• Friday Playlist

    Over halfway through the year; that’s kind of nutty! Be looking for my annual bonus playlist on Monday. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ptS7CPCztYAfNIpdvLtSe?si=e556e77807424c28 “Rubberneckers” – Christian Lee Hutson A perfect mid-summer song in tone, this is about how many people you run across in LA who have made messes of their lives. It doesn’t take much to extrapolate that to our entire country right…

  • Stats

    June 2022 The War on Drugs – 106 MUNA – 40 Dehd – 25 The Beatles – 25 Night Moves – 23 Complete stats available at my Last.fm page.

  • Reader’s Notebook, 6/29/22

    Midnight in Siberia – David Greene Interesting timing on reading this. Greene is a former NPR reporter who was the network’s Moscow bureau chief in the early 2010s. Late in his tenure, he took the Trans-Siberian Railway 6000 miles across Russia. In 2014, he returned to take the same journey and write about it. It is a fascinating read because…

  • NBA Draft Notes

    I loathe the NFL draft. It is the most over-hyped event in sports. Primarily because there are very few players picked in that draft that make an immediate and profound impact on their teams. For every Joe Burrow, there are dozens and dozens of players that take two, three, even five years to acclimate to the professional level, complete their…

  • Travel Hoops Wrap Up

    Travel basketball came to a disappointing end for L over the weekend. Her team lost in the semifinals to a squad they had beaten twice this year. That team went on to win the championship by four points. So it was right there for our girls and they blew it. Saturday’s pool games were two very different contests. In the…

  • Friday Playlist

    https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2FbAXvuHtGlC0YyOzLsW1a?si=e73c41154e6b4525 “Birthdays” – Craig Finn Hey, I had a birthday this week! Coincidentally this is the best song from Craig Finn’s latest solo album. “I Was Neon” – Julia Jacklin The first single off JJ’s up-coming album was solid. This one cooks. “Wait ‘Til the Morning” – Frightened Rabbit Spotify suggested this, a bonus track from the final FR album,…

  • Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 75

    Chart Week: June 20, 1981 Song: “Angel of the Morning” – Juice Newton Chart Position: #38, 18th week on the chart. Peaked at #4 for four weeks in May. Juice Newton was a classic Right Artist at the Right Time success. Although she came up in the world of folk music, by the early 1980s she had slid into a…

  • Top Gun Links

    Following up on yesterday’s posts, here are a couple articles related to Top Gun. First, Michael Baumann dives into the details and comes up with his best guess for what county is the target of the movie’s main mission. This is important journalism here. But like Maverick, Rooster, Hangman, and their buddies, I was given a mission. My editors came…

  • A Day at the Cinema – Top Gun: Maverick

    It’s damn hard to make a good sequel. Think of how many absolutely ass ones have polluted our cinema and entertainment room screens. So when one hits all the right notes, it feels like a triumph. And when you do it nearly 40 years after the original, you’ve really pulled off a miracle. I took C and L to see…

  • Miles on the Odometer: College Visits and Weekend Hoops

    A long post about a long few days. Thirteen months into my Audi lease I was in great shape, milage-wise, about 1000 miles lower than where I should be. I pretty much wiped out that deficit over the past few days. Thursday M and I drove to Cincinnati to take her first college campus visits. We toured the University of…