My afternoon has been wrecked by a simple torment. I could not for the life of me remember the name of a song from my childhood. It's a trumpet instrumental that i thought had some Spanish title ... therefore i spent a while searching for songs called "The Matador" or "The Toreador". Having exhausted my knowledge of bullfighting, i then started looking at surf rock compilations as for some reason i associated the song with them. It wasn't on the soundtrack to The Endless Summer (awesome movie, btw), nor on Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction soundtrack homage to surf. No luck on the Rock Instrumental Classics Volume 5: Surf collection, although i'm going to have to pick that up too. I really didn't want to be reduced to humming the tune to friends and family and seeing if it rang any bells. I remember hearing it in a movie not too long ago, but what was it? Either of the Kill Bills? Nope. The Big Lebowski? No again. Goddamit!

Then after hours of torture, i had a strange thought ... could it possibly have been on the soundtrack to the decidedly silly but oddly charming Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon 1987 revival flick Back to the Beach? I managed to find a track list on IMDB, and spotted a song called "The Lonely Bull". Aha! My memory is worth something after all. Digging up a Herb Alpert greatest hits CD on Amazon, i listened to the 30 second preview and ... eureka! Now i'm a bit peeved that if i had simply done a google search for "bull trumpet instrumental", it would've been on top of the list. I had tried everything from "surf rock trumpet instrumental" to "trumpet soundtrack endless summer". 20/20 hindsight, i suppose.

What's bizarre is that i can now remember exactly when the song plays in the movie ... Frankie Avalon is running into the surf to catch the climactic wave in the surf contest. The "humunga cowabunga from down unda". Where does my brain keep this information?

My day has otherwise been quite good ... the reviews on my postdoc Ivana's first paper came back from Molecular Imaging, and are not bad ... some more work to do, but nothing we hadn't anticipated. I'm also chugging through various other affairs at work and making good progress. Booya.