Month: January 2019 (Page 1 of 2)

Like the rest of my readers who live in the Midwest, we’ve been hammered by Arctic temperatures for the last 36 hours. Which has led to some controversy.

On Monday our school principal sent out an email stating that assuming the roads were in good shape and the school’s furnace, water, and electricity were functioning normally, he would plan on having school on Wednesday and Thursday. Which made sense: we’re a no-bus school and kids get dropped off within 50 feet of the front door. Even with a windchill of –38 yesterday, they only had to be outside for a few seconds. Brutally cold, yes. Dangerous, no.

Some parents were not pleased with this decision. Tuesday night there was a lot of chatter on Facebook about whether classes should be cancelled or not. Some of this was based on over 60 kids being sick and out of school that day. That’s over 15% of the school. Some parents thought rampant illness combined with super cold temps should equate with no school. Never mind that it was not just one illness that was reaching pandemic status in the school, but a nasty combo of flu, strep, stomach bugs, and regular old colds.

Again, the roads were expected to be fine and our kids don’t stand on the corner waiting for busses.

As you can imagine, there was a bit of back-and-forth in the comments. I stayed out; I really like one of the moms who was complaining and did not see any point in engaging on either side of the debate. And school policy has always been if school is in session but you feel like it is dangerous to get your kids to school, you are welcome to keep them at home. Make the decision yourself, don’t ask the principal to wipe out an entire day of school for everyone because you’re not willing to make that choice.

Our girls got wind of what was going on, most notably M, who was getting messages from friends at other schools that had already cancelled classes. She started lobbying us to stay home. Her hand was strengthened, or so she thought, but the fact that S’s office was closing on Wednesday.[1] We could all stay home and have a nice, warm day together! Or so M thought.

I reminded her there was no danger in driving on dry roads, I would kick her out of the car mere feet from the front door, and there was no point in staying home. She did not like this. She whined. She argued. She pouted. She went to bed hoping we would get a call at 6:00 AM cancelling classes for the day.

We did not.

She gave us the silent treatment in the morning. When I insisted she pack gloves and a hat, she stomped around, made a show of jamming them into her backpack rather than putting them on, and then sat in glum silence until it was time to leave.

After school she continued her act. She refused to talk to either of us. She used heavy footsteps to navigate around the house. She sighed often. When we asked her how her day went she muttered under her breath how it would have been better if she had stayed home so she could have spent seven hours working on her science fair project.[2] She also claimed that our school was one of only three in the entire state that did not cancel classes.[3] In short, she acted like a teenager.

Good times!

For public schools, cancelling classes made total sense. That’s just too big of a risk for kids to get stuck outside if a bus breaks down, there’s an accident that delays them, etc.

But for schools that have no bus services, it was straight dumb and lazy to cancel classes. Seriously, people are getting soft.

November Road – Lou Berney
As with Tana French, I returned to another author that I read last November who gave me immense reading pleasure. Expectations for this one were cranked up a little, not just because I enjoyed his The Long and Faraway Gone so much but because of the historical event this book is anchored to: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

It would be wrong to say this book is about the Kennedy assassination. However, the events in Dallas are the prompts for two of the three major characters in the book.

One is Frank Guidry, a suave, well-connected member of the New Orleans mafia. When news of Kennedy’s assassination breaks, Guidry is given a task to handle in Texas: pick up a car he had dropped off in Dallas a week earlier, take it to Houston, and dispose of it. Other members of his organization start disappearing and Guidry connects the dots: his boss, Carlos Marcello, was behind the assassination and is cleaning up the loose ends left and after Guidry takes care of the car – which was apparently the get-away car for the shooter[1] – he is next. So he does his job, but then slips away and embarks for Las Vegas and a rival boss he hopes can save him.

Meanwhile in a small Oklahoma town, a young woman named Charlotte is also beginning a trek west. Sick of a rural town that won’t let her be anything more than a secretary and a drunken husband who is harmless but also hopeless, she and her two daughters pack up their suitcases and the family dog and set out for an aunt’s home in LA.

As you would expect, Charlotte and Guidry’s paths cross and an opportune time for both. Guidry and Charlotte make it to Vegas, followed soon after by the hitman sent to finish Guidry. There are plenty of tense moments in the coming days; it would all be over quickly had the Vegas mob not placed a temporary hold on the hitman. The resolution is a bit unexpected: Guidry has a bigger heart and Charlotte is more calculating that you would have expected. Oh, and there’s a very creepy but satisfying shoot out.

This is a decent book. I didn’t like it as much as The Long and Faraway Gone, perhaps because it hits fairly familiar territory. Unlikely companions on a road trip. People from different worlds falling in love. A good guy from a bad world fleeing a legitimately evil pursuer.

Berney does a nice job with all of this, and there are plenty of fine moments. But it is nothing unique.

How Democracies Die – Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt
I try to shun political books these days as they generally get me all worked up and feeling more helpless about the state of the world than I already do. But this book came with a lot of recommendations from people I respect, so I gave it a shot.

And it left me feeling worked up and hopeless.

But at least it tries to explain how we got where we are today.

The authors argue that while blame for most of the current political mess we’re in can be blamed on Republicans – notably on Newt Gingrich who utterly transformed the party into a deeply conservative organ that adopted slash and burn tactics in the early-to-mid 1980s – it isn’t just parties and people who got us here.

They argue that is is the rapidly changing demographics of the US and, ironically, the expansion of the electorate brought about by the civil rights movement of the 1960s that set us on this path. Once upon a time all politicians, regardless of ideology or party identification, where white men in the upper half of the socio-economic world. Party ID was as much about where you were from as what you believed. So there were liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. And these groups often reached across the aisle to like-minded members of the opposite party to get things done. That was possible, the authors say, because they all were white men and, thus, could find ways not only to get along, but to sell the compromise to their supporters back home.

As the electorate has become less white, less Christian, and less moored in old-time traditions, so, too, have our representatives. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats disappeared in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Suddenly the opposition party believed different things, represented different people, and often looked different than you and your caucus did. Power came from sticking with your party and doing everything you could to limit the power of the other side. So election laws were changed to reduce participation by minority groups, districts manipulated to protect incumbents, and the judiciary was politicized in a way not done in the first 200-plus years of the Republic. The legitimacy of elections was questioned and the press was pilloried as a biased, enemy of the people.

All of this came well before our current Buffoon in Chief; he’s just a master at exploiting it all.

So how do we fix it? Levitsky and Ziblatt offer ideas, but I have zero confidence they will work. We are stuck with the mess we’re in and will be for a long time. All over the country there are elected officials who see how the Buffoon managed to win the presidency and realize if he can pull that off at the national level, it will be even easier at the state and local level. And there are plenty of people out there with huge wallets and bigger egos who are going to take runs at the presidency using the same tactics he used.

Until large swaths of both parties and the electorates who support them decide to return to a system where compromise and cooperation are more important than destruction and the subversion of democracy, we’re going to be stuck in the toxic swamp we are currently in. And, given how the rest of our society runs these days, there’s no reason to believe there are enough people out there with the will and strength to make it happen.

I’m on nephew duty the next couple days so I’ll go ahead and post this late on a Sunday to kick off the week.

Chart Week: January 28, 1984 Song: “Let the Music Play” – Shannon Chart Position: #18, 12th week on the chart. Peaked at #8 the week of February 25. Reached #1 on the US Dance Club Songs chart.

It’s been over a month without a Reaching for the Stars entry. What better way to end that slump than by beginning 2019 the way we ended 2018: with the greatest pop music year of all time, 1984.

There were two songs that were hits in late 1983 and early 1984 that redefined dance music for the next decade or more. One of them is an classic that everyone remembers: Madonna’s “Holiday,” which was #16 on this week’s countdown. The other, I think, is less well-recalled by the average person. It doesn’t get played very often on 80s weekends or stations. And I’ll bet other than music geeks like me, it would require a lot of prodding and hints to get the average listener to remember it on their own.

That stone cold jam was Shannon’s “Let the Music Play.”

“LTMP” sounded like nothing else that was being made in the early ‘80s. It wasn’t an updated version of the ‘70s disco sound. It wasn’t some European sounding offshoot of New Wave or New Romantic music. No, it was this heavy yet sparkling sound that was utterly undeniable. Seriously, unless your soul is a cold lump of charcoal, you can’t help but shake your ass the moment the beat from this song hits your brain. It was urban and Latin, straight and gay, black and white, pop and soul all at once.

Seriously, this one of the greatest dance songs of all time. Its rhythms and studio techniques launched at least two new genres of music: freestyle and acid house. First and second wave hip hop largely adopted its percussion and production values as well. Yet, again, “Holiday” is the better remembered song. Don’t get me wrong; “Holiday” is a jam, too. But, god damn, “Let the Music Play” is a big, massive motherfucker of a song that has been holding dance, hip hop, and pop music up for 35 years now.

My easiest explanation for why it is forgotten is that is a classic one-hit wonder. Shannon had a long, successful, influential career, with five songs that hit the top three on the dance chart, three of which hit #1. For much of the mid–80s she was dance music in the US. But this was her only single that charted on the Billboard Top 40. Meanwhile Madonna took the momentum from “Holiday” and became one of the biggest artists in the history of music.

That’s ok. I haven’t forgotten Shannon. She will always get love from me and others who keep her biggest song close to our hearts. *** From doing some research on Shannon and this track, I learned that she doesn’t actually sing the words that give the song its title. Session vocalist and guitarist Jimi Tunnell sings that line and Shannon sings the response. That kind of blew my mind. *** A spot ahead of Shannon that week was Jump ’N’ The Saddle’s “The Curly Shuffle.” I’m pretty sure that song made me laugh when I was 12 but my 47-year-old ears find it pretty rough. *** Finally, at #15 that week was Hall & Oates’ “Say It Isn’t So,” arguably the best song of their career. In this week’s countdown Casey shared the story of where the phrase that lent the song its title came from: the apocryphal story of a young boy who asks Shoeless Joe Jackson to “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” after he was indicted in the the Black Sox scandal. I share this because I remember listening to Casey tell this story originally back in January 1984. And you know how I love when I can connect listening to a replay in the 21st Century with listening to the original show. If it was January 1984, I was probably sitting in my bean bag chair in our basement, playing Q*Bert or Pole Position on my Atari 2600 while listening to AT40 on my Panasonic boom box.

No, you’re weird…

The music continues to flow. It’s been a really good stretch of both single and full length releases. So I’m going to pump the list up a little this week to make sure I’m sharing the new stuff in a timely matter. Hopefully the extra tunes will warm your day a little.

“Jeremy” – Muncie Girls. Two curveballs on this song: first, the band isn’t a bunch of Ball State alums and it is not a Pearl Jam cover. But the English group does sound straight out of the 90s.

“GIRL” – Maren Morris. My new music routine is to cruise the various music sites I follow, pull all the new tracks they highlight into a Spotify playlist, and then work through that between other listening. Often by the time I listen to a song, I’ve forgotten whatever I read about the song if it is from an artist that is new to me. So when I listened to this song for the first time last week, something about it struck me as different. But I couldn’t place what it was until I went back and read about it. Turns out Morris is a country artist, one of the emerging group of women who are stretching the bounds of traditional, popular country. (Kacey Musgraves is another example, and someone whose music I just can’t get into.) This track, for example, begins with that big, very-90s bass line. The rest of the song has an indie vibe to it. And its lyrics of female empowerment and unity are certainly not traditional country fare. But Morris’ voice still has that little tinge of classic, popular country that you can trace back to Dolly Parton. 

“The Cuckoo Is A-Callin’” – FONTAINES D.C. Three guesses where this band is from. No, not Muncie, IN, fools! These lads reek of all that is Dublin. I love their blend of classic punk, post-punk, and early ‘00s modern rock.

“Red Bull & Hennessy” – Jenny Lewis. God damn, there is nothing coy about Lewis’ return after five years. The lyrics are pretty straight-forward about wanting to get down and do the do. And the album cover is mesmerizing. This track features Ringo Starr, Don Was, Benmont Trench, and a kick ass solo from Ryan Adams at the end.

“Fuck the Rain” – Ryan Adams. Speaking of Adams, after a couple leaks, finally the first official single from Adams’ first album of the year. It sits right in that space he’s been in for awhile. Which means it is quite good.

“My Backwards Walk” – Death Cab for Cutie covering Frightened Rabbit. Frightened Rabbit opened for DCFC on their 2011 tour. Ben Gibbard has said he asked FR to tour with them because The Midnight Organ Fight helped him get through a difficult time in his life. Gibbard has spoke often over the past nine months about how Scott Hutchison’s death floored him. This is a lovely cover done in Hutchison’s honor.

“The Great Pixley Train Robbery” – Cass McCombs. McCombs usually makes much more mellow, contemplative tracks. This one, based on a real train robbery in 1889, is much more forceful than his normal sound. I love its rumble and kick.

Let’s talk hoops for a few minutes.

Yeah, I know I said I was drastically reducing my expectations for KU after Udoka Azubuike was lost for the season. But, still, that loss to West Virginia last Saturday was fucking stupid. It put me in a bad mood for the rest of the day. Seriously, it’s been awhile since I’ve been that angry after a loss.

Why the change in attitude? Because West Virginia only showed the mildest of interest in winning that game for the first 37 minutes, because slightly smarter play over that stretch would have put the game out of reach, and because KU had a complete meltdown in the closing three minutes to hand the game to the Mountaineers. No matter what my expectations for KU are, I still can’t deal with them pissing away a game against the last place team in the conference. A team that went out Monday and got pounded at home by Baylor to go to 1–6 in the league.

Sheesh.

And then came Iowa State on Monday, followed by a trip to Kentucky, a trip to Texas, Texas Tech at home, and then on to Manhattan to face the suddenly hot Purples. Man, this could get ugly quick. As Iowa State led by nine in the second half Monday, I texted a couple of my buddies and suggested, only kind of jokingly, that we might not win another game this season.

Then KU promptly ripped off a 14–0 run to take control of the game.

When Iowa State tied the game with about 2:00 left, I sent the same text again.

KU righted the ship and closed out the game to get a very important win.

So I guess I’ll be texting how we may not win another game a lot over the next two months. Hey, I might have given up hope on the Big 12 title and a Final Four trip, but I’ll be damned if I stop being stupidly superstitious during games!

Fortunately for KU, the teams I thought would be ahead of them, Iowa State and Texas Tech, have both struggled over the past two weeks. Unfortunately, K-State is healthy and playing great.

I don’t think there is a great team in the Big 12 this year. I expect that there’s going to be a lot of beating each other up between now and March, with a team getting a big win one night only to give it back a couple days later. Six losses might still win the conference.

Hey, KU has a chance. They are playing better defense. Marcus Garrett has been a revelation, except at the free throw line. Ochai Agbaji looks confident, steady, and explosive…other than when he peed himself in Morgantown.

I just don’t see them having enough shooting to weather the beast that is the Big 12 schedule. There are going to be nights when they can’t count on Dedric Lawson scoring 29 because the defenses are swarming him, and I don’t see enough guys around him to pick up the slack.

They should get pounded pretty good in Lexington Saturday. Bill Self has beaten John Calipari three-straight years and you know Cal wants that shit to end. Plus Kentucky is playing really well right now, and they are crazy big. If Self had a couple shooters, I could see him figuring out a way to out-coach Cal as he usually does when they meet. Just get out of Lexington injury-free and be ready to fight next week.[1]

Since L has become a big Indiana Pacers and Victor Oladipo fan, we watch at least part of every Pacers game. Or rather I turn it on, she kind of drifts in and out, and after she goes to bed I settle down with the second half. That’s been a good routine because the Pacers have been excellent for the last month. To me they look like how you would want to build a really good college team: balanced across the entire roster with shooters, bigs, athletes, defenders, and depth. Good enough to beat any team on any night. The issue, though, is are they good enough to beat Boston, Philadelphia, and/or Toronto four times in seven games in the playoffs?

L was out of the room last night, and I was staring at my iPad, when I noticed the sound of the game had changed. I looked up and saw Oladipo lying on the floor, holding his knee, and waiting for a stretcher to take him off the court.

Damn.

There’s been no official word yet, but given Victor’s reaction – he pulled down the sleeve covering his knee and then started screaming – you have to figure he’s done for the year. Which pretty much wrecks this season. The Pacers have a bunch of good players, which is enough to keep them in the playoff picture. But they will surely slide from the top four in the Eastern Conference where they’ve been all year to the bottom half, meaning they have to face one of the teams they really struggle with in the first round of the playoffs. It was one thing last year to take on, and really push, Cleveland. That was with Oladipo doing everything he could to match LeBron. Without him? Not happening.

Which is a damn shame because this team was a lot of fun to watch. The good thing is they are, for the most part, pretty young. If Oladipo can come back healthy next year and they are again smart in the off-season, hopefully they will be as good and fun to watch in the ’19–20 campaign.

Our holiday weekend was both busy and lazy.

We watched one of our two year old nephews from Friday night through Monday morning. He’s a really good kid – smart and funny and loves being with the girls – but you do kind of forget how exhausting that phase of life is. The repeated questions. The bizarre mood changes. The out of nowhere finickiness when eating. The failure to grasp basic logic. We love having him but it’s a relief to pass him along after a few days rather than face his barrage of Two-ness constantly.

But the weekend was mostly good. The big bummer was our expected snow storm came through about 12 hours later that initially forecast, and by the time we could get him outside to play the windchill was in the single digits. So we only took him out for about 10 minutes, made a slow lap around the house looking for icicles, and then went back inside.

M went on her first ever ski trip Sunday, down to a hill near Cincinnati with a group of other middle schoolers from North Side Catholic schools. She had a great time. She had never tried skiing before. Late in the afternoon she sent us a video of her zooming along rather nicely. All without taking a class. She had a great time and is excited to go to Colorado some winter and try skiing with her cousins.

As for sports, I’ll save the KU stuff for a post later in the week. Our nephew-watching duties cut into my football viewing time a little on Sunday. I actually slept through most of the first half of the Rams-Saints game and then turned the TV over to the kids while I made dinner. I started getting texts about a terrible call and then it took me five minutes of searching before I could find the remote to switch back to the game. It was after that game ended before I finally saw a replay of “The Call.” Man…that was brutal. How many bullshit DPI penalties do you see every game and then they let that go? Utterly amazing. If I was a Saints fan I would probably still be rioting.

I kept the TV on while we ate dinner and had one eye on the game. But somehow I missed that Greg Zuerlein’s absolute bomb of a field goal was for the win. I muttered “Wow,” between bites of taco lasagna, thinking it was just a great kick. Then I saw Rams running on the field and realized the game was over. That was a wacky, wild game.

For the Pats-Chiefs game, I watched the first two drives then had to run out to pick M up. By the time I was home it was halftime and I just had this feeling that A) the Chiefs would get back in it but B) the Patriots would manage to pull it out.

My football picks generally suck but this one was right on!

For most of the third quarter we were watching a movie with the nephew before bedtime. But I was able to sit down and give the game my undivided attention roughly mid-way through the fourth quarter. Which was the perfect moment to pick things up. With about 5:00 left I – semi-jokingly – texted a couple friends saying there would be four more scores in the game. I was wrong; there were five.

For an non-partisan viewer, those final five minutes plus overtime were fantastic to watch. And the best part was Tony Romo calling every damn play before it happened. I don’t get how some viewers are put off by this. And I don’t get why no other analyst is as good at it as he is. Does he watch more film than them? Are they told not to do it, as he apparently was told by CBS for part of this season? Or does he just have a gift no one else has? It was an amazing football game taken to another level by his insights.

I’ve heard plenty of bitching about the NFL’s overtime rules. In general I agree with those complaints. The overtime rules are already tweaked for the playoffs since you play until there is a winner. Why not make a second minor tweak and say that both teams get a chance with the ball, regardless of how the first possession plays out? Ending the season based on the whims of a coin toss seems counter to what the NFL is all about.

Then again, every sport is somehow compromised by its overtime rules. Soccer is strange, with different tournaments having different rules. College football is dumb. Basketball likely gets it best: add five minutes and keep playing. But team fouls also carry over, so you begin overtime with teams generally being overly penalized for every foul. Playoff hockey is fantastic: add a fresh 20 minutes and repeat until someone scores. But while those extended overtime games are often breathless viewing experiences, the play can get very choppy because of exhausted players.

I’ve heard some folks say the NFL should just go to a fifth quarter in the playoffs. Add ten minutes, play it out, and if someone is ahead at the end you have a winner.

I think the fairest way is to ensure each team gets at least one possession in overtime and then sudden death kicks in. No need to play out the last three minutes if one team kicked a field goal and the other scored a touchdown.

Anyway, another January disappointment for Chiefs fans. Another January of listening to Patriots bullshit. How long until pitchers and catchers report?

Conference championship weekend.

That doesn’t get me fired up the way it used to. Although I came back to the NFL a little this season, I would still label myself as a casual fan at best. A far cry from when I was a kid and I was super into everything about the NFL. I watched The NFL Today each Sunday, made sure I caught the halftime highlights on Monday Night Football, and could likely tell you several important facts about the third place team in each division.

Back in those days I was a hardcore Cowboys fan. That all stemmed from the first Super Bowl I ever watched in January 1977. I thought it was cool that the two teams playing, Dallas and Denver, both started with a D. The Cowboys won, I adopted them as my favorite team. I lived in southeast Missouri, the nearest team, the St. Louis Cardinals, were kind of garbage. It seemed like a good move.

When we moved to Kansas City in the summer of 1980, the Cowboys were beginning a run of losing in the NFC title game three-straight years. At my new bus stop, in the classroom, on the playground at recess, and at my own football practices, the primary topic of discussion was the Royals, who made it to the World Series that year. But when football would come up, I was usually the outcast. There were a few Steelers fans, a few random Raiders or Broncos fans, and a sprinkling of Cowboys fans. But most of the boys I hung out were Chiefs fans.

I remember a conversation that fall that went something like this:

“Why don’t you like the Chiefs?”
“Because I like the Cowboys.”
“Well, you live here now, you have to like the Chiefs.”
“That’s stupid. And so are you.”

I didn’t learn to cuss until later that year, otherwise I would have told the kid to fuck off.

Don’t get me wrong, over the next decade or so when the Chiefs had the occasional solid year, I would cheer for them. I went to a few games here and there and pulled for them to win. In the early 90s, when they became a very good team, I pulled hard for them…as long as they weren’t playing the Cowboys. They were a pretty solid second team, and it was cool that the local team was doing well.

But as the 90s progressed, the Chiefs started to drive me nuts. I hated how the Chiefs were the primary topic of KC sports discussion so much of the year.[1] I hated the almost Stalinist party line that the entire Chiefs organization stuck to in the Carl Peterson era. And that guy, he drove me freaking nuts with his press conferences where he would say “The Kansas City Chiefs Football Team” 1000 times while insisting everything at 1 Arrowhead Way was better than any other place in the NFL.

And then there were Chiefs fans. Not all of them, for sure. In fact, not even a very large percentage of them. But there was that vocal, idiot minority who just drove me nuts. The ones who yelled “Chiefs!” at the end of the national anthem at KU, Royals, or other games. The ones who had entire wardrobes that were nothing but Zubaz pants in Chiefs colors. I remember coworkers going on-and-on about how Steve Bono or Elvis Grbac were going to lead the Chiefs to the Super Bowl. I decided those “Camaroheads” were the typical Chiefs fan, and began openly rooting against them. I laughed when the Chiefs blew playoff appearance after playoff appearance. Greg Hill raising the roof when he got a first down while precious time ticked away in another home playoff loss was my favorite Chiefs moment ever. That the Cowboys dynasty was crumbling didn’t matter to me. I was more interested in watching Chiefs fans be sad.

I think it is very hard to live in an NFL city, be a fan of another team, and not end up hating the local team. Especially these days, where NFL games are 3+ hour exercises in avoiding drunk people, fights, and other nonsense. It’s easy to look at whatever stupidity is going on at your local stadium, think that is unique to your city, and then use it as a reason to hate the local squad.

When we moved to Indy, I was still a Cowboys fan. But I was growing sick of Jerry Jones’ bullshit. The Colts were getting good. It seemed like the perfect time to jump ship. My first year here, the Colts went to Kansas City for a playoff game. I wish I still had one of my favorite voice mails of all time, left on the answering machine attached to our land line – !!!! – during that epic, no-punt game.

“D, it’s Julie! Are you watching the game? Because the Colts are wiiiiiiinning!”
(Voice in background: ‘He doesn’t like the Chiefs!’)
“Oh, Mark says you don’t like the Chiefs…so never mind. Go Colts!”

So, for the couple of readers who told me they didn’t realize I wasn’t a Chiefs fan a week ago, that’s most of the story of how that came to be.

Speaking of bullshit, I’m pretty sick of New England’s bullshit. When their dynasty was first getting started, I really admired them. Tom Brady still seemed like a delightful fluke. They rarely had superstars around him on offense, and Belichick built a classic No Name defense that was always better than everyone else in January.

But they kept winning, got obnoxious, cheated several times, and became a joyless, soulless machine that just grinds all the fun out of the game. Tom Brady whining about how everyone thinks they suck and no one thinks they can win is classic, Patriots horseshit. Jon Bon Jovi and Robert Kraft sitting together and singing “Livin’ On A Prayer,” might be the worst moment of the 21st Century.[2]

So am I pulling for the Chiefs Sunday? Let’s not go too far, now. I would rather see the Chiefs win. But I will still laugh if all the Camaroheads go home sad because Belichick and Brady’s deal with the devil remains valid and they somehow get out of KC with a win.

Chiefs 45, Patriots 21. Yes, 21. Fuck you, Brady.
Saints 38, Rams 35

The music finally hit this week. There has been a steady flow of new tracks all week. There are at least five new albums out today that I am interested in (Sharon Van Etten, Deerhunter, Maggie Rogers, The Twilight Sad, and Steve Gunn) along with a couple others I’d like to get to. We’ll start to see that flood of new tracks hit the playlist next week. Although I am excited that the first 2019 song I’m crazy about is in this week’s selections.

“In This Time” – HAERTS. The latest great track I found thanks to my Discovery playlist on Spotify. HAERTS released a new album last fall, both the result of and focused on losing their major label deal. I just read a review that said the album harkens back to the 70s sounds of George Harrison and Tom Petty. This song, to me, sounds like it could have been a B-side to a classic Fleetwood Mac song.

“All Over Now” – The Cranberries. The Cranberries were working on a new album when Dolores O’Riodon died early last year. This is the first track they’ve released from those sessions. Let’s be honest: it’s fine enough but doesn’t match up to their classic work. Yet I’ll listen to it because it’s the last thing we’ll get from her legendary voice.

“Five on It” – Spielbergs. These Swedish dudes keep cranking out excellent, massive tracks. 

“Weird Ways” – Strand of Oaks. Here it is, the first great song of 2019. Timothy Showalter is back, this time with most of My Morning Jacket serving as his backing band. Their presence comes through beautifully on this track. Musically you could drop this on about any MMJ album. They really work well together. I don’t know if it is Showalter or Carl Broemel playing that solo in the middle, but it is beautiful and takes the song to another level. Jason Isbell and Emma Ruth Rundle will also appear on the album, which I am officially very excited for.

“Dynamite” – Jermaine Jackson. The Stereogum series The Number Ones has gone through several songs by The Jackson 5 in recent weeks. In one of those entries, someone dropped this video in the comments as a reminder of Jermaine’s solo career. I remember the song – and have always kind of liked it – but, whoaaaa doctor!, I forgot how terrible the video was. There is just so much to deal with here: why is Jermaine so sweaty? Why do they put “Dynamite!” on the screen some of the times he sings it, but not all of the times? Did they mean totally rip off the “Beat It” video’s dance sequences? Could they not have choreographed this better so Jermaine didn’t have moments of just standing and waiting for his next dance moment to occur? What tiny sliver of Michael’s video budget did Jermaine get? And what’s going on with that warden? The 80s, man. They were a trip.

A new reading year comes with a bit of a change. I still have my Carmel library card, which should be good for several more years.[1] Just before Christmas L and I finally went over to the Indianapolis public library branch that is about a mile away to get cards there.

Our local library is very small. But you can request books from any IPL location and they will show up at our branch in a few days. I imagine I will still be going up to Carmel for most of my library needs, but it is nice to have an option that is basically right around the corner.

My first book is from the Carmel library. The second from the IPL.

Sting-Ray Afternoons – Steve Rushin
This is officially listed as a memoir. But it is an odd kind of memoir. It’s hard to say whether it is more a document of Rushin’s childhood in Minneapolis, or an accounting of what every kid who grew up in the 1970s went through. Every story about some event in his life contains diversions where Rushin highlights a few things that were popular at the time, whether it is music, Evel Knievel, Hamburger Helper, or some other fad of the 70s.

This is a delightful and touching book. Rushin is about five years older than me, so his memories don’t line up exactly with mine. Especially in the sections about the late 70s, there were a lot of “Oh yeah!” moments for me. I also felt a strong sense of jealousy reading his book. I wondered if I could write my version, tweaked more toward the 1980s, and based in Kansas and Missouri. Sadly I don’t think my family was nearly as interesting as Rushin’s – that’s the breaks of being an only child vs growing up in a large family – so I doubt I could make my version as universal as his.

Broken Harbor – Tana French
After I read French’s In The Woods I did some research on how to best tackle her other books. Although many of them have very loose connections, they are not a proper series. Most folks seemed to think Broken Harbor was her finest work, so that was where I jumped into the rest of her oeuvre.

The books have several common elements. A murder investigation in which an established Dublin detective is working with a new partner. The detective has a personal connection to the case that he keeps secret from everyone around him. And the detective has a side of his personality he keeps hidden from his co-workers.

Broken Harbor revolves around a mass murder in a subdivision 45 minutes from Dublin. A husband and wife are found in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor, the wife with a faint pulse. Their two young children are found upstairs in their beds, dead of apparent suffocation. Their home is also filled with all kinds of strangeness: holes in the walls, chicken wire stretched across an open access point to the attic, and baby monitors in strange locations.

Detective Mike Kennedy and his rookie partner Richie Curran are assigned and within a day have a primary suspect who, after rather light questioning, confesses to the attacks and murders. That all seems too simple, especially since there are over 250 pages left in the book.

A large swath of the book deals with how Kennedy and Curran deal with that next part of the investigation. How they try to press neighbors to tell what they saw. How they dive into the suspect’s life and find his shared past with his victims. And how they slowly discover what was really going on with the victims in the months before the attacks. At times, I was bored as the pace was quite slow for long stretches. There were several chapters where I would pause, flip ahead, and count how many more pages until I reached the end of that chapter so I could put the book down.

But I kept going because of all the praise for the book. The case gets more and more murky the deeper the investigation goes. Murky in a good way. French throws a number of wicked curves at her readers. I reached the next-to-last chapter at about 11:00 last night. There was no way I was stopping, knowing the identity of the real killer was about to be revealed. Over the next hour I raced through the nearly 50 pages of French’s “confession” chapter. I set the book aside and went to bed utterly spent.

French is really, really good at this stuff. She plumbs all kinds of delicious psychological depths of each of her characters. The crime elements of her stories are rich, believable, and well-told. And, man, can she ratchet up the tension.

A busy and fun weekend around our house.

Saturday C and I headed out at 7:00 am for her first preseason volleyball tournament. At that point in the day we had about 2” of snow. The roads were not great, but not terrible either. It helped that no one was out on them, other than parents going to volleyball tournaments. We were at one of two volleyball facilities that back up to each other. There was a long line of cars to pull into each, more traffic than I saw on the 30 minute drive there.

C’s team did ok. They won three of four sets in the pool play part of the day. Then they lost their first playoff match before winning the second in dramatic fashion. They were down 13–9 in the third set, against a bunch of fifth graders, before they came back to win 16–14. Six hours in a cold gym on hard, metal seats wiped me out. C was tired, too. When we left all the cars were covered in another 3+ inches of snow. The roads were, again, not great but still usable. We made it home without incident.

We ended up getting about seven inches of snow at our house, which I believe was the biggest snowstorm in Indy in nearly five years. We were overdue. We were pleased at how well our new snowblower worked. We replaced our 12-year-old blower in the fall. I had my eye on some higher end models but S insisted I stick with a more budget-friendly pick. Our choice runs at least twice as fast as our old one, and is lighter to boot. S ran it once Saturday while I was out, and I did a second run Sunday morning. I cleared our whole driveway in less than three songs on the old American Top 40 I was listening to!¹¹

I was very thankful that the KU-Baylor game matched up with the first half of the Colts-Chiefs game. That way I missed the Colts laying a big, fat turd and was able to move on to other things when the KU game ended.

A disappointing end to a surprising and successful season for the Colts. They enter the off season with a young, talented team, more cap space than any team in the NFL, and a general manager who absolutely cleaned up in last year’s draft. There’s every reason to believe even being half as successful in this year’s draft and free agency will make the Colts the AFC South favorites next year, and right up with the Chiefs and Patriots as best teams in the conference. Of course, football always surprises, so whether the results match those expectations is another story.

For the Chiefs, although I watched very little of the game, I thought of one very promising comparison. The 2006 Colts were absolutely terrible on defense late in the year. In December it looked like it was going to be another waste of an epic season by Peyton Manning and the offense. They the defense flipped a switch when the playoffs started and were amazing. In fact, other than in the second half of the AFC title game, the offense was pretty mediocre through the entire playoffs and it was the defense that got the Colts their only Super Bowl title since coming to Indy.

I’m not sure whether the Chiefs can sustain what they did defensively on Saturday. But if they can? Look out. You only need a halfway decent defense with that offense.

My other predictions were so-so. I thought the Cowboys-Rams game would be closer that most folks expected. I went to bed before it ended, but it wasn’t the complete domination that some predicted.

I whiffed on the Chargers. My bad. And apparently Tom Brady reads this blog, as his comments after the game about all the people who thought they sucked and couldn’t win a game were clearly aimed at my comments about the Pats on Friday.

That Philly-New Orleans game was really solid. I feel for Alshon Jeffrey. That guy has made so many big catches over the years and whiffs on a fairly easy one that cost the Eagles a chance to pull the upset. Sports are brutal sometimes. I’m sure Philly fans will handle his mistake gracefully. Some people believe every championship team needs a gut-check game along the way to wake them up. Perhaps yesterday was the Saints’ gut-check game.

Sunday we had all the two-year-old nephews over to play in the snow. We only spent about 20 minutes outside because the winds were beginning to pick up, but we drug them around on sleds, made snow angels, and L and C made a snowman. It was pretty funny watching the little guys play. They’re beginning to separate a bit more in both abilities and personalities. Throw in none of them being at the developmental stage where they can co-play or begin to understand sharing and it can be a volatile mix at times. But for the most part they are very entertaining. We’re watching one of them next weekend, so this was good prep.