Month: September 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

https://youtu.be/ASFSjjbD_D0

“Ride On” – Rocky Nti

Good grief this song is catchy!

Many errands and household chores got crammed into Tuesday, so a belated look back at the final weekend of the summer. It was very good, but also kind of crappy.

The good parts were:
* The girls getting a four-day weekend. It was nice to sleep in a bit Friday before all our other activities for the weekend.
* Our KC friends the B’s were in town, staying with local pals the H’s. Together we went to watch our local high school play football Friday night, then down to the lake Saturday and part of Sunday. It was a perfect lake weekend: sunny and hot. We tubed and cruised, floated and swam, drank and ate.
* Some old friends who now live in Michigan were visiting the lake as well. It was good to catch-up briefly.
* After our guests left, we hung around Sunday night and had one, last relaxing summer evening down there. Well, if you call doing laundry, mowing the grass, and putting the summer toys away relaxing. Odds are there will be several more decent lake days before the season is officially over. But with a cross country meet every Saturday and a soccer game every Sunday for the next six weeks, the next time we use the boat will likely be when we take it out to store it for the winter. Man does the lake part of the year go fast.

As for the bad parts, they were all sports-related:
* Our local high school football team lost to one of its big rivals 24–21 Friday. That was a bummer because A) we all went to the game together (the girls had a great time), and B) our buddy Coach H is now the head coach. Losses suck a little more when you friend is the one who is taking the heat for it.
* KU lost likely it’s only winnable game of the year. Expectations are always pretty low at KU. This year they are as low as they’ve ever been. Blame Lew Perkins and Turner Gill, or Sheahon Zenger and Charlie Weis. Or all of them. The fact is the program is an absolute mess. The only good news is this should be rock bottom. It can’t get worse, right? Of course, it may not get better for awhile. I think David Beaty has the right combination of recruiting mojo and coaching chops to get it turned around. It’s just going to take 3–5 years. And maybe another round of conference realignment that allows KU to get in a situation where they can play four non-conference games instead of three. Unlike the last two coaches, I really like Beaty. Hopefully the cause isn’t hopeless.
* In addition, the proud, freedom-loving, equality for all men craving Jayhawk was besmirched on the field an hour to the west. We live in an era of stupid, manufactured controversies. Far too many of us scream with outrage over the tiniest of slights. This “controversy” is profoundly dumb. My bigger concern is why the hell was K-State making fun of KU when they were playing South Dakota? The Wildcats have won something like 17 of the last 20 football games against KU. Seems like they should be worrying more about Baylor and TCU than big brother over in Lawrence.
* The Royals got swept at home by the White Sox and then fell Monday to Minnesota. Thank goodness they won Tuesday, keeping their longest losing stretch of the year four games. Lots of wringing of hands about several parts of the team. I’m not wringing my hands just yet. Still three weeks to get things figured out.

It was a busy four-plus days. Hope all of you had fine holiday weekends to wrap up your summers, too.

Music for the last weekend of summer.

“The Boys Of Summer” – Don Henley

Say what you want about Henley, and there’s plenty of negative things to say about the guy, but this is a great song. Even if he’s not really singing about the end of summer, its place in pop culture is as an end of summer song.

“Don’t look back, you can never look back…”

“We’re Going To Be Friends” – The White Stripes

The other side of the end of summer: a song about starting school and making new friends.

A bit of a slower, more relaxed reading month in August. Part of that is simply because I’m roughly halfway through a fairly massive novel that locked down the last couple weeks of the month. But still on book-a-week pace for the year overall.

100 Things Royals Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die – Matt Fulks
My step-dad brought me this book, which was a fun little thing to flip through between innings while watching games. There was plenty of cool stuff in there that I did not know about, along with a healthy dose of refreshers for trivia tidbits I knew when I was a kid but had forgotten over the years.

The only downside is that the book was written after the 2013 season. So while there’s a feeling of hope about the future in several of the segments, all the magic of last fall is missed.

The Fletch Chronicles, One – Gregory McDonald

(Consisting of Fletch Won, Fletch, Too, and Fletch And The Widow Bradley)

The Fletch Chronicles collections were put together in the late 80s, and gave McDonald the chance to put his assorted Fletch novels in order based on how they happened, rather than how they were written. Thus, Fletch Won and Fletch, Too, which were both written as prequels in the mid–80s – a decade after the first novel was published – become the entry points for readers to the Fletch series.

Thus we start with cub reporter Irwin M. Fletcher, assigned to drudgery work at the copy and obituary desks, stumbling onto a murder in the paper’s parking lot. Despite being warned off the story by his editor and the paper’s star reporter, he sticks with it and both solves the mystery and discovers a link between his arch rival and the police with the murder. All this while investigating a prostitution ring and planning his wedding!

Fletch, Too picks up immediately after, with Fletch arriving late for his wedding after writing his two blockbuster stories. Following the ceremony, a stranger hands Fletch two tickets to Kenya, claiming Fletch’s father, who he had always been told died before his birth, was alive and well and wanted to meet Fletch. Fletch and his bride take the tickets, he witnesses a murder in the Nairobi airport, and then bum around the country with one of his father’s associates after his father fails to show. Again, two mysteries intertwine and are resolved in a rather sweet manner.

Finally, in The Widow Bradley, Fletch loses his job when he publishes quotes from a man who has been dead for over a year. Or has he? Fletch investigates and uncovers a truth that is ripped straight out of 2015’s headlines.

All three are tight, quick, well-written mysteries. You can’t help but read each in Chevy Chase’s voice, even if the Fletch of the books has a slightly different persona than Chase’s screen version. I love McDonald’s dialogue, which has a snappy, 1940s movie feel to it. I really enjoyed these, even if they feel the slightest bit dated.

I don’t know that I’m going to work through all the Fletch novels, but I do want to go back and read Fletch, which the movie was mostly based on.

As I mentioned in last week’s Friday Links, I watched Real Genius a week ago. Then, this past Sunday, I watched Fletch. As with Real Genius, it had been a long, long time since I had watched Fletch, a movie which has to be in my top five most-watched non-Christmas movies of all time list.[1]

So A), yes I’m on a bit of a classic 80s movie run. Sunday nights seem to be the most convenient to watch them right now, since the Royals generally play during the afternoon on Sundays. We’ll see if this holds once football starts. I have a couple titles in mind for my next viewing. B) I also read one of the Fletch Chronicles last month, which combined three of the original Fletch novels into a single volume.[2] More on that in my next reader’s notebook entry.

Anyway, I found my reactions to the two movies rather interesting. I loved every second of Real Genius, even the parts that did not age very well. Fletch, on the other hand, I had some issues with. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still terrifically funny and I could still quote about half of the movie or make subtle gestures as Chevy Chase made them on the screen. But there was something I couldn’t pinpoint as I watched that made it maybe 3% less enjoyable than Real Genius.[3]

After thinking about it, I think it was purely about Chevy. Back in 1985, and through the next decade or so when I watched Fletch religiously, Chevy was one of my comedy gods. Throw on Fletch, Caddyshack, Vacation, Spies Like Us, The Three Amigos, or an SNL compilation, and I’m going to love every second of Chevy. The problem is how we’ve learned over the years that Chevy is a monumental dick to most people he works with. So the whole time I was watching Fletch, I kept thinking about who he pissed off while filming it. Did Dana Wheeler-Nicholson and Geena Davis cringe each time they had to do a scene with him, knowing some sexist comment was coming? Did Tim Matheson[4] roll his eyes when Chevy talked down to him?

Maybe none of that happened, but still it was always in the back of my head.

Val Kilmer has a reputation as being a bit difficult as well. But I didn’t think of that while watching Real Genius. Perhaps because he was not yet a big star when that came out, or because it was more of an ensemble piece than a vehicle to showcase him.

I had another problem with the movie, too. The first time Fletch sleeps with Gail Stanwyck has always bugged me. So he just told her that her husband has asked Fletch to kill him, had used money she provided to finance a drug deal rather than buy the land she believed she was purchasing, and is married to someone else. And five seconds later they’re in bed together? Even by 1980s movies standards, that’s a stretch.

But, as I said, overall I still really enjoyed it. There are so many classic lines that have woven their way into our common, pop culture language. Potential off-screen issues aside, it was the peak of Chevy Chase’s big screen career. We’ll see how some of his other classic 80s movies hold up when I get to them.

Two weeks of the Indiana high school football season are in the books. Throw in a few previews I’ve written, and it’s been a busy couple of weeks.

The previews were largely uneventful. I’ve been doing those long enough where I have a pretty solid formula in place. Every now and then I run into a coach who is difficult to reach on the phone, which is frustrating and causes delays. This year I had two.

One flat out refused to talk to me on the phone. He kept suggesting that I drop by the fields during practice. Even when I told him I live an hour away from his school and that the phone call would likely take only 10 minutes, he refused to talk. Another coach acted like it was a monumental pain to spend a few minutes on the phone, and then coughed, sniffled, sighed, and mumbled the entire five minutes we raced through her roster. Most coaches, even if they aren’t great interviews, understand that this is about their players, not about them. They’ll work to make sure we get the right players highlighted, their names spelled correctly, etc. This is the first time, in six years of writing previews, I’ve had coaches who were this difficult to work with.

On to the games…

Football week one I drove about 40 minutes east to watch our Class 3A school, IC, open their season. They went 9–0 against a weak regular season schedule last year then lost in the last minute, by a point, in the first round of playoffs. When I got to the press box, the college-aged guys who were doing the local cable broadcast were running through IC’s roster. They asked me what I knew about the kids and I shared a few insights. Then one of the announcers said, “What do you think of Coach G.?”

Coach G. is IC’s coach. He’s one of the top ten coaches, in games won, in state history. His teams are always good, they threw the ball a ton even before that was the style, and they tend to put up a lot of points. In fact, lots of folks don’t like him because he has a reputation of running up the score. And I’ve heard some stories about his behavior toward his players in practice. I needed to answer this question very carefully.

“How so?” I responded with a grin.

“He’s not coaching tonight,” the announcer said.

“WHAT?!?!?”

“Yeah, he’s suspended because of what happened in their sectional game last year.”

And then it came back to me. He threw a fit at the end of their final game last October and got thrown out of the game. Which apparently earned him an automatic, one-game suspension by the state high school sports association.

I sent a text to my editor to see if he knew about this. He did not. He asked me to go find the athletic director and get official word on cause and length of suspension. I made a lap of the field during warmups and couldn’t find the AD. My editor said to keep my eyes open, he’d likely turn up at some point.

So then the game starts. The hosts ran right down the field in their opening possession and took a 6–0 lead. IC had a long drive that stalled and ended on downs. The first quarter ended in about 20 minutes, which was a great pace.

And then the second quarter blew the hopes for an early night apart. It took just over an hour of real time. IC scored 35 points, giving up 8 along the way. Lots of passes, which stopped the clock. Three turnovers, which stopped the clock. Man, that thing took forever.

Fortunately the second half went pretty quickly. I never saw the AD so I ran down onto the field after the game and hoped some IC coach would be obvious as the guy in charge for the night. I grabbed the guy who talked to the team in the post-game huddle and he gave me the details on Coach G., a few good comments about the game, and I filed my story easily before our 10:15 deadline.

Week two I drove down to my favorite school, good ol’ EHS. Things aren’t as bad as they were down there when I first started writing for the paper. But they did get pounded pretty good in week one by a team that was winless last year. I wasn’t counting on a close game.

It was ugly quick. Touchdown on the third play of the game. EHS threw a pick six on their third snap. Then they gave up five more touchdowns before halftime. I was able to write 90 percent of my story during the break then just kind of half paid attention during the second half.[1] My worry was how to deal with the coach after the final whistle. He’s new to the school, so I had no idea what his temperament was like, especially after such a profound beating. And he was an offensive lineman in his playing days, which were only about 10 years ago. He is the first coach I’ve had to talk to who is significantly bigger than me. I was a little nervous about approaching him after the game.

It ended up being fine. He wasn’t happy, so he was rather terse in his comments. But while he has at least 150 lbs. on me, I’m still about two inches taller then him, so I could look down at him and pretend I was not intimidated by his size.

Oh, and there was some discomfort in the press box as well. The guy sitting next to me, who was running the clock, was making vaguely racist comments all night. I didn’t hear what got him started, but I heard him telling the announcer that “…that whole Confederate flag thing is bullcrap!” Then EHS has one black player, who did not show a ton of initiative on the night. He whiffed badly on a couple open-field tackles, didn’t chase down a fumble that was in his vicinity, etc. The guy next to me was seething. Fortunately he never dropped any of the bombs I was fearing. He did talk about how lazy that kid is, which based on his play that night, might be entirely true. But when a guy defending the Confederate flag makes those comments, the last place I want to be is in that conversation.

I’m once again writing some previews for the state basketball magazine, which means I’m just putting a bunch of stats and quotes the publisher sends over into a specific format. It’s kind of tedious and doesn’t pay much. But it is always cool to take the girls to the bookstore in December, find the magazine, flip to my section and show them my name.

This week I take a break from reporting but will go watch two of the top three teams in the state play each other. There is a personal angle on this game I’ll share next week.