All posts tagged: Random DJB Thoughts

Good Friday 2009

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Good Friday was a day of heightened – and mixed – emotions.  It began with an email from Andrew’s school about the irrational act of a disturbed man that some of the students observed.  In the early evening, Candice and I helped Andrew and Claire’s youth group prepare sandwiches and meals for Grate Patrol.  And while they delivered the sandwiches to the homeless throughout Washington, Candice and I closed out the day with the powerful Good Friday meditation at the National Cathedral. We’ve been around the Washington National Cathedral for years, but I only discovered this Good Friday service a couple of years ago.  It quickly became my favorite. Held in the St. Joseph of Arimethea chapel (photo) – the most appropriate of spaces – the service showcases all that is wonderful about the Cathedral.  The stone and marble combine with the vaults and intimate space to send the music on a magical journey to your ears.  And make no mistake – this is a service made for music. A hauntingly beautiful cello solo – Candice …

Opening Day

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A few observations from around the big leagues on Opening Day: Those young Nats pitchers may be in need of a bit of seasoning.  Maybe those Baseball Prospectus writers were right.  Still we have 161 games to go! Nonetheless, it was good to see Adam Dunn hit his first Nats dinger during game 1. O’s rout the Yankees.  Way to go O’s! What did C.C. Sabathia do all winter?  Eat all the money given to him by the Yankees? New look Braves looked pretty good against the Phillies. More to come… DJB

Vintage Roadside has New Route 66 Design

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Last October I wrote a post about the Vintage Roadside folks and their great t-shirt designs from old and often defunct roadside businesses.  This morning, the weather in Washington promised to be warm enough to get around in a t-shirt, so I pulled out my Route 66 t-shirt (see photo at left) from Vintage Roadside and didn’t think much more of it. But when I opened up the blog this morning and went to the Word Press home page, there was a blog posting from a Route 66 News blog that featured a great new design from – you guessed it – the Vintage Roadside folks.  Just too cool and too much of a coincidence not to write a bit about it.  I posted a comment on the blog and took the opportunity to give a shout out to the wonderful folks at Vintage Roadside.   To top it off, they are members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and contribute some of the proceeds to help save historic places.  If the great designs aren’t enough to …

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 …