Friday, December 31, 2021
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a normal Friday playlist. Might as well wrap up 2020 by getting back into the routine of sharing good music with friends on Fridays. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Maelstrom” - Melts I’ve been sitting on this one for awhile. Turns out it is perfect to save for New Year’s Eve, as it is about a getting caught in times of turmoil and being powerless to resist. I can’t think of a better analogy for the past few years.
Thursday, December 30, 2021
KU has entered the silly season. Three-straight scheduled games either cancelled or postponed because of Covid issues with their opponent. The next regularly scheduled game is in jeopardy, too, although the new quarantine rules may save it. Odds are at least the first half of January will continue to be crazy, and perhaps only a quickly declining Omicron wave will keep the entire conference season from being a mess. In place of two of those games, KU scrambled to get new opponents.
Tuesday, December 28, 2021
Only about six weeks behind on these, no big deal. If you got a gift card for Christmas maybe you’ll find something in here to use it on. The Last Tourist - Olen Steinhauer My latest entry from a recent list of best espionage novels. I knew this came from a series, but it got tremendous reviews so I figured it could stand on its own. It was only after I finished it that I saw I had read the first book in the series nine years ago.
Monday, December 27, 2021
It is days like this you can’t help but wonder if climate change is a good thing. I’m sitting on our back porch, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, at 10:39 AM on December 27 and feeling completely comfortable. It feels like a May morning. Hell, it wasn’t that much warmer than this around sunrise in Hawaii. We will obviously pay for this at some point. Tomorrow we are supposed to have heavy rain all day and a slow decline until a low in the teens Monday morning.
Thursday, December 23, 2021
KU Hoops Well, I was hoping to post another Jayhawk Talk entry this week. I was looking forward to seeing how KU played three days after struggling to put away a Stephen F. Austin team that exposed some of their deficiencies. Alas, Colorado had some players test positive, the game got wiped from the schedule, and the Christmas break begins early for the Jayhawks. Which leaves the big KU hoops news of the week the announcement that KU will play Indiana the next two years.
Monday, December 20, 2021
Today is a strange day in our house. M and C wrapped up finals on Friday, so (as I begin this in the morning) both are still in a deep sleep. Hell, C probably finally went to bed somewhere in the 2–3 AM range. L, on the other hand, has class through Wednesday. So the two of us were up at the normal time. That feels weird because it’s the first time we’ve had a schedule like this.
Thursday, December 16, 2021
We’ve made it to another year-end list of my favorite songs of the past twelve (-ish) months. Usually I start working on these rankings in early October. This year I didn’t put any real work into it until after we returned from Hawaii on December 1. Some of that was because my working list was about as tight as it has ever been. I don’t know that it ever got over 40–42 songs, and I was able to trim many songs before I began giving it serious consideration.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Over the weekend I knocked out all of The Beatles: Get Back. A few observations and thoughts about Peter Jackson’s nearly eight-hour documentary of the January 1969 Beatles studio sessions. I’m pretty sure I saw the original movie that was made from the film shot at those sessions, Let It Be, years ago. When I first saw the trailer for Get Back last fall, I was incredibly excited as it seemed to upend the narrative Let It Be had created: that the Beatles constantly bickered and battled through those sessions.
Monday, December 13, 2021
After a week of fun buildup, Kansas and Missouri finally took the floor against each other Saturday for the first time in nearly a decade. The result felt a bit empty, although the process was a lot of fun for us Kansas fans. The Jayhawks’ 102–65 win was the third-largest margin of victory in series history. That wasn’t a surprise. From the Vegas gambling line (starting at KU minus–25!!!) to every article I read, podcast I listened to, and discussion I was in last week, universal opinion was that KU would win easily.
Friday, December 10, 2021
A few links to kick off your weekend. ‘Wrong team won both days’: Flashback to epic finale of KU-Mizzou basketball in 2012 Kansas and Missouri renew their basketball rivalry in Lawrence tomorrow. This is a good summary of how they ended their time as conference rivals almost ten years ago. For the record: Thomas Robinson’s block was 100% clean. Now the foul that put Tyshawn Taylor at the line to hit the winning free throws?
Friday, December 10, 2021
Like the good little elf that I am, I’ve been hard at work on my Favorite Songs of the Year list since we returned from Hawaii. My goal is to publish it the middle of next week. As has become tradition, I will offer this prelude: my favorite songs for each year since 2004. These are in chronological order, so Modest Mouse represents 2004, Waxahatchee represents 2020. Songs 14 and 15 in this list were co-songs of the year for 2017.
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Chart Week: December 10, 1977 Song: “Here You Come Again” - Dolly Parton Chart Position: #12, 9th week on the chart. Peaked at #3 for two weeks in January, 1978. This edition features another musician origin story.[1] I really like this one; hope you do, too. It is a tiny miracle that anyone becomes a recording star. There are, what, thousands of people out there with the same dream? Tens of thousands?
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
A couple flawed yet fairly easy wins after the Thanksgiving tournament for the Jayhawks. Now everyone can look ahead to Saturday’s game. Not me, though. Or at least not yet. The last three games have brought a very nice and surprising development: Christian Braun is good. Really good. He struggled so much in the opener against Michigan State that I think a lot of us kind of wrote him off as just being a role player again this year.
Monday, December 6, 2021
Movies and Shows Blondie - Apollo Theatre, Glasgow, 1979 This is AMAZING! Debbie Harry in her white-hot prime. The freaking drummer is insane, doing his best Keith Moon impression in his gold lamé suit. A The Bourne Identity The Bourne Supremacy The Bourne Ultimatum I hadn’t watched any of these since the third installment came out in 2007, when I watched all three in three days. I repeated that over three nights last month.
Monday, December 6, 2021
It seems like most of the family has re-acclimated to being in the eastern time zone, but our days are still all messed up. A full, five-day school week this week will surely get us back on track. Our holiday schedule is all out-of-whack from normal, though. The day after Thanksgiving is normally our decorating day. Since we were hiking through Waimea Canyon ten days ago, that wasn’t possible. L and I got a bunch of the decorations out on the Friday before we left, placing them around the house as we listened to the Cathedral semi-state game on the radio.
Friday, December 3, 2021
It will take me another week to get back into the swing of things musically, so a couple videos to share today. youtu.be/YAbYsxd3A… “Hero Takes a Fall” - The Bangles I read this wonderful interview with Susanna Hoffs this week. In it she said this was the song through which Prince first came to know their music. Which, of course, led to “Manic Monday,” the song that thrust The Bangles into the mainstream.
Thursday, December 2, 2021
Strap yourselves in for my mega-account of our trip to Hawaii! At around 3000 words, it might take you awhile to get through it. After a long day of travel and another of recovery, I’m hoping today (Thursday, Dec. 2) feels a little normal. Weird things happen when you travel nearly 9000 miles in less than a week. Our Thanksgiving trip to Kauai was, quite simply, amazing. S and I have been super fortunate to have taken some pretty great trips in our lives together.
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
November 2021 A new album by my favorite band, a vacation, and Spotify and Last.fm maybe not syncing up properly at the moment makes for a pretty boring list. The War on Drugs - 142 Sam Fender - 20 Bruce Springsteen - 15 Trace Mountains - 13 U2 - 13 Complete stats available at my Last.fm page.
Monday, November 22, 2021
Our house smells different this morning. Some of that is a real change in the aromatics that are spread around, some of it is the smell of anticipation. As we begin a Thanksgiving week unlike any other in our family’s history, some notes from the weekend. Friday was semi state for high school football in Indiana. Cathedral played a school from down near Louisville that only advanced because their regionals opponent, who had beaten them by 30 in the regular season, was missing their starting quarterback and running back.
Friday, November 19, 2021
There was no time for a full Friday Playlist, but there is time for some words about the Jayhawks. Thursday’s game against Stony Brook was about what you expect this time of year. KU - especially David McCormack - was sloppy early; they struggled to guard a smaller, faster team; and generally muddled through the first 20–25 minutes. Then Ochai Agbaji caught fire and scored 10 straight points, the rest of the team relaxed, and a 20+ point run put the game away.
Friday, November 19, 2021
youtu.be/L65NNh6vJ… “Plowed” - Sponge No time for a full playlist this week, so I did the thing where I randomly scroll through my library and pick something that pops up. This was the third song I landed on, and it seemed appropriate since I heard an unplugged version of it on Sirius yesterday. This is not a song that sounds super cool when done acoustically. Probably because the original was so good.
Thursday, November 18, 2021
With L done with hoops for the time being, I figured I should still get out and watch some live basketball. Tuesday I went to my first high school game in a long time. C has a classmate that made the varsity team (girl also made varsity soccer as a freshman, so obviously she’s a stud). A few of the freshmen girls wanted to go and support her so I took C.
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr When you win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as Doerr did for his wonderful All The Light That We Cannot See, it can be a bitch to follow it up. So why not build a story around five main characters who occupy 700 years of time? If nothing else, the sheer scope of the book will make it stand out. There is no good way to summarize this book.
Monday, November 15, 2021
Holy shit! There aren’t a lot of big, important, communal memories surrounding Kansas football. For those of us who were in school in the early 90’s, there was the Monte Cozzens game, when KU beat Oklahoma. For the few of us who stuck it out through the cold, there was the Tony Sands game. The Mangino era brought an epic win over Nebraska, an Orange Bowl victory, and a game-winning, fourth down play against Missouri in the snow.
Sunday, November 14, 2021
I’m not sure how I had never heard this story before. Nearly a decade before Pearl Harbor, the American military ran a series of war games in which an attacking force wiped out the forces sheltered at Pearl by launching a sneak attack from the north on a Sunday morning. Which is exactly what the Japanese would do nine years later. Only the Navy decided the attack wasn’t fair and rather than learning from their failure, nullified the results.
Friday, November 12, 2021
open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Luna Moth” - Lola in Slacks Kind of a terrible band name. But this song cooks, so I’ll allow it. “When This Gets Out” - The Persian Leaps Rock ‘n’ roll, bitches! These guys sound like an updated version of The Smithereens… “A Girl Like You” - The Smithereens …this song to be specific. “Oh My God” - Lula Wiles I’m currently reading a book about the effects that Amazon has had on our society.
Thursday, November 11, 2021
Chart Week: November 6, 1976 Song: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” - Gordon Lightfoot Chart Position: #3, 11th week on the chart. Peaked at #2 for two weeks. This entry is cheating a little bit, as I’ve written about this song before. However, I heard not one but two countdowns last weekend that included it, so I take that as a sign from the Music Gods that they want me to share it again.
Thursday, November 11, 2021
Another CYO basketball season is in the books. Thanks to a big win last week, with a guest coach on the bench, L’s team solidified itself as the solid middle of her league: they lost to each of the top three teams and beat each of the bottom three teams. Fourth place, bitches! Last Wednesday we played St J. This was my first game handling all of the coaching responsibilities with both of the usual coaches out-of-town.
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Today I begin a new series. After most KU basketball games, I will do a brief collection of thoughts.[1] My goal is to keep these in the 500-word range, although exceptional performances may require more than that. The season opener went from concerning to a snoozer. KU could not shake Michigan State early, but a 9–1 run to end the first half and Ochai Agbaji taking over in the second half made the last 10 minutes of the game kind of boring.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
KU fans have put in their time suffering through the bulk of another football season. College basketball has finally arrived! The Jayhawks will take on Michigan State at Madison Square Garden tonight to kick off the hoops season. I think this is going to be a very interesting and important year for KU. Like most of the college hoops world, the Jayhawks took advantage of the relaxed transfer/eligibility rules and plugged a number of holes on their roster.