It was in the late 90s. Maybe it was 1996. I had been going to a songwriters' group in Hollywood every Monday night to see if I could get a grip on publishing and promoting my music… and of course, to learn a little more about the craft of songwriting.

Remarkably, any artistic home runs I'd hit prior to those meetings had become nothing more than wisps of memories. My current brood of songs, sadly, were systematically thumb-squashed by my panel of peers as well as by the moderator, an expert with his own string of successes. I was a nobody struggling and failing to become a somebody. I was a wandering minstrel in search of validation, but validation eluded me.

The other night I was pulled over by a policeman. It was a Saturday night. He was trolling I'm sure, for drunks. So was the other police car that was sniffing around this stretch of road. It was easy pickin's, like shooting fish in a barrel.

I produced my license and registration, proof of insurance, passed the follow-my-pen-with-your-eyes-to-see-if-you're-drunk test. My wife sat in the passenger's seat in a cold sweat wondering what I'd done, wondering how much this was going to cost.

"Have you ever been arrested?"
"Nope."
"Any outstanding warrants?" he asked.
"Nope," I answered. "Just speeding tickets." The beam of his flashlight finally turned away. "I'll be right back," he said. Then he left me to do some business in his patrol car.

It was an interminable wait, there on the side of the road with cars whizzing by, drivers and passengers with their necks craned thinking, "Look at that sorry bastard."

"The reason I stopped you," the policeman said when he returned, "is that you have a burned out headlight here on the driver's side."
"Really? It doesn't look burned out."
"Yeah, it's burned out. I'm going to give you a fix-it ticket. You've got 'til March 29th to fix it....."

We drove off to have dinner with our friends. "That light's not burned out," I said to my wife.

I'm kind of lazy, so when I decided to rob that bank, I only disguised my hand.

Not really.

Actually, what happened was that I baked something in a pan in the oven last night, took the pan out and removed the food, then a few minutes later decided to use the pan for something else.

The salad was ready. The potato was in the microwave. I had just opened a beer.

It didn't occur to me that the pan was still about 300 degrees Fahrenheit (down from 450) when I grabbed the stainless steel handle with my bare hand. At the emergency room they said, "I'll bet that really hurts."

The answer is, "You dream in English."

When you think about it, you can't sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" in Italian, can you? (Look at the picture.) The song won't rhyme.

The creator of this store window display in Rome agrees. He/she knows that you don't mess with tried and true slogans and lines from Christmas songs. (Try singing, "Here Comes Suzy Snowflake" in Italian.)


They have a different approach in Asia, though, where anything goes. Look at a couple of examples of Christmas sloganry on www.engrish.com. example A - example B

So why tear down a perfectly functional building when you decide that you don't want to use it as a movie theater any more?

Obviously, there's no reason to. Someone in charge in the Croatian town of Pula decided that they needed more parking spaces. Where better than in the movie theater?

Until 1990, it was called the Beograd Theater, then it was called the Pula Theater, then it was called the Sayam book store. Now you park cars in it.

When my brother showed it to us, I asked him if people could sit in their cars and watched movies, just like in the good old days. (It was a funny thought as far as I was concerned.)

He looked at me quizzically and said, "No. It's a parking garage. They park cars here."

I said, "No... but wouldn't it be funny?"

"They park cars here now," he said.

He had a point. Besides, all the cars were pointed sideways which makes for a bad movie experience. (But still, don't you think it would be funny if they still watched movies there?)

_I've been mesmerized lately by a peculiar phenomenon that's been plaguing Los Angeles: Tuba thefts.

For what? Steal 'em for spare parts like a Cadillac Escalade? Hold 'em for ransom? Maybe even make music on 'em?

It appears that something called "banda," a type of polka-style brass band music from Mexico might have something to do with it.

Look at an example of banda music on YouTube.


According to a Los Angeles Times article, an abnormal amount of these sometimes mind-numbingly expensive instruments (worth as much as $5000 each) have been the removed from local schools during after-hours breakins.

Stolen by whom? Aspiring banda bandits, one might assume. I can imagine, if this theft trend continues, that in a matter of months one could assume that if he saw two banda groups in a given period of time, one of them would be serenading you with a stolen Los Angeles School District tuba.

But why would someone want to be in a banda group in the first place?

To pick up chicks, of course. What draws women like a tuba? (I once saw a didgeridoo player fail to pick up two girls on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. He failed because he wasn't playing a tuba.)

Curiously... on the other side of the world, a similar brass music phenomenon (minus the tuba thefts) has been sighted. It's in a town called Gucha in Serbia where, every year, the Gucha brass band festival and competition is held.

What's a Gucha band sound like? It sounds like a banda band. Click to listen.

(Hey, that tuba looks familiar.)