I sit here on a lovely autumn evening, windows open, Upland Oktoberfest in a glass, watching MLB game #163. Not a bad way to spend a night, especially with David Price doing David Price things in the early going. Since I can’t make full playoff predictions until this game is resolved, some final thoughts on the Royals’ season. As I said last week, I’ve decided to milk the good from this season.
Obligatory weekend notes. I was finally back on the road for high school football Friday night. The game itself aside, it was kind of a mess. Thanks to a big construction project on the highways here in Indy, a drive that normally takes an hour, or just over, on a Friday night took 95 minutes. I rolled into the stadium with 7:00 left before kickoff. Fortunately, this school saves a seat for us so I had a spot in the press box.
I’ll assume that people who are long time readers of the blog, and/or have known me for many years, have mental lists of my many odd traits. I’m not even going to jog your memories with a few examples. You know what you make fun of me for. Here’s one more you can add to your lists: Several times a year1, I have a dream in which it is Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, and I realize I haven’t watched any Christmas movies or listened to any Christmas music yet.
(Stealing a line from Twitter…) This is how the season ends. Late at night, in Seattle, on another evening when the offense is pathetic while losing to a bad team. Of course, I was long asleep when the game, and the Royals’ playoff hopes, ended with a 6-0 loss to the Mariners last night/this morning. But I knew that the Royals had to win to keep the most meager of playoff chances alive, and was not terribly surprised when I pulled up the scores as I was waking the girls up this morning.
Man, I remember the early days of Korleone Young well. First, there was that unforgettable name. Then, the fact an allegedly world-class high school baller was coming up in Wichita about the same time as JaRon Rush in KC. KU fans dreamed of those guys playing together, along with Quentin Richardson. Alas, while Rush and Richardson were once committed to KU, none of the three ever enrolled in Lawrence. Richardson’s had a long and solid, if unremarkable, NBA career.
Your weekly weekend wrap-up, featuring a two-hour stretch from Sunday that was as good as any sports moment this year. This was no ordinary weekend. No, we had visitors! The Nesbitts traveled from Kansas City (with the Belfords also traveling here, but staying with the Heberts) for the Missouri-Indiana football game Saturday. There were plans to attend the local high school football game Friday, but rain ruled that out. 1
I don’t obsess about music the way I once did. I blame that on the digital music revolution. As much as I love having access to a seemingly endless stream of music, it also means I don’t live with an album for weeks at a time the way I once did. But there are exceptions to that, certainly, whether it’s a Pearl Jam or Clash week or when I do fall in love with a record and listen to it beyond its first week of release.
I wasn’t sold on every move he made in the off-season, but yesterday Colts General Manager Ryan Grigson showed why he’s one of the best in the business. He absolutely stole Trent Richardson from Cleveland. Sure, he gave up a first round draft pick next year for Richardson, but the Colts will not be drafting in the top ten next year. 1 That’s a hell of a move for a team that was relying on Ahmad Bradshaw to carry the load by himself after the loss of last season’s running back revelation, Vick Ballard, to an injury.
As promised, the long, boring, navel gazery that is the “Why I Changed The Blog” post. Feel free to skip. First, the important things you need to know. The landing page will show the five most recent posts. If you want to read further back, just hit the Journal link over on the left and you can browse to your heart’s content. To the tune of 150 pages of blog posts!
Twelve games to play, 2.5 games out of a playoff spot. Isn’t this what I said was all I really wanted from the Royals earlier this year? Meaningful baseball in September? Well, we got it. And in late September, to boot. It’s been a crazy, weird, frustrating, enthralling season. Thanks to all the peaks and valleys, this whole Wild Card chase thing kind of snuck up on us. Obviously, the Royals have played (mostly) great baseball since the All-Star Break.
Well, that was pretty easy. As you can tell by reading this, the site is up and running just fine. It took me about half an hour to make the final changes and move the site over to its new home. I’ll write about the changes in the next day or so, but the important thing is that everything appears to be working fine. The weekend was chock full of activities for us.
Well, it’s time. It’s been almost two years since I’ve made any large changes to the blog.1 The itch to change has been bugging me and it’s finally time to scratch it. Over the next three days, I’ll be picking everything up and moving it to new servers, installing new software, and hopefully by Monday, all will be working as normal again. As always, there’s no need for you to do anything.
30 - VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave![][image-1] - Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, and Martha Quinn with Gavin Edwards. I knew before reading this, from the reviews, that it wasn’t considered to be nearly as good as I Want My MTV, the oral history of the glory days of MTV I read last year. But that didn’t mean I was going to skip this oral history of and by four of the five the original MTV VJ’s.
Sorry for the delay on the Boston trip wrap-up. But Mondays are S.’s day off and we did what any married couple who has a morning alone without the kids would do. That’s right, we went through each room in our house and…picked up every damn toy, which we then put in a huge pile in our basement and methodically went through, throwing away the ones with jacked up or missing parts, putting dozens of others into a donation pile, and only keeping the stuff that was still age-appropriate or that we knew we couldn’t get away with throwing away.
I was thinking about the state of the NFL. On the one hand there is a dynamic group of young players, mostly quarterbacks, who have come into the league over the past three years and promise to be the collective face of the league for the next decade. With them has come the era of hyper-offense, where a variety of new schemes are designed to maximize the number of plays an offense runs and punish the defense by driving them to exhaustion rather than stuffing it down their throats or throwing the ball vertically every play.
OK, this is just nuts. The team that I saw in week one of high school football? That had the quarterback who threw for 373 yards and six touchdowns? Well apparently they were just getting warmed up. Last Friday they won their game 83-78. Again, this is HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL! As the Indianapolis Star story I link to below points out, the schools’ boys basketball teams played a 71-67 contest last season.
Man, those four day weekends fly by. And now, as of about 30 minutes ago, all three girls are in school. L. was wound-up and ready to go this morning, coming into our room before my alarm went off. Which was a good thing. She got waylaid by a stomach bug Sunday night and into Monday, which had us concerned that she might not be able to make her first day of Pre-K.
A few quick notes from the start of the high school sports season. High school football kicked off last Friday. I covered GHS, who were coming off their best season in decades but had to replace a ton of seniors. That showed as they lost 42-19. They got torched by the opposing quarterback. Kid threw the ball 23 times, completing 17 for 373 yards and six touchdowns. First play from scrimmage was a 79 yard TD pass.
Week three at school and folks are still having issues with the drop-off procedure. Which naturally always makes me think of Mr. Mom, when Jack drops the kids off for the first time and does it all wrong. Each day the teachers who monitor the drop off area at St. P’s have to run over to a couple cars and explain that kids can’t get out off the left side of the vehicle, that you have to pull all the way up to the sign, or to wave cars forward who are just sitting in the drop-off zone.
Each week, as I go through my RSS feeds, Twitter, email, and other mediums through which I find cool stuff, I come across things that I’ll open up in my browser but forget about. They may sit in an open tab for days, but at some point a mental alarm goes off and I think, “Well, I haven’t read that yet. Time to close it and forget about it.” That happened a week ago with the freaky music item of the week, a slowed down version of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” that people were buzzing about.