This is a song called “Thumb-start My Harley” by two of the biggest gods in the world of professional bass asskickery. Just watch Steve Bailey work his six string into an awesome frenzy - I still don’t understand how he managed his awesome, awesome tone - while Victor Wooten pounds away with his intense slap technique on the four-string bass.

The only awful thing about this vid is Greg Bisonette on the drums; he really looks strange in this song. Like some mutated guppy.

Looks like the band life’s about to get more interesting for me. My old band’s looking for a new bassist, and it looks like I’m It, for now. Normally, that’d be a good thing, because I do kinda miss playing with the boys. The problem is, these days, the music’s become . . . shall we say, complicated. So complicated that my 4-string GSR Ibanez won’t cut it.

So now I need to get a new bass. And lordy, those things are not cheap.

The baby I’m eyeing right now is the Ibanez GSR, not exactly the most beautiful of bass guitars, nor the most versatile, but this kid stems from the same lineage that my GSR 390 is from, so it’s tried and tested good:

Now if I can only raise the cash I need to get that baby. . .

I woke up earlier than usual today, and since I couldn’t go back to sleep right, I fired up the Internet and searched for the oddest thing I could think of at the moment.

It just so happened that the first thing on my mind at the time was Mars. Yes, the planet. I don’t know. Ever since the report a couple of months ago that one of the newer rovers had found water on the planet - imagine! ice in a stellar body other than our very own! - the planet’s been stuck at the back of my mind. The amazing thing about it is that within the next few years, they’re thinking of releasing microbes in the environment, just to see if they’d survive.

Now, the question is: will Mars be able to support life as it is today? I’m guessing it can’t. There isn’t enough of an atmosphere on the planet to protect anything living from cosmic radiation.

But it’s interesting, no? If life manages to find a way to survive in the harshest of situations, then that says something about how scientists pereive life-surviving in planets. That would cause a pretty big upheaval in how modern science would define life as we know it.

I’m a pretty huge guy, so exercise is by no means an important part of my day. Recently, I’ve been relying more and more on weight-based workouts, instead of what used to be my daily routine of thirty minutes of cardiovascular workout and an hour and a half of weight training using my own body weight. While a purely weight-oriented workout isn’t bad, there’s nothing quite like a good jog.

So earlier this week, I went back to running every morning. Since I’d put on some weight since I last jogged, I limited my running time to fifteen minutes. Now, the problem was that I wanted to run at the park near my house, but the park was still closed at five in the morning. Since waiting for six a.m. would seriously wreck my schedule (I did my weight workout right after the jog), I hauled myself over to the nearby bridge.

It wasn’t bad. It took twelve minutes back and forth, with a warm up and cool down period of four minutes. Good thing about five in the morning is that there aren’t that many cars in the morning, so the pollution’s not too palpable.

Fun thing about running is that after some time, it just feels natural. And it’s exhilirating. I mean like, wow. Really thrilling. You may be gasping for breath like a fish out of water afterwards, but man, you know you enjoyed yourself. And for a few moments, seconds before the adrenaline rush fades, you’re thinking that you’ll be doing this again tomorrow.

And that’s when you start feeling the pain in the knees. . .