Tuesday, November 30, 2010
As promised, and I’m sure you are all nervous with anticipation, some general thoughts and reflections and musings on my NaNoWriMo experience. First off, the 50,000 words came quite easily. I stuck close to the suggested daily word count, which worked for my rather open-ended story idea and daily schedule, but each time I sat down and focused on my story, I could pretty easily get 1000-1500 words knocked out in 30-45 minutes.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Wrapping up the weekend while watching the predictable destruction of the Colts by San Diego.1 First off, we had a happy and healthy Thanksgiving, and hope you did, too. We had 20 people in our home Thursday for dinner. I cooked two turkey breasts2, brought in a ham, and then added the usual trimmings. Other than that mad dash in the last hour to try to get everything cooked and warmed in one oven, I thought we pulled it off successfully.
Monday, November 22, 2010
It’s hoops season, bitches. One more week of half-assed posting while I write my “novel.” 40,000 words down; 10,000 to go. I hit a couple games in the county girls tournament last week. One was a blowout, as expected. It was 10-0 after a minute and never got closer. The other looked like a great match-up on paper. It was a dud. Both teams played like ass. The team that won has a lot of talent, but just play ugly.
Monday, November 15, 2010
A few Monday notes to kick off the week. Today I should cross over the halfway point in my NaNoWriMo project, keeping me exactly on schedule. Last night I got up to 24,491 words, which according to the stats-o-matic tracker on the NaNoWriMo site, would have me finishing one day early if I continue my pace. NFL. Who in the heck is the best team in the league? The answer was Pittsburgh coming into this week, and then New England made them look silly last night.
Monday, November 8, 2010
A few years ago, a friend of mine instituted a New Man Plan for the New Year. It was his clever name for the annual adjustment in eating and drinking habits, workout regimen, etc. most of us start January with. I’ve always liked that name, and use it anytime I’m making even minor changes in my life. It might be early, but I seem to have gone full-New Man Plan for November.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
I slowed down a little last month. Not much, though. The Shallows - What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains - Nicholas Carr. The internet and high tech are changing the way we access information. And anyone who spends even a little time surfing the net has stories about how their attention span seems to be shrinking, or how they can read something on their computer screen and have trouble retaining it afterwards.
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
The next installment in the AV Club’s look back at 90s music is up, this time focusing on my favorite band of the era, Pearl Jam. It’s a fair and comprehensive look at the band’s creative highpoint: 1992-1995. I still love them, and buy each new album as soon as it’s released. But there’s no doubting they’ve been, mostly, cruising along for 15 years without much heavy lifting. It is sobering to read through the comments and see the one that says, “My dad is a huge Pearl Jam fan…” Yikes!
Sunday, October 31, 2010
I’m going to try something new for the next 30 days. It’s actually something I wanted to do a year ago, but I got sidetracked in my three-month journey that was reading Infinite Jest. I’m finally going to give National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo to the kids) a shot. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is that anyone can write a novel, you just need a strict plan and lots of encouragement.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Much to my generation’s chagrin, Michael Jordan has not aged well. He came back one time too many, and when he finally left the league was a rather ordinary professional baller. Since his retirement, he’s had mixed success, at best, as an NBA executive. He offered a mean, bitter Hall of Fame induction speech. And he seems to be constantly cruising the party circuit with younger women. Kind of a dirty old man, not what we expected of the allegedly regal Jordan of his prime.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
I’ve had a draft sitting around for awhile that I was unsure whether to post or not. In fact, I think I have three different versions of it sitting on my hard drive. The New York Time’s Nicholas Kristof had a terrific story in last weekend’s Magazine about international philanthropy. Kristof was one of the people who worked hard to raise awareness of the Darfur genocide and continues to write about similar issues.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Even without a Colts game to suck up time, it was a solid sports weekend. I covered an opening round football playoff game Friday. It was a blowout, but the coach I spoke with seems like a good guy and is struggling to turn around his alma mater. It was interesting to listen in as he spoke to his team for nearly 20 minutes on the field after the game, laying out a plan for the offseason.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Let’s cross some more T’s and dot some more I’s. Or whatever. In other words, clearing out some of the junk in my head. High school football playoffs start tonight in Indiana. I’m assigned to what I expect to be a big blowout, with my team on the short end. Several of our teams have tough games in the first round, so there’s a decent chance this will be my last week covering football.
Friday, October 22, 2010
So does McSweeneys. Carving orange pumpkins sounds like a pretty fitting way to ring in the season. You know what else does? Performing an all-gourd reenactment of an episode of Diff'rent Strokes—specifically the one when Arnold and Dudley experience a disturbing brush with sexual molestation. Well, this shit just got real, didn't it? It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers
Thursday, October 21, 2010
It’s already Thursday and I’ve yet to post anything? Weird. I’ll blame the nice weather and the time we’ve been spending outside. Also, I’m contemplating a post about Turner Gill, but struggling with how/what to write. Trust me, there will be something about Turner here soon. In the meantime, here’s a fascinating article from a series at the Onion’s AV Club about 90s music. In this edition, the author examines the relationship between Axl Rose and Kurt Cobain during the period in which alternative rock rose to prominence.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Recently I picked up a copy of Def Leppard’s seminal 1983 album Pyromania. I had been waiting for years for it to show up in the iTunes or Amazon MP3 stores, to no avail. After hearing a couple songs in the pregame mix at a high school football game, I thought it was time to finally take the plunge and order the CD. This was a big deal. First, I don’t buy CDs anymore.
Monday, October 11, 2010
I’ve mentioned poor EHS several times when sharing my sports reporting exploits. They are the team that had A) a seven-year losing streak and B) have won only five games in the past decade. It was my week to draw the short straw1 and for the first time, I headed down to cover one of their games. It promised to be a long night. The previous week they played, and beat, the only school they’ve defeated in the past ten years.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
It’s tough for dads to be one of the girls. We go to the park; it’s me and the moms. We go to the Target, it’s me and the nannies. This is my reality. And it drives me nuts when people feel the need to make a big deal of it. This quote is from a recent Matt Villano column in the New York Times Magazine’s parenting section. Since NYT articles tend to disappear behind a log-in wall after a few days, the gist is a stay-at-home dad takes his daughter to a library event, and everyone makes a fuss over him being the only dad there.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
I was in the zone. I was crushing books, knocking them out at better than a book-a-week pace. Then I ran into a wall. I still got some things done last month. The 80-Yard Run: A Twenty-Week, Coast-to-Coast Quest for the Heart of High School Football - Theron Hopkins. A buddy who is deeply involved in high school football recommended this awhile back. The author takes a trip around the country over the course of a fall, each week profiling a different high school football program.
Monday, September 27, 2010
I’ve been busy working so far this fall, if you call getting out once a week busy. So if you’re interested in what I’ve been doing, plunge in for some navel-gazing. I’ve covered four football games, a county championship tennis match, and am set to cover both tennis and football again this week. Three of the four weeks I’ve covered football, I’ve followed the same team, WHS. They were expected to be quite good this year, but the first two games I saw they lost.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The Onion nails it. 1 in 5 Americans Believe Obama is a Cactus ”I don't care what he says or what his people say or what anybody else says," 48-year-old Kansas resident Jake Nolan told reporters. "The guy's a cactus, plain and simple. I mean, Christ, look at him."
Thursday, September 23, 2010
As I believe I mentioned before, I recently went through a bit of a David Lee Roth-era Van Halen phase. For a couple weeks their songs were in high rotation on my various digital music devices. That got me thinking. How would I rank the DLR songs? More to the point, what are my five favorite DLR songs?1 Purely subjective and subject to change, of course. “Runnin' With the Devil” - The first single that the band wrote, it was a minor hit.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
I remember the good old days, when September meant a new round of TV shows to be excited about. There would be a bevy of new comedies, some action shows (Air Wolf, The A Team), and maybe a drama that interested me. By November I likely would have only stuck with a couple of them, but for a TV freak like me, it was akin to Christmas morning, with each night bringing something new.
Friday, September 17, 2010
A quick update on the girls. M. is now a month into her real Catholic school experience. All continues to go well, although she is crankier in the morning than she was the first couple weeks. She has a BFF, and they’ve hosted each other for post-school playdates. Obviously a lot can change, but I keep thinking that my wife met her best friend when they were six or seven. It may be someone else, but there’s always the chance that someone in M.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
If I’ve learned one thing following the Colts over the past seven seasons, it’s that you don’t overreact to how they look in the preseason. They’re a well-oiled machine and will always bring it when the games matter. So pay no attention if the defense is porous, the offensive line weak, the running game non-existent. Thus my confidence in picking them to win the AFC this year. I may have to rethink that.
Monday, September 13, 2010
I expected my weekend in Kansas City to be good. A surprising performance by the KU football team made it even better. First off, thanks to the R’s and B’s for hosting me last week. And thanks to Mary Y for insisting I attend her 30th birthday blowout. That alone would have made for a fine weekend. I was not looking forward to the KU - Georgia Tech game all that much, to be honest.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Another professional football season has arrived. I must log my guesses, um, picks for all to see. It is a required part of owning a blog. AFC East: Each year there is a team that gets too much hype, generally based on a small window of their previous season, rather than their entire body of work. Don’t the Jets feel like that team this year? They should not have made the playoffs, making it only because the Colts benched their first teamers early in the second half of week 16, then parlayed two favorable match ups into an AFC Title Game appearance.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
And now the books of August. Star Wars: The Lost Tribe of the Sith - John Jackson Miller. These sucked. They were actually four small mini-books strung together to tell another story in the endless Star Wars novel world. They were free, so I figured what the hell. Sometimes you get what you pay for. There was nothing compelling about this series. Peculiar, MO - Robert Williams. I selected this largely because of its title.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
August was a busy month, reading-wise. I threw a wrinkle in my reading, as well, so the month gets two Reader’s Notebook posts. In Part 1, I discuss why I read what I read. Part 2 will cover the books themselves. I’ve begun running into the big downside of the Kindle: the expense. I had been rolling through books so quickly that I was buying more than one a week. Thus, I decided to spend the month exclusively reading either free or low priced books.
Monday, August 30, 2010
There’s something pretty cool going on just a couple hours from my house. The Cincinnati Reds have survived the summer and are poised to enter baseball’s final month with a comfortable lead in the National League Central. Some writers picked the Reds as a team with the potential to surprise last spring. But after they stumbled out of the gate, it looked like another long summer for Reds fans. The Cardinals, as expected, were going to run away with the division and Reds fans could only hope that their young arms would get some experience and be ready for a run in 2011.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
During my summer blog redesign project, I added a number of design websites - both general design and web-specific - to my daily reading list. Through them, I’ve learned more about what I’ll call the Cult of Minimalism.1 Minimalist web design puts an emphasis on strong, simple design elements that easily convey a site’s message to the reader. That means fewer widgets and graphic embellishments in favor of a sparse, but carefully designed, look.