Friday Vid(s)
Touching on some of my favorite music of the new year today. “Quiet Americans” – Shearwater First, from my favorite album of the year so far, this very mid–80s Bowie-like track from Shearwater. Shearwater is a band that has slowly grown on me over their career. They began as a side project for two members of Okkervil River, another band…
Some Big 12 Hoops Thoughts
And now the stretch run begins. After a weekend of play against SEC teams (more on that in a bit), the Big 12 season gets going again tonight. Every team has ten games to play before the conference tournament. And with six teams within a game of first place, at first glance the lead race seems wide open. I think…
⦿ Friday Links
Some links as you waste time waiting for the weekend to begin. First, this terrific find. Jim Henson produced a series of brief TV commercials for the Wilkins Coffee company in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They were designed to run in 10-second windows for station IDs. The primaries are two creatures that resemble others we would become more…
Friday Vid
“Black Metallic” – Catherine Wheel Catherine Wheel is one of those great, lost bands that seem to both define a certain time and still hold up well. Being British, with droney guitars as their dominant sound, they are generally considered part pf the shoegaze movement. But their sound transcended that genre. Of their five studio albums, two are fantastic (Ferment…
Changing of the Guard
I like the ambiguity of that post title. Am I writing about the Big 12 basketball race? We’re only halfway through the season, but it is looking more likely than it has ever looked that KU’s 11-year title streak is going to end. Or am I going back a few years and writing about the machine that is Apple and…
⦿ Sunday Links
Sunday Links As I mentioned, some of these go back over a month. They are worth sharing despite not being the freshest links in the world. First up, Complex did a visual representation of the best rapper alive, by year, from 1979 to the present. I disagree with a few of their choices (Chuck D. was never #1????), and I…
Friday Link – Re:Rey
I’ll share a traditional links post over the weekend, but I wanted to devote some focused words on one link in particular. Most of you have probably heard about the Star Wars toy controversy: that Rey is almost entirely absent from the new toys released with The Force Awakens. This article lays out much of the story. Where’s Rey? Some…
Friday Vid
https://youtu.be/i7nXvOTqyCY “Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas” – Beach Slang This is the first great New Music Friday of 2016. The first two Fridays of the month were rather slow, lacking both a large number of new releases and a bunch of eagerly awaited albums. But this week there are three new albums I’ve been looking forward to. And based on…
Hoop Tales
L. kicked off her basketball career a week ago. I wrote a lengthy accounting of her epic debut last Monday but didn’t get around to posting it before I had to leave town. Just because I didn’t share it with the world does not mean I’m not still on the hook for the resulting jinx. She is playing at the…
December Books
December is always a big reading month for me. Each year I read Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story, which only takes a couple hours. I generally squeeze in at least one other quick Christmas read. And then the holiday break at the end of the month allows me to really finish the year strong. 2015 was no exception. I knocked…