Playing and collecting bass guitars with 4,5,6,7,9,10,or 11 strings! (Okay I don't own a 9,10,or 11 string bass yet - but I really really want one. I have played on a few 9's and love it). Trying to play fretless bass. Trying out different bass amplifiers. Physics, mathematics, chemistry. Heavy mining equipment and construction equipment (the bigger the better). Collecting models of equipment - mostly 1/50 scale. Farm equipment. Trains - big steam locomotives are cool. Learning - watching the Discovery, History, and The Learning Channel. Astronomy - lots of good stuff happening now with scientific spacecraft exploring the solar system. The Hubble Telescopes images - good stuff! I don't have my telescope with me currently. Calculus - The triple integral! The Gradient and the Curl. Tensors! Bessel functions! Fourier transforms are really cool too. I have forgot how to do most of this stuff though. Working with complex numbers is really fun! x+iy where i=square root of -1.
Garry Goodman, Pino Paladino, Mark King, Tony Levin, Mike Adler, Fred Bolton of Bee Basses, Jens Ritter of Ritter Basses, Victor Basson of Basson amp/cabinet company.I would like to meet many of the different people: engineers, designers, factory workers, who design and build many of the pieces of large mining and farm equipment used across the world.I have now official met Yves Carbonne, C3, Stew McKinsey, Darren Michaels, Jean Baudin, Gregory Bruce Campbell, and Trip Wamsley (crazy man.)
I like a variety of 80's music. I like listening to music to listen to the bass players, but I listen to some music just because I like it. Some of the groups and singers I like are: The Police, The Fixx, Level 42, U2, some Bon Jovi, Mr. Big, Winger (for Reb Beach's guitar playing) Animal Logic (with Stanley Clark), Pearl Jam, Rush, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Robert Cray, Don Henley, Joe Satriani, Paul Young, Phil Collins, Sting (tasteful stuff), Peter Gabrial, and many of the songs that were "hits of the 80's". Other musicians I have checked include Phil Keaggy, Keiko Matsui (jazz piano player), Stacy Hobbs (harp guitar player from Roanoke, VA). Some christian artists that I like include Third Day, Margaret Becker, Degarmo and Key, and Michael English. I have heard many other songs that I don't know the artists who made the songs. Bass players who I like to listen to include: Pino Paladino, Mark King, Billy Sheehan, Keith Horne, Tony Levin, Garry Goodman, Leland Sklar, Jaco, Stanley Clark, Darren Michaels, Yves Carbonne, Trip Wamsley, Michael Manring, Jean Baudin, Stew McKinsey, Victor Wooten, Bill Dickens, and many bassist who are not known by name but by their grooving or melodic bass lines in a song.
I like the Original Star Wars Trilogy, The first and third Indiana Jones Movies, October Sky, The Hunt for Red October, 2010, Space Cowboys, Contact, Pale Rider, BAT 21, Vanishing Point, Enemy of the State, Deep Impact, Star Trek IV, the (original) Blues Brothers.
Favorite shows right now: Dirty Jobs, Battle Star Galactica. In the past: Babylon 5, The X-Files, Extreme Engineering, Mega Machines, Extreme Machines, and many other shows on the educational channels.
"The Cosmic Onion" - An interesting book that explains the basics of QCD (Quantum Chromo Dynamics) in laymans terms. This basically deals with quarks and how they combine to form subatomic particles: bosons, mesons, w-particles, protons, neutrons, and electrons, positrons, etc."The Fourth Dimension" - a book that discusses the aspects of a world of four dimensions (sometimes more) which can either be Time or a Fourth spacial dimension (besides length, width, and height). Example: A 4-D cube has 12 sides, and 16 corners. A 3-D cube only has 6 sides and 8 corners. In addtion to "Hypercubes" there are Hyperspheres, Hyperplanes, etc. Wild stuff. "The Guiness Book of World Records". The Bible which I really need to spend more time reading - our instructional booklet for life. Don't just read the Bible - let the Bible read you.
Mashed Potato Man, my two dogs, the person that labels the food items on the buffet table at Roma Pizza - Want some "microni and cheze" and some "fench fries". Last the Deadhead that wrote the serial numbers on Eden bass amps and cabinets. Cartoon heroes - Voltron and the Transformers - Soundwave the boom box was cool.