I’m not the soccer fan I once was. That’s not because I like soccer any less, but rather because I just have a harder time squeezing it into my schedule. Which is kind of a shame because this is the glory age for American soccer fans. When I first began following European soccer after the 1994 World Cup, viewing options were extremely limited. ESPN would show a few Champions League games each year, sometimes just the final.
It’s funny how things always come back on the Internet. I guess it’s a function of there being thousands of websites seeking page views that makes every trend, fad, or other pop culture moment/icon get a second or third look. For example, I’ve read three long article in recent weeks about Don Johnson, who is apparently a thing again. If you were a fan of him in his Miami Vice days, I suggest hunting down some of the articles.
Our first full week of summer kicked off today. I was looking at the calendar last night and it sunk in how short summers are for kids these days. I remember getting out of school the week of Memorial Day most years and not going back until the day after Labor Day. A full three months to waste in swimming pools, on dusty Little League fields, in the backs on un-air conditioned cars, and watching bad reruns on TV.
Three quick hours this morning, apparently to satisfy the state of Indiana, and now M. and C. are finally done with school.1 It’s been a long few days, as the district we live in wrapped up their school year last Thursday. So while the neighbors have been swimming and going to parks, we’ve still been on a normal school schedule. Not anymore, though. As with the stomach bug hitting the house over Memorial Day, I hope the weather today isn’t an omen for the rest of the summer.
34-Ton Bat - Steve Rushin Here we have a book that is perfect for summer and browsing through while a baseball game buzzes in the background. Rushin tells a story of the history of baseball not through on the field actions, but rather through all the ephemera that is attached to the game. The development of uniforms, where nachos came from, how the modern bat industry came about, the man who kicked off the game day giveaway craze (and in the process made the Dodgers a Southern California institution), and on and on.
When we jumped into this owning a pleasure craft thing, we knew there would be a significant learning curve involved. Neither of us had spent more than a few seconds steering a powered craft on water. Neither of us is mechanically minded, meaning we can’t quickly diagnose and then fix problems. Then there’s the matter of educating ourselves while making sure everyone on board stays safe. Kind of takes the pleasure out of pleasure craft if you dwell on it.
As a young lad, my summers were split into two, roughly even, segments. The first half consisted of baseball and day camp at the YMCA. Once baseball season ended, usually in mid-July, my mom would ship me off to spend a month or so with my grandparents in central Kansas. Her parents were farmers. They could pick up three TV stations (on a good day). Their home was small and few items from my uncles’ childhoods remained.
How did your summer 2014 start off? Ours had highs and lows. Breakdown? You betcha! I’m hoping the way our weekend began was not an omen for the rest of the summer. L. and M. both woke up with stomach aches Friday. It was L.’s last day of school, with her big bike parade on the agenda, so I did not want to be stuck at home with one or two sick kids.
There are many good aspects to being in your 40s. In a lot of other ways, though, it bites the big one. I could write for pages and pages about the downsides to being 40+. Rather than bore you with stories about how my back always hurts, my crappy eyesight, my deteriorating hearing, etc. I thought I would share this less personal observation. I’m beginning to question how I dress. Only mildly, mind you.
I was back on the diamonds last night, watching a game in the county baseball tournament. It was your average 21-0, 5 inning blowout. WHS scored four runs on four hits, two walks, and three wild pitches in the first. Then they went down 1-2-3 in the second. I went from thinking it would be a blowout to wondering if EHS could keep it close. They couldn’t. Ten runs in the third, seven in the fourth, game over in a tidy 90 minutes.
A quick administrative note. It’s a very busy week here. As I’ve mentioned, this is L.’s final week of pre-school. Thus, I’m trying to cram a bunch of projects into my final (now) 14 or so hours without a kid to get in the way.1 As you would expect, we have a busy holiday weekend on the horizon. And I’m getting out and working for the first time since basketball ended Tuesday night.
Finally! I not only watched a Bond movie for the first time in ages, but I knocked out the most recent one. The same movie I nearly saw in the theaters upon its initial release 18 months ago. The same movie I nearly bought the day it was released on disk. The same movie that has been in my Netflix queue for months. Better late than never, right? I forget how I did these in the past, so forgive me if I’ve strayed from the format I’ve used before, or if it’s extra disjointed.
The Royals have officially reached the maddening stage with me. They had a nice road trip last week, winning four of seven games. With one exception, they continued to get solid pitching from the starters. Those guys just can not hit, though. As Joe Posnanski and others have written about many times, what is especially infuriating is that this franchise hasn’t hit since the Golden Era. It doesn’t make sense. Yes, Kauffman Stadium is not a great home run park.
A few things about a few things. After our endless winter, we finally got a blast of hot over the weekend. It pushed well into the 80s both days, with a healthy dose of humidity to make it feel a tad uncomfortable. I swore not to bitch about the heat after the months of cold… This is the Midwest, though. The high Friday is supposed to be down in the 50s.
Kickball season ended last night. St. P’s got a gutty two-run win over the team they got their first win over a week ago. They ended the season 3-4, but won three of their final four games. As with the first game, last night was not without controversy. There were a series of contested calls involving foul balls late in the game. The OL coaches and parents were complaining especially loudly about two calls in the last inning.
Worlds collide to make the first post of the week an easy-to-name one. First, a few words about Naadir Tharpe leaving the Jayhawks basketball program. I felt sorry for Naadir all season. He was clearly miscast as a primary point guard for a national championship contending caliber team. But, thanks to several misses on the recruiting trail by Bill Self1, the job was his. And despite his obvious limitations, people looked back at his performance against Michigan a year earlier, when he played wonderfully, and expected him to be a step up from the always wild ride that was Elijah Johnson’s year at the point.
Just about everything Joe Posnanski writes is good. We’re luck that so much of it is great, too. He’s written many times about his hero, Duane Kuiper, over the years. His latest effort, centered around a trip to San Francisco for Kuiper’s bobblehead day, is one of his best ever. ...And I have seen my friends crushed after finally meeting the sports star at the center of their childhood, and this is where I'm lucky.
I was crazy productive on the book-reading tip in April! High Fidelity - Nick Hornby Another in my series of re-reads. Apparently I bought this while in Portland, Oregon for work, Halloween week 2002. How do I know this? Well, A) I remember, silly. But also, B) one of my Delta boarding passes from that trip, that I apparently used as my bookmark in my initial read, was still tucked inside.
Too many words about one kickball game. Man, what a kickball game last night! It was a highly emotional game as we traveled to the school where S. and her entire family attended grade and middle school, OL.1 St. P’s was 0-3 and badly wanted to put a whole game together. They had tended to do well early then blow leads late. Things started well. They were up 11-6 after two innings, and 16-13 after four.
Way, way back I wrote, rather brilliantly I think, that being the parent of a two-year-old is a constant reminder that you are an utter failure. Those little beasts are just constantly challenging you, and often by the end of the day, you’re at your wits' ends and barely clinging to your sanity. The bad thing is those trying moments never really go away, they just come from different angles and although not the constant barrage of toddler-dom, are sometimes even more stressful as your kids get older.
We’re nearly a third of the way through the year. There’s already been some great music. Since my year-end focus is always on singles, I thought I would use this opportunity to share some of my favorite albums of the first four months of the year. I’ll try to repeat this again in the fall. Lost In The Dream - The War On Drugs Ahh the breakup album. I do love them, when done well.
Trees are budding out, lawns are greening up, mowers are being pulled out, allergies are popping up, and I’ve already got the first sunburn of the year. Spring, at long last, has truly sprung.1 Which brings the annual wardrobe reevaluation, pitching aside shirts that have survived a couple of summers and are worse for the wear, or that I’m just no longer fond of, and going through the fun process of replacing them.
Most of us have thought, at some point, that we could sway someone with different political views to our side if we just presented them with cold, hard facts showing that our view was correct. Turns out even when the numbers support your argument, you are unlikely to change the opinion of someone from the other side. Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test.
C., L., and I were at Target yesterday wasting time during M.’s kickball practice. The girls were looking through the toy aisles and came to a large, empty section that should have held all the toys related to Frozen. There were a couple Baby Anna dolls, but the rest of the area was barren. C. asked why it was so empty and I said I guessed the Frozen toys were still really popular.
This is so great in so many ways. The Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team will be hosting a Seinfeld night on July 5, the 25th anniversary of the “Seinfeld Chronicles,” the original name for “Seinfeld.” They’ve put some thought into this. Activities will include: MCU Park will known as Vandelay Industries Park for one night only. Mailmen in uniform get to throw out a ceremonial first pitch ("Hello Newman!
Three large pieces of news. Well, maybe not to everyone. But enough to justify a new post. First, C., after nearly a year of being close, decided she was ready to ride a bike without training wheels over the weekend. Twice last summer she was on the verge of staying on two wheels full-time, but each time she went back to her bike with training wheels. She’s complained for some time about her training wheel bike.
The name Zander Hollander may not mean much to the majority of my readers. But for some of us, mostly men who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s loving sports, he played a huge role in our formative years as sports fans. Mr. Hollander, who was the creative force behind the Complete Handbook series, died last week at the age of 91. One of the few splurge purchases I was allowed to make when I was young, and my parents were short on cash, was the occasional book from the Scholastic book flyers that came home from school.
Another quick one before the weekend begins. A couple sites have linked to this modern, design-based review of the Sony Walkman. It focuses on form rather than function, but is still interesting to read/look at. Like the iPod, the Walkman isn’t truly the first of its kind. There was a cassette player before it called the Stereobelt. It was big, ugly, expensive and only lived on as a patent. What the Walkman did was make the idea of a portable cassette player into a marketable, attractive consumer product.
Tuesday night I did something I haven’t done in years. I took out a baseball scorebook I had stashed away1 and kept score for a game I watched on TV. I keep score a few times a year for baseball and softball games that I’m covering for the paper. But I can’t recall the last time I decided to keep score for a game I was watching from home. It’s one thing to do it when I need all the details for a story and box score that I will submit to be published with my name attached.
A bit behind thanks to our travels and visitors last week. But I have to offer up some MLB predictions. First, though, I must link to this fine story about the 25th anniversary of Major League. It arrived during that brief glut of baseball movies in the late 1980s.1 You can argue it is the best. I’m more of a Bull Durham guy, but Major League isn’t far behind. I did not know this: