All posts filed under: Random DJB Thoughts

Chicago: Great Main Streets, Great Architecture, and Great Food

Published by

I’ve been in Chicago since Sunday for the National Main Streets Conference, and it has been a great couple of days.  I love Chicago and I love Main Street.  The conference is sponsored by the National Trust Main Street Center and brings together 1,600 people from around the country who are rehabilitating their downtown commercial districts.  Having lived in three great Main Street communities – Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Americus, Georgia; and Staunton, Virginia – I have a real affinity for these towns. Getting to Chicago was interesting.  The first of two snowstorms blew into Washington on Sunday morning.  I got a call from the airlines at 4:40 a.m. telling me my morning flight was delayed by an hour.  When I arrived at the airport it turns out that every other passenger on the flight had been moved to a different flight in order to make connections and I had a regional jet all to myself!  I joked that I flew up on the corporate jet…but it was a surreal experience. The opening session at Main Street is …

March Promises Some Wonderful Music

Published by

As we head into March, the Institute of Musical Tradition has some terrific music lined up.   Those in the Washington area should check out one or more of the great musicians in town. I been listening to bassist Missy Raines for years – first with Cloud Valley, then Eddie and Martha Adcock, and more recently with Claire Lynch and in a duo with flatpicker Jim Hurst.  She’s a seven-time winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association bassist of the year, and she’s just formed a new band named Missy Raines and the New Hip in honor of a new body part!  She’s at IMT on March 9th. On March 23rd, flatpicker extraordinaire Steve Kaufman plays at IMT.  I haven’t seen Kaufman live, but I’ve heard and admired his music for a long time.  Kaufman runs a series of well-respected guitar camps during the summer and is a great teacher.  He’s also known for his long list of banjo jokes on his flatpik website. A little boy told his mother that when he grew up he wanted …

My New Favorite Off-Season Sport, Part II

Published by

In late January, I wrote a post about the Washington Capitals and how their exciting brand of play was making hockey my new favorite off-season sport.   A play last night by Alex Ovechkin – the “Great 8” – just solidified that feeling. First some background as to how I came to watch an entire hockey game uninterrupted at home.  Candice and Andrew were out while I was battling both a computer with a virus and a head cold, both of which came from my teenagers.  As for the computer, I normally have my laptop with me as I watch TV sports but Claire was using it last night. On Monday  Andrew had ventured off on the home computer into web sites where viruses lurk, and so we were down one computer waiting to get it debugged.  The head cold came, on the other hand, from Claire’s recent sickness.   I finally decided to just give in, curl up on the couch, and watch the entire Caps vs. Canadiens game. And what a great decision that was!  After a wide open first period …

The Chattering Class and President’s Day

Published by

Regular readers know I don’t delve too often into politics.  There’s just so many more interesting things to write about (such as the Nats finally landing a good free-agent in Adam Dunn – more to come on that in the near future). But today’s Daily Kos had a posting by Markos that hits on an issue that I think deserves widespread reading:  the cluelessness of the Chattering Class.  Or perhaps that’s too charitable.  The issue may be that they are working to protect their own interests instead of seeking the truth. This was all too clear during the campaign debates.  The instant polls were terrific because they showed – in real time and all too clearly – how out of touch the cable TV political commentators were with what the rest of the country was thinking.  As Kos says today, In 2008, those snap polls made fools of the talking heads until the last debate, when they finally shut their traps and let the snap polls determine the winners. Because according to them in the previous …

Two Modest Milestones

Published by

This week I passed two modest Internet milestones:  More to Come… welcomed the 4,000th visitor and I reached 100 “friends” on my Facebook page. Stop laughing… I take the blog milestone as the more satisfying.  My children won’t even let me friend them on Facebook, so I don’t put a great deal of effort into rounding up friends or in keeping my status updated.  (My most recent status update is from last Tuesday when I said I was ready for more news about the game of baseball and less (or no) news about A-Rod.  I still feel that way, so why change.) More to Come… is much more like writing letters to friends.  The blog now averages almost 25 readers a day, which is fine with me.  And occasionally someone picks something up I’ve written and spreads it around, which is nice recognition as well.  That actually happened today, although the link was to a slightly altered version of my recent Readyville Mill post that was also posted on the blog at PreservationNation, the National Trust web site.  Mike …

Lilly is Our Best in Show Every Day

Published by

We all jumped for joy this morning when we opened the Washington Post and saw that Stump, a 10-year-old Sussex Spaniel, won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show at Madison Square Garden last evening.  That’s because we have a 12-year-old Sussex Spaniel, Lilly, who we consider our Best in Show every day of the year. Lilly came to us after life as a show dog, having won all the competitions her breeder thought possible.  The weekend before Thanksgiving in 2000 we went to a dog show to begin to get an idea of what type of breed we may want.  Like President Obama, I had been promising Andrew and Claire that we’d get a dog once we found a permanent home in Washington.  As seven-year-olds, they were searching the Internet nightly for information, and Claire would often bring printouts with pictures and information about a certain breed’s “kid friendly virtues” to the dinner table. Sussex Spaniels were not on our radar screen, but as we stepped into the main building at the show …

Watching the Grammy’s Part II

Published by

After closing out last night’s More to Come… post on the Grammy’s, I caught the final award for album of the year, which went to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss for Rising Sand.  There is some justice when a rock icon who never won a Grammy with Led Zeppelin suddenly wins five when he teams up with – as the Washington Post’s J. Freedom du Lac termed her – “bluegrass goddess” Krauss. I loved it when Plant – that Led Zeppelin screamer – thanked old time musicians Mike Seeger and Norman Blake, along with bluegrass fiddler extraordinaire Stuart Duncan and the wonderful independent roots record company Rounder Records in his acceptance speech.  We haven’t heard names like that from the Grammy stage since O Brother swept the awards show.  Woo hoo! More to come… DJB

Watching the Grammy’s

Published by

Andrew and I have been watching the Grammy Awards show together…a little father/son bonding.  He’s helping me understand the genius of Radiohead and I’m helping him understand why Paul McCartney was such a seminal bassist in pop/rock music.  Seems like a fair trade to me. Of course, the categories I care about never get face time in prime time.  Wouldn’t you have loved to see Dr. John sing from his Grammy award winning City That Care Forgot album?  I know that they had to bring out Lil Wayne for the masses as part of their New Orleans tribute, and it was good to see Allen Toussaint, so I’ll take what I can.  Thank God some people still care about New Orleans.  In the Bluegrass category, Ricky Skaggs won for the terrific Honoring the Fathers of Bluegrass, while banjo player Bela Fleck won best pop instrumental album.  (Isn’t this the category that would have included Walk Don’t Run and other pop instrumental classics?  That’ll teach all those folks who make banjo jokes!) In the folk category, …

How Does One Dress for a Swim Meet?

Published by

It is the time of year for the big end of swim season meets, where every swim team in the Mid-Atlantic states (or maybe it just seems that way) comes together for a giant swim team mash up.   This meet began at 8 a.m. and is being held at George Mason University – which I call commuter hell.  The entire campus is ringed by parking lots the size of Rhode Island. Because there are so many teams, the warm-ups began on Thursday afternoon…or at least it seemed that way.  Claire’s team bus left school at 6 a.m.; Andrew had to be in the pool at 6:30 a.m.  Lilly and I were up at 4:45 to take care of Lilly’s business and to get this show on the road. Well, it is cold at 4:45 in February so you have to bundle up and dress accordingly.  But at 9:34 with a “Natatorium” full of enthused parents and high schoolers, the place is heating up.  Now I wish I had my summer swim meet outfit of t-shirt, shorts, and …

Shuffling Off to…the Swim Meet

Published by

Today I took some time off to serve as a timer at the swim meet for Andrew’s school.  I do this every now and then to make sure I connect with that part of Andrew’s life during the school year, and because every parent needs to volunteer to make these meets work.  It was great fun and Andrew dropped time in all his races.  I even got to time him in the 500, when he beat his personal best.  What fun. But this post isn’t about swim meets and getting your pants wet (which I did .  Those high school boys come in hard for the touch at the end.)  Nope, this post is about why I love the Shuffle feature on the iPod. I have about 3,500 songs or so on my iPod.  About 2,400 of them are in one playlist that I call “Americana.”  That’s where I dump in all my albums and iTunes purchases that have anything to do with bluegrass, acoustic music, country rock, Americana, blues, you name it.  I can go …