Worlds collide to make the first post of the week an easy-to-name one.
First, a few words about Naadir Tharpe leaving the Jayhawks basketball program.
I felt sorry for Naadir all season. He was clearly miscast as a primary point guard for a national championship contending caliber team. But, thanks to several misses on the recruiting trail by Bill Self1, the job was his. And despite his obvious limitations, people looked back at his performance against Michigan a year earlier, when he played wonderfully, and expected him to be a step up from the always wild ride that was Elijah Johnson’s year at the point.
Just about everything Joe Posnanski writes is good. We’re luck that so much of it is great, too.
He’s written many times about his hero, Duane Kuiper, over the years. His latest effort, centered around a trip to San Francisco for Kuiper’s bobblehead day, is one of his best ever.
...And I have seen my friends crushed after finally meeting the sports star at the center of their childhood, and this is where I'm lucky.
I was crazy productive on the book-reading tip in April! High Fidelity - Nick Hornby Another in my series of re-reads. Apparently I bought this while in Portland, Oregon for work, Halloween week 2002. How do I know this? Well, A) I remember, silly. But also, B) one of my Delta boarding passes from that trip, that I apparently used as my bookmark in my initial read, was still tucked inside.
Too many words about one kickball game.
Man, what a kickball game last night!
It was a highly emotional game as we traveled to the school where S. and her entire family attended grade and middle school, OL.1 St. P’s was 0-3 and badly wanted to put a whole game together. They had tended to do well early then blow leads late.
Things started well. They were up 11-6 after two innings, and 16-13 after four.
Way, way back I wrote, rather brilliantly I think, that being the parent of a two-year-old is a constant reminder that you are an utter failure. Those little beasts are just constantly challenging you, and often by the end of the day, you’re at your wits' ends and barely clinging to your sanity.
The bad thing is those trying moments never really go away, they just come from different angles and although not the constant barrage of toddler-dom, are sometimes even more stressful as your kids get older.
We’re nearly a third of the way through the year. There’s already been some great music. Since my year-end focus is always on singles, I thought I would use this opportunity to share some of my favorite albums of the first four months of the year. I’ll try to repeat this again in the fall.
Lost In The Dream - The War On Drugs Ahh the breakup album. I do love them, when done well.
Trees are budding out, lawns are greening up, mowers are being pulled out, allergies are popping up, and I’ve already got the first sunburn of the year.
Spring, at long last, has truly sprung.1
Which brings the annual wardrobe reevaluation, pitching aside shirts that have survived a couple of summers and are worse for the wear, or that I’m just no longer fond of, and going through the fun process of replacing them.
Most of us have thought, at some point, that we could sway someone with different political views to our side if we just presented them with cold, hard facts showing that our view was correct.
Turns out even when the numbers support your argument, you are unlikely to change the opinion of someone from the other side.
Presented with this problem a funny thing happened: how good subjects were at math stopped predicting how well they did on the test.
C., L., and I were at Target yesterday wasting time during M.’s kickball practice. The girls were looking through the toy aisles and came to a large, empty section that should have held all the toys related to Frozen. There were a couple Baby Anna dolls, but the rest of the area was barren. C. asked why it was so empty and I said I guessed the Frozen toys were still really popular.
This is so great in so many ways.
The Brooklyn Cyclones minor league baseball team will be hosting a Seinfeld night on July 5, the 25th anniversary of the “Seinfeld Chronicles,” the original name for “Seinfeld.” They’ve put some thought into this. Activities will include:
MCU Park will known as Vandelay Industries Park for one night only. Mailmen in uniform get to throw out a ceremonial first pitch ("Hello Newman!
Three large pieces of news. Well, maybe not to everyone. But enough to justify a new post.
First, C., after nearly a year of being close, decided she was ready to ride a bike without training wheels over the weekend. Twice last summer she was on the verge of staying on two wheels full-time, but each time she went back to her bike with training wheels.
She’s complained for some time about her training wheel bike.
The name Zander Hollander may not mean much to the majority of my readers. But for some of us, mostly men who grew up in the late 70s and early 80s loving sports, he played a huge role in our formative years as sports fans.
Mr. Hollander, who was the creative force behind the Complete Handbook series, died last week at the age of 91.
One of the few splurge purchases I was allowed to make when I was young, and my parents were short on cash, was the occasional book from the Scholastic book flyers that came home from school.
Another quick one before the weekend begins.
A couple sites have linked to this modern, design-based review of the Sony Walkman. It focuses on form rather than function, but is still interesting to read/look at.
Like the iPod, the Walkman isn’t truly the first of its kind. There was a cassette player before it called the Stereobelt. It was big, ugly, expensive and only lived on as a patent. What the Walkman did was make the idea of a portable cassette player into a marketable, attractive consumer product.
Tuesday night I did something I haven’t done in years. I took out a baseball scorebook I had stashed away1 and kept score for a game I watched on TV.
I keep score a few times a year for baseball and softball games that I’m covering for the paper. But I can’t recall the last time I decided to keep score for a game I was watching from home.
It’s one thing to do it when I need all the details for a story and box score that I will submit to be published with my name attached.
A bit behind thanks to our travels and visitors last week. But I have to offer up some MLB predictions.
First, though, I must link to this fine story about the 25th anniversary of Major League. It arrived during that brief glut of baseball movies in the late 1980s.1 You can argue it is the best. I’m more of a Bull Durham guy, but Major League isn’t far behind.
I did not know this:
What a crappy night, at least for people who share my rooting interests.
On the one hand you have Kentucky, aiming for their ninth national championship with a team full of precocious freshmen who have suddenly found an extra couple of gears in March. Great story on many levels. But John Calipari is, arguably, the most reviled coach in the college game. Will all the hype his freshman class got before the season - remember that 40-0 talk?
The Secret History - Donna Tartt I know Tartt is one of the hot American novelists of the moment, with her novel The Goldfinch getting a lot of acclaim last year. I believe this, her debut, came on the qualified recommendation of Brother in Books, Dave V. He had a mixed view of the book, but suggested I begin with it if I was going to read Tartt’s other stuff.
A whirlwind of a weekend.
Leave Indy early Saturday, just ahead of a quick burst of snow, heading west through rain and dreary skies. Our traditional lunch stop at the St. Louis Bread Company in Maryland Heights. Into sun and warmth in western Missouri. Finally arriving at our home base for the weekend in Overland Park.
That evening, dinner with friends from S.’s days as a resident. Minsky’s pizza and Boulevard beer.
As mentioned yesterday, we are traveling for the next few days. We’ll be making a quick trip west to visit friends and family in Kansas City over the first part of St. P’s spring break. We’re hoping to see many of you while there.
Yesterday was the last day of school before break, and in the parking lot there were several vans with storage containers strapped to their roofs. C. was telling me which friends were going where.
Trying to get caught up on some links I need to share before we take a mini-vacation early next week.
Malcolm Gladwell has a piece in the New Yorker about Clive Doyle, a survivor of the Waco, TX Branch Dividian compound, and the lessons that are still emerging, 20 years later, from that disaster.
It’s a really interesting read. What stuck with me most was how the Federal agents, and really all the law enforcement agencies involved in the action, utterly failed to understand the people inside the compound.