ItsOnlyBob

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I love the Florida State-Florida football game. It's one of the great rivalries in college sports — a game in which emotions and intangibles can wreak havoc with rankings, records and statistical trends. Even in a year with a clear favorite and underdog — one team mowing down every opponent, the other just trying to avoid another embarrassing loss or season-ending injury — shocking things can happen. Like all great rivalries, FSU-Florida can bring out some pretty uncool behavior, not just among players and coaches, but also among the fans. I try to keep that behavior in perspective. I suspect every team in the country has a fringe group of obnoxious fans who get more attention, headlines and YouTube views than the highly likable ones who far outnumber them. I won't pretend that Tallahassee is completely devoid of garnet-and-gold-clad idiots, nor will I completely write off any other school's fans because of the few drunken halfwits I've met along the way. ...

So I'm watching ESPN tonight and I see the Capital One commercial with Samuel Jackson. I've seen it before, and noted the rarity of a mainstream commercial using a phrase like " every damn day ." The first time I saw it, I even rewound it to be sure I heard right. Then I thought, hey, it's Samuel Jackson. Good for you — push that envelope!  But wait  ... this time  the ad is slightly different. This time he says the card delivers on its benefits "every single day." Really? Not as effective, to my ear. Certainly not Jacksonesque language. A quick google search reveals there was (shocker!) public backlash . Apparently some people's ears went up in flames when they heard the dreaded "d" word. They complained, so the company went with a blander version that could as easily have featured Beaver Cleaver.  Two commercials later, a couple of high-school girls at an arcade  check out a shy boy standing nearby, out of earshot. "Lewis ne...

Let's all thank Thomas Jefferson for donating his text messages to the Library of Congress. (Click the pic to see it full-size.)

Several years ago my friend Becky Gjendem solicited entries on the subject of "What Memorial Day Means to Me" for her blog . She was kind enough to post my entry:  To some military musicians and ceremonial guardsmen, every day is Memorial Day. I'm a military musician in Washington, DC. Where I work, the main mission is rendering final honors to the dead at Arlington National Cemetery. Though performing is not my primary duty (I'm usually off in the corner where they keep the creative types), I am occasionally called on as an extra or substitute drummer for a funeral.  Even for a stand-in like me, it is all too easy to regard the job with a sense of routine. A military funeral is, after all, a ritual that has changed little over the centuries, and the troops who perform it are professionals whose principal job is to perform it as many as four times a day.  Services are virtually identical from one to the next. It is rare for members of the ceremonial unit ...

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May 2013  I’m sitting in my sunroom on a warm afternoon, looking out across my newly green backyard and the ravine that cuts through our neighborhood. I’m awaiting, with a creeping sense of dread and resignation, a benign but loud invasion.  The 17-year periodical cicadas (Brood II) are due to crawl up from underground around these parts, as soon as the ground temperature hits and maintains 64 degrees.  Soon.  A few precocious cicadas emerged in the past couple of summers, much to the evil delight of our cats, who regarded them as toys to be brought inside and batted about.  I know many people look forward to the cicadas. And I know they’re essentially harmless. ( Even delicious , some say.)  I certainly don’t regard them the same way I regard, say, roaches or spiders or ants.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.  Cicadas are often mistakenly called  locusts   –  but really, they’re not even c...

I took the last sip of my first cup of coffee yesterday morning and realized I'd had some company: a deer tick. Near it was another, smaller particle I can only hope was a coffee ground, but for all I know my little arachnid friend was so cranked he shat himself. Such is your thinking when you're freshly caffeinated and you realize Ixodes scapularis has been doing the backstroke in your dark roast. It reminded me of another coffee tale from several years ago. I was in the kitchen one morning, 6-ish, doing my usual routine: feeding our critters while waiting for the coffee to brew. After I'd start the coffee, I'd get some fish food out of the freezer—a small cube of brine shrimp from a plastic-and-foil package—and I would scoop out some aquarium water to thaw it in before dumping it in the fish tank. (I've long since decided it's easier and more fun just to let the fish attack the frozen cube.) In the meantime I'd feed the rest of our menage...

1. Must they leave the damn door open? I'm sure people stop in the hallway to gawk at the dork sprawled in the chair, wearing shades and a bib. 2. At least the shades are wraparounds, so I look cool. Don't I? 3. I don't care how cool her European accent is: If the dentist asks me, "Is it safe?" I'm hauling ass. 4. (Note to younger readers: "Marathon Man." Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier. You'll never look at your dentist the same way again.) 5. There's nothing quite like the hungry squeal of tungsten carbide bearing down on the pulpy innards of a hollowed-out molar at 400,000 rpm. The bit looks like a medieval toothpick, modified for lethality. As it grinds out the remains of the old filling, the bur feels like something the size of a baseball, or possibly a cantaloupe. 6. Obviously foreign objects feel bigger when they're inside your mouth. 7. (That's what she said.) 8. (Not really.) 9. Are we there yet? 10. Appar...

I'm pretty sure my ability to write music comes from my dad. I have no other musical blood ancestors to blame.   Dad couldn't read a note of music or play an instrument (he washed out on the trumpet in elementary school), but he had a good ear and he could carry a tune.  Best of all? He could whistle like nobody's business. His technique was astonishing, as nimble as a chimpanzee. And he could improvise for hours. He would putter around the house, spinning endlessly inventive, wildly acrobatic variations on the simplest of tunes. One of Dad's favorite songs from his own childhood was "Dunderbeck's Machine." It used a familiar folk melody to tell the story of an evil butcher whose sausage production flowed in suspicious concord with the disappearances of animals from the nearby pound:  Dunderbeck, oh, Dunderbeck! How could you be so mean? I'll bet that you are sorry You invented that machine. Now dogs and cats and long-tailed rats No lon...

Like anyone else who makes stuff up for a living, music arrangers occasionally suffer from creative constipation – sometimes to the point that we are so unsure of our ability to put a new spin on a tune and write it to our impossibly high standards that we back out of doing it. Then we hear the arrangement that’s used in its place, and we realize we could have farted out a better one after a dinner of corned beef, cabbage, egg salad and Old Milwaukee. So my advice to the creatively blocked – no matter what your art may be – is always: Go have that dinner. Then write. Write whatever is in your head at the moment, even just the melody and chord symbols. Bland is better than nothing, for now. It can be merely the least inspired thing you've ever written … or you can make it intentionally bad . Ask yourself what Mr. Trololo would do. Let it be shabby and cheesy and gauche. Or maybe just a little over-caffeinated . Write it as a jaunty march in 6/8 time, or as...

I love reading other peoples' inciteful commentary referencing the unproper usage of language expecially if it centers around some of the things which also tend to bother myself when I am reading things which are written or things spoken by voice in a poor fashion. There are many writers and speakers, who only tend to utilize the weakest sentances and words; irregardless of the fact that they are just watering down the affect that there words have on the people that are reading that which they have written or hearing that which they say. A long time and well reknown critic of carless writing and talking, this has and always will bother me. I often wonder if the English language will ever survive in tack. The thing is, is that oftentimes these are educated individuals, they are someone who definately should not have any excuse of incriminating the mother tongue like they do and, yet there intercourse is literally sprinkled with the following, to name a few; bad punctua...

Today's inaugural festivities are the first since 1993 that I've watched on TV at home. In the past four inaugurations—Clinton's second in 1997, Bush's in 2001 and '05, and Obama's in '09—I marched with the U.S. Air Force Band. This time around, I was a standby in case a primary percussionist couldn't make it.  I have mixed feelings about not marching. On the one hand, Inauguration Day is genuinely historic, and being an official part of it, however peripherally, is something to tell the grandkids about. Then again, it is The Mother of All Parades: a marathon of rehearsals (including a full-scale predawn dry run the week before) for an event that dominates the national consciousness for weeks and completely wigs out the detail-fixated and the security-obsessed.  I wrote this after President George W. Bush’s first inauguration in 2001. It's probably safe to say my colleagues' day today was pretty much like this one,  only with better w...