A 30 Year Tradition
I realized a few weeks back that this year is the 30th anniversary of my all-time favorite TV episode, Cheer’s “Thanksgiving Orphans,” which first aired on November 27, 1986. I taped the show that night and held onto that tape for years. Somewhere along the way the tape either gave out or I lost it. I recorded it again sometime…
The Verge Of History
Well, here we are, the day before the end of the world. Perhaps. As I shared sometime last year, I just don’t have the stomach for politics the way I used to. I had largely disengaged before this fall, sick of how our political process had become a system not of checks and balances, give and take, discussion and compromise,…
Top 5s
If you follow Joe Posnaski on either Twitter or his personal blog, you no doubt saw his recent piece that was based on Xavier basketball coach Chris Mack’s list of favorite Bruce Springsteen songs. A Bruce Top Five There is so much for me to love here. A) It’s Poz, so it’s almost automatically great. B) It’s about music lists,…
Good Journalism Moment of the Day
I went through a stretch a few weeks back where I was watching a lot of Veep, the HBO comedy where Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Vice President Selina Meyer.[1] And this week I finally cracked the seal on our DVR’s collection of The Good Place, the new Michael Schur comedy starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. That combination means I can…
Just Once
Music post #2 for the day. Consequence of Sound released their list of the top 100 one-hit-wonders of all time earlier this week. It’s a lot of fun. All music lists are ripe for being picked apart for any number of reasons. I think one-hit-wonder lists are especially troublesome. You can argue for hours about how to define a one-hit-wonder…
Leaf Changin’ Time, Fools!
Awwwwww yeaaaaaaaaah! It’s leaf-changing season, ya’ll! That’s right, the time of year when your gutters are constantly overflowing with dead leaves and seed pods and your yard needs to be raked/mowed every 45 minutes so your lawn, which is still trying to recover from the summer, doesn’t get smothered before the winter. It’s also the time of year when we…
Long Overdue
Hall & Oates somehow just received their Hollywood Walk of Fame star last week. Which makes total sense. You know, an act that was in its prime 30 years ago just getting their recognition now. Honestly, it’s staggering if you scroll through the list of entertainers who previously received stars and compare some of their careers to H&O’s. Maybe there…
Jerry And The Gang
We didn’t travel much when I was a kid. Summer vacations for me were just trips to my grandparents’ homes in central Kansas for anywhere from two to six weeks. So I was pretty much always home Labor Day weekend, with three days to kill before school started on the day after the holiday. Since my mom was generally working…
Proof There’s Still Hope For Humanity
Classic album covers with Star Wars characters? Hell yeah! Star Wars Album Covers
On @BotStove
We are deep into baseball’s silly season: the 7–10 days before the trade deadline. In the era of Twitter, fake “insiders,” who create accounts with names that look very similar to real “insiders” like Buster Olney and Tim Kirkjian, claim to break made-up deals that get the webz a buzzin’. That made it the perfect time for this “profile” of…