Pictured above in a late 60’s Martin N-20. Martin is best known for their Dreadnought line of guitars, a term borrowed from ship building which denotes the full size, such as the D-28 or D-35. The N-20 is a classical guitar made for nylon strings. There is no pick guard as the strings are nylon and meant for finger picking. The N-20 was never a big seller with Martin producing less than 300 per year at the height of its popularity. The line ended production in 1992. So why would anyone even care?

Because of Trigger, the only famous N-20 that exists because of Willie Nelson. After a show in 1969, a drunk man stepped on Nelson’s new Baldwin acoustic-electric classical guitar. He sent it to a shop but it was deemed beyond repair. The luthier Shot Jackson of Nashville offered him an N-20, a new line of classical guitars form Martin at the time, as a replacement. Nelson asked for the electric pickups from the Baldwin to be installed in the new Martin and he agreed to purchase the N-20 on the telephone, sight unseen. Jackson transferred the bridge from the Baldwin with the pickup still attached to the new Martin. Nelson made the purchase for $750, which would be nearly $6,500 today when adjusted for inflation. 20 years later he named the guitar Trigger, an obvious nod to Roy Rogers horse, because of loyalty. He considered the guitar “his horse.” The wear on the guitar is caused by him playing with a pick, rather aggressively, and as mentioned that’s not what most people do with classical guitars. The Baldwin bridge with the original pickup from 1969 is still in place and helped created the style and should we associate with Willie Nelson. A pristine N-20, like the one at the top of the page, will fetch a handsome price today but were it not for one guy, and the one guitar he made famous, chances are the N-20’s would have been forgotten a long time ago.

Artificial Intelligence has gotten better at drawing fingers but still displays major flaws at times in its logic. Google used to be a search engine that simply returned results and linked to the sources of information. Then they tweaked it a little and made it look like it could answer questions. It didn’t really answer questions, those were still just links to what others had posted to the internet, but they looked like answers. Now Google AI can answer questions; perhaps badly, but it answered the question. There are still search results you just have to scrolled down a little bit to see them.

Pro Tip: delete your cookies before accumulating 17 billion Gigabytes worth of them. Yes, that’s billion with a B. And no, it’s not possible. This operating system became unstable when it ran out of disk space. I wouldn’t trust its math, it thinks it has saved all that data in just the last hour.

I found it interesting. Click on the image to view full size and you can really see it’s not just about getting the most board feet out of each log but also about how the grain looks on each piece.

You will not need a bigger boat. Leopard sharks are known as the friendliest sharks in the sea and are a favorite among divers and snorkelers. The truth is most sharks, just like most predators in the world, will not attack a human if they know what it is. Some animals will attack if you invade their territory or threaten their young but no animal actively hunts human beings and eats them. (There are, of course, exceptions. Polar bears live above the arctic circle and food sources are scarce. Your best defense against polar bears is do not go there.)

There are two things believers should do each day, and they are read the Bible and pray. I’ve posted a couple of times in the past week or two about a new series of posts called Read the Bible. The first post went up early this morning, scheduled for 5 a.m. EST (GMT -5). The first few are going to be a little rough around the edges until it finds its voice but I hope to get settled into a routine and production value should slowly get better. Read the Bible may turn into a podcast could can get from Spotify and other podcast venues in the future but let’s start with baby steps. Why don’t you listen to the first one and tell me if we are doing any good here? Give it a few days to find its legs and then maybe share with your friends.