First my gratitude to Steve for a fine, fine week of Lunch Reports even while being really busy. For me this week it is pretty much the same. You see, I work for PopCap Games building the back-end server solution for one of our big franchises with a updated release on the horizon later this year. And it is crunch time right now. So all the Lunch Reports were actually written last weekend, will be posted early in the morning (my time) and I will only be able to react to your input sparingly. But lets see how it goes …
Lunch:
They provide lunch and dinner for our team so we don't have to leave the building. But I actually hate that. I rather spend money to get out of the building than to eat at my desk. So my gut-feeling (no pun intended) is that it will be Thai-Monday; just like always. In my later Lunch Reports I'll let you know what I had for lunch the day prior.
Steve's Friday LR on Saturday featured his red SC-1. Sometime last year I got me a black one and was immediately bowled over. Which got me interested in G&L early to mid-80's G&L entry level instruments. Not withstanding the 'entry level' moniker, the instruments have proven to be amazing sonic tools: you'd frequently read somebody on this board extol their virtues. After all, the main reason to get an SC-1 was to find out for myself what this KenC fella was writing about all the time (sorry Ken

G&L question:
Do you consider the Asian produced Tribute series to be G&L's entry line of instruments or are they a 'separate' thing entirely? And if you own a Tribby, how likely is it for you to ever get an US G&L, either as replacement or as an addition? Or is the Tribby already good enough by itself? (See Poll above)
Since I mentioned Ken, I thought it would be cool to feature the low-end member of the student models: the SB-2. You might know that the SB-2 is still part of the G&L line-up. But when initially released, it had a different pickups configuration:


In 1985, this configuration was renamed to Lynx (which in turn was discontinued at the end of '91) and the SB-2 went on a 2 year hiatus only to come back with its current Jazz/Precision combo of pups in '87, this time to stay.
A couple of weeks ago my wife expressed an interest to learn to play the bass. The L-2500 in my collection is pretty heavy and the ASAT Commemorative Bass is just heavy on pretty. So we started looking around CL and eBay to see if there would be something suitable and this one popped up. Look, I'll be honest, in those kind of situations I have no qualms saying 'Yes dear!'

General question:
What is the weirdest excuse you've ever used to buy an instrument?
Like my other student models, it is a beautiful Black and has a great looking neck with nicely figured grain on the fingerboard. It came in the original hard shell case with its funky corners (like many original student model cases) and has this funky block attached to the divider to avoid the instrument to slide around:


And it turned out to be an early one produced shortly after the model was introduced in November '82:


I have been playing this thing all week now, and am again surprised by the great tone coming from this modest model. Yes, you have to dial back the highs a bit but it has this beautiful sound. Not that my other basses are not great, but sometimes simplicity is just the ticket.
Hope to be able to check in later this day,
- Jos