Ballad of Webb Doss

Bell County’s most memorable son
for the Cummins Family reunion ~1975

When I was a young lad in the county of Bell
Webb Doss was a man that I came to know well
His parents had money and built a fine home
Which Webb Doss inherited when they were gone

The years went by and his fortunes decreased
He had a strong aversion to elbow grease
He avoided all labor with exceptional skill
And rested himself with a passionate will

When winter wind blew and his house became cool
It was too far to walk out and tote in the fuel
So instead of fetching from the wood pile at night
He discovered that furniture burned warm and bright

And when all the furniture had been consumed
He pulled down the walls of the outermost room
Each winter a wall in the fireplace got hove
Till all that was left was a kitchen and stove

Now squirrel hunting wasn’t too much of a chore
If he could take aim from his own back door
If he ever did any work besides that
Then he managed keeping it under his hat

Although his requirements were modest indeed
He had several schemes to take care of his needs
He found out how gullible people could be
And took advantage of their naivety

Whenever his shoes became tattered and frail
He wrote a shoe company their products to sell
And when he received his shoe-salesman kit
He found in the samples a comfortable fit

He obtained all his cloths by a similar means
And swindled a company of a shipment of beans
He was very clever with paper and pen
Without Webb Doss where would Bell County have been

An agent of a company sustaining a loss
Inquired in Bell County where to find Webb Doss
They all directed him to Doss’s place
Where this man confronted Webb Doss face to face

But Webb Doss retained his aequanimitas
And said “Mr you got the wrong Webb Doss
“Oh you’ve made a dreadful mistake I fear
“For lots of Webb Dosses are living round here”

Webb ordered a set of false teeth in the mail
But he was reluctant to pay up the bill
Said they fit so bad that his whole body hurt
So how could he pay them if he couldn’t work

Now Webb Doss knew how to make politics pay
He wrote to all candidates with this to say
“I’ll work for you here as you campaign commences
Send 100 dollars to cover expenses

He picked up this money from every contender
And wrote them describing his services rendered
Saying “You’ll likely carry the County of Bell
“Send 100 more and we surely can’t fail”

When Roosevelt came to the president’s chair
He took a great interest in Doss’s welfare
Each month a check was mailed right to his door
So Webb didn’t have to work any more

But one time his check was a little bit late
Webb went to the bureaucrat very irate
Said “Your money comes from the same place as mine
“So see to it that I receive it on time”

Folk-Guitar Basics

Guitar basics for folk, country, bluegrass, cowboy and gospel
(To print text for easy reference:  Highlight it by smearing mouse cursor from top left to bottom right.  Right click on highlighted text, then from ladder select Copy.  Open new word-processor page, eg Word, click Edit and select Paste, click File and select Print.  To print chart for easy reference:  Left click on chart, right click middle of graphics page, select Copy Image.  Open new word-processor page, click Edit and select Paste, click File and select Print.)

 * A beginner might be amazed at how many songs in our culture require only two easy chords and how many more require only three.  A small minority require four or more.
 * My song-lyric collections (eg Wailing for Wuv) use numbers to specify chords – each chord presented as a superscript on the syllable where the chord begins, almost always at a downbeat.  People enjoying the number system can be seen at:  All smiles tonight,  Blue eyes crying in the rain,  Church in the wildwood,  Darkest hour.
 * The basic chord-number system is presented in the image below (major chords only, learn minor chords on your own).  The lower-case letters at the top of the B7 diagram show the notes to which the respective strings of a guitar should be tuned (get a clip-on electronic tuner).
 *  The numbers on the strings and between the frets show where your fingers go to make each chord (2=index, 3=middle, 4=ring, 5=little).  Until you can play most of the chords easily, begin each learning session by playing all the chords one after the other, left to right, F#, B7, E, A, D, G, C and F.
 * Below the chord pictures, are tracks with numbers 2, 5, 1, 4.   The numbers in a track are written below the chords typically associated in a song.  Consider the second track from the top, the chords used in the key of A, ie 2=B7, 5=E, 1=A and 4=D.
 * After playing all the chords, select a song to sing from the Two-Chord Songs or Three-Chord Songs.  If you don’t know a satisfactory key for your voice singing that song, then start by trying an easy key like A or D (ie 1 = A or 1 = D).
 * If you can’t tell instinctively what note to sing first, it will be good to hum the three chord notes (1,3, 5) repeatedly.  They can be found by holding the 1 chord and picking the strings labeled 1, 3 and 5 at the bottom of the chord diagram.  Play and hum those three notes several times.  Then, while strumming the 1 chord, hum the half scale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1) up and down several times or the whole scale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1).  After that, you should be able to start your song on the right note.  By the way, it’s worth noting that every song begins on the 1, 3 or 5 note of the 1 chord, and every song ends on the 1 note of the 1 chord, the key note.

If you were God

Fellow humans:
 * If you were God (objective and benevolent), what would you think of humankind today?  Would you be disappointed that we haven’t bridled our reproductive, acquisitive and profligate urges?  Would you hope that we soon recognize that every effort toward sustainability, shared contentment, justice and peace will be wasted without reproductive restraint?
 * Would you condemn us for driving thousands of other species to extinction by exploiting them, encroaching on their space, and by polluting air, water and land?
 * Would you suspect us of willful ignorance for failing (after 3000 years of written history) to see that unrestrained population expansion condemns us to repeated famines, contagions, confrontational migrations and endless tribal conflicts, nation against nation, religion against religion, race against race, language against language, community against community, philosophy against philosophy?  Tribes cannot decide to share limiting resources with other tribes.  Proponents of such sharing are considered traitors.
 * Would you weep to hear our leaders and pundits proposing that we solve our contentment-distribution problem by faster exploitation of non-renewable resources, when we are already awash in products both practical and trivial?
 * Might you be raising up a prophet to tell your subjects how to incentivize lower fertility rates in crowded and arid lands?
 * The chart below presents fertility rates.  Thirty-six African countries between the northernmost six and the southernmost six have fertility rates to double or triple their populations with every generation, as do four Muslim countries.  No Latin American country has such a high fertility rate, though Guatemala is close.  There are several such maps on the web.  Compare the fertility-rate map with the Maplecroft food-insecurity map.  It's hard to escape the conclusion that international food support and other relief should be contingent on contraception success.

Radio Signals

 *  What is the signal that a radio-transmitter's antenna emits that a receiver's antenna absorbs?  It seems to me that a transmitter cannot produce a photon as long as a radio wave and that a radio wave cannot be singular, coherent or smooth, except perhaps at absolute zero temperature.

My conjecture:
 *  1)  During a radio-wave cycle, millions of electrons will emit photons that depart individually, intermittently and separately.  Those photons can’t assemble to make a single photon or even a coherent wave.
 *  2)  Each transmitter-antenna electron constantly undergoes thermal agitation at IR frequency, so no electron can move without interruption in response to its radio-frequency EMF, and no electron can emit a photon of radio-wave length given its collisions with thermally vibrating elements.
 *  3)  Thus, an electron of the transmitting antenna must emit numerous IR-length photons during a cycle, so the signal leaving the transmitting antenna must be showers of IR-length photons alternately carrying a net energy for accelerating electrons toward one or the other end of a receiving antenna.
 *  4)  During a phase of the radio-wave cycle, emitted photons must affect receiving antennae in a way expected of a growing or propagated magnetic field transverse to the transmitting antenna.  During the next phase, the action must be opposite.  Would that work be attributable to photon spin?  If so that might say something about photon spin.
 *  5)  It appears that the windings of a toroidal coil with rising EMF emits a signal mimicking that classically attributed to a growing magnetic field, but no magnetic field is found outside the toroid under continued EMF.  IR-size photons emitted from the windings could account for the rising-EMF signal with no continued-EMF magnetic field outside the toroid.  That is, the signal outside the toroid is a photon shower of specific spin, what I propose to be the radio signal.

 *  Perhaps my discomfort with existing descriptions of radio signals is due to my misunderstanding of the doctrine that an electron radiates when changing velocity, not when coasting in its inertial frame.  Can it emit just from receiving a changing EMF?

 *  I presume that Maxwell’s equations describe radio-signal emission and absorption phenomenologically.  Good for engineers,  But I obviously doubt that the actors are those usually imagined in applying Maxwell’s equations.  If I’m correct, then a revised accounting for radio transmission is due, one good for physicists.

 *  I would appreciate receiving addresses of internet sites providing evidence or arguments for or against my conjecture about radio signals.  Reply to David Regen  at  xms@bellsouth.net