I’ve been kicking around the idea of starting a new blog, not to replace this one but rather in addition to it to give me an outlet for all my technology geekery. If that happens, I’ll let you all know. I wrote something this morning that would have fit such a blog perfectly. But, in the absence of it, below I shall share with you my thoughts on the latest “scandal” to plague the fine Americans at Apple, Inc.
I once made the grandiose assertion that the Beastie Boys saved my life. The context was, in our preparations to see the B-Boys live in 1998, several of us were sharing our favorite Beasties memories. My claim that they saved my life stemmed from the year my family spent in San Leandro, CA. Our arrival in the Bay Area over the holidays of 1986 coincided with the explosion of the Beasties' Licensed to Ill.
A few notes from our Easter celebration. M., who it should be noted is getting smarter by the minute, had an interesting observation last week. She suggested that the Easter Bunny exists simply so Easter is exciting for kids. She’s received a healthy dose of why Easter is significant, going to a Catholic school and all, but apparently she was unimpressed. She said she knows all about how Jesus died and they put him behind the rock then he came back to life and moved the rock.
So there I was, sitting on my couch, watching Luke Hochevar mow down Cleveland batter after Cleveland batter1 Wednesday night and, for a few moments, I thought history was unfolding on my TV. The first 15 batters Hochevar faced failed to reach base. He was commanding every pitch beautifully. He and Matt Treanor seemed to have a solid plan of attack. Even when a Cleveland batter made contact, the ball flew directly to a Royals fielder.
Time for two more Bond movies. Thunderball, 1965 Four years, four Bond movies. While there was a sense of extravaganza to the first three Bond movies, Thunderball feels like the moment the series became a massive event. Sprawling, audacious plots by the bad guys. Large deployments of troops by both sides. And massive climactic battles. In this case, it all works. Almost. What kills Thunderball is not the cheese factor, which again creeps upward.
Let’s get this out of the way right up front: expectations for athletes are never fair. Especially for kids who were high school stars and who move on to elite college programs. All these kids do is play a game they have some natural talent for very well and suddenly outsiders are ranking them against other kids their age, experts are touting them as the missing piece to teams that are already loaded with talent, and fans expect players who may not have to shave more than once a month to step in and play like Kobe or LeBron.
I’ve been kicking around a minor change to the blog for a couple weeks. I’m still not 100% happy with how it looks right now, but I’m going to go with it for the time being. Basically, Reader’s Notebook posts are disappearing. I will still be listing the books I read, but instead of doing a monthly listing, I will be posting each book individually on a new Reading page. You can either hit that link to see the first entry, or click on the Reading link up at the top of the page.
Winters are hard for me. I think that’s probably the case for most stay-at-home parents. You run out of things to do to entertain the kids. They get sick of being stuck inside around each other, and you, constantly. The longer the winter stretches, the more tension builds. I’ll admit that each year, when we get to late February/early March, I’m pretty much ready for them to leave for a month or so and let me recharge.
If the Internet is good at anything, it’s connecting people with similar, obscure interests.1 If there’s something that interests you even in the slightest, chances are you can find a community of people who are crazy about the subject. Blogs, Flickr groups, newsgroups, podcasts. Thirty minutes of searching on Google can produce enough research material to keep you busy for weeks. Example: people love to show off their desks. Either they’re sharing the computer hardware they own, 2 showing off their interior design chops, or perhaps are writers and just want to share how their carefully crafted writing space looks.
It seems like once a week I’m linking to Joe Posnanski’s blog. Believe me, I’m tempted to do so more often. In fact, I’m surprised that someone hasn’t already set up a blog where all they do is use Joe’s posts as a jumping-off point for their own writing. His latest effort, at its surface a commentary on what happened to reporter Tara Sullivan at the Master’s but evolves into a discussion on Internet commentary, is typically brilliant.
Opening Day, bitches! In general, I’m against beginning the season on a Thursday. Opening Day should be on a Monday, preferably the Monday of the NCAA title game. But, needing something to take my mind off of basketball, I’m granting MLB a waiver this year. I can’t wait to fire up MLB.tv in a few hours and start watching some games. Of course it snowed here almost all day Wednesday, so odds are most of the early, East Coast games will either be played in shitty weather or not played at all.
This week Pearl Jam reissued their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. I’ve listened to both online, and neither is as interesting or exciting as last year’s reissue of Ten, their debut album. Ten was recorded and produced in a manner that did not fit with how the band’s sound evolved. While remixing and rereleasing it was probably self-indulgent, the result was surprisingly great. In fact, I now only have the remixed songs from Ten on my hard drive, the originals banished to the CD box in the basement.
Well, that certainly sucked. I should have done what I threatened to do midway through the first half: turn off the TV, get in the car, and drive until the game was over. It worked against Davidson three years ago. Perhaps it would have worked yesterday. Instead, I just turned the volume down when the second half began, pulled out the MacBook Air, and dove into some media file organization projects I had been putting off for awhile.
There are times in every man’s life when he must undertake a specific challenge: watch all the Bond movies. Some men are even more ambitious, endeavoring to read all the Bond novels as well. Friends, it is time for me to climb this mountain. This is not my first attempt at Mt. Bond. I believe it was the summer of 1986, the summer in which I turned 15 and still relied on my parents for transportation, that I acquired a stack of Bond books at a used bookstore and spent hours on our deck reading them in the Midwestern heat and humidity.
If you watched any of ESPN’s coverage the night the NCAA tournament pairings were announced, you know that Jay Bilas laid into the selection committee and some of their decisions. It was great TV as few analysts, no matter what issues they had with the teams that made and did not make the tournament, have attacked the committee so directly. Nearly two weeks later, some of his criticisms seem silly, especially with VCU winning three games and still being alive.
I had a nice long rant half-drafted, and then it got shot down. Tuesday, Amazon removed API access for Lendle and several other Kindle book lending services. That killed these services as they rely on access to Amazon databases to facilitate sharing amongst users. Amazon said they removed access because the services did not aid Amazon in its primary mission: to sell things. Fair enough. Amazon is a business and certainly has the right to deny access to their content to those they feel cut into their sales.
16 to go. Some first weekend of the tournament. Or week, I guess, with the new First Four games. The NCAA thinks it’s being sneaky, but it’s pretty obvious that we’ll have another tournament expansion sooner rather than later. It’s just a matter of logistics, mostly securing sites for an additional weekend of games. But it’s happening. Two years from now, I bet. I’m really going out on a limb there, aren’t I?
I’ve been stuck on a couple longer pieces all week. So to make up for that, a few smaller ideas crammed into one post. The new NCAA tournament broadcasting agreement is spectacular! Four channels with simultaneous games is about the coolest thing ever. We spent most of Thursday outside, enjoying the perfect weather, so I read e-mails and Tweets and blog posts carrying on about the viewing options jealously. Finally, after the girls collapsed into bed, I was able to watch.
We are a filthy nation. Three songs currently in the Billboard Top 10 feature the most vile of vile words. That’s right, the F dash dash dash word! Cee Lo’s song is a big hit in this house. Dad prefers the original version, not because it’s dirty but because it’s a hell of a soul song. Mom enjoys the original, the radio version, and the Glee version, which featured Gwyneth Paltrow on vocals.
A lot of rambling thoughts about last weekend and the NCAA tournament. If you are a Facebook friend of mine, you know I only saw a few minutes of the Big 12 tournament. M. had a school event Thursday, keeping me away from most of the KU-Oklahoma State game. Based on the quality of play, that was probably a good thing. Friday’s KU-Colorado game was, for some odd reason, blacked out in many areas on ESPN3.