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Two points define a line, three points confirm it.
I’m sure at one point (heh) or another, some highly trained and well intentioned education professional disciplined in the mathematical arts uttered those words in a manner designed to impress upon you that someday you would need to know and use this shit.
Am I right?
Think back to your high school geometry class where that and other prescient life-lessons on how to measure the hypotenuse of a right triangle were purveyed.
Ladies and gentlemen, how many times in your adult life has the knowledge about the fundamental relationship in Euclidean geometry about the three sides of a right triangle saved your bacon?
Measuring the distance a catcher has to huck the ball to second base to dispatch a would-be base thief comes mind. Even still, I’ve got wonder whether Johnny Bench or any of his brethren ever executed the mathematical gymnastics it took to calculate the square root of 16,200 when Willie Mays Hayes made a break for it. Instead, I’m pretty sure they called back on years of training and natural talent to catch the pitch and burn it down the line to keep the bases clean.
With that in mind, kwicherbichen about my little math lesson here and respect the fact that you know I’ll be moving on to other things shortly.
For those of you not in the know, there was a time not too long ago…..
Okay, I just remembered that I’m now 50 and my aspirations of becoming a math teacher took place 30 years ago.
All things being equal, I’ve got to wonder if I would have made a decent career with such machinations (or is it “mathenations”?). Certainly I use a lot of the strategies today that I learned back in those advanced math classes to solve a problem. That’s regardless of whether an adjacent angle is involved. The thought of impressing those same methods on the product of today’s culture where straight forward facts and figures are frowned upon causes my pyloric valve to display a variety of symptoms which suggests the presence of Tourette’s Syndrome.
However none of this really applies to the definition of a line now, does it?
Let’s stop this tangential rant (see what I did there?) and get back to the subject at hand.
Yesterday will go down in history as the last Saturday of June, 2018. Upon rising from my slumber, I donned the cargo shorts, a t-shirt with a witty display, and New Balance shoes; all of which define everything about me that you need to know. After convincing the dog that although I was dressed for a walk, that wasn’t where we were going, I subsequently crammed, jammed, and poured a cacophony of cream cheese slathered bagel and coffee flavored energy drink into my unfiltered yet brushed and gargled pie-hole, inserted a pair of earbuds into the wax richened holes on either side of my head, and proceeded to the garage in hopes of getting some work done in there before the heat index would rise to the occasion of a different sort of cacophony of four letter words.
For what it’s worth, that one word I used twice in the previous sentence was only used correctly once. None the less, it sounded good in the mis contextualization, so I’m leaving it in. Verbal brilliance continues to reign supreme.
As I waded through the obstacle course of uncompleted projects, unrealized accomplishments, and perpetual procrastination that is my garage, I pumped a certain level of music into my skull so as to drown out all of the voices which were criticizing me for not keeping the garage neat and tidy. In the process, I discovered something that had only made itself known to me on the surface. As my tune supply shuffled through the thousands of songs which reside on my portable device, it happened upon a recording I made four years ago when Juniorette and I trekked to Austin to see Def Leppard and KISS.
During that tour, Def Leppard had a unique way of coming onto stage. One thing about that band that has always been unique is the way that they just appear on stage without the audience even realizing how they got there. They’ve done it for years.
For the 2014 tour, the stage was blocked by a massive curtain with the band’s logo. Behind the scenes, the crews were breaking down the equipment from the opening band and setting up for the next act. As always, various rock songs by other bands are played on the sound system for the crowd to help pass the time. The last song to be played on the external sound system prior to Def Leppard taking the stage for that tour was “Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who.
However…..
Def Leppard didn’t just let the recorded song end, come to stage and start doing their own thing.
Instead, they integrated themselves into the end of the keyboard solo which “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is famous for. At about 25 seconds into the video that follows, the drum comes in to finish off the keyboard solo. Whereas the recording of that song would have featured Keith Moon serving as the harbinger to Roger Daltrey’s upcoming scream, Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen is the one that did this part during the show. The curtain was then pulled up and back and there was Def Leppard to sing the outro of the song.
Cool. Right?
It should be noted that I didn’t record the video above. It was recorded a few days later in Dallas by someone else.
So in listening to the audio recording I made of that particular event, I noticed that my voice appears at the point the curtain is pulled back and the band is on stage. I’m yelling “YEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHH!”.
“Now just wait a cotton pickin’ minute here” went through my mind as I suffered an epiphany while looking for a place to put the hedge trimmer.
That’s not the only recording I have where I can be heard enthusiastically responding in the affirmative.
Take for instance the next year when I saw Def Leppard at 1:08 in the following video:
Consider this last April when I saw Shinedown at 1:50 in the following video:
Just a few days later, I saw Foo Fighters and signaled favor at 0:09:
I said it before and I’ll say it again.
Two points define a line, and three confirm it. I just offered up three points of evidence which suggests that I can very agreeable when I’m presented with a song that I like in a very loud and live environment.
For those of you who argue that all those math classes in your formative years didn’t give you any life lessons, I would suggest that you reconsider.
