So It's Religion You Want?

In spite of the dire predictions of doomsayers about the inevitable effects of allowing things like Science, Democracy, Teaching Women to Read and Racial Integration to carry on, religion today seems more popular than ever.

Religion's greatest strength is the fact that notions about god and an existence outside the knowable physical universe (e.g. life after death) are unprovable, and therefore un-disprovable.  Many religious people don't seem to grasp the importance of that, and go around trying to generate proof for these notions by all sorts of means, some honest and some, hypocritically, less so.  Being unable to be proven and unable to be disproven are two sides of the same coin, and so making your god-hypothesis a provable concept also risks making it a disprovable concept.  Being disproven and discredited is what normally happens to it next.

The hypothesis of the existence of a transcendent being or beings not bound by ordinary natural constraints is in its essence an unfalsifiable hypothesis.  I prefer the word "untestable" since it provides a clue about what you're supposed to do with hypotheses generally.  When your proposition is untestable, then you do not have to listen to anyone who claims to know that your proposition is not strictly true.  You are free to believe in it implicitly, because for all practical purposes it is true, being indistinguishable from the truth by any means available.  Like Russell's Teapot, it is untestable.

If it's religion you want, then you really want your religious propositions to all be of the untestable sort.  That way you do not ever have to surrender them to the force of evidence, reason, proof, or fact.

A strict Empiricist such as myself might question the utility of even having such beliefs; but I am well aware that no human activity, science included, is possible without an irrational, unempirical, intuitive belief in the value of creative actions taken before evidence of their benefit can possibly be known.  Therefore we do not dismiss untestable religious beliefs out of sheer arrogance, but choose instead to "live and let live."

However (and you knew this was coming, didn't you) . . . religion is too frequently not content with untestable beliefs about their god.  They foolishly begin inventing doctrine, creeds, and stories with which to adorn their god and which are often quite readily testable.  It is these adulterations that I adjure you to accept only conditionally.

Many religious movements want you to accept god as Omnipotent, that is, possessing all power.  At the same time, they want you to feel obligated to certain performances, which this "omnipotent" god somehow "needs" you to perform.  Your skepticism of these requests is well-founded.

The only sort of god that needs you to fight, give money, vote a certain way, hate someone, commit crimes or generally make a nuisance of yourself is either a non-existent god invented by cynical humans to manipulate weaker-minded humans, or is not an all-powerful god at all.

For instance, politics is all about the acquisition of power.  An omnipotent god already has all power, and therefore has no use for politics.  Therefore anyone trying to get you to be political on behalf of an omnipotent god is obviously full of shit.

Any real god would not be in the least bit inconvenienced by the existence of infidels, their expressions of blasphemy or heresy, or by people not wearing the right clothes on the right day of the week.  The agenda of any real god, if he even has an agenda at all (being eternal, why would he need one?) would be impossible for any mere human to subvert by anything whatsoever that we could possibly do or not do.

But if religion is still what you are after, then consider this.  Wodan, Master of the Wild Hunt, God of the Saxons, God of Poetry, God of Wednesday (and god knows Wednesday needs one), God of Beards and the God of Men (meaning males specifically), does not care who you vote for or what you wear.  While he may not be omnipotent, omniscient or omni-anything (OK - we'll leave the door open for Omnivorous), Wodan is comfortable enough with his godhood to be rather amused by blasphemy, if he takes any notice of it at all.  Just a suggestion - do with it what you will.

A voice in my head objects, saying "It is a worthless religion that does not require something of you."  Fine - we'll address that.  Since Wodan or any other god will get on perfectly well with or without you, the question is not how you can help or serve god.  The real question is what you can do yourself.  The size of your vision limits the size of your actions, which limit the size of your life.  Your life is to be your religion, serving the vision that you create.  It isn't going to live itself; it needs you.  You are fully empowered and fully authorized by the consciousness with which the universe has endowed you, specifically, and you are the only means in existence through which the matter of this universe can experience what it would be like to live your life.

So get out there and start livin' it.

Genetic Defect

I have a genetic defect which renders me incapable of seeing dirt. Scientists call this gene mutation the "Y-chromosome."

This is usually not a problem.  However, each year when it is time to vacuum the floors and carpets, I can't tell which parts of the floor or carpet have already been vacuumed and which haven't.  This can lead to misunderstandings of a domestic character. But I have solved this problem, and am willing to share the solution with others who may be suffering from a similar genetic deformity.


Step 1.  Get everyone who is not you out of the house for one hour. If the internet is working, make that an hour and twenty minutes.

Step 2.  Access the hole puncher and take out all the holes that have been punched over the last 12 months.  If there are not enough holes, punch some more.

Step 3.  Spread the hole-punch holes uniformly over the carpet to be vacuumed.

Step 4.  Vacuum up all the hole-punch holes.


Voila!  Every individual carpet fiber has now been vacuumed and the other humans in your domestic situation will have no grounds for their complaints and accusations.  Moral superiority is now yours for the next forty-three seconds.  Revel in it!

The Secret of Hovering

No, I said HOVERING.
As in "Levitating."

Not to be confused with the secret of Hoovering, which pretty much any idiot can figure out.


This is THE secret that has eluded humankind for thousands of years.  Transcendental meditationists, yogic flyers (aka butt-hoppers), ninja masters, medieval alchemists, druidic high elders, and Harry Potter fans have all searched in vain for this ONE THING you need to know about hovering.

This one essential truth is the finish-line in your life-long quest to float free of this planet's relentless downward pull.

This knowledge is the final cumulative result of mankind's thirst for hovering awareness and our ten-thousand year journey towards levitation enlightenment.

This fundamental fact has been painstakingly distilled from the fabric of the Cosmos, groped after between the cushions of Reality and plucked from the very sofa-crack of Existence.

Yet, here it is, free of charge, and your reward for doing nothing more than stumbling upon this humble blog from the far remote wastelands of Australia.

However, if this astonishing insight is going to be too much for you and cause you to have some kind of a spiritual break-down, embarrassing fit, or maybe a bladder control issue, then please read no further.


But for those of you who are worthy and have truly prepared yourselves:

Here is the ONE THING that tells you ALL THERE IS TO KNOW about levitating in the air without any technological assistance:






. . .








You can't.

If It Isn't Baroque, Don't Fix It.

The Shed as a retreat is extremely versatile.  For example, it has recently enabled me to run away to Leipzig in the first half of the 18th century.  That's the time and place to which JS Bach belonged.

I did not accomplish this through anything fantastical like time travel nor by anything too mundane like downloading some tracks to my mobile phone.  My escape was not mere passive consumption.  It was achieved through attempting to re-create some of Bach's music in a manner that I consider fit and proper.

Yes, I could have simply listened to the CDs again.  But to be honest, some of the re-interpretations and so-called performances of Bach's preludes and fugues make me want to - well, not quite burn my ears off with acid.  Certainly, at least, they make me want to listen to something else.

That's why I take it upon myself to arrange and produce my own recordings of Bach's most astonishing works.  In not just the history of keyboard instruments, but in all human history, the Preludes and Fugues are among Mankind's greatest achievements.

Yes, Baroque music may be considered quaint and primitive in comparison to mind-blowing experiences like Rachmaninoff or Jimi Hendrix.  But closer inspection of these pieces reveals a depth and complexity that would make any century proud to claim them.

True, Baroque music is extremely simple rhythmically.  Four evenly-spaced beats repeated, then divided equally in half, then divided equally again and again.  Nothing can be simpler, and our entire system of music notation is based on the temporal simplicity of that age.  But that simplicity is more than made up for in its harmonic complexity.  There are harmonies of harmonies, or meta-harmonies.  Bach's harmonic systems exhibit almost fractal divisibility.


But, there's no use talking about it.  Enjoy the fruits of my efforts:  the D-Major Prelude and Fugue, BWV 532.  Being in a major key, it's relatively up-beat and cheerful.  But not so much as to forget one's dignity.


So sit back, put on headphones, and leave the 21st Century for the next 10 minutes and 34 seconds.

The End of Neurosis

During days of quiet reflection at the Shed, one of the most powerful insights that comes back to me time and again is that you can never change other people.  They will stay crazy right up until they decide to change all by themselves.

Oh, sorry, did I use a non-PC word there?  Crazy?  You are correct: therapists strongly dislike the word "crazy."  It makes it sound like any fool can become a therapist without years of medical, scientific and psychiatric study and training.  Now, that actually is the situation, but they still don't like it to be generally known.  That is why they prefer to call crazy people by a another name that makes it sound as though they knew something meaningful about it:

Borderline Personality Disorder

Therapists also do not like to work with crazy - uh, I mean individuals exhibiting Borderline Personality Disorder, because they know that there is nothing they can do to "cure" them.  Because you can't change other people; people can only change themselves when they decide to.

Stop Whining about the noise and sparks,
and let Angle Grinder Man cut your chains off.

And crazy people (just get over it, ok?  It takes less time to write and amounts to the same thing) never, ever change because part of being crazy is that they are utterly convinced that they are not the ones with the problem.

I don't have to define crazy (or BPD) because you know it when you see it.  Everyone knows someone with wild swings of emotion, likely to bite the head off of anyone at the slightest whiff of what they believe to be an attack on their self image, or people that get mad at you and sulk for weeks over something you don't remember doing or saying.  We label them drama queens, rage-a-holics,  people with issues, narcissistic, co-dependent and so forth.  But really, they're just plain-old straight-up Crazy.

(I'd like you to immediately, right now, buy and read this book: Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder.  Do it now.)

The most important thing you can do now to ensure that your life is not infected with crazy is to stop hanging around crazy people.  You'll be glad you took this step, and the sooner, the better.  (I know a good divorce attorney if you need one.)

The next step is to swallow the bitter pill and look in the mirror.  How does a person who consciously chooses to no longer be crazy actually make the change?  Perhaps you're not full-on bat-shit crazy, but just, say, a little on the neurotic side.  Maybe there's just a touch of some social phobia, anxiety, anger, brooding over past bullying or trauma, or a wee bout of addictive tendency.  If that's the case, then you're actually pretty normal.  Therapists love people like you!

Crazy people never question for a moment the existence or meaning of their emotions.  They have intense emotions set to explode on a hair-trigger.  Ordinary neurotics have less intense emotions that underpin their various behaviors, and the trigger isn't as sensitive, but in principle, it's all one of a muchness.

The whole thing, the entire spectrum of human irrationality, suffering, self-sabotage and discontent, hangs on just one thing.

The one thing that allows all of this stuff to exist is your unquestioning belief in and unwavering devotion to the illusion of consciousness.

Break that illusion, that spell, that waking, life-long trance of the mind, and all forms of neurosis vanish like smoke.  If you can crack that facade even just a little, you can begin to do things that make an enormous difference to your happiness, success, suitability as a marriage partner, sense of fulfillment in life and rankings on Google.

For example, you can begin to understand that emotions are not actually real.  This admits the possibility of questioning your emotions.  As the observer of the mind, whenever you discover an emotion forming within you, always ask this question:

"What would a person have to believe in order to actually choose this emotion?"

You can also begin to question the validity of your experiences and the people that inhabit them.  Your mind, based on what it senses and what it unconsciously believes and assumes, pieces together the objective world around you and the people within it and projects a simulation of this onto your consciousness.  That is in fact the only possible way for a conscious being to experience anything at all.  While there most definitely is an underlying objective reality outside you, you only ever experience a subjective, carefully-filtered and not-100%-accurate simulation of that reality.  That is why people in your reality sometimes say, do or think things that they did not actually say, do or think.  Crazy people fly off at shadows and imagined threats; non-crazy people discipline their mind not to make those assumptions without first considering the illusory nature of consciousness.

When people moan and say they can't change, that means they are still 100% convinced by the illusion of their own mind. Pain still exists, insults still cut deep, fear and past trauma keep the unformed future and the unchanging past alive within them at all times. Suffering goes marching on.

But as soon as you know how the magic trick is done, the show is over.  The veil is lifted and it is the End of All Neuroses.

New Music for your Dancing and Dining Pleasure

I thought I'd give Audacity another try.  The last time I tried it was about five years ago, and the sound quality was hopeless.  The laptop I was using at the time may have had something to do with it, but recordings using other software on the same machine sounded much better.

This time the sound is pretty good, if you can overcome the latency problems that cause tracks to be shifted out of sync with each other.  I've decided to blame all the problems and mistakes in these two numbers on that issue.  However, once again the hardware has a lot to do with it.

On my older XP machine I could play the keyboard instrument straight through the soundcard and out the speakers.  With this newer, larger and more expensive computer running Win7, the latency is so bad that I cannot even play a few notes: the delay between playing a note and hearing the note drove me bonkers.  The issue was so bad that I bought a second pair of speakers just to avoid ever experiencing it again.  When I play the Nord (which being a stage performance instrument has no built-in speakers) into the computer, I must disable the computer speakers and monitor myself through the second pair.

And so, when Audacity is playing and recording at the same time, the resulting tracks are so far out of sync it sounds like there are two different songs playing over each other.  I had to manually, meticulously nudge them back and forth until they matched.  Of course that was impossible, because my playing never matches from one track to the next, so the best a mathematically-minded musician can to is to minimize the error in the least-squares sense.

Or just keep fiddling with it until it sounds OK.  Yeah, that's actually easier.  It helped to magnify the waveforms and line them up visually.


In any case, the first song takes advantage of the fantastic backing accompaniment available on the Roland FP-80 instrument.  The three piano parts you can hear are me in live performance.  Just not performed all at the same time.

This is a Gospel-style blues that makes abundant use of 6, 9 and 11 chords.






The second, conceived and recorded all about a half an hour after finishing the previous track, was meant to be a showcase for the amazing and deeply satisfying Nord electric stage piano sounds that I have been enjoying privately for some months now.  There are three piano parts, no drum or backing track, and it's all me.

I've known since about 1986 that simply dashing off a musical number and committing it to a recording in multiple tracks is not as easy as it sounds, particularly when it's being improvised on the spur of the moment.  And if your sense of rhythm and tempo are as abysmal as mine.  Virtually non-existent.  Plus, each time you rewind and lay on another track, you have to remember exactly what you did previously and when exactly you did it.

I didn't accomplish that perfectly this time, but I really enjoyed giving it a go!




Let me know what you think.

How To Kill Australian Bugs

There's a clever cartoon circulating on the web which we need to discuss:

I wish I knew who created this so I could credit them.  This person is obviously a far, far more talented artist than I will ever be.  How do they draw such straight lines, I wonder?

While the creator may well be the Rembrandt of our age (such as it is), he or she is an amateur when it comes to killing bugs.  Yes, these are all acceptable ways of defending your home and homeland from invading insects and aggro arachnids.  But they are only the beginning.

I used each one of these in only my first week here in Bugland (aka Australia).  Since then I have expanded my repertoire to match the challenge:

• Fire.  Did you know that insects are flammable?  So is insect spray, rubbing alcohol, acetone, turpentine, spray cooking oil, and lots of other handy household items. This requires certain precautions, however.  Such as not living in a flammable structure.
• Flood.  When a bug goes down the drain, it almost NEVER comes back!
• Burying Alive.  Actually, this one is not always effective unless you have access to a backhoe/excavator.  Then, it is pretty effective.
• Rubber Band Archery.  This takes practice.  Fortunately for me I delivered newspapers as a child laborer, and my co-child-laborers and I had access to thousands of rubber bands and hours of unsupervised time in which to shoot at all sorts of targets: flies, ants, each other . . .
• Ballistic Projectiles.  I once bullseyed a mouse (basically a large mammalian insect) using a lemon thrown sidearm.  While seated.  At the dinner table.  While eating.  (You get extra points for each element of normalcy maintained during the kill.)
• Shovel Bisectioning.  100% effective.  "But," you say, "how often do you have a shovel handy when there's an insect around?"  Let me put it to you this way:  Every time I have had a shovel in my hand, there has sooner or later been some sort of critter that required bisectioning with it.
• Rake Multipokery.  This is an advanced tactic that requires specialized training.  And a rake.
• Vehicular Bugslaughter.  This comes in two varieties:  Premeditated Bugslaughter and Involuntary Bugslaughter. What's the difference?  Legally speaking, with one of them you have to have good aim and good timing.  Either way, you have to wash your car later.
• Utensil Stabbery.  This is a good one to know because you almost always have access to dining utensils.  Just remember to ask your waiter for clean utensils afterwards.
• Wooden Stake Through The Brain.  This works extremely well on almost anything, not just bugs.  It's probably the only thing effective on Zombie Vampires and certain species of cockroaches.  
• Death by Riverdance.  Got boots?  Got bugs?  Then you too can do this.  Very little practice and no Irish heritage required. Or any of that annoying jig music.  Just stomp away!
• Flattening To Death of Small Bugs Using Your Bare Hands.  Sometimes it comes to this.  Do not attempt on anything that can bite, sting, pinch, poke, or that has a large volume of guts inside it.

Good luck!  You'll probably need it.

Keyboards, keyboards

As a wee lad I had little interest in music.  I attribute this to the cognitive dissonance between what was defined to be music in my parents' home and my internal experience seeking expression.  I just didn't feel inside the way classical music, least of all opera, sounded.

My interest in music was born the day I heard Blues for the first time.  Prickles on the back of my neck.  Now that's what I'm TALKIN about!  That's MUSIC!  That's MY music.

At around 22 years of age the need to actually make Blues music was growing impatiently.  So I bought my first keyboard.  It looked exactly like this:

Mom's piano, a Baldwin
Acrosonic, still in the family
and still being played.

Really.  No joke. Obviously, there was already a piano in my parents home and always had been: a very competent Acrosonic console from the early 1950's, my mother's personal piano that she owned since she was about 11.  (I later learned that she was an accomplished classical pianist, but I did not know this at the time.)  So why did I need this tiny Radio Shack novelty?  Well, I couldn't be seen and especially heard to be laboriously practicing the piano, so a tiny, plastic, portable, electronic gadget that I could play through Walkman-style headphones was just the thing.

And play it I did.  Unbelievably, on that ridiculous toy I learned all the major and minor scales, practicing them endlessly.  I learned jazz scales, and most importantly, the blues scales.  I learned a few songs, too. I also learned that the piano wasn't beyond me, and this tentative step, this dipping of the toe so to speak, was rapidly superseded.

My next keyboard, purchased second-hand a short time later, was the legendary Casio CZ-1000 phase-distortion synthesizer.  Yep, it even has its own Wikipedia page!

I had a lot of fun with this and a 4-track cassette recorder.  The sounds were primitive by today's standards, but it sounded great at the time.  It was also fun to fiddle around with the oscillators and create new sounds.  Years later I gave this keyboard to a family I thought could really use it.

In the mean time, I was hungry for more, and the big thing in the 1980's was Polyphony.  How many notes could an electronic instrument produce at the same time?   My first tiny toy keyboard had a polyphony of one (is that monophony?) The CZ-1000 had a polyphony of 4 or 8, depending on how many oscillators were needed to produce the tone.  So I could actually learn chords now.

But I wanted to use the new MIDI standard and play ALL the music!  So I needed this:

The Roland D-10 multi-timbral workstation.  It was 32-note polyphonic, and 16 of those could even be completely different sounds!  This was the first Orchestra in a Box.  I had some great times with this, including the following completely digitally-sequenced track I produced using this machine in 1989:


(Bach's Prelude and Fugue in Am BWV 543)

and this performed by me, aptly titled, "Don't Laugh,"



My first real piano, bought very second-hand in about 1998 for $200, was not so much a piano as it was a sort of piano-shaped box of assorted piano parts.  It was really more of a piano kit.  I spent two years building a piano out of it.  It was an English birdcage action upright, and had one hell of a big sound when I got done with it.

When I moved to Australia in about 2000, I was keyboardless.  I had a harmonica, that was all.  It took about 8 months before conditions were ripe for me to have a piano.  This is what I bought, for about $2500:

When things went non-linear a few years later, I would again be without an instrument (not to mention a home, a family, friends, a job, a sense of identity . . . .)  But the keyboard situation was ONE problem I could do something about.  I went to the music shop, said, "I'd like a portable digital piano, please.  That one, there."  The sales clerk blinked twice, collected what wits were at his disposal, and said, "um, OK!"  It was a Casio Privia Px-300.  All in all, a good machine.

But playing at home and getting up on stage to perform are two very different things.  I realized after the Bridgetown Blues Festival last year that I was at a serious disadvantage, but one that could be addressed.  Specifically, I needed the Nord Electro 3/73 professional instrument.

And, lo, I beheld that it was good.

Update:  August 2013.  I have acquired possibly the most advanced digital piano in the world, and possibly the first one in Western Australia.  It's the Roland FP-80, featuring an advanced piano engine that models the hammers, dampers, strings and even the cabinet of a concert grand.  Its simulated ivory key tops look, feel adsorb and respond like real ivory, and the internal hammer action gives keys the right amount of inertia for a genuine playing experience.  Do I sound a bit like an advertisement?  That's because I'm in love with this instrument!

Except for one small thing:  There seems to be a housing/case resonance right on A3.  It disappears when I use the headphones or play through external speakers.  I'll be asking Roland for a tech note on that problem.  Meanwhile, let's enjoy it:

The Tesla Effect

Portrait of a Moron

When you meet someone for the first time, how do you know if they actually possess a rigorous grounding in the "hard" sciences and engineering disciplines, or if they are only pretending to have one?

They may wear glasses and know words like "entanglement" and "wave function collapse" and "nonlinear phonon scattering," but do they actually know what the flip they are talking about?

Here is a simple test that works 99% of the time.  Ask them what they think of Nikola Tesla.  If they say something like, "He was a misunderstood genius that science is still struggling to catch up with," then that person is a moron.

The Tesla Effect

Chances are that such a person will also think that perpetual motion is possible and is being actively suppressed by the government, that aliens are currently snooping around our planet and the government is suppressing this information, and that oil is generated through geological processes unconnected to paleo-biology and the government is, well, you get the idea.  They march in step in the ranks of the Cult of the Willfully Ignorant. They are often also much enamored with Creationist beliefs of the most absurd and demonstrably false sort.

Therefore you would be pretty safe, once someone expresses any kind of admiration for Tesla, in ignoring anything else they may happen to say.

The truth is that Tesla's understanding of physics in general and electromagnetism in particular was a hundred years behind the science of his day.  He had no real idea why some of his "inventions" accidentally worked and why most of the rest of them did not.  Most of his so-called "accomplishments" are merely urban myth, hyperbole, and straight-up fantasy.

The more a person's understanding of things comes from empirical science and mathematics, the less interest one has in lame things that are well behind the curve and superseded by fact.

Tesla was an accidental inventor at best, a self-deluded kook at worst.  Get used to it.

Another Perfect Day For The Blues

I get these a lot for some reason.  The sort of day no goddamned good for anything except playing the blues.

I call this the Sunnyland Blues because it takes certain liberties with the 12-bar Blues Form.  But it does so with authority, specifically that of Sunnyland Slim who used it to great effect.

In a 12-bar in A, one normally hears only A, D and E.  Listen carefully for the odd F and B that sneaks in there.

The Most Important Thing I Have Learned

The most useful thing I've learned since coming to Australia is probably the importance of always having a stick with you when you go to the outhouse.

This weekend I was reminded of that timeless lesson, and of a photo album I created about six years ago from the construction of the outhouse at The Shed.  It explains how to build your own outhouse in just 83 easy steps.  The incident that reminded me also happened to involve this very dunny.

It had been about a month since I last made it up to The Shed.  This is May, and for some reason, this year Western Australia has decided to hold Winter in May.  That means that it was dark by the time I got up here.  Dark, wet and cold enough to warrant bringing in a bunch of firewood with which to warm up The Shed.  But by the time I arrived, I also had an urgent need to, uh, meditate upon the porcelain.

So I picked up a flashlight and a handy stick and headed out to the dunny.  Approaching it with caution, I opened the door and poked the stick inside.  It caught on something crackly.  The stick caught hold in a large, stiff web.  A messy, disorganized web that practically filled the entire space inside the dunny.  Though the responsible party was not to be seen, I knew.  Redback.

I closed the door, willed my bowels to postpone the evening's scheduled activity and went back inside the shed to get a fire going and something to eat.

The next morning I returned to the dunny with a bigger stick and a can of spray.  And an even more urgent "need."  I knocked down all the webs I could see and put down some surface spray along the walls.  When I came to the crevice under the sink I believed to be concealing the redback, I gave it a good shot and stood back.  Right on cue, about 10 seconds later an enormous, fully mature redback came scrabbling out and began the writhing and lashing that I've seen hundreds of times in my life. American Black Widows and Australian Redbacks share a lot of DNA and a lot of similar behaviors.

Since using a dunny puts one in a rather vulnerable, immobilized position, I prefer to wait until there are no deadly poisonous creatures within inches of my person.  I therefore waited another hour or so before returning to find the venomous spider well and truly dead.

The wisdom of always bringing a stick with you to the dunny once again proved its worth.  No, there weren't any more spiders, but due in part to the repeated delays, my visit created a temporary plumbing malfunction.  A good, solid stick is useful for sorting out that, too.