I don’t usually blog about K-State sports, even though I am the second biggest K-State fan I know (the biggest fan blogs here), but I wanted to say something about this. Someguys who specialize in blogging Cats news have said everything I would say, so I’ll summarize with two points:
1. Michael Beasley is the best college basketball player I ever saw in person. I made it to two games this year, including the thriller in Norman in which Mike made a last second shot to beat the Sooners on their home court. I’ve never seen anyone like him, and besides all that, he seemed like a really likable guy. My kids are all fans, and that’s OK with me. And I’d like to point out that the guy the sportswriters gave the Player of the Year Award to scored 17 points against the University of Kansas City team that eventually won the big game against the team that couldn’t be bothered to practice their free throw shooting. The player who deserved the player of the year award scored 25 and 39 against the same KCU team. FWIW.
2. I think he’s made the right decision. As much as I would love to see him play even one more year for the Cats, it would be crazy to risk an injury and potentially miss the chance to be financially independent and take care of his mother and family. It was a privilege to see him play, and we’re all proud to have had him in the purple for a year. I hope he tears up the next league like he did this one. Thanks, Mike. EMAW!
I have been converting my classical CDs to .mp3 a little bit at a time for months now, for ease of access, to be able to listen to it on my iPod, and so on. So a few days ago I was sorting through the CDs (there are only 100 or so, not a huge collection) and found myself calling the pile of CDs I had not yet imported to my computer “the ones I haven’t dubbed yet”. Oops.
1. I was watching a college basketball game on a Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, and Katie, who is 8, came into the TV room, glanced at the game on the TV, and said, “Oh, full-court pressure. Cool”.
2. We were watching an edited-for-TV version of “I, Robot” starring Will Smith a few days ago, and Ellie, who is 4, informed us that “the guy who is talking right there [Will Smith] looks like Michael Beasley.”
Some Bible Church feller took issue with the guys at Reformation 21 for their general approval of Led Zeppelin. You can read his post here if you feel like it. What is amazing about this is that I thought everyone knew that Zeppelin was a Christian band. Just listen to the words to “Ramble On” or “The Battle of Evermore” for proof.
I hereby designate 2007 as “The Year of Unused Tickets”. Last summer I won tickets to see the Deftones here in town, but was unable to find anyone to go with me. Then when our van committed suicide at 12,000 ft. on Trail Ridge Road in Colorado, we were stuck in Grand Lake for an extra 4 days, preventing me from making it to the Dream Theater concert in Kansas City with a bunch of the guys from the church, a concert we had all been looking forward to for months.
Yesterday, a blizzard over much of the state rendered our 6 tickets to last night’s basketball game between K-State and Winston-Salem St. useless. Ellie took it standing up, the rest of us were pretty broken hearted. So we watched our freshman phenom Michael Beasley score 40 points and put up his 11th “double-double” in 11 games on the television.
I have two tickets to another basketball game next Saturday afternoon in Manhattan. Our dearest friends are coming up from College Station and Jon and I are planning to drive up for the game. The long range weather forecast says that the skies should be clear. I’d say we’re about due to actually hand some tickets over and witness an event for which they were purchased. We’ll see.
Finally, proof that, contrary to all expectations, I did in fact grow up. Tonight, when this is happening in our fair city, I am taking my little girls to this (the top story).
Autumn has come upon the prairie, the tallgrass is turning a beautiful rust color, and the sumac is a startling blood-red this year. The wind has turned around to the north and Rob’s World of Beers is carrying about 50 different varieties of “Octoberfest”. All this means it’s time (at our house, anyway) for our annual reading of The Lord of the Rings. We usually begin around Bilbo’s and Frodo’s birthday, which in the book is September 22. (I am aware that if one converts the Middle-Earth calendar to ours it ends up being September 12 or something, but I don’t care. What am I, a nerd?)
This year there are five of us reading it (Elanor will need a couple of years before she can discover where her name came from) so for the sake of peace in the home I went and bought two more copies of the trilogy, in addition to the two we had from last year and the one we picked up at a garage sale last summer. We also retired the set I bought Kiersten back in 1999, as it is disintegrating before our very eyes. I feel like the guy who assassinated John Lennon who supposedly had to buy a copy of A Catcher in the Rye anytime he came across it in a bookstore. Somehow, though, I think this is different.
Anyway, the point is that I thought I might try to put down in writing some of my thoughts as I travel with the company through the Old Forest and across the Downs and down the Loudwater and over the Mark and to Orodruin. I don’t expect it will amount to much, and what you’ll get (if anything) will probably tend more toward a description of my experience as I’m reading than it will to actual exegetical insight into the stories, but if you love Middle-Earth like we do, you might find something to think about. Every year the story is better, every year I see something new that I’ve never noticed before, and every year I grow in my hope and sincere belief that the “real world” is much more like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth than the dull and sterile machine that we have had forced down our throats for almost 400 years now.
Yesterday was Andy’s day (I take one of my children to breakfast on Friday each week) and we were having a nice visit when he asked me, “Besides Dream Theater, Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Van Halen, what are your favorite bands?” I mumbled something about Metallica and King’s X and Norah Jones and Charlie Parker and then we talked about his favorites for a while, which include Aerosmith and Lynyrd Skynyrd. (more…)
I have been asked numerous times since I began at Trinity Covenant Church why I wear a clerical collar.This is a brief attempt to explain why (which is itself a revision of an article I posted on my old Xanga account about a year ago).(more…)
