ItsOnlyBob

September 5, 2016  Weather permitting, my beloved Florida State University Marching Chiefs will rehearse this afternoon at Oak Ridge High School in Orlando before heading to Generic Corporate Overlord Stadium for the Seminoles' season opener against Ole Miss at 8 pm.  My first band directing job out of FSU was at Oak Ridge. And our band’s first performance, on September 11, 1987, was one for the ages, thanks to my intrepid students and their unflappable drum major, Amy Booth—and a pants-wettingly fabulous cameo from Mother Nature. Oak Ridge opened its football season at home against Dr. Phillips High School, which had just opened its doors and was instantly Oak Ridge’s biggest rival, since many former ORHS Pioneers were now newly minted DPHS Panthers. The skies had been overcast all day, but the rain had held off … until the Pioneer Marching Band took the field for pregame. Just as Amy started the National Anthem, the rain came. By the second line, “Whose ...

My Review of Star Wars 7: The Search for Luke (mild spoilers) * Reboots! Reprises! Do-overs! Homage a trois! * Drunk Nekkid Vegas Weekend Spawn of George Clooney and Erik Estrada! * DNVWS of forgotten Backstreet Boy and Severus Snape! * DNVWS of Yoda and Sy Snootles! (^ Okay, I dunno about that one. Somewhere. Probably.) * Andy Serkis in mega-budget deleted scenes from "The Wizard of Oz"! * Winner of the "We Need a Young R2D2" casting call! * Sly reference to trash compactors! * More chuckly inside jokes! * Renewed non-ironic misuse of "parsecs" to stoke astronomy grammar nerd outrage! * More Joe Schmo-looking X-wing fighter pilots for the Resistance! (^ Wouldn't have been suprised to see Randy Quaid.) * Desert planet that isn't Tatooine! * Ice planet that isn't Hoth! * Green planet that isn't Endor! (^ Yay, no Ewoks!) * Less interplanetary politics, more intrafamily shenanigans! * Better script! Better back stories! Better dialog! ...

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...

As of today, I've been putting off my next cigarette for 19 years. I don't intend for there to be a next one, but I've torched that intention three times before, so I distrust the word "quit." I was a pack-a-day smoker by the time I was in high school, having started when I was 9. (Yes, you read that right.) There were those three smoke-free periods — a year when I was 20, three years starting at age 26, seven weeks at age 34. Each time I stopped — including the current 19-year-stretch — it was cold turkey. I know others who have done it with gum, or a patch, or e-cigs, or whatever. The method is less important than the simple determination to stop. At any rate, I had smoked for more than 20 years out of 25. Several times in the six years I've been on Facebook, I've commemorated this day publicly with a "yay me" post. This time, instead, I'm thinking about my mom, who stopped smoking around the same time I did. My siblings and I — for...

Today's Unsolicited, Nonjudgmental, No-Nerd-Speak Grammar Lesson:  Punctuation and Parentheses It's simple: Whatever you put between parentheses, you should be able to remove and still have a complete sentence. That includes punctuation. The parenthetical matter itself need not be (although it can be) a complete sentence, if it is simply inserted into a sentence. (Standalone parenthetical matter, on the other hand, should be a complete sentence, with all appropriate punctuation contained within the parentheses.)  So: * This is a sentence (including parenthetical matter), properly punctuated. * This is a sentence, properly punctuated. (And this is a standalone parenthetical sentence, also properly punctuated.) * This is a sentence with parenthetical matter at the end (also properly punctuated). It's often when we put parenthetical material at the end of a sentence that we grow uncertain: Um ... the ending punctuation belongs ... um ... inside the par...

I’m thinking of petitioning the Steinbeck estate for permission to write a series of sequels to The Grapes of Wrath. Possible titles: Figs of Crankiness Kumquats of Snark Prunes of Condescending Disapproval Raspberries of Righteous Indignation Blueberries of Spittly Fury Kiwis of False Bravado   Coconuts of Compensation Trilogy Conclusions: Butter Peas of Vaguely Unsettling Malaise Kidney Beans of Disturbance in the Force Creamed Corn of Feelings of Inadequacy Stewed Cabbage of   Projected Shame Chipped Beef of   Disgruntlement Sauerkraut of Acute Despair Escargot of Existential Dread Fried Liver of Misdirected Anger Spotted Dick  of  Sad Old-Age Epiphany Head Cheese  of Unprovoked Aggression Groaty Pudding of  Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Doom Gratuitous Continuations Just for Money:   Pork Rinds of Chronic Flatulence Cheap Beer of Spastic Colitis Kimchee of Explosive Diarrhea Junior Mints o...

Today I had my semi-annual phone chat with my cousin Lin. He is 83 years old and lives in Newberry, South Carolina. To be precise, he's my first-cousin-once-removed, the adopted son of my dad's Aunt Hazel (my grandmother's sister). His own dad, who died when Lin was a boy, was actually the brother of his adoptive father—so the person Lin called "Dad" was really his uncle. (Yeah, I have to sort that out anew every single time, too.) I have met Lin in person only once, on a family vacation that swerved through Newberry so my dad could visit with his Aunt Hazel —the mother of Lin's wife, Mabel. I was 11 or 12 at the time. This was in the early '70s, and it is the only memory I have of Aunt Hazel (who died in 2001 at age 102), or of Lin and  Mable , or of their son, Ross (who died in 2010 at age 45).  My three siblings and I remember Ross for a single conversation during that visit. He was maybe 7 then (he was three days older than my sister Karen) . ...