On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns? The reverse is also true: many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased." - John Steinbeck (Travels With Charley 1962) THREE BOOKS: Steinbeck's Travels With Charley, Robert Graves' Wife To Mr. Milton, and Boswell's Life Of Samuel Johnson. I kept reading books in 2016; thanks to my eReaders, it was possible to be a homeless guy with a big library. Three books influenced my own work, "On The Road With Al & Ivy: The Novel (Book 1)," in different ways.  I talked about John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley in an earlier blog entry that discussed classics relating to homelessness and my opinion, as it still is now, that it was a travelogue that would relate to those who've chosen the Van or RV life. Travelogues have been around for a long time. The great ones are more than just a description of places and people; they tend to be meditations abou...

THREE REVIEWS FROM THE DELTA SNAKE ARCHIVES: VOL. ONE NOTE: VOL. 2 COMING SOON. THIS ISSUE WILL HAVE THAT LINK WHEN ITS LIVE. Wednesday, July 2, 2014 (Revised Dec. 3, 2022) (Model: Klaudia) No. 1: Are American-made guitars really better? As a general rule, American-made guitars, particularly electrics, are better made and of higher quality (There are important exceptions, but for the purposes of this essay, we'll stick to the generality). The reason isn't that Americans are better at making guitars. It's about cost. It's because America uses foreign factories to make the lower-priced economy models. When making first-line guitars for their own market, countries like Japan generally make guitars that are as good as American ones. One example is Stevie Ray Vaughn. He played some Japanese Stratocasters before signing an endorsement deal with Fender. The main reason was that Fender wasn't producing guitars in the United States for about a decade or so. It was after the ...