Let’s see what I can whip up for you this week. Some old stuff, some new stuff. All good stuff. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “You Got The Love” - Rufus & Chaka Khan This week I read a long interview with Ray Parker, Jr. He seems like a pretty cool dude and has had an amazing career. He wrote this song with Chaka back in 1974. I had never heard it before but he mentions it in the piece.
Funny what happens when sports come back. My media consumption was waaaay down in August. Or at least compared to the previous five months. Here is what I did knock out. Jayhawkers I remember when this movie was made. Justin Wesley, a recent KU basketball player and brother of former KU great Keith Langford, was cast in the main role as Wilt Chamberlain. A KU professor - Academy Award winner Kevin Willmott - was making the film.
Three highly lauded books have kept me busy the past couple weeks. Disappearing Earth - Julia Phillips The last part of a book is so important to how readers feel about the entire story. This is an example of a book that was elevated by a nearly perfect ending. It begins with the disappearance of two young sisters from Petropavlosk, the capital of the Russian region of Kamchatka. The rest of the book advances in one-month increments, with each chapter focused on a different person.
Two full weeks into the school year and we’ve had our first major change. Beginning today, and for the foreseeable future, M will be home on Mondays. In Thursday’s normal parent newsletter, the CHS principal announced that the entire student population would be virtual and on a fixed schedule on Mondays. Several reasons were offered, but the one that seems the most compelling is to give all the kids the same experience at least one day per week.
I didn’t work on a playlist this week, so only a video today. youtu.be/i06UL-8AM… “Release” - Pearl Jam I couldn’t settle on something to watch last Saturday so started scrolling through YouTube and came across Pearl Jam’s 2018 performance at Lallapalooza in Brazil. Two and a half hours later I had watched the entire thing and knocked out a couple bourbons and started digging for rarer performances. Eventually I found this, from a month before the band appeared on Saturday Night Live for the first time and truly began to blow up.
I’m having a hard time with what is happening around this country right now. What frustrates me most is that I no longer have the patience to sit down and hammer out a couple thousand words about what is going on. I’ve tried, but the longer I type, the madder I get. So in place of a post I would have offered in the past, when I could work through that anger to try to get something coherent to share, I will offer this video from Trevor Noah.
Chart Week: August 14, 1982 Song: “Someday, Someway” - Marshall Crenshaw Chart Position: #40, 6th week on the chart. Peaked at #36 for two weeks in August/September. Some one-hit wonders are easy to explain. There are the accidental hits, songs by unknown artists that get tied to popular movies or TV shows. There are novelty hits that piggyback on some cultural fad and ride its popularity to chart success. And there are the dozens and dozens of artists who capitalize on some musical trend - disco, new wave, etc.
I swore that I had written a detailed breakdown back in 2004 of my first Indianapolis 500 weekend living here, which until this year was the strangest Indy 500 day of that era. Alas, after checking the archives, I found I wrote way more about the crazy weather that day than about my experience on my first race day as an Indiana resident. Yesterday was way stranger than 2004, which just featured tornado warnings as the race was ending.
A delayed but very special playlist for this week. Today would have been Joe Strummer’s 68th birthday. To celebrate, a group of musicians is doing a virtual tribute concert for Joe later today. Sadly I’ll be running around getting the girls then heading to kickball, but I will certainly be watching a replay over the weekend. As Strummer is on my Mt. Rushmore of influential musicians, seems like I should honor him as well.
Three days into everyone being back in school. I wouldn’t say it’s been a smooth transition, as both schools continue to adjust on the fly as conditions warrant. At CHS, they have had to make multiple changes to students’ schedules. We heard that the first change was because they had a higher students-per-class ratio than the county health department wanted. So over the weekend 62 sections - I’m assuming that means groups of similar classes - had to be revamped to hit that threshold.
All about the ladies this week. Well, kind of. There is a male artist in the PL, but as you’ll learn, he was “in a phase,” as my mom would have said. [open.spotify.com/playlist/...](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0qnJThjEn3irKQDbqIwjNu?si=uQNjlCdESFyn7EOxNKP4UQ) “the 1” - Taylor Swift I give Taylor all the credit: show knows how to write a fucking song. I keep getting drawn back to her folklore album. It might be the best album I’ve listened to this year.
Chart Week: August 2, 1986 Song: “Your Wildest Dreams” - The Moody Blues Chart Position: #20, 16th week on the chart. Peaked at #9 for two weeks in July. Having a teenage crush on a teacher is kind of a rite of passage, the stuff dozens - perhaps hundreds - of trashy novels and movies have been based on over the years. However, I don’t recall every being infatuated with one of my teachers.
After five months at home, C and L finally went back to school today. We shall, of course, see how long this lasts. The entire 7th/8th grade football team is currently quarantining at home after at least one kid tested positive last week. There will be more positive kids that pop up soon and all we can do is hope those numbers stay low enough to keep the school open and that our girls don’t get sick.
Feel free to skip this article if you think the “China virus” is overblown, that it is going to disappear any day, that Democratic lawmakers are using it as an excuse to institute socialism and take away your freedoms, etc. But if you’re sane, this is a completely devastating reminder of just how royally the president has fucked everything in 2020. Coronavirus: How Trump killed tens of thousands of Americans.:
It’s taken me awhile to get into them, but sports are back! Kind of, sort of, that is. As I type this fall college sports are looking nervously at the drain, aware that a hand is lingering near the handle to flush them away to 2021. But the pros have been keeping us entertained for a few weeks now. And it has been surprisingly good. Golf Golf was the first major American sport back, and had a glorious weekend with the first major championship of the year, the PGA Championship played at Harding Park in San Francisco.
With our situation constantly in flux, a lot can change in a week. But as it stands this morning, all three of our girls are scheduled to be back in a school classroom this time next week. Which makes this the final playlist of a rather long summer. Nothing specific to celebrate that, but this will be a mega playlist this week as I do some housecleaning. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “Jeannine” - Pete Yorn A lovely song that sounds like saying goodbye to those summer romances as you head back to the real world.
I’ve accumulated five books that require discussion. I’ll try to make this quick, but you know me, so strap in. The Match: The Day the Game of Golf Changed Forever - Mark Frost I knew nothing about this book or the event it covered until I heard a discussion of it on a podcast. The focus is the 1956 match between professional golf legends Ben Hogan and Byron Nelson and young amateurs Ken Venturi and Harvie Ward.
Please examine this picture. One the left you see an open box of Multi Grain Cheerios. It is nearly empty, but there is still a half-serving, give or take, left inside. Enough to start a bowl, fill a coffee cup,[^1] or be the perfect portion if you’re slicing a banana to go with. On the right you see the brand new box of Multi Grain Cheerios that I purchased yesterday.
Well, we spent a week in Florida. Whether that was a good idea or not, I suppose we’ll figure out in the next 10-14 days. But it was definitely fun to get away from home for a bit. There were enough mixed feelings hanging over this trip thanks to Covid-19. Then some other shit happened. We were scheduled to leave early Saturday, July 25. Our flight was at 7:30 so my alarm was set for 4:45.
[youtu.be/2RHTiXvEL...](https://youtu.be/2RHTiXvELNg) “Vacation” - The Go-Go’s As we enjoy our final day of vacation, please enjoy this classic video on the subject.