D's Notebook

Month: July 2025 (Page 1 of 2)

Friday Playlist

July 25, 2025 /

Back to extra-stuffed this week. So stuffed that I’ll only include one summer song. And apologies to Chuck Mangione, but there’s no room to honor his passing with more than these words.

“Summer Nights” – Van Halen
Perfect late July song.

“Touch Myself” – The Beaches
Not a remake of that song, but definitely about the same subject. And a strong Song of the Summer contender.

“Cowbella” – bar italia
I’m not sure if they were going for this, but every time I hear this song I think of Elastica. Or maybe druggier Elastica?

“The Scene” – Hotline TNT
Some poor DJing here. I’ve only been sitting on it since the summer began. It deserved to be shared much sooner.

“Adored” – Been Stellar
Not quite as good as the songs they released a year ago. It’s a little more contemplative and less straight rock. It reminds me a bit of Silversun Pickups.

“Paint By Number” – Coral Grief
I’ve been kicking a few of this band’s songs around for several weeks. I finally broke down and picked this one to share with you. I hope you like it.

“Reticence” – Girls Names
This song is a decade old, so from before I started doing Friday playlists. I 1000% would have included it had FPL’s existed then. I love this band’s blend of dark post punk and jangly indie rock.

“Let It Happen” – Tame Impala
Currents was released 10 years ago last week. Its highlight is this stone-cold classic. Five stars all around.

“Twilight Zone” – Golden Earring
George Kooymans, guitarist and vocalist of Golden Earring, died this week. His passing got lost in the wave of other, more notable deaths this remarkable week. Shame. One of the obits I read suggested that if the term Two-Hit Wonder was a thing, Golden Earring might be the best example. “Radar Love,” from 1973, is a Classic Rock radio staple. This track went to #10 in 1982 and has never dropped out of rotation on Eighties stations. Eleven-year-old me thought it was the coolest song on the radio.

“War Pigs” – Black Sabbath
You didn’t have to be a fan of Ozzy Osbourne to know a shitload of his songs. That’s certainly the case with me. I never owned one of his albums or singles, never taped a song of his off the radio, never downloaded any of his songs. I was never deep enough into metal to be interested in his music. But I can sing along to the choruses of at least half a dozen of them because Ozzy was always in the air.

A few years ago I learned that Ozzy was actually a big hippie in the Sixties. That helps to explain this song, one of the most incandescent, ferocious anti-war songs ever made. It kicks all kinds of ass. He may have loved darkness and the occult, but deep down he just wanted everyone to love each other and have a good time.

It’s amazing he made it to 76. One obituary this week stated that researchers had studied him and determined that he was a genetic freak, able to tolerate drugs and alcohol in quantities far beyond the normal human being. That explains a lot.

“Killing in the Name of a Terrible Holy Lie” – Nine Inch Nails and Various Artists
I miss good mashups like this. I know things got a little out of hand in that moment, about 20 years ago, when mashups blew up. But when done well, how can you not like them?

Fitness Update

July 23, 2025 /

A belated review of my fitness activity in April-through-June. You can read about the first quarter of the year (and L’s ED visit) here. I exercised 73% of the days in those three months, which I was hoping to beat in Q2.

Which I did. Barely. Officially I was at 73.3% in Q1. This past quarter I was at 73.6%. May was my best month of the year, but then a couple travel weekends, pool issues, and a heat wave in June made that my worst month of the year. The good news is I’ve locked in this month and am on pace to break May’s number.[1] I’ve also increased the distance I’m swimming by 25% since the beginning of this month.

Somehow in there I had a blip where my weight jumped up noticeably for two weeks. I would blame S for buying a Costco cheesecake for Father’s Day/my birthday and me being dumb enough to eat most of it over the course of a week. Seriously, I have zero self control when it comes to cheesecake, or monster Costco desserts in general. But the weight gain came two weeks later, so I’m not sure that was the cause. Fortunately I’m back to normal. The human body is a weird thing.

Blue days are strength training, red gym cardio, black other cardio (normally walks), and the new addition of green is swimming. Not that you can tell blue from black from green very well in this picture.

  1. I just jinxed myself into my back going out, my arthritic foot pains flaring up, etc.  ↩

On Malcolm

July 22, 2025 /

 

Celebrity deaths that are somehow connected to your childhood always hit a little harder. But, man, the news that Malcom-Jamal Warner drowned while on vacation in Costa Rica had an extra big wallop to it.

Part of it was the circumstances. Pretty much every person who reads this has been on a vacation with a loved one and gone for a swim. Thus while incredibly tragic, Warner’s death had an everyday quality to it.

Bigger was that Warner was one of the few heroes of my late childhood who was roughly my age.[1] Almost everything he was going through as Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show was stuff I was going through. Maybe his family had a little more money than mine. Perhaps he was a little cooler. Certainly he was more willing to make a fool of himself, especially when it came to trying to impress a girl, something I was mortified to do. But when he got emotional and his voice cracked because his sister messed up the shirt she was sewing for him or his parents dismissed his big ideas, all us other teenage dumbasses knew that pain.

My heroes in the early Eighties were mostly athletes, men who did superhuman feats I struggled to repeat in my backyard or on rec league fields and courts. Theo Huxtable was a hero not because he was an incredible athlete, but because he was putting all the ups and downs of being a teenage boy right there an the TV screen for all of America to see. These were universal concerns, and it was validating for them to be an integral part of the most-watched program in the country.

The Cosby Show has largely been erased from our culture, for understandable reasons. With that we’ve lost one of the most remarkable programs in TV history, one that broke down countless barriers without being edgy or radical or actively courting controversy. This was an upper-middle class Black family, living in comfort in an integrated neighborhood, that looked and acted pretty much just like the white families of the same backgrounds that had dominated prime time TV for 30 years. Especially for my generation, we saw that Black folks were just like us, no matter what our racist grandparents might think.[2] While that was all the vision of the now disgraced Bill Cosby, the actors who played his children were the ones who made the biggest impact on me. As the only boy in the house, Theo was the one I connected with the most.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner came from an era when a lot of child actors washed out – or worse – in one embarrassing way or another. He always seemed steady and comfortable with who he was and willing to find new avenues to stay in the entertainment business without flailing to find the same level of success and game he had as a teenager. He seemed like a genuinely good dude.

Here are two terrific pieces about Warner’s life.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner Wore the Gordon Gartrell Shirt Like No Other
Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the Other Side of the Climb

  1. Warner was a year older than me.  ↩
  2. Some of you grew up with parents, and even siblings, that were just as racist as our grandparents.  ↩

Weekend Notes

July 21, 2025 /

Once again this weekend notes piece will involve more than what went on from Friday to Sunday. I’ll start with a focus on the actual weekend, though.

WNBA All Star Game

The best players in the league were all in Indy over the weekend for Saturday’s All Star Game. While that was exciting, it was tempered a bit by Caitlin Clark getting injured again Tuesday and not participating in either the 3-point contest Friday or playing in the All Star Game Saturday. She did “coach” her team, though.

The biggest point of this section is that L got to go to the game. And not only was she in Gainbridge, but she had amazing seats. The dad of one of her best friends runs the business that puts the gigantic decals on all the buildings around downtown for whatever the latest event is.

Because of that he has tickets to pretty much every game. L has been their guest at Gainbridge before, for the Big 10 tournament last March, and assumed she would be sitting in the suite again. Apparently the suite was reserved for VIPs so the girls had to slum it in the sixth row.

Pretty cool.

She had a good time. She and her friends were close enough that the mascots all kept coming over and harassing them. They were sitting near all kinds of famous people. They got to meet and take a pic with WNBA player Nika Mühl. She dropped $112 on a Paige Bueckers jersey. I told her I really hope CHS has multiple jersey days this year so she can actually wear it.

The game itself was ok. They introduced a fun wrinkle by having four-point spots behind the 3-point arc. Which, in theory, was cool. But it turned out both teams just kept chucking from that point. Team Collier was hitting them while Team Clark was not, and that was the difference.

I think a good tweak for next year is to make those only count for four points in the last two minutes of each quarter or something. Not that the ASG will ever be real ball – Clark told her team not to even bother with defense and just chuck all night – but watching 25 foot shot after 25 foot shot got a bit tedious.

It being the WNBA, naturally there was a manufactured controversy. The players came out before the game wearing shirts that said “Pay Us What You Owe Us,” referring to their current CBA negotiations with the league. The usual crowd who never watched a WNBA game before Clark was drafted piped up and criticized the move. God forbid workers stand up for their rights and to be paid their fair share of the massive amount of money the league is now bringing in. Especially when the workers are all women, mostly Black, and many of them queer.

Never a dull moment.

Tour de France

I had been enjoying the Tour de France each morning until this weekend. Defending champ Tadej Pogacar came in as the heavy favorite, but there was hope that two-time champ Jonas Vingegaard could put pressure on him. The two were sitting in second and third places, separated by a minute, when the race finally entered the mountains on Thursday. And Pogacar promptly destroyed everyone. Vingegaard himself finished well ahead of everyone else, but at the end of the stage was over four minutes behind Pogacar in the general classification. The only hope for an exciting final week is that Pogacar has some kind of major illness or accident. I’m not a huge fan, but I’m not rooting for that at all.

I’ll still watch this week, but it will likely be with far less attention that I gave the race the first 10 days.

British Open

Speaking of dominating performances, Scottie Scheffler solidified his position as best golfer in the game with a relatively easy win at Royal Portrush. He makes it look so easy that the comparisons to Tiger Woods in his prime have started. I’m not sure those are fair or accurate. Scheffler doesn’t blow away the course the way young Tiger did. But he does have a clinical, unperturbed style that is reminiscent of Tiger’s second peak.

He also is far less single-minded and weird about winning that Tiger was. Scheffler has always said how he doesn’t get too worked up about failing on the golf course because he is a very religious man and believes there are bigger things to worry about. Last Tuesday he admitted he doesn’t burn to be the best, nor is his goal to be a role model for others as a golfer.

I usually bristle when athletes bring religion into the conversation when explaining their success, mostly because is it often framed as God being on their side somehow. Which the heathen me has always taken to the next logical step that God must have not been on the opponent’s side, then, right? And I refuse to believe whatever higher power there might be has any interest in who wins a stupid game.

But Scheffler has never been an evangelist when he talks about his faith. He talks about his personal experience, and suggests that faith frees his mind rather than gives him some kind of boost over his opponents. Which I totally respect. And I admire that Scheffler seems a lot more normal than most high level athletes who are so wired to win or motivated by slights that they turn into psychopaths.

One thing that really drove me nuts about NBC were the incessant ads for their upcoming NBA coverage, featuring a variety of NBC personalities singing or humming along to John Tesh’s famous “Roundball Rock” theme. I get that networks always celebrate when they re-gain rights to sports they used to have. But Fox Sports bought “Roundball Rock” a few years back and used it for their college basketball coverage. It’s not like it was buried and you could only hear it on grainy rips of old VHS tapes on YouTube.

I might have been ok with the ads if they didn’t run them during EVERY commercial break. And they’ve also been running them during Peacock’s Tour de France coverage. So I’ve seen them a million times this month.

House Stuff

As mentioned last week, I had two visits from contractors. One planned, one unplanned.

Tuesday morning I went to the basement to grab some chlorine tabs for the pool and noticed wet concrete under our water heater. Uh oh. We’ve been in the house seven years, which means it was probably installed 7.5 years ago, which is right in line with when traditional heaters can begin to fail.

I noticed the water was all coming from the top of the tank, not the bottom, so I was hopeful maybe it was just a leak.

I had a service come out and they confirmed that tanks can rust out from the top as easily as the bottom. So we needed a new one. Terrific. Water heaters ain’t cheap, friends.

I called early enough that we were able to get a new one installed before the day was over. We still had hot water until the crew showed up so everyone was able to get a shower in before they removed the old one, and then I could wash dishes normally after dinner.

You think stuff is going to last forever, especially when you buy a new house. It is a little shocking that we’ve been here long enough that some of the original parts are beginning to fail.

The planned visit was on Thursday. Without writing a million words about it, I’ve been wanting to jump from Xfinity for cable and internet for a while, for a variety of reasons. But they are the only service in our neighborhood. I even looked into various satellite options but those are all much, much slower than what Xfinity provides.

Last December, though, Metronet ran fiber through our neighborhood, including right through our yard. Some dudes were out digging holes and running the lines on the coldest week of that month.

I discounted Metronet because their line is on the north side of our house. Our Xfinity line comes in from the south side and feeds into our basement where our network box is. To get from the north side to south side of our house, you would have to run several hundred feet of line and either go under our driveway or find a way to go around our pool without hitting anything. I didn’t want to mess with that so figured it wasn’t an option.

It only took me seven months to realize I’m an idiot and they could absolutely run a line to the north side of our house. Like, literally, I am such a dumbass.

I scheduled them to come out on Thursday. The guy showed up and said it would take probably two hours to get everything installed.

Sweet.

Again without going too deep into it, a two hour job turned into five. We are apparently the first people to sign up for service since they ran the line, so the poor guy had to drag his ladder all over our neighborhood and climb utility poles to connect the overhead lines to the underground ones. The heat index was 95° while he was doing this. We only had small bottles of water so I gave him a cooler that was filled with 10 of them, and he finished every one.

Once our new network was running and stable, I signed up for YouTube TV, which I’ve wanted for some time. The first two months, while we have a series of discounts, we will pay close to $200 less per month for the same internet speed and basically the same TV offerings. Even when the discounts go away, it will be over $100 difference. And we were about to have some Xfinity discounts expire so that was going to go up anyway.

Through the first weekend I’m pleased with Metronet. They use Eero boxes for internet, and with just two we seem to have better internet throughout the house than the three Xfinity boxes gave us. YouTube TV took a minute to get used to, but I like it so far. I’m looking forward to fall sports season when I can use the multiview to watch four games at once. I will have to pay to get Pacers games, and the app they used last year had all the usual issues those services are known for.

Other than fighting with a couple of our TVs for a few hours to get everything set up, it’s been a pretty easy process[1]. But I wasn’t the one climbing utility poles in the heat.

The installer said someone would be out in the next two weeks to bury our line. I put up a bunch of flags and stakes and ran out to warn our lawn guys about it when it showed up. Hopefully whoever shows up to take care of the line doesn’t take four months like Xfinity did when they installed our line in 2018.

  1. We are using an Apple TV as the interface on our main TV, an Amazon FireStick 4K on another, and on our outdoor TV just using the built-in apps. This will cause some confusion with some people in our house.  ↩

Friday Playlist

July 18, 2025 /

This week’s playlist is dominated by the ladies.

“Pool Hopping” – illuminati hotties
Yeah, pool hopping sounds great and all, until every pool you jump into is 95°.

“Jealous Boy” – The Bug Club
A suggestion from brother-in-music E$. I’ve been trying to figure out who this group sounds like for a couple weeks but can’t quite pin it down. So I stopped worrying about it and focus on enjoying the song.

“davina mccall” – Wet Leg
I somehow completely missed their new album dropping last week. It has an 86 on Album of the Year, so I need to get on it.

“Wreck” – Neko Case
Neko never sits still, so you her output can vary. This is in line with her best work.

“Welcome To The End” – Maren Morris
This is on a benefit album for an organization that supports LGBTQ+ kids. Lord knows our government is going to do anything to help those kids anymore.

“Quitting” – Eliza Mclamb
A delightful power-pop jam produced by Sarah Tudzin of illuminati hotties.

“If She Was A Boy” – Gatlin
I was sure this was Katie Gavin of MUNA at first. It sounds a lot like her. Wild that their names are so close.

“Summer Girl” – HAIM
I recently saw someone describe HAIM as the “queens of the summer song.” If that is true, this was the song where that began.

“No Curse” – Waxahatchee
From 2017, when there was a little more of her punk origins in Katie Crutchfield’s sound.

Reader’s Notebook, 7/17/25

July 17, 2025 /

This week has gone a little off the rails. We are expecting a contractor at the house shortly, which was planned. Had another very much unplanned visit on Tuesday that ended up costing us the equivalent of a nice vacation. More about those next week, probably. I had planned on saving my latest RN post for after I finish my current book. I’ll go ahead and post what I have to get some content up for my loyal readers.

The Barn – Wright Thompson
One of the most difficult books I’ve ever read. Thompson dives deep into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was lynched by white men while visiting family in Mississippi. Not just about the murder or resulting acquittal of the men who killed him. But also about the environment in Mississippi at the time and how it got to be that way. Thompson went way back, to when the earliest Europeans made it to Mississippi and their interactions with the native people of those lands, through the age of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era. Along the way he ties little moments of history together to explain how (some) Southern whites harbor grievances against their northern counterparts. He also jumps ahead to today, to examine how the truth of the Till murder has long been buried in Mississippi, at least amongst the white population.

This is important to Thompson because he grew up a few miles from the barn where Till was tortured and likely murdered before his body was weighed down and thrown into a river. Despite being the son of progressive Democrats who fought for civil rights, Thompson had no idea about the history of the barn. How on earth could that happen, he wonders? Well, turns out a lot of white folks thought it was better just to move on and never discuss it rather than honor Till’s memory and maybe teach their children to treat people who looked different than them a little better than their grandparents did.

Like I said, this was a difficult read. Each day, though, I think it becomes increasingly important to keep stories like Emmett Till’s alive as a minority of Americans who have taken over power think it’s better to hide the more disturbing parts of our history because it might make white people uncomfortable. Don’t get me started…

The Killing Of The Tinkers – Ken Bruen
Book two in Bruen’s Jack Taylor series. As with most book series, I don’t know that the bones of the story were much different from the first. That said, Bruen is such a good writer and the story is so tight and quick that I have no problems sticking with it.

Tuesday Links

July 15, 2025 /

Bruce Springsteen’s Tracks II set came out a few weeks ago. I’m not a big enough fan to wade through all the songs, but I did sample the ones highlighted in the various articles that dropped at the same time. Naturally, Steven Hyden had the best of the bunch.

Another Side of Bruce Springsteen

At some point I lost touch with Joe Posnanski, I believe it was when he took all his posts behind a paywall and stopped writing regularly for any commercial sites. Thankfully I was forwarded this piece and see that it looks like his site is free again. Or at least partially free?

For baseball fans my age, the 1979 All-Star Game was a keystone moment in our sports lives. The All-Star Game as an institution was awesome to us because of Dave Parker’s throw. That was the first All-Star Game I ever watched. While I don’t watch the game much anymore – tonight I’ll likely be watching Slow Horses on my iPad while I have the Fever game muted on the TV – I still get a little tingle when it comes around. Its roots are in that night I sat on my aunt and uncle’s horrible brown shag carpet and watched Parker unleash a missile from right field.

The 1979 All-Star Game drew a 45 share. Yes, it was a Tuesday night, and there was nothing else on television, but forty-five percent of all the televisions on in America were pointed to the Seattle Kingdome for that game. There were 115 million fewer people living in America in 1979 … and yet 24 million more people watched that All-Star Game than the one last year. It was just that big a deal.

“Bet” — On Dave Parker, and THAT Throw

Both a fascinating piece about how film works, and a reminder that George Lucas kind of sucks.

This is not the ‘Star Wars’ you thought you knew

A disturbing look at why the wildfires in Canada never seem to go away. Zombie fires? Seriously?

Why Canada is riddled with wildfires that burn year-round

Wait, I thought liberals were supposed to be the snowflakes.

Attorney general: ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ sign cannot be displayed in Idaho schools

Weekend Notes

July 14, 2025 /

We had a great weekend highlighted by some visitors, both local and from KC, and lots of basketball. But first we need to jump back and review C’s trip to Bloomington for orientation.

Orientation

We got up bright and early to make check-in at 9:00 AM last Monday. Thank goodness the I–69 extension is finally complete after a decade of work. Once you get out of the Indy construction it is a breeze to get to B-town. No more stoplights every two miles!

For the first 90 minutes we were together, but then separated for the rest of the day. I went to several parent sessions, most of which were informative. We were supposed to link back up for dinner before the parents were dismissed and the kids shuffled on to evening activities, but C decided to have dinner with her future roommate, who lives in Bloomington. I might have been a little annoyed she didn’t share this with me earlier in the day so I could have left before I had to return home in rush hour traffic. Alas…

I was back for an 11:00 session on Tuesday, which was also when she had her enrollment appointment. We finished about the same time then took a tour of the dorm she will live in. She’s in the biggest dorm on campus, it’s actually a complex that has three satellite buildings and one central one. She’s excited because there’s a Starbucks in the basement of the main building. There were a bunch of high school campers there so the cafeteria was bustling. For some reason they didn’t walk us through it but the food sure smelled good.

It seems like she had a good time. One of her best friends was in her group both days, so that helped. They stayed in single dorm rooms and her AC unit wasn’t working, so she had to battle a sweltering room to try to sleep. She had fun at dinner with her future roomie. She seems happy with her schedule, although she has an 8:00 AM class two days. We’ll see how that goes. We will move her in on August 20, so it’s coming up quick. Our bonus room is starting to fill up with our many Amazon and Target purchases for her.

Travel Hoops

This was a big AAU weekend, both open for recruiting and for teams that play on a “circuit,” it was the last weekend to lock in places for next week’s nationals.[1] Her team had games Thursday through today. We went to watch them play their Friday games. She didn’t tell me that her coach’s daughter asked if she could play. I would probably have let her if she had told me and her coach thought it wouldn’t get him in trouble. I guess it’s probably best, as I’m not sure her body is ready for the full-contact style that is travel ball.

Her team played great in their first game, coming from seven down to beat a solid team by one. Then they got absolutely run out of the gym by a team from Nebraska. This team was all skinny, scrappy white girls. But they could shoot the shit out of the ball and ran great offense. L was glad she wasn’t on the court for that one.

I missed most of that one because I walked down to the feature court to watch a U17 game that featured a team that had two girls over 6’3”. There were coaches from Texas, Duke, NC State, Auburn, Rutgers, IU, and plenty of smaller D1 schools sitting along the baseline, so I figured they must be big prospects. Turned out they weren’t. They were both kind of messes. But this girl on the other team was crazy good. She was only 5’10” or so but had a crazy handle, made great passes, and moved well without the ball. Oh, and she also hit four straight 3’s without touching the rim before the other team decided to stick one defender on her and never let her get open. I always get mad there aren’t rosters at these events so I can look up kids and see where they are ranked and track where they end up going.

I know L missed playing travel, but her team was kind of weird this year, and I think it would have really frustrated her had she played. There were several girls who seemed to have no interest in playing team ball. I’m guessing one girl was told by her high school coach to work on her shot, because she took at least 800 shots a game. And she’s not that good. Other girls just would not pass ever, and either take their own awful shots or pound the ball until they turned it over.

It was nice for L’s coach to tell me several times this season how much he missed her. Not because she would have been the best player or anything, that definitely was not true. But as I’ve said many times, she has a steadying presence and is a vocal leader who isn’t afraid to call out teammates. His team needed that, as his daughter is probably the best player but very quiet and always tries not to step on people’s toes since her dad is the coach. Another girl who has played for him for six years, and is L’s best friend on the team, is fiery and physical, but also isn’t good at bringing teammates together. Had L played that would have given them four girls who had been together four seasons, plus a true voice on the court, and perhaps that could have brought the entire roster together.

Or maybe L would have been pissed after every game because this player never passes and that player doesn’t know the sets etc.

Some of her friends were down in Louisville for the weekend. You may have heard on the news that the tournament was suspended Sunday because there were reports of shots being fired at the Expo Center. It turned out there was no shooter, but I’m sure that was awful to experience. We’ve been there the last three years and that place is jam packed. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had someone actually been firing bullets in a building filled with girls playing basketball.

One of her friends who was there texted, “Well, I guess someone went 0–4 and was DONE.” Sometimes you have to laugh not to cry?

Wimbledon

I did not watch much of the tournament over the past two weeks. The match I paid most attention to was Thursday’s women’s semifinal between Amanda Anisimova and Aryna Sabalenka. What a fun match! Anisimova rebounded from taking an extended break from tennis a little over a year ago to upset the #1 seed and make her first Slam final.

What struck me was Sabalenka. I’ve never been a huge fan, for a variety of reasons. But over the past year I’ve found myself admiring her more because she is such a compelling, yet tragic, figure. When she’s on, she seems like by far the best player in the game. But she has these hiccups in the biggest moments, and then often very honest, human reactions to them. You can see her losing faith in some aspect of her game, and the rest of it slowly unraveling. Maybe the reason I didn’t initially like her is because she came across as an old-school, Eastern European robot designed to destroy anything in her path. These meltdowns make her much more relatable. The fact that she seems to have grown as a person, and usually apologizes for her mistakes and mis-speaks makes me like her more.

But I was still rooting against her. Shame Anisimova had nothing left for Saturday’s final.

I didn’t watch the men’s final because I was busy. As you’ll read about in a moment.

Visitors

My old high school pal Stacey and her kids were in town over the weekend. They came by Saturday evening, along with our local friends the H’s, for dinner, drinks, games, and conversation. Some big storms passed right before dinner, but they cooled it off just enough that late in the evening the kids were able to get in the pool for a swim in the dark. I think the water was still around 95° so it wasn’t exactly refreshing…

Fever Game

Sunday L and I went to our first ever Indiana Fever game with our visitors. It was a big game, as Dallas was in town with Paige Bueckers. L is not shy about saying she’s really not a Caitlin Clark fan anymore,[2] and that she much prefers Bueckers. This was the first time the two phenoms were facing each other as pros – CC was out injured for the first Dallas-Indiana game of the year – so it became one of the most anticipated games of the season.

It was a great game…for about 15 minutes. The Fever were up 33–31 when they absolutely blew the game open with a 31–8 run. Soooo many breakout layups. I’m not sure Dallas has ever practiced transition defense. It reminded me of how KU ran all over Miami in the second half of their 2022 Elite Eight game.

The arena was packed, so that run was great. I don’t think it was quite as loud as it was last month in game six of the NBA Finals, but the place was rocking. Interestingly, there were also a lot of young ladies there who love Paige, too. When Dallas did something right, which wasn’t often, there was a smattering of applause. But when Paige did something, there were big roars. Not as big as when anyone on the Fever did something, but it was also very noticeable.

CC is obviously the big draw, but as this is Indiana the top six or seven in rotation have really been embraced by the crowd. Everyone loves the quiet determination and brilliant scoring of Kelsey Mitchell. Aliyah Boston is admired as much for being the public face of the team off the court as for her low post game. How can you not love Lexie Hull? But newcomer Sophie Cunningham is the clear #2 choice behind CC. I think the girls love her because she’s a badass, she’s Insta glamorous, and she plays with flair. And, of course, the dudes like her for all those reasons and a few more. We sat pretty high up but I heard several people yell “We love you Sophie!” A little kid got on the big screen with his sign that said “Marry Me Sophie C!” There was lots of laughter when they showed him, and comments about how he wasn’t the only one with that dream. Props to him; you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

The Fever won in a blowout. Clark hit a long 3 to start the game, had some amazing passes, but otherwise continued to look like she’s not 100%. Cunningham had a big game. And Bueckers had the best statistical line of anyone. Just about everyone went home happy. Well, other than the Dallas players, I guess.

  1. L’s team plays in the U–16 Rise level on the Under Armour circuit. The top 32 teams play in the platinum division next weekend. Coming into this weekend they were ranked 28th, and their coach thought they had a good schedule so could at worst defend that spot.  ↩
  2. It’s mostly because of the whining and complaining and taking plays off on defense.  ↩

Friday Playlist

July 11, 2025 /

Between the holiday weekend and me spending mornings watching the Tour de France, I’ve been a little slower on getting through the music this week. I think I can still come up with a few decent ones to share with y’all.

“Summertime” – The Sundays
Pure pop genius.

“Paint A Picture” – The Hives
Yes, it is those Hives, back for more nonsense.

“Stay Out Of Place” – Idlewild
Speaking of bands that first broke out in the early part of the new millennium, these Scots are also back with new music. No where near their best, but I will always give them music a chance.

“All The World” – Pale Fire
Holy crap, these guys sound like classic Idlewild! And they are Scottish, too! This is from their 2020 album Husbands.

“Bag of Bones” – Lord Huron
Steven Hyden has a great piece on Uproxx about how Lord Huron might be the best example of a “popular but not famous” band at the moment. They sure don’t drift from the sound that made them famous.

“Insulin” – Black Honey
In addition to the latest shoegaze revival, can we also admit there’s a strong ‘90s alt rock revival thing going on? It seems like I’m playing a song that could easily be from 1995 every couple of weeks.

“Lonely Town” – Steve Queralt & Emma Anderson
Queralt is in Ride. Anderson was in Lush. This track manages to sound like both bands, which isn’t that big of a stretch since both were among the giants of the original British shoegaze movement.

“Cropduster” – Pearl Jam
The old joke about Pearl Jam was that they couldn’t keep a drummer. Over their first eight years, they had four official drummers and two unofficial, temporary ones.[1] Then in 1998, when Soundgarden was on hiatus, Matt Cameron filled in on tour when Jack Irons was unable to play. When Irons decided he did not want to tour anymore, Cameron became a permanent member of Pearl Jam.

As I stood in line to get lunch at IU orientation on Monday, I received an email from the band saying that Cameron was leaving. Reasons were not given. There was speculation he had tired of the band’s touring cycle, or that he was just interested in working on his own projects while staying close to home. Chris Cornell’s widow finally reached an agreement with his former bandmates and there is expected to be a new album of leftover Soundgarden songs, so perhaps he is focused on that. He gave Pearl Jam 27 years. I think he’s earned the right to do what he wants. Like so many fans, I hope Cameron isn’t facing some kind of major health issue.

He wasn’t my favorite drummer; I’ve said many times I found his style too clinical and precise, and I thought his best playing was on their last album when he seemed to let loose more. But if he was the big brother they needed to get out of the Nineties alive, it was worth it. I don’t think rest of the band are ready to stop touring, so it will be interesting to see who they bring in next.

Props to Matt. He had several writing credits, this is my favorite of them.

“Sunchaser” – Arc de Soleil
This cat is Swedish. His music is very reminiscent of Khruangbin’s.

“Atlas Drowned” – Gang of Youths
I was listening to some GoY this week and wondered what they were up to. My internet sleuthing suggests they may be taking a long sabbatical before they begin work on their next album. And then they are infamous for taking a long time once they get into the studio. That’s a bummer. To you bells in the curve, I will love you but love not the powers you serve.

  1. Matt Cameron played on some of the early demos that were sent to Eddie Vedder by Jack Irons before Eddie was invited to join the band. And Dave Grohl filled in temporarily during a set of dates in Australia in the ’96–97 range when Irons had some health issues and Foo Fighters were serving as the opening act. That would have been a hell of a show!  ↩

Greatest Songs Of The Century (So Far)

July 10, 2025 /

It’s been 12 years since I’ve updated my Favorite Songs of All Time list. Which seems like a crime for someone like me: a music freak with lots of free time and a blog. I’ve thought about it a lot, trust me. I’ve reached the point in my life, though, where the return on that process doesn’t seem to justify the effort that would go into it. Streaming has messed with my head too, and I just don’t listen to the old songs as often as I used to, so I think I’m worried I would need to scrap big parts of the 2013 list if I ever jumped back into it.

However, last week The Bridge, 90.9 FM in Kansas City, which I stream often, played their top 909 songs of the century (so far), based on listener voting. I streamed off-and-on all week, but really locked in Friday evening, somewhere around #50, after all our holiday guests had left. It’s amazing how fast you can go through a countdown when there aren’t commercials!

That experience inspired me to crank out my own Best of the 2000s list. Which, again, seemed daunting. I gave myself a couple rules to simplify the task. First, I would only select songs from my annual Best Of lists. Second, for the years I did not make a Favorites list, I would only do a quick glance at my Apple Music catalog, The Bridge’s list, and a brief search of the Internet to make sure I was including anything important for those years. I wasn’t going to spend hours on 2000–03. Finally, I would try to keep the descriptions of each song brief.

(Several of these appeared on The Bridge’s countdown, so I’ll put that number in parenthesis.)

25 – “Wreckage” – Pearl Jam
I’ll sneak this in at 25, as recency bias is still in play, but after spending most of this century making good but rarely great music, Pearl Jam found a new path in 2024 and it paid off with one of the best songs of their entire careers. I still listen to it often.

24 – “Can’t Do Much” – Waxahatchee
Katie Crutchfield is an American treasure.

23 – “The House That Heaven Built” – Japandroids (#294)
Straight ahead, roaring, beer drinking, gasoline burning, rock ’n’ roll.

22 – “American English” – Idlewild
True story: one of the first nights that S worked a 24-hour shift in the summer of 2003, after we had gotten married and moved to Indy, I listened to this over-and-over-and-over. I loved it so much I was sure there had to be some kind of hidden meaning in it. Turned out it was just a great song, and also my introduction to Scottish indie rock.

21 – “Bohemian Like You” – Dandy Warhols (#271)
Looking back this may have been the first, big indie rock song I ever loved.

20 – “Catch the Sun” – Doves
Then again, I heard this a few months earlier in 2000, so this would be first.

19 – “Pynk” – Janelle Monáe featuring Grimes (#669)
I’m not sure that any artist this century has been as successful making insanely ambitious music as Ms. Monáe.

18 – “Believe” – Amen Dunes
There were a couple better known and possibly more deserving songs that could have filled this spot. None of them have the hold on me this song has.

17 – “Anything But Me” – MUNA
The best indie song that is sneakily a straight pop song of the century.

16 – “For Nancy (’Cos It Already Is)” – Pete Yorn
Musicforthemorningafter was the first great album of the century, and maybe the first new album I ever downloaded in full from “file sharing” sites and then burned onto a CD-R. Ah, nostalgia! This absolute banger was the first thing I heard from that album, on the Music Choice channels on my cable TV package.

15 – “Motion Sickness” – Phoebe Bridgers (#93)
Phoebe is our Indie Rock Queen, and this is the song that will likely stand above everything else she does in her career.

14 – “Call Your Girlfriend” – Robyn (#199)
Any one of three Robyn songs could have been here, but this wins thanks to perhaps the greatest video of the century.

13 – “Stacking Chairs” – Middle Kids
Marriage is hard. This song is a reminder that sometimes the best way to tell your partner that you love them and will always be there for them is through a simple act of helping to clean up after a party.

12 – “Hey Ya!” – Outkast (#2)
The greatest crossover song of the 21st Century. You heard it on pop stations, Black stations, and rock stations, saw the video on MTV. It was everywhere. And, at least to me, it never got old. This was #2 on The Bridge’s countdown.

11 – “Wild” – Spoon (They had 10 songs on the list, but somehow this didn’t make it.)
The best song from the most consistent and enduring indie rock band of the last 30 years.

10 – Take Me Out – Franz Ferdinand (#25)
What an amazingly awesomely arranged song.

9 – “Ball & A Biscuit” – The White Stripes
OK, allow me to brag for a moment. When The Bridge started their countdown, I thought ahead to what might possibly be the #1 song. Their playlist leans to the alt/indie rock side of the spectrum, although what makes them so great is how they play plenty of modern soul, thoughtful hip hop, a smattering of enlightened country, and plenty of classics that have influenced all those modern genres. I gave the subject about 30 seconds of consideration before landing on what I thought would be the top song.

When they got to #1 sometime around 10 PM eastern Friday, my guess was confirmed: “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes. It was so obvious! I told S and she was whatever the exact opposite of impressed was. Oh well…

Anyway, “SNA” is a GREAT song. But as my brother in music E$ put it, it would be better if we had all heard it 10,000 fewer times. And it’s not even the best song on the album it comes from. This is that song.

8 – “Phantom Limb” – The Shins (#160)
The most beautiful song of the century.

7- “Mistaken For Strangers” – The National (#213)
The most cinematic song of the century.

6- “Float On” – Modest Mouse (#6)
This was the song I was listening to when S’s water broke the night before M was born and we officially became parents. Good thing it is a jam!

5 – The Rat – The Walkmen (#206)
Anger kind of went out once Korn and bands of that ilk ruined it in the late 90s. This is the best angry song of this century, though, a lament of both a fractured relationship and what that relationship cost the narrator.

4 – The Gold – Manchester Orchestra (#530)
The moment MO figured out if they dialed everything back just a touch, their music worked better than when everything was pushed to 11.

3 – “Stuck Between Stations” – The Hold Steady (#164)
I had dabbled a bit in The Hold Steady’s music before they released Boys and Girls In America in 2006. Notably “You Little Hoodrat Friend,” one of the key songs that helped guide me into the indie rock world. But the first time I heard this? It blew me away with its literacy, its humor, and its pure, American, bar-band rock.

2 – “Red Eyes” – The War on Drugs (#170)
Another band I could throw a handful of songs into a hat and be happy with any I selected. This is the song that launched TWOD’s ascent from esoteric indie rock darlings into the mainstream of the indie rock world.

1 – “The Modern Leper” – Frightened Rabbit
A song, and an album, that really fucked me up. In the best possible way. And continued doing so for years. Until the pain that birthed them became too much for Scott Hutchison and they took on a whole other level of fucked up-ish-ness.

Two other of my annual #1’s made the Bridge’s list:
2009 #1 “Whirring” – Joy Formidable was #309
2016 #1 “Pain” – The War on Drugs was #153

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