Friday Playlist

“Eden” – Baths
A little world music influence to this buoyant, fun track.

“Ankles” – Lucy Dacus
We are officially on the clock for a new Lucy Dacus album. No surprise it seems like it’s going to be wonderful, as usual.

“Take Your Aim” – Rocket
Some serious Smashing Pumpkin vibes on this track. Fortunately their singer is better than Billy C so I can happily listen to it.

“Let Me Go” – Deep Sea Diver featuring Madison Cunningham
Sharon Van Etten is having a moment with the release of her new album. You could easily slide this track onto that LP.

“Everything You Want” – The Disappearing Act
Wrapping up three straight songs that sound like other bands, I had to quadruple check that Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum wasn’t singing lead here. He was not.

“Fourth Street” – Dutch Interior
I don’t think this band sounds specifically like another, but there are sure little threads of other artists winding through their sound. None distinct enough to pin down, but present enough to make this song sound very familiar.

“Speed Freak” – Youth Lagoon
YL leader Trevor Powers had this to say about this song:

“We spend our whole lives running from this thing we can’t outrun. This body is temporary, but there is no death. Only transformation. A door opens when you learn to let go of the identity you’ve been building your whole life. Someone told me a couple years ago, ‘I have good news for you and I have bad news. The bad news is Trevor is doomed. There’s no hope for Trevor. The good news is — you’re not Trevor.’ When I heard that, it clicked.”

Ooooooookay. Good song, though.

“High Beams” – The Laughing Chimes
Something lighter to break up what has become kind of a heavy playlist. Mid-February sucks.

“Story of the Egg” – Cloackroom
Stereogum’s Tom Breihan described this band, which comes from the industrial wastelands of northwest Indiana, as “sick ass.” Highest praise!

“Valentine’s Day” – Bruce Springsteen
It was 8° when I woke up this morning. Next week looks brutally cold. Not exactly the kind of weather that makes you think of romance, so a dreary song about today’s holiday seemed in order.

“Rockin’ In The Free World” – Jack White
Pearl Jam has been using this as one of their show closers for years. Jack Mutherfucking White OPENED a show in Toronto with it last week.

If you go to YouTube you can watch Jack and PJ play this song together at a 2018 show in Portugal.

Wednesday Links

A terrific feature about SNL’s Lorne Michaels as the show celebrates its 50th anniversary.

Many writers have sat beside him watching their sketches die, only to have him turn and say, with stony sarcasm, “You must be very proud.” If the host’s monologue is flat, he’ll moan, “Can we get any charm out of him?” If a piece is too erudite, he might tell its writer, “Can they take the Emmy away?” John Mulaney said, “May the cast members go to their graves never knowing the things I heard under the bleachers.”

Lorne Michaels Is The Real Star of Saturday Night Live


More good SNL stuff.

Who was the single funniest cast member in Saturday Night Live’s history?
Kevin Nealon, cast member, 1986–95: Besides me?

50 Saturday Night Live Cast Members Reveal Their Favorite Saturday Night Live Cast Members


There’s the old saying about not wrestling with a pig because you both get muddy and the pig likes it. Well, author Jon Krakauer decided to take on a YouTuber who, for some unknown reason, has been obsessed with ripping apart Krakauer’s best setting book Into Thin Air, apparently mostly by lying, misrepresenting actual events, and fabricating others. I’m only part way through this series. I recommend having some popcorn handy if you choose to read it.

The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter One


As the world gets more absurd each day, sites like McSweeney’s become more important.

Fluoride in the office water has been replaced with a compound of Red Bull and beef jerky.

Mark Zuckerberg Makes Meta More Masculine


I sent this next post to my buddy who works for Apple. He had no comment.

So, how did Siri do? With the absolute most charitable interpretation, Siri correctly provided the winner of just 20 of the 58 Super Bowls that have been played. That’s an absolutely abysmal 34% completion percentage. If Siri were a quarterback, it would be drummed out of the NFL.

Not So Super, Apple


DEPLOY THIS IN INDIANAPOLIS IMMEDIATELY!!!!!

When micro-cracks begin to appear inside the asphalt, it becomes deformed which leads to the oils being released from the spores to fill the cracks. This prevents the oxidation that would otherwise cause the bitumen to become brittle, which would allow larger cracks to form and ultimately result in a pothole.

Self-healing roads could end plague of potholes

Reader’s Notebook, 2/11/25

Once again I am behind on these, so let’s get caught up with my last four reads.


The Miracle of St. Anthony – Adrian Wojnarowski
What a book! Future NBA scoops guru Woj spent the 2004–04 season embedded with the basketball team at St. Anthony High School of Jersey City. The program was famously coached by Bob Hurley for 45 years. For much of that time Hurley also worked tirelessly to keep the school open, spending countless hours fundraising and donating the money he made from speaking engagements and clinics to the school. He, and others, kept it afloat until 2017.

That 2003–04 squad was one of his 26 state title teams, finishing the season undefeated and ranked #2 in the country. Unlike his four national championship teams, this one didn’t have a single D1 senior recruit on the roster.

The book is about more than basketball, though. Woj gets to know the kids on the team, the circumstances they came from, the daily challenges they face, and so on. He tracks the Sisters who run the school as they also fight to keep the facility from being closed and kids from dropping out.

Hurley had a lot in common with Bobby Knight, someone he was friendly with. He was fiery. He held players to a high standard. He expected as much from them in class as on the court. You can see where his sons got their (over) intensity. Unlike Knight, though, Hurley seemed like someone you could have a genuine conversation with that wouldn’t involve him spending most of the time proving that he was smarter than you and everything you believed was wrong.

Like any sports book, it was fun to see how much things have changed in the 20 years since this came out, and how players who seemed like can’t miss prospects at the time faded away.


Lazarus Man – Richard Price
I’ve read a couple of Price’s books in the past, and watched movies and TV shows he’s written for. He never disappoints.

Here he writes of the aftermath of a building collapse in New York, and how several people are affected by it, including a man pulled from the rubble alive three days after the collapse. As these folks navigate the days after the collapse, they give us a view of what everyday life is like for people in Harlem in the late 2000s. These glimpses into their lives pull the story along, but there’s never any great conflict or common ending that their stories are leading us towards. There is a rather notable reveal/twist late in the book, but it is hinted at throughout and doesn’t really shock the reader or flip the story in a dramatic way.

Price is such a good writer, especially of dialogue, that this thinness in plot is fine. Not every novel needs to have a great, deeper meaning or statement on life. That lack does keep this from standing next to his earlier, better works, though.


The Gray Man – Mark Greaney
A decent, mindless, assassin kills a bunch of bad guys novel. There’s a whole series of these. I’m not sure I’m going to work through them all – Lord knows I have plenty of other spy series I could jump back into – but Greaney’s 2024 entry landed on a couple Best Of lists so I may selectively pick some that got good reviews and/or focus on topics that interest me.


Notes On A Foreign Country: An American Abroad In A Post-American World – Suzy Hansen
I forget where I heard about this book, but I also read an article Hansen published in a magazine within recent weeks, so something got her into my feed.

I knew that this was all about her observations as an American living overseas over the past decade, but I did not realize it was almost pure analysis. I was hoping for a book that was as much travelogue as extended piece for Foreign Affairs.

That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy it. Hansen spends the entire book explaining how pretty much everything about her world view was challenged and changed by the decade she spent living in Turkey. She dove into how little history Americans know and understand about other countries. How even our overseas reporters, who are supposed to learn about and explain other cultures to us, are often woefully ignorant about the lands they are reporting from. She gets deeply into how Americans don’t understand the ramifications of our foreign policy and the direct effects it has on people in other countries. How what is “good for America” is often purely about economics for us and has no regard for anyone crushed along the way. And so on.

I tend to agree with much of her perspective, which shouldn’t be a surprise. Pretty woke, right? Where this is important for all Americans is in explaining the “why do (insert ethnic/religious/cultural/racial group identifier here) hate us?” questions we face all too often. It’s because we’ve routinely crushed, or helped to crush, popular, effective governments in other countries because their interests didn’t align with ours (or more specifically with our biggest corporations who have operations in these countries). It’s because we have a long history of supporting very bad people because we didn’t understand local interests or assumed because their opponents might lean to the left, that meant they were deeply indebted to the Soviets. We would never let another world power come into the US and tell us what we could and could not do inside our own borders. But we’ve been doing that to people all around the world for nearly 150 years now, since we first started building our own empire by taking Cuba and the Philippines from Spain.

Even if you disagree with her contentions, Hansen’s perspective is important, especially in an age when we are equally threatened by small, non-governmental actors as we are by China and Russia. Like so much of the bullshit we face these days, a little interest in and empathy towards others could go a long way towards making the world a safer place.

Weekend Notes

Well, one big topic to get to, and not the one most of the rest of the world is discussing today, so I’ll blow through the first two subjects quickly.


Jayhawk Talk

More stupidity. This team seemed to quit in the second half against K-State. Afterward, Bill Self said his players showed poor effort in practice Friday. This entire team is too old to not figure out the effort thing. And they get paid too much. But we’ll probably crush Colorado tomorrow and fool people into thinking they are close to figuring it out. I feel another blowout loss to a more athletic, engaged team in the round of 32 coming.

Meanwhile top recruit Darryn Peterson, ranked #2 in his class, played the #1 recruit’s team Friday and scored 58 points, including a game-winning 3. Next year can’t get here fast enough.


Super Bowl

I don’t like either team, rooting against the Chiefs has brought me more aggravation than joy in recent years, and I had zero interest in some of the peripheral aspects of the game involving famous people watching from the stands, so I kept the game on mute and worked through my YouTube queue most of the night. Obviously I should have done this a few Super Bowls ago. That was a total ass kicking. Crazy that Nick Sirianni was probably one game away from getting fired back in October, and now he’s a Super Bowl champion coach.

I didn’t watch a single commercial, either, so no opinions or comments about that part of the evening.

I did watch the halftime show. I like the idea of Kendrick Lamar, and am 100% on his side in the whole Drake beef. But my old man ears can’t decipher what young guys with his style are saying, so I can only give his performance a solid B. C was disappointed he didn’t choose a few other songs and bring in more guests than SZA. Apparently old conservatives were annoyed with the entire thing, which is a true bonus.

L went to a party at a friend’s house. She gave another friend a ride back to our house so his mom could pick him up, since we live about halfway between his home and the party. They arrived when there were still about three minutes left in the game. I explained to the friend how I was from Kansas City but not a Chiefs fan. Which probably really confused him as I was wearing a Royals World Series champs shirt.


Sectional Champs!

OK, time for the topic of the day.

Cathedral won their first sectional championship in 20 years with a dominant performance Saturday night.

The girls took on the Polytechnical school from downtown that has a few nice players and was picked as a “darkhorse” to win the sectional in the paper last week. There was never much doubt. We jumped out by double digits early, pushed it to 20 early in the second quarter, and other than a couple lulls around halftime never let up.

The only real drama came when Poly’s coach got ejected in the third quarter. We’re not sure what happened. I saw her get warned in the first half but hadn’t noticed her doing anything too crazy. I did hear their fans going nuts when they thought one of our girls should have been whistled for a five-second call (they were probably right). Seconds later the coach got a T. She was seated on the bench, but I guess she kept jawing because she quickly got T number two.

We hit three of four free throws then Poly hit a 3 and got two free throws to pump up their fans, but that burst was short-lived.

The only down side to the night was that had L been healthy, she definitely would have played. Our coach cleared the bench with 3:00 left, which is very early for her. And I bet a healthy L would have got some minutes well before that.

She did get to help cut the net down though, which she was excited about. She wasn’t on the court, but she is in the trophy picture of a team that made a little school history. Amazing it had been two decades since the last sectional champion, but until this year we were slotted into one of the toughest 4A sectionals in the state. Moving down to 3A had an immediate benefit.

It was fun to see how happy the girls were, especially for our four seniors. Girls basketball at CHS isn’t a glamour sport. There are often more visiting fans than Irish ones at our home games. The boys team gets better warmups and gear. CHS teams play difficult schedules in every sport but that seems to hit our girls a little harder. They earned all that happiness they got to display this weekend.

Our Friday semifinal was more interesting than the championship game, even it if was less competitive.

We played CA, the school that won a game 115–5 last month. Well, their coach was suspended for the game by the state athletic association because of that. Which seemed weird on a couple levels, but whatever. CA is led by his two junior daughters, who have attended four different schools in the past four years.[1] The better of the two sisters is a ranked recruit that lots of Big 10 schools are looking at. But the team is basically the sisters playing off each other, while their three teammates are expected to screen, rebound, and play D.

Although they were ranked well behind us, they still had the most talented player on the court and we were coming off an emotional win over our arch rival. So, you never know, right?

No doubt Friday. We opened on a 22–0 run and that was pretty much that. TWENTY TWO STRAIGHT POINTS!!! Final score: 65–27. We shut down their star and other than letting her sister hit three 3’s, contained the rest of the team. Dominant.

The best thing to come out of these games was that one of our seniors, T, has finally shaken off the bad luck that plagued her all year. I swear this poor kid is shooting 20% because she has shots rim out in the cruelest possible ways. Wide open shots will bounce around the rim 3–4 times before falling off. Layups will spin out or catch the wrong side of the rim. It’s impossible to accurately explain but if you just watch her work to get open and shoot, you would guess she scores 15 points a night. In reality she averages less than 10 ppg.

L and T became good friends last summer, with T often coming over to hang out at our place. I know she has a tough home life. Her parents are very hard on her. She has four older brothers who all played D1 football and the parents expect the same from her. You can see the weight on her shoulders getting heavier each time she misses a shot.

Tuesday against BC she was very good on both ends of the court, keying our pressure and hitting a couple big shots early. Friday she got the defensive assignment of the better CA sister and completely shut her down. Saturday she was on fire, scoring 19 points before halftime. Most of all, you could see her playing free and easy. She hit a 3 in every game, the first time this season she’s hit one in consecutive games, let alone three-straight.

Saturday, as the team was celebrating, I found T and told her whatever she’s been eating, DO NOT change it. She laughed and said she agreed that she wouldn’t change a thing.

The Irish advance to the Regional round of the state tournament.[2] We will play a team that is 20–6, but against a schedule ranked 194. They are #26 in 3A to our #9. According to the computer rankings, we are a 13-point favorite with a 78% chance to win. We just need to keep everyone focused and get any illnesses out of the way early in the week (L is home sick today) and we should be fine. The computer says we have pretty good odds.


  1. That’s as far as I know. They were in 8th grade on the southeast side of town, freshmen in a different district on the southwest side, spent sophomore year in Florida, and this year came back to an inner city school. Who knows if they were somewhere else for 7th grade, or will move out-of-state again for senior year.  ↩
  2. I could get real geeky about the structure of the Indiana playoff bracket, but I’m guessing no one wants to read about that. Long story short, Regionals were two games in one day for a long time, but a year or two back reverted to the old school style of Regionals being a single game, then the Semistate round consisting of two games. If we are lucky enough to win this week, I’ll share more about that.  ↩

Friday Playlist

We stay knee-deep in the new music another week.

“Prisoner of Beauty” – The Limiñanas, Bobby Gillespie
I can find almost no information about this song or band, which is from the far south of France. So all I can say about it is that it 100% sounds like it should have been in some gritty film during the mid-90s indie movie craze.

“All My Freaks” – Divorce
Kind of funny that a brand new band is writing a song about all the troubles that come with being famous. Like, how do they know anything about that yet?

“Never Said Goodbye” – Jake Bugg
Favorite song of the week alert. This absolutely majestic track draws a straight line back to DMAs and then to Oasis. Apparently Bugg’s latest album came out in September but I just discovered it in the past couple weeks. So, yes, I’ve been hating myself about that even since.

“I Want You (Fever)” – Momma
There’s some serious Nineties alt rock queen DNA in here, touching up against Garbage territory.

“Blackstar” – Fanning Dempsey National Park
Not a Radiohead cover – that would be “Black Star” anyway – but another fine song from this newish, Aussie, super-duo.

“Loving You” – Jorja Smith featuring Maverick Sabre
This week’s neo-soul track.

“Nice Clean Shirt” – Beeef
I’ve reached the point in the year where I start exploring options for new t-shirts for warm weather months. Mmmmmm, nice, clean shirts…

“Holding Pattern” – Prism Shores
Speaking of spring, this jangly tune is full of springtime vibes.

“Give It Time” – Goose
A perfect combination of Goose’s mainstream and jam band sides.

“Santa Monica” – Everclear
I had to make a quick run to the grocery store around the corner for a couple things last night. It should have been a minute in-and-out type deal. But suddenly I heard a familiar guitar riff over the in-store music – one of the greatest riffs of the Nineties – and had to walk around for a few minutes to enjoy “Santa Monica” is all its glory. If you muted this and just watched the visuals, there would still be no doubt what decade this video was from.

More Hoops Talk: I Am A Fraud

Me, in Monday’s post:

I’m not sure if I have a worse feeling about tonight’s KU game or Tuesday’s CHS one.

Shows what I know about ball.


Jayhawk Talk

Well, that was much, much better. Arguably KU’s best, wire-to-wire, performance of the year, jumping on Iowa State early and never letting up. The offense was humming, moving the ball quickly and finding the open man. Aside from a few ill-advised drives by guys who couldn’t shoot and Rylan Griffen missing four wide-ass-open 3’s, you couldn’t ask for much more on that end of the court.

And the defense was locked in all night. Iowa State is in a bit of a funk, but KU’s switching defense thoroughly baffled the Cyclone guards. You could see them setting something up and then, suddenly, they were faced with KJ Adams in front of them and they had zero interest in either driving or pulling up.

The question is was this a one-off performance, or have they genuinely found something and can start playing to their talent level? They are about to start the most important stretch of the year, as their next six games are all about as favorable as you can have. Now that run begins with a suddenly frisky K-State team in Manhattan and includes back-to-back visits to the Utah schools over four days. I’m not saying they should go 6–0. But 5–1 would be a terrific boost before a brutal closing stretch that includes Texas Tech, Houston, and Arizona.

Wild stats that came up during/after the game:

Bill Self is now 38–0 in Big Monday home games. Video game numbers.

Baring a total collapse by Houston, this will be the first time in 24 years that KU has gone more than one year between conference championships. Again, that just doesn’t seem right, even having lived through Self’s domination of the Big 12.


HS Sectionals

Man, I was convinced the Bishop Chatard would blow the doors off our girls Tuesday night. We beat them by three for the City championship three weeks ago, and that win seemed a little flukey. The Trojans were four-time defending sectional champs. They have a tough-ass senior who I figured would not let her team lose. Throw in some illness/general bad vibes on our team over the past week, and I was prepared to have to shake the hands of our BC friends after the game and wish them luck moving forward while getting out of the gym as quick as possible.

Again, I don’t know shit.

Our girls played their best 15 minutes of the season to start the game. We forced at least 10 BC turnovers in the first quarter and led by eight after 12 minutes. Midway through the second quarter the lead was up to 28–13 and our top scorer had barely played. We were ridiculous on D and knocked down some shots. It didn’t feel sustainable, but 15 point leads give you a lot of rope to work with.

By halftime the lead was down to just to seven when we gave up an offensive rebound and put-back at the buzzer. It felt like BC had all the momentum so the break was well timed.

Except we didn’t do anything to start the second half, turning it over on our first two possessions. By the end of the third period we were down five, the BC run 28–8 since our largest lead. Moments later, the deficit was up to eight and our student section resorted to yelling “Let’s play football!” at the BC students across the way.[1] Fun chant, but seems like they had lost hope. I understood it; the game felt over.

But one of our freshmen hit her first 3 of the season – it might have been her first made jump shot of the season – and we followed with a long two. Next thing you knew one of our senior leaders was driving and flipped up a tough attempt from five feet that would have made it a one-point game, but it rimmed out. BC went down and scored off the miss and hit a free throw to push it back to six with 3:00 left.

The next three minutes were literally insane. Drunk as a game can get. Off the rails. Bananas. Etc.

The dad who normally sits next to me was home sick and couldn’t get the streaming broadcast to work so I was texting him updates. Thus I can kind of recreate the final minutes.

BC is up 48–42, they are in a box-and-one defense to keep our best player from getting the ball, and we seem to have no idea how to attack them.

Somehow we strung together a couple stops and baskets, got another steal from our press and one of our seniors, A, went to the line with 1:57 and a chance to tie the game. She hit one-of-two, down one.

BC ball, they turn it over.
We give the ball right back to them.
They turn it over again.
We call a timeout with 54 seconds left.
After the timeout A is fouled again, this time she hits both, we are up 49–48.

BC has the ball and we knock a rebound out of play. They are inbounding under their own basket. Our defender tips the pass, but the BC inbounder grabs the loose ball and immediately passes to their center who lays it in. 50–49 BC, less than 30 seconds left.

We turn it over with 17 seconds left. Shit, game over again, right?

Our other freshman steals the ball in the backcourt and gets fouled going to the rim. She hits both, 51–50 us, about 10 seconds left.

BC inbounds, makes a cross court pass that the same freshman steals. She sprints down the sideline and whips a pass as she tries to avoid getting fouled to keep the clock running. She gets absolutely jacked and flies out of bounds, where she lands and grabs her head. She has a history of concussions so this did not look good. She stays on the ground for several minutes before she goes to the bench. The refs did call a foul when she got trucked, so we will go to the line up one with 3.9 left. We sub in a girl who doesn’t play much, but had hit 4–4 free throws on the night.

Naturally she misses both.

A BC guard got the rebound in the corner, took three dribbles (they had no timeouts left), and let it fly from halfcourt. It looked good on the way and I had visions of their 3-pointer that beat us at the buzzer in overtime a year ago.[2] But this shot crashed off the backboard and had no chance to go in.

Pandemonium on our bench, the BC girls were on the ground in tears. Both locker rooms are in the same corner of the gym, so there was a lot of awkward standing around by the families while waiting for both teams to exit as the girls for the next quarterfinal warmed up. Luckily our best BC friends are great people and I was able to chat normally with them. When their daughter, one of L’s best friends since forever, came out she mocked shoved L a few times before they gave each other big hugs. She plays a lot so the loss was tougher on her than it would have been on L had we lost. I love that all those years together at St. P’s don’t get pushed aside because they are on different teams now.

What a win for our girls! They played out of their minds to start the game, then made an incredibly tough comeback after blowing their lead. It isn’t always pretty, but our girls might be tougher than I give them credit for.

When I picked L up from practice Monday I mentioned how that might have been her last practice of the season. She flatly said, “It wasn’t.” She had faith where I lacked it. While she is on the sectional roster, she did not get to dress, but was allowed to sit on the bench. There’s a good picture on Instagram of our coach screaming after the final buzzer. You can see L’s curls flying in the air as she jumps in the background.

Now is where things get tricky. Pretty much everyone said, before the game, that whoever won Tuesday’s opening game would be the heavy favorite to win two more games and advance to regionals. So now there’s all that pressure of not screwing it up after winning the toughest game. And we might be playing without a starter because of that injury in the closing minutes.

In Friday’s semis we play the third-best team (of course) in our sectional. This is the squad I mentioned last month that won a game 115–5. They have one of the best juniors in the state and play a frenetic style. But they are only 8–13 for the season, most of those wins against bad teams. Against common opponents they are 1–5, we are 4–2. Again, though, anything can happen in a single elimination tournament.


Last week when we played that 1–18 team, CE, a few of us laughed that their opponent in their sectional opener sent coaches to scout them. Why scout a team that bad? Well, those coaches should be fired, because CE beat them by six! Good for those girls!


  1. The Irish beat the Trojans 31–7 this past season.  ↩
  2. On that play they called a timeout after we made one-of-two free throws to go up 2, and had 4.9 seconds to get a shot off.  ↩

Monday Hoops Notes

Yeesh. Quite a weekend for basketball stuff, so I guess that will be my focus today. Let’s get the worst of it out of the way first. Feel free to skip; it ain’t brief.


Jayhawk Talk

I’ll begin by saying I’ve never been happier to have missed watching a KU game live than I was Saturday. Yet I was still angry and frustrated later that evening because I had checked the score just as KU took a 21-point lead on Baylor late in the first half and felt pretty good about how things would turn out. The next time I checked the score it was a four-point game. This was concerning. The final time I checked the score Baylor was up by seven with a couple minutes left. That’s when the relief kicked in that I hadn’t devoted my late afternoon/early evening to watching this shitshow and would then sit and stew about it the rest of the night.

Coming on the heels of last weekend’s disaster against Houston and then Tuesday’s near disaster against UCF, I think we can officially call this a trend. Or, better yet, just what this team is. Which is not very good, relatively speaking. With an angry Iowa State team, that got wrecked at home by a mediocre K-State team Saturday, coming to Lawrence tonight, it sure feels like it’s going to get worse, too.

I guess there is still the opportunity to make adjustments that paper over some of this team’s issues. I doubt even the most optimistic of KU fans thinks that’s likely, though. Making this feel like not only a lost season, but a lost mini-era. And hopefully not the end of something bigger.

The transfer portal/NIL era was supposed to be a gift for Bill Self. He had just won his second national title and Jay Wright had retired, leaving Self as the unquestioned Best Coach in the Game. The NCAA probe was also over. Self was going to clean up in recruiting, whether in the portal or with high school kids, and put himself in a great position to win at least one more title before he decided to retire.

The problem is that his portal success has been decidedly mixed. Kevin McCullar Jr. was great for a year and a half, arguably the best player in the country for the first six weeks of the ’23–24 season until his knee gave out on him. Hunter Dickinson is flawed and takes a lot of deserved heat for that, but for the most part he’s been good to very good. Zeke Mayo has been KU’s best player most of this season, although he mixes in the occasional stinker.

But pretty much every other transfer has been anywhere from mediocre to terrible. And that has wrecked the culture of the program.

What made KU so good for those 14 straight years they won the Big 12? It was the continuity in the program, the proverbial Culture. The Jayhawks didn’t always have the best talent, or the best pro talent I guess. But they always had the best combination of talent and experience. It was those top 50–60 recruits that stayed for three and four years and learned how to play for Self and understood the rigors of the Big 12 who made the biggest plays in the biggest games.

Those guys are gone. DaJuan Harris and KJ Adams have such limited games that they can’t fill the Ochai Agbaji, Devonte Graham, Frank Mason, Landon Lucas, Perry Ellis, Jeff Withey, Elijah Johnson, Tyshawn Taylor, Sherron Collins roles of carrying a team that is struggling in crunch time to a win in Ames or Manhattan or even in Allen Fieldhouse. I just don’t think that’s in Dickinson’s DNA, even with him being a second-year Jayhawk. And none of the other transfers or freshmen have any idea what to do in those moments.

There’s another big red flag here, one I’m reluctant to address. KU had won the Big 12 and was headed for a number one seed in the NCAA tournament when Self had his heart attack in March 2023. Without him, and without Harris who rolled his ankle just before halftime, KU blew a big second half lead over Arkansas in the second round of the NCAA tournament. That was seen as a blessing in disguise, as under-seeded UConn was waiting in the next round and would have destroyed KU, just like they destroyed everyone else that spring.

Since then it’s been an uncharacteristically mid run for KU. Some good wins in the early part of each season, followed by more really bad losses than I can remember as teams learned how to attack KU and the Jayhawks seemed to have no answers. Last year they were blown out in the second round by Gonzaga. Has this team done anything for the past month that suggests a third-straight second round loss is their ceiling?

Some of KU’s issues are talent. Harris and Adams are such one-dimensional players that when they can’t do those things well – basically defense for Harris and effort for Adams – they are giant holes on the court. Putting more pressure on the other three players out there with them, most of whom have their own flaws. Dickinson is a scoring savant in the low post and can grab 10 rebounds without trying. However, he’s a huge liability on defense if he has to take more than one step. He’s regressed when he takes shots away from the basket. Mayo, as hot as he can get, also has games where he can’t hit a thing and forces things to the point where he turns the ball over. And so on.

If you read back through my KU posts for the past 21 years, you’ll find that I was always whining about something each team doesn’t do well. But the teams that didn’t shoot well could still get to the rim and score there. Ones that struggled to guard could at least rebound. Teams that were offensively challenged could choke the life out of the game on the defensive end.

This year’s team has no identity, no strength, no experience to fall back on when they can’t hit 3’s and can’t get to the rim and the defense breaks down and they get out-rebounded. Their two homegrown senior leaders are players that should be backups or complimentary players, not the guys who make the tough ass plays in the last three minutes that turn an L into a W.

Self recruited this roster, and the ones the two previous years that also had massive flaws. The bad portal players have been so bad that they counter-balance a lot of the credit he should get for bringing in McCullar/Dickinson/Mayo. High school recruiting has been uneven for several years, although the incoming class seems like a return to form. He’s refused, for whatever reason, to recruit over Harris and Adams, and neither of them has improved much in their time on campus.

No matter how much we want to ignore it, we have to wonder if Self lost something in his health scare two years ago. Has he dialed back his intensity, and that spills over to the team? Is his preparation time less rigorous than it was? Does he process things a half step slower than he used to? Is there some other issue that he hides in public but which affects how he coaches? I sure hope this is all coincidental, but it’s a question that has to be considered.

A good buddy of mine shared this hot take after the back-to-back Creighton-Missouri losses in December: this would be Self’s last year. He thought this team would drive Self to pull a Jay Wright and go sit on a beach or work on TV. I argued that Self has raved as much about Darryn Peterson as he has any recruit ever, and there’s no way, health allowing, that he won’t be back to coach him next year. But, I added, after that all bets are off. If the passion is gone, he could retire any time after next season.

After the last week I have to wonder if leaving after this year might truly be on the table. Again, I sure as hell hope not and am frantically lighting candles, saying prayers, and rubbing rabbit feet to guard against this option. We need to keep kicking that nightmare scenario down the road as long as we can.

In reality Self just won a national title three years ago. He was chasing his third, which would place him in the truly all-time elite list of coaches, and made some big swings that ended up being huge misses. I don’t think he suddenly forgot how to coach, or his methods stopped working in 2023.

The modern era of Kansas Basketball began on March 10, 1984, when Ron Kellogg hit a baseline jumper to beat #6 Oklahoma in the Big 8 tournament championship game. We Jayhawk fans have had things pretty good for over 40 years. I think it’s way too early for us to start worrying about KU falling into the pattern that Indiana has been stuck in for over 20 years. There are some concerning cracks in the foundation, though.


HS Hoops + Injury Update

The final week of the regular season was not great.

Tuesday we took on Carmel. The JV game went down to the final seconds, and we hit a shot with about three ticks left to get a one-point win. I enjoyed the Carmel coaches getting super heated with the refs for not giving them a time out as the clock ran out. It went on for several minutes after the game, and then our athletic director had to keep one of the coaches from approaching the refs as they left the gym. I would have been equally livid had that happened to us. L again didn’t play much, and she was annoyed about it after the game. On the one hand I understood her frustration. On the other, she is clearly compromised and can’t do a ton so I totally got why the coaches didn’t play her much. She had four points, an assist, and three steals.

The varsity game was kind of a mess. Carmel lost their best player to a knee injury a month ago and had gone 2–6 since. If we played smart, we should win. We were up with a couple minutes left until we let a freshman hit consecutive 3’s to give them the lead. Our offense couldn’t get a thing going on the other end and we lost by three. Carmel is really well coached and has some nice players, but this is not a game that a team that wants to make a serious run in the tournament should lose.

Thursday we traveled 75 minutes south to play one of the worst programs in the state. They had sent word earlier in the week that they only had six JV players, so asked if the JV game could just be two quarters. Lovely. We’re spending over an hour in the car for half a JV game then a varsity game that shouldn’t be close.

JV took care of business, winning easily. L was even more limited in minutes and had just an assist and a turnover.

Varsity jumped out to a big lead, I think it got as high as 30 early in the second half, but then got sloppy and never reached running clock territory. We ended up winning by 24. The JV parents were annoyed because CE had 11 girls dressed for varsity. They easily could have moved a couple down for JV so we could have played a full game. I mean, the varsity team ended the season 1–19. It’s not like they go 10 deep with decent players.

JV ended the year 17–3. A terrible, blowout loss to start the year. The other two losses L is convinced we would have won had she been healthy and available. A really good season for a team dominated by sophomores. I just wish a few of those sophomores were obviously kids that could step in and start for varsity next year.

Varsity ended the regular season at 14–9. Three of those losses were by three points or less. I can’t say I’m super confident about sectionals because this team has never really locked in for multiple games in a row. They struggle to make shots and are too reliant on our leading scorer for offense, and she’s far from an unstoppable player. Our defense is spotty. We have no size so struggle to rebound. We don’t have a deep bench. Oh, and there’s the matter of playing our arch rival we beat three weeks ago in the opening game of the tournament. I’m not sure if I have a worse feeling about tonight’s KU game or Tuesday’s CHS one.

It’s a knock-out tournament, though, and anything can happen. When two Catholic schools are playing God obviously sits back, eats popcorn, and watches rather than taking a side.

L did make the sectional roster, so she’s continued to practice with the varsity. In theory. I don’t think she did much Friday or Saturday, and Saturday her foot hurt so bad that she went back to the crutches when she got home.

If you’ve made it this far I’ll share the biggest bad news of this post last: she is scheduled for an MRI on Thursday, and we’re pretty sure she’s going to need surgery. That will knock her out for most, if not all, of the travel season. I’ll share more about that once we get results/confirmation, but it’s obviously been a rough couple of weeks for her. She didn’t make varsity to start the season, had to stop playing three games in, was never fully healthy when she returned, and is now looking at another long stretch without basketball. I think she’d love a do-over for her sophomore year, at least for basketball.


NBA

HOLY SHIT!!!!

The biggest, dumbest trade in NBA history took place late Saturday night. Luka Doncic to the Lakers, Anthony Davis to the Mavericks. Plus other parts and picks.

If you don’t follow the NBA, Doncic is one of the three best players in the world, when he’s healthy. He’s been out since Christmas, though, and has a history of not taking care of his body. Which may have been the reason Dallas moved him. Davis was once a top five player in the league, but now probably somewhere between 15–20 most nights, with the random night he can still go nuts. But Doncic is seven years younger than Davis. And Dallas didn’t get nearly enough back for him.

This is an insane trade if you’re Dallas. You are basically gambling that Doncic’s body is going to fail on him sooner rather than later. But instead of leveraging his ability and age, you treated him like he was an equal to Davis.

It makes no sense to me why/how you make this trade. Worse, it hands a golden ticket to the Lakers, who somehow always come up with deals that get them superstars just as they are reaching their peaks. If Luka listens to LeBron and gets healthy and takes his fitness seriously, they could be a monster next year.

The NBA pods were insanely fun the past 24 hours as people tried to make sense of this trade. The conspiracy theories are A++++ at the moment!

A few hours later, Sacramento sent De’Aaron Fox to San Antonio. This wasn’t as seismic, and the Kings actually got a decent return. What made this huge was that Victor Wembanyama now has a legit running mate, along with several other nice, young players around him. This probably doesn’t do much for the team this year. It does make them title contenders as soon as next year.

I have college buddies who are big Mavericks and Kings fans. When the Fox trade broke last night, I told them I am now going to start getting worried that either Tyrese Haliburton or Pascal Siakam gets moved before the trade deadline Thursday.


Fever

There was some actual good basketball news in our house: the Fever made some great moves over the weekend. First they re-signed Kelsey Mitchell, Caitlin Clark’s backcourt running mate. Then they traded for two former All Stars with championship rings, Natasha Howard and DeWanna Bonner. Both are on the back ends of their careers but have experience and size and versatility that the Fever needed. Finally they added shooter in Sophie Cunningham. Through all that they also managed to keep super-sub Lexie Hull, for the time being at least.

We’ll see how these all work out, but on paper they make the Fever much better. Especially when you figure Clark should be steadier and stronger as a second-year player than she was as a rookie.

January Media

Movies, Shows, etc

Rebel Ridge
Movies like this are hard for me to watch these days. The moments of injustice seem far too real and common in the real world. That said, this was a good, old fashioned action flick. Not too complicated. Amazingly, despite a lot of gunplay, there’s not a ton of bloodshed nor are there any deaths as far as I could tell. There are some BIG leaps in logic in the final 20 minutes, but that goes along with the old school, action movie vibe.

B+

The Fall Guy
Two uncomplicated action movies to start the year. This one is just goofy enough, and filled with enough wild stunts, to gloss over a thin story. Throw in Emily Blunt and Ryan Gosling, two dazzling looking humans, and this was a pretty fun couple hours.

B+

Canary Black
Here’s a movie that took a pretty cool idea for a Bond film – bad guys use a computer virus that could cripple the world’s economies, one country at a time, to ransom trillions of dollars from governments – and shoves the reveal into the final 20 minutes. Right there we have a problem. Then a lot of the writing is extremely dumb. Some of the acting is C-level. A lot of the action sequences are super unbelievable. And even a lot of the production is strange; some of the dialogue feels like it was dubbed in because the actors were speaking a different language. But Kate Beckinsale is mindblowingly hot, and I wonder if the producers thought that would be enough to paper over all the movie’s issues.

C

Black Doves
First off, I wish I would have known this took place before Christmas so I could have watched it a month ago. Christmas music played a big role in this show, so you know I got all bent out of shape hearing them in January.

As for the show? Eh. There were some good elements, but many aspects of the story seemed far-fetched, crazy, or both to me. I will often measure how much I’m enjoying a series by how well I remember details of things that happened an episode or two earlier. I kept having to remind myself of who characters or what plot angles were in this one. Which is funny, since Netflix now writes their shows to constantly re-state the central themes because they know people aren’t paying full attention. I felt like I was and still couldn’t keep all the details of a not super complicated show straight. It was fun watching Ben Whishaw go from the nebish Q of the Daniel Craig era to an absolute assassin in this flick, all while maintaining his queer bonafides.

B-

Spectre
I needed some real spy shit to balance the last two entries. At the moment this is the only Bond movie I could find streaming for free. So I watched it. Some good car chases but otherwise far from the peaks of the Craig era.

Also, I kept wondering how Bond always has these fabulous clothes and insane gear but you never seeing him toting a bunch of luggage around. You might see him with an old school suitcase, but it clearly isn’t holding all the stuff you see him wear in that location. These are the things I think about when I watch a movie for the third or fourth time.

B

Van Halen: Story Of Their Songs
Literally an hour after I finished Ted Templeman’s book, I was scrolling through the cable guide and found this show. It had started 20 minutes earlier, but I sat through the next 90 minutes anyway. Kind of a bummer. For some reason, of the six songs they picked to break down Van Halen’s career, only two were David Lee Roth songs. Seemed like a bizarre choice to me. I’m not convinced you have to include a Gary Cherone song, but let’s say you do to pull in the entire history of the band. Then the breakdown should be three DLR songs, two Sammy Hagar, one Cherone. I think the mid–90s “answer to grunge” entry should have been replaced by a third Dave song. Also thumbs down to the Reelz channel for peppering this show with four minute commercial breaks.

B-

Wolfs
Oceans Eleven is a perfect movie. That’s what you’re running up against when you put George Clooney and Brad Pitt in a movie together. So you better come with your strongest material. This, sadly, did not. I thought the script was weak. How do you not give these two crackling dialogue? The pace was far too slow, especially when this is supposed to be as much a comedy as a drama. There are moments where their charisma is strong enough to lift the picture up for a moment. But those isolated scenes make it clear how weak the rest of the movie is. I’m disappointed in them for taking on this project without giving it some serious sprucing up.

C+

Slow Horses, season two
I didn’t love the first season, but I keep hearing people rave about this show so figured I’d give it another shot. It took me most of the way through this one to remember I read the book it was based on just a year ago. I didn’t love that book, either. I did like this season better, though. Bonus points for wrapping things up in six, sub one hour episodes.

B+

Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years on SNL Music
Treeeeeemendous. I was a little worried that, at three hours, the last hour would drag and be filled with extra long commercial breaks. Instead that might have been the most interesting part of the program, diving into some of the biggest controversies in the show’s music history. I found it awfully convenient that Lorne Michaels suddenly thinks Sinead O’Connor ripping the photo of Pope John Paul II was brave and sincere two years after she died. I don’t recall him defending her in the days after her act.

I also found the segment in the middle about the choices for musical guests in the 70s and early 80s that were less than conventional fascinating. Those kinds of acts haven’t been part of the show in decades, which is a big shame. Now it’s all massive, established stars or of-the-moment artists doing heavily produced sets. Some of those left-of-center picks back in the day were not very good, but they also reinforced that the show was cutting edge and, at least in theory, subversive. Today the show is all about reading cue cards and hitting your marks, with the audience a slave to the Applause sign. The early days gave us comedic geniuses. The modern iteration gave us Jimmy Fallon. ‘Nuff said.

A

Our Kind of Traitor
Decent enough film based on a John le Carré novel, but despite checking in well under two hours it lacked energy so it seemed to lag a bit. And there was a healthy chunk of the story that seemed flat-out dumb to me.

B-

Pearl Jam – Chicago – Wrigley Field Night 1
A terrific show – of course – from just a couple nights after I saw them. It’s pretty amazing how 1) people can make high quality concert videos taken on cell phones these days and 2) can perfectly match up the video from multiple devices with the official soundboard audio. These look better than official concert films from not that long ago.

A

The Town
On the last night of the month I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out what to watch, whether to pick a movie I had not seen before, start a new series, etc. Eventually I landed on this as a rewatch. Which was smart. Or smaht.

A-


Shorts, YouTubes, etc

Why streaming will destroy the typical sports fan
We still pay for cable, partially because I am too lazy to change and partially because every time I do the math to switch to YouTube TV I can’t see that it would change our monthly outlay that much, and while we don’t watch a ton of TV, the cable bill is worth it to me to ensure I can watch whatever I want when I need to. This piece shows how that traditional offering is on the verge of collapse. And the observation about how young people consume sports very differently than older people checks out with how L follows basketball.

Paul Rudd Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters
Zero surprise this is great.

Jack Black Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters
Jack’s, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as fun since he’s kind of a weirdo.

Top 10 Controversial SNL Sketches We Can’t Believe Made It to Air
Funny how times change.

SCTV SPORTS – Battle of the PBS Network Stars!
Truly amazing comedy, if you are able to get most of the references.

The Ultimate Paper Airplane
This is some wild shit right here.

1977 NIT Indiana State vs Houston Larry Bird 44pts vs Birdsong 30pts
This is so awesome. A highly edited selection of highlights from what appears to be an insanely good NIT game in 1977. The hoops are incredible. Even better is our glimpse to how a college basketball game was aired on a local station in the late Seventies. The choices in cuts. The announcers. Throw in the behavior of the players and ISU’s uniforms and this is a fan-freaking-tastic time machine piece.

Larry Bird 35 Pts Vs DePaul 79 NCAA Final Four
The Game Larry Bird Dropped 49 Points vs Wichita State
Algorithm gonna algorithm.

Fighter Pilot Breaks Down Every Fighter Jet From Top Gun: Maverick
How Navy Pilots ACTUALLY Land on Aircraft Carriers
Watch The Navy’s Most Difficult Student Training
USAF B1-B Lancer EARTH SHATTERING Full Afterburner takeoff!
Trying to keep up with an SR–71 Blackbird
Speaking of the algorithm, watch one fighter jet video and you’re going to get a bunch of jet videos in your feed. Which I do not mind.

Why are mountains so tall?
Science!

Classic Bob Uecker – July 29th, 1976 | Carson Tonight Show
Bob Uecker’s Advice For Kids | David Letterman
A Visit with “Mr Baseball” Bob Uecker
19 minutes of legendary Bob Uecker calls and moments
RIP to Mr. Baseball.

Dave Chappelle Stand-Up Monologue 2025 – SNL
Good stuff, especially the ending.

Hilarious Steve Carell BLOOPERS VS Actual Scene
Office bloopers never get old.

Every James Bond Watch Is A Watch To Die For (1962 till now)
Come on, the Omegas are clearly the best, and the Brosnan Omegas rule them all. If I ever win the lottery…

How Super Bowl Fields Are Deep Cleaned And Prepped For Game Day
Not as interesting as I hoped.


Car Content

First Road Trip In My New Tesla Model 3! FSD Taking Us To Kansas City
Road trip to KC? Sure, I’m in. Wish I was as comfortable turning my car over to FSD as this guy is.

My Kia EV6 GT 800mi Winter Road Trip Was Super Annoying!
Amazing how many cars have horrible software. That’s a bad thing in a traditional ICE vehicle. That’s a deal-breaker in an EV.

Lucid Gravity Charging Performance! 400kW, Tesla Supercharging & Deep Dive Interview w/ Emad & Peter
Lucid definitely has the battery/charging side of the equation figured out. I remain hopeful they remain in business long enough to finally release a vehicle that is competitive with what the average auto buyer can afford. Maybe that is two cars away for me?


Photography

Fujifilm X100 VI: My Honest Take as a Leica Shooter
A Day of Film Photography in the North Bay
Do You Need a Wide Angle Lens?
Capturing the ‘modern prairie’ with landscape photographer Alex Burke
A Day of Winter Film Photography and the Struggle to Stay Motivated


Podcasts

The Rest Is History
I did some looking around to refresh my podcast routine and this one got good reviews. I enjoyed their recent series about the lead-up to World War II, but have skipped the latest one about Roman emperors for the time being. Maybe I’ll dive back in once the NBA trade deadline passes and the hoops pods slow down.

Plain History
Derek Thompson has added this subset of his Plain English pod in which he tackles a moment in history, in this case the assassination of President James Garfield. Fascinating topic I knew nothing about.

Friday Playlist

No sign that the current pace of new music will slacken any time soon, which means I will continue to have the pleasure of providing music to soundtrack a good chunk of your Fridays for the foreseeable future.

“People Of Substance” – Craig Finn
DAD ROCK ALERT!!!!! Craig Finn has new music out! And it is produced by Adam Granduciel! And the other members of The War On Drugs are playing on it! What a great day to be a middle aged white dude who still listens to cool music! There is no chance you can miss that TWOD presence on this track.

“Ankles” – Lucy Dacus
Less dad rocky, to be sure, but another literate artist I love with new music.

“Good Old Fashioned Fun” – WOOZE
“Hooked” – Franz Ferdinand
I heard the new WOOZE track and thought it had some serious Franz Ferdinand vibes. A couple days later I hear FF’s new song. Serendipitous!

“Together” – Blankenberge
Some tremendous Shoegaze from Russia, of all places. I’m going to assume that since these kids are cool enough to play music this good, they are anti-war, so I will not boycott their songs.

“It’s a Mirror” – Perfume Genius
Based on my inability to connect with his music before 2020, I figured my love of PG’s “On the Floor,” my #3 song of 2020, was a momentary blip. This, though, is a tremendous song as well. I am officially intrigued by what is to come.

“T&A” – Blondshell
Blondshell made my favorite tracks list last year (with some help from her friend Bully) with “Docket,” a song about the perils of hooking up while touring. Here is another powerhouse song about how sex can mess things up.

“Hazy Shade of Winter” – The Bangles
With February about to arrive, we are in the dog days of winter. That said, we have two days approaching 60 in the forecast and the last of the piles of snow in our yard and driveway should be gone by Tuesday morning. So maybe not ideal conditions to play this, but my annual reminder this is one of the greatest covers ever recorded.

“No Excuses” – Alice in Chains
I read this article earlier in the week about the 31st anniversary of AiC’s Jar of Flies EP. Which is a weird year to mark. But, still, it made me go back and listen to the EP, and then some other AiC tracks. For those who were around at the time, remember how shocking this song was because of its beauty, especially when compared to the songs from the Dirt album, which was basically 100% about heroin? Still a great song.

Favorite Things

More basketball stupidity, at both the high school and college levels, yesterday that I prefer to avoid for now.

So, I’m launching a new series that promises to be randomly occasional: a few words about some of the favorite things in my life at the moment.


Olukai Kekaha Boots
It is a little weird that a Hawaiian company, famous for making casual shoes designed to be kicked off at a moment’s notice, has made some very nice cold weather boots. After several years of searching, and failing, to find a solid pair of boots to get me from October to March, I finally decided to splurge and give these a shot.

A wise choice!

Super comfortable, great looking, warm enough, and with the bonus of being water resistant. I thought the “natural distressing” was unnecessary and cheesy, but the effect is pretty minimal. And once you’ve worn them a couple weeks, those factory scuffs blend right into whatever wear and tear you’ve put on them yourself.

Where the cheaper options I tried the past couple winters failed because they were either poorly constructed or uncomfortable to the point I couldn’t wear them, these have been one of the best things I’ve purchased in the last six months. And they seem like they’ll hold up so I won’t have to worry about replacing them for at least a couple more years.


The Bridge
I included this Kansas City public radio station in a media post a year or so back, but drifted away from it. However, this past fall I made a major switch in how I listen to music when I’m in the house. Where my default in the kitchen used to be either iHeart Radio’s Classic American Top 40 station or a Spotify playlist, I’ve switched to exclusively streaming The Bridge. Now I leave it on our kitchen speaker most of the day, saving Spotify for other parts of the house and driving.

This is a near perfect radio station, at least for my tastes. The best internet radio option I’ve found since WOXY.com died nearly 15 years ago. If I owned a radio station, I bet my playlist would have around 90% similarity to what my KC homies spin. Here’s what they’ve played while I’ve been typing this post up:


Bluesky
I created a Bluesky account right after the platform publicly launched, but never used it for more than a few moments before this past fall. Then there was a flood of folks migrating from the service I had been using for 15+ years, led by several prominent NBA writers. Over about six weeks I split time between the two services. By January, I was only launching the Bird app during KU games or if someone sent me a link. I’ve now cut out the KU game connection, so rarely checking out what is going in that cesspool.

Bluesky isn’t perfect, and there are still a lot of accounts I followed at the old place for years that need to come over. But it sure is better than what the Tech Toddler turned the old place into.[1] The auto-muting of idiots is a wonderful feature. I’m sure the Nazis, wingnuts, and trolls will figure out a way to ruin it eventually, or some asshole billionaire will buy it to appease our Beloved Leader. For now, though, it’s where I spend most of my social media time. Which, to be honest, is way less time than I was spending four months ago. Another obvious bonus.


Hot Roast Beef with Onion Jam sandwiches
Holy shit, these are awesome! Simple to make with a tremendous depth of flavor. I was a little nervous about dropping them on the family, as the ladies don’t always enjoy beefy meals the way I do. But it was a hit with them all and I’ve added them to our rotation of dinner meals.


  1. Yes, I know, I lease one of the Tech Toddler’s vehicles. And I love the car. We all contain contradictions. But, man, somehow that guy gets worse and worse every single day. Which I guess shouldn’t be a surprise given who he is palling around with. Praying Rivian or someone else gets their shit figured out before my lease expires in 2027.  ↩
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