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and taught myself Keith Richards’s simple but great guitar solo to “It’s All Over Now.” It took me all night but by midnight I had a reasonable facsimile of it down. Fuck ’em, I was going to play lead guitar. For the next several months (years!) I woodshedded, spending every available hour cradling my Kent, twisting and torturing the strings ’til they broke or until I fell back on my bed asleep with it in my arms. Weekends I spent at the local CYO, YMCA or high school dances. Dancing was over; I was silent, inscrutable, arms folded, standing in front of the lead guitarist of whatever band was playing,
Born to Run
Bruce Springsteen
Whenever I offered any plan that would give the other teams a fighting chance against them, the Yankees always cried socialism, the first refuge of scoundrels. I say it is not socialism to tighten competition; I say it is capitalism at its best. The essence of capitalism is competition, and there is no competition when you are playing with a stacked deck. Weiss made his reputation by starting off so far ahead of the field every year that he almost had to break a leg to lose. The fallacy of this kind of “competition” is that it doesn’t really help the Yankees either. We are in a strange business; we are in competition and yet we are partners. Weak teams like Washington, Kansas City and Los Angeles are a drag on all of us.
Veeck--as in Wreck
Bill Veeck, Ed Linn
As a modern commentator has summed up this old controversy, Edison knew he wanted a small light which could be independently controlled. Independent control implied a parallel circuit where, with a constant-voltage generator, the current units could be multiplied as desired. But the increase in current could mean either heavy current loss in transmissions or excessive copper cost. To avoid these the light would have to be of high resistance. That conclusion is easily reached by an elementary application of Ohm’s law. But in Edison’s time it was an important achievement which placed him far ahead of the other incandescent-lighting inventors and scientists...285 All that autumn, and through the winter of 1879 that followed, Edison studied the problems of high-resistance lamps and multiple circuits, as his notebooks show.286 As he himself confessed, this investigation of electric lighting required a most arduous program of research: Edison and his staff made lengthy studies of the electrical resistances of various substances, and examined them also for their heat radiation, recording their specific heats. The effect of increasing or lowering resistance, and of changing voltage or amperage on such materials, and of using them in different forms, was also measured carefully. Contrary to the prevailing impression, Edison was not primarily “the great tinkerer,” but was remarkable rather for his power of observation, his imagination, and clear-cut reasoning faculty. The delicate mechanical tinkering was handled by Charles Batchelor, who was literally Edison’s “hands”; Kruesi served as a superb machine maker; while John Ott did the drafting work after Edison’s rough sketches. One day Ott drew attention to the inventor’s hands; though usually soiled or acid stained, they were soft, white and beautifully formed — the hands of an artist, of a man who imagined things, not those of a workman or a craftsman.
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