I’ve wanted to believe Lance Armstrong for a long time. I know I’m not the only one.
Each time there was a new allegation claiming Lance had, in fact, benefited from various banned substances and procedures during his Tour de France reign, I held the company line: He had been tested over and over and over again through his career and never been caught. He operated under as intense a microscope as any athlete in modern times, with seemingly the entire European cycling community focused on nailing him for doing something wrong, and was never caught.
In recent weeks both Amazon and Google have launched cloud music services. Persistent rumors have it that Apple will follow suit sometime soon. Throw in a wide-range of independent streaming services and we may be on the verge of the next digital music revolution: the age of cloud storage, high speed broadband access, and the ability to stream our music wherever we want it.
I’ve been a loyal iTunes user for almost seven years.
We are in the midst of some crazy times in our house. S. was away at a work conference for a couple days. She now works eight straight days. I have a couple work assignments coming up, and really could be working almost every night if S. was not. C. finishes school this week, M. next week. Next Friday we’re off to South Carolina for a week.
Oh, and C. turned five yesterday.
Did I jump off the Bond Bandwagon? Nope. Between watching the Royals most nights and keeping up with my Thursday shows, it’s been tough to watch movies lately. My slight reluctance to tackle the next Bond movie didn’t help.
I remember hearing, when I was a kid, that some people thought George Lazenby was the best Bond ever. Back then, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was rarely, if ever, shown on TV.
You would think I learned my lesson already. I was unreasonably excited about Josh Selby’s arrival at KU last fall, and downright giddy the day he debuted against USC. That didn’t work out so well, after the first five games or so.
Four years ago, I was pumped for Alex Gordon’s arrival in Kansas City. That excitement quickly disappeared and did not return until this season, when Gordon seems to have finally figured things out.
In case you missed my recent ramblings about my training schedule, I ran 13.1 miles Saturday. It went pretty darn well, all things considered.
First, the important thing. Not only did I finish but I did so in 2:21. So I was slow, but that was expected. I was pleased to break 2:30, although it was another sobering reminder of my age. When I ran a half-marathon 11 years ago with a sore hamstring in pouring rain in hilly Kansas City, I got in in 2:05.
We all have our sports weak spots. There are those who think Pete Rose did nothing wrong. Giants fans embraced Barry Bonds when the rest of the baseball world shunned him. I guess there are a few people out there who think Roger Clemens isn’t lying. And then there’s Manny Ramirez.
I’ve written many times over the years about my love for Manny. Through all of his bizarre behavior, I stuck with him because he was such a joy to watch in the batter’s box.
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.