the Latin area, the more this stupid arrogance of the Northern Europeans and North Americans gets on my nerves. This impudence to misbehave in the south without hindrance. We are all human, and everywhere there are smarter and dumber, good and bad. But it has nothing to do with the country of origin!

And everywhere in the Latin area there are skyscrapers, dignified old architecture, wide, tree-lined avenues, well-kept parks, lavish film productions, super music and luxury - and be it in Venezuela, Ecuador etc.. Only the gap between rich and poor is more unevenly distributed than here. But the Latino world is not an uncivilized no man's land!

Madrid - OP

Still a problem with the sciatic nerve in my right leg. I finally decided to have surgery and went back to the hospital at the end of January. This cost my health insurance company a fortune. The day after the procedure I could already get up and felt like a newborn. No more pain. My room neighbor, who had the same operation, gave me a few cigarettes and we smoked with pleasure on the terrace, although of course it was forbidden.

Unfortunately I was rejoicing too early. After a few days the pain started to return. An x ray showed that there was a heavy bruise, which allegedly pressed on the nerve.

I was also furious about how the nursing staff had treated me after the operation and I couldn't avoid sending an angry message to the clinic management:

My name is Dieter Wilhelm Gölsdorf and I was operated on the intervertebral disc (sciatic nerve) last week.  I use prescription glasses and I was not allowed to take them, presumably understandable from a medical point of view, into the operating room. When I awoke from the anesthesia a few hours later, I asked for my glasses in the UCI room, as I can hardly see anything without them. I was told that only my wife or another family member could get them for me. When I asked what would happen if I had neither wife nor family, I received no answer.  To put it bluntly: without my glasses I can't watch TV, put toothpaste on my toothbrush without spills, use my cell phone, and certainly not read a book - which made me particularly angry. What are these methods? How do you treat your patients? From hearsay, even prisoners in Spain are treated better. And for this insolence, which I would like to casually refer to as deprivation of liberty, I was charged this incredible five-figure sum, including two nights in a private room with instant coffee!  Also annoying: One week before the operation I sent an e-mail to the office of Dr. Sala Walther, which came back with the note "undeliverable - error". Today exactly the same thing happened to me again. How is it possible that no emails can be received in a hospital for more than two weeks? Also a promised callback did not happen.  The only logical conclusion that I can come to in this matter is that the organization of the Hospital Ruber International consists of a gang of useless, shameless, profit-hungry people who should definitely and immediately be replaced by more qualified personnel!

Back to Cádiz

At the beginning of March we drove back down south, where the carnival in Cádiz was already in full swing. In the meantime our house was completely renovated and furnished. So was the kitchen; a good reason to finally go to the market and buy some fantastic seafood and fish.

What’s on offer here is really incredible: mussels, crabs, langostinos, fish of all possible varieties. And as constant companions in the parks these little mini parrots "Cotorras" fly around, see right. Imported from South America and somewhat larger than budgies, they are said to disturb the ecological balance. But they are pretty!

Carnival of Cádiz

An unbelievable spectacle on all squares, streets and alleys. People everywhere the eye can see. Groups in costume celebrate musical performances with mostly politically relevant content, and they sing absolutely professionally in four part harmony. In addition, there are competitions in various categories, which are held at Teatro Falla - just around the corner from us - until late into the night. Live TV broadcasts throughout Spain are included. On Youtube there are endless videos under "Carnaval de Cádiz"!

Corona, Corona, Corona, Corona, Corona, Corona

Towards the end of the carnival the first Corona messages came from Italy. And there were a lot of Italian visitors here ...

And shortly after that the virus got me. But I did not notice anything. We had met a nice couple - Robert and Elo - who are also in the music business, promotion, gigs etc. Robert had flown to London shortly after carnival for the mixing session of a Foo Fighters studio recording. There were about 50 people there, and one of them had passed Corona on to Robert. Back in Cadiz he suddenly felt bad. We were together for half the day including dinner, and when they were finally gone, I finished Robert's glass of red wine, delicious Amarone, which I didn't want to pour out. But no symptoms on my part, only Paloma felt a metallic taste in her throat. But that was it.

And then came the lockdown, you were only allowed to leave the house for shopping in the supermarket, of course only with mask and gloves.

Israel Fernández - Roger Saturn

The end of a friendship

In April, our friendship with the couple Luigi and Nieves, which I mentioned before, broke up. Ultimately, the Corona virus was to blame. But the thing had also two preludes, which already lay over years back: First Nieves had sent us once photos of airplanes with vapor trails in the balerarian sky with the remark "with this they want to poison us!

Second, they had sold their house on Formentera and moved to León, a small town in the north of Spain, gray, boring, horrible. Nieves supposedly wanted to care for her demented mother and also had an attractive-looking apartment up her sleeve. What we didn't know was that this apartment had belonged to an Isabel Carrasco, an obnoxious, right-wing and corrupt local politician who had made the life of a young employee hell and had been practically executed by her mother on a bridge with five shots. Luigi and Nieves had bought the apartment of this Carrasco for an apparently very good price. The photos they sent us showed an extremely nouveau riche ambience, and we had lost all desire to visit them in León.

Shortly after the Corona outbreak, Nieves flooded us with abstruse Whatsup messages that communism was coming over the world and similar nonsense, as well as a Youtube link to a Laura Eisenhower who, sitting in front of a camera, pretended to be the niece of the deceased ex-president and warned of all kinds of dangers ahead, e.g. that Bill Gates wanted to implant a chip in everyone by vaccination. Then she suddenly changed the subject to even more abstruse claims: we would all be under the influence of aliens, who would suck the blood out of us and our children, respectively, and would need humans for their nutrition. This was just too much to maintain this friendship. Luigi got a final email from me that sealed the deal.

Also, I posted an English commentary on Youtube to the post of this Laura Eisenhower, meaning that as a doctor I had worked in the Boston psychiatric hospital until 2012 and had treated this lady as a patient for her mental disorders. Schizophrenia, paranoia, and the warning, "Beware of this person! She is dangerous!" By the way, my comment was deleted again immediately.

The great Bender Land

Much home alone time with Corona. Spurred on by Daniel Frantz and then by Martin Huch and Heinz Rebellius, I devoted myself to a Bender problem in addition to writing this website: A Multi-Bender for the Tele would be a hit! It should be possible to integrate it directly into a Tele bridge without milling and drilling.

First, I thought about it. The problem was solvable. The first wild prototypes were made. Everything worked, even the "bending up". Soon coming into production.

Sitarizer

While experimenting with a hand lever bender I mounted the sitarizer brackets on the tele bridge again.

Unfortunately this horizontal bender did not make it into production.

Hip, Hip ...

But that escalated so far that I installed a hip lever on this part. But it was rejected by Heinz and Huch. Once again into the garage of the discarded inventions ...

Tremola-Bender

But that's not all ... Corona, how much time do you give me? What about a Duesenberg Tremola with an integrated Bender?
This one will now go into production. Heinz and Huch were totally enthusiastic!

Expanding dowels for stop tailpieces

M8 sleeves with spreading function: (Text from our web shop) Even with such a despicable component as impact sleeves, the wheel can be reinvented. Inside the sleeve there is a grub screw which spreads the sleeve apart after installation. This makes it secure in the wood and ensures an optimal transmission of the vibrations. It is best suited for the reassembly of vibrato systems that are fixed in the threaded sleeves of a tailpiece.

The "collar" at the upper edge of the sleeves prevents direct contact of mounted hardware parts with the guitar top and protects the surface from damage. Required hole diameter: 10mm - ideal for a centered 10mm drill! Supplied in pairs.

Futbol español

Hah, this is Spain! Watching and feeling the soccer matches of the league during the pandemic is "quite normal". The Spaniards project pixels onto the stands that look like they are spectators. No idea how they do it. The supposed spectators can also be seen during camera pans. Only in certain sections does this not work. Then you see the empty stands. Chechu once explained to me that this technique was originally developed for porn movies. You could exchange the faces of the actors with other faces. Incredible technique! Imagine a bank robbery, which is recorded by a camera, and then exchange the robber's face for yours. Boom, you are in jail. But let's get back to soccer: As a background noise, there is a constant stream of authentic audience sounds: "Oaah, Uaah". However, it still needs to be tweaked, because when a goal is scored, the most important thing is probably missing, namely the "Goool" roar. But they will get that soon too.  

Narcotrafico? (drug dealing?)

My oh my, what can happen to you! My website here is in English, edited by our distributor / agent, Bernard Ayling, who sold a lot of Tru-Tune tremolos for us in the early 80s in the USA. Still a good friend who grew up practically near Frankfurt, Germany, because his father worked there in the US military. Speaking perfect German, the man is very intelligent and has a good sense of humor. But I wanted to have the whole thing in Spanish and I remembered my old friend Ana (also mentioned before), who grew up in Switzerland and also speaks perfect German. At that time she worked for a distributor of guitars and guitar parts in Alicante, who often ordered things from us.  More than twenty years ago she translated all our catalog texts into Spanish. Super lovely woman, educated and with a lot of detailed knowledge of our business.  We hadn't seen each other for fifteen years, but I still had her phone number: "Hello Ana, Dieter here, what a surprise! "Dieter, how nice that you remember me!" "Of course I remember you. What are you doing anyway?" "Still in Alicante and working for an export company for fruits and fruits that we mainly export to Germany and Switzerland. Besides, I have been married for a long time and have two children" "Your German is still great! "Not as good as it used to be, especially since our export customers are practically all South Americans".

Then I told her of my wish for translation of the texts. Her answer: "I don't have much time, but I think I can do it for you."  I e-mailed her the first texts from 1964 to 1978, then I called her again and asked if this was really possible for her. "Yes, yes, yes, I'll have a look at it in when I have some peace and quiet."

After two weeks without further contact I called again, but at the other end was an older, apparently slightly confused woman who asked me if I was calling from the land registry office about a property, and other babble that was incomprehensible to me. Another attempt. Ana answered the phone, but this older person could not explain herself - strange, because I could not have dialed the wrong number, the number was stored in my cell phone.  Then I couldn't reach her for the next few weeks, always only an answering machine.  I was worried. Ana had a page on Facebook that I had looked at: husband, two children, lots of photos. Called again several times, but always only the answering machine! I thought I'd take a look at her Facebook page to see if there was anything I could verify. But suddenly the page no longer existed!

In the evening I told Paloma this, who immediately expressed a strong suspicion: She knew that about two weeks before, there was a European-wide drug investigation, in which among other things narcotics dealers in Alicante had been arrested.  It’s easy to see that by exporting fruit and vegetables you can of course also pack several kilos of cocaine or hashish into a few crates of tomatoes or bananas etc.  Ana's customers in Germany and Switzerland were also all South Americans! Of course, none of this is verified, but I am guessing that this lady was either arrested or possibly escaped to Morocco with her husband and children.

Well, shortly after that I found another translator, a guitarist in Madrid who works as a night porter in a hotel and has plenty of time for this job. I e-mailed him all the existing texts and pre-translated them with a program called "DEEPL" (which is much better than Google). Let's see, what will become of it ...

Paloma & Palomita

We gave the Palomas these cool colors. But with the completion of the Split-King pickups I wanted to add one more. Working title: Palomita.

The name "Super Fly" comes to my mind because of the undisturbed neck access all the way up the neck.

My big secret / The Ghost Song  - Hollow Skai

Now that the Book of Hollow has been published, I can no longer avoid confessing and thereby bringing the honest truth to light.

This book is a real revelation and describes, with the help of reliable witnesses, almost all the places where Jim Morrison stayed after his alleged death, in Senegal, Australia and New Zealand, Poona, even on a yacht off the California coast, as well as in Jamaica, the Czech Republic, Dresden, London, on La Gomera and on Jacob's Path in northern Spain. Two small text excerpts here. At the top, a GDR police transcript of a concert of a rebellious group "Die Türen" in Dresden, where Jim also sang "Break On Through". This is followed by my translation of this song into German. The GDR agents couldn't find me back then.

The information that I had met Jim by chance in Cádiz before the recordings of my CD "Jim's Legacy", when he came back to the Spanish mainland on a ferry from La Gomera, I had withheld from Hollow. This meeting and my penchant for old Doors songs confirmed my kinship with Jim, and I spontaneously offered him hospitality at my house in Cádiz, not the one that was currently being renovated, but another one that I had bought years before. He would only have to take care of this house. And since Jim was also an absolute fan of seafood, he liked it here very much. Yes, yes, nobody believed it, but Jim even came to Madrid once and sang a few songs with us (Los Dooros). He just couldn't resist it!  Actually, he didn't look that different at this age than he did when he was in his Doors youth, but no one ever recognized him, or people thought, "That's a Doors tribute band guy".  Of course, I never took any photos as discretion was key, not even when Johnny Depp stayed with me after the renovation, and not of Gran Wyoming during the pandemic, because if such a photo came to public attention, it would have been a bad violation of the Corona regulations, even though Chechu was only officially present at congress. But in Spain, everything that can make a politically important person look bad is immediately exploited by the opposition right wing.

Die Ärzte (The doctors) in the daily TV news

How nice. The “Die Ärzte” show opens with the theme played on our Starplayer TV-Outlaw!  Awesome!

Madrid Rock

Here is a nice video of various guitarists from Madrid (let's play some Rock'n'Roll on the village square!)
 

Dino-Walk

And another one ...

"There already is!"

In the mid-70s, while I was still studying diligently in Würzburg, there was a steady stream of wonderful commercials from the Bosch company on the radio in the morning. The motto: An inventor visits the examiner at the patent office and presents to him the ideas of his new household appliance which, as far as he knows, are worthy of a patent (which is actually practically impossible, because patents are always filed in writing). E.g. a vacuum cleaner: The inventor lists one advantage (e.g. fine dust filter, self-retracting cable, etc.) after the other, with the examiner saying the same two words after each detail, most scathingly, each time: "Already exists!"

The inventor becomes more and more dejected, and in the end asks in despair, "Why does all this already exist?" The answer: "From Bosch!"

At least that's what happened to me this year.

Dept. Dieter's good advice ...

Like most Spaniards, Paloma also likes to smoke pot, about two to three joints a day. For me it's nothing, because it works like a sleeping pill. Although, smoking pot could certainly be very useful for me because of my excesive nervousness. But I don't want it! I want to be active, I want to get excited, I want to get angry and echaufate when it's time.

But when it comes to pot, there seem to be difficult issues that have come to my attention that may need resolution. When a hash or marijuana smoker rolls a joint, he reaches for the cigarette paper, usually in larger size, and when he breaks open the new paper pack, the first thing he does is tear off the top lid to make himself a roll-shaped filter or two by the finest of hands. When these two filters are used up, he reaches for thicker paper wherever he can get it. In addition, the tobacco industry had now developed small "Libretos", 50 sheets of thick paper, about 2cm wide to tear off, from which you can turn the filter. Where need is, there are even solutions!

My thought now, to save this annoying rolling: Why are there no pre-produced rolls in nice 50-piece packs, even in a kind of tobacco pouch, fancy printed with tobacco leaves, so that even the consumer after using up a bag could repack his tobacco in just this pretty bag. The tobacco packages are just like the cigarette packages always printed with these ugly, deterrent lung cancer and otherwise photos to deny people the nicotine pleasure. And a filter - however made - also reduces by its length the amount of tobacco to be consumed by almost 20%!

So I found a factory for paper rolls (main production probably toilet roll inlets) and briefed them. They agreed and made me a quantity of 1000 filters at the minimum order price of € 500. So I was able to try it out first, although both the paper thickness was too thick and the outer diameter a tad too large. Another € 500? Not now! In principle, everything was generated, so the moment had come to contact relevant smoking paraphernalia companies.

No. 1 was "Pueblo", a company that offers natural tobacco and especially in Spain are extremely popular, because there are not only many self-rolled but also many stoners. My life to this day is an ongoing continuity of quitting smoking and starting again. In any case, it seems to me that the only way to limit tobacco consumption at least a little bit is to roll your own cigarettes. That's why I'm a committed Pueblo consumer when I smoke. There were once even eight smoke-free years of my life, thanks to my partner at the time. Women do have some power over us after all!

However, I received the somewhat sobering answer from the Pueblo company that tobacco producers are forbidden by law to market so-called accessory items such as filters, leaflets, etc.

Next candidate: OCB - located in France: I translated everything by DEEPL translation program into French and sent it again by email together with photos, illustrations etc.. Immediately sobering answer: They had such filters already for quite some time. Damn, they were even superior to my design, because there was a horizontal crossbeam inside for stabilization, which divided the inner area of the filter roll into two areas, so that the thin-walled roll could not be so easily compressed inwards, see photo.

And it came even worse: At a tobacco kiosk in Cadiz I asked curiously whether they could order me a pack of these OCB filters, because currently not available. The guy replied that there was also from the company RAW, and showed me a fancy metal can with comfortable sliding lid, which housed 100 pieces of filter rolls, price under € 5,00.

Conclusion: A lot of thoughts, a lot of energy and € 500 in expenses for nothing. This is what can happen to a problem solver / inventor.

Football

(Jogi Löw does not accept the defeat and declares the German national team the winner.
The goals must be recounted.)