Lunch for today is smoked salmon and cream cheese in a Turkish pide bread roll. I was worried about yesterday’s lunch looking too healthy to be enjoyable, but I’ve got no such qualms about today’s lunch. Fat, salt, spices, white bread, all the basic male food groups are covered (with the possible exception of grilled red meat and beer). And no dietician is going to make me feel guilty about enjoying this baby.
G&L Topic – Celebrity Endorsee Dream Team
We all know G&L make fantastic guitars but when you’re looking for a new instrument the hype surrounding the larger, more established brands does tend to resonate. This is even more so given the huge amount of choice these days - solid body, semi-hollow, single coil, humbucker, US made, Asian made, alder, ash, mahogany, it’s all so confusing.
One of the most powerful tools the big guitar brands use to differentiate their product is association with a highly respected or iconic artist. This tends to take the product from being what it is at a component level, a guitar, and elevates it to some kind of mythological object. There’s probably a marketing term for it like ‘brand association’ but my knowledge of marketing is nil.
Anyway, this association with respected players does work extremely well - at least on me! When I first saw the Beatles I wanted a Rickenbacker and Vox AC30 amp like John Lennon because I thought that must be the gear you needed for success. And my first electric guitar was a sunburst USA strat after I saw Neil Finn of Crowded House playing one. Shallow and fickle? I suppose I am but we’ve probably all made buying decisions like that.
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So where am I going with this? Well G&L has some top notch professional players who do a really great job of flying the G&L flag. Will Ray springs to mind, and he is probably the best guy you could have to promote a B-bender tele style guitar. Looking down the endorsees list there are truly some fantastic, well respected players.
http://www.glguitars.com/artists/index.asp
But imagine a parallel universe where access to the Guitar Gods was no issue. Who would you like to see playing and endorsing G&L guitars, and what model?
I’ll kick things off by suggesting a few, perhaps too obvious, candidates.
G&L Legacy – Mark Knopfler. Mark Knopfler has a unique ability to coax the most beautiful sounds out of a single coil guitar. It's probably something to do with his fingerstyle technique. I know he plays a Les Paul a lot these days, but nothing sounds quite as good in his hands as a strat type guitar (IMHO of course). A red George Fullerton signature model would be ideal.
ASAT Special – I reckon Keef Richards of The Rolling Stones would sound fantastic on one of these, especially in semi-hollow form. The beefy MFD’s would really do justice to Keef’s bluesy chord based riffs. A Bluesboy semi-hollow would also be a great guitar to hear some Stones riffs on too.
S-500 – Eric Clapton. EC seems to prefer a more modern strat sound than most players, hence the 30 dB mid boost circuit he gets installed on his guitars. The S-500 is also a modern take on the strat sound and the high output MFD’s already have a mid-boost compared with standard strat pickups. If Eric declined then a belair green S-500 with large neck and jumbo frets might get Jeff Beck on board.
Off Topic
Australians are not particularly inventive as a rule. If something really essential needs to be invented and you can’t buy it somewhere else in the world then we’ll invent it. But in general we’re happy to let other people do all the hard work and buy the stuff we need as we need it. It’s a national trait that I find annoying because it makes many of Australia’s most talented and inventive people move abroad. But it aint going to change any time soon. Maybe the apathy comes from having too many other fun things to do like sit on the beach, go fishing or play sport with your friends.
For some reason though, Australians get very inventive when it comes to biscuits. Yes biscuits. Or cookies, or whatever you like to call them. For such a blasé country we have some really iconic, delicious biscuits, and when I’ve been overseas I really miss them. It probably stems from the great Australian tradition of the tea break. To properly enjoy your tea or coffee you need to have a delicious biscuit on the side.
Here are some of my favourites, with descriptions from the web.
1) The Tim Tam
A Tim Tam is composed of two layers of chocolate malted biscuit, separated by a light chocolate cream filling, and coated in a thin layer of textured chocolate. That’s only half the story though. The centre of the Tim-Tam is porous, and if you bite off diagonal corners and use the biscuit like a straw to suck up a warm drink e.g. coffee, an amazing thing happens. The inside melts and you end up drinking a rich liquid chocolate and malt mix.
2) The Iced Vo-vo
An Iced Vo Vo is a wheat flour biscuit topped with a strip of pink marshmallow either side of a strip of raspberry jam and sprinkled with coconut. It’s a traditional biscuit that is a firm favourite with the older generation, and it goes really well with a good milky tea.
3) The ANZAC – ANZAC’s are made of rolled oats, flour, desiccated coconut, sugar, butter, golden syrup, and bicarbonate of soda. They have long been associated with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) established in World War I. It has been claimed the biscuits were sent by wives to soldiers abroad because the ingredients do not spoil easily and the biscuits kept well during naval transportation. The Anzac is a humble looking biscuit, but freshly baked they have a wonderful, soft, gooey texture on the inside.
4) The Wagon Wheel – these have a layered biscuit, marshmallow and jam centre coated with chocolate. I believe you can find these in Canada too. Wagon wheels are so iconic here that you can buy them separately packaged from convenience shops, for those times when no other biscuit will do, or in standard biscuit packs from a supermarket.
Don’t be shy everyone. Please share your favourite cookie or other accompaniment to a nice relaxing coffee or tea break. I've got no idea what people in North America eat on their breaks!
That's no ordinary Wagon Wheel - that looks like a luxury version. Where can I get one of them? We had a packet of Wagon Wheels in the house on the weekend, I don't know where they went, but I suspect that my girlfriends nephew may have something to do with them not being here anymore. I'm partial to a good hedgehog slice
