• Friday Vid

    “All I Want for Christmas Is You” – Mariah Carey This is right up my alley: a holiday music classic that just made chart history. Twenty-five years after its release, “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is currently the #1 song in the country. Because of weird chart rules, it did not officially qualify as a charting single for…

  • Weekend Notes

    There were some happenings around our house this weekend. The big event was M’s first true high school dance on Saturday, her winter formal. As you would imagine, this has involved several weeks of preparations both for her attire and who she would attend the dance with. And then the direct prep dominated our Saturday morning and afternoon when she…

  • Favorite Songs of 2019

    This was not a classic year for music. There were only a couple albums that I listened to more than a few times, only one of which that I went back regularly over the course of several months. There were long stretches in the year when there were no new songs that I was crazy about. But there were still…

  • Friday Vid

    “2000 Miles” – KT Tunstall If you make a good Christmas song, eventually it will be covered to death. Somehow I’ve only heard a couple versions of this Pretenders original. Coldplay did a very nice, in-studio version at KROQ in the early 2000s. But KT Tunstall’s version is just wonderful.

  • Weekend Notes

    It’s Monday. That means some of my patented Weekend Notes are in order! Service Hours M, C, and I went to a local food pantry to volunteer Saturday so they could earn some service hours. They were sent to man the produce table, while I spent the first two hours running the door where people waited to have their eligibility…

  • Friday Vid

    It’s tough to crank out a list this week. I’m coming off the high of putting out my Favorite Songs of the Decade list. I’m working on my Favorite Songs of 2019 list. I’m deep into the Christmas music. And new music pretty much dries up this time of year. So just a video this week. “Christmas in Hollis” –…

  • Every Kind of Thing in Space

    I love stuff like this. It is crazy to even begin to consider the vastness of space and the objects that might be out there. We have all these ideas, grounded in physics and math as we know them, of what’s going on across the universe. But we don’t really know what is happening beyond our solar system. If those…

  • Reader’s Notebook, 12/3/19

    A whole mess of books to share. I’ve been putting this off because I was having a hard time writing about a couple of them. I think you’ll be able to guess which ones as you work your way through the list. The Last Stand of Payne Stewart – Kevin Robbins This is an unlikely book for me to both…

  • Holiday Weekend Notes

    It was an enjoyable holiday weekend at our house. Some highlights… KU Hoops I’ll break this out later, but the KU-Dayton game on Wednesday was a fine beginning to the holiday break. That game is an argument for why college hoops is better than college football. Two very good teams going toe-to-toe in the season’s earliest weeks and a loss…

  • Favorite Songs of the Decade: The 2010s

    Well shit, I’m late. Last week I looked back and saw that I released my Favorite Songs of the 2000s on November 23, 2009. I was aiming to post this decade’s list on December 1 but when I saw that date, I figured I better get my shit together and drop this on your heads. Besides, I haven’t even started…