Chart Week: December 16, 2023
Song: “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” - Darlene Love
Chart Position: #21. Current all-time high is #15 the week of January 7, 2023.
I heard the wonderful tidbit this post is built around earlier this year on an AT40 from December 1984. It was one of Casey’s “Special Reports,” music trivia blurbs not related to the current countdown that were occasionally inserted between songs. I copied down the details, wondering if there was some way I could work it into an RFTS post.
As tends to happen in these pre-holiday weeks, time has gotten away from me a bit. I can’t believe it is Thursday and I still haven’t written about KU’s win in Bloomington last Saturday. Turns it was good to put it off as now I can write about football signing day, too.
KU-IU Hoops This game was played at the same time as L’s JV game Saturday. Actually they started a few minutes earlier in B-town, so I knew the Jayhawks were down 15–6 or whatever early.
A quick, one-game summary to wrap up the first half of the season.
Last night CHS took on HSE, ranked #2 in class 4A. HSE has a junior who is committed to IU and just passed the 1000 career points mark last week. They also have a sophomore who already has multiple D1 offers and was taking visits to big-time schools as a freshman. A very good program from a huge suburban district.
It seems like most Decembers recently I write something like “Well, it wasn’t a great year for music…” as I prepare to share a bunch of songs I both liked and listened to a lot. Something was different this year, though. According to Last.fm, I listened to about 15% less music in 2023 compared to 2022, and my least music since 2015. I’m not sure what caused that decline, whether it was changes in me/my habits, a quirk in how I was listening, or something specific about this year’s music.
Our weekend was pretty boring, other than a bunch of basketball Saturday, so I’m changing things up for this week’s posts. I’ll begin by recapping L’s hoops then get to some Jayhawk Talk later this week.
In our last volume in this series, I detailed a pretty rough week for L. This post will have a decidedly better vibe and includes another milestone in her young career. Thursday CHS hosted New Palestine.
To get your pre-Christmas week started right, I put together a playlist of seldom played, (mostly) non-traditional Christmas songs to counter all the usual stuff you’re hearing at the mall, in your car, on TV, and in your offices/homes. Enjoy roughly 40 minutes of cool Yuletide tunes.
open.spotify.com/playlist/…
“Main Title” - John Debney 2003. M and I sing the “Bop-bop bop-bop-bop” line at each other often.
“Sleigh Ride” - The Ventures 1965.
A good, old fashioned notes dump like the old days.
CHS Lockdown There was a lockdown for about an hour at Cathedral yesterday. Apparently someone called 911 claiming to be inside the school with a gun. About a million cops showed up and no person with a gun was ever found. We live in wonderful times, friends. Our girls seemed more annoyed that they had to stay and finish the day after the all-clear than worried/scared by the threat.
A kind of bizarre and not very successful week for L on the court, with one very notable exception.
Tuesday CHS played Zionsville, where a travel teammate goes to school. L came out firing early, hoisting six 3-pointers in the first half. She missed them all, but was fouled on one and hit two-of-three free throws. She also had 2 rebounds, an assist, three steals, and no turnovers in the first half.
We had a super-busy Saturday that featured a lot of L’s for our family. Fortunately, for me, the one dub was a big one.
Throwing hoops and real life together, our family went 1–7 for the day.
Cathedral lost JV and varsity games. More on that tomorrow.
S’s Hoosiers lost to Auburn.
M’s previously undefeated Bearcats lost to Xavier.
The Pacers lost to the Lakers in the IST championship game.
Looking at the calendar, this may be the last regular FP of the calendar year. Next week will be a set-up piece for my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist, which will drop the following week. I plan on a non-traditional holiday music playlist for sometime the week before Christmas. Then I will most likely take the final Friday of 2023 off.
Even this isn’t going to be your standard playlist, though.
Please Report Your Bug Here - Josh Riedel This was my Florida Trip book about a month ago. It is framed as a modern take on the workplace novel, which I didn’t know was a thing. I know there are workplace shows. I guess that means it makes sense for there to be a whole swath of novels that relate to our relationships with our jobs then, too. This focuses on a 2010-ish San Francisco start-up that has created an insanely popular dating app that is about to get snatched up by a Big Tech company.
Two games last week. One of them was the biggest night of L’s young career.
Tuesday we played Ben Davis, a west-side of Indianapolis school that is the second-biggest in the state.[1] Their athletic program is generally quite good. Their football team just won the 6A state title and their boys basketball team was undefeated 4A state champs in March. The girls hoops program made it to semi-state last season. Back in the day - 2000–2009 - they won four state titles in ten years, two of those undefeated seasons, and in 2009 were crowned national champions by USA Today.
Jayhawk Talk What a game Friday night between #5 KU and #4 UConn! Since this is rolled into a Weekend Notes post, I’ll chop my thoughts up into chunks tied to the four quarters of the game. Opening tip to 10:00: This is awesome! The Jayhawks are unbeatable! UConn are frauds! The crowd is AMAZING! Why is Jason Sudeikis hanging out with Sue Bird?
10:00 to Halftime: OK, that could have ended better, but we still have a seven-point lead.
Another pretty light month. Movies, Shows, etc Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland An amazing five-part documentary about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is a balance of archival footage and interviews with people who lived through the worst years of the conflict. One of the most moving aspects of the series was seeing these people interviewed in the 2020s and then again in newsreels from 30 or 40 years ago, in a moment of grief when a loved one had been killed.
We’ve reached December, the month when these playlists can get a little squirrelly. There’s less new music to begin with. I’m listening to holiday music much of the day. I’m also focused on my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist. This year has the added element of me just reading a book about Eighties music, and being neck-deep in a book about Nineties music. I could easily just play songs pulled from those books this week.
Time to catch up with L’s exploits on the hardwood.
Two Fridays ago we traveled to North Vernon, IN, about 90 minutes south, nearly all the way to Louisville. The varsity team was playing the #14 team in the state, which features a senior who signed with Michigan State earlier this month. She averaged 22 & 12 as a junior and is ranked in the top 60 in the country. We weren’t sure if she was the one good player down there, or just a sign of a good program, so had no idea what to expect from their JV squad.
For the first time in three years we were home for Thanksgiving week. We packed a lot in, and it deserves a wide-ranging, extra-long breakdown.
College Visitor I picked M up Tuesday around noon after her last scheduled class of the week. We grabbed lunch at Hangover Easy, a place just off campus I’ve wanted to try just because of their shirts. It was solid, but I couldn’t find any shirts for sale.
Chart Week: November 14, 1981
Song: “Never Too Much” - Luther Vandross
Chart Position: #37, 6th week on the chart, first week in the Top 40. Peaked at #33 for two weeks.
Happy Thanksgiving week to you all! A quick entry based on a Casey anecdote about how a pop artist paid the bills before he started making hits of his own.
The Voice of a Generation. The Velvet Voice.
Kind of a chill weekend, with the holiday ahead of us. M does not come home until Tuesday so it was the usual crew around the house. L had a game Friday, more on that later. The weather was nice, so S and I did some yard work at a sister’s house Sunday. And a fair amount of football, the biggest game being a certain showdown in a certain state when a certain blogger attended college.
open.spotify.com/playlist/…
“Beaming” - The Treasures of Mexico What a glorious piece of jangle pop this is, harkening back to the mid-80s college rock scene.
“What Now” - Brittany Howard Howard bringing the funk to her blues. If you don’t like this, stop reading these posts.
“Beautiful Sky” - Semisonic featuring Jim James I gave Semisonic’s new album a listen when it came out. Their advance singles were all the best songs, with this one exception, a perfectly named track.