A lighter month, as I tackled another beast of a book and then punted most of Thanksgiving week. With a strong finish - and December always includes a few traditional and quick reads - I’ll get to 52 books for the year. The Cartel - Don Winslow What is the official threshold that you need to cross for your book to be labelled as epic? Is it a physical size, surpassing X number of pages?
The first Monday after Thanksgiving, aka The First Day of the Longest Month of the Year. If you’re a kid, that is. M. has already said several times she wishes we could skip straight to Christmas and get this nonsense in-between holidays out of the way. I’m perfectly fine with four long weeks filled with Christmas shows, music, and beers. Anyway, I begin the month sitting on the couch, watching The Polar Express, with a seven-year-old who has been puking for roughly 19 hours next to me.
I should have shared this earlier, as it kicks off on November 1 each year and includes Thanksgiving shows. But my annual link to this page listing all the holiday shows. A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving is on tonight! Christmas TV Schedule Check daily and set your DVRs accordingly.
The holiday season is officially here! Which you know gets my juices going. It was weird to be sitting in Arizona last weekend, switching around TV channels while S. was in her conference session, and coming across a Christmas cookie show while it was pushing 80 outside. I spent one year in northern California - we moved west the week before Christmas 1987 - and it was odd to my Midwestern core for it to be in the 50s and 60s over the entire school break.
youtu.be/M4K7XZGeH… youtu.be/idnJnjV_8… “Tunnel Of Love” and “Brilliant Disguise” - Bruce Springsteen A prominent music writer noted during the flood of articles about Born To Run’s 40th anniversary earlier this year that he couldn’t wait for Springsteen’s 1987 album Tunnel of Love to get the same treatment. He was kind of kidding, but also kind of serious. To most people, Tunnel Of Love was a confusing, off-putting, and largely forgotten follow-up to Born In The USA.
I don’t know if I’m ready for college basketball to begin. People who have known me for many, many years should re-read that statement. Because, once upon a time, my sports life was a big countdown to the next KU game, to the next recruiting deadline, to the day when practice could begin in the fall, and so on. Other sports were secondary to the endless calendar of college hoops.
We had a relatively fantastic weekend. I say relatively because that only applies if you enjoy fall weekends in warm locales sans children. After years of talking about it, S. finally signed up for a medical conference outside of Indianapolis. A few years back we were on the verge of signing up to spend a weekend in New Orleans. Another time we strongly considered going to San Antonio. Each time either something else came up or we just put it off too long and weren’t able to plan the trip.
Now for non-Royals links. I’ve been sitting on some of these for nearly a month. I hope they’re still worth it! First, something brand new. Actor/comedian Aziz Ansari wrote in the New York Times about many issues surrounding minorities in TV and movies. It is funny and surprisingly great. Aziz Ansari on Acting, Race and Hollywood At Grantland (RIP), Mike Thomas wrote this wonderful profile of the late Jan Hooks.
So, so, so far behind on sharing links. So I’ll break them into two sets. We’ll begin with articles related to YOUR WORLD CHAMPION KANSAS CITY ROYALS! A rather significant sports journalism event took place during the baseball playoffs: ESPN shut down the wonderful Grantland sports/pop-culture site. Many took that as a sign that there isn’t room in the modern, hot-takes-centric media world. Turns out, though, there’s actually a ton of great sports writing out there.
Despite all the baseball last month, I still managed to get through four books. One of which inspired me to read two other of my October selections. For those keeping score at home, I began November with 44 books read for the year so far. Night Soldiers - Alan Furst You may recall I read Furst’s Dark Star a couple months back without knowing it was book two of a series.
I’m going to try to get back in a regular schedule of posting now that baseball is over. Although S. and I are heading out-of-town Thursday, which is yet another impediment to those plans. I’ll try my best! Let’s begin with an old style weekend round up! It was odd not to have a stressful baseball game two watch on Friday night. Or to be covering a high school football game.
youtu.be/ri97Sk8Gw… “We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions” - Queen at Live Aid A pretty good way to wrap up a pretty good week and month. I’ve posted Queen’s full Live Aid performance before. I will repeat what I said then: this may be the greatest live performance ever. Huge moment that the entire world was watching and the band was absolutely locked in.
Another October down the drain. In all this baseball madness I was not in the mood to write about much else. So some catching up is in order. Let’s begin with wrapping up the younger two girls’ fall sports experiences. When we last discussed sports, C. was building up for her final race of the year, the City Championship meet. This was going to be the biggest meet St. P’s ran in, with something like 27 schools taking part.
I used to keep a large composition notebook with me while I watched TV. When something would amuse, enrage, or otherwise interest me, I would jot down a few lines about it. Especially in the earliest days of this site, back when it was hosted on Blogger, those notebooks provided the basis for an awful lot of posts. I find myself wishing I had not gotten out of that habit. Because I know I had a million thoughts worth sharing over the past week as the World Series ran its five-game course that are lost forever between their sheer number, the lack of sleep, the alcohol, and my mid–40s brain just not retaining information as well as it once did.
Words will come. And trust me, long-time readers, there will be many of them. But I’m operating on less than three hours of sleep, may still be a little buzzed, and am operating at a level of giddiness that makes it tough to put thoughts together. Oh, and I have to write a basketball preview article for the paper in the next couple hours. That should be a good one.
youtu.be/cIy2wyEV0… “The Weekend” - Modern Baseball I was conflicted about what to share this week. Should I throw a scary song out at you? It’s somewhat traditional that I post “Thriller” the week of Halloween. Or at least I’ve done that three times. On the other hand, should I go back to last year’s October theme and share something from 1985? But since I haven’t done that yet this month, would that be bad luck to suddenly harken back to the last time the Royals won the World Series?
Once again, I’m left wondering what to write about a baseball game. How about this, for starters: Game Six of the ALCS was the craziest, most dramatic, and best baseball game I’ve ever watched my team play in. Keep in mind, I did not watch last year’s Wild Card game but rather listened to it. While we all know that game is the pinnacle in the history of the Kansas City Royals, Friday night’s pennant clinching win is right up there with it.
youtu.be/7MDWtSf_A… “In My Eyes” - Best Coast Normally in October, I’m starting the think about my Best Of lists for the current year. Reviewing albums from early in the year I may have forgotten about, digging out singles that I only listened to a few times and demand more consideration, and then shuffling all my favorites around in various orders so that, in about six weeks, I can publish my definitive lists for the year.
Over the weekend we had a conversation with the girls about pet peeves. We took turns sharing what some of our biggest ones were, which ended up being pretty funny. S. and I made most of ours about things the girls do that make us crazy. And the girls each chose ones that had to do with their sisters. The clip below from John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight would have been perfect had I decided to share a few of my real pet peeves with the girls.
The Royals host the Blue Jays in game one of the ALCS tonight. Just like we expected, right? Well, maybe for most of the past two months. But last weekend, when the Royals trailed Houston 2–1 and Toronto trailed Texas 2–0 in their respective division series, an all-Texas AL final looked much more likely. But the two best teams in the AL righted their ships, made big comebacks, and now we’ve got the series that has had a slow fuse burning on it since the teams last met in early August.