My Musical Youth
On occasion a memory from the past will trigger something in my brain and I’ll fall into a deeper hole of nostalgia. That’s been the case recently concerning summer music from the 1980s. The trigger, this time, was two separate American Top 40s I listened to on recent Sundays.1 One was from 1984, and was loaded with Prince, Bruce, Tina,…
Tabloid News
First, a quick story from my youth. I once had a babysitter who had stacks of newsstand tabloid magazines. I recall them mostly being The National Enquirer but I believe she had some of the really crazy ones, too. Anyway, I liked to read and since the TV was usually on soaps or the news, I would hide in the…
The Greatest
One of the many cultural icons of my generation is the 1992 US men’s Olympic basketball team: The Dream Team. While this oral history of the greatest team ever is good, I must admit I was a little disappointed by it. It doesn’t seem nearly long enough. I know there were more great stories that could have been repeated. Johnson:…
Don Cornelius
One of the greatest of the many gifts my parents gave me was my appreciation for music. Part of my musical education was our weekly, family viewing of Soul Train. For a white kid growing up in a small, Kansas college town, the show opened my eyes to not only a different kind of music than was commonly played in…
Sounds Of The Game
Piggy-backing a bit on my post about cloud-based music systems last week, my baseball post for this week will focus on the changing broadcast technology of the game. I first became a baseball fan in 1978. But I really went head-over-heels for the game in 1980, when we moved to Kansas City. Suddenly I could listen to every single Royals…
When Len Went Off
A terrific essay about a legendary night and how things have changed. Twenty-five years ago was another world. The game was over and I was by myself—my parents and brother presumably asleep—alone in the late night with the incredible fact that had just come into being. Len Bias beat Carolina. There was no one to shout it to, nothing to…
Darnell Vs. Jacque
More thoughts on the Coolest Athlete thread on Twitter. This isn’t an original observation – I even think I’ve written about it before – but something else struck me about how we view athletes while reading through the Coolest Kansas City Athletes meme on Twitter over the weekend: athletes are a lot cooler when we’re kids. The reasons are pretty…
The Coolest
There was a thread on Twitter Sunday soliciting suggestions as to who the coolest Kansas City athletes of all time were. While I was never a true Chiefs fan, I did spend 23 years in the city and have some thoughts on the subject. First, let’s go ahead and admit this covers the 30-35 years that I’ve been aware of…
Young Jordan
Much to my generation’s chagrin, Michael Jordan has not aged well. He came back one time too many, and when he finally left the league was a rather ordinary professional baller. Since his retirement, he’s had mixed success, at best, as an NBA executive. He offered a mean, bitter Hall of Fame induction speech. And he seems to be constantly…
Pyromania 27 Years Later
Recently I picked up a copy of Def Leppard’s seminal 1983 album Pyromania. I had been waiting for years for it to show up in the iTunes or Amazon MP3 stores, to no avail. After hearing a couple songs in the pregame mix at a high school football game, I thought it was time to finally take the plunge and…