Catch Up

We celebrated my son's ninth birthday last Friday. Mom delivered breakfast in bed. He spilled his milk but we cut him some slack since this was his first breakfast in bed morning. He went to school and we surprised him at lunch with a meal catered from the golden arches. That night we jumped in the minivan and drove across town to see the Royals play the Blue Jays. It was the coldest Royals game I've ever seen in person with a game time temp around 39 degrees with a strong wind. The Royals blew the lead in the 8th and I wanted to give up, but the gang talked me into staying. They scored six runs in the bottom of the 8th and won the game. The boy also got his birthday mug plastered on the HD jumbotron during a pitching change. We went home happy.

The next day the fun continued with the official birthday party and present opening. His favorite gift was an Ipod nano from my cousin Anne. We staged the party at a nearby kids pizza and video game emporium and my parents stopped by to witness the mayhem.

Sunday my sinuses went on strike and I've been coping with a cold or allergies or both ever since. My energy level is low, low, low, and so to bed.

This Party Needs Frauleins

Replace Your Replacements

Four albums by The Replacements have been remastered and re-released this week, along with new bonus outtakes and b-sides. I've included the Amazon.com links here, but they're already sold out at the moment.

• Hootenanny
• Let It Be
• Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash
• Stink

Top Gunn

Read this excellent interview with Professor James Gunn by Jon Niccum. I took Gunn's Sci-Fi literature course back in the 80s as I detailed here on this very blog.

Correction

I have corrected the link to the demolition photos from the Lawrence Journal World. It took you to an online copy of my great-great-grandmother's will before I corrected it. Now you know what I was looking at before I wrote The Crossing blurb. You can have that link too in case you find it more interesting.

No More Crossing

Here are Pictures of the Crossing / Yello Sub demolition, from the Lawrence Journal World web site. This photo, from Google Earth, shows the scene as it existed in August 2007. In case you're not familiar, that's The Crossing bar, front and center, located at a busy cross street atop Mt. Oread for campus foot traffic at 12th and Oread Avenue. There was a little shop down the alley there, called Rudy's Pizza for a time, and to the left was one of the locations of the Yello Sub sandwich shop, arguably their most successful, after they moved off of 23rd street in the mid 1980s, (though they did return with a second location on 23rd street later that same decade). The Glass Onion, a coffee house, opened in the 2nd floor space above the Yello Sub, circa 1986. The best thing about The Crossing was the location and the beer porch. The combination made for great people watching on Friday afternoons. The two most popular freshman girls' dorms, G.S.P. and Corbin, were a block down around the corner, and the cuties passed by to and from their campus destinations. My last beer at The Crossing was January 29th, 2005, as detailed here.

Patti Smith - Triple Threat

Nice article about Patti Smith by Jeffrey T. Iverson from Time Magazine.

More Pedaljets linkage

More Pedaljets pub, from Tim Finn's Rockville blog.

Feelin' Good About The Feelies

Sasha Frere-Jones buries the lead in this excellent blog installment from The New Yorker. He wrote about how tough it is to be famous when you're in a rock outfit, switches gears to mention the New Trier gal who once had street cred, lost it, and is trying to get it back, Liz Phair, and ends up writing about the best news of all about The Feelies! Go read it and get excited, then come back.

And you're back. It turns out the idea to re-release the Feelies' "Crazy Rhythms" album wasn't sanctioned by the band, but keep your fingers crossed. Bar/None Records is working on a sanctioned re-issue, perhaps later this year, according to the comments in Jones' blog.

Taxes and Trivia

I finished our taxes this weekend and listened to the annual world's largest trivia contest unfold on 90FM, Steven's Point, Wisconsin, via an Internet feed. The guy I sat next to on stage at the Millionaire show back in 2000, Mike Gliniecki, has participated with friends each of the past 15 years. The contest ran 54 straight hours with a new question given over the air every 6 minutes. About 400 teams participated this year.

Points are awarded based on how many different teams come up with the correct answer. Internet lookups are allowed but the questions are designed to take that into account. Mike and his trivia team, Larry & Vince's Driving Academy, finished 68th, an all-time best for them. Congratulations. Now get some sleep!