And now for some girls sporting notes. M. ended her kickball season last night. Her team got another big win (45-11 after trailing 9-4 to begin the second inning) to end their season at 6-1. Unfortunately, that was not enough to make the championship tournament. Only the four division winners go into the tournament. And their one loss came to a team that went 7-0. That single loss was a bummer.
Mannnn do I have a fun story to share. I just hope I can do it justice. To set things up, I’m two-thirds of the way through a three-week run with our 3A school, IC, who is currently 4-0 and ranked #7 in the state. Two weeks ago I had them against last year’s runners-up from class A, and IC manhandled them by 30 points. Last week, against an 0-3 team, IC won by nearly 50.
I have a whole mess of sports thoughts piled up, so let’s kick it off by running through probably the craziest 10-15 minutes of sports I’ve lived through in awhile. Last night I had to multitask for my sports. I had the Colts-Eagles game on TV. And because the Royals were playing the White Sox, which are blacked out in Indy, I had MLB Gameday on my laptop with the game also on my phone so I could punch up the audio any time the game got interesting.
Not as many things to share this week. Who do you think the greatest American athlete of the current age is? LeBron? Peyton? Tiger, before his fall? Ian Crouch argues it’s the perpetually underrated and unfairly maligned Serena Williams. I’m not sure I agree, but I’ve always liked Serena and I think she’s in the conversation. For fifteen years, over two generations of tennis, Williams has been a spectacular and constant yet oddly uncherished national treasure.
youtu.be/gZi-dw03f… “Alex Chilton” - The Replacements Nearly 30 years after being banned from NBC for their notorious drunken performance on Saturday Night Live, The Replacements returned this week and performed on The Tonight Show. Sure, it’s only two of the original members. And they’re clean and sober and that sense of danger that was key to their early performances is gone. But it’s still a great song. And, in case you don’t know who Paul Westerberg is singing about, one of the finest power pop songs ever, written and sung by the late Alex Chilton.
As you may have heard, U2 performed following Apple’s iPhone and Watch event on Tuesday. Along with their performance, their new album Songs Of Innocence hit the iTunes Music Store for free until October. I was immediately faced with a dilemma: do I listen to the album, since there’s no cost to me for doing so, or do I ignore it, since nothing U2 has done in roughly a decade has sounded good to me?
We started off strong with a few fantastic albums in the first 3 1/2 months of the year. Things slowed a bit, with some fine but not great albums, as we moved into summer. So let’s run through some of my favorite albums since April. Teeth Dreams - The Hold Steady Beauty & Ruin - Bob Mould They Want My Soul - Spoon Brill Busters - The New Pornographers Each of these albums are exactly what you want from each band.
Sadly I didn’t get to this before Monday afternoon’s disaster in Comerica Park in Detroit. But still, the Royals are one game into their biggest regular season series since that epic series with the (then) California Angels in September 1985. The big differences are that Angels series was in KC and during the final week of the season. When the Royals caught the Angels that week, they needed just two more wins to clinch the division.
I figured three posts on Friday would be one too many, thus I’m finally posting these during halftime of the Broncos’ beat-down of the Colts. You know, the last time I turned off a Colts game at halftime it worked out ok… First off, these pictures showing the effects the drought is in California are incredible. Dramatic Photos of California’s Historic Drought I miss the glory days of The Office and Jim’s best pranks on Dwight.
Whoo, what a busy week. I’m on library duty for all three girls this year, and I decided to stack those assignments in the same week. That makes them easier to remember, but also sucked up a lot of time this week. In addition to that, I have a small work project I’ve been hammering away on. I’ll share more about it later. So here we are and it’s Friday already.
youtu.be/rPRLbjGE6… “English Girls Approximately” - Ryan Adams An absolutely amazing live performance. No studio tricks here. The guy can just write great songs and sing them well. It can be daunting to attempt to tackle Adams' massive output. He’s released no fewer than 20 albums in his career, whether with his first band, Whiskytown, with his accompanying band The Cardinals, or solo efforts. I might be about to tackle it, though.
Indian Summer - Aaron Mahnke This was an impulse purchase for the Kindle before my Kansas City trip in late July. I’ve read another of Mahnke’s books, but it was a guide to being a freelancer rather than a novel. Between that and the cheap price, my expectations were low. It ended up being pretty solid. It begins with a piece set in the 1980s. A group of pre-teen friends sneak into an abandoned factory in New England that was originally built over 100 years earlier.
This quick, odd summer of 2014 is officially closed. After a fine start, in which most days were pleasant but not oppressive, things turned cool and rainy right about the time our swim season ended. So there were a lot fewer trips to the pool this July and August as compared to last year. Since Mother Nature is a bitch, it’s felt like late June/early July ever since school started. We didn’t touch 90 degrees until two weeks ago.
Friday was busy, busy, busy. The girls were out of school, S. was working a half day, and we had a big group headed to the LVS for the weekend. So the links got pushed back. My apologies, because one of these might have been quite useful for some of you over the weekend. So let’s start with that one. Here is one butcher’s guide to making the perfect burger.
youtu.be/Lt6r-k9Bk… “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” - Sophie B. Hawkins A guilty pleasure of mine, this was released in 1991 but charted in the summer of 1992, one of the greatest music summers ever1. It’s long been in my iTunes library, but I can’t recall ever watching the video until recently. It’s really something else, isn’t it? Enjoy the last weekend of the summer. I was listening to Pearl Jam, TLC, Ice-T, Mary J.
I recently began following Chris Jaffe on Twitter. His claim to fame is that each day he tweets out a bunch of reasons why that date is significant. For example, here’s what his feed looked like this morning. Anyway, a couple weeks back I noticed he mentioned that the Rolling Stones album Steel Wheels had been released exactly 25 years earlier. I’m not a huge fan of the Stones, but I immediately thought about what the singles were from that album.
At last it was back out into the field Friday night as high school football season began here in Indiana. I caught a pretty nice assignment, following a top 10 5A team up north to Lafayette. The stadium was the nicest high school stadium I’ve ever been in. I had to take a damn elevator up to the press box! And it was completely enclosed. I don’t normally like that, because you can’t hear the crowd or the whistles of the refs.
The girls did fine without me Friday, coming back to beat a tough team 22-11. The coaches prepped them for the game by telling them it would be “like playing fifth graders.” Such is the reputation of the St. S’s kickball program. I was back on the scorebook tonight. Another win. Again the mercy rule came into effect. 41-15 this time, and they gave up seven of those runs in the first.
Before large capacity hard drives became relatively cheap and easy to obtain, lots of government agencies, corporations, and regular folks put important archival data onto CDs, thinking they would be safe forever because they were digital. Oops. Turns out CDs don’t hold their data in perpetuity. Worse, there’s no real way to predict how long it will take an individual CD to break down. CDs of the same age, and kept in the same conditions, can deteriorate at different rates depending on where and how they were manufactured.
youtu.be/vkLOg252K… “Under The Pressure” - The War On Drugs We’re approaching the final third of the year, and no album has yet challenged TWOD’s Lost In The Dream as my favorite of the year. This artsy, psychedelic video matches the mood of the nine minute album-opener nicely. As a bonus, here is TWOD performing another track from the album, “Burning,” live in Spain. Starting at about the 2:20 mark, when the band really begins to kick in, it is pretty spectacular.