#1080 And the Beat Goes On & Off

It’s the law of unintended consequences.
I was at a theatre and they had a live band. The drum set was on a raised area of the stage. My first thought was, “Gee are drummers particularly susceptible to swine flu?” Because this guy’s entire drum set was encased in a sneeze guard.
Then I looked a little closer and noticed that each drum had a little microphone on it. About then I hear the sound guy at his board behind me talking into his microphone saying, “...okay now the floor tom, okay, now the bass...” and so on.
So it all made sense. They have ripped the throats and guts out of the wild abandon of drumming and civilized the sound so it can be perfectly mixed in with other instruments. They want the control of syntho-drums but the visual effect of a real guy playing real ones. So they have to amplify the drums with microphones so they can turn the microphones down.
The beat goes on...and off.
And they enclose the drummer in Plexiglas panels like he’s the Pope on tour. Or with a giant a sneeze guard because being a drummer is like having a disease of wild sound that could infect all the other players.
Another unintended consequence I saw recently. My neighborhood has a homeowners’ association with covenants. It’s also near a river. To get to the river people trespass across a certain area. They also leave tons of trash and start fires. So the homeowners’ association finally erected a nice wrought-iron fence across the area where the people were trespassing.
But they didn’t extend the fence into the yard of the person that was next to that area. So once the fence was up, the trespassers went around it—through the guy’s yard. The guy put up a chicken wire fence to stop them.
The homeowners’ association made him take it down. It wasn’t consistent with the architectural control parts of the covenants.
Of course, if the homeowners’ association hadn’t put up the first fence the second fence wouldn’t have been necessary.
For some reason I thought of the drummer and his sneeze guard.
America, ya gotta love it.