All posts tagged: Random DJB Thoughts

This is where I put anything that is not easily categorized…

Home to Tennessee

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One of the great things about going home has always been the chance to get together with my brother Joe and play a little music.  So last week when the children and I were in Tennessee, I eagerly looked forward to heading out to Joe and Kerry’s house with my guitar and mandolin in tow. Joe (with a beard grown for a play at the Arts Center of Cannon County) had told me that his oldest children had begun to pick up the banjo, guitar, mandolin, and fiddle.  And sure enough, as we pulled out our instruments my nephew Joseph joined in with some clawhamer banjo.   It was great fun to play along with the next generation of pickers. Joe is an ornamental blacksmith and we had a good time checking out his new wares as well as his expanded shop.  Joe and Kerry essentially built their house by themselves, and it was great to see the new stairway they designed and constructed to open up the living room.  Joe’s shop is usually on the annual studio …

Good Food, Good Friends

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I’m in Louisiana for work and took the opportunity to meet one of our volunteer leaders and his wife for an early dinner in New Orleans.  Jack and Mimi are incredible preservationists who enjoy life…and especially the part of life that involves good New Orleans food.  What could be better? They took me to a neighborhood restaurant named Clancy’s.  It has been a favorite of Mimi’s family for decades and Jack sent along the following review to let me know where we were headed: Classic New Orleans restaurants fall into three basic categories: Originators, Innovators and Upholders. Originators have been around as long as the trees and specialize in dishes of the same vintage. Stimulated by the originators’ example, innovators create food that in some instances barely resembles its inspiration. Upholders are the bridge between the two. They are created by restaurateurs and chefs who express their passion for traditional New Orleans cuisine by giving diners another outlet for enjoying it. In the process, these restaurants develop specialties. Some are personalized versions of established regional classics — …

Searching the Internet and Finding…The Music’s Over

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This is another of those “look what I found on the Internet” postings. The other day I was searching for information on Clarence White and found this cool blog called The Music’s Over…but the Songs Live On.  What a labor of love.  The blogger writes about musical artists who passed away on that day in history, and he’s putting together a great archive of American music in the process.  He’s also covering just about every musical genre imaginable.  So you’ll find your bluegrass guys right up there with the punk rockers. On this date – March 16th – in 1975 the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker passed away.  As noted in The Music’s Over: Electric Blues starts with T-Bone Walker. No T-Bone Walker? Then possibly no B.B. King, Pee Wee Crayton, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown or Stevie Ray Vaughan. From his recording debut in 1929, to his passing from an earlier stroke in 1979, T-Bone Walker dazzled his audiences with a guitar style that was, well electrifying. And when he decided to actually “plug in” in the …

Sweet Love

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Candice and I were out at a party on Capitol Hill last evening and had a nice time with friends old and new.  However, when I climbed into bed last evening I knew I’d best set our alarm or we’d miss our obligations at church this morning. My iPod has a playlist I entitled “Quiet Time” which we listen to as we fall asleep and then which is what we hear as our morning alarm.  We may wake to a Gregorian Chant or Anonymous 4, some Miles Davis or Bill Evans jazz, or perhaps a quiet New Age guitar piece from Will Akerman or Al Petteway. This Sunday morning we slept a little later, due to the party.  But the wake-up music set the tone for an introspective day that worked well with the gray and rainy weather. The first thing out of my iPod this morning was John Gorka singing this wonderful Kate Wolf tune entitled Sweet Love. John Gorka has one of the most distinctive voices in folk music.  I can listen to him sing anything.  But several …

Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up

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Every morning on The Daily Kos (warning:  this is a progressive blog post about politics), Barbara Morrill (aka BarbinMD) posts Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up.   I look at it almost every morning, because it is funny, short, and almost always includes at least one comment about a previously unknown writer that I want to read. In today’s post, Morrill includes a link to New York Times’ pundit Gail Collins’ column of March 5th entitled The Rant List, with the comment that “Gail Collins is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists.”  Amen to that.  Collins makes me laugh out loud almost once a column, and she’s not as snarky or personality focused as Maureen Dowd.  In today’s column (and I recommend the entire read), she’s writing how we have to prioritize the things list of  “life is unfair” items hitting the news reports on an hourly basis. The paragraph that hits home for me is: Given the competition, I can’t get all that worked up about defaulting homeowners who are looking to the government for a rescue. True, a …

My New Favorite Off-Season Sport, Part II

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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

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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 …

Lilly is Our Best in Show Every Day

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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 …

How Does One Dress for a Swim Meet?

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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 …