The Singing Weatherman
I go by many names — Stormin’ Bob Swanson (The Singing Weatherman), StarMan Bob Swanson (The Singing Astronomer), and Bob the Builder. The last of these I picked up while living in Tupelo — a neighbor of mine, Peggy Hurley, would patrol the neighborhood in her pickup truck (sometimes walking her dog by holding the […]
Ever wonder what this “singing weatherman” does when I’m not doing Summer Reading Program performances? I teach — in fact, I just wrapped up my fall semester which included teaching a synchronous online Physical Science II course (conceptual chemistry, with a smidge of geology, meteorology and astronomy mixed in) and two online sections of Descriptive […]
Fun fact #1 — Phoenicians sailed across the seas and taught the Greeks their ABCs Fun fact #2 — I often refer to fun fact #1 (that the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician civilization) when explaining what inspires me to write songs about science. When I was in 8th grade (nearly 40 years […]
Long-time fans may remember that my 2018 Summer Tour was entitled “Taking the State by Storm.” It made sense at the time because my “Singing Weatherman” schtick seemed to tie in nicely with the Summer Reading Program theme of “Libraries Rock.” This Fall I am taking the stage by storm, acting for the first time […]
My musical and professional careers have taken many unexpected turns. Sometimes the winding road has left me feeling, if not lost, at least out of place. As a teacher, I’m a meteorologist (my MS is in meteorology from Penn State University) in a physics and astronomy department. As a musician, I only picked up a […]
Today I completed my 51st trip around the Sun. Even if I manage to stay healthy, I only have a couple of decades left, which, on an astronomical time-scale (make sure to check out my YouTube playlist of astronomy-themed songs), is vanishingly small. But I’m fine with that — I’m one extremely lucky dude. I […]
There’s nothing like a breakthrough case of COVID, a week of isolation, and couple of weeks of quarantine to give this philosophy major/songwriter plenty of grist for the mental mill. I have to give a lot of credit where it is due — the scientists who developed the vaccine, and the nurse practitioner who prescribed […]
I’ve always been a little (or a lot, depending on who you ask) behind the times. I’ve waited until 2021 to start a blog, I’ve never posted a photo of my food to social media, and it’s taken me until August 2021 to contract COVID-19, which has been plaguing our nation and the world since […]
I’ve been doing a lot of picking this summer. Some of my picking will come to an end in a week or so, some more picking will end at the end of September, but I hope that some of my other picking goes on for years and years. Let me explain . . . When […]
Because I teach astronomy (in fact, I’m currently teaching an asynchronous online summer section of “Descriptive Astronomy”), I am sometimes asked my opinion about UFOs. Well, yesterday the government released its preliminary assessment about UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). If anything should be able to shed some light, it is a government report, right? While you […]