Breaking The Beatles
I’ve tried not to get sucked in too much to the Beatles Arrive In America nostalgia wave. Mostly because I feel like I’ve read plenty about them already and it’s enough for me just to spin some of their tunes. This piece, though, is fantastic. In it, Billboard takes an in-depth look at the process of getting the Beatles on…
Requiem For A Van
A week ago Saturday was a big day in our house. After eight years and fourteen days, we cleaned out the minivan, drove it to a local car dealer and left it as we drove away in a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. That’s right: our days as minivan owners are over! I must admit, that minivan served us well. We…
A Very Special Reporter’s Notebook
There are plenty of notes stocked up from the last month of high school basketball and swimming. But coming home Tuesday night, I had a bizarre encounter that warrants sharing on its own. I had just left an especially scintillating girls basketball sectional game1 and pulled onto the main drag of a small town about half-an-hour east of Indianapolis. About…
Quick Notes
Feeling better today, although it was a busy Tuesday and Wednesday morning has me at St. P’s for my library duty. Thus, I’m going to try to breeze through some stuff before I get too far behind. Marcus Smart A buddy of mine has said all year that he found Smart scary. Not in a threatening way, but rather, well,…
Lost Month
As I write this, I’m sitting in the living room, looking out the front window, waiting for the next snowstorm to hit. The first flurries are expected to start falling in the next hour, and by morning we’ll have 8-10” of new snow. Yeah, I’m about done with this winter bullshit. What a waste of a month January was. St.…
Boomed
I’ve come up with a phrase or two over my ten years of publishing my thoughts online that I particularly enjoy. One of those is “comprehensive ass-kicking,” used to describe, well, comprehensive ass-kickings. I’m pretty sure the Super Bowl is the classic example of one. Man, that was ugly. I missed the opening 12 seconds, as we were hosting friends…
January Books
Four books in four weeks to kick off the year. But one of those was a children’s book I knocked out in an afternoon, so I’m feeling like I didn’t take advantage of January the way I should have. Also, I’m skipping one book, just because I’m still thinking about how to write about it. It’s the first time I’ve…
Treating The Game Like A Toy
If Super Bowl week is all about absurdity, it gets no more absurd than this: SB Nation’s Breaking Madden creates a Super Bowl of giants vs. tiny people. Even if you don’t read it all, scroll through for the GIFs, which made me laugh until I cried. With just under two minutes left in the first quarter, I was winning…
Ends In A Zero
This all probably means nothing, and I can’t find a clever way to tie them all together, but there are four rather interesting anniversaries/birthdays that each end in zero, in close proximity to each other. In reverse order, youngest to oldest… Hoop Dreams just turned 20. I remember watching it in a little arty theater in Westport, in Kansas City,…
Can’t Get That Song Out Of My Radio
Sad news from the radio world. Faced with growing competition from digital alternatives, traditional broadcasters have managed to expand their listenership with an unlikely tactic: offering less variety than ever. The strategy is based on a growing amount of research that shows in increasingly granular detail what radio programmers have long believed—listeners tend to stay tuned when they hear a…