Stats
February 2022 Eddie Vedder - 124 Gang of Youths - 93 Something for Kate - 40 Phantastic Ferniture - 27 The Beatles - 26 Complete stats available at my Last.fm page.
Weekend Sports Notes
Jayhawk Talk A large game in Waco Saturday. KU looked fantastic for the first 15 minutes against Baylor, then, other than a brief spurt in the second half, pretty pedestrian. I was as low-key about this game as any late-season, Big 12 contender matchup in years. I listen to three different KU-focused podcasts and all of them insisted last week that Baylor was a great matchup for KU. I think that was putting too much into the teams’ first matchup, which was as dominant as KU has looked all year.
Friday Playlist
open.spotify.com/playlist/… “A Real Thing” - The Beths This lovely track from New Zealand sets up a run of poppier tracks that make up the bulk of this week’s PL. “Bad Love” - Dehd In the write-ups for this song, I saw it compared to the blog rock of the ’00s. I certainly hear that, but I also hear a nice dollop of ’60s-influenced pop. “Kissing Lessons” - Lucy Dacus More good shit from Ms.
Jayhawk Talk: Some Notes
One last breather before the biggest and toughest stretch of the year, via a good, old-fashioned thumping of Kansas State. I’m not sure why K-State decided to force the tempo Tuesday night. They damn near beat KU a month ago playing their normal style of ball. Why they thought they could come to Lawrence and win a track meet is baffling, and perhaps the final nail in Bruce Webber’s coaching coffin.
Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 70
Chart Week: February 16, 1980 Song: “We Don’t Talk Anymore” - Cliff Richard Chart Position: #32, 18th week on the chart. Peaked at #7 for two weeks in January. I’m guessing most, if not all, of my readers have no memory of Cliff Richard. That’s kind of crazy, because he was one of the most popular singers in the world for a long, long time. He’s sold over 250 million records around the world in his prolific career.
Weekend Hoops Notes
Jayhawk Talk Ah, the trip to Morgantown, where so many good/great KU teams have gone and dropped total turds. It didn’t matter that this year’s WVU team is kind of bad and sitting in 10th place in the Big 12: this game should have frightened KU fans because of our past experiences there. (You could tell this West Virginia team kind of sucks by the way Bob Huggins coached. That was as docile as I’ve ever seen him.
Friday Playlist
open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Invincible” - Eddie Vedder I included EV’s “Brother the Cloud” in last week’s playlist. That was also the release day of Ed’s solo album Earthing. Shortly after posting that PL, I virtually spun the album for the first time. And I almost haven’t stopped since. As with the first two singles, I was blown away by how unexpectedly great the album is. There are a few Pearl Jam-y tracks, but it is more indebted to Ed’s childhood love of pop and is filled with references to his musical heroes.
Hoops Notes
Jayhawk Talk Two more wins, one entirely too stressful, the other had too much sloppiness but 15 of the better minutes of the year to balance. Saturday against Oklahoma, KU looked slow and uninterested for much of the game. Like they saw the line was KU –10.5 and figured they would just walk onto the court and the game would be over. They got their shit together in time to turn it into a comfortable win…until they started missing free throws and turning the ball over.
Super Bowl Notes
A pretty decent game, unless you live in Cincinnati. And even then, it was solid until the last five minutes or so. It had a game-winning score in the final 2:00, which always elevates a game. Only one traditionally spectacular play - Tee Higgins’ 75-yard touchdown catch to open the second half - and that came because of a pretty egregious officiating error. I think my generation still expects Super Bowls to be terrible because so many of them in the 80s and 90s were, so any time a game is close still feels like a win even if it wasn’t a classic game.
Friday Playlist
open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Brother Cloud” - Eddie Vedder I wasn’t sure about this whole “EdVed solo album” thing. And then “Long Way” was one of my favorite songs of last year. Still, I held off listening to any of the other advance singles, figuring I would wait until today when the album finally dropped to check them out. Then I heard this last week on Sirius and was, again, pleasantly surprised. This track was inspired both by Ed’s friendship with Chris Cornell and the death of his biological brother.
Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 69
Chart Week: February 5, 1977 Song: “Carry On Wayward Son” - Kansas Chart Position: #36, 7th week on the chart, debut week on Top 40. Peaked at #11 for two weeks in April. The world is a much smaller place today than when my generation was growing up. Thanks to cable/satellite TV, the Internet, and social media networks, trends spread to the hinterlands almost as soon as they pop up in the cultural centers of the world.
Wednesday Links
As usual, this collection of links has been sitting in my queue for far too long. The two holiday-related pieces, though, were both published in the New Year, so they aren’t as old as they seem. Every Winter Olympic Event, Ranked by How Terrified I’d Be to Participate in It Has fighting the massive time difference for the third-straight Olympiad got you down? This might spice up your Winter Olympics viewing a little bit.
Jayhawk Talk: Win Some, Lose Some
A Jekyll and Hyde entry today, as I have two very different games to cover. Saturday’s win against Baylor was KU’s best and most complete performance of the year. KU smacked them in the mouth from the beginning and the Bears not only never responded, they never looked interested in responding. It was as easy a win over a fellow Top 10 team as KU has had in years. And it could have been even more convincing: KU missed a boat-load of wide-open 3’s throughout the game.
Reader's Notebook, 2/7/22
Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir Officially a 2021 book, I finished this over New Year’s weekend. It was my 53rd book of 2021, just getting me over book-a-week pace for those 12 months. This treads similar territory to Weir’s excellent The Martian, again focused on a man who is stuck in space alone. This time, though, the stakes are much higher. Ryland Grace is a former teacher who finds himself alone on a spacecraft sent to another solar system in an attempt to save Earth.
Friday Playlist
Although our big winter storm was kind of a dud - I’m guessing we are in the 7-8" range instead of the 12"+ that was forecast - this is snow day number two for our girls. Which means as soon as I get this posted I’m outside for round number two of shoveling so S can head to work in a bit. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Running with the Hurricane” - Camp Cope I’ve been digging this powerful song for a couple weeks.
Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 68
Chart Week: January 26, 1985 Song: “Do What You Do” - Jermaine Jackson Chart Position: #19, 14th week on the chart. Peaked at #13 the week of January 5. How do you define a single? That dilemma has long frustrated people who track the popularity of music. Over the years Billboard magazine has used a variety of definitions for how to classify individual songs on its different charts. In the current, streaming age, for example, just about every track can be considered a single the moment an album is released.
January Media
Shows and Movies Cobra Kai, season four See here. B+ Narcos: Mexico, season three A very good wrap-up to the series’ three-year look at the Mexican drug cartels of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Typically great casting and writing. This had some similar themes as season five of The Wire. It pulled in the press, which is an important part of any story of the Mexican drug wars. The most compelling angle of the season, Mexican cop Victor Tapia’s quest to find who is snatching and murdering women who work at factories near the US border, somewhat mirrored Jimmy McNulty’s search for who was murdering prostitutes in the final season of The Wire.
Jayhawk Talk: Surprise, Surprise, Surprise
Bad news is supposed to come in threes. KU seemed poised to fulfill that cliché Tuesday in Ames, IA. Ochai Agbaji tested positive for Covid, taking the likely All-American out of a key road contest. Remy Martin’s knee refuses to heal, and he was ruled out of the Iowa State game as well. Throw in a game in an arena where KU is hated as much as anywhere else, against a team that believed they had beaten the Jayhawks in Lawrence a couple weeks back, and everything seemed lined up for a second-straight loss.
Stats
January 2022 Something for Kate - 54 The Beatles - 42 Phantastic Ferniture - 35 The War on Drugs - 34 Frightened Rabbit - 25 Complete stats available at my Last.fm page.
Weekend Sports Notes
Well, for most of my friends, this was a sports weekend to forget. KU I picked a very good night to have dinner plans that interfered with me watching the KU game. Thus I was able to not see a minute of KU getting whacked by Kentucky. We left right around tip off and by the time we got to our destination, the lead was already big enough that I was saved the awkwardness of checking my phone throughout dinner.