Music

Note: Each week I take a look back at my playlists and share songs that were either played the most, got stuck in my head, or just stood out. Many are new to me, but there are old faves mixed in as well.

Below is my Top 5 of the last 7 days:

This past weekend, my sons and I took a last-minute trip to Minneapolis for a soccer game. Or rather; we drove up, watched the game, visited with a friend, and then drove straight back.

It’s 4 hours each way, but the opportunity presented itself, and we took…

In his continuing quest to keep the culture wars hot (and himself relevant), Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has introduced the Love America Act.

If passed, the bill would block any federal funds from public schools teaching Critical Race Theory (spoiler alert: none currently do.).

It would also mandate funding go towards ensuring that students learn parts of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Pledge of Allegiance (spoiler alert: this already happens).

In a statement, Hawley noted:

“We cannot afford for our children to lose faith in the noble ideals this country was founded on. We have to…

Cleveland’s Baseball team announces name change.

After months of discussions, the team will be officially dropping its Indians name, a moniker that’s been in use for over 100 years. The results came after discussions with over 40000 fans & 100’s of hours of interviews with team staff & the community.

The team had previously ditched their “Chief Wahoo” logo in 2019 replacing it with the interim one seen above.

“You see, there’s always been a Cleveland — that’s the best part of our name,” actor Tom Hanks says in a video announcement he narrated for the team, which posted it…

In 2020, life expectancy in the US fell by 1.5 years — the largest drop since WWII.

Some of that was directly due to COVID, but the second order effects are also starting to show in the data:

The full toll of the pandemic has yet to be seen, doctors and public-health officials said. Many people skipped or delayed treatment last year for conditions such as diabetes or high blood pressure and endured isolation, stress and interruptions in normal diet and exercise routines.

“That has led to intermediate and longer-term effects we will have to deal with for years to…

Music

Note: Each week I take a look back at my playlists and share songs that were either played the most, got stuck in my head, or just stood out. Many are new to me, but there are old faves mixed in as well.

Below is my Top 5 of the last 7 days:

Thomas Dolby- Europa and the Pirate Twins

For a song turning 40 in a couple of months, this sure holds up well. This appeared on Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless record.

Multiple configurations were released with songs added/removed along the way. One was called “She Blinded Me With Science.”

Maybe you’ve heard of…

On this day in 1989, United Airlines flight 232 crash landed in Sioux City Iowa, after suffering a catastrophic failure of it’s no. 2 engine.

The regularly scheduled flight from Denver to Chicago was operated using a DC-10 aircraft (N1819U). About an hour into the flight, and at cruising altitude, the fan disk of the #2 engine explosively disintegrated, raining parts down on the fields below.

The uncontained failure damaged all 3 of the DC-10’s hydraulic systems, rendering most flight controls useless.

In what would become a landmark example of Crew Resource Management (CRM), the flight crew fought to control…

Twitter has announced that it is shutting down it’s Fleets feature effective August 3rd.

Fleets are (were?) tweets that showed up at the top of your timeline and disappeared after 24 hours. Now they’re about to disappear for good.

In a blog post, the company said it was shutting down the feature because, “we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped.”

Regardless of how one might feel about Fleets (I wasn’t a fan), it’s nice to see the company moving relatively fast to kill something that clearly wasn't…