Today is our 60 day warranty inspection, so I’ve got folks through the house. Thus, just a quick playlist for this week.
open.spotify.com/user/224a…
“Missing U” - Robyn. It’s always good to have new Robyn jams.
“Poison” - David Nance Group. Some good, old fashioned, dirty rock ’n’ roll from Omaha, NE.
“Christmas Down Under” - Phosphorescent. Despite the title, this song is appropriate for play in mid-September. And the new Phosphorescent album is shaping up to be a hell of a disk.
Once again, that bitch Mother Nature has been playing havoc with our family sports schedule. I’ve lost track of how many practices, games, and other events have been wiped out over the past month. Seriously, it didn’t rain here for like six weeks, then, as soon as fall practices started, we began getting multiple downpours each week right around the time a kid was supposed to be doing something.
Here’s where we stand now.
It was a full weekend of football for at least some parts of our family this weekend. Here’s a breakdown.
Friday was a big local high school game. Cathedral, where our girls will go, was playing their biggest Catholic school rival, Bishop Chatard. BC has the most state titles in Indiana history. Cathedral is second. I believe Cathedral leads the stat in total wins and championship appearances, though. Or something like that.
A few very good music links to share. Apologies as a couple of these are slightly out-of-date with the change in seasons. Good reads regardless.
First, investigative journalism at its finest.
Taylor Swift and Bryan Adams’ Duet of “Summer of ’69” Reopens One of Music’s Great Historical Mysteries: Is This Song About the Sex Position?
Next, isn’t it funny how if a song is good or great, it is easy to overlook logical inconsistencies within its lyrics?
Well, as I check this morning, it looks like Spotify and Wordpress are cooperating, so I’ll give the old Friday Playlist thing a shot. Which is good because I have a ton of great music that I need to make sure you’re paying attention to. Apologies if this (likely) breaks again by the time you get around to listening.
open.spotify.com/user/224a…
“Stay Down“ / “Me & My Dog" - boygenius. Off the EP by this indie rock super group that features Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus.
Ty! What’d you shoot today? Oh, I don’t keep score, Judge. Oh well, how do you measure yourself with other golfers? By height. Yep, first round of golf in something like 11 years, and only second round in 15 years.
It went about as you would expect. I picked my ball up on three holes, so I did not finish with an official score. It would have been well above 100 had I completed my scorecard, though.
New York New York it’s a hell of a town The Bronx is up and I’m Brooklyn down “Hello Brooklyn” - Beastie Boys, 1989 We survived our first trip to New York City. I’ll admit, as a child of the Midwest in the ‘70s and ‘80s, I’m a little shocked we weren’t mugged ten times, weren’t dropped in a sketchy neighborhood by a dishonest cab driver, didn’t see wilding in Central Park or open drug deals in Times Square, and weren’t constantly run into by either impolite people or gigantic rats.
I’m posting this a little early as Friday is a big day for the Mrs. and I: We are flying to New York City, the first visit there for both of us, believe it or not. Officially this is our annual trip to one of her conferences. But we will be spending most of the weekend with her two college roommates and their husbands. One lives in Jersey, the other is flying in from Chicago.
Man, how did I get so behind on these? Well, part of it is that my reading pace has remained slow in recent weeks. It doesn’t help that I have a stack of golf instructional books that are stealing time away from my proper reading stack. I’ll quickly run through some recent books.
Notes from a Public Typewriter - edited by Michael Gustafson and Oliver Uberti. Gustafson and his wife own a bookstore in Ann Arbor.
Finally a day of calm. After about two weeks of constant activity by contractors, we have wrapped up whatever phase of the Fill the House cycle we are in. The latest projects were building a work station for S and adding a large, built-in to our main office. That involved custom cabinetry, some serious painting, and a lot of me sitting around either waiting for people to show up or monitoring them while they are here.
I never voted for John McCain - I guess I had three chances if you count primaries, although I would not have voted in the primaries he ran in - but like a lot of folks who tend to vote Democratic, I long admired the man. For me it went back to reading Michael Lewis’ Trail Fever, his accounting of the 1996 presidential campaign. McCain did not run that year, but he was a finalist to be Bob Dole’s running mate, and thus bounced in and out of Lewis’ narrative.
Opening day of fall sports, which is always both exciting and stress inducing. I have to admit, it is nice only having to worry about two kickball schedules this season. And somehow we lucked out and have no nights with two games. We do have three different stretches with three games in three nights, so we’ll still be busy. Only having two kickballers does not mean we’re not busy, though.
Chart Week: August 18, 1984
Song: “We’re Not Gonna Take It” - Twisted Sister
Chart Position: #39, 4th week on the chart. Peaked at #21 for two weeks in September.
In between contractor visits last week, which have caused a move of my computer gear onto the dining room table temporarily, I was trying to hack together a post about a chart from 1981. But I couldn’t quite find the right song or angle.
Our summer of change, 2018, is officially over. The girls went back to school today. M begins her final year at St. P’s as an 8th grader,[1] C in 6th, L in 4th. The last time all three girls will ever be in the same school building. I think they were relatively excited to go back. M and C were up and dressed before my alarm went off, which was nice.
I remember hating how much my stepdad and other guys his age loved Jack Nicklaus winning the 1986 Masters. I couldn’t believe they wanted some washed-up, has-been like Jack to win instead of the brash, exciting, much younger Greg Norman.
If my stepdad was still around, he would have been laughing at me yesterday as I watched most of Tiger Woods’ final round at the PGA, hanging on to every shot like it was 2002 again.
Chart Week: August 5, 1989
Song: “18 and Life” - Skid Row
Chart Position: #32, 5th week on the chart. Peaked at #4 the week of September 23.
These late 80s countdowns are not my favorites. By 1987 my tastes were drifting away from mainstream, Top 40-style music. Emphasis on the word drifting, because I still liked plenty of music that Casey counted down every week, just a lot less than I had a few years earlier.
Another pretty busy weekend in the books and now we’re suddenly just over a week from school starting. Yikes!
C went to King’s Island amusement park with a friend on Friday. L had two birthday parties over the weekend. M had two friends over Sunday night. We took them all to Top Golf, they slept over, and we made a pool run Monday afternoon. And we hosted a gathering of three families on Saturday night.
youtu.be/vnP8XzZFx…
“Leave It Alone” - Amanda Shires. This song totally blew my mind this week. Shires is Jason Isbell’s wife and a member of his backing band, The 400 Unit. When I first began exploring his music, I checked out some of the songs she had recorded in the past. They leaned a little too country for my tastes.
But her new album, To The Sunset has been getting a lot of very positive buzz so I decided to check out this advance single.
I’ve been using the Venmo payment service for a few years. Mostly I use it to pay my sister-in-law, who is a personal chef, for the meals she makes for us weekly.
When I first signed up for the service, I thought it was strange that I could see a timeline of all the transactions of my friends who also used it. And there was a global timeline, where I could follow anyone who used the service.
As I’ve documented here many times over the years, sometimes I get paralyzed by the many options I have for watching quality TV. There is a long list of shows that I need to go back and watch, but I’m always torn about where to start, whether to watch one to completion on its own or to start several at one time, and whether to focus on shows I’ve not seen or mix in some classic shows as well.