Friday Playlist
https://open.spotify.com/user/224aiwksicafjldlua6nnpo4y/playlist/0YW4QYgwdNraFhXF8Xln2e “Another Time” – Mimicking Birds. For some reason I have a hard time typing the word “mimicking.” I taught myself to type in middle school and never learned home rows and all that. I can type quite quickly, but my hands are constantly crossing over each other, violating all kinds of typing rules. For some reason that causes me…
Reader’s Notebook, 1/18/18
Two more notches on my 2018 reading belt. Mrs Fletcher – Tom Perrotta Perrotta’s books all feel similar. They often center on sex, although none of them can be described as salacious, and the problems that sex causes in our lives. There is usually a strong element of nostalgia, where one or more major character wants desperately to turn back…
Dolores
Another music legend dies requiring another one of these sad, memorial posts. Dolores O’Riordan was unmistakably one of the Voices of the Nineties. The Cranberries may not have been as big and important as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but hearing her sing a single note will instantly take those of us who were alive in the 90s back to that…
Kid Sports
Boy did we have a Sunday. Nine-plus hours of kid sports! Things started with L and I leaving the house just before noon for week three of basketball, once again playing about an hour from home. Game one was a barn-burner. We have exactly two plays on offense, variations on the same theme where the point guard either comes off…
Monday Playlist
Apologies for the lack of rocking on Friday. We got the call at 5:45 that the girls would be having their first snow day in nearly four years. I never really got back to sleep after that, which wasn’t all bad as I had an eye exam at 9:00 and needed to get up anyway. The exam took entirely too…
Reader’s Notebook, 1/11/18
Two books down already for 2018. Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World – Rob Sheffield Oh no, another book about the Beatles?!?! That was my first thought when I saw that music critic Sheffield was releasing his take on the Beatles last year. My initial plan was to skip it even though I…
The Footballs
Good gracious, what a CFP championship game Monday night. Like most folks who were unaffiliated, I was pulling for Georgia. Those downtrodden, underdog Dawgs from Athens. I found it funny that Georgia has this big reputation as a somewhat cursed program. Maybe my humor stems from when I first started paying a lot of attention to college football, and Georgia…
All Together Now
My first book of the year was about the Beatles. So it was a nice coincidence that I was hipped to this website over the holidays. The author is ranking all the Beatles songs in order, roughly one per day. His commentary isn’t a rehash of all the commentary you’ve read a thousand times before about Beatles songs. Which makes…
Big 12 Hoops: A Very Different Year
Last day of Christmas break. The girls go back to school tomorrow. I guess the teachers need an extra day to get grades processed, settled into their classrooms, etc before beginning the second semester. Meanwhile the temperature is finally above freezing for the first time in two weeks. It might hit 60 Thursday! We may be able to see our…
Friday Time Waster
Here is one of the greatest things I saw over the holidays. “Euverus” used the game Cities: Skylines to test how traffic would flow at a 4-way intersection using 30 different road configurations. I love the examples with no controls, especially the little software glitches that allow vehicles to pass through each other. And some of the higher-end examples are…