ItsOnlyBob

1. If 30 miles is how much I hate this commute, then 150 minutes is how glad I am that I don't do this commute regularly anymore. 2. If 30 miles is how glad I am that I don't do this commute regularly anymore, then 150 minutes is how much I love visiting Bolling Air Force Base and hearing the Air Force Band play stuff I wrote for them. 3. None of which alters the fact that I gotta pee. 4. Like, bad. 5. But yes, I really DO love hearing the Air Force Band play stuff I wrote for them. 6. By the way, you should plan to visit the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly VA (the "companion facility" of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington DC) this coming Tuesday at noon. 7. No, really, you should! Just sayin'. 8. Sequels might be like, y'know, "Jaws II" - but then again, they might be like "The Godfather II," in which Al Pacino plays a killer English horn and Robert DeNiro beats the holy snot out of a bass drum. 9. We, as a s...

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...