Our holidays come to an end today. M and C go back to class tomorrow, although CHS is once again having a two-week J term filled with electives, so they don’t have “real” school for awhile. L has another week off but I will still have to start setting an alarm to make sure her sisters are awake tomorrow. A rundown of how we ended 2022 and began 2023. New Year’s Eve/The New Year Our postponed Christmas Eve family gathering was rescheduled for this night.
I believe I promised this for Monday, but it makes more sense to share this today. Happy 2023 to all! open.spotify.com/playlist/… “nye” - Runner “The New Year’s Resolution” - Spielbergs “New Year’s Day” - U2 “New Year’s Resolution” - Camera Obscura “New Year’s Day” - Taylor Swift “The New Year” - Death Cab for Cutie
As I do every January 1, a slightly different accounting of my listening habits. December 2022 Bing Crosby - 79 Frank Sinatra - 76 The Jackson 5 - 57 Burl Ives - 37 Otis Redding - 36 2022 The War on Drugs - 362 Gang of Youths - 326 The Beatles - 298 Eddie Vedder - 249 Wet Leg - 166 All Time [1] Frightened Rabbit - 3678 Pearl Jam - 3641 The War on Drugs - 3214 The Beatles - 2589 Ryan Adams - 2297 Checking my totals from 1/1/2022, Frightened Rabbit gained one point on Pearl Jam over the past 12 months while The War on Drugs knocked off over 150 plays from the #2 spot.
The final playlist of 2022. It will be a little different as I plan a special playlist for Monday and will hang on to new tracks until next Friday. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Man at C&A” - The Specials “Our Lips Are Sealed” - The Go-Go’s Terry Hall, one-time frontman for The Specials, died a week ago. I’ve listened to a fair amount of Specials music over the years, but his passing had me reading up on their history.
I guess if you have to go 14 years between bowl games, this is the way you want to return. Well, kind of. A win sure would have been nice. And not going down by 25 points would have made for a more interesting game. But the Kansas Football Jayhawks sure found a way to make Wednesday’s Liberty Bowl exciting. They nearly capped off a year of unforgettable KU comebacks with another epic one.
A stressful but pretty good Christmas weekend. Obviously the big issue the past several days has been the weather. We ended up only getting between 1–2” of snow Thursday, a far cry from that initial forecast of over a foot. But it was still enough, combined with the wind and cold, to make travel difficult and dangerous. Fortunately, for us, S was home before the roads got bad and the rest of us had no need to be outside of the house on Friday as the windchill dropped to over 30 below zero.
I realized after I posted my Favorite Songs of the Year that I forgot to share my Year By Year favorites playlist. So, on this very cold morning (–9, wind chill –36 as I type…), I will send you into the holiday weekend with those 21 songs, running from 2004 to the present. Merry Christmas! [open.spotify.com/playlist/...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4bySVyeFTUGpGeWplD0hdN?si=4159a1aaa79d4dbc)
A few links to get your holiday weekend going. What? Some element of our annual Christmas celebrations is completely made up? Unbelievable! So, what does it mean? “Nothing,” says Holton. “It’s basically gibberish.” FWIW we saw Mele Kalikimaka displayed quite often in storefronts, etc last year when we visited Hawaii. Of course, they were probably just catering to us White Folks. Is ‘Mele Kalikimaka’ Really the Thing to Say on a Bright Hawaiian Christmas Day?
It’s been a crazy couple of days. That will happen when a massive winter storm is predicted to arrive just as the biggest holiday of the year arrives. M and C finished finals Tuesday. They seemed pleased with their performances. We’ll find out in a few weeks. L wrapped up school Wednesday. It was pretty much a useless week, as all tests and assignments were completed last week. She cracked me up by wearing a Santa hat to school each day, then again when we went to the gym on Tuesday.
What a weekend of sports at all levels! Hoo, Hoo, Who? I was unable to watch the Indiana-Kansas game live, which was a major bummer, because it was another first-rate ass kicking. One so comprehensive that I’m left wondering if IU really isn’t that good and, thus, us KU fans shouldn’t overreact to the win. Regardless, as a Jayhawk living in Hoosier-land, that was a fun ass game. I was following the score from L’s games, but because I’m a superstitious idiot, I decided I would only check the score every 15 minutes of real time so I could focus on her games.
There’s not much music left in my FPL pool, so seems like a good week to take this in a different direction. It’s been an odd weather month here in Indy so far. Not warm but not cold, generally in the upper 40s with a few days up into the low 50s. THe issue has been that we’ve been socked in by low, thick clouds for most of the past two weeks.
M and C start their first semester finals today. I’m pretty sure that CHS has changed their finals schedule all four years that M has been there, which she finds annoying. This year the days are split between two morning exams and two afternoon review sessions. So, technically, finals began yesterday with two reviews after lunch. We’ll see what the girls think of this schedule when they wrap up next Tuesday.
We have arrived at one of the most glorious days of my blogging year: the reveal of my favorite songs of the past 12 months. I often attempt to find common threads that wind through my selections. At first I wasn’t detecting any this year. There were a few songs about dead people, but that was a small subset of the bigger list. As I was putting the final touches on my list, I realized that there is a presence of gratitude in quite a few of these tracks.
Border Dud Last year, when Kansas and Missouri played basketball for the first time in nearly ten years, I wrote this: That’s the good news for MU: things change quickly in college hoops these days. They could add some solid transfers and the young guys who were overmatched on Saturday may be much more comfortable and confident next December. KU could be on probation and have lost a ton of talent.
Some brand new songs and one that goes back nearly 50 years for this week’s playlist. (Spotify embedding is cranky this morning, so here’s a link) Friday Playlist 12/9/22 https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6PrFQ6Y0xt5JJnHAB5wx1b?si=a478ce2e928544ab “Peace Blossom Boogy” - Babe Rainbow Not sure how/why it happened, but I just heard this five-year-old song about going to Venice for the first time. Spotify must be tracking my location. If you told me there was a song called “Peace Blossom Boogy” I would expect it to sound exactly like this.
Long Road: Pearl Jam and the Soundtrack of a Generation - Steven Hyden One of two books I loaded onto my Kindle for our Italy trip, and the only one I really read much of, mostly on the train. This is Hyden’s take on the story of Pearl Jam, told through chapters that each center on one song selected from their catalog. It is less an updated comprehensive history of the band - there are plenty of those books already - than an attempt to take elements of that history and use them to explain how PJ carved out such a unique place in music history.
A music-heavy list of interesting pieces this time. Since the Milli Vanilli scandal came in the prime of my music listening years, it will always resonate. While reading this piece, it struck me that a lot of younger people have no idea what it was about, just that it is a cultural punchline. In this review, the author makes some great points about how what was scandalous 30 years ago can be the norm today.
I think I broke my media consumption habits in October and have yet to get them right. A lot of basketball (on TV and in person) and another week away from home didn’t help. Thus, another rather short list of things to share this month. Movies, Series, Shows Halloween Baking Championship I wrapped up the most recent season on November 2. Blayre was a deserving winner in a season filled with super-talented bakers.
A fairly quiet weekend for our family. A couple folks are still trying to get their sleep schedules back to normal. Me? I’ve been sleeping awesome all week. I probably just jinxed myself to a week of insomnia… College Football Bowls and Playoffs I must be getting old. The stupid little “controversy” that took over my Twitter feed Friday about Missouri allegedly not wanting to play Kansas in a bowl game annoyed me to no end.
Since returning home I’ve been super focused on getting my Favorite Songs of the Year playlist put together. I’ve made a lot of progress and expect to post it in about 10 days. In the meantime, the next two weekly playlists will feature some songs that were weeded out as I get the big list down to its final number. Also three songs this week honor artists who have passed recently.