Friday, March 27, 2020
youtu.be/6i-fiRgbp… “The Rising” - Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band It’s a big new music week. I’m a few songs into my first pass at the new Pearl Jam album. There are at least four more new albums that require my attention today. So just a video today, and something to hopefully give a little hope that things will get better.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
I find myself bouncing between hope and despair quite often these days. The numbers from Italy and Spain are so staggering, and our country’s reaction so inept, that it is difficult not to live in great fear of what comes next. But I also know that despite all the issues we have had in preparing for this, America tends to do pretty well at crisis once we can get moving in the right direction.
Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Chart Week: March 24, 1984 Song: “They Don’t Know” - Tracey Ullman Chart Position: #30, 5th week on the chart. Peaked at #8 for two weeks in April/May. It’s been a minute or two since I’ve done one of these. Part of that is because my AT40 workflow has changed. My normal, weekday routine is to turn on the iHeart Radio Classic American Top 40 station while making breakfast, eating lunch, and other moments during the day when I am in the kitchen alone.
Monday, March 23, 2020
Kudos to ESPN and CBS for dropping some classic college basketball games on us to help pass time. I’ve recorded every KU game that has been on so far. I’ve watched a few minutes of the triple overtime Oklahoma game from 2016 and the 2007 Big 12 tournament championship game. In anticipation of Sunday’s airing of the 2008 national championship game, I fired up the YouTubes Saturday and watched that year’s national semifinal against North Carolina.
Saturday, March 21, 2020
Our first week of home schooling/working is in the books. The girls all did about as well as we could have hoped. They’re bored, bummed they are not seeing their friends, and it can be a struggle to get them out of their rooms. But so far, so good, for the most part. M was scheduled to have her first in-car driving lesson today. We were a little surprised the company didn’t cancel appointments, so we went ahead and cancelled it on our own.
Friday, March 20, 2020
There is so much information about Covid–19 out there right now it is easy to get overwhelmed. Especially when the news is bad, as was the case earlier this week with the release of a British study that suggested the strategies the national governments of both the UK and US were taking would simply push the flood of sick people out until late this year or early next year. The situation is fluid, though, as everyone seems to be saying.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Shit was real this week. Let’s go ahead and call it the worst week ever and hope that next week doesn’t immediately grab that title away. The only bright spot is my new music playlist is absolutely bursting with great tracks right now. So another extra large edition for today. Take a few moments to chill out and listen to some good tunes. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “The Garden” - Briston Maroney I shared this with a brother-in-music earlier this week and his summation was, “That slaps.
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
I’m not sure if these posts are useful or interesting. But I feel like I need both an outlet and a way to document this bleak moment in history. I’ve probably read too many post-apocalyptic novels where some artifact of an earlier age is discovered and helps explain how the new world came to be and am angling to leave my own artifact. If you’re reading this from a Covid-free future, hello!
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
The strangeness continues. My last trip to the gym was last Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I was too busy being glued to the TV to run across the street to get a workout in. By Saturday I thought it best to avoid the gym. You can see my gym’s parking lot from our house, and over the past five days I’ve watched the crowds there get smaller each day. I have a friend who is a workout fiend and I still saw her car over there yesterday.
Monday, March 16, 2020
My normal Monday posts are summaries of what happened over the weekend, mostly revolving around sports. So what to do when there were no new sports to watch? I did watch some of (and recorded the entire) replay of the Kansas-Dayton game from last November. That was such a great game and it would have been fun if those teams had met again, either in Atlanta or on the road there, to see how they matched up with four months of growth.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
youtu.be/TPpoJGYlW… I thought this was a very informative video. I’ve heard many people, including some of our girls’ teachers, share explanations for why diseases often come from Asia that just seemed wrong. This explains why the jump from wildlife to humans so often takes place in Asia.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Saturday M and I were scheduled to work at a local food pantry as part of her service hours commitment. Late last week I kept checking the pantry’s website and saw no changes in the schedule and did not receive a cancellation from the volunteer coordinator, so we got up early and headed down. When we volunteered there in December the streets around the pantry were completely filled with parked cars well before the pantry opened.
Friday, March 13, 2020
And then life got even crazier… I suppose this is the second in what will be an on-going series sharing my thoughts and observations on the most insane era of my lifetime. I’ll work a little out of order to get caught up. First, my girls are all out of school. Cathedral was scheduled to be off today for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.[1] The parade was cancelled so it’s just a day off for high schoolers.
Friday, March 13, 2020
youtu.be/I52eefwAK… “Don’t Dream It’s Over” - Crowded House This song has been going through my mind the last 36 hours or so. Granted, it’s always in my head since it is my favorite song ever. But I keep thinking of how it was used in the 1994 adaptation of The Stand. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere near what Captain Trips did to Stephen King’s mythical, late 70s US, but there is certainly madness about.
Thursday, March 12, 2020
Below are some collected thoughts on what is going on with COVID–19. I’m not going to promise they are coherent or all that intelligent. I’m trying to get them into text and online quickly, so I may contradict myself or miss some glaring flaws in logic. My apologies if it goes off the rails anywhere. Wednesday was the craziest damn day I can remember since, perhaps, September 11, 2001. While the causes and immediate effects of each day were dramatically different, both are ones that will be seared into my memory.
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
An Honorable Man - Paul Vidich I’m on a bit of a Cold War kick right now; I believe reading about Chernobyl kicked it off. This is the first of several Cold War espionage thrillers I’m working my way through. It takes place in Washington 1953, in the midst of the Korean War and as the McCarthy hearings are getting ramped up. George Mueller is a CIA agent who is thoroughly burnt out.
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
March is the time to relive both the glories and horrors of NCAA tournaments past. This excellent piece of speculative sports history brought back some bad memories. But it was also a very enjoyable read. What If Ben Affleck Had Stayed on the Kansas Basketball Team in ‘The Way Back’?
Monday, March 9, 2020
About a month ago, my KU buddies I text with daily and I had a lengthy exchange fearing what was ahead of us. The conversation went something like, “I’m not sure if we can win the Big 12, but we need Baylor to lose to someone so they don’t go 18–0.” At that point the Bears were rolling. They had waxed Tech in Lubbock and KU in Lawrence and, a close game here or there excepted, seemed like no one was going to touch them.
Friday, March 6, 2020
It’s another one of those all-Aussie weeks. With KU basketball about to get hammered by the NCAA and our country as toxic as it has ever been, I’m thinking about talking S into scrapping our lives here and moving to Australia so I can sit on the beach, listen to great music, and wait for COVID–19 to wipe out the world. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Sandwiches” - Gordi. A gorgeous song, an ode to Sophie Payten’s late grandmother.
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
I’m a failure as a blogger. Somehow I let the 40th anniversary of The Miracle on Ice pass without writing or sharing anything about it. Seriously, the biggest sports moment in the first 10–15 years of my life, and the event against which I have compared all other sports, and I don’t share a word? Weak. Here are two pieces I consumed the weekend of the anniversary. First is E.M. Swift’s Sports Illustrated piece for the 1980 Sportsmen of the Year issue.
Tuesday, March 3, 2020
Media In the bleak mid-winter, I watched quite a bit of televised entertainment products. Here are a lot of words about those movies and shows. The Two Popes This movie made me understand why some people get so frustrated with Hollywood. While it is a charming and hopeful look at the relationship between the current pope and his predecessor, as I was watching it I knew it was playing fast and loose with some of the history between those men.
Monday, March 2, 2020
We made it! The worst two months of the year are in the books! I think it’s funny that that is still my mentality. This is my 17th winter in Indiana and my internal clock still thinks that spring begins when the calendar turns to March. You would think those 17 years would have beaten that Great Plains state mentality out of me. Spring doesn’t come to Indiana until well into April.
Friday, February 28, 2020
Still a lot of new music to share. I’m also developing a glut of older songs to include when time allows. With that in mind, I’m going to expand these a little, sharing more like 5–7 songs each week instead of 4–5. Let’s hope Spotify/Wordpress cooperate this week. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Do You Understand?” - En Attendant Ana I had been really digging this track for a couple weeks when I finally decided to look up the band.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
We’ve gone through a series of firsts in recent days. Sunday M and I knocked out two firsts together. She recently told us that she would like to try playing tennis. As in for her high school, not just for fun or as part of some open rec league. At first S and I were concerned: M took some lessons five or six years ago, but they were very basic, she did not show any particular aptitude for the sport, and other than wacking balls with her sisters in the driveway, she has never actually played tennis.
Monday, February 24, 2020
It’s been awhile since KU played a huge Big 12 game. The game at Texas Tech two years ago, when the Jayhawks clinched their 14th straight conference title was a big game. ESPN Gameday was in town, Tech had beaten KU in Lawrence a month earlier. But that game didn’t feel massive because A) KU was in first place coming into the game B) a loss would only drop them into a tie for first and C) there were still two games to play and KU had a scheduling advantage over that stretch.
Friday, February 21, 2020
A sudden backup of good, new songs means an extra-full playlist this week. (Spotify is being a bitch today, so just a link rather than embed.) https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1EX994vPAnfwchd6GKVQ4f?si=NvBVzSZ5S5ONAJ5HzpkVBg “What It Is” - Angel Olsen Olsen’s All Mirrors album got tremendous critical praise last year, but never resonated with me. I heard this song a couple weeks ago and kicked myself for not giving the album more listens so I could take in this track’s brilliance.
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
Chart Week: February 11, 1984 Song: “I Still Can’t Get Over Loving You” - Ray Parker, Jr. Chart Position: #16, 14th week on the chart. Peaked at #12 the week of February 4. Ray Parker Jr. had a hell of a career. Before he formed his first band, he was in the touring bands for the Spinners, Stevie Wonder, and Barry White. Later he worked with The Carpenters, Rufus and Chaka Khan, The Supremes, Aretha Franklin, Deniece Williams, Bill Withers, The Temptations, Boz Skaggs, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, LaToya Jackson, and New Edition.
Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Time for some of my famous half-assed sports thoughts! NBA ASG Man, I am mad at myself for not paying more attention to Sunday’s All Star Game. I blame L. I told her the game was on and she wasn’t interested, so we watched other things. I turned it on for the last 30 seconds of the first half then switched away, got distracted by a book and emptying the dishwasher, and forgot about it until it was over.
Friday, February 14, 2020
youtu.be/1YlSa1wJK… “Love Is In The Air” - Stella Donnelly covering John Paul Young. OH. MY. GOODNESS. I just ran across this, which is about the most delightful thing I’ve come across in ages. A thoroughly wonderful cover of John Paul Young’s 1978 AM pop radio hit “Love Is In The Air” by Australian artist Stella Donnelly. She looks like she’s having so much fun in this performance, which is what sells it for me.
Friday, February 14, 2020
open.spotify.com/playlist/…–2kWaPLJEHfQ A strange weekend in our house. St. P’s always has a four-day weekend surrounding President’s Day. This year is no different. However, CHS does not take any days off. So while C and L get to sleep in today and Monday, M has a normal schedule. It is messing with my head a little for some reason. It being Valentine’s Day, I thought I’d share songs about love. Some about the good side of love, some about the dark side.