Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Open letter to Mr. Baxter regarding the ban of Bill Bremmer

Septic tanks and coffee rooms only work if everybody discloses their real identity. The main issue is that someone will always be held liable for injurious statements. If you can post unidentified, do your damage, and then disappear to be never found again, injured parties will go after who is left, the forum owner(s).

Helen will be missed by many who shared her left brain inspired views.



keyboardklutz: is there any particular age group of children or particular social class of people you feel a comment like this is suitable for?

Grandpianoman, I keep my tool box light and only carry the tools I need for day to day work. It took many years to get it this way and I did so by keeping track of what tasks come up and what customers require of me. I look at the temperament the same way. If I get asked to tune EBVT or any historical temperament enough, I'll learn to tune it and carry it as an additional tool. Its just that I have never been asked.

My comment to continue with the thread was not a blessing, but thank you for the sarcastic compliment.

BTW, unlike someone else you constantly refer to as creating "magical" tunings, I'm simply a mere mortal that hasn't dwelved much in that stuff. I'm not sure if I could conjure or baffle with the same enchanting effect. I guess I could do a tuning, bill it on my invoice as "magical", and leave some charred dice and chicken feathers on the piano when I leave...

"To compare US constitutional rights to Stalism is to reveal how little one knows about Stalin."

Alex Ross's 2007 book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has some very telling chapters about the situation of musicians in Stalin-era Russia.

News reports a few months back of a survey, asking Americans questions about judicial decisions based on Constitutional principles, revealed that most of the respondents not only did not know what the Constitution says but were opposed to it when they learned.

More than a little scary, if not exactly surprising. Still, that is not at all the same as the operations of a totalitarian government.

If anything, it revealed that human impulses need some brake on them lest society's car end up in the ditch or crashing through the guard rail and flying off the cliff. Moderation, in other words. It doesn't take much reading on these forums to see that more than a few threads end up in a death spiral of personal attacks... or, yes, the septic tank. People get carried away; when they can't stop themselves, someone else has got to stop them, sometimes.

There's road rage, and then there's the smoldering wreck being hauled away on the flatbed; the drivers hauled away to the morgue. Or, there's the time-out that gives the hot tempers a chance to cool down... and everyone walks away from it.

Beating up on Ken does not really answer the problem of people's lost sense of personal responsibility for their own behavior. To my mind, it reveals it, if anything.

Hey Folks!

I just realized what this all reminds me of: a major league baseball game. The umpire makes a critical call that puts the home team behind. So the manager gets in the ump’s face and kicks dirt on his shoes to get thrown out of the game. Then the fans get to cheering for the home team and the players naturally play a little harder. But come the seventh inning stretch all the fans get up and sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” together.

This is my favorite complaint about alternate temperaments! So much, that I often begin my classes with the question, "Sitting in this room are technicians representing decades of tuning experience. How many of you, during the initial contact with a client have been asked to tune ET?"

The response is perhaps, one or two hands in the group - of them, maybe once or twice their whole career.

Ron Koval
chicagoland

I agree. However, what is rarely taken into consideration or talked about, is "what or who, caused the road rage in the first place." All parties involved need a time out. Not just the one that flew off the handle.

I teach plenty of children. They themselves are quite open about their anatomy and how it responds to accidents. Why can't you be?

While it is mildly amusing to read members pointing out continually to each other what the other member is doing here respectively, is there any chance we all collectively might get back to talking about pianos???

Oh yeah, pianos..... those pesky things......Just an abstract thought for today....

Sure, Dan. You first!

So Jerry, then two wrongs make a right? Or do you mean it is OK to overeact in order to get someone else into trouble too?

...Still tuning quasi-ET and quasi-EBVTiii. It's the best I can do at this point. My customers are still happy

Glen

Not at all Jeff. I am merely pointing out that there has been consistently the same people in here pushing buttons. Bill pushes back as some of us have also done to one another at some point in time. I am saying that the button pushing needs to stop.

Fair enough, Jerry. I'll start:

"Take me out to the ball game..."

(Who's next?)

Sounds good but I get to be the bat!

Uh, Jerry, you can't be the bat until the 7th inning stretch is over. Now you gonna sing or ain't ya?

I Write The Songs.....

I have a better idea. I just found this site. Hope you all enjoy it.

http://www.trachtman.org/ragtime/

That's great, perhaps that will happen in the near future.



Your post here should really be in the other thread, but since you posted it in this thread, I will respond in kind. Your original comment to me:



Call it what you will. I see it as you giving me your 'blessing', your 'ok' so to speak, to continue. Your reference to me to "have fun" is not exactly devoid of sarcasm.

I have a request Emmery. You obviously do not share my enthusiasm or others for that matter, for EBVT III or my "My piano in EBVT III" thread. Why don't we just leave well enough alone and stop this back and forth jousting. It serves no purpose that I can see. I think we have both clearly expressed our opinions on the subject, and the readers here on PW understand both sides.

Quote

from Emmery: BTW, unlike someone else you constantly refer to as creating "magical" tunings, I'm simply a mere mortal that hasn't dwelved much in that stuff. I'm not sure if I could conjure or baffle with the same enchanting effect. I guess I could do a tuning, bill it on my invoice as "magical", and leave some charred dice and chicken feathers on the piano when I leave...

Your comment above is a perfect example of what I am talking about. What purpose does that kind of dig serve here? Absolutely nothing, would be my answer.

War! What is it good for?


Say it again.

Oh I don't know, I just found that one was the first song posted that I looked up so that is what I posted here. No harm intended in doing so..

I'm in the same situation. My customers don't ask about temperaments. I've tuned a few others for fun (but not the EBVT yet).
Nonetheless, I think the argument is irrelevant. Customers often don't know to ask for "voicing" or "regulating". Only after I do some voicing do I get comments about how the piano sounds really better than after any previous tuner's visit.

It's partly a matter of education. If temperaments are something for people to ask for, it will happen only after we technicians educate our customers. Or, if we don't educate our customers and just "do" some other temperament, the proof of the pudding is in whether we increase or lose customer base and what kind of "buzz" our customers create about us to their contacts.

The comparison of Stalinism was not to constitutional rights, but rather to the increasing phenomenon of "playing the man not the ball" and "rule of the mob" becoming more prominent than "rule of law".

When anyone can ambush someone, even an elderly and decrepit 90 year old woman, tease them and pull on them to capture a surreptitious comment to be filmed and broadcast without permission and abused for making political hay, using and discarding the person as a worthless object, demonizing them and ruining their public reputation, then suddenly everyone must be very, very careful about who they talk to and what they are saying, worrying it it is politically correct, similar to the care required under Stalinism when one might offend Stalin and suddenly find oneself without a position and effectively banned or even murdered, as the career and reputation of Helen Thomas was ruined to distract attention from the 9 dead on a ship halfway around the world while disrespectfully ignoring her 50 years of service.

In my opinion, it is better to organize countries and forums around the rule of law rather than mobs. There should be clear and unambiguous guidelines for what is permissible and what is not. There should be a transparent process for enforcing the standards and the terms of service.

If instead enforcement is simply done along the lines of the whim or bias of the moderator or the owner, or based on mob rule of how many complaints a thread or post gets from those who (politically/personally/otherwise) oppose them, then we are heading again away from the rule of law. Away from civilization.

When posters are unable to follow the TOS or act civilly, they are not banned, but by not following the rules of civil conduct they ban themselves.

..."Away from civilization.

When posters are unable to follow the TOS or act civilly, they are not banned, but by not following the rules of civil conduct they ban themselves."...

Yes, they would, if they got no reply. Refrain?

a.c.