Another great list from the Onion AV Club. Naturally, it begs the question, what movies are on my list?
In no particular order:
Star Wars. I probably watched this 50 times between 1977 and 1984. I’ve seen it once all the way through since then.
Chevy’s Classics. I’ll bundle the classic work of Chevy Chase together, since watching one often meant watching another immediately after. Includes Caddyshack, Vacation, Fletch, Fletch Lives, Spies Like Us, and Three Amigos.
If you didn’t flip by ESPN at any point on Sunday, you may not know that the final baseball game has been played at Yankee Stadium. ESPN devoted approximately 800 hours of programming to this historic event. The Yankees are missing the playoffs this year, so they had to fill their Yanks quota somehow.
Anyway, lots of people shared their memories of Yankees Stadium over the past few days. I’ve never been there, but I have watched a game or two that has been played there.
M. took a bit of a tumble the other night. We were talking with the neighbors while our kids chased each other around and heard a solid smack, followed by screaming. M. caught her toes in the sidewalk as she was running and ended up face-down on the sidewalk. Not only did she skin her knees, but also her forehead hit the ground, leaving a nice, bloody welt. Just in time for her class' circus at school on Friday.
Going back to the first album I purchased with my own money for a moment, I’ll admit thinking about Def Leppard’s <em>Pyromania</em> made me a little nostalgic. So I fired up the iTunes Music Store. No <em>Pyromania</em> available there. Jump over to the Amazon MP3 Store. Not there either. So one of the biggest selling albums of the 80s - one of the top 100 selling albums of all-time for that matter - still isn’t available on either of the two biggest, legal, online music stores.
I don’t know how to feel about Lance Armstrong’s return. I tend to want my retired athletic heroes to stay retired. Call me old fashioned. But, I read an article during this summer’s Brett Favre drama that convinced me that the whole idea of legacy and pleasing the fans is a little silly. Each athlete should do what makes him or her happy, not what keeps our mental image of them intact.
Four hours of sweet freedom. That’s what we got today with the girls both going off to school. What a strange thing to have a completely quiet house in the middle of the day. I had to shut off my music junkie switch for awhile so I could enjoy this rare time of no noise.
C. did great at school. S. had a meeting this morning, so I dropped C. off by myself.
In honor of M. starting school Wednesday, here are some stories about the kids.
As promised, I will now reveal the curse word that C. has been using from time-to-time.
When I drop something, knock something over, etc. my default curse is “Dammit.” I’ve learned to more mutter it than exclaim it since becoming a father, so I say it in a low voice, often through clenched teeth.
Not too long ago, I noticed when C.
Admit it, you were glued to VH1 Classic’s 80 Hours of the ’80s this weekend (That is if you have VH1 Classic). Lord knows I was. I thought about e-mailing each of you individually to make sure you knew it was on.
In between shows for the kids and doing things outside, I tried to check in on the A-Z run-through of some of the decade’s best videos all weekend. Most nights, while I was reading, I used it as my background music instead of my usual iTunes library.
Something very disappointing happened while my attentions were dominated by the Olympics: the Royals completely went into the tank. It wasn’t that long ago that they had a four game lead on the Indians for fourth place, and Detroit wasn’t too far ahead in third. Keep things going, and there was a chance for 75 wins and a third place finish, a perfect building block for next year and beyond. Instead, they’ve lost 15 of 18, have sustained some crippling injuries, and now look poised to continue the tradition of anti-excellence the franchise has forged over the past 20 years.
Sigh. The Olympics are over. What the hell do I do now? Actually, the Olympics didn’t dominate my time this year the way they did four years ago. But I had a two-week-old baby then and we just kind of sat on the couch for about 20 hours a day anyway. That year, the Olympics were a God-send. This year, once the girls watched their fill of morning TV, rather than switch to the games, I was trying to get them outside to do something fun and active.
Usain in the brain! Sweet baby Jesus.
As I said earlier, my favorite run ever was Michael Johnson’s 200M world record in Atlanta. Second, before this week, was the 4x100 relay in 1992, when the U.S. destroyed the field, Carl Lewis ran away and hid, and Dennis Mitchell went nuts after he handed off to Lewis.* Bolt’s two world records this week are suddenly in the mix. I shudder to think what the Jamaicans are going to do in the 4x100 relay.
Trying to keep these things shorter.
I’ve never been a gymnastics guy, and this year has reinforced the wisdom of that decision. Not that I understood the scoring before, but it’s even worse this year. I’ll be the one millionth person to ask, how can you fall down on your dismount and still win a gold medal?
My favorite technical aspect of the Olympics might be the curve cam in the long sprints.
I’ll try to do these more often this week, to avoid 1000+ words of rambling.
I forgot to mention in my first Olympics Notebook that I’m thrilled with NBC’s coverage in one big way: we have five channels of high definition coverage. S. laughed at me on the night of the opening ceremonies when I got terribly excited when I saw there were four new channels. Of course, two are fairly limited in what they show, mostly basketball and soccer.
With seven weeks to go, we’re finally cranking up the baby preparations. Of course, when you already have two girls, there isn’t that much original preparation to do. We moved the crib back up to newborn level today. We moved all of C.’s clothes out of that room and into her current room as well. Sometime this week, we’ll start pulling out all the infant clothes and restocking the dresser. We officially have a nursery again.
10 “Paid In Full” - Eric B. & Rakim, 1987. I’ve told this story before. In the fall of my year in the Bay Area, I discovered a hip-hop show on Stanford’s campus radio station, KZSU. The only problem was we lived way across the Bay, and I could only pick the show up on a small, portable radio that had a three foot antenna. So, to record the shows, I had to run a cord to an old-school tape recorder (this was 1987, so it wasn’t so old school at the time).
I can’t believe that between the Olympics, the phenomenal weather, etc. I’ve forgotten to share some very important news: we’ve scheduled the c-section. If she doesn’t arrive sooner, Baby Girl #3 will arrive on October 3, sometime shortly after 10 AM.
All continues to look well inside the Baby Mama. The Baby Mama herself is a bit tired and uncomfortable. But that comes with working as much as she’s worked the past couple weeks.
The first of what should be many Olympic Notes entries over the next couple weeks.
I looked back at the archives of my original blog today to skim through my thoughts on the 2004 games. I may have to pick out a few gems to share with you during this year’s games.
I understand I have a problem of having a problem with people who have problems pronouncing foreign words, especially in the two languages I’ve studied.
The Olympics kind of snuck up on me. All kinds of blog-worthy material there, so look for lots of that stuff over the next couple weeks.
For now, I found this on Wired’s website and thought it required sharing. Even if you’re not a Geek, I bet you have a fond place in your heart for WarGames. It’s one of my favorite 80s movies and could have been a turning point in my life.
Don’t mess with the bull, Frenchies. You’ll get the horns.
My MacBook just about went across the room at the end of the 4x100 relay.
The Olympics are awesome.
A few words about the methodology for my favorite songs list.
First, I had to own a song for it to appear on the list. Duh.
Second, I limited myself to one song per artist. After some consultation with a few other music geeks, I determined that I could consider both Beatles songs and John Lennon’s solo work separately. Same for Neil Finn’s work with Split Enz, Crowded House, The Finn Brothers, and on his own.
Songs 20-11 of my 20 favorite songs of all-time below the jump. I changed my mind; part two will come out next Friday.
20 “Born to Run” - Bruce Springsteen, 1975. I have this theory, still in its infancy mind you, that all American rock groups must follow one of two models: Van Halen or Bruce Springsteen. They need to be focused on either having a good time for the sake of having a good time (VH), or on having a good time while talking about some important things with friends along the way (The Boss).
A quick but good trip to the lake over the weekend. There were four families, and ten kids total, at this get-together, which made things a little crazy. Especially when the three two-year-olds decided to get wound up. Unfortunately, we were the only family without an older kid - each of the other three had at least a seven-year-old - so our girls lagged behind everyone else a bit. While even the other two-year-olds were hopping into the water (with life jackets, of course), ours would only stick a toe in, or walk ankle deep while holding one of our hands.
Here is my look at the latest iPhone software update, the Application Store, and other things iPhone.
I’ve found the iPhone 2.0 software update to be a profoundly mixed-bag. One of the reasons that lines were (and continue to be) so long for the 3G iPhone is how successful the first generation model was. There were some opening weekend issues a week ago, as well, but things quickly fell into place.
We took the girls to our church’s festival/carnival last night. While I did not indulge, I was reminded of why I’m glad I married a Catholic girl: drinking is encouraged at church fund raisers. That’s going to come in handy when the girls get a little older.
For now, though, we had to concentrate on keeping the girls from getting trampled and whatnot. We succeeded and they seemed to have a great time.
I was a little disappointed that baseball is being purged from the Olympics after this year. Not that anyone really cares about Olympic baseball, and I can usually name about one of the players on the U.S. squad. But this news makes me think it is a good idea to ditch it. Freaking Euros messing with our traditional American sports.
Perhaps Brett Favre and Manny Ramirez should run off together. And then they could take a significant portion of the sports media with them.
Every football off-season, it’s Favre’s retirement drama. And every July, it’s the Manny Wants Out Of Boston drama. Every summer Favre comes back to play another year. Every August, Manny wakes up wearing a Red Sox jersey and goes out and continues to be Manny as long as the Sox play that season.
We decided to bite the bullet, take the plunge, make the move, etc. and put the girls in the same room last night. My rough plan was to do it sometime in August, so we had a buffer A) before school started and B) well before the baby arrived. And so, if we had a set-back, we had time to regroup and try again. But C. continues to have trouble going to sleep when we put her down and then wake up at least once a night because either her teeth are bothering her or just because she’s a stinker and enjoys waking us up, so we were dreading making the move.
We celebrated M.’s fourth birthday last night. As mentioned earlier, her actual birthday is today. We didn’t make a huge deal out of. Next year, no doubt, she’ll realize that she got to go to several cool birthday parties for friends and that she should start complaining about wanting farm animals to come to the house, or a trip to Chuck E. Cheese, or something like that when her birthday comes around.
Our house has been taken over by small creatures I can only assume are aliens. Nearly every room has at least one piece of paper with these strange little being drawn on them. Surely this is some kind of message that there are E.T.’s living in our backyard, right? Either that or anytime you give M. a crayon or pen and a piece of paper, she draws these cute little guys and tells us what people she wants to send them to.
Interesting that these two pieces hit the Internets today. First, Joe Posnanski writes about autographs, mentioning how he sent letters to players and teams as a kid. Then, former player Doug Glanville writes in the New York Times about cleaning out his closet of some fan mail left over from his playing days. Apparently Glanville is a really sharp and cool guy. Who knew?
I totally spent my summers in the early 80s sending baseball letters to players, with their cards and SASEs included, and to teams hoping for autographs, stickers, pocket schedules, and any other freebies they were willing to send my way.