Rallys Eat-It-All #18 : Cheese Double and Rally Bacon Cheeseburger

The end is near.

Here's the Cheese Double. Not a double cheese. WATCH YOUR VERBAGE! I dunno... maybe the gloss has worn off but there just wasn't anything special about it. The diced red onions were properly zingy but otherwise... meh. I can see why the fries are the star of this franchise.

The other half of my Two for $4 deal is the Rally Bacon Cheeseburger. It's got round onions, not diced. I wonder how the Rally Gods decide which kind of onion will be on which burger? Note the severe lopsidedness of this sammich. For the pictures I just pop off the top bun and whatever clings to it stays with it and wherever the condiments lie, there they lay. Despite the odd arrangement, this burger had some good flavor. But then again, how can anything with bacon taste bad?

Only five more sandwiches to go! That is if they really do have a chili burger which was on one web site but I've never seen on the menu board. And I guess classic bone-in wings don't really count as a sandwich. Technicalities!

Rallys Eat-It-All #17 : $2 Shrimp Box

I loves me some shrimp but it's expensive. When I saw the sign for a $2 shrimp and fry box at Rallys I figured that the shrimp would be pretty tiny but I didn't expect them to be non-existent.

I also wasn't expecting the ten minute wait in the drive through but you know how the Rallys ordering lanes are... they're like channeled chutes and once you're in there's no way you're getting out aside from driving over some shrubbery.

When the employee, at long last, handed me my bag and said, unsolicited, "These are really good!" I didn't expect the smell of garlic that entered my car. Shows how closely I read signs, eh? [NOTE: The sign only says BUTTERY shrimp, not GARLIC BUTTERY shrimp... VINDICATION!!!!]

So here they are. A bit on the overcooked side, eh? There may be shrimp juice poured into the batter, or possibly artificial shrimp flavoring (I don't have the gumption to go check their web site) but there were no discernible shrimp parts even in the largest pieces. The garlic sauce was squirted over the whole mess and as usual had more smell than taste. The fries in garlic sauce tasted pretty yummy but for the most part I paid for batter and not shrimp. It's a good thing it was only two bucks.

This Too Shall Pass Too

To follow up on my original G.A.S. (guitar acquisition syndrome) article, my sweetie bought me the top guitar back in 2007, the lovely natural finish monster that weighs a ton but sounds amazing. I would love to someday hear it played by a real guitarist! The only problem with it is that it has jumbo frets and I play too hard. I recently switched to heavier gauge strings and it has helped me quite a bit with staying in tune and not having the guitar sound “queasy.”

I still would love a Danelectro. Every now and then I search for used ones and they go for around $300. I missed the boat on a good investment, but maybe not because I kind of remember the clearance guitar being a seven–string. Maybe one day I will own a Mod or a 59.

The pawn shop by my work recently had the bottom/Artist guitar in. It was only $150 and was in great shape. However since I have two nice mid-range guitars I couldn’t bring myself to shell out $150 for a beginning guitar. It didn’t take long for someone to buy it.

Enter modern times.

Last summer I played a few times with a guy named Ricky who owned a half dozen or more Telecasters. Aren’t those country guitars? It turns out they aren’t and I soon started seeing Telecasters everywhere. Tom Petty, John Mellencamp, all your heartland rockers. I wanted that twang! I can build my own from BYOGuitars for $110 and have a decent guitar. Or I can add new pickups, new electronics, a Wilkinson bridge, through body strings, a better nut, copper shielding and have an amazing guitar. All it would cost is $270 (sarcasm) but it would be the equal of an $800 guitar when finished.

But there’s a problem. Aside from money and the fact that I think about guitars more than I play them. I’m not particularly fond of the Telecaster shape. It’s a classic but it doesn’t make me drool.

Then one of the ad-servers, based on my Telecaster browsing, showed me a picture of a Talman. It’s got a retro-Danelectro-Mod type body but with a Telecaster pickup arrangement. In sea-foam green!!! Sha-ZAM!

Speaking of sea-foam green, why are there two different shades from the same maker? The guitar shown above screams "That's ME!" but this one, with the same shape and pickup configuration, does nothing for me. Very strange.

Also strange is that they make a Talman bass guitar. I would probably use a bass more but once again it just leaves me cold. Is it the pickups? Is it the color? Should I get professional help?

Like most subjects of G.A.S., the longer I wait the less pull it has on me. But I enjoy the wanting. At my age there isn’t much that I need and very little that I want that I have any real chance of getting. A two week vacation with my family in the Smoky Mountains? I’d love it but it would cost five grand or more. Not in the budget if we want to eat and have money for medical bills. A house with enough bedrooms for every kid and one for my music stuff? A car that isn’t wishing it was ten years old? Pipe dreams. But two or three hundred dollars? I can scrimp/save that in six months, giving me something to hope and dream about the entire time. That is until a new guitar catches my eye.