• Sports Notes

    Thanks to the NCAA tournament, spring break, and general laziness, I’m behind on a couple sports stories. When a huge one broke Wednesday night, that jogged my memory that I should probably get to them. Jayhawk Talk Hey, did you know the Kansas Jayhawks won the national championship two weeks ago? It was pretty cool! We’ve had a steady run…

  • Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 71

    Chart Week: April 19, 1986 Song: “A Little Bit of Love (Is All It Takes)” – New Edition Chart Position: #38, 8th week on the chart. Peaked at #38 for two weeks. Every teen pop group faces a dilemma as they get older: how do they maintain their audience as they, their fans, and their music matures? New Edition was…

  • Reader’s Notebook, 4/19/22

    I’ve been on a good reading stretch lately. Here are some blurbs. The Mercenary – Paul Vidich Vidich gets a lot of critical acclaim for his espionage novels. I wasn’t crazy about his first book I read, The Good Assassin. It was so noir-y that I felt no warmth towards or connection with any of the characters. Despite that, I…

  • Weekend Notes

    Sometimes the Midwest really sucks. We had a decent Easter weekend, weather-wise. Not perfect – if it was 5–10 degrees warmer it would have been ideal – but at least it was warm enough to do little kid activities outside. Then this morning it was snowing when I woke up. And it’s going to be 80 by Friday. Sheesh. We…

  • (Good) Friday Playlist

    I promised an extra-thick playlist last week. To be honest, I really didn’t deliver. Since it’s a holiday weekend, I’ll recommit myself to dropping a heaping helping of high quality tunes on your ears. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4hpfZLwW3nPTES1rVVOhF1?si=735baf9bb4274b9c “Don’t Turn Around” – Crystal Eyes I know it’s dumb when I say things like “This band sounds like they are/are not from this place.”…

  • D’s Links

    I thinned out my Instapaper queue quite a bit over spring break. Which means I’m way past due in sharing some of my favorites (along with a few I’ve added in the past week). First, a couple pieces about the situation in Ukraine. As with any fast-moving current event, these are already a little out-of-date. I think they are still…

  • Weekend Notes

    That was a weird weekend. No big sports of any kind. No basketball or football on the TV for the first time since Labor Day. No kid sports. Sure, I watched some of the Master’s, but we were often busy during the peak watch times so I wasn’t able to give it a ton of attention. Plus it wasn’t a…

  • Friday Playlist

    We’ll go a little long this week as I attempt to clean out the queue a bit after missing a week. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kNTguupxFGGSKkuqvElAy?si=f32dd0515a834d4d “The Lightning I/II” – Arcade FireDamn, I really should have included these two weeks ago when they first came out, but I forgot to drop them into my working list for the Friday PLs. The good thing is…

  • Big Ass Jayhawk Talk

    You might have heard that the Kansas Jayhawks won the NCAA men’s basketball championship on Monday. I didn’t want to let the occasion pass without sharing some, well a lot, of thoughts. These should be super disjointed as they were assembled in various moments and in different stages of sobriety. I will the answer the question I got from several…

  • March Media

    Fewer entries this month as college basketball and spring break sucked up a lot of my time. Shows and Movies Don’t Look Up Reviews for this were so mixed, with some people loving it and others straight-up hating it. I was finally encouraged to watch by two different friends who told me they really enjoyed it. It’s certainly not high…