Time to finish clearing out the Links To Share queue. Kicking things off, two posts about Kansas City. First, The Midwestival traveled to KC for an epic weekend of eating and seeing the sites. Kansas City has really evolved over the past 10–15 years. Kansas City: The Paris of the Plains As a bit of a counter-point, Robert Trussell wrote about how Kansas City’s downtown was once a wasteland of blowing garbage and dark streets when the workday crowd cleared out.
Two videos that have nothing to do with each other this week. youtu.be/IxkJHX7uk… “No Myth” - Michael Penn It’s National One Hit Wonder day! What actually constitutes a one-hit wonder can often be a little murky. Does it mean cracking the Billboard Top 40? Or does it mean songs that get into our pop culture memories regardless of chart position? Regardless, this is one of my favorites. Just a perfect pop song, and one that everyone seemed to love my freshman year of college.
So I’m obviously way behind on sharing interesting links with all ya’ll. Thus, I’m breaking them up a bit to clear out the queue. This edition focuses on the great Joe Posnanski. Boy did I love this one. In My Favorite Year (Redux), Joe went through the entire sports calendar of 1986 and broke down, month-by-month, why it is his favorite sports year ever. That was indeed a pretty good year, even if my teams were different than his at the time.
I’m loving a lot of things right now, pop culturally. I took a long bike ride this morning and mentally wrote at least 10,000 words about the new Ryan Adams album. We’ll see if I can make something coherent out of those thoughts to share here. I just finished an amazing, if flawed, book that took me nearly a month to get through. I also finally started watching Veep, which is fantastic.
A super-busy start to the week. I’m attempting to wrap up the four basketball previews I’m writing. I was minutes away from submitting one earlier this morning when I realized I worked off two different files yesterday rather than putting all my updates into my final draft. So I spent two stressful hours today combing through to find what belonged in the final draft, what did not, and then rewriting the whole thing.
youtu.be/N1Hs2AQwD… “Major Tom” - Peter Schilling I have a bad habit of loading up our DVR with shows that I either take months to watch, or eventually delete without ever viewing them. Even for a show like The Americans, that I absolutely adore, I was a month behind. I still have the entire first season of Better Call Saul to begin.[1] I have countless Anthony Bourdain shows tucked away. And I believe I still have a couple episodes of Louie in there somewhere.
With the late holiday, our kid fall sports calendars are a little odd this year. Kickball always starts just after school begins and runs for only three weeks. And soccer did not start until after Labor Day. But as of Sunday, we finally have all three girls on the fields each week. Kickball It’s been a fantastic season for M’s team. Last night they wrapped up a perfect regular season with their fifth run-ruled win in seven games.
Mondays are perfect days for Hot Sports Takes! Colts Yeesh. Once Rex Ryan took the Bills head coaching job, this officially became the dreaded tough road opener against a team with a great defense and something to prove. Which is an actual NFL game description. A loss wasn’t out of the question, but getting worked over, totally owned, and blown out was unexpected. I only saw the first quarter because of soccer so can’t make any broad assessments.
Yes! It is that time of year: time for fearless football predictions! I admit up front that my predictions are even more half-assed than normal this year. That’s because my regular disdain for preseason football was combined with the Royals leading the division this year. So I’ve been able to spend even less time than normal avoiding NFL news as I’ve been fully immersed in all things Royal. More than likely there have been half-a-dozen season ending injuries I know nothing about that will affect some of the teams I’m picking to do good things.
youtu.be/ASFSjjbD_… “Ride On” - Rocky Nti Good grief this song is catchy!
Many errands and household chores got crammed into Tuesday, so a belated look back at the final weekend of the summer. It was very good, but also kind of crappy. The good parts were: The girls getting a four-day weekend. It was nice to sleep in a bit Friday before all our other activities for the weekend. Our KC friends the B’s were in town, staying with local pals the H’s.
Music for the last weekend of summer. youtu.be/qh4nVj8g4… “The Boys Of Summer” - Don Henley Say what you want about Henley, and there’s plenty of negative things to say about the guy, but this is a great song. Even if he’s not really singing about the end of summer, its place in pop culture is as an end of summer song. “Don’t look back, you can never look back…” youtu.be/n9ENhIyV4…
A bit of a slower, more relaxed reading month in August. Part of that is simply because I’m roughly halfway through a fairly massive novel that locked down the last couple weeks of the month. But still on book-a-week pace for the year overall. 100 Things Royals Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die - Matt Fulks My step-dad brought me this book, which was a fun little thing to flip through between innings while watching games.
As I mentioned in last week’s Friday Links, I watched Real Genius a week ago. Then, this past Sunday, I watched Fletch. As with Real Genius, it had been a long, long time since I had watched Fletch, a movie which has to be in my top five most-watched non-Christmas movies of all time list.[1] So A), yes I’m on a bit of a classic 80s movie run. Sunday nights seem to be the most convenient to watch them right now, since the Royals generally play during the afternoon on Sundays.
Two weeks of the Indiana high school football season are in the books. Throw in a few previews I’ve written, and it’s been a busy couple of weeks. The previews were largely uneventful. I’ve been doing those long enough where I have a pretty solid formula in place. Every now and then I run into a coach who is difficult to reach on the phone, which is frustrating and causes delays.
Another music-heavy list this week. Including the promised articles about the 40th anniversary of Born To Run. Rolling Stone shared the full transcript of an interview they did with Springsteen 10 years ago for the 30th anniversary of BTR. Of course, the mythology of the album is that his career may have been over had it not been a success. I think my biggest admiration for the album is how rather than playing it safe while operating under that kind of pressure, he completely went for it, making the biggest, boldest album he could imagine.
youtu.be/-OZV5i_6R… “She’s The One” - Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band Born To Run turned 40 this week. You may have read something about that somewhere.[1] The song “Born To Run” is one I remember from way back in, likely, it’s earliest days. It wasn’t a song for me, or about my life. But it was one that got heavy play on the stations my parents listened to. So it was already in my rock ’n roll DNA before I rediscovered it many years later and learned to love it on my own.
Without those pesky kids around during the day, I can finally knock out a few longer posts that I’ve been sitting on for months. First, a post I know Billy is looking forward to: a summary of my adventures with my new camera. To reset, I purchased an Olympus OM-D EM–10 back in May. It is the first “real” camera I have ever owned, with “real” meaning one that offers full manual control and interchangeable lenses.
Perhaps you’ve noticed, if you’ve dipped into the site’s archives in recent weeks, but I’ve been working on another clean-up project around here. I wrapped it all up this morning. A couple years back I stopped putting pictures of the girls on the site. Well, at least ones where you can clearly identify them. The idea being I wanted to reduce the chances for people to connect their names with a picture online.
Well, the first full week of school is wrapping up. There was some more grumpiness in the mornings as the week progressed. But mostly things have gone well. We’re already super busy in the evenings. And I’ve had a nice, lazy week around the house, thus the dearth of posts. But I’ve still saved some articles worth sharing. This week’s list is music-heavy. Let’s dive into the links, shall we?