It’s been nearly eight months since I watched a Bond movie. I need to get back on that. Perhaps this article, coming with the 50th anniversary of the franchise, will get me motivated again. It tells the story of all the elements that had to come together the get the first movie made. While Bond seems old hat these days, once he was the face of a bright, space age future.
I’ve hit a wall. I’ve abandoned two books in a row. The first, which got good reviews on Amazon, was so horribly written that I gave up after two chapters. The second, a piece of alternative-history fiction, I gave 100 pages. But I was sure I would get more annoyed and less entertained as I continued. I’m going to start over tomorrow. Here is a book I did finish, though, a couple weeks ago.
Thursday. All three girls in school. Which means I can sit down, scan the headlines, and pick out something to write about. So… Jim Calhoun retires from UConn I’ll throw this out: no coach has had as much success as Calhoun with as little respect. Seriously, when was the last time someone drew up a Best Coach in the Game list and he was in the Top 5? He has three titles, for crying out loud!
Four weeks of high school football in the books here in Indiana. My last two weeks have been very interesting, for very different reasons. I shall share. A week ago, I had the one Catholic school we cover, RHS, which was ranked #5 in 4A, against one of their two biggest rivals, BCHS, which was ranked #1 in 3A. Despite the class difference, BCHS has dominated the series in the last decade, as they’ve dominated pretty much everyone over that span.
It promises to be a strange year for NFL fans here in Indianapolis. Most Colts fans were able to deal with the wreckage of last season, knowing that Andrew Luck would be the reward. Based on early returns, Luck seems to be the real deal. But a good quarterback does not alone rebuild a crumbling franchise. The Colts still have lots of work to do to get back in the playoff mix, let alone become a Super Bowl contender again.
When you really think about it, there are three different days when summer ends. If you have kids in school, there’s the first day of school. There’s the really-real end of summer, which is the date of the autumnal equinox. And then there’s today, the day after Labor Day, which has long been the traditional end of summer. There’s an added bonus in our house today as L. goes off to her first day of 3’s class.
To continue my recent music nostalgia jag, the fifth anniversary of me posting my favorite albums of all time list just passed. Seems like a good time to revisit the list and see if anything has changed. As a quick refresher, here were the Top 5, Honorable Mentions, and Super Honorable Mention from August 2007. 1a - London Calling - The Clash 1b - OK Computer - Radiohead 3 - It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back - Public Enemy 4 - Revolver - The Beatles 5 - Achtung Baby - U2
On occasion a memory from the past will trigger something in my brain and I’ll fall into a deeper hole of nostalgia. That’s been the case recently concerning summer music from the 1980s. The trigger, this time, was two separate American Top 40s I listened to on recent Sundays.1 One was from 1984, and was loaded with Prince, Bruce, Tina, Cyndi and the Footloose soundtrack. That was one of the truly great summers ever, between some epic pop artists and the LA Olympics.
Some notes from the weekend. First football game of the season Friday night. I covered Good Ol’ ECHS who had won their season opener. Friday they were facing a team that easily beat them twice last season. ECHS had a 7-6 lead at halftime, and after turning a fumble into a scoring drive, were up 25-24 early in the fourth quarter. They promptly gave up a 58-yard TD run and ended up losing 36-25.
I’ve gotten way behind on updating my Reading page, the little summaries of books that I finish. When I switched over to Squarespace 6, the formatting of that page got jacked up, meaning I have to redesign it. In the interest of killing two birds with one stone, I’m going to wipe out the existing Reading page and begin posting my summaries here on the main page. Rather than completely catch up, I’ll start with two small books I’ve read over the past week.
I’ve been promising this post for nearly two months. Time to share it, I guess. As promised, here is my accounting of how I would evaluate each major league franchise were the Royals ever contracted/moved away from Kansas City and I was in the market for a new team. There are several factors that would go into selecting a new team. The team would need to be competitive. Not necessarily a shoe-in for the post-season, but at least in the running for a division title more often than not.
More firsts over the weekend. M. and C. each caught their first fish. Both snagged a blue gill off a dock with a little help from a friend of ours. I didn’t have my camera or phone with me, but I can assure you they were thiiiiiiiiis big! Actually, they were quite small but that didn’t make their joy any smaller. They were both about as excited as could be. L.
First, yes, another visual change to the blog. If you’ve been checking in during the late evenings over the past week, you may have noticed various changes on each visit. I continued to tweak my initial choice of theme on Squarespace 6. Instead of getting more pleased with my choices, I liked it less and less. So I explored the other options available. Eventually I settled on what you are now looking at, which I will likely/probably/perhaps stick with for a while.
The alarm went off at 6:20. Ten minutes later I was up and rousing the girls. They stumbled downstairs, shoveled some breakfast in, and made their lunch requests. We brushed teeth, put on uniforms, and fixed hair. We loaded backpacks and grabbed bags of school supplies. And then we were off. The 2012-13 school year has begun. The morning went surprisingly well. C. was quick to get out of bed, which is often a problem for her, and seemed full of energy and excited.
Finally, a tribute to some real American heroes: the men who stay home with their children. “I sort of take things upon myself,” said Mr. Griffioen, whose family has added a son and moved to Detroit. “I don’t go to the store to buy my kids toys. I make them toys. I do woodworking, leatherworking. I learned all sorts of manly skills that I never would have had time to learn if I were sitting in an office 28 stories above San Francisco.
Another summer Olympics has come-and-gone. These were good ones, I think, although if you’re a loyal reader of the blog and this was your only connection to the games, you wouldn’t know it. In both 2004 and 2008, I wrote extensively throughout the games. This time around, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t do any immediate posts after important events. Instead, I kept a running file where I jotted down little notes as they occurred to me.
A quick note about the new look. No major changes for you, the loyal reader, to worry about. Squarespace, the service I’ve been on since early this year, just released the newest version of their platform. Version 6 brings in a bunch of new technologies, most of which can be lumped under the term ‘responsive web design’. Basically what that means is a site should look the same whether you’re reading it on a 30' display, an iPad, or a smartphone.
This is a frightening story. Mat Honan, a technology writer, had his iCloud, Google, Twitter, and Amazon accounts hijacked, and in turn, his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook remotely wiped, destroying years of data he had not backed up. He was lucky, though, in that the hackers were only interested in having some fun rather than running amok with his financial data. All of the big technology companies are pushing us towards exclusive use of their cloud-based systems.
From the time I left my house Friday morning until I returned very late Sunday night, I spent approximately 67 hours in, or traveling to-and-from, Kansas City. The obligatory run down of the weekend’s events. I landed at 7:30 Friday morning. Having been up since 4:45 Eastern, I drove straight to The Roasterie to grab some coffee and enjoy the easy-going ambiance of Brookside. I followed that up with a few laps of the Plaza.
I couldn’t wait any longer, so last night I cracked open my first bottle of my first batch of beer. While I found it lacking in a few areas, I am reasonably pleased with how the B. Brewery’s first beer, Naismith Nut Brown Ale, turned out. My first concern, as I mentioned last week, was that I had presented too much oxygen in the bottling process and there might be some off odors/flavors present.