Friday Playlist
https://open.spotify.com/user/224aiwksicafjldlua6nnpo4y/playlist/6yRpKSsraaZuFh8ILQp7cO “Brand New Lover” – Dead or Alive. Perhaps you heard that DoA lead singer Pete Burns died this week. Here’s a reminder that the band had more than the one good song you probably think of first at the mention of their name. “Dead Alive” – The Shins. Purely coincidental, but The Shins released a new song this week that name-checks Dead or Alive. “Wanna” – BRONCHO. This doesn’t sound like a band from Norman, OK should sound, does it? I’ve heard their music before, but I discovered this song, which is a deep cut from their current Double Vanity album, when Frightened Rabbit dropped it into their Current…
Top 5s
If you follow Joe Posnaski on either Twitter or his personal blog, you no doubt saw his recent piece that was based on Xavier basketball coach Chris Mack’s list of favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. A Bruce Top Five There is so much for me to love here. A) It’s Poz, so it’s almost automatically great. B) It’s about music lists, something I’m also a little obsessive about. C) I enjoy the thought process Poz went through from first being floored by Mack’s list, to coming to an understanding of how we all come to different conclusions about music, to the natural end: sharing his own list of favorite Springsteen songs.…
Curse Breaking Season
Welp, here we go. In about a week, either the Chicago Cubs or the Cleveland Indians will be World Series champions. A week after that, Donald Trump could be the president-elect of the United States of America. Y’all know I’m not a religious man, but if you believe in signs, I think those could be the first two of the three that signal the world is coming to an end! Hopefully since #2 is looking increasingly unlikely, the World Series will stand on its own rather than a portent of doom. I’m struggling with the plot lines for this Series. I have, over the years, generally dislikes both franchises. I’ve…
Fall Break Wrap
It was a pretty laid back fall break for us. As I said last week, we had no travels on the agenda and hoped for good weather so we could do some fun stuff locally. Things started off as well as I could ask: we had been home five minutes on Wednesday when I got a call from the mom of one of M’s friends, asking if she wanted to come over and spend the night. Ten minutes later I was dropping M off and we were down a kid. L had playdates both Thursday and Friday, and C had a friend over to spend the night Friday. Those four…
Friday Playlist
We’re fall breaking it this weekend. No trips or super exciting and unique plans on the agenda. Just flu shots, playdates, sleepovers, and general chilling. Here are some songs that I’ve been listening to this week, and thus they feel fall break-y to me. https://open.spotify.com/user/224aiwksicafjldlua6nnpo4y/playlist/5gd4gLKzvI692XZAwibrqk “Queens” – La Sera. La Sera put out an album earlier this year that got fine reviews, but which I did not like that much. Then they released an EP of extra tracks a couple weeks back, and I dug it the most. I love the little guitar runs in the back half of this track. And something about it makes me think of Juice…
Tuesday Notes
A few assorted tidbits for Tuesday. Here’s the thing about Indian Summer: you never fully appreciate it. Sure, you can talk in wonder about it being in the mid–80s in the back-half of October. You can take a long lunch, leave work early, or just take the day off to get outside. But as good as these days feel, we are also craving those cool, autumn breezes. It looks like the weather here is going to shift dramatically in the next 36 hours. I’ll miss these warm, muggy, breezy days. Sunday afternoon was kind of crappy around here. It rained pretty hard for about 90 minutes, which just happened to…
Friday Playlist
https://open.spotify.com/user/224aiwksicafjldlua6nnpo4y/playlist/04Qkgc37mN2C9VWPNAZ9kn “Shadrach” – Beastie Boys. None of this week’s new releases really piqued my interest, so after dropping the girls at school this morning I threw on Paul’s Boutique and have been reliving the first month of my freshman year of college. At least musically. I haven’t been skipping classes and puking in trashcans. “Positron” – Palace Winter. Another very fine track – this one recorded live – from PW. “Tiny Fires” – Kevin Morby. I’ve been digging this song – which sounds very fall-like – for a couple weeks and finally spun Morby’s most recent full-length album Wednesday. Turns out he is originally from Kansas City, which will pretty…
Good Journalism Moment of the Day
I went through a stretch a few weeks back where I was watching a lot of Veep, the HBO comedy where Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice President Selina Meyer.[1] And this week I finally cracked the seal on our DVR’s collection of The Good Place, the new Michael Schur comedy starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. That combination means I can finally share this piece from a few weeks back in which Steven Hyden posits that Louis-Dreyfus and Danson are the two finest comedy actors of the modern age. Then he breaks it down. It’s pretty excellent and I can’t believe no one has done it before. Louis-Dreyfus is an absolute…
Finishing Fast
Before I jump into the true topic of this post, a quick realization I just had. Lately many of the family stories I’ve been sharing in detail here have already been posted to Facebook in much more simplified form. Since the bulk of my regular readers are friends on Facebook, that means you’ve often had a sneak preview of the story about X or Y before I get around to putting a few hundred words about it up here. The rest of story, you might say. Which instantly made me think of sitting in my grandfather’s or uncle’s pickup truck in a field or pasture in central Kansas while they…
Friday Vid
I’m having a fun morning. I’m searching on what movies are appropriate for a 12-year-old’s sleepover. Up until now it’s been pretty easy to pick movies to show when our girls have friends over. But now that M is up on the verge of being a teenager, you can’t throw in a Barbie movie or even a good animated flick like Inside Out. She needs something that is a little more grown up for her and her friends who are sleeping over tonight to watch. I’ve been reading the the Common Sense Media site, which has some good suggestions. It’s kind of funny how many of their recommendations are from…