This weekend was another reminder that sports are dumb. At least they were to the people - well me - in our house. KU You all know that I’m superstitious. So I got a bad feeling as news broke that Tech’s two best players, Terrence Shannon Jr and Kevin McCullar, would miss Saturday’s game against KU. It just seems like anytime people get excited about an opponent missing key player(s) against KU, the Jayhawks decide to lay a big, fat egg that day.
There is an unintentional theme to this week’s playlist. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Tunnels” - Weakened Friends A huge, crunchy very 90s song about getting your heart broken. It’s awesome. “Lo Lo Lonely” - Young Guv YG returns in March with a double album filled with his take on power pop. I know Matthew Sweet put out an album last year. I didn’t listen to it, but this reminds me of his work back in the 1990s.
I knocked out season four of Cobra Kai over the weekend. Six episodes Saturday, four Sunday. Solid work. I liked it, although I thought it took a long time to find a good rhythm and flow. I hoped there would be a payoff for a rather slow start, and, thank goodness, there was. In fact, the last three episodes were as good as any in the total run of Cobra Kai.
What the hell was that? In the building named for Henry Iba, KU and Oklahoma State took turns sending basketball back to the Stone Age Tuesday. OSU was awful in the first 10 minutes. KU was even worse in the next 10, at one point missing 19 straight shots. And both teams looked like fifth graders in the closing minutes of the contest. In the final 2:24 there were seven turnovers, five fouls, four missed field goals, two missed free throws, and zero points scored by either team.
Holiday Stuff The Office, Christmas episodes I wrote about them last year; they get a collective A Christmas Vacation, A Elf, A Office Christmas Party, B+ Die Hard, A Community, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” This was the Community entry on a list of best Christmas TV episodes I found. I hadn’t seen it since probably its initial airing. It should be a classic for everyone. It is to me now. A
Happy New Year, everybody! Let’s kick off another calendar year of discussing random shit, shall we? Our New Year’s Eve was rather quiet, as usual. M went to a party, which was a first. That meant we had to stay up until we were sure she was safely at the home of the friend she was spending the night with. What did our parents do before the Find My app?
My listening stats for 2021: The War on Drugs - 417 Middle Kids - 303 Pearl Jam - 199 Manchester Orchestra - 115 Wild Pink - 112 Sam Fender - 110 Crowded House - 102 Hatchie - 102 Julien Baker - 98 Eliza Shaddad - 88 And since I began using Last.fm in February, 2005: Frightened Rabbit - 3532 Pearl Jam - 3494 The War on Drugs - 2850 The Beatles - 2286 Ryan Adams - 2268 The Clash - 1904 Radiohead - 1613 Crowded House - 1557 Bruce Springsteen - 1367 The White Stripes - 1272 Complete stats available at my Last.
It’s been awhile since we’ve had a normal Friday playlist. Might as well wrap up 2020 by getting back into the routine of sharing good music with friends on Fridays. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Maelstrom” - Melts I’ve been sitting on this one for awhile. Turns out it is perfect to save for New Year’s Eve, as it is about a getting caught in times of turmoil and being powerless to resist. I can’t think of a better analogy for the past few years.
KU has entered the silly season. Three-straight scheduled games either cancelled or postponed because of Covid issues with their opponent. The next regularly scheduled game is in jeopardy, too, although the new quarantine rules may save it. Odds are at least the first half of January will continue to be crazy, and perhaps only a quickly declining Omicron wave will keep the entire conference season from being a mess. In place of two of those games, KU scrambled to get new opponents.
Only about six weeks behind on these, no big deal. If you got a gift card for Christmas maybe you’ll find something in here to use it on. The Last Tourist - Olen Steinhauer My latest entry from a recent list of best espionage novels. I knew this came from a series, but it got tremendous reviews so I figured it could stand on its own. It was only after I finished it that I saw I had read the first book in the series nine years ago.
It is days like this you can’t help but wonder if climate change is a good thing. I’m sitting on our back porch, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, at 10:39 AM on December 27 and feeling completely comfortable. It feels like a May morning. Hell, it wasn’t that much warmer than this around sunrise in Hawaii. We will obviously pay for this at some point. Tomorrow we are supposed to have heavy rain all day and a slow decline until a low in the teens Monday morning.
KU Hoops Well, I was hoping to post another Jayhawk Talk entry this week. I was looking forward to seeing how KU played three days after struggling to put away a Stephen F. Austin team that exposed some of their deficiencies. Alas, Colorado had some players test positive, the game got wiped from the schedule, and the Christmas break begins early for the Jayhawks. Which leaves the big KU hoops news of the week the announcement that KU will play Indiana the next two years.
Today is a strange day in our house. M and C wrapped up finals on Friday, so (as I begin this in the morning) both are still in a deep sleep. Hell, C probably finally went to bed somewhere in the 2–3 AM range. L, on the other hand, has class through Wednesday. So the two of us were up at the normal time. That feels weird because it’s the first time we’ve had a schedule like this.
We’ve made it to another year-end list of my favorite songs of the past twelve (-ish) months. Usually I start working on these rankings in early October. This year I didn’t put any real work into it until after we returned from Hawaii on December 1. Some of that was because my working list was about as tight as it has ever been. I don’t know that it ever got over 40–42 songs, and I was able to trim many songs before I began giving it serious consideration.
Over the weekend I knocked out all of The Beatles: Get Back. A few observations and thoughts about Peter Jackson’s nearly eight-hour documentary of the January 1969 Beatles studio sessions. I’m pretty sure I saw the original movie that was made from the film shot at those sessions, Let It Be, years ago. When I first saw the trailer for Get Back last fall, I was incredibly excited as it seemed to upend the narrative Let It Be had created: that the Beatles constantly bickered and battled through those sessions.
After a week of fun buildup, Kansas and Missouri finally took the floor against each other Saturday for the first time in nearly a decade. The result felt a bit empty, although the process was a lot of fun for us Kansas fans. The Jayhawks’ 102–65 win was the third-largest margin of victory in series history. That wasn’t a surprise. From the Vegas gambling line (starting at KU minus–25!!!) to every article I read, podcast I listened to, and discussion I was in last week, universal opinion was that KU would win easily.
A few links to kick off your weekend. ‘Wrong team won both days’: Flashback to epic finale of KU-Mizzou basketball in 2012 Kansas and Missouri renew their basketball rivalry in Lawrence tomorrow. This is a good summary of how they ended their time as conference rivals almost ten years ago. For the record: Thomas Robinson’s block was 100% clean. Now the foul that put Tyshawn Taylor at the line to hit the winning free throws?
Like the good little elf that I am, I’ve been hard at work on my Favorite Songs of the Year list since we returned from Hawaii. My goal is to publish it the middle of next week. As has become tradition, I will offer this prelude: my favorite songs for each year since 2004. These are in chronological order, so Modest Mouse represents 2004, Waxahatchee represents 2020. Songs 14 and 15 in this list were co-songs of the year for 2017.
Chart Week: December 10, 1977 Song: “Here You Come Again” - Dolly Parton Chart Position: #12, 9th week on the chart. Peaked at #3 for two weeks in January, 1978. This edition features another musician origin story.[1] I really like this one; hope you do, too. It is a tiny miracle that anyone becomes a recording star. There are, what, thousands of people out there with the same dream? Tens of thousands?
A couple flawed yet fairly easy wins after the Thanksgiving tournament for the Jayhawks. Now everyone can look ahead to Saturday’s game. Not me, though. Or at least not yet. The last three games have brought a very nice and surprising development: Christian Braun is good. Really good. He struggled so much in the opener against Michigan State that I think a lot of us kind of wrote him off as just being a role player again this year.