No surprise. The Peyton Manning era in Indianapolis will officially end today, when the Colts announce that they’ve released him. It’s the correct move, yet still a gutsy one. Much credit to Jim Irsay who has steadily made the moves this winter necessary to rebuild the franchise. A new GM. A new coach. And now a new quarterback. Perhaps if Peyton came back healthy next year, the team would still have another playoff run or two in them.
M. gave up something big for Lent this year: playing the Wii. She had already lost access to it for a week because of a controller-related incident, but I give her credit for selecting something like that as her sacrifice. Of course, by this weekend she was already saying she wanted to reclaim the Wii and exchange something else for it. Since we operate a very strict Catholic household, an arrangement was made.
Baring something crazy happening this weekend, it appears my basketball coverage season is complete. We have four teams that are playing in tonight’s sectional semifinals - three in the same sectional - and even if two survive until regionals, our staff writers will have dibs on their games next week. I didn’t work as much as I’ve worked the past two seasons, but thanks to favorable assignments over the last month of the season, my teams made a big comeback and left my Total Margin Factor for the season at +22.
Here’s the problem with your kids being fans of teen stars: the stars grow up. Monday I’m at the grocery story, doing my thing. As I waited to check out, I took my usual glance at the register magazine stands. I chuckled at the tabloid headlines. I rolled my eyes at how often Jen and Angelina still make the covers. And then I was shocked to see, gracing the cover of Cosmopolitan, my girls' favorite Disney star: Selena Gomez.
Another really interesting piece on Grantland about the end of the Peyton Manning era in Indy. People don't want to lose him, but they are not about to test the boundaries of the First Amendment on his behalf. People would like Peyton Manning to stay, if he feels so inclined, but in Andrew Luck they see a younger and healthier iteration of the same quarterback, and they wonder if the tradeoff is an inevitable fact of life in the NFL.
I suppose it says volumes of the Timothy Dalton era that it’s taken me nearly three months to watch his two movies. In my defense the holidays, and the Christmas movie season, were right in the middle of that stretch. And the copy of The Living Daylights our library has is scratched so badly the disk does not play after 45 minutes. But still, there was not much enthusiasm about getting through these two films.
And thus, it ends. This isn’t going to be another post rehashing the hows and whys of the end of the Kansas-Missouri rivalry. I’m not going to advocate for the continuation of it, nor argue who is more at fault for its demise. No, this post is about that special feeling you get each year when the schedule comes out and you circle the dates your school plays your arch rival.
I don’t spend a lot of time playing games on my iPad or iPhone. I’ll buy a handful each year and maybe get really interested in a couple of them. It’s rare that a game captures my imagination for more than a couple days. But for the last three weeks, I’ve been loving Armor Games' Kingdom Rush. I bought it despite several Internet warnings that it was hopelessly addictive. I can report, after three weeks or nearly constant play, that is absolutely true.
It’s been a big few days for C.. Last Monday she lost her first tooth, her upper left incisor. It had reached that crazy, almost sickening level of looseness when S. finally reached over and yanked it out. There was a scream of surprise then much happiness. Even more happiness the next morning when she found the Tooth Fairy’s gift. The upper right incisor looked to be about ready, too. It hung in a few more days, and when I picked C.
Yes, I’m biased, but I love Nick Collison. He’s pushing ten years in the NBA and, while he was a great college player, I’m not sure anyone expected that kind of pro career for him. And I’ve always enjoyed his thoughtful take on things. He is blogging for GQ magazine on what life is like for a role-player in the NBA. His latest entry addresses finding your niche. It’s something every player who gets drafted should read, because not everyone turns into the next LeBron.
You may recall that I took a crack at running a separate blog dedicated to my musings on Apple and technology. Like many of my Internet dreams,1 it seemed like a great idea but in practice wasn’t such a huge success. Turns out it’s hard to write every day about the same subject, especially when there are about 1000 people out there doing the exact same thing. I admire those who can find something to focus their writing each day.
There was a common theme to the basketball games I cared about over the weekend. Friday the team I covered won their game by 35 points. In an amazing comeback over the past three weeks, my teams are now up to a +7 TMF. I get to cover the #2 team in class 2A this week, so hopefully that improves some more. Saturday KU won by 33. And Sunday, in the first NBA game I’ve attended since 2003 (I think), the Pacers waxed Charlotte by 35.
This week kind of went off the rails yesterday, so I’m going to throw some bits-and-pieces that could have turned into longer, individual posts into a single grab bag to end the week. The biggest obstacle we faced this week came Thursday morning at approximately 3:30 am. I woke to hear the smoke alarms and cable backup box chirping and seeing strange flashes of light out the windows. After a few moments I realized the power had gone out.
A few weeks back we donated an aging piece of furniture to AmVets. Hopefully they’ve made good use of the ugly but insanely comfortable, 40-year-old corduroy chair that my wife was finally able to purge from our home. For some reason, M. thought of that this morning as she was getting ready for school. She asked who it was that came to pick it up. Here is our conversation, as I remember it.
Saturday was another sad night for us children of the 80s. Whitney Houston’s death wasn’t a huge surprise; we all saw the way she lived. The surprise was that this didn’t happen a decade ago. Yet it is still a little chilling when someone who was such a big part of your youth dies before we think they should. This isn’t going to be a long ode to Whitney. As a fan of Top 40 music, I liked her a lot from her debut until 1988 or so.
So S. and I are in the basement this afternoon, installing the final piece of our new entertainment system. We hear arguing upstairs. After it escalates, I head their direction to stop the nonsense. On my way up, I hear C., in tears, yelling at M.. M. responds, in her ‘I’m not really sorry’ voice, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.” C. shrieks back at her, “THEN YOU NEED TO GET NEW EARS!
Some posts are a form of therapy for me. This is one of those. Below, I’ll explain why I didn’t watch the Kansas-Missouri game Saturday, which will also explain the why I’ve hardly watched any KU games this year. Basically, I’ve become an old man and can’t handle the highs and lows of basketball the way I used to. I want to point out this has nothing to do with this year’s team, and with the perception that this is a down year.
Indianapolis' week in the national spotlight is over, and it ends with the city looking very good. That’s the beauty of low expectations: you assume there will be snow and ice and sub-freezing temperatures and when you get sun and temps in the 50s all week, it seems like the best week ever. Downtown was flooded with friendly locals. The out-of-towners were pleased that pretty much everything worth doing was a short walk from wherever they were at the moment.
Just when you thought the Peyton Manning drama was going to fade for a few days, yesterday’s news that he has been medically cleared to play again hits and all hell breaks loose. That’s about a 2000 word post by itself, in which we could explore his motivations for having that news released during Super Bowl week, what it means for the Colts' administration, and so on. But I’ll cut to the chase: it changes nothing for the Colts.
One of the greatest of the many gifts my parents gave me was my appreciation for music. Part of my musical education was our weekly, family viewing of Soul Train. For a white kid growing up in a small, Kansas college town, the show opened my eyes to not only a different kind of music than was commonly played in Hays, KS1, but also to the broader world in general. There were people out there who looked different than me, talked different than me, dressed different than me.