Here’s a little something I put on LinkedIn, which I basically use to occasionally brag on people I know. For whatever reason, I get more “engagement” on LinkedIn than any of the social media platforms. Which is great, since I just brag on people I know. Anyway, time to highlight on the award-winning IUSTV folks once again.
I counted and this year’s batch makes 73 IU student awards and honors that I’ve had the privilege to work with. We’re quickly running out of wall space for plaques mostly because we refuse to give any of the individual awards to the individuals because of the terrific talent I am fortunate to work with from time-to-time.
And because the days are (thankfully) getting longer I was able to catch a bit of the sunset after watching the award-winning sports division produce two shows tonight.
We’re in the Almost Spring now, a welcome arrival after — I guess I can say it now — a mild winter. Spring finally arrives in 22 days.
I believe I am still five CDs behind in writing about the Re-Listening project. But, today, we’re going to quickly get two discs closer to catching up. It’s a car experience, playing the discs in the order in which I acquired them, and then writing a bit about them here. Since I’m behind, it’s a scant bit. Which actually works out for this particular stretch of music.
Take this one, for example, one of the dozen or so Marvin Gaye greatest hits records. This one was released on the Motown label in 1976 on LP and then in 1987 on CD. I picked this up in 1997, because everyone needs a little Marvin Gaye in as many formats as possible. As true a statement then, as it is today.
It is as perfect as you would imagine. The first eight songs make the best part of the argument of why there are so many compilation releases:
Let’s Get It On
I Want You
How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
What’s Going On
After the Dance
Can I Get a Witness
I’m barely equipped to go on at length about Marvin Gaye, and there’s not a lot of new things to be said about a musical genius at this point, anyway. But, as I listened to this disc I found myself wondering, a lot, about how even the greats can transcend time. Marvin Gaye died young, of course, and he died while I was young. Generationally, I came about his music almost secondhand. Today, it’s been almost four decades since he was killed. What do young people today know about Marvin Gaye? You look at the first eight songs there and think some of those are just downloaded into the brain naturally, surely as oxygen or evolution. Which brings us to the ninth track.
“Trouble Man” was in the MCU, you say. Surely it was.
A decade ago now. Time marches on, but the music of the masters really ought to be immortal.
This is the last track on the CD. An argument could be made that this is the greatest live recording ever. I would not dismiss the argument.
I don’t know, yet, what the consensus best live recording is, but that’s on the list. It’s a 1974 recording in Oakland and that crowd made the thing work in some special ways.
The other CD we’re featuring in the Re-Listening project today marks the beginning of jazz albums in my collection. (I’d reached the point where I realized I needed some jazz. What of it?) I have no recollection of how or why I picked up the Holly Cole Trio in particular, but listening through this thing in the last few days, I do wonder why. And, also, why are we ruining The Jungle Book, right off the bat?
Lyle Lovett wrote this song. Sounds like a soundtrack tune.
I’m glad I didn’t give up entirely on this one, though. This song has some sass, at least. Which, hey, it’s a Fats Waller classic.
I thought, at first, I was being trolled on the last track.
And this, I think, is why I don’t have any memories associated with this CD. I decided, early on, I wasn’t going to listen to this one a lot.
I did 16 slow miles this morning. Felt slow, anyway.
But, still, three new Strava segment PRs, including two on climbs. (I am not a climber.) I took 3:24 off my best time on one of the little climbs today. Good legs, even if it felt slow.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 88 routes down, 41 to go.
I have been twice informed that we are way overdue for a check in on the kitties. This is, of course, the most popular weekly feature on the site, woefully neglected these last few weeks, and how dare I? “Oh. big cats, oooooh. Not the point, friend.”
Twice I have been thusly informed.
Mainly by Phoebe, sitting on the stairs, as if to say “What gives?”
And also by Poseidon, who can’t even cast his gaze upon me in disbelief.
The cats are doing great, even if they have been thusly neglected. Oh, so tragically neglected, just ask them.
I am sadly nearing the end of North Toward Home. I want to continue, but I want it to continue, you see. It’s an odd sensation, even as I have a small stack of other Willie Morris books in the To Read collection. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, not wanting to finish things I enjoy. Is this a vein of anti-completism? An unwillingness to part beloved things? There are TV shows I’ve never finished for the same reason. If I don’t watch the finale or read the last chapters, it is all still out there and we never have to part.
I haven’t read this memoir before, but it isn’t my first time around with Willie Morris. I know the broadest strokes of his life and have a comfortable understanding of the style he’s using in this book. In the last 40 pages of so, which I read tonight, he’s written about the changes coming to the upstate community in New York where he’s bought a farm to escape the harsh realities of the city. He wanted to give his son and family a life, while he took the train 70 miles into town. He detailed seeing accidents on the train, the shifting attitudes of people as they got closer to the city, or closer to their homes. He wrote about how he learned about the sniper shooting at his alma mater, the University of Texas, while on the train. He wrote painfully, rawly, about how aghast he was, while his fellow passengers noted the news, and moved on. Suburbia is creeping in on that farm, which is too close to the big city, and too far away from the idyllic small town world he grew up in. He wrote about that too, watching the developers drive out, point this way, look at maps, buy that plot, cut those trees.
“It was impossible,” he wrote, “not to become deeply attached to this old country of the Indians and the Dutch and the Yankees, to the quiet hills and farms of western Connecticut, to the great sweep and flow of the Hudson Valley.”
He quotes the passage from Sleepy Hollow, about “A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.” Morris tells us that reading Washington Irving to his son on a windy November night, writing that he was glad, for the sake of the child, that a real writer had lived in the neighborhood years before.
By then, before then, it had grown obvious where he was going, but it was breathtaking all the same.
The thunderclap of rightness, which he says came upon “not apocalyptically but slow as can be, slow as good sourmash gets its mellowing or as a young man matures and finds balance” is, somehow, why I don’t want to finish the last pages of the book.
I had a fast little ride this morning, getting in a quick 19 miles before work. I set PRs on four Strava segments, including on two climbs.
It felt like I could have done a lot more, but for time.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 87 routes down, 42 to go.
Finally, we continue to catch up on the Re-Listening project. Each CD, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a thing to do in the car, and to write about here. Mostly it’s music and memories and a bit of whimsy, which is what music should be about.
The memory I have with this CD is that I picked it up off a giveaway table because the cover art was great. Otherwise, I have discovered, over and over, try as I might, that Michael Hedges just isn’t for me.
But if you like technically proficient guitar work, new age lyrics and a classically trained flute, the posthumously released “Torched” might be for you.
Our friend Sally Ann came up from Nashville this weekend. She brought an agenda, and I am pleased to report that each of the items on it were discussed. No one entered new business in a Robert’s Rules of Order sort of way because, honestly, it was nerdy enough.
Every now and then I do some obscure Robert Rules of Order thing in the hopes that someone will call me on it, so I can walk into my home library, pull my tattered edition — the August 1986, 17th printing of Jove Books’ edition — of Robert’s Rules off the third shelf of my first book case and point to to the appropriate passage.
I made it to the state finals in a parliamentary contest in high school, because I knew how to have fun.
Anyway, I’m feeling much better, thanks. Feel just like myself, in fact, except for the cough that won’t quit.
On Sunday afternoon we took Sally Ann to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center, which is about an hour away. This was our third trip, and her first, and it’s still a great time. Also, you can get a few nice pictures.
This is Tiger Lilly … or Tiger Jilly. I can’t yet tell them apart. They are sisters, and they live in the same giant enclosure. They came to the rescue by way of an Amish farmer who owned a roadside zoo. He had to find them a new home in 2017, and they’re now the first big stars of the walking tour.
This lion is Cera. She’s from Pennsylvania, where a vet there had an exotic animal rescue center, but he got to a point where he physically couldn’t take care of the animals there, so several of them are at EFRC now.
I think this was Jade. I didn’t take careful note of the enclosures this time. It had rained recently and I was trying to avoid the mud. Let’s assume I have that right: Jade and nine other cats came here from an Oklahoma traveling animal show in 2009 when the Okie lost his federal licenses.
All of the cats here are here to stay. They’re well-cared for, regularly attended and live in carefully planned
spaces. Over the years, EFRC, one of just a few such places in the country, has cared for more than a dozen different species. Today, more than 100 big and small exotic cats, are living out their lives there.
Rocky has been here since 2008. His owners lost their license, and he’s been here ever since, always watching the people passing by.
You think “Cute!” But these guys are all thinking, “If this fence wasn’t between us … ”
I’ve never been to Africa, or seen any of these sorts of animals in the wild, and this might be as close as I can get, but it’s difficult not to be humbled by the power of a lion’s roar.
You don’t even have to be near him to hear him. In fact, each time we’ve heard Zeus get chatty we’ve been around some other cats. They say, though, that neighbors two miles away can hear him.
An animal trainer in Peru, IN retired from the circus and just put all of his animals — lions, horses, an elephant — in a barn. The cats were kept in circus cages, their manes matted from sitting in their urine and feces. For nine years Zeus and his brother, Thor, lived like this. They could barely walk in 2010 when they came to this rescue, but both recovered well. Thor died a few years ago, but Zeus still rules the place, and he runs all over his great big yard. They say he will lose his patience with visitors, though, and that he’ll let you know when it is time to move on.
You go on this walking tour with a volunteer. It lasts about an hour. Though if you are there when it is slow, as we were last Thanksgiving, they will walk you through as slowly as you like. Our volunteer on this trip was a lady who works here when she’s not volunteering at a humane shelter. She’s very pleased and excited about doing all of this, as you might imagine, though some of it involves continually telling people to step back fro the fence. Which is a good idea because, while chain link is a useful invention, it would just serve to slow down a properly motivated tiger. That fence gives you a little head start and a false sense of security, that’s all.
This is Beaux. He’s not an albino, it’s just an exceedingly rare genetic trait. It seems that research points back to one particular line for all of the white cats in the U.S. Three of them live here. And, like a lot of the cats here, he has a ridiculous story.
Beaux arrived, at 14 months old, in 2016. A preacher in Virginia took in unwanted tigers from the circus and used them … to teach Sunday school. Three tigers came to this rescue when the preacher’s health began to fail him.
Beaux was pacing around because as we walked the one way, his friends, the people who are feeding the cats, were working their way toward us. Beaux was hungry, and it was quite something to see all of the cats get fed.
Just as hearing a lion roar is a humbling experience, hearing these powerful jaws snap bones is another reason to glance down to make sure your shoelaces are tied … just in case.
Our guide told us about the recent Big Cat Safety Act, which was signed into law in December. Essentially, this law prohibits the private ownership of big cats and makes it illegal for exhibitors to allow direct contact with cubs. The second half of that, once you hear all the details of how those normally work, is a good development. The first part should, effectively reduce the need for large cat refuges in the United States in the next 20 years or so. If people can’t own them, they can’t abuse them, can’t be outgrown by the cats, can’t need to give them to a rescue center. This should be a good thing.
I got in a little ride Saturday morning, before our company arrived. It was just 20 miles, and a little slow, but it felt a lot more comfortable than I did on Wednesday, when I was still recovering from my cold.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 75 routes down, 44 to go.
Time for a quick pass through the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I picked them up, and writing a bit about them here, and I’m well behind. These aren’t reviews, but they can be fun, or prompt some nice memory, or, really, just an excuse to put some music in here.
Which is what we’re doing today, as we do a quick scan through a compilation, Son of Frat Rock that was, I am sure, desperately desired in 1988. This one was part of a trilogy, it seems, and this was the second one, which has some great old tunes, and some fun one-hit wonders. This was a giveaway, I’m sure of it. And I’ve probably listened to the whole thing four or five times. Mostly, it was good for a quick tune here or there. But for the Re-Listening project, everything gets heard.
And this is a good policy because, wouldn’t you know it, there’s some fun stuff on here. This one cracked the top 20 in 1964, and I am only vaguely familiar with it.
The Music Explosion, The Kinks, Tommy James and the Shondells are on the front half of this thing, and then there’s the timeless Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels.
And then Bill Deal & The Rhondels comes on and you think, “that sits at the intersection of doowop and big band, and, thus, that’s rock ‘n’ roll.”
Which is silly, that’s blue eyed soul and the beach, and it works.
At which point this huge blind spot in my musical education is unavoidably apparent. (My in-laws will be aghast. I’m going to play them a few of these songs on our next visit, and see how long it takes them to name the groups.)
This one they’ll nail. It isn’t the same on the computer, but in the much-better speakers in my car I found myself thinking, “This is a Rev. Horton Heat song, 30 years too early.”
That’s Ernest Maresca, he was a songwriter first, a record exec second, and then a reluctant singer. He wrote some of Dion’s biggest hits, like “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer,” but never thought much of his own singing. That one made it to number six in 1962. He also wrote hits for acts like The Regents, Dean & Jean, Bernadette Carroll and Jimmie Rodgers.
All of which makes part of the experience, here. I’ve had this CD for a quarter century, I’m discovering music almost ready to retire, finding mostly positive things to say about it. And then a song pops up and think, “I see here why we were so ripe for the British Invasion in 64 …”
I’m a generation behind this stuff, and there’s no fault in that, but about half of it was new to me when I picked this up in the late 90s, and some of them still feel new to me, today. Like this cover of a young Stevie Wonder song.
Who knows about The Blendells without using Wikipedia? And when does there music come into the public domain? After running across this in the Re-Listening project I started searching for some of their other stuff, this was a good band. Mexican American brown-eyed soul from the 1960s in East LA. It certainly fits a tunes, probably helped define a place, and there’s still some life in these tunes.
The next song was La Bamba. If I play that here I’ll have to watch the movie again. It’s a rule or something.
Gary U.S. Bonds is 83 and is still playing shows. He’s got one coming up at the end of this week in New York, and that’s worth playing the gold record. He sold a million units of this after it was released in 1961, when it sat atop the charts for two weeks, and here we are, 62 years later … dancing to a quarter to three.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the recorded quality of that song. Accidental, deliberate, whatever it was, the lower fidelity is a signature part of it, at least these days. There are a lot of people trying to do the same sort of thing now.
This is less a gloss over than I intended, but we’re going to make up for it tomorrow, when the Re-Listening project continues with a record that … just wasn’t for me. Maybe it’s for you though. Come back and find out.
I’m beginning to feel more and more like myself. With every phlegmy cough it feels like the end is around the corner. Except for the coughs that feel like, somehow, the respiratory restrictions in my torso will force the collapse of all known gravity in the universe.
It’s all for show. I do feel a great deal better.
Here are a few more photographs from the Val d’Incles in Andorra. I think you’ll come to lichen them, as I do.
It seems that a good slate roof can last a century. I wonder what all of this weighs. Pity the person who had to lug all that up on top of the building as an apprentice.
Also in that valley, some green stuff growing on the stones that line the single-track road.
If I ever have a long driveway — ours is about 1.25 lengths of a car, which is ideal for snow purposes — I would do a lot of research on how to move in stones and promote moss and lichen growth.
It’d be nice to walk past that on the way to the mailbox, is all.
This, I think, would promote a slow, lingering walk, as opposed to the long, fast strides to and from the mailbox I take right now.
Speak of moving quickly, I am well behind on the Re-Listening project. This, you’ll recall, is the game where I am playing CDs in my car in the order in which I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, but a chance to enjoy some music, think fondly on memories and put some of that there.
Only I’m several CDs behind now, so we’ll be playing a bit of catch up over the next several days.
Today, it is the second and final record from The Refreshments. They were an Arizona bar band who signed a deal, got alt radio and MTV airplay and grew bigger, faster, than probably they wanted. Back in the studio, they found themselves butting heads with their label, and a bit with each other. Roger Clyne and the rest of the guys disliked all of this so much they disbanded after “The Bottle & Fresh Horses.” Shame, too, The Refreshments were great and this album is a lot of fun, even still, 26 years later. I got this as a hand-me-down from the campus radio station in the fall of 1997.
It’s funny, the instrumentation is clever and earnest and all of it was forgotten too fast. But we’re Re-Listening. I’m singing along.
In some ways, the whole thing feels like a continuation of Fizzy, Fuzzy. Even the characters narrative arcs were familiar.
And the jangly guitars got dustier and, more … southwestern … somehow.
This character actually is referencing the first record.
I think this is the song where the band decided they didn’t like the label meddling in their work. It just feels off, and the intensity is a little different. This song, or something else, that was an important catalyst in the band calling it quits.
This one is a referential sequel to something from the other album. This was, I think, the first time I’d ever had that happen from one record to the next. It was so novel — still is, I suppose — and gratifying and welcomed.
I remember reading some trade magazine, an article I will never ever find again in our digital age, about this song and how they overlapped. I was sitting in a burger joint, killing time between this and that, and found myself thinking that if I didn’t like them already, I would have had no choice but to appreciate The Refreshments after that.
No one thinks about things like this, but I wonder what would make up the best three-song series to close out a forgotten record. I’m putting these three tacks up for nomination.
They run the gamut in three songs. Just one of the reasons I was sad to hear of the band’s demise soon after. They went from a local opener in 1993 to a headliner in about a year. About a year later they were signed, but they were defunct by 1998. Clyne and Naffah have been playing in a full band as Roger Clyne & The Peacemakers since then, but I still think of The Refreshments first. They’re touring right now. They’re in the Midwest this spring, in fact, but still too far away.
Anyway, after this rush job on the Re-Listening project, I think I am five or six CDs behind. So guess what we’ll spend some time on next week!?
I forgot to brag on this sunset from yesterday. My bad, sun. You know that big ball of fusion has been hurt by that oversight all day. And the skyline, poor emotional skyline. I’ll never be able to make it up to the skyline. And my thoughts are also with the remnants of those clouds, wherever they are a day later.
It was one of those sunsets of a fleeting sort. As I left the building I though, Take a picture, forget to post it, and give the clouds and all that some human emotions in a poorly framed joke. But by the time I got to my car, just a block away, and up to the top of the parking deck, that’s what I was left with. But, sun, you made a lovely one yesterday.
Probably today’s, too, though I didn’t have the chance to see it.
After darkness fell we walked over to the IU Auditorium to see the traveling show of Chicago. The old man sitting in front of us, and the younger man sitting behind us each obviously had no knowledge of the play. Their surprise at Ms. Sunshine was delightful.
And the performers were good. But almost everyone on stage looks so young all of a sudden. Indeed, quite a few of the people in this photo are making their national touring debut.
The audio guy had some trouble, but of the sort you’ll forget in a few days. Billy Flynn and Mama Morton and Amos and Roxie and all the rest pressed through and gave us a nice version of the musical. I think this is my third time seeing it.
I wonder which song will be stuck in my head for weeks this time.
Remember those flowers that I noted, last Wednesday, as a trick of winter?
Almost all of them have unwrapped themselves now. It’s quite a site, even at night.
Forty-five days until the bike races and the official arrival of spring, but it is starting to feel as though we’re closer than that.
It is time, once again, for the Tuesday feature that allows me to close some tabs on my browser. Some things are took good to X out of and see them disappear forever. Much better for me to memorialize them here, on the off-chance that one day they’ll come to mind, and I’ll do a good keyword search, find a particular thing, and hope the original link is still active.
It isn’t a long shot, but if the first real step is my coming up with the text from memory it might take two or three ties to find the right page.
But I digress.
I’m a sucker for all of these job interview type pieces you see on CNBC and Forbes and the like. The titles are outstanding click bait — case studies, almost — but every now and then you’ll find something good in the body of the piece.
Nailing a job interview isn’t just about listing skills and experience directly from your resume. You want to paint a picture of your accomplishments through concrete, detailed examples.
To do that successfully, you must know how to communicate effectively. As a career coach who has helped hundreds of people land six-figure jobs, I’ve found that there are certain words that will get the interviewer to pay attention.
Here are five job interview phrases that will make companies want to hire you on the spot.
I started my 12-year career at Google in 2006, where I held positions as chief of staff and executive business partner. Before that, I worked at Amazon as an executive business partner to Jeff Bezos.
After spending so much time with some of the world’s most successful and influential leaders, I learned what to look for in new candidates. In fact, Bezos hired me on the spot after my first interview with him in 2002.
Based on the hundreds of interviews I’ve conducted throughout my decades-long career, here are my top tips on how to instantly impress a hiring manager during the job interview.
See what I mean about those titles? SEO bait and plenty of optimistic gold. They’re quite well done. Speaking of …
Put up your hand if you’ve ever stared out your office window, daydreaming about launching one of your imaginative inventions, being your own boss, and getting very rich in the process.
If your hand is firmly raised, then listen up: The fantasy—which you’d be forgiven for thinking is restricted to those in Silicon Valley or movies—is not entirely unrealistic.
London-based Steph Douglas did exactly that when in 2014 she left her job as a branding marketer for EDF Energy to devote herself full-time to …
It’s an online gift company. You can order custom-made care packages and the like.
People have long stoked an urban-versus-rural rivalry, with vastly different cultures and surroundings. But a burgeoning movement—with accompanying field of science—is eroding this divide, bringing more of the country into the city. It’s called rurbanization, and it promises to provide more locally grown food, beautify the built environment, and even reduce temperatures during heat waves.
And, with that, I am now down to 28 open tabs in my phone’s browser.
I don’t remember how I got the next CD to appear in the Re-Listening project. I don’t even have the liner notes. But I never had those in this case, and I’m sure that’s part of the story, which I’ve forgotten entirely. I assume someone gave it to me, probably a radio station. “Fear” was released in 1991, but the last CD we played was from the first half of the 1997, and this one got added to my collection sometime soon thereafter.
Anyway, this is the first Toad the Wet Sprocket CD I owned, and the only one until the last year or two. “Walk on the Ocean” and “All I Want” seemed to be everywhere on everything. Both made it into the top 20. And, seriously, until looking through Toad’s entire discography just now, I thought they’d been put on multiple records for some reason. They released those and three other songs from “Fear” as singles. Eventually, in 1994, this record went platinum, having peaked at #49 on Billboard’s Top 200 Albums.
Of the deep cuts, I always enjoy the “Nightingale Song.”
Sonically, this is an acoustically perfect alt rock song.
The very next track ups the ante.
And, remembering that this was recorded in 1991, they were bringing back the organ before bringing back the organ was cool.
Or, if you want some of the modern live experience, we saw Toad twice in 2022. Somehow I’d always managed to miss their live shows, to my chagrin. They’re now adding dates for this summer, but none yet so close that we’ll be able to see them. At least not yet.
I’d go back to see a bit more of that “confident, laid back urgency,” that the band has been able to mine for decades now. If this was the summer of 1997 for me, this was my first apartment, and I was desperately trying to personify my own version of confident, laid back urgency — failing miserably at that, no doubt. It was that, going to class and filling time while everyone else was out of town. This record, and the next one we’ll hear from on the Re-Listening project, became big, big parts of filling that time.
He said in early March, not at all thinking about the summer ahead.
