What To Buy
As promised, some thoughts on whether should buy an iPad or perhaps something else. To quickly recap my initial thoughts about the iPad from a year ago, I thought the iPad was super cool and immediately set aside some money to get one when they were announced. After that initial interest waned, though, I reconsidered and evaluated the tech products…
Reporter’s Notebook
More blurbs from the notebook of a roving sports correspondent. Wednesday I got my second crack at a college basketball game. It’s been two years since I’ve been to a game of the small college we cover, FC. The experience was similar to my last visit. Enjoyed seeing a Division 3 game. Marveled at the size of the gym, which…
Reporter’s Notebook
A few tidbits from the road. I don’t recall if I shared this story in a previous notebook, but late last month I had back-to-back games that were completely awful. In the first, one of our best girls teams, WCHS, won easily but in very ugly fashion. They should have won by about 70 but apparently decided to play down…
Darnell Vs. Jacque
More thoughts on the Coolest Athlete thread on Twitter. This isn’t an original observation – I even think I’ve written about it before – but something else struck me about how we view athletes while reading through the Coolest Kansas City Athletes meme on Twitter over the weekend: athletes are a lot cooler when we’re kids. The reasons are pretty…
The Coolest
There was a thread on Twitter Sunday soliciting suggestions as to who the coolest Kansas City athletes of all time were. While I was never a true Chiefs fan, I did spend 23 years in the city and have some thoughts on the subject. First, let’s go ahead and admit this covers the 30-35 years that I’ve been aware of…
The Super-Quick Pour
I forgot to mention this amazing use of technology I first experienced at the Colts-Jets game a week ago. Trust me, when you’ve already had a few, it’s even more amazing. And when you go to a traditional beer stand later, it’s kind of a let-down. It “pours” a draft beer nine times faster than traditional methods and dramatically reduces…
Reader’s Notebook, Early January 2011
ESPN columnist Jim Caple kicked off his book blog this week. Coincidentally, I just finished the first book he highlights, George Dohrmann’s Play Their Hearts Out, a terrific, numbing look inside the world of “grassroots” basketball, the name now used for what used to be called the AAU circuit. Dohrmann focuses on one coach, Joe Keller, and his prodigy, Demetrius…
Second Season
KU begins the final Big 12 season tonight at Iowa State.1 They enter the game #3 in the country, 15-0 against a solid schedule (#31 according to collegerpi.com, which also has them ranked #1 overall). Seems like just another good season in Lawrence, right? Maybe. Fact is this team remains a mystery halfway through the season. Do they still have…
Change Of Scenery
Some good stories never go away. A few of you may recall that two years ago, there was a boy in C.’s preschool class that she constantly insisted had hit her. She talked about it every day. “DJ hit me.”1 The way she made it sound, DJ beat her up every Monday. We never heard a thing about it from…
Buzzers
Some weekend. Friday night I was on the road, covering one of our better teams, FHS (11-3 entering the game), against the #10 team in the state, MHS. MHS had just lost their first game of the year, one they played without their best player, who is the #2 scorer in the state at nearly 30 ppg. They are also…