Old School Gaming

It should be national championship night. Maybe KU would be playing tonight in the school’s ninth title game seeking their fourth NCAA title. The Chicago Tribune ran a simulation and had the Jayhawks beating Michigan State tonight to indeed grab the 2020 nets. USA Today had KU beating Dayton on a buzzer-beating shot. Alas, there was no tournament this year so we’ll never know if Dot, Dok, Marcus and company could have won four to six games to hang another banner in Allen Fieldhouse.

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Friday Playlist

open.spotify.com/playlist/… “I Know That Much” - The Lathums This band is from England, but there is a distinctly 80s, Australian vibe to their music. To be fair, there is also a strong early 90s jangle pop feel to it as well. I also hear REM and Johnny Marr. This is turning into a wine description: “Oaky, but with a hint of vanilla, burnt caramel, and a touch of burnt hay in the finish.

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Covid Chronicles, 4/2

The latest in America’s favorite new blog series! Last night I had my first Zoom meeting with friends. Most of those buddies check in here on the blog occasionally - Nez, E$, Sir Dave, The Piddler - and we’ve been texting often. But it was still great to see their faces, have a conversation, and make a human connection. Yesterday the Indianapolis mayor extended our city’s shelter in place order through May 1.

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What I'm Watching, March

Obviously a busier month than normal. Let’s get to it. Narcos, season three Maybe not quite as excellent as the first two seasons, largely due to the end of Wagner Moura’s epic run as Pablo Escobar which carried the first two seasons. The move from Medellín to Calí still made for compelling TV. Despite that move, there was still a revelatory performance, this one by Matias Varela as cartel head of security Jorge Salcedo.

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Reader's Notebook, 3/31/20

First off, in my last entry I mentioned that I had forgotten to include a book in my December updates. But I had also forgotten the book’s title, so I could not mention it at all. Fortunately the author of the book blurbed one of this entry’s books which jogged my memory. This is my official recognition that I read and enjoyed Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter. It’s a terrific, mind-fucky novel.

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Covid Chronicles, 3/30

Happy spring break, everyone! So excited to leave dreary, cold Indiana behind for a week in sunny, warm… Well shit. We weren’t even supposed to go someplace warm, but it is still crappy to remain stuck at home rather than on day two of skiing in Colorado. Who knows, maybe staying home means one of us didn’t break a leg or blow out an ACL on the slopes. Regardless of what is going on here, we are glad the resorts shut down as the Keystone-Vail corridor is apparently a hotspot thanks to at least one person who traveled from Italy to that area in early March.

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Friday Vid

youtu.be/6i-fiRgbp… “The Rising” - Bruce Springsteen and the E. Street Band It’s a big new music week. I’m a few songs into my first pass at the new Pearl Jam album. There are at least four more new albums that require my attention today. So just a video today, and something to hopefully give a little hope that things will get better.

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Covid Chronicles, 3/25

I find myself bouncing between hope and despair quite often these days. The numbers from Italy and Spain are so staggering, and our country’s reaction so inept, that it is difficult not to live in great fear of what comes next. But I also know that despite all the issues we have had in preparing for this, America tends to do pretty well at crisis once we can get moving in the right direction.

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Reaching for the Stars, Vol. 39

Chart Week: March 24, 1984 Song: “They Don’t Know” - Tracey Ullman Chart Position: #30, 5th week on the chart. Peaked at #8 for two weeks in April/May. It’s been a minute or two since I’ve done one of these. Part of that is because my AT40 workflow has changed. My normal, weekday routine is to turn on the iHeart Radio Classic American Top 40 station while making breakfast, eating lunch, and other moments during the day when I am in the kitchen alone.

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March Memories

Kudos to ESPN and CBS for dropping some classic college basketball games on us to help pass time. I’ve recorded every KU game that has been on so far. I’ve watched a few minutes of the triple overtime Oklahoma game from 2016 and the 2007 Big 12 tournament championship game. In anticipation of Sunday’s airing of the 2008 national championship game, I fired up the YouTubes Saturday and watched that year’s national semifinal against North Carolina.

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Covid Chronicles, 3/21

Our first week of home schooling/working is in the books. The girls all did about as well as we could have hoped. They’re bored, bummed they are not seeing their friends, and it can be a struggle to get them out of their rooms. But so far, so good, for the most part. M was scheduled to have her first in-car driving lesson today. We were a little surprised the company didn’t cancel appointments, so we went ahead and cancelled it on our own.

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Friday Reading Assignment

There is so much information about Covid–19 out there right now it is easy to get overwhelmed. Especially when the news is bad, as was the case earlier this week with the release of a British study that suggested the strategies the national governments of both the UK and US were taking would simply push the flood of sick people out until late this year or early next year. The situation is fluid, though, as everyone seems to be saying.

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Friday Playlist

Shit was real this week. Let’s go ahead and call it the worst week ever and hope that next week doesn’t immediately grab that title away. The only bright spot is my new music playlist is absolutely bursting with great tracks right now. So another extra large edition for today. Take a few moments to chill out and listen to some good tunes. open.spotify.com/playlist/… “The Garden” - Briston Maroney I shared this with a brother-in-music earlier this week and his summation was, “That slaps.

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Covid Chronicles, 3/18

I’m not sure if these posts are useful or interesting. But I feel like I need both an outlet and a way to document this bleak moment in history. I’ve probably read too many post-apocalyptic novels where some artifact of an earlier age is discovered and helps explain how the new world came to be and am angling to leave my own artifact. If you’re reading this from a Covid-free future, hello!

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Covid Chronicles, 3/17

The strangeness continues. My last trip to the gym was last Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I was too busy being glued to the TV to run across the street to get a workout in. By Saturday I thought it best to avoid the gym. You can see my gym’s parking lot from our house, and over the past five days I’ve watched the crowds there get smaller each day. I have a friend who is a workout fiend and I still saw her car over there yesterday.

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Weekend-ish Notes

My normal Monday posts are summaries of what happened over the weekend, mostly revolving around sports. So what to do when there were no new sports to watch? I did watch some of (and recorded the entire) replay of the Kansas-Dayton game from last November. That was such a great game and it would have been fun if those teams had met again, either in Atlanta or on the road there, to see how they matched up with four months of growth.

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Why China?

youtu.be/TPpoJGYlW… I thought this was a very informative video. I’ve heard many people, including some of our girls’ teachers, share explanations for why diseases often come from Asia that just seemed wrong. This explains why the jump from wildlife to humans so often takes place in Asia.

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Covid Chronicles 3/15/20

Saturday M and I were scheduled to work at a local food pantry as part of her service hours commitment. Late last week I kept checking the pantry’s website and saw no changes in the schedule and did not receive a cancellation from the volunteer coordinator, so we got up early and headed down. When we volunteered there in December the streets around the pantry were completely filled with parked cars well before the pantry opened.

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Corona Chronicles

And then life got even crazier… I suppose this is the second in what will be an on-going series sharing my thoughts and observations on the most insane era of my lifetime. I’ll work a little out of order to get caught up. First, my girls are all out of school. Cathedral was scheduled to be off today for the St. Patrick’s Day parade.[1] The parade was cancelled so it’s just a day off for high schoolers.

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Friday Vid

youtu.be/I52eefwAK… “Don’t Dream It’s Over” - Crowded House This song has been going through my mind the last 36 hours or so. Granted, it’s always in my head since it is my favorite song ever. But I keep thinking of how it was used in the 1994 adaptation of The Stand. I don’t think we’re getting anywhere near what Captain Trips did to Stephen King’s mythical, late 70s US, but there is certainly madness about.

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