ItsOnlyBob

Cleaning out my work emails recently, I came across one I'd been saving for years. It was a mass email from some guy off in middle-management somewhere who was a big fan of a weekly email quasi-blog called "Thoughts While Shaving."  The author, Len Fuchs, compiled his emails into a book called " Thoughts While Shaving: Common Sense Leadership Principles ." The concept is pretty clever - you picture the guy standing in front of the bathroom mirror, raking the stubble off his chin and experiencing daily epiphanies about leadership and management ("Leaders are influential, even when they are not the number one person in the organization"), and even about thought itself ("Ideas that initially appear to get in the way often lead you to someplace new and better"). Then he jots down these epiphanies in the form of a quasi-random list of principles (#170 - "Leaders know that success is not random"), and starts cashing the royalty checks....

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

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...

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...

Researchers recently uncovered previously unknown correspondence among the Founding Fathers that sheds new light on the process of dissolving political bands, declaring independence, pledging sacred honor and so forth. Who knew? (Click on the picture to make it bigger.)