Moderated Guitars And Financial Markets
Well, things have stabilized a little bit in my musico / financio world.
Yesterday, I worked with harmonica wizard J.G. at his 85 degree workshop. As suspected, my guitar neck went flat, up the neck, as a result of the ten degree increase in temperature from my house to his workshop. I brought a stage tuner with me to confirm this. Step one was raising the string height by raising the height of the bridge. No improvement. After a couple of songs, I asked for a break so that I could pull out a small screwdriver and adjust the length of each string. The third and fourth strings were the biggest offenders. With a trial and error process, I firstly caused the intonation to go sharp up the neck and finally on pitch up the neck. Frustratingly, the well adjusted strings then emitted a buzzing sound as a result of the string touching the screw that adjusts the string length. I had to put the screwdriver in between the screw and the string and move the screw over slightly in order to correct this new problem that I had created. I hope that the screw is not now bent out of shape ! If this paragraph has been tedious to read, believe me it was more tedious to do this work on the guitar while my fellow musician waited for me to fix this problem. My guitar now has acceptable intonation at an 85 degree temperature. I have not checked it in my 75 degree practice area.
As I suspected in my last diary entry, Jean Claude Truchet of the European Central Bank raised interest rates by 1/4 point on Thursday. This increased the value of the Euro, due to the lower amount of Euros that can now be borrowed at this higher interest rate. Another way of looking at this is to say that the U.S. dollar is now worth less as compared with the Euro. With the dollar worth less, the relative price of crude oil in dollars is more, with crude oil rising to above 145 dollars a barrel yesterday. Fortunately today, the price of oil has gone down to just over $144. Fortunately also, the fund managers of this world did not pull their money out of the market and the U.S. markets rose and fell within the range that day traders have influence upon. Unfortunately, a couple of respected stock market analysts have predicted that the market will stagnate at this current level for the rest of the year…
With moderation,
I.C.