Thomas Martin's blog

it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Waaaaaay back when CD players were new, I bought a Beatles CD Abbey Road before ever owning a CD Player.

CD Player purchased, I bought "Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon" and "Wish YOu Were Here". An ALBUM I'd listen to a million times. Dark Side of The Moon remains in the top five best selling albums everrrrr.
Roger Waters included bits of dialogue from interviews he conducted on none other than Abbey Road. I was amazed at the clarity.

Man! you could even here David Gilmore smoking a cigarette in the background. How could I have missed this for over a decade. Static, that's how.

Similarly, I've been missing the subtleties of Prince Albert, Carter Hall, Sir Walter Raleigh until this experiment:

http://pipelore.net/...

... something I've been meaning on doing for a while. I just sold 30 pipes leaving me with: My homemade pipes, a handful of Grabows, two Kaywoodie Christmas pipes that we (SHPC) get when we go to their holiday party, and about 4 pipes that are special to me and are worth keeping.

I feel so much better. Pipe Aquisition Disorder Therapy has worked wonderfully. Ahhhh.............

Now I have a lot of vacant rack space. Back to re-accumulating, and refocusing.

The thrill is in the hunt ain't it?

I've recently been absorbed entirely in relocating my office from Hunitngton Ave to Mass Ave Boston. I wish I could even say I've been lurking but not even time for that! Carry on.

After the input recieved, I am sold on conicals and turned a 1" bit, appropriate only for pots, into something far more acceptable:

Good stuff as always. Keep up the good posting.

I have sequestered myself from the pipe community as one of my mentors seems to live his life. It seems odd to do so, but there is huge value to distance. He creates and adjusts based on his own variables and development. His name is Andrew Marks a man I admire greatly. THE number one lesson I learned from him was this. To be truly creative, in a way you need to eliminate the static. That's not to say the 'net is static (well it kind of is in a way, more on this in a minute) But to get inside your own head is cathartic, although not so cathartic that you can actually spell "Catharticism."

OK, so I just wrecked a nice pipe I had going on.. got carried away with the design and forgot about the engineering... Broke the shank. But, up until then it was looking good. Now its firewood! F---.

The good news i I just pimped my cob. When I bought it, the clear amber colored plastic stem was bent... strike that. It was Crimped such that it wouldn't even draw. Rick told me "let it go Dude, what'd ya pay for it? All of 6 bucks. Yes Six Bucks, or expressed interms of tobacco, thats a couple of ounces of tobacco!