In regards to my previous entry on "arrow catching", I'm posting pictures of several different arrow types, to give non-archers some notion of what it is we're talking about on the Mythbusters forum:

First, typical "target" arrows as used in sporting competitions:



Note the small, aerodynamic fletching. These arrows are made for consistency.

Second, a "flu-flu" fletched arrow:



This is just one style; using un-trimmed feathers. There are others, including using a feather wound spirally around the shaft, and using a larger-than-normal number of regular feathers (as many as six).

Finally, Japanese feudal-era arrows used by Samurai in warfare:



Note that these are actually fairly contemporary arrows used in the practice of Kyudo (a meditational form) I found actual photos of period Samurai arrows hard to find!
Still, from book illustrations, the arrows with the long, thin fletchings in this period are pretty close.
These arrows would have been fitted with razor-sharp forged arrowheads in a variety of styles.

Commercial Peeves

Nobody likes TV commercials much; at best, we accept them as sort of "the price of doing business". Some are actually clever and even informative.

Those are rare.

More likely, they provoke groans and a quick grab for the remote.

Here's a few of the current crop that really tick me off for one reason or another:

1. The "ITT Tech" commercials. You know, the ones that appear to be geared to brain-damaged slackers? The first one I saw aired was with the little snot who just likes to "lay on the beach, ride horses, and have fun." He's scheduling railroads, the commercial says. Would you want to be in a passenger train with this guy in charge?
Not me....
Then, we have the even-more-brain-damaged individual who appears to have an IQ slightly higher than my Labrador retriever. He's managing IT networks, they say, and has "another baby coming on the way". Evidently, English composition is not part of the ITT curriculum...
Now, brain-damaged people need to be employed too, but it seems these commercials are geared to cause people to over-reach a bit.

They are not as bad as:

3. The various "tech" schools that teach video-game design. You've seen the one with the two geeks sitting in a chair with their game controllers, supposedly working on a game by playing it? "Do you believe we get paid for this?" says one.

No.

Anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of programming and game design knows that it's hours of tedious coding and testing and re-testing.
Good luck on that career, guys.

Then, we have the new Toyota commercials with the monster trucks and gravelly-voiced Sam Eliot as the narrator. (at least, it sounds like him)
Apparently, Toyota is not content be the biggest car manufacturer in the world, and to have cornered the market on economy cars.
No, they want that big, manly truck market too, the one that's presently dominated by Ford and Dodge.
So, our heroes demonstrate the massive potency of these huge vehicles by towing incredible weights, hauling cargo containers up steep cliffs, and so forth, while Sam intones "cowboyisms" to show just how terribly manly these things are.

Now I'm sure there is an actual market in the construction trades for such things, but in my neighborhood the status symbol amongst the rednecks is to have a huge, diesel-powered "dualie" which they use for a family car. Plenty of accessory lights and Calvin-pissing-on-the-other-brand decals too.

Will these "good 'ol boys" ever buy Japanese Iron?

Who knows.

4. The American Express card commercials. Oh, excuse me, it's not a "credit card"...It's just The Card. And you don't just have one, you're a "Cardmember". Of course, if you're a cardmember, you get special privileges not available to common folk, stuff like concert tickets that mere mortals can't have.
Snooty to the nines.

Finally, we have:

5. The "Special K" commercial showing a woman who's contemplating skipping her breakfast to loose weight. Better to eat that healthy breakfast, which of course includes the cereal. No argument with all that, but the woman concerned looks like a stick! She's doing well to top out at 100 pounds.
With all the "body image" problems we have, as well as bulimia, anorexia, and so forth, this hardly seems to be sending the right message.
Now we hear of "diabulimia". This is a new phenomenon among juvenile diabetes sufferers, who deliberately short themselves on insulin so that they won't gain weight. Of course, they go blind and limbs fall off, but who cares as long as you're skinny!

Catching Arrows

I'm a Mythbusters fan, and they had a recent episode (the "Ninja" episode)that sought to prove/disprove that ninjas could catch arrows.
They decided it would be pretty well impossible.

However, many fans have cried foul, and pointed out that various people can, and do, catch arrows. The following is my thought on this question.

First, I am an archer, and have been for quite a while. As some of my other posts indicate, I recently got into building my own tackle. I've been shooting bows and arrows since I was a kid back in the 50s, and have read rather a great deal on the art, science, and history of archery. Also the history of Feudal Japan, the Samurai culture, the Bushido, and Japanese martial archery or Kyujutsu.

So....

First, let's define what we're talking about. Yes, junior, people can catch arrows. A variety of martial artists, stage magicians, "strongman" guys, and others catch arrows.
They do this under well-controlled conditions that I'll discuss further. However, that isn't what the myth is about.
The myth is about a warrior of some sort catching an arrow that's intended to kill him. Presumably shot by a trained archer on the battlefield with equipment meant for warfare.

That's not remotely what contemporary "arrow catchers" are doing. I've watched a variety of film clips and TV segments of the various people doing this. They all cheat.
The first thing an archer notices is the arrow. Non-archers just see an arrow, but an archer notices right away that invariably these arrows are equipped with what we call "Flu-Flu" fletching. (Fletching is the feathers that stabilize the arrow in flight)
Flu-flu fletching looks like this:



And there are other styles. These bulky, oversized feathers are designed to slow the arrow down. They are used normally for upland game shooting or aerial targets.
They keep you from chasing the arrow into the next county.
For the would-be arrow catcher, they not only slow the arrow down, but they provide an easy-to-see visual "target" that the guy can track.

Second, it's obvious that modern arrow-catchers are using underpowered bows. One guy says his arrows travel at "over 100 miles per hour". Sounds impressive to the non-archer, perhaps, but full-powered bows cast arrows at 250 mph and more.

Some of these guys use "traditional" longbows or recurve bows; these invariably appear to be very light; target bows in the 30-pound draw range. This is easy to gauge by the arrow's trajectory, which is invariably very steep. At the ranges these guys are working at, an arrow from a full-powered bow would have little or no trajectory.
If the shooter is using a modern compound bow (the ones with the little wheels and cams and such) it's even more suspect. It's very easy to "gimmick" such a bow by substituting different cams, different limbs (the part that supplies power), or whatever. The bow would look quite normal, but be much weaker than it could be.

Finally, the shooter always shoots off to one side of the "catcher". This does several things; first it's less dangerous. Second, it's easier for the catcher to "track" the arrow visually.

So, what we're looking at with the modern types who catch arrows is a sideshow trick. It's not particularly easy, and requires practice. However, it cannot even remotely be compared to our original premis, that is a warrior catching an arrow that's about to kill him.

Let's take our "ninja" as in the Mythbusters episode. Let's say he's sneaking into an enemy camp, perhaps to assassinate one of the generals. Suddenly, he's spotted by an enemy sentry, an archer.
This guy would be a Samurai warrior well-practiced in Kyujutsu, the art of killing with the bow. He would have been trained since childhood, and would have likely fired around 1000 arrow shots per day in training. (Yes, that was the standard)
He is fast, accurate, and has excellent equipment.

His "Yumi" bow:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://eclay.netwiz.net/translat/kyudo10.jpg&imgrefurl=http://eclay.netwiz.net/translat/kyudo.htm&h=476&w=420&sz=22&hl=en&start=20&tbnid=Zkf35VX3NqDx9M:&tbnh=129&tbnw=114&prev=/images%3Fq%3DYumi%2Bbow%26gbv%3D2%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26channel%3Ds%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DG

Would have had a draw weight of 70-80 pounds, and at full 34" draw (The Japanese drew to the shoulder, unlike the to-the-chin draw of Western archers) it would send the long, heavy bamboo arrow downrange with a velocity of 170 feet per second or so.
The arrow would have been equipped with one of a variety of razor-sharp forged arrowheads:

These were made with the same care and forging techniques as the famous Japanese swords and other battlefield weapons of the period.

The sentry comes to a full draw and looses in a flash, and the arrow speeds straight to the unfortunate ninja's chest. Remember, this arrow is a full 36" in length....
Our ninja desperately tries to catch the arrow, and he's dead lucky, he succeeds in grabbing the shaft right before the fletching!
This leaves about one foot of arrow penetrating his chest, unfortunately....

An arrow like this coming straight at you gives you very little visible cue; all you'd see is a little dot coming at you very fast indeed. In twilight conditions, you wouldn't see it at all.

In reading histories of archery in warfare, with accounts of thousands of soldiers killed at Agincourt, Crecy, the Indian wars, the Mongols, etc, etc,...I can't think of a single account of anyone in combat catching an arrow.
Not one.

My conclusion:
Yes, Virginia, it is possible to "catch an arrow", but this is little more than a trick.
If it's possible for some sort of warrior to defend his life by catching an arrow that's enroute to kill him....Ain't happened yet.

On Archery and Bowbuilding

I've always been interested in archery, since I was a little kid in the 50s watching Robin Hood (The Richard Greene version) on TV. My first bow was made by my dad, who took two pieces of 1/4" X 1" moulding and taped them together with electrical tape. The bowstring was a piece of cheap flycasting line, and my arrows came from the local hobby shop, at 50 cents each.
Amazingly, it got so that I could hit things with this...

Eventually, I got a better bow, a solid-fiberglass job that "weighed" about 30 pounds.
Still mostly got my arrows from the same hobby shop; I think they had gone up to about a buck by then.
After I got out of the army, I bought a proper bow. This would have been around 1972. I got a nice full-recurve laminated number from Herters. Herters was at the time a big mail order outdoor supply company, with a catalogue that provided weeks of colorful reading. I understand now these bows were made to spec by some other major archery company, and sold with the Herters name.
Anyway, a nice bow. Pulled 63 pounds (I was young and strong...).
I was shooting pretty regularly at the local field range, and had tried stalking bunnies and such. I had notions of trying for deer; the bow was certainly capable.

Then I ran afoul of one of my other interests, motorcycle racing. During my rather brief racing career, I broke my shoulder. Actually, a rather minor break, just the tip of bone that keeps your arm from raising too high. Anyway, the thing was so painful that I could not draw the bow at all. This condition plagued me for nearly two years; long after the bone itself had healed. During this period, I got married, and the realities of life gave me little time or money. Eventually, I sold all the archery equipment.
Fast forward 30 years.



This is the longbow I've just completed, my first self-made bow. I've had some success building things; a recumbent bicycle, a cigar-box guitar. Fun little projects. Somehow or another, I ran upon a webpage showing how to build a "board" bow. "Looks like something I could do", I thought.
My first attempt was a failure. I used a bad piece of wood, and the wrong kind of wood. (Poplar) Thing broke as it was nearing completion.
So, I bought a nice Red Oak board, and tried again. Had a few moments of panic, and when it was nearly done I became afraid that some of the grain run-outs near the tip would let go. I reinforced the back with fiberglass drywall tape.

As you can see, it didn't turn out badly.



Pull weight is right at 50 pounds at 28" draw. I painted the rather ugly fiberglass prior to applying the final sealer. I took it to the local field range today just for testing, and fired a couple of dozen arrows. Everything hung together, and it looks to be a good shooter. Have to get some proper arrows, however.
In addition to making the bow, I built the bow stringer, the string, and the jig you use to make the string.
The arrow rest design is courtesy of "Ferret" (who's instructions I followed for the bow as well!), and the handle is wrapped with a contribution from my wife; the handle of an old purse made of very nice Italian leather.

Now to build some proper arrows and get back into shooting!

Brakes

Some wag once wrote that the ability to stop is amongst the more important things for both machines and humans...

I rebuild and repair a lot of bikes, and I often notice that though the rest of the bike might be rather crappy and poorly maintained, the brakes are often rather pristine, almost as if they had never been used.

This was brought home to me the other day when I was at work and doing my usual Sunday thing, sitting on a parking lot in my patrol car. A young woman showed up with perhaps 5 little kids, all on bikes. I guess she decided that the parking lot was a good place to let the kids ride. They ranged from one tyke young enough to have training wheels, up to a max of about 7 or 8. All the kids would dash madly down the length of the parking rows, and then lurch around the "turn" at the end and go the other way.
None of them ever touched their brakes. They all had been equipped with youth-sized mountain bikes with typical controls, including standard brake levers. They would charge up to the point where they had to turn, then sort of "lurch" around the turn.

I began to wonder...Are people afraid to use the brakes on bicycles? There does seem to be a sort of "folk wisdom" that if you apply front brakes too hard, you'll fly over the bars. Doesn't happen, of course, unless you "help" with body english.
I do notice that rear brakes tend to be more worn than fronts...

Sort of related is an incident from my brief motocross racing career. (Long about 1974-75) This was AMA "sportsman" racing, the sort of thing where you'd buy some sort of dual-purpose motorcycle and strip off all the street gear and then go racing.
I was riding Hodaka, a Japanese marque that was popular as it was almost race-ready out of the box.
You had to tune up the little 100cc engine a bit, but that was pretty easy. Once you had made the even-tempered little two-stroke into a fire-breathing racer, it wasn't easy to keep it running at low speed.
Enter the reed valve. Reed valves are devices which prevent "blowback" in two-stroke engines. Thus, they can run at low RPM even in race tuning. These things were becoming popular, and I was considering buying one. One of the other guys who hung out at the shop had just got one, and he was quite enthusiastic about it. So, during practice period at one of the races, I asked him if I could take his bike around the track. "Sure", he said, and I fired it up and roared down the straight. Thing ran great! Then I got to turn one... I squeezed the brake levers, which went all the way back to the handlebars! Fortunately, I didn't crash, and managed to get it back to the pits in one piece.
"You have no brakes!" I complained.
"Oh, I never use 'em."

Now, anyone who knows anything about racing knows that braking is as important a facet as is accelleration and handling. Charge as fast as possible till the last minute, brake as hard as possible to get down to the speed you need to get through the turn, and accellerate.
This guy could have cut seconds off his lap times with proper braking, but was quite unaware of basic techniqe.

I wonder how many folks are in the same shape regarding bicycling. Watching many people ride, it's apparent that an awful lot of them ride very slowly indeed. Maybe it's all tied together....Afraid to brake, afraid to go fast...Odd. Very odd.

Computer Gaming

I'm 59, and many folks are surprised that an old fart like myself is into computer games. Me too, I suppose..
We got our first computer in late 1998. At that time, I don't think either of us had any clear idea as to what we would be doing with the thing; maybe odd ideas of e-mail and using the word processor. My wife commented, when we got the boxes home, "I hope you'll be happy with your new toy!" Hehe- Within a few weeks, I had to pry her off the thing. She had discovered e-mail, and gaming as well. She was (and still is!) involved with the "Pogo" type of online gaming, mostly card games and such. She uses these things as much for the online chat feature as the game; she has a group who play on an almost nightly basis.
Now, I had been totally divorced from any sort of electronic gaming. Friends of ours had bought an Atari, and we had fooled around with "pong" and such a couple of times. Cute for an hour or so, I thought.
The kid wanted, and got an early platform as well, I don't recall which one. It had "duck hunt" on it, which I played once. Again, pretty thin beer, in my opinion.
I had no idea what was available in terms of such games.

One day, I found that the wife had downloaded a demo of the Star Wars "pod racing" game. We had just seen "Episode One", and I did sort of like racing...
The game was kind of cute, but not quite my cup of tea. I craved a bit more realism.

So, all unknowing, I did some searches and found a huge variety of games available. I had always been interested in WWII, and I wondered if there were any WWII-based games available....Hehe.

My very first game was Combat Flight Simulator, by Microsoft. I sometimes say that I learned everything I know about computers by playing CFS. Over a couple of years, I not only became a deadly "ace" pilot, but learned all about downloads, installations, file management, altering lines of code, creating folders and subfolders, and all the stuff you need to know to operate and maintain a computer properly.
There was a very active community for these flight sims, and I learned about "Mods" as well. CFS came with eight flyable aircraft, as I recall. By the time I gave up on this one, I had almost 200 aircraft, a whole world of scenery to fly in, and a variety of utilities and sub-programs as well.
I still do flightsims, but not quite as actively. My primary is the excellent IL-2 series from Maddox Games. IL-2, Forgotten Battles, and Pacific Fighters. Simply the best and most realistic WWII-themed flightsim available. I have a nice joystick, and the wonderful TracIR system, which ties your head movements to the view feature in the game so that you can "look around" in a very realistic manner. It's almost like actually flying.
I don't know how many games I've purchased or tried demos (or even pirated versions) of; but quite a few.
Standouts include the above-mentioned IL-2 series (other wise known as Sturmovik) Battlefield 1942 and it's excellent "realism" mod, Forgotten Hope, Elder Scrolls III (Morrowind), Half-Life and Half-Life 2, the newly released Red Orchestra, and a few others.
You can see a trend here, I like realistic military-oriented "sims".

I do not like strategy games, turn-based games, or things of that nature. I want to do my own shooting, flying, driving, and so forth.

Oh yes, driving. I had always been sort of interested in motorsports, but I had wanted to try a realistic driving game. There were not many available. The one that kept popping up on forums and such was Grand Prix Legends. Essentially out of print, it was still sort-of available...I found a copy at a discount store for ten bucks.
Grand Prix Legends models (and I do mean models) the 1967 Grand Prix racing season, right before they started to use aerodynamics on the cars, and odd little things like safety features.... Imagine a 1200-pound car with a 400 hp engine, "adequate" brakes, 30 gallons of gasoline (no pitstops)in an unshielded tank, and no safety devices for the drivers. Absolutely insane. Watch "Grand Prix" with James Garner sometime for a good depiction of what this racing was all about.
Grand Prix legends was absolutely uncompromising, and damned difficult. After much practice, and downloading many different training aids and utilities, I found I could manage "benchmark" times on most of the tracks.
I tried several other racing games, including the fine series of sports-car mods for EA's Formula One series of games.
Alas, after several years of flogging all kinds of cars around all kinds of tracks, I decided that racing was simply not for me. I suck. On many tracks, I would be 10-15 seconds slower than the "fast" guys. Just too old and slow, I imagine... My MOMO force-feedback steering wheel is collecting dust.

But enough of my gaming history, on to the "observation" part of this longer-than-I-expected segment.

Computer (and console, of course) gaming has become wildly popular, not only with kids but with adults such as myself. In fact, the electronic gaming industry as a whole made more money last year than the movie industry! That's huge, folks.

Along with this popularity has come the inevitable controversies. Games are making our children fat. (maybe true) They contain naughty images that will warp our children's little impressionable minds, and most of all, they are violent and "desensitize" our children to violence.
"Everyone knows" that the two lads who shot up Columbine "learned" to kill by watching video games.
Violent and sexist images are ruining our youth.

Odd, when I was a kid it was Rock & Roll....

My two bits on all this:

Can excessive gameplaying make kids fat? Maybe, but I read a lot as a kid and didn't get fat. I also went outside and played, which might be the difference. Kids nowdays seem to only play "organized" sports, instead of the knock-around and sandlot games of my youth.
More importantly, the violence. Here is my stock rebuttal; human beings are violent. At least, that's what history shows us. Oh, there have been isolated little groups of people that lived idyllic lives free from warfare and strife, but they have been damned few. The history of the human race is a history of warfare and conquest.
Think about it; the most horrible atrocities committed in all of history, the pogroms, wars, genocides, inquisitions, tortures, slavery, and so forth were all racked up long before there was any "media" whatever. No TV news during the Spanish Inquisition, no newspapers during the Crusades, no TV coverage from Buchenwald. And no video games either.
We have it in us to be violent creatures, we don't need video games to push us over the edge. I don't recall any of the prolific serial killers in recent history being big Streets of LA players...
It's a game, lighten up. It's pixels on a screen, moved around with a mouse and a keyboard or a controller. No one is dying, no one is in pain, and that's not real blood.
Kids can tell the difference; I wonder why adults can't.

Coming back to the guitar

I have always enjoyed music, but seldom what was popular at the time. As a kid in the 50s, with early rock & roll on every other kid's transistor radio, I preferred the pop music of the times. Broadway musicals, movie scores, and classical music. I became quite the classical buff for some time, and annoyed my army buddies by playing Rachmaninoff and Sibelius on my portable record player.
I gradually began to appreciate some of the pop stuff, and was amazed to learn that many of the tunes I was listening to were Lennon & McCarntey items! Totally out of touch...Hehe.
However, one of my fellow officers on the County PD was an ex-folkie from the Gaslight Square era here in St. Louis. Through him, I fell in with a crowd of people (including my wife-to-be) who were either musicians or otherwise involved in music.
My buddy introduced me to a variety of artists who were part of the folk revival at the time, and also a bunch of local artists who played in a variety of styles. I began to hang out at an "open mike" club in South St. Louis, and eventually became part of the regular crowd.
It was sort of intimidating being a non-musician in a crowd of musicians. Nearly everyone I knew played something! So, I bit the bullet and bought a banjo. I was beginning to appreciate bluegrass music, and had always liked Pete Seeger.
I was living with my wife at the time, and I flogged away at the banjo, working out of books. No one else in the crowd played banjo, so I didn't have any tutors. During this time, I had obtained an inexpensive nylon-stringed guitar for my wife, as she'd had to leave hers behind with her ex-husband.
My progress with the banjo was slow, and occasionally I would pick up the guitar and fiddle with it. For whatever reason, I found I was making much more progress with the guitar than the banjo, so I trucked the banjo back to the music store and traded it for a little Yamaha steel-string.

Before long, I was doing pretty well. I mastered basic flatpick technique, and was soon playing well enough that I could sit in on jams with the rest of the crowd, and even back up my wife. She was a semi-regular at the above-mentioned club, and often subbed for the owners, who were the main act.
I started subscribing to Guitar Player, and before long was playing pretty complex stuff, working on Jazz chord-melody styles, and beginning to get pretty decent at improvising lead lines and blues.
We got a generous income-tax rebate one year, and I bought us each a new Martin.
I got my wife a nylon-stringed classical model, and for myself a very nice D-18.
Wonderful instrument, very balanced. A lot of the more expensive rosewood Martins have a rather bass-heavy tone; sort of "boomy". This is due to their traditional use as the rythym instrument in string bands.
But for all-around use and recording, many preferred the more-balanced tone of the mahogany D-18. I sure liked it.

Eventually, when I started fooling with blues and jazz, I bought an electric. The high acoustic action of the Martin just was not conducive to making complex chords and fancy string bends, at least for someone with average-sized hands.

However, all things come to an end. The club we all hung out at closed, over a lease agreement. Folks got older, moved, quit playing, and so forth. The "scene" sort of died. There was always talk of a new club, but it never materialized. With no outlet for playing, interest waned. We'd occasionally break out the guitars and play a bit, but we fell on bad economic times, and the Martins were sold. Eventually I picked up a used Yamaha and kept playing, but it was difficult to keep the interest level up with no real outlet for performing.
Finally, last year, I sold the Yamaha, and that was pretty much that.
I contented myself with listening to other folks play.

A few months ago, however, I was thumbing through an issue of "Make" magazine, a publication for folks who like to ....Make things. The cover article was "how to make a cigar-box guitar". I looked at the article, and said, "I could do that". I've always enjoyed making things, from tying flies as a youthful fisherman to handloading my own ammunition to building recumbent bicycles...

I checked the internet and sure enough, there were several web pages and a Yahoo group devoted to cigar-box guitar. Within a few weeks, I had obtained the necessary bits and had built my first instrument.
This is quite a fun little thing to play, but eventually I found it rather unsatisfying. You're pretty much limited to playing with a slide, though it's possible to install frets. Very limited volume as well unless you build in a pickup.

The project sort of fired up my musical juices, however. I found that I wanted a proper instrument again. I had been saving money to upgrade my computer (a never-ending task), and couldn't decide which way to go on that project. So, I decided to wait on the computer, and see what kind of guitar I could get on limited funds.
We have a big chain Guitar Center here, and they have a variety of brands. I was pleasantly surprised at the variety of instruments you can buy in the 200.00 price range. (My Martin had cost 600.00, and was worth some 1200 when I sold it.)
I hauled instrument after instrument back to the sound room, and played and examined them all.
Eventually, I had it down to two identically-priced guitars. One was a Fender dreadnaught, that came in a kit with tuner, string winder, picks, bag, etc. The other was a Mitchell acoustic/electric cutaway model. I had never heard of Mitchell, but assumed it was some sort of overseas import. Seemed very nice, however.
I went home and did some research on the net. The Mitchell, it turned out, was from Indonesia, part of the growing instrument industry in that island nation.
It got excellent owner reviews on a number of sites, not only for sound, but for fit, finish, and overall quality.
The Fender fared not quite as well, scoring significantly lower in similar reviews.
When playing both, I'd noticed the Fender was a bit heavy on the base, and had a rather stiff action that would require adjustment.

So, I bought the Mitchell. It's an impressive instrument for 200.00, and came well set-up from the factory. Even came with my favorite D'Addario bronze strings.
I'm working on re-establishing my callouses, and looking over the wide variety of guitar resources on the web.