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Future Football On The West Coast

The Big Ten dropped their 2024 and 2025 football schedules yesterday, the first to include UCLA and USC.  With sixteen teams, the conference is abandoning its divisional format and moving to a “Flex Protect Plus” model, where each school will play nine conference games each season and will play every other conference opponent at least twice, home and away, in a four-year period.  In addition, there are eleven protected matchups that will be played annually, featuring a combination of historic and geographic rivalries along with trophy games.  The Big Ten Championship game will feature the top two teams in the conference standings, with tie breakers to be determined.

So, what does this mean for Purdue?  First off, they will have two protected rivalries to be played every season: Illinois and, of course, Indiana.  They will face USC at home in 2024, their first visit to West Lafayette since 1976.  UCLA makes their first appearance on the schedule in 2025, where Purdue will make their first appearance in Los Angeles since the 2001 Rose Bowl.  Over the course of the two seasons, Purdue will play every other Big Ten team at least once.

Unfortunately, Danny will be out of school before any of this takes effect.  Maybe we can look at that 2025 UCLA trip as a chance to meet up.  I know of a pretty good breakfast place that I think he would like.

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Orange Haze

Last night’s contest between the White Sox and the Yankees in the Bronx was postponed after wildfires in Canada caused “clearly hazardous air quality” at Yankee Stadium.  Tuesday night’s game was played under a lesser haze, but conditions worsened during the day on Wednesday, leading to cancellations across sports in both New York and Philadelphia.  The game is currently scheduled to be made up today as part of a straight doubleheader, assuming the skies clear up some.

This is not the first time the White Sox have had a game cancelled in New York for non-weather-related reasons.  The White Sox were scheduled to start a series against the Yankees in New York on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, before certain events in the city caused the game to be delayed.

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Fitbit IX – Week 19

A decent enough week, as I managed to extend my streak of 30,000-step weeks to three even though my 4000-step day streak was snapped after seventeen days.  Things got off to a decent start on Sunday, which ended with 5300 steps.  A small decrease on Monday wrapped up the Memorial Day weekend with 4700 steps.  I made my first trip to the office for 2023 on Tuesday, which helped put me at 5400 steps.  Back at home on Wednesday, I dropped down to 4000 steps.  My 4000-sted day streak came to an end on Thursday, as I finished 7 steps shy of 3700.  Friday was even worse, dropping down to 3000 steps.  A record-breaking White Sox game on Saturday left me just 23 steps away from 4800.

Total steps: 31,021

Daily average: 4431.6

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Book 25 (of 52) – Have I Told You This Already?

Have I Told You This Already? Stories I Don’t Want To Forget To Remember – Lauren Graham

Lauren Graham, star of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood, returns with Have I Told You This Already?, her third book of essays containing stories from her personal life and about aging in Hollywood.  Her stories cover the gamut, from her childhood and beginning years in New York, working at Barneys, to her pandemic puppy and the health issues he faced while moving back and forth from Los Angeles to Vancouver.

Graham has a breezy style that matches the comedy of the characters she has played over the years.  She provides an interesting insight into her career and how she got to where she is today.  I see she has another book of essays that I have not read along with a novel, so I’m sure she’ll be back in my life sooner rather than later.

 

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Yet Another Mix Tape Monday – Volume 20

33 years ago, during my sophomore year of high school, I put together the first of what would eventually become a nearly 20 volume collection of mix tapes, containing my favorite songs that I had gathered either from the radio, a cassette tape, or (eventually) CD.  Today, we revisit those mix tapes for the fourth time and see how, or if, the soundtrack of my youth still resonates in today’s digital world and how much has changed over the past four years.

At some point during the 1995-1996 school year, I noticed a slowdown in the tape players on my boombox.  It bothered me enough that I brought it in for repair multiple times, getting new heads installed, but nothing seemed to work.  Or, at least nothing made me feel like they worked and I, at least, still heard a lag.  On the plus side, I did manage to come home with a Blizzard of Oz cassette, which one of the techs must have used for testing it and left in the compartment when it was returned to me.  But, my frustration with the ongoing effort led to end for this series of tapes, with the last volume just barely stretching on to Side B.

We wrap up our look back with Volume 20, which stretches over late 1995 and the fall semester of the first of my two senior years of college, while I was living in Hilltop Apartments.

Side A

Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet With Butterfly Wings
iTunes stats: 22 plays, most recently on 7/13/2022

Winner of the 1997 Grammy award for Best Hard Rock Performance, the first single from the Pumpkins double album opus picked up only five new listens over the past four years.

Melissa Etheridge – Your Little Secret

The first single from Melissa Etheridge’s under-performing follow-up to her smash hit album continues to be missing from my collection.

Lisa Loeb – Do You Sleep
iTunes stats: 23 plays, most recently on 2/11/2020

The third single from Lisa Loeb’s major label debut, which peaked at #18 on the Billboard charts, was last heard prior to the global shutdown in March of 2020.

Goo Goo Dolls – Name
iTunes stats: 13 plays, most recently on 8/24/2022

A mere eleven play increase over the past decade for this breakthrough hit, which reached #5 on the Billboard charts.

Collective Soul – The World I Know
iTunes stats: 14 plays, most recently on 9/12/2022

The band’s highest charting single in Canada, it has picked up only five listens since mid-2018.

Edwyn Collins – A Girl Like You
iTunes stats: 10 plays, most recently on 7/8/2021

Featured on the Empire Records soundtrack, the song went years without being heard, but managed to pick up an additional five plays in the last four years.

Garbage – Queer
iTunes stats: 28 plays, most recently on 5/14/2021

Originally recorded off of Q101, the breakthrough hit, which led to nine concerts over the past 20 years added just five listens since 2019.

Side B

Continue reading →

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Post Mortem – Star Trek: Picard

A spinoff of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Picard debuted in 2020 on the CBS All Access streaming service.  Isa Briones, Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Santiago Cabrera, and Jeri Ryan joined Patrick Stewart for the first two seasons, telling the adventures of retired Starfleet admiral Jean-Luc Picard twenty years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis.

For the third and final season, released this spring on Paramount +, the show pivoted to a full-on reunion of the Next Gen cast.  The crew of the Enterprise D reunite for a final mission, saving the Federation, and the universe, from one more attack.  The season gives a proper sendoff to this generation of Star Trek and leaves the door open for a new future, with Seven of Nine commanding a new crew of the USS Enterprise.

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20 Years Corked

Twenty years ago tonight, Sammy Sosa came up to bat in the first inning against the Devil Rays at Wrigley Field, broke his bat on an RBI ground out to second base and then, all hell broke loose.  Home plate umpire Tim McClelland ended up with the handle of the bat, which showed an unmistakable dark spot that was deemed to be cork.  He conferred with his crew and Cubs manager Dusty Baker and, after a long delay, Sosa was ejected and the run was wiped off the board, though the Cubs would go on to win 3-2.

After the game, Sosa confirmed the bat was corked and tried to explain he used it for batting practice and for home run exhibitions to entertain his fans and that it had inadvertently been mixed in with his game bats.  “I just picked the wrong bat,” Sosa said at the time. “I apologize to my team, to my fans…  I apologize to the commissioner of baseball.”

Sosa was suspended for seven games and, it could be argued, this was the beginning of the end of his tenure with the Cubs, culminating in the blow up on the final day of the 2004 regular season that has kept him out of the Cubs good graces to this day.

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Book 24 (of 52) – Hidden Pictures

Hidden Pictures – Jason Rekulak

Eighteen months sober, a young woman takes a job as a summer babysitter for a wealthy family in the suburbs.  But when mysterious drawings start showing up, drawings that appear to come from the hands of her young charge, she starts digging into the local urban legend of a young woman murdered in the cabin where she now lives.  However, she finds that the truth is much scarier, and everyone’s lives are in danger.

Hidden Pictures, by Jason Rekulak, landed on my radar after winning the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Horror.  Aside from the small supernatural element, it is your standard thriller, with the young protagonist trying to figure out the mystery unfolding around her.  While the ending was a little shaky, I liked most of what Rekulak had to offer and look forward to trying his next offering some day.

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Running It Back

Last month, after winning nearly every accolade available this past season, Zach Edey announced that he was entering the NBA draft while maintaining his college eligibility.  Tonight, he announced he was returning to Purdue for his senior year.  The 7’4″ center has very little left to prove in college basketball, at least in the regular season.  I assume avenging March’s loss in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, not to mention dropping both meetings with IU, will fuel his game for the upcoming campaign.