D's Notebook

Month: December 2023 (Page 2 of 2)

Weekend Notes

December 11, 2023 /

We had a super-busy Saturday that featured a lot of L’s for our family. Fortunately, for me, the one dub was a big one.

Throwing hoops and real life together, our family went 1–7 for the day.

Cathedral lost JV and varsity games. More on that tomorrow.

S’s Hoosiers lost to Auburn.

M’s previously undefeated Bearcats lost to Xavier.

The Pacers lost to the Lakers in the IST championship game.

And L was nominated for, but did not win, Ice Princess at the CHS winter formal.

The win…

Jayhawk Talk

Well, we finally got a competitive game between Missouri and Kansas for the first time since the series re-started. Even then, Missouri never got it down to a two-possession game in the second half, so we can call it a comfortable KU win. Comfortable, acceptable, yet somehow unsatisfying. Simply because the Jayhawks were once up 18 and another ass-kicking appeared imminent until Mizzou sliced 10 points off that lead and the final few minutes were a little nervy.

I think it officially qualifies as a Weird Game. Mizzou was better early, and held KU off for about three-quarters of the first half before a huge KU run allowed them to take control. Then the second half had a couple mini-KU runs balanced by steady Mizzou counters. There was never any real rhythm to the game. Mizzou played terrific defense, but couldn’t put together the offensive performance you need to pull an upset in Allen Fieldhouse. KU seemed low-energy much of the game outside of the last five minutes of the first half. Then the ending felt like it could have stretched on forever and the margin would never get outside a 7–11 point range. Like I said, weird game.

One concern for KU is that Mizzou showed that until someone on the Jayhawks starts forcing defenses to respect them from behind the arc, teams will just pack defenders around Hunter Dickinson, both taking him out of the game and preventing cuts to the rim by his teammates. I don’t see anyone on this year’s roster turning into a consistent deep threat, at least not this season. So I think Bill Self’s challenge is to find a way to generate mid-range looks, which this team has the potential to be quite good at, to open up the lane. I’m confident he’ll figure something out.

As is often the case, KU’s schedule is kind of hurting them. They need to develop a couple guys from the group of Elmarko Jackson – who was quite good Saturday – Johnny Furphy, Nick Timberlake, and Jamari McDowell as complementary players that Self can trust. A schedule packed with close games against high level opponents makes that difficult. Worse, KU has played kind of like ass in their guarantee games sprinkled in amongst the MU, UConn, Kentucky, and Hawaii games, preventing mop-up minutes for the young/new guys. Conference play is just a few weeks away, and that’s when guys that Self doesn’t trust usually disappear.

One positive for KU is how well KJ Adams played. He was the best player on the court Saturday. It’s remarkable how he keeps finding ways to add to his game. I joked Saturday night that he may just develop a 3-point shot over the Christmas break to solve KU’s shooting woes. I doubt that will happen, but I also wouldn’t ever count that kid out.

Oh, and he had the signature play of the year so far for KU, one that will be in the pregame video for years.

I also noticed that Self seemed pretty chill throughout the game. I guess this is a post- heart attack thing? It confuses me a little. I mean, I want the guy to be healthy and able to coach for another decade or so. But it also helps my mood considerably when he rips into the team when they are playing like ass.

I love how petty rivalry games make people. MU coach Dennis Gates made a comment in his postgame press conference about how not many teams come into Allen Fieldhouse and lead for 14 minutes. I get what he was saying, and it was 100% valid. I don’t think he was suggesting the game was a moral victory in any way. Just pointing out there was something his young team could build on.

But since it was a rivalry game, naturally KU people made fun of it, generating fake banners about close losses to hang at Mizzou Arena or referencing Bruce Weber and his Try Hard chart. I didn’t necessarily buy into those arguments, but they made me laugh.

Along those lines, I was watching the UC-Xavier game later in the evening and saw a sign in the XU student section that said “Hell Is Real And It’s Three Miles Away.” Rivalries are the best.[1]

Pacers

After a dream run to the championship game – during which they beat Philadelphia, Boston, and Milwaukee – the Pacers played their worst game of the inaugural NBA In Season Tournament in Saturday night’s championship game. They missed sooooo many open shots they had hit over their previous games. Myles Turner was really bad. A lot of people took shots at him forgetting he had played wonderfully in every game before the final.

Oh, and 157 year old LeBron James played like he was 25 and Anthony Davis remembered he is one of the best, and least guardable, players in the game and could not be stopped. Two transcendent players showing out usually get you the win in the NBA.

And even then the Pacers were right in it until about 2:00 were left and the Lakers went on a final surge.

A terrific run, a coming-out show for Tyrese Haliburton, and some rare national attention on the Pacers.

The Pacers have a lot of flexibility moving forward thanks to expiring contracts, some team-friendly short-term contracts, and full control of their future draft picks. Might they make a splashy move to bring in another proven scorer to put next to Haliburton, either between now and the trade deadline or over the summer?

Winter Formal

As I mentioned, L was nominated for Ice Princess at the CHS winter formal. Their winter formal is weird. It is the biggest deal for freshmen, who dress up and get nominated for stuff. Some sophomores go. Almost no juniors go. And seniors show up briefly, but wearing ugly sweaters rather than suits and dresses.

Anyway, L was one of five girls nominated. I hoped she would cross enough demographic lines to be in the running, but it was a girl who is kind of Tik-Tok famous, is a model, and the daughter of a former local celebrity that won. L isn’t a huge fan of the kid who won Ice Prince and she was relieved they didn’t have to stand/dance together. So she really won I guess?

Colts

What a shit game. A couple terrible calls went against them, but the Colts basically rolled over after the Bengals scored an early touchdown. And on a day when the Jags and Texans both lost. This team really isn’t playoff worthy, and will lose in the first round if they make it. But that was still a super-dumb loss.

Indiana Fever

I doubt I’ve ever written about our local WNBA team here before. The Fever won the WNBA draft lottery yesterday. Meaning if Caitlin Clark decides to go pro, as expected, she will likely be playing here in Indy this summer. We already have tickets to watch her play in Bloomington in February. I’m guessing this means L will be going to her first-ever Fever game sometime in 2024.

  1. M was very excited about the game…but went to see a movie with her friends.  ↩

Friday Playlist

December 8, 2023 /

Looking at the calendar, this may be the last regular FP of the calendar year. Next week will be a set-up piece for my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist, which will drop the following week. I plan on a non-traditional holiday music playlist for sometime the week before Christmas. Then I will most likely take the final Friday of 2023 off.

Even this isn’t going to be your standard playlist, though. I’ll throw in a few holiday tunes to help setup the rest of the month.

“Faded State” – Home Front
Since back in my iTunes days I’ve kept a playlist of the latest songs I’ve come across at the core of my daily listening. Tracks generally get about two months in the playlist before they cycle out. I added this song on October 30. Somehow between travel, holidays, and other distractions, I have barely listened to it over the past seven weeks. Big bummer because this is an awesome piece of modern post-punk. Apparently I played another kick-ass song from Home Front in my first playlist of 2023, so I guess they are bookending the year. I might need to look into their album.

“Adelaide” – Sand Brothers
This is an Australian super group, although I don’t know any of the bands it pulls from. It definitely sounds 100% Australian.

“Bend” – Middle Kids
As much as I’ve enjoyed the three previous advance singles from the next MK album – spoiler alert, one will appear on my Favorite Songs of 2023 list – this is the first that recaptures the strong emotion that was such an important element of their last album. This is fierce, dramatic, and has a sense of desperation I’ve not heard in their music before.

“Bright As Yellow” – The Innocence Mission
I forget where I recently re-discovered this wonderful song. It may have been on Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explain the 90s podcast. I’m pretty sure he and his guest talked about 1995’s soundtrack for Empire Records on an episode I listened to recently. Then again, Spotify may have just churned this up and thrown it into something else I was listening to. I should take better notes. Anyway, this was on that Empire Records soundtrack – one of the better soundtracks of the Nineties – and was a minor hit. I’m sure its success had nothing to do with how much the song, both in the music and vocals, resembled Mazzy Star. Thank goodness it was a great song on its own.

“Yellow Bike” – Pedro The Lion
Songs about your most-loved Christmas present are always awesome, especially when they match up with your childhood.

“Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” – Brenda Lee
Allow me to put on my Reaching for the Stars hat for a moment. This hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 last week, setting a couple records in the process. First, it shattered Mariah Carey’s record for longest gap between a song’s original release and when it first topped the chart, finally reaching #1 after 65 years. Second, the 78-year-old Lee became the oldest performer to hit #1, breaking Louis Armstrong’s record by 16 years. Good for Brenda, and better that she is still alive to enjoy the moment. With the nuttiness of the charts these days, including the fact that Christmas songs can actually chart on the Hot 100, there’s certainly a chance each of those records could be broken in a future holiday season.

“The Chanukah Song” – Adam Sandler
Happy Chanukah everybody!

“She Kissed Me” – Sananda Maitreya (FKA Terence Trent D’Arby)
This is definitely a lost song I re-discovered on Harvilla’s podcast, although I forget what episode, as it was one of the songs/artists he talked about leading into his main subject. I remember this 1993 track actually getting some airplay on alt-rock stations thanks to its grungy lead guitar, but guarantee I had not heard it once in the 30 years since. It’s a shame whatever torpedoed Maitreya’s career happened, because he made amazing music.

Reader’s Notebook, 12/6/23

December 6, 2023 /


Please Report Your Bug Here – Josh Riedel
This was my Florida Trip book about a month ago. It is framed as a modern take on the workplace novel, which I didn’t know was a thing. I know there are workplace shows. I guess that means it makes sense for there to be a whole swath of novels that relate to our relationships with our jobs then, too.

This focuses on a 2010-ish San Francisco start-up that has created an insanely popular dating app that is about to get snatched up by a Big Tech company. One problem: an employee has discovered a huge bug in the software that allows people to time travel. But with very unpredictable and possibly life-threatening results. With the influx of money, though, no one really wants to hear about the bug. Expect for those within Big Tech who have discovered it on their own and are trying to find a way to monetize it.

I guess it makes some commentaries on modern work life. But I found the story to be cold. Or, rather, I found the characters to all be very cold and isolated. I wanted to smack them all and tell them to pull their freaking heads away from their screens and learn how to relate to other humans. My God, am I a Boomer???

Anyway, there were some very interesting directions this story could have gone that it failed to. Which made it a disappointment.


The Word is Murder – Anthony Horowitz
I knocked out Horowitz’s Bond novels earlier this year and promised to check out some of his other work. This is the first in a series that is pretty meta.

Horowitz himself is a main character and our primary narrator. He joins forces with a somewhat disgraced former police officer, Daniel Hawthorne, as he assists on a murder case. The idea is that after Hawthorne, not the police, solves the case, Horowitz will write a true crime summation of it.

There are a series of predictable issues between the men. They don’t trust each other, aren’t honest with each other, and each questions how the other does his job. Horowitz, the newby to real murder investigations, nearly mucks it all up, but Hawthorne saves the day. There’s very much a Holmes and Watson vibe to their relationship.

The story was good enough, but not one that makes me want to jump into the series and read another installment.


Mad World – Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein
This book is nearly a decade old, but I just learned of it thanks to a mention in Tom Breihan’s Alternative Number Ones series. He clipped a quote by Echo & The Bunnymen lead singer Richard Butler when he refers to Bono as a “…gibbering, leprechaunish twat.” That is tremendous! I immediately sought out the book.

It is a series of brief sketches about New Wave bands and some of their biggest songs, mostly based on interviews with the artists themselves. Some of the chapters are only a couple pages long, none more than 10. None of them are super-deep dives. For the most part it is filled with artists you know, like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, OMD, Simple Minds, etc. There were only a couple bands I hadn’t heard of, and of the bands I knew of, only a couple songs that were new to me.

This is far from a definitive account of the era, but it is a quick, very fun read if you lived through that time.


Everybody Loves Our Town – Mark Yarm
And this was my Nineties music book, an oral history of the Seattle scene, from its earliest days well before the giants emerged to Layne Staley’s death in 2002. Most of the big names of the scene contributed, but many artists I had never heard of were involved, too, giving a truly full accounting of the Grunge era. There was a lot of shit talking, which was kind of funny given most of the interviews were done 20–25 years after actual events. Name a famous Seattle artist, and for every person that spoke admiringly of them and their music, someone else was slamming them. And then pretty much everyone laid into Courtney Love.

More than the Eighties book, this one made me reminisce about my own experiences in the moments these events occurred. Maybe that’s because I was a child in the 80s and became an adult in the 90s? Or maybe my memories of the 90s are just more distinct? Who knows the real explanation, but this book was not only illuminating, it also constantly dredged up snapshots from my own past. Which was mostly a good thing.


This Is Christmas, Song By Song – Annie Zaleski
Finally, a third music book, this one spanning decades. Zaleski breaks down 100 of her favorite holiday songs, mostly modern interpretations, basically from “White Christmas” up to Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm.” All little blurbs, so this is a book you can skim casually as time allows. And I bet you’ll learn something about one of your favorite – or least favorite – songs along the way.

High School Hoops Chronicles, S1V3

December 5, 2023 /

Two games last week. One of them was the biggest night of L’s young career.

Tuesday we played Ben Davis, a west-side of Indianapolis school that is the second-biggest in the state.[1] Their athletic program is generally quite good. Their football team just won the 6A state title and their boys basketball team was undefeated 4A state champs in March. The girls hoops program made it to semi-state last season. Back in the day – 2000–2009 – they won four state titles in ten years, two of those undefeated seasons, and in 2009 were crowned national champions by USA Today. But they were just 1–6 coming into our game.

The JV game was pretty similar to the Warren Central game a week earlier. BD was far more physical and athletic, plus they were older, and dictated almost all of the action. It didn’t help that our only decent inside player could just play one quarter so she was eligible to play in the varsity game, filling in for our injured center. We ended up losing by eight but had trailed by 12–16 for most of the second half.

L genuinely got beaten up. She was limping after the game because of one collision. She had big claw marks on her leg from a loose ball pileup. And her left arm was sore because someone landed on it in another scrum.

She played all but 58 seconds of the game, scoring 5 points on 2–7 shooting from the field (1–3 on 3s). She added a couple rebounds and five turnovers. She was matched up with sophomores and juniors all night, so I was proud of how she hung in.

BD’s varsity won by eight. They had a player who hit her first five shots of the game – four were 3s – and that was pretty much the difference.

Thursday Center Grove came to CHS. Their varsity team was ranked #3 in the state, but were coming off their first loss of the year. They have a girl who is going to Villanova next year. Unfortunately our center who is going to Nova to play volleyball was still out with a concussion.

Fortunately their JV team wasn’t quite as strong. In what was truly the ugliest quarter of basketball I’ve seen this year, we had a 7–1 lead after the first quarter thanks to a banked-in 35-footer at the buzzer. We only scored two in the second quarter but still led by one, before giving up a 17–7 run in the third quarter. We made our own run late, but couldn’t finish the comeback and lost by two.

L probably had her best game of the year. She tied her career high with nine points, hitting three of four shots (1–1 on 3s). She finally decided to drive and had two beautiful blow-bys that she got fouled on. Each time her shot rimmed out. Each time she hit one-of-two free throws. She played fantastic defense, too, the best I’ve ever seen from her. She made it impossible for whoever she was guarding to get into the lane. She had a rebound, an assist, and three steals. She had three more turnovers, but only one of those was because of an error she made. She actually got to sit out a little more this game, playing 26:40.[2]

Her middle school and travel ball buddy, also L, who went to a rival high school came and watched. I’ve seen her a few times since school started, but it was my first time seeing her mom since August. We either coached together, I kept score for her when she coached, or we sat together for the last six years in both CYO and travel ball, so that was fun.

After the game Other L was talking to some of the St P’s girls who cheer for CHS while we were waiting for L to come out of the locker room. Then Other L yelled my name and pointed at the court with a big grin on her face. L was pulling on a varsity warmup shirt with a goofy grin of her own.

That’s right, seven games into her high school career L got to dress for the varsity game against the #3 team in the state! We were all pretty excited. It was a shame she was a sweaty mess otherwise I would have gotten a picture.

She didn’t get into the game. I didn’t expect her to, even as CG easily won by 16. Maybe if CG had cleared their bench there would have been a chance but even that was unlikely.

Put that all together and I think Thursday was the best day of her season, so far. Would have been nice to win the JV game to top it off. A third of the way into the season, both varsity and JV are now 2–5.

The Irish have three games this week. Varsity plays the #13 4A team tonight, a 3A Catholic school that starts a bunch of freshmen L played against in CYO Thursday, then the #2 2A team Saturday.

  1. Cathedral, by comparison, is 93rd of 405.  ↩

  2. I only know the exact time she sat because the math was easy on the two times she got to sit. The final seventeen seconds of the third quarter, then a minute and three seconds in the fourth quarter.  ↩

Weekend Notes

December 4, 2023 /

Jayhawk Talk


What a game Friday night between #5 KU and #4 UConn! Since this is rolled into a Weekend Notes post, I’ll chop my thoughts up into chunks tied to the four quarters of the game.

Opening tip to 10:00: This is awesome! The Jayhawks are unbeatable! UConn are frauds! The crowd is AMAZING! Why is Jason Sudeikis hanging out with Sue Bird?

10:00 to Halftime: OK, that could have ended better, but we still have a seven-point lead. And most of UConn’s points were unreal makes at the end of the shot clock. We’re fine, but we need to get the offense back into gear.

Beginning of second half to 10:00: This team sucks. Bill Self is an idiot for not recruiting more shooters. Why is DaJuan Harris playing so bad? UConn isn’t even full strength and they’re going to beat us. I hate this game and sports in general.

10:00 to final horn: What a team! What a win! I love Kevin McCullar and KJ Adams! This was an incredible game and I would have been fine losing it because it was so well played. Bravo sports!

Then I proceeded to stay up another hour watching all the postgame interviews. That put me in bed around 1:00 AM. 9:00 PM tips are dumb. Especially on Fridays.

The Huskies are super tough to guard because of their motion and actions out of it, and KU shut them down for the first ten minutes and last 5–6 minutes. That was an incredible defensive performance. UConn’s comeback was largely fueled because only the KU starters could keep that level of intensity up, and it cost them on the offensive end.

Still a lot of questions about KU’s ability to score, but you toss them aside for a few days after a win that fun.

A bonus to the night was parents of a couple UConn players bitching about their seats. They claimed KU put them in the upper row. Once the game started and you saw two rows of UConn fans right behind the bench – the exact seats you often see Big 12 player parents sitting in – it was obvious someone in Storrs decided that the parents needed to take the upper level seats in their allotment while more important people got the cool seats. Typical entitled east coast BS. Besides, there isn’t a bad seat in Allen Fieldhouse. Even if you have to lean under a beam to see the court.

College Football

OH MAN, WHAT A MESS!!!! AND IT’S GLORIOUS!!!!

I don’t have a huge beef with how things shook out. You can make legit arguments for six teams, and with only four spots, someone is going to get screwed. Obviously a huge bummer for Florida State. It absolutely sucks to go undefeated in a Power Five, err four, errr three, Power Whatever conference, and get the shaft. Michigan and Washington were awarded for doing exactly that. FSU gets the shaft because their quarterback is hurt, which seems like an odd decision point. If you take Alabama, you have to take Texas, who beat Alabama convincingly in Tuscaloosa. Georgia had their shot and blew it.

It was garbage how the biggest topic of last week was not the games themselves, but the hypothetical that the SEC would get left out. Actually my beef was more with some of the horseshit logic used to carve out a spot for an SEC team. The SEC commissioner suggested that if you throw out Texas’ win over Alabama, Bama was actually the better team. Which, first off, is debatable. And then THERE IS NO BETTER DATA POINT THAN A HEAD-TO-HEAD RESULT. Until it threatens the SEC’s spot in the championship playoff. That’s when you throw it out.

The commish also suggested that the SEC deserved a spot simply because of history. There’s no doubt the SEC has dominated college football this century. That means nothing for this year. Georgia doesn’t get extra points for being two-time defending champs. Bama doesn’t get a bonus for being the best program in the game since Nick Saban took over. The playoff is about the games played in the last four months only.

I don’t buy into the conspiracy theories floating around that ESPN wasn’t about to let their future partner the SEC get left on the outside. It is, though, another blow to college sports that a lot of folks are buying into those theories this morning. I think it’s just a super flawed process that had no clear outcome that would have been fair to all. However, you don’t have to be a conspiracist to have known there was no way that it would be Alabama and Georgia who would get screwed in the process.

Mostly I got fired up because the SEC nonsense actually had me wanting Texas to win Saturday so they could put the squeeze on the SEC. I guess KU gets a cut of the Texas CFP payout, so that’s cool. But I’m all about Washington for the next month.

KU Bowl Game

KU goes to Phoenix to play UNLV. Which is kind of weird since the teams will play week three next season in Lawrence.

Seems like it should be a high scoring game, which is how all bowl games should be. I probably just cursed it into being a 17–14 penalty-fest.

Jayhawk fans are now holding our collective breath that no key players decide to sit the game out as they prepare for the draft. Which is dumb. For us fans, not the players. It’s dumb because this game is basically meaningless. It will be cool if KU wins its first bowl game since 2008 and gets its ninth win. Grand scheme of things, though, this is just an exhibition and if Devin Neal or whoever decide they’d rather protect themselves for their pro career, its just a bummer, not something to lose sleep over.

Colts

The Colts remain in the playoff hunt thanks to a truly stupid win in Nashville. Were this not already a pretty long post, I would dive into the details. I mean, the Titans punter got flipped completely upside down and that was NOT the play he might have destroyed his leg on. Let’s all just accept it was a stupid game in every single way and move on.

Holiday Vibes

We went to a Christmas party briefly Saturday. We hung out for maybe 90 minutes then bugged out. It’s not that it wasn’t fun. We just didn’t know a ton of people and weren’t super in the mood to mingle with strangers. Also, S and I both realized we couldn’t hear shit. Everyone was crammed into two connected rooms and our old people ears just were not working at all. S had a long conversation with a lady and I could only catch snippets of it because they were operating in the 5’1” to 5’4” airspace and my ears being a foot higher just could not keep up. I don’t think my hearing is terrible in normal settings. But, man, put me in a crowded room and it goes to shit pretty quick.

M has her last final tomorrow morning, so I’ll be picking her up around noon. We keep telling her that is super early, and our finals always went much deeper into December. I swear we usually wrapped things up at KU right around December 20. UC did not have a fall break, which I guess helps.

Her roommate is already done and went home yesterday. M also has some friends who have a final this Friday at 5:30, which seems like kind of a dick move.

November Media

December 3, 2023 /

Another pretty light month.

Movies, Shows, etc

Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland
An amazing five-part documentary about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is a balance of archival footage and interviews with people who lived through the worst years of the conflict. One of the most moving aspects of the series was seeing these people interviewed in the 2020s and then again in newsreels from 30 or 40 years ago, in a moment of grief when a loved one had been killed. It was also fascinating to see how some of them have changed their views while a few, it seemed, had not. Which seems baffling to me, a non-religious person who lives in a society where we generally don’t kill people because they might pray to the same god in a different way. I know there was more to the conflict that religion, but that was the biggest dividing point between the Republicans and Unionists.

A

Arrival
The inspiration for these monthly posts came from Jason Kottke, who began doing his own periodic media posts awhile back. In his most recent he mentioned that he re-watched this, and it is one of his all time favorites. This was my first time watching it. It is the kind of sci-fi I can get into, where it’s more speculative than world building. Also dig the little clues that first-time viewers will miss but become apparent as the story wraps up. I may have to go back and re-watch it at some point to track those moments.

A-

Reservation Dogs, season three
A fitting finale season for an extraordinary show. Episode nine, “Elora’s Dad,” is on my list of best shows of the year. I’ve said this before, but this program was a true gift to viewers.

A

Barry, season four
Hmmm. A pretty bizarre final season for another one of the best shows of recent years. There were still plenty of moments that shared the dark humor of the first three seasons. But this one had too many connective moments in between that didn’t work, which kept it from being great. Of course that was because the bar was set so high by seasons one-through-three.

B

Shorts, YouTubes, etc

Key & Peele
I spent a lot of time last month watching random sketches from K&P. They never disappointed.

Prince ’91 Special Olympics Rehearsal
What a wonderful piece of music history.

El Estepario Siberiano
A friend bombarded me with a bunch of this dude’s videos one day. I don’t play drums but he seems pretty bad ass.

Friday Playlist

December 1, 2023 /

We’ve reached December, the month when these playlists can get a little squirrelly. There’s less new music to begin with. I’m listening to holiday music much of the day. I’m also focused on my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist. This year has the added element of me just reading a book about Eighties music, and being neck-deep in a book about Nineties music. I could easily just play songs pulled from those books this week. Oh, and there were two pretty significant music deaths this week. As I begin this, I’m not sure exactly where it’s headed. I guess we’ll find out together…

“I Used To Be Fun” – Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers
In the month we celebrate Jesus’ birthday, why not give Teen Jesus some love, too? I wish I kept better track of my Aussies. This might be the first band I’ve shared that comes from Canberra rather than Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane.

“Wake Me” – Rusty
This was not in that Nineties book. But Spotify did flash it as a Recommended tracks underneath some other stuff I was listening to. So they knew. I guarantee I hadn’t heard this song in a good 25 years. I guarantee this was one of those notorious Nineties tracks I spent $16 to buy the entire CD only to learn this was the only decent song on the entire album. Also, I thought about other songs like this from that era, when total random bands got these quasi-hits because they were a little grungy, or had a cool video. Since alt-rock wasn’t really mainstream, you can’t even call them true one-hit wonders. There’s probably a longer playlist idea in there somewhere.

“Blues From a Gun” The Jesus and Mary Chain
This week’s The Alternative Number Ones entry is the final alt #1 of the 80s, and first of the 90s. I didn’t get into JAMC for a long, long time after this was released, and never made it to this track, so it was new and wonderful to me.

“jamcod” – The Jesus and Mary Chain
In an amazing coincidence, the day Tom Breihan’s “Blues From a Gun” piece dropped, so did a brand-new JAMC track. Like most of what they’ve done over the past 35 years, it does not suck at all.

“Love And Anger” – Kate Bush
Last week’s Alternative Number Ones entry. I know two Kate Bush songs – “Wuthering Heights” and The Kate Bush Song Everybody Knows – so this one kind of blew my mind, as it was not what I expected at all.

“Eighties” – Killing Joke
KJ guitarist Geordie Walker died last week. This was the only KJ song I ever listened to much, but it was enough as it is 1000% incredible. And, obviously, the main riff showed up in a Nirvana song a few years later which was likely the first way most of us learned of Killing Joke. Apparently Walker was hugely influential to a lot of rock guitarists.

“Original Sin” – INXS
Last month I shared Nile Rogers’ Tiny Desk Concert. My brother-in-music Nez in Lee’s Summit and I texted about what a huge swath Rogers cut through music over his career. I forgot he helped INXS on this track. In that Eighties book I learned that INXS good-naturedly tried to hide that from Duran Duran, because they didn’t want to share Rogers with other bands of that era. Oh, Daryl Hall also sang harmony on this track. I feel like I knew that at some point, but can’t say for sure.

“Fairytale of New York” – The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl
Most of you should know that main Pogue Shane MacGowan died this week. He had to be high on the He’s Still Alive??? rock star chart. I kind of hate to say that since he had been in very poor health for several years, but, seriously, dude lived a rough life and it’s amazing he nearly made it to 66. He was also known for his truly atrocious teeth. I was shocked to learn he had sired a son because how do you sleep with a man with a mouth like that (RIP, obviously).

MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, 1957. It was somehow apt that he passed in the holiday season. He was known for combining punk rock with traditional Irish music, but is probably most famous outside Ireland for this track. It has lost some favor over the past decade because of the presence of a particular slur. I hope it earns a revival as we remember MacGowan, perhaps with the offending word bleeped or removed. If you believe in rock ‘n’ roll heaven, I bet MacGowan and MacColl got to this quick when they were reunited.

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