This week, TV and Fury bang out a podcast while in neighboring states.
The story starts there with Fury talking about an epic loss to his dad in high-stakes golf and continues with analysis of the NBA playoffs.
Oh, and it turns out that NBA executives like nursing shoes. What? Exactly.
Here’s the link.
So I made my music video acting debut over the weekend. But don’t worry – I didn’t gyrate atop a yacht or anything. Kept it classy. I’m not trying to be just another Joe, all up in the videos.
All joking aside, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from the video-extra experience. A friend asked on short notice if I could fill a spot. I didn’t have anything else planned and got the OK to include my 9-year-old daughter – it would be good blog fodder and some temporary hero status at home, if nothing else.
It wound up being more than that – not the part, but the idea. (more…)
* Mount Union’s Larry Kehres is retiring after going 332-24-3 with 11 national titles. Not too bad. His son Vince, the longtime defensive coordinator for the team, will take over. This also means that the career victories record for John Gagliardi will almost certainly never be broken. Gagliardi won 489 but Kehres was winning 15 games a year so could have had a shot if he had stuck around.
* The Columbia football team is in the news, but not for good reasons. A defensive player is accused of a hate crime and several other players had their racist/homophobic/anti-Semitic/asinine tweets revealed. That Ivy education really paying off. The CU Lions Blog has more information.
* The Great Gatsby is opening to less-than-stellar reviews. Here’s Wesley Morris’ for Grantland. No matter how bad the reviews I’m looking forward to seeing it. Team Leo.
* Not everyone loves The Great Gatsby the book. In fact, New York Magazine’s Kathryn Schulz absolutely despises it. Is she just being contrarian or are there some good points? Or both?
* Why don’t superheroes work on television?
* Oh-oh. According to The Wrap, American Idol might dump all of its judges for next season.
* Sad newspaper news. The Daily News got rid of numerous employees this week and some of the big names in sports include Tim Smith and Sean Brennan. But the biggest name was the legendary college hoops writer Dick Weiss, whose nickname is actually Hoops.
* Short first names mean bigger paychecks. Plan accordingly.
* The horrific case of former Minnesota State Mankato football coach Todd Hoffner took another turn this week when he left the school, though it’s not known if he was fired or left on his own. Hoffner was arrested and charged with possession of child porn last year before being totally exonerated. He was innocent. No technicalities, nothing like that. Wrongfully arrested. Unfortunately he lost his coaching job and now his reassigned position at the university.
* Rolling Stone has a profile on popular rapper Macklemore and his struggles with alcohol and drug addiction. It feels unusual to read about an artist trying to avoid chemical excess at the height of his powers rather than embracing it.
* From the department of nonsense, Late, Late Show host Craig Ferguson recently declared TV’s town – Sioux Falls, S.D. – as the booty shaking capital of the world. Um … what?
The fine people at Weather.com tell me (and anyone else with a computer) that there’s a 50-percent chance of rain and/or snow today in Sioux Falls.
It’s April 23. Oy.
I don’t know the exact numbers, but we’ve gotten a bunch of snow this month – too much. Yet on Saturday it’s going to be 73 degrees. What the what?
There’s an old saying in the Dakotas: If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute; it’ll change. But this is ridiculous. (more…)
I had planned to write about the weather today. The stupid weather.
Oh, the Boston Marathon was on my mind from the start – one of my best and oldest friends participated, and I followed his path and times online. Had been planning that out for a couple days. He’d won North Dakota state championships in high school, qualified for NAIA nationals in college and earning a spot in this event – and performing well – seemed on par with that, one of the highlights of his running career. And, let’s be honest, running at that level for that long is a lifestyle as much as a sport. Couldn’t be happier for him.
To think that a few hours later I’d be sending him a poorly written text message to ask if he was safe? That was never part of the plan.
If I had a fireplace, I’d be sitting by it tonight. Coffee in hand. Multicolored lights from the tree reflecting around the room. It’s Christmas Eve, a time for reflection, especially this year.
My wife and I brought home two kids this week, a boy and a girl, after a 29-day stay in the NICU, the shortest of our two sentences. That makes five kids – one deceased and four by scientific means – in a shade under nine years. Five kids. I never thought I’d be that guy. (more…)
I covered 45 miles of straight freeway in 4 hours Sunday. Not on foot or by summersaulting. By car. One made after 1984. And it didn’t break down or explode or have kittens. (more…)
On Friday, Sioux Falls is going to become a safer place, certainly in theory and maybe in actuality, a city ordinance that bans texting and driving going into effect. That’s right, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the Foo is looking out for people, too, and without taking away their buckets o’ soda.
This law will have no direct impact on me, of course, because I’d never even think of sending a text message while behind the wheel. (Looking around to see if anyone bought that.) But a … friend of mine … may or may not fidget with his phone while behind the wheel on a regular basis. He knows it’s not the smartest decision of the day, but he’s also an unrealistically busy guy and at last halfway believes that he won’t be able to get it all done in a day if he can’t be productive when on the move. (more…)
TV will spend countless hours staring at this over the next nine months.
Considering how much time I spend operating one, my lack of knowledge about cars is fairly astounding. The school year starts today in Sioux Falls and soon at South Dakota State, meaning I’ll spend more time than I can easily count on the road and in the air, traveling back and forth and here and there. It’s part of my job as a sports reporter – a big part of it, sometimes.
Take the back half of last week, for example. (And I write this despite fully acknowledging that travelogues are arguably as uninteresting as retroactive play-by-play of a round of golf or a hand of poker. That’s never stopped me before.) On Thursday evening, I drove 50 miles from Sioux Falls to Brookings to attend a two-hour football practice. I made the return trip, too. Friday morning, it was off to Minneapolis to cover a Vikings preseason game. That’s 4 hours each way. I got home at 4 a.m. About six hours later, I was headed to a muddy field near a town called Renner to run an obstacle-laden 5K.
Certainly, not every three-day span from September to June is like that, but many of them are.
And I generally love it. (more…)
By Rich Jensen
Guest blogger
Curiosity is certainly an apt name for the recently landed Mars explorer.
Every creature not entirely governed by instinct possesses a measure of curiosity. Surviving in an environment means learning about and understanding that environment, at whatever level of understanding a particular animal is capable of.
We, having mastered the basics of survival (at least in most places, most of the time), are still curious. Curious about all sorts of things. In fact, science is nothing more than curiosity in its Sunday clothes. (more…)
