My momentum in this series has been off for a few months. No worries for the two or three of you who care about these posts; I’m not giving up on them! A combination of factors over the summer kept me from listening to American Top 40 very often. Less time in the kitchen, where I play the iHeart Radio Classic American Top 40 channel the most. No more SiriusXM in the car, so no 80s on 8 Big 40 countdowns to supplement my Casey shows.
I had a couple longer posts in various states of readiness that I hoped to select from to post today. But, man, these early mornings getting up to take L to basketball wipe me out. More about that in another post. Instead of posting something longer, I’ll just share some links for now. A great story about a group in Oakland that is making sure that professional baseball survives there after the A’s leave.
Another weekend jam-packed with sports dominating my attention. Personally, it was a tough weekend for football. Cathedral lost Friday night against Cincinnati St. Xavier in the closing seconds of their game, 35–31. KU lost to Illinois despite dominating on defense and having an unstoppable running game they, for some reason, went away from. M’s Bearcats blew a big lead and lost. And the Colts failed to get a win on opening day for the 11th consecutive season.
I’ve finally wrapped up the music projects that have been eating up a lot of my time lately. As I do, I find my new music playlist is down around 40 songs. For a good chunk of 2024 it’s been closer to 60 songs. The new tunes have definitely dried up over the past month. Hopefully just a lull before another wave flows before the holidays. It took adding a few old songs to pad this week’s playlist out to a reasonable size.
My NFL predictions are always half-assed. Let’s see if I can make them even more half-assed (quarter-assed?) by typing them up on a morning when a chirping smoke alarm woke me up at 3:30, it took me an hour to fall back to sleep after finding/quieting the proper alarm, then I had to be up less than an hour later to get L to practice… I never do any real research for these posts, although this year I’ve listened to a few preview pods.
Well, August was quite a month when it came to reading. I finished seven books last month. And that was with a vacation, the Olympics, paying more attention to baseball (at least some of the time), and watching the US Open mixed in. I guess I used my free time wisely. Also I read some very enjoyable books that kept me engaged and turning the pages. Here are the last four from that run.
It was an action-packed weekend. At least for watching sports from the comfort of my house. Friday night in particular was kind of crazy. High school football on the radio. Indiana Fever and US Open on the TV. Royals-Astros Gameday coverage on the Mac. With bonus weather monitoring on every screen. I guess I’ll break things down by subject rather than day. KU Football A slow start turned into the blowout it was supposed to be Thursday night for KU.
Movies, Shows, etc 2024 Summer Olympics Already much discussed in this space. A The Americans, season 3 The re-watch continues. Season three was a tight, excellent set of episodes: I believe every show fell between 43 and 48 minutes. Even in 2015, that was rare in the prestige TV realm. The last four episodes, especially, were crackling with intensity as the Jennings’ secret started to spill out. A- Homicide: Life On The Street, selected episodes One of the all-time great TV dramas finally arrived on a streaming platform last month.
After months of having more than enough songs in the queue for these posts, the tide of new music might finally have slowed a bit. Have no worries, I still have plenty of songs for you. It is just taking a tad more work to put this week’s playlist together. Which I, of course, do not mind. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Summer’s Over” - Jordana, TV Girl One weekend left. “Hallelujah” - Bad Moves There is always a debate on whether rock music and politics go together, and then how much politics you can inject into a song before it puts people off.
College football is finally here! With it comes what is the most anticipated and also oddest season for the Kansas Jayhawks in my life. Anticipated because a program that won nine games last year enters week one with 20 of 22 starters who are either seniors or redshirt juniors, a level of experience this program has probably never had before. Biggest of all is the return of quarterback Jalon Daniels. When he’s been healthy at KU he’s been amazing.
As hinted at in yesterday’s post, I got to do something insanely awesome Monday night that I’ve been waiting a long time for. Even with a short night of sleep, I’m still a little keyed up from it this morning. If you choose to proceed, prepare yourself for an overly detailed accounting of my evening watching Pearl Jam play live rock ’n’ roll music. One of the funny things about me is that for as big a fan of music as I am - and I think the archives of this blog are testament to that - I’ve not been to tons of concerts in my life.
This weekend seemed pretty chill to me. There were enough things going on to justify a blog post, though. Let’s see how many words I can stretch this alleged slow weekend into. Friday Night Lights High school football started in Indiana last week. In a shocking upset, it was a perfectly pleasant night. That will change this week, though. That wasn’t the only upset of the night. Number 10 Cathedral pounded #1 and defending 6A state champs Ben Davis 24–6.
A little smaller selection this week, as I’ve had two music projects that have been sucking up my listening time this week. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “London Calling” - The Clash Joe Strummer was born 72 years ago this week. At first, I accidentally added the entire London Calling album to this playlist. For a second I thought about making that the entire PL for the week. There are worse ways to spend an hour.
I am now four months and over 5000 miles into Telsa ownership, err, leasership? Blog rules dictate that an update is in order. I don’t think I have anything super profound to say. For the most part, I love the car and EV life. I would say it has been a 90–95% positive experience, with mostly small things annoying me. At the same point in my Audi lease, I bet I would have said the same thing.
I probably should have shared these first three links last week, when we were all still gripped by Olympic fever. Ranking Every Summer Olympic Sport Based on How Terrible It Would Be for the Average Person The Winners and Losers of the 2024 Paris Olympics Merci, Paris: We needed these Olympics As I continue my re-watch of The Americans, I was horrified by an ad shown within a season three episode, which took place in 1983, for Love’s Baby Soft.
An Unexpected Trip What started as a boring, uneventful weekend ending up being surprisingly fun. S worked full time all weekend, filling in for a hospitalist who is on maternity leave. She had like 1000 babies to see,[1] so was at the hospital until 5:00 Saturday, nearly as long Sunday. Because of that and the girls being tired after their first full week of school, we just sat around and did nothing on Saturday.
open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Archbishop Harold Holmes” - Jack White What an idiot I am! White dropped his No Name album on streaming services two weeks ago, and I listened to it a ton after we got home from vacation. Then, somehow, I forgot to include a track in last week’s playlist. Again, idiot. This track is soooo White Stripes-y, with his spitfire vocals straddling a line between dark & menacing and hilarious & nonsensical.
Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic - Jason Turbow My brother in books David V handed me a copy of this on my visit to Kansas City in June. It took me some time to work through my stack of virtual books to crack it open, and once I did, I realized I had read it before, back in 2017. Looking back, I loved it so much then that I read it in two days.
Catching up on some family stuff from the past few weeks. Back to Campus The biggest event was moving M back to school on Sunday. In every way it was so much easier than moving her into the dorm a year ago. She’s living in the sorority house this year. She and three other girls share a little quad on the third floor. They have their own rooms with a shared bathroom and little storage hall which has a door to the main hallway.
Strap in for a good, old fashioned, mega post about the Olympics! In a week filled with amazing events and results, it would be impossible for me to not start with Saturday’s men’s basketball gold medal game. The first quarter was nearly perfect, a breathless, back-and-forth, up-and-down, punch-and-counter punch 10 minutes. The US seized control early in the second quarter and never really lost it, although the French made several valiant runs.