I don't know how many of you even know who this is, but as a teenager on Saturday mornings, I used to turn on PBS and watch The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross. I never knew very much about Bob, but personally, I liked to believe he was a burnt out ex-druggie who was there at Woodstock, protested the war in Washington, got arrested at the Democratic National Convention in '67, hung out on the corner of Haight and Ashbury during the Summer of Love, and sat at the Human Be-In -- sort of the Forest Gump of the hippie generation.

As it turns out Bob retired from the Air Force as a medical records technician. (What did we do without the Internet? How did we know anything at all?)

Having held military positions that required him to be, in his own words, "mean" and "tough," "the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work," Ross decided that if he ever moved on from the military, "it wasn't going to be that way any more," and "vowing never to scream again."


Bob's soft voice "Dab... dab... dab... let's just tap a little color in there," his positive affirmations "even a little tree needs a friend," stories about his pet squirrel Peapod, and the constant reminder that "in your world, there are no mistakes, you can create anything you want," had the ability to immediately relax me and make me believe that if I picked up a brush, I too could paint like that.... even though I'd never tried or been interested in oil painting in my life. If you have been prescribed beta-blockers for your high blood pressure and can't afford it, try watching Bob Ross. I swear it works better than any pill.

There are a ton of Bob Ross parodies on the interweb; all of them funny (well, not all of them). But this is my favorite because it's more of a tribute to him than a spoof. So I will share it with you.

A tribute to Bob Ross