Potato Salad in Red

 

Kitchen Cyclone

My Sweet Baboo suffers terribly in the heat of Western Washington. Those 85 degree temperatures can be brutal to someone who has lost their heat resistance after nearly 5 years in residence in a climate that consists largely of drizzle and mild cold. She already has heat flashes to go with her medications, various surgeries and conditions, so she is suffering mightily this summer.

My wife also believes that if she is miserable, everybody must be miserable whatever they might say to the contrary.

I was making potato salad for the 4th of July (and doing it wrong, of course). There is a swamp cooler in the kitchen blowing in a generally southerly direction and a small fan in the window blowing generally westerly. Together they make a nice southwesterly draft that carries the cool air past me as I work. There is a third fan at the edge of the living room which I have pointed in a westerly direction to carry the cool breeze on through the rest of the house.

My wife has this theory that if you point two fans directly at each other things will be twice as cool.

So when she looked in a few minutes ago and decided I looked overheated, acting on her theory of double coolness, she turned the big west-facing fan around to the northeast pointed directly at me a few feet away and straight at the other two fans creating an invisible vortex around me of which I was blissfully unaware. I was adding spices to the potato salad at the time.


Having been raised in Texas I am mostly impervious to heat or temperature change and when I'm working on something you could have set fire to the place and I really wouldn't have noticed. So I didn't - that is until I went to add a touch of paprika to the taters - at which point a sudden tornadic swirl of red paprika rose up in front of my face. In fascination I watched the little red cyclone take a couple or three swirls and then break apart, half of it sailing off across the kitchen and a generous portion of the lower half collapsing into the potato salad bowl.

Paprika is red.

And now so is my potato salad - a nice pinkish shade of red.

Sheila looked in a few minutes later.

"Potato salad isn't supposed to be red," she commented. "That's not MY recipe!"

That is how holiday legends are born and somehow it will be the "Dad's Red Potato Salad" incident and will give much hilarity to my offspring, friends and relations.

I tried to brush it off. "I'm a very funny guy," I said.

"It would be nice if it was on purpose," the household's other resident wit shot back without hesitation.

© 2015 by Tom King

How to Draw a Compass Rose

 

How to Draw or Paint the Compass Rose

Want to paint a compass rose? Here's an easy tutorial to create your own. I designed one on the floor of a swimming pool. It looked cool from the diving board, but I had to remind the kids that if they dived for the bullseye on it, they'd hit the bottom where it sloped up to the shallow end. Not all of them heeded my warning. The rose still looked great, though!

I used rubber-based paint for this particular product. It used to be a state-of-the-art product, but I couldn't find many color options back then. Today's epoxy-based paints are even tougher and available in any color you want!

1. Draw Two 12' Legs

2. Draw Two More 6' Legs

3. Make Marks at 6" up the 6' Legs

4. Draw the Sides of the Four N/S/E/W Legs to the Marked Points

5. Draw Marks 6" up the Point Edges from the First Marked Points

6. Draw the Sides of the Short Points From the Tip to the New Marks

7. Paint the Left Half of Each Point a Light Color

8. Paint the Right Half of Each Point a Darker Color

Painting Tips

To create this lovely pattern, keep these pointers in mind for a successful result!

• Clean and powerwash the floor to prepare the surface. Let it dry for a couple of days.

• Paint the whole floor with textured paint. This will act as a background.

• Next, mark out the compass as shown in the drawings and draw it on the floor.

• Mask off the left half of each star point and paint it a light color of your choice.

• Use two or three thin coats. Then, use box cutters to cut the paint away from the masking tape before peeling it.

• Repeat this on the right half of each point and paint it with a darker, complementary color.

• After completing the paint job, allow everything to cure for 24 hours (or however long the paint manufacturer recommends). Finish the project by sealing the floor to protect the paint! 

   

   

How to Identify and Avoid an Online Romance Scam Artist

You've got a target painted on you whether you know it or not.

 Women Are Prime Targets for Internet Predators
(But men can be too!)

If you do social media, there are some things you need to be aware of. First, you need to know that not everyone on the Internet is who he says he is. If he seems too good to be true, he likely is. If you are a woman and put your photo on your Facebook or other social media page, you are going to get some attention. Ironically, it’s not the prettiest girls they go after. Their favorite targets are:

1. Older women in their 50s and 60s, especially widows, unhappy wives, or chronically single ladies.

2. Women who seem concerned about their looks, especially the ones who Photoshop their pictures a bit. They find this out by comparing their avatars with other more candid photos on their social media sites.

3. Women who are rather plain but not unpleasant looking.

4. Women who by their posts seem like they are attracted to money and power.

5. American women because everybody knows that you are all rich and won’t miss $10,000–20,000.

These predators tend not to go after young hot independent sorts of chicks because those girls don’t need the fantasy. In today’s loose, sexually charged American culture, such young women tend to date in person and don’t have to keep telling themselves how good they look. Drooling post-adolescent males do that for them. If, however, a girl seems needy or insecure, the piranhas will start circling. They can smell the blood in the water. That doesn't mean that if you are pretty they won't take a shot at you. I mean we all pick our best looking pictures for our avatars don't we?

How to Identify Internet Scammers

If you do get a message from a new “friend” who is male and good looking and apparently well off financially, and he wants to chat, watch out. Here are a few telltale signs that this sheepdog is a wolf with a cultured growl and a permanent wave.

1. New profile with few if any friends. If he gives a location, it will likely be someplace you've posted pictures of or wanted to visit, especially if it's a foreign country.

2. Important military man picture—usually nothing less than a colonel whose picture they found on some other website. You can do a search on the name, and you'll probably find where they got the name and possibly even the picture. Female scammers post sexually provocative pictures and the conversations will drip with playful innuendo - what we used to call the "come hither." 

3. If you accept their friend request, they jump right on with a direct message. Lots of flattery at this point complimenting you on how interesting you are or how beautiful. 

4. They tell you they are a widower with a son, or a well-to-do man whose rotten wife left him or whose precious wife died and left him with a child, usually a son, but she can also be a daughter. If you are a Christian, he will be too, and he will ask you for your prayers.

5. He will likely tell you he doesn't need money and mention some large amount of monthly salary he earns. Often, he will own a company, frequently in the oil business. Engineers and other professionals who travel around the world. It gives them cover when they ask you to send that loan to Bahrain or Germany.

6. In short order, he will fall in love with you because you are so understanding and beautiful. If you show any return feelings ...

7. THEN, he will ask you for money.

8. It will be for a modest amount at first to tide him over, just 'til he can get his humongous check cashed, but there's a problem at the bank, and his child is sick, and you are the only one who can help because he is all alone in the world.

9. If you ask questions, you will get evasive answers. It will seem as though he is working off a script because he keeps trying to force you back into a specific line of conversation. That's because is working from a script.

10. The quality of his English will drop dramatically if he does try to answer your more persistent questions. The cagey ones will pretend they didn't get your questions and try to get you back on script. 

Play with his head if you want, but be very careful. The more real information he has on you, the more likely you are to be stung. My wife ran one of these yahoos around the rosie bush just to see what was in his script. When she suddenly stopped responding, he went frantic. Wonder what his supervisor did when he found out the kid had dropped such a likely mark?

Ladies, you are not alone in being romance scammed.
Lonely  men can be real suckers for a pretty picture of an eager female.

Has This Ever Happened to You?

Where do they come from? You get a message from someone you just friended or who has friended you. They usually come from somewhere overseas where they are harder to track. Beware! The distinguished gentleman you are talking to who says he lives in Denmark, Ireland, Britain, or Italy, owns an oil company contracting business in the North Sea, or is a retired military guy or an English country squire is very likely a 17-year-old Nigerian kid working out of an Internet Cafe in Oshobogu or some other small Nigerian town. Internet cafes are a booming business in loosely regulated parts of Africa. Since the invention of the Internet, online scams have become sort of a standard career track for Nigerian kids who can type in some places. You also get a lot of Russians and folk from Slavic countries as well. Some Middle-Eastern terrorists also use these scams as a fundraising trick.

The kids, especially the African ones, are working from a script, likely with an older person managing him. If he stops talking for a while, and there's a delay in response, it's likely because his handler has caught him wandering off-script and endangering the con. The kid has screwed up, and his handler is probably boxing his ears and telling him to get you back on script.

What to Do If You Suspect Your "Friend" Is a Fraud

End the Conversation! The first and most effective thing to do if you smell a rat is to end the conversation. Stop up the rathole. Don’t respond. The pleading by this guy for you to write him back will be entertaining once you've twigged to the con. And it will be pathetic, but don't fall for it.

Don't Feel Bad for the Scammer

Don’t worry about the kid. He might get a beating for blowing the con, but maybe he’ll decide to go back to school and get out of the business altogether. Think of it as giving a young person some great career advice. It’s a terrible business and sinful to boot. And don't feel bad for these kids. Many of them go on to develop their own criminal organizations specializing in conning people out of their money. They make a fortune compared to the hard-working folk they swindle. They often go to great lengths to make people believe they are legitimate. Sometimes they even fly a particularly fat prize mark to their country and put them up in hotels in an effort to convince them they are legit. Once they have the money in hand, however, the mark gets dumped, and they disappear.

Spread the Word

Finally, one of the best ways to protect yourself and your friends is to share these tips with people you care about. You’ll be surprised how many of your friends and family have been targeted by these schemes. And it’s not just women who get taken in.

These guys have a hundred variants of these romance cons, all tailor-made for every sort of mark. And just because you are a man doesn’t mean they won’t hit on you. That long-legged Lithuanian fashion model may just be a chubby little Albanian part-time pig farmer. Long-legged models are particularly good at taking in lonely guys with this type of con. Guys may not appear to gall to these cons, but remember that guys are a lot less anxious to talk about being scammed than women who fall for them. Women get outraged. Men are embarrassed and are not at all motivated to tell anyone. Even if you are one of those guys like me who is fiercely loyal to his Sweet Baboo and would never ever stray, not even by email, you need to know these creepy little thieves are out there cruising for babes, and the next one they hit on might be your wife, your daughter, or even your mother or grandmother. In the Internet age, these thieves have got smooth-talking down to a script, and they have no morals, no consciences, and, if I ever get hold of one, they’ll be missing something else too!

This picture was used to convince thousands of women that a 17-year-old Nigerian kid 
was an Army general. If you're going to lie, I guess you might as well make it a big one. 
He later demoted his picture to sergeant after women noticed the stripes.

How the Con Works

The kids have a name for these kinds of cons. They call them “Yahoo” jobs. Want to hazard a guess as to who the “yahoo” is? Here’s how it works:

1. The scammer goes on the Internet to find a likely looking prospect and “friend” them. They trawl Facebook, other social media, dating websites, and chatrooms looking for women with two characteristics. (a) They are lonely women. (b) They have money to spare.

2. In order to draw you into the scam, once they’ve identified you as a likely candidate, they research them to find out what they are worth. That's why it's not a good idea to flaunt your wealth on social media. It's catnip to romance artists.

3. They find out where you are working and work out what your likely salary is and make an estimate as to how much you usually have in the bank at any one time. Some of these kids’ bosses have pretty sophisticated methods of sussing out your net worth. If charity fund-raisers like me can do it, so can con artists.

4. Some of this they discover by researching your footprint on the Internet. The rest they learn by getting in tight with their mark (that's you by the way).

5. Over a series of emails, which become increasingly steamy especially with female targets, but also with males, the scammer develops a level of trust. They may even get you on the phone at some point. With women the relationship with their poor orphan child is a major hook. With guys the scammer portrays herself (and she may not be an actual woman) as young and vulnerable and in need of a strong protector.

6. The scammer develops an attractive identity, in part by lending a sympathetic ear to the woman’s trials and troubles. These completely phony Lotharios manage to glean an incredible amount of personal information from their marks. The scammer’s false identity necessarily starts out very sketchy but he makes himself appear strong and self-assured. Above all he will seem to get you. That may be because "he" is a woman and in tune with what attracts women. Female cons do the same in reverse to men. They will flatter him that he's the only one who understands her. She'll trigger that protective paternal instinct any way she can.

7. This mystery scammer becomes more ever more exciting as they find out more about their female or even male target. These kids do both genders.

8. Depending on how the relationship grows and who the scammer has decided to be, African prince or ruggedly handsome Danish oil rig contractor (whatever that is) he will start to deepen the relationship as much as possible. He’s not going to be specific and will fumble if you press for more info about his job.

9. Then comes the favor. He or she declares their love, or if that’s too much, they’ll let slip that they're coming to America from whatever romantic-sounding country they say they live in and, further, they're just dying to see you.

10. Then something will come up to hinder those plans. He’ll hint and hem-haw around until, if you don’t suggest it, he’ll ask for money. His check is delayed. Her bank burned down. He’s covering a margin call on his stock portfolio, and he just needs a thousand dollars till his Hong Kong bank opens in a few hours. He’ll try to sound like he doesn’t need your money, really, but if you could help, it means he can come to see you sooner. For smaller amounts, she tells you her car is broken down or she doesn’t have the proper card for the ATMs in Morocco.

11. Then, he starts pressuring. “I love you. I wouldn’t ask, but I know you wouldn’t want me to miss my flight to the States." or "I'm in much trouble through no fault of my own. Can you help me, my beloved?" They can get just that schmaltzy. If it wasn't so pathetic and cruel what they are doing, it would be laughable.

12. At this point, he either closes the deal and escapes with your cash, or he doesn’t, and you also never hear from the con artist again.

If you send them the money, they’ll likely disappear unless they think you are amazingly gullible and that you can be taken for more. One senior widow handed one of these kids over $800,000 in cash. She was actually surprised when he disappeared with the money which had already been transferred through a dozen phony banks and accounts to heaven only knows where. The next day after you send the money, the target (that’s you) looks in your inbox for another of his love-struck emails. Meanwhile, back in Nigeria, he’s having a night on the town with his girls on your money.

In 2011 alone, the FBI had 30,000 reports of so-called advanced fee scams and more than 4,000 complaints about romance scams. Just the reported scams cost victims more than $55 million in just one year. Many more go unreported. For some reason, Nigeria has about a fifth of the scam trade. A typical romance scam nets anywhere from $200 to $12,000 from a single job.

Profits are dwindling, however, as Westerners, especially women, catch on to the scams and share their sad stories among themselves. Thousands more romance scams go unreported as lonely folk, humiliated at having been conned, simply eat their losses and don’t tell anyone. Really, can you blame them? Who wants to let it be known that you were romanced and swindled by a 16-year-old kid from Uzbekistan? Men are even more prone to hide it if they've been taken. 

Stick to analog romance, the kind where a bunch of ladies at your church band together to hook you up with some nice guy or girl. The church ladies do a tremendous job of doing background checks on potential matches for lonely singles in their churches. If Miss Margaret or Mrs. Dooley introduce you to some nice girl, she won't be a 17 year-old skinny boy from Kondugu or Bogatyrevo.  

This article is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge. Content is for informational or entertainment purposes only and does not substitute for personal counsel or professional advice in business, financial, legal, or technical matters.

Fixing Scratches on Your Fiberglass Boat

Something to do in the off-season when you're not going to be 
out on the water for a bit.

Repairing scratches on a fiberglass boat is a relatively simple process, albeit a bit on the messy side. You will basically be refilling the gouged out area with new fiberglass. Shallow scratches are easily done. With deep scratches you’ll have a more complicated task ahead of you. Here’s how to do both.

Materials:

• Epoxy fiberglass resin and hardener
• Respirator
• 4-6 oz. E-glass Fiberglass fabric (4 by 8 inch square)
• Scissors
• Disposable mixing cup and stirring stick
• Sharp knife or chisel
• Sandpaper and sander
• Acetone
• Styrene (small bottle)
• Plastic film
• Disposable brushes
• Plastic flexible spreading tool
• Latex or rubber gloves
• Duct tape
• Power buffer and fine grade buffing compound
• 
  

For Shallow Scratches:

Step 1
Clean the hull around the scratch with soap and water and then wipe with a rag wet with acetone. Wear gloves while handling acetone and all fiberglassing liquids.

Step 2
Drag the point of a knife or corner of a chisel down the scratch to widen it slightly to accept the repair more readily. Lightly hand sand to remove any bits of fiberglass sticking up along the edges of the scratch. When the scratch edges are level with the rest of the hull, you’re ready to go.

Step 3
Mix up a small amount of epoxy based fiberglass resin. For most scratches you’ll use less than a quarter cup of resin.

Step 4
Tease fibers loose from the edges of a piece of lightweight fiberglass fabric with your gloved fingers or a small sharp knife blade. When you have a little pile of them, place the fibers next to the scratch. Dip the fibers into the resin cup and lay them in the scratch. Stagger the threads so their ends overlap. As the fibers fill up the crack, brush lightly over the top with the fiberglass resin. Use the spreader tool to press the resin flat across the top of the crack and smooth out any air bubbles or bumps.

Step 5
Allow the resin to set and cure overnight. Lightly sand with fine sandpaper, and then fine steel wool. Polish and buff with buffing compound to a shine that matches the rest of the boat. For very light scratches, polishing and buffing over the scratch may be all you need to do and you can skip the fiberglass mess.

For Deep Scratches:

Step 1
Use a sharp pointed knife or corner of a chisel or screwdriver to clean out and widen the scratch so the repair material will set better. Clean the area around the scratch and wipe with acetone dampened rag.

Step 2
Lightly sand the edges of the crack to remove any burrs sticking up above the rest of the hull.

Step 3
Mix up a small batch of gelcoat paste. You will have to match the color of the boat. Gelcoat paste repair kits come with a selection of pigments to mix with the paste to match the original color of the boat. This is the hardest part. If you can find a matching color swatch at your local paint store, they can tell you what pigments in what proportions will match your color. You’ll have to do a little math and you will very likely waste several batches of gelcoat paste. Get it as close as you can. Buffing may help disguise any minor color variation. Color the paste BEFORE you add the catalyst. Add the pigments one drop at a time to an ounce of paste in the proper proportions. When the paste looks close to matching, put a drop on the boat hull and check to see how close it is. When it’s right, write down the number of drops of each pigment per ounce for mixing later batches of gelcoat paste. Add the catalyst and stir. Follow the directions that result in hardening in 30 minutes to 2 hours.

Step 4
Wipe the scratch with styrene before applying the gelcoat paste. This reactivates the old gelcoat and helps improve the bond between the old fiberglass and the repair.

Step 5
Spread the paste into the scratch with your spreader. The paste will bulge up a little after the spreader goes over it. Don’t let it bulge too much or you’ll have a lot of sanding to do. Wipe off any excess paste. Cover the gelcoat with a sheet of plastic film and tape it down. Gelcoat won’t fully cure in the air. Let the repair cure for 24 hours. Sand with fine sandpaper, then with very fine wet sandpaper and finally with fine steel wool. Buff with rubbing compound to a high gloss and then give the hull a coat of wax.

Did You Know Your Uber Driver Can Get You Shadow-Banned from Uber?

LITTLE KNOWN FACT ABOUT UBER: A recent discussion on Right Angle talked about people's reluctance to give a bad rating to our Uber drivers. Yes, we get to rate the drivers and that can be an attractive way for jerks to harm their drivers.  We decent folks are therefore reluctant to trash drivers with one and two star reviews for fear of costing them their jobs. But Uber drivers are not defenseless. Did you know that UBER DRIVERS ALSO RATE THEIR PASSENGERS?

Several low ratings by passengers can get an Uber Driver removed from the list. So we have good reason to be careful not to overreact when we rate a driver. Who wants to get a guy fired (anyone who is not an entitled, drunk on power, #$$#()|& that is)? But the little-known fact is, that Uber drivers rate their passengers and several low ratings can leave you stranded because drivers won't pick up passengers with a low rating.

I got a message from Uber several months ago that a driver had given me a low rating. Uber then proceeded to give me a lecture about wearing a mask in their cars. I investigated further and found that the driver had burned me because I got into the car from outside and forgot to put on my mask. Instead of reminding me to do so, which would have got him an apology and my instant compliance with Uber's mask mandate, he remained in a sullen silence the whole trip and then low rated me afterward.

Needless to say I reciprocated vis-a-vis giving him a low rating and expressing my opinion to his bosses. Instead of giving me a polite reminder about the mask and protected me from the vile streams of CoVid virus spewing from my nostrils as I breathed, he clearly jumped to the conclusion that my noncompliance was due to me being a Republican White Supremacist conspiracy theorist who might commit violence against him in his car in the midst of a deadly pandemic. These people make me so tired!

To their credit, the Uber system does allow you to protest the low rating by contacting their customer service and giving your side of the incident. It also allows drivers to warn other drivers that this passenger is bad news. That makes for a more friendly environment for both drivers and passengers. In all of the hundreds of rides I've taken with Uber I've only had that one problem and the trouble erupted after the ride was over and I was safely home.

Uber has a good system, but knowing the driver gets a vote on how well you behave as a passenger should probably be more widely known among riders. It might result in a lot more self-restraint among their riders. I've driven a taxi so I know how much I appreciated the polite people I carried in my cab. Met some of the nicest drunks that way. They used to hand me their wallets and say, "Take what you need!" at the end of the trip. I never cheated them, not gave myself even a tip as they were too impaired to make that sort of decision. And I couldn't even rate my riders, nor could they rate me. This was Ft. Worth, Texas after all and people tend to gravitate toward nice by and large in those parts.

The closest any of us ever got to being able to rate our passengers was by throwing them out of our cab. One driver (not me) picked up a drunk at Felix Bar in downtown Ft. Worth late one night. The driver got pulled off the cab stand at the Hyatt where most of the riders are headed for the airport or are great tippers so he wasn't in a mood to put up with much from a $3 fare. The drunk he picked up immediately got surly because the barkeeper had cut him off and he somehow got it into his head that the barkeep was in cahoots with the cab driver. He began threatening the driver and shouting threats at him from the back seat. The guy was driving one of those old yellow Checker cabs with the flat back floorboard that made for easy egress. So anyway, the guy was sitting on the right side of the back seat, leaning against the door as he berated the driver. So when they reached 7th Street, my fellow driver made a sharp left hand turn onto 7th and mid-turn, reached back and flipped open the back door and let centrifugal force do the rest.

His increasingly violent passenger, rolled limply out the door and onto 7th Street, one of Ft. Worth's busiest thoroughfares. The cab disappeared into the night leaving the drunk in the middle of the street in a puddle of his own vomit. Fortunately, at that time of night, the street was pretty empty so no one ran over him. 

The driver, in effect, rated him 0, GONE, and canceled.The drunk meanwhile couldn't identify the driver or even remember where he was picked up and why. Driving a cab was hazardous enough without having someone sitting behind you threatening violence. We often had to come up with some creative solutions to avoid problems, but we essentially had little or no choice as to who we picked up.

I personally think Uber's system is much better. It is a close to insuring everyone behaves themselves and provides both members of the ride-share transaction with means to defend themselves and as Robert A. Heinlein once said, "An armed society is a polite society."

© 2023 by Tom King

Building the Homemade Cajón (Peruvian Drum)

You may have never heard of a folk instrument called a cajón. You may have seen one and not realized it was a drum. We smuggled one into our special music one Sabbath. Our church at the time had an older congregation who looked askance at percussion instruments in the sanctuary. We'd have never got a drum set approved by the church board. Turns out one of our kids sat on a a cajón playing soft percussion to fill out the guitars, bass and violin for several weeks before someone twigged to the fact that Bobby wasn't just sitting on a box, but had been playing it all along. People heard something that sounded like percussion, but couldn't figure out where it was coming from. The cajón helped desensitize our older more traditional members to the presence of a percussion instruments in church. Later he was able to play it with brushes and drumsticks (gently of course).

A cajón is shaped like a box, about the size to offer the drummer a comfortable seat. It can have a sound hole in it, slits, or no hole at all. Some mike them up with piezo-electric or other types of instrument pickups. You slap the front or rear faces, even the sides, with the hands or fingers mostly, but some drummers use brushes, mallets, or drumsticks. Cajones are widely used in South America and Africa, in Latin American music, Afro-Peruvian music as well as Mexican folk music, flamenco and  the Cuban cajón de rumba and the Mexican cajón de tapeo. 

The cajón comes originally from Peru. The cajón takes three main forms: the bass box drum, the middle drum, and the solo drum. It is believed that the bass box drum was originally developed from wood salvaged from shipping crates. The crates were large enough for the percussionist to sit on top of it. The middle drum is thought to have come from a smaller shipping box used to ship church candles. The middle drum is played with spoons rather than palms and fingers. The first solo drum may have originated from a salvaged desk drawer. Modern cajónes may be made of metal or plastic, which is up to you, but it feels blasphemous to use anything but wood.

A cajón tends to be a very personal instrument. Drummers often build their own boxes, alter the design and may use several woods to get a different tone to each face. One guy I know of builds the front from Masonite and uses three different types of wood for three different tones - one for each of the other sides. This allows him to vary the sound of the beats as though you had multiple drums.

Check lumber dealers in your area that deal in hardwoods and specialty woods. Cruise the internet for specialty wood dealers in your area. But don't necessarily depend on store-bought wood for your cajón. Old furniture can also provide you with some unique solid wood pieces in maple, mahogany, pine, cherry, and lots of other woods. You want to checked out the wood's tonal qualities in person as well as the looks of the wood. The body of the cajón is usually open on the bottom and sits flat on the floor, but if you want to skip cutting a hole in your lovely wooden drum faces, you can add short legs to lift the box off the floor to let the sound out from beneath.

One way to determine the wood tone and timbre of each wooden side is to build a plywood box the size of a cajon and leave one side off. Then simply lay the wood you are considering using and beat on it so you can hear the tone. Try different types of wood until you find a wood type that gives you the tone you like - thicker sides and thin sides. Some specialty wood dealers will let you bring your box to the store and experiment with pieces of wood they have for sale. Thinner pieces of wood will give you louder sounds when using hands, fingers or brushes. Thicker pieces may be more of a tone you want if you are using drumsticks or mallets

If it were me I'd try a variety of woods and a variety of thicknesses. I like wood salvaged from old furniture that's being trashed. You might start with maple, rock maple, cedar or spruce at first. Then give some more exotic woods a try. Make your cajón completely unique. A luthier friend once found some old growth Black Forest lumber that had been sitting in a shed in Germany for a hundred years and made violins with it using a Stradivarius pattern. They sounded wonderful. 

Also, don't discount the value of lumber from old buildings and old discarded furniture. Sometimes you can find the most beautiful sounding wood in abandoned buildings and on scrap heaps. Also try antique stores. Look for damaged furniture that the proprietor has pushed into a back room and forgotten. Old table and desktops can even be cut up to make the thicker pieces of your cajón. 

Depending on your woodworking skills you can build a cajón with whatever joining scheme you're comfortable with. If you're really good, you can fasten the sides and tops with dove-tail joints. This makes for some beautiful work You can also glue the sides and top together. You can screw it together, nail it together, or whatever you like best. You can pad the top (seat) if you want - it will certainly make the seat more comfortable. It doesn't make much if any difference in the sound. Your butt will serve to deaden the top anyway.

There are several ways to add a snare effect to your cajón. There are some add-on devices that can be attached to the cajón to create a snare effect. Another way to do this is to add 4 paired screws inside one of the thinner faces of the box and attach 4 steel guitar strings between each pair of screws - the unwound ones E, B, or G.  Tighten or loosen the strings to get the snare sound you're looking for. 

As you can see there's a lot of room for creativity in assembling your cajón. Check out the references below to get further information before diving into your project. They might suggest some ideas you can use to get just the right sound you're looking for.

© 2023 by Tom King

References:

1. https://www.instructables.com/Adjusting-a-Cajons-Snare/
2.  https://cajonbox.com/2012/03/31/tuning-your-cajon/
3. https://www.fuelrocks.com/how-to-build-a-cajon-with-guitar-strings/
4. https://lousondrums.com/products/floating-external-snare-system-for-cajon-and-cajontab

Figuring Out the Fact Check Shuffle

This post (below) keeps showing up claiming that their posts are being limited by a mysterious Facebook algorithm that limits your posts to just 25 people. It will automatically receive the dreaded "false information" tag and be blotted out. This makes people mad because the "KNOW" that Facebook is blocking them with some kind of algorithm. 

WELL THAT'S NOT WHAT'S HAPPENING.  

So technically the Fact Checkers are correct - it's misinformation.  Facebook isn't limiting you directly. Actually all your friends pages limit who they can see. Truth is, you are probably limiting which of their posts you can see because your account's newsfeed is set on a setting called "Top Stories" which gives Facebook permission to limit what posts you see in your newsfeed. Here's the post that turns out to be wrong on almost all counts except that you and your friends are limited as to what posts they can see.

• The post reads: Finally made it !! Thank you everyone for telling me how to bypass. Good to know: it’s ridiculous to have so many friends (692)and only 25 are allowed to see my posts I ignored all these posts earlier, but IT WORKS!! Thanks for the dribbling tip Facebook… Now I have a completely new profile. I see posts from people I haven’t seen in a long time. Facebook’s new algorithm chooses the same people — about 25 — who will see their posts. Press your finger anywhere in the post and click on “copy”. Go to your page and it says “what are you thinking about”. Tap your finger anywhere in the empty field. Click and paste. This will go around the system. Hello new and old friends hello Trying this because I just get adverts on my feed

And if the fact checkers flag you,
you've got to deal with these guys.

Turns out, because it's not Facebook that limits what we can see and the solution above is bogus, the fact checkers can label your post misinformation. The fact checkers are using a technicality to throw you off the scent. The fact check debunking of this posts exploits a misunderstanding as to what is actually going on. They want us to think that Facebook isn't limiting what we post and technically that's true, but it's a trick. The limiting is not happening to the "visibility of what we post." Limiting is still happening, just in a more stealthy way.

Your friends themselves (and probably you yourself) are collectively limiting what we can see of each others' posts. There is a setting on your newsfeed (where you should be seeing your friends' posts) that gives Facebook permission to limit what you see. The default setting is "Top Stories". This is the "curated" setting which filters out what FB thinks are unimportant posts and gives you what it believes is a "best of" assortment of posts; an assortment I might add that seems to lean decidedly in favor of either innocuous posts or posts which support the mainstream narrative. And we know which direction of that lean.

The good news is that you can solve the problem permanently. I'm not going to give you the convoluted process of switching your newsfeed from "Top Stories" where your views are limited to "Most Recent" where you see everything your friends post. It won't do you any good, because Facebook automatically switches you back to Top stories after a day or two and then you don't know you're being limited again and you have to go through the whole convoluted process of setting your newsfeed back to "Most Recent".

Here's what to do! There's a delightful little app called "Facebook Purity" that's free and downloadable. It's also called "Fluff Busting Purity" which for a while allowed people to post the link on Facebook. But Facebook caught on and blocked people from posting the link. Here on Blogger, I can, however post the link. And here's where to go to download it.

https://www.fbpurity.com/ 

Once you install it, it rides herd on your newsfeed setting and when Facebook tries to reset it to "Top Stories", FBP automatically resets your feed to "Most Recent".  FBP also helps you control other settings and improves your Facebook experience by letting you hide all the Ads, Suggested Posts / Related Posts / Sponsored Posts / Upcoming Events / Games your Friends are playing / Games You May Like / Similar To / Related Articles / More Like / More From etc.. It even lets you insure the posts on your newsfeed are in chronological order. This stops Facebook from putting 3 day old posts at the top of your newsfeed and keeps them coming in current time order. FBP also lets you create your own filters, block posts with specific words, turn off autoplay and a whole bunch of other things that let you see Facebook the way you want to see it without all the annoying fluff that comes with the default account setting Mr. Zuckerberg saddles you with when you sign on.

Keep an eye on your newsfeed, though. Facebook does an update ever once in a while and disables FBP. The developer is very good about coming up with a fix in short order. Sometimes FB even succeeds in removing the FBP icon so you can't use it. Just go to the website and reload it.

This app is really useful and it's FREE!  If you like it, it would be nice if you sent the guy a few bucks to say, "Thanks for making Facebook more like it ought to be and not what it is!"

Happy Facebooking all you subversives out there!

© 2023 by Tom King