You may have noticed I stopped posting my monthly listening stats a year ago. Or maybe you didn’t. I’m not sure why, I just decided it wasn’t necessary. I will not be skipping the annual updates, however. Here’s a look at what Last.fm says I listened to most in 2023, and since I began logging my music with them in 2005
2023 Pearl Jam - 236 The National - 201 Ratboy - 186 The War on Drugs - 166 Bully - 148 boygenius - 126 Frightened Rabbit - 125 Middle Kids - 124 The Gaslight Anthem - 124 The Rural Alberta Advantage - 110 All Time Frightened Rabbit finally knocked out of the top spot.
I planned on taking most of this week off from blogging. But Tuesday’s bizarre shitshow of a football game that was the Guaranteed Rate Bowl[1] required me to share a few words about the mighty Kansas Jayhawks winning nine games for the first time since the 2007 season. I mean, I was up until 1:45 AM, and then struggled to sleep, because of this stupid game and its aftermath. I’m going to have some thoughts.
Chart Week: December 16, 2023 Song: “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” - Darlene Love Chart Position: #21. Current all-time high is #15 the week of January 7, 2023.
I heard the wonderful tidbit this post is built around earlier this year on an AT40 from December 1984. It was one of Casey’s “Special Reports,” music trivia blurbs not related to the current countdown that were occasionally inserted between songs. I copied down the details, wondering if there was some way I could work it into an RFTS post.
As tends to happen in these pre-holiday weeks, time has gotten away from me a bit. I can’t believe it is Thursday and I still haven’t written about KU’s win in Bloomington last Saturday. Turns it was good to put it off as now I can write about football signing day, too.
KU-IU Hoops This game was played at the same time as L’s JV game Saturday. Actually they started a few minutes earlier in B-town, so I knew the Jayhawks were down 15–6 or whatever early.
A quick, one-game summary to wrap up the first half of the season.
Last night CHS took on HSE, ranked #2 in class 4A. HSE has a junior who is committed to IU and just passed the 1000 career points mark last week. They also have a sophomore who already has multiple D1 offers and was taking visits to big-time schools as a freshman. A very good program from a huge suburban district.
It seems like most Decembers recently I write something like “Well, it wasn’t a great year for music…” as I prepare to share a bunch of songs I both liked and listened to a lot. Something was different this year, though. According to Last.fm, I listened to about 15% less music in 2023 compared to 2022, and my least music since 2015. I’m not sure what caused that decline, whether it was changes in me/my habits, a quirk in how I was listening, or something specific about this year’s music.
Our weekend was pretty boring, other than a bunch of basketball Saturday, so I’m changing things up for this week’s posts. I’ll begin by recapping L’s hoops then get to some Jayhawk Talk later this week.
In our last volume in this series, I detailed a pretty rough week for L. This post will have a decidedly better vibe and includes another milestone in her young career. Thursday CHS hosted New Palestine.
To get your pre-Christmas week started right, I put together a playlist of seldom played, (mostly) non-traditional Christmas songs to counter all the usual stuff you’re hearing at the mall, in your car, on TV, and in your offices/homes. Enjoy roughly 40 minutes of cool Yuletide tunes.
open.spotify.com/playlist/…
“Main Title” - John Debney 2003. M and I sing the “Bop-bop bop-bop-bop” line at each other often.
“Sleigh Ride” - The Ventures 1965.
In preparation for next week’s unveiling of my Favorite Songs of 2023, a review of my past favorites. This playlist begins with 2004 and includes co-favorite Songs of the Year for 2017 and 2022.
Also below are links to my annual Favorite Songs posts. 2009’s list has been, somehow, lost to time. 2011 was the year I was stupidly using Squarespace and lost six months of posts when I left that platform.
A good, old fashioned notes dump like the old days.
CHS Lockdown There was a lockdown for about an hour at Cathedral yesterday. Apparently someone called 911 claiming to be inside the school with a gun. About a million cops showed up and no person with a gun was ever found. We live in wonderful times, friends. Our girls seemed more annoyed that they had to stay and finish the day after the all-clear than worried/scared by the threat.
A kind of bizarre and not very successful week for L on the court, with one very notable exception.
Tuesday CHS played Zionsville, where a travel teammate goes to school. L came out firing early, hoisting six 3-pointers in the first half. She missed them all, but was fouled on one and hit two-of-three free throws. She also had 2 rebounds, an assist, three steals, and no turnovers in the first half.
We had a super-busy Saturday that featured a lot of L’s for our family. Fortunately, for me, the one dub was a big one.
Throwing hoops and real life together, our family went 1–7 for the day.
Cathedral lost JV and varsity games. More on that tomorrow.
S’s Hoosiers lost to Auburn.
M’s previously undefeated Bearcats lost to Xavier.
The Pacers lost to the Lakers in the IST championship game.
Looking at the calendar, this may be the last regular FP of the calendar year. Next week will be a set-up piece for my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist, which will drop the following week. I plan on a non-traditional holiday music playlist for sometime the week before Christmas. Then I will most likely take the final Friday of 2023 off.
Even this isn’t going to be your standard playlist, though.
Please Report Your Bug Here - Josh Riedel This was my Florida Trip book about a month ago. It is framed as a modern take on the workplace novel, which I didn’t know was a thing. I know there are workplace shows. I guess that means it makes sense for there to be a whole swath of novels that relate to our relationships with our jobs then, too. This focuses on a 2010-ish San Francisco start-up that has created an insanely popular dating app that is about to get snatched up by a Big Tech company.
Two games last week. One of them was the biggest night of L’s young career.
Tuesday we played Ben Davis, a west-side of Indianapolis school that is the second-biggest in the state.[1] Their athletic program is generally quite good. Their football team just won the 6A state title and their boys basketball team was undefeated 4A state champs in March. The girls hoops program made it to semi-state last season. Back in the day - 2000–2009 - they won four state titles in ten years, two of those undefeated seasons, and in 2009 were crowned national champions by USA Today.
Jayhawk Talk What a game Friday night between #5 KU and #4 UConn! Since this is rolled into a Weekend Notes post, I’ll chop my thoughts up into chunks tied to the four quarters of the game. Opening tip to 10:00: This is awesome! The Jayhawks are unbeatable! UConn are frauds! The crowd is AMAZING! Why is Jason Sudeikis hanging out with Sue Bird?
10:00 to Halftime: OK, that could have ended better, but we still have a seven-point lead.
Another pretty light month. Movies, Shows, etc Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland An amazing five-part documentary about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is a balance of archival footage and interviews with people who lived through the worst years of the conflict. One of the most moving aspects of the series was seeing these people interviewed in the 2020s and then again in newsreels from 30 or 40 years ago, in a moment of grief when a loved one had been killed.
We’ve reached December, the month when these playlists can get a little squirrelly. There’s less new music to begin with. I’m listening to holiday music much of the day. I’m also focused on my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist. This year has the added element of me just reading a book about Eighties music, and being neck-deep in a book about Nineties music. I could easily just play songs pulled from those books this week.
Time to catch up with L’s exploits on the hardwood.
Two Fridays ago we traveled to North Vernon, IN, about 90 minutes south, nearly all the way to Louisville. The varsity team was playing the #14 team in the state, which features a senior who signed with Michigan State earlier this month. She averaged 22 & 12 as a junior and is ranked in the top 60 in the country. We weren’t sure if she was the one good player down there, or just a sign of a good program, so had no idea what to expect from their JV squad.
For the first time in three years we were home for Thanksgiving week. We packed a lot in, and it deserves a wide-ranging, extra-long breakdown.
College Visitor I picked M up Tuesday around noon after her last scheduled class of the week. We grabbed lunch at Hangover Easy, a place just off campus I’ve wanted to try just because of their shirts. It was solid, but I couldn’t find any shirts for sale.
Chart Week: November 14, 1981 Song: “Never Too Much” - Luther Vandross Chart Position: #37, 6th week on the chart, first week in the Top 40. Peaked at #33 for two weeks.
Happy Thanksgiving week to you all! A quick entry based on a Casey anecdote about how a pop artist paid the bills before he started making hits of his own.
The Voice of a Generation. The Velvet Voice.
Kind of a chill weekend, with the holiday ahead of us. M does not come home until Tuesday so it was the usual crew around the house. L had a game Friday, more on that later. The weather was nice, so S and I did some yard work at a sister’s house Sunday. And a fair amount of football, the biggest game being a certain showdown in a certain state when a certain blogger attended college.
open.spotify.com/playlist/…
“Beaming” - The Treasures of Mexico What a glorious piece of jangle pop this is, harkening back to the mid-80s college rock scene.
“What Now” - Brittany Howard Howard bringing the funk to her blues. If you don’t like this, stop reading these posts.
“Beautiful Sky” - Semisonic featuring Jim James I gave Semisonic’s new album a listen when it came out. Their advance singles were all the best songs, with this one exception, a perfectly named track.
Without going back and reading a bunch of them, I’m assuming my Champions Classic posts have a similar theme every year: that wasn’t pretty basketball. Most years it is at least competitive, but despite the big-time matchup, it rarely has the same juice as a March tournament game.
Chalk that up for another year, with #1 KU outlasting Kentucky by five last night.
It was a game of swings.
KU opened up ahead 8–0 then 11–3.
As promised, I have a big batch of articles to share. I read most of these while on our trip last weekend, thus on my Kindle, which meant I couldn’t clip pull quotes as I read. With a couple exceptions, you’ll just have to trust me that these are worth your time. Most are pretty lengthy, so if you have travels planned for next week, or just need some distractions to get away from “loved ones” who rub you the wrong way, these could be ideal.
It was Adult Fall Break time for S and me, the first time we’ve done this in a couple years. This was for a medical conference, the first time we’ve done that since before Covid. We spent Thursday through Sunday in Clearwater Beach, FL, staying right on the beach. Like in a hotel, not in a tent or something.
The weather was perfect, low 80s each day. Someone told us it was a little warmer than usual for this time of year.
Chart Week: November 5, 1983 Song: “Automatic Man” - Michael Sembello Chart Position: #34, 7th week on the chart. This was the song’s peak.
A quick RFTS to fill the place of the Friday Playlist as we are taking an adult fall break for the next few days.
The 100th entry in this series is getting very close. I’ve been reading through most of the previous posts, both to refresh my memory and to look for trends.
Welcome to the first post in a new, recurring series in these parts. L started her high school basketball career Tuesday night, and I think that deserves a clearly identified set of entries to document her adventures.
The season opener was against the Jesuit school not too far from our house, BPHS. We have good friends who have a son who goes there and it was fun to see him working as a team manager when we walked in.
The Kennedy Men - Laurence Leamer After about a month of reading, split into sections, I knocked out my Big Book for the fall. A neighbor passed this to me over the summer. We were sitting on the porch having some drinks and somehow books or the Kennedys or something along those lines came up and she mentioned she had read this book and loved it. She offered it to me.
Not a bad weekend at all. The weather was wonderful, and looks to remain that way for a few more days, then seasonably warm after that. Changing the clocks always sucks. And plenty of football, of course.
HS Football The Cathedral game was on TV so we were able to watch them get a relatively easy 20–3 sectional championship win over Lawrence North. Their defense was great and their running back went for over 260 yards.