Mr Bob Radio Blog

Have you ever noticed that weather is around us all the time? You can’t get away from it. It’s everywhere. Except at the mall. Ok, the mall has weather. It’s a constant comfortable 68 degrees and the wind chill is barely negotiable. They say there are two certainties of life – death and taxes but they never mention the weather. There will be weather going on while you are being taxed to death. And weather is always doing something. Always busy. Always working up new patterns and trying them out on people to see how it will go. Weather even has focus groups. Noah’s Ark? Focus group.  

I have decided after many years of study that weather’s whole purpose in life is to make people query – “Do I need a jacket?” Weather gets a huge kick out it. To quote John Burroughs – “I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather” or “Do I need a jacket?” We go through life asking the eternal questions “Why am I here? What does it all mean? Do we need milk?” And if you think about it “Do I need a jacket” is just as significant. If you were to venture out on a seek the meaning of life journey that included scaling a mountain top to reach the summit were upon you will meet the all-seeing-all-knowing-all-request-dance-party-Saturdays-swinging-guru well, before you take one small step for mankind out the front door there is only one important question that must be answered first – “Do I need a jacket?”  

Yes, I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather and let’s face it all humans are. What is the number one topic of all daily conversations? Weather. What do you talk about at a funeral after the condolences? Weather. What does cocktail party/first date/office function Plan B chit-chat revolve around? Weather. Can‘t help it. It’s coded in our DNA.  

Mr Bob DNA fingerprint - one of a kind.

Humans spend an inordinate time trying to govern the life around them. You know walk don’t walk type things. However no matter how hard we try we cannot legislate the weather. We can try but Mr. Weather has skipped town after failing to appear on the charge of raining on our parade and he has forfeited his bail. Sure he will drift back to town like a cool summer breeze in a Tennessee Williams script to tease us and caress us like a young lover. And we will forgive and forget as he tussles our hair with gentle gusts of playfulness. And we will think we have tamed this untamable condition but our hearts will be broken yet again. For that summer breeze changes direction and from the north it blows hard and cold. And then we are out on the front lawn with our neighbour King Lear raging at the elements. “Blow, winds and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” Sorry Pete Townsend but we got fooled again.  

Ok, so listen to this it was written by William Bradford… “And for the season it was winter and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent and subject to cruel and fierce storms dangerous to travel”…it goes on ….“weather beaten face…..full of woods and thickets… a wild and savage hue.”  I would guess that when Mr. Bradford wrote this about the New World or as we know it, Canada back in 1620 something or other it’s obvious he wasn’t working for a travel agency. Not something you want to re-print in a hospitality industry newsletter.  

My family has a journal written by my great, great-grandfather that describes his early days in Canada. It goes on and on about how tough it was to get here and how poor they were and how everything little thing was so difficult. How hard it was to clear the land. How cold the first winter was. Blah, blah, blah. The only thing I learned about my ancestors was that they were a whiny bunch of sucks. Anyway things got so bad that first winter they had to eat their shoes. Or that might have been a Chaplin movie I saw as a kid but things were tough. So when spring came did they pack up and head south? No. They stayed and the next winter they had to eat the horse’s shoes.  

Did you know who discovered Canada first? Vikings. Yes, Vikings. But they didn’t stay. They crossed the North Atlantic in open row boats – open row boats people, took one look around and said nope. If it was too tough for the Vikings what are we doing here? When I hear someone complain about the weather in Canada I have one thing to say to them. Move. Move to Vikingland. Which is what I plan to do as soon as I can afford it. Have you seen the Viking women?  

The future Mrs. Mr Bob Radio

Reminds me of a joke. Baby Polar Bear is crossing the ice with his father. He asks his father if he is a polar bear. Yes is the reply. A moment later he asks if he is a full-blooded polar bear. Again the reply is yes. After a time he pipes up again questioning the possibility that contained within his veins flow the blood of a bear who hails from a more southern clime. At this Father Polar Bear becomes angry and demands why is his son making these ridiculous queries. And Baby Polar Bear says, “ I’m freezing.”  

So what are we to do? Well we don’t have much choice. The weather has us surrounded and is taking hostages. You can’t live at the mall. Ok you can but only during zombie attacks. No, the only solution is get used to it. Quit complaining. Deal. And get a jacket.

True story. Recently while working on a project I said in an email to the rest of the production crew something about bringing in a sax player. Someone responded in a somewhat LOL vibe that I could put my sax in my ass. At first I was not exactly sure how to respond to this. Surely it was a jest. But what if it was a serious request?

I thought the best way to deal with the situation was to discuss the mechanics of placing a “sax in the ass”. Now I am going to go out on a limb here and presuppose that I have personally experienced more decadence, degradation and debauchery then most of my peers so let me state emphatically that in my experience – a “sax in the ass” is not an easy feat.

The saxophone was invented by Adolphe Sax who created many different types of instruments (for example the saxhorn played in concert bands) but is most famous for his saxophone. The saxophone is the marriage of a brass instrument and a woodwind or reed instrument. The saxophone while not being a standard orchestral instrument is played in every idiom of music today. Ok so there is the quickie all-you-need-to-know-to-answer-Alex-Trebeck-in-the-form-of-a-question in the category – history of sax.

Now for us to truly understand the “sax in the ass” quandary we must look at the shape of the saxophone. For those of you with less musical knowledge then myself there are a number of different Saxes in the saxophone family. As mentioned before the sax is a reed instrument and is quite narrow at the mouthpiece but widens down the length of the horn until it curves at the bottom and flares open at the bell. The sax also has a complicated series of keypads and connecting rods that open the various valves to create the notes of the scale.

The alto sax (Charley “Bird” Parker’s instrument of choice) has a slightly curved neck at the top of the horn and than curves again at the bell. At first, insertion looks easy but once you are past the neck you run into problems. Even at the most narrow part – the mouthpiece there is a little do-hickey called the ligature that holds the reed in place. There is also the possibility that one could get slivers from the reed.

The tenor sax (Lester Young, Clarence Clemmons) has almost an S – shaped neck and only with a great deal of twisting (and earlier insertion of the alto) can any depth be achieved. The baritone (Gerry Mulligan, Lisa Simpson) is one big bad horn. Its neck has a complete 360 degree curlicue before it joins the body. Sadly insertion is impossible.

There are lesser known saxophones such as the C Melody and the popular but less played soprano. The soprano (Kenny G) is shaped straight like a clarinet and and therefore complete insertion is indeed possible…wait a minute…

Tomorrow the sousaphone.

Ok I’ve got nothing. I’m done. Just gotta find my keys…“Hey honey I’m going to take the blog out for a drive. Maybe run some errands. Back soon. Luv ya”

I love a joke that takes two days to tell

So congratulate me. Second posting. Oh yeah. Why the fanfare? Several studies (don’t ask me where I got my facts this is a blog for Pete’s sake. If you want to believe everything you read on the net then go over to Wikipedia) several studies indicate that most blogs (60 to 80% – depending on the math you use) are abandoned soon after creation. A research company who had already found the cure for cancer and were bored one day did a survey of blogs. Wonder if they got a government grant for surfing? Cause everyone’s gone surfing, surfing U.S.A. Their report stated that 66% of blogs surveyed had not been updated in two months.

Over a million blogs are one-day wonders with no postings after that first burst of creative energy. There are something like 2.3 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily driven out to the country on a Sunday afternoon and then left by the side of the road under the false belief that some farmer will find them and give them a good home. They just die people. They starve death. Or are eaten by wolves. Look me in the eye and tell me you haven’t abandoned a blog. People like you make me sick. I told you before we went to the blog store – you had to feed it and walk it and update it. Don’t you dare and even think to ask me to get you a fish.

But on a serious note I’m a little worried about this. Are we not creating some sort of virtual cyber pollution? Web warming? World wide web shrinkage? I was researching polar bear websites and most of them are disappearing. The ones that are left are only a few pages and the polar bears have no where to go.

This is the 25^th year of the dot com. A company named Symbolics.com was the first dot com in existence. I don’t know if they still exist. I mean I’m not that interested in this to do any real research. The Pentagon tech research agency, DARPA let six companies join them for shared research and that was the start of the WWW as we know it. Today there are now about 120,000 dot coms and do you know why you can can’t get your own name as a dot com? Because there are over 85 million registered dot com names. They have cleaned out the O.E.D. They have pillaged the phone book. Every word has been clear cut in a dot com frenzy. The word forest has nothing left but a few conjunctions and some Gaelic words that no one can spell or pronounce. We will now have to concoct new words just to get by. Or start using Esperanto.

So remember every email, text or twit – I know it’s only 140 characters but every key stroke adds to your binary carbon footprint with . I just hope the hippies don’t find out. I don’t want to be attacked by some dread locked virtual tree huggers in a Zodiac while I blog at my local wireless café.

So congratulate me. That’s it. Oh that feels good. Let the accolades pour over me like lemmings going over a cliff. I have nailed this blog thing cold. Now I just have to come up with something for everyday for the rest of my life.

Blast.

I know, I know what you are thinking – do we really need another blog cluttering up the world wide web? Good question. What could I possibly add to the kazillions of bits and bites already flooding cyberspace? The endless stream of ones and zeros blinking on and off in a Northern Lights display of binary code. Do we need more conspiracy theories? More pictures of cute puppies? More recipes for tuna loaf? More half baked opinions from some pseudo-intellectual spewing his personal psycho babble about the events of the day. Don’t hypothesize just give me the facts. Just the facts ma’am.

We live in this time of hyper communication. Everything is right now split second instant. Remember when we thought the microwave was fast? But now I can hardly believe I have to wait a whole minute for my baked potato.

The information super highway. The thing that was going to make us all smarter. All the great thoughts of all the great minds in one big bundle at our disposal. Every book in every library available to us. And yet our reading and comprehensive skills are on a downward spiral. And don’t mention our spelling. Are we LOLing our way down the river instead of up? The only fish that swim with the current are dead. When you can only use x amount of characters to fritter your cyber friends one must dumb down the language. We have been building language for thousands years – inventing new words, borrowing words from other languages, incorporating regional dialects just so today we can say “cu l8tr”.

When man first laid down the cornerstone of language did he know what a powerful tool he had? Did he know he was designing a new medium and that the medium was the message? That words would outlast and endure the rise and fall of empires – ok well maybe not the Sumerians but in general. That someday someone would invent radio plays? Sure for the first few hundred years it was just grunts, squawks and whistles that provided an adequate means of communication but hey if all you have to do is warn somebody of an impending pterodactyl attack how many actual words do you need?

Then they invented words – at least a thousand of them so they could paint a picture and then things really started to happen. Before the invention of words hardly anyone used the telephone – oh sure it would ring and ring and ring, damn telemarketers. And it was the only time in history that you could win on Wheel of Fortune by making a word out of seven vowels.

As a species we have always prided ourselves on the fact we have an opposable digit – the thumb. Wow. But let’s be honest we could have survived without it. Look at the millions of animals who get by without a thumb. I mean except for the extinct ones that couldn’t survive due to a weakness in their…but here we are and we have come so far and yet – dramatic pause – what do we use our thumbs for? Texting. ROTFLMAO. This is what a million years of evolution was all about? Darwin at the helm of the Beagle would be so proud. So armed with our thumbs and our words we were moving on up to the east side to a deluxe apartment in the sky and nothing can stop us. Well except a pterodactyl attack.

Sure it’s great to be in touch in the moment especially when it’s an emergency but all this instantaneous myfacespacebook stuff is making us way too egocentric. I was playing a show a while back and between sets one of the producers was fiddling away at his very new and very expensive and already obsolete phone/camera/radon detector. After a minute he announced that he had just updated his status on his facebook page. Then he proceeded to read aloud the amusing little musing he had posted for his legions of fans – in the real 3D world he has maybe three friends if we count his mother – but I guess there are many who follow his every cyber step.

Have we become such self involved navel gazers that we think that the rest of the world is following us twenty four seven with wonder and delight at what we will do next. With all of our instant technical ability everybody is talking to everybody. But what are we saying? And who is listening?

So you ask if that’s how I feel why am I posting my thoughts and opinions here in this public forum. Another good question. Well let me say this about that – all the cool kids are doing it. I just wanted to fit in. Maybe somebody out there might want to know what lurks within the corners of my mind? Ok the truth – my mother is getting hundreds of hits a day with her blog and it’s just pictures of cute puppies and tuna loaf recipes and well I‘m jealous. I have been a practicing Luddite most of my life. It is a noble but albeit lost cause. It’s not like the Luddites will rise up seize control and suddenly Amish is the new black. Sure we would like to see a world that is a little less technology driven but it’s so hard to plan anything when we can’t get in touch with each other because we don’t have a central database or a website or even an answering machine.

So here I am cruising down the Infobahn. Yeah I’ve hit the road. The virtual interstate. I’m taillights people. One of them may be out but a one-eyed cat is easier to see in the dark.