Stray Hawkeye

For any of the Hawkeye fans out there looking for good blog dedicated to irreverent coverage of Iowa athletics (and by athletics, I basically mean football and basketball), try out Black Heart, Gold Pants (occasionally, or somewhat frequently, NSFW).

A relevant post for the upcoming Minnesota game this weekend.

For a general flavor of the site, Celebrity Jeopardy with Sarah Palin, Burt Reynolds, and Joe Paterno.  (Visually fine, but definately not for reading aloud at work.)

Black Heart, Gold Pants actually used to be The Hawkeye Compulsion.  I mention the fact only so it makes sense to link to this post on The Hawkeye Compulsion from August 2007, on the topic of if each Big Ten team was a car, what car would they be.  It’s outdated, and shows just how much the Big Ten can change in that amount of time.  But, if you remember the traditional position of each team in the conference, and specifically where they were at the start of that season, it may be the best blog post ever.

Really interesting photo diary of a trip to the DMZ.

A friend / former co-worker of mine, Amy Leger, started a blog called The Savvy Celiac about Celiac Disease.  From my (very limited) understanding, Celiac Disease is basically having quite unpleasant gastrointestinal issues when you eat things derived from grains.  Sort of like being lactose intolerant, but for grains instead of diary.

Amy’s daughter and brother have Celiac disease, and, as you can imagine, this puts some unusual and strict restrictions on what you can eat, and some pretty strong negative reinforcement for forgetting.  So, Amy started a blog about how to deal with this at home/school/work, and generally how to make life easier for people with Celiac disease.  If you know some with Celiac disease, or work in education with kids that might have it, or whatever connection you may have, pass it along.

A brief survey of current internet culture, in children’s storybook form.  NSFW.  Baby’s First Internet.

This weekend, my Hawkeyes knocked off the number 3 team in the country.  In the pregame, the announcers were not even discussing if Penn State would win, but if they would do so with sufficient “style points” to make a case for being in the national championship game.  Lets see how that worked out for them…

The ending still comes up short of the all time best ending of a football game ever in the history of ever (which of course goes to Iowa vs LSU at the Capital One Bowl 2005), but one of the better overall games I’ve seen in a long time.

Go Hawks!!

Related to the last post, here’s a local band that they play on The Current, which I particularly enjoy – Cloud Cult.  I’ve listened to a couple of their albums, and they’re pretty uniformly awesome.  They’re also some of the few albums I’ve come across lately that not only contain a lot of really good songs, but are actually really good as albums to listen to all the way through.  They have themes and variations that continue throughout without becoming boring or repetitious, and a good amount of building/tension/restraint/flow that’s sorely lacking in a lot of popular music.  They’re a bit like well written classical music in some ways, while still being playful, fun, and modern.  In a very tangent way it kind of reminds me of Nine Inch Nails in the intelligent, well thought out structure, though a totally different genre.  Good background music for writing as well.

I particularly like these two songs.  Both are also good for singing along with.

A performance of “Pretty Voice” in studio at The Current:

And a more polished, though pleasantly simple, music video of “Everybody here is a Cloud”:

Their website is located here, in case you’re interested in CD’s, live shows, etc.

In case you’re ever looking for some music while at work (or wherever) we have a really good radio station here in the Twin Cities that broadcasts online, 89.3 The Current.

It’s public radio, so they occasionally have donation drives that get a little annoying, but on the whole they have far, far fewer commercials than most stations.  It’s an extremely eclectic mix of music, from punk, to blue grass, to hip hop, to rock, to… well, anything really.  It’s a bit hit or miss, so you might have to try a couple of times to fall in love with it.

The best overarching theme that I could really assign to what they play is- you know when you see a commercial on TV, and you really like the song playing in the background, but have no idea who the band is, or what the song is, and you never hear it anywhere else?  That’s what they play.  Those songs.

No worries (or yes worries depending on your preferences), there will still be the occasional political rant (it’s in the tag line after all), just returning to a bit more of the eclectic balance now that the election is over with.

There are right now, quite literally, people dancing in the streets in Minneapolis.

In a quick drive around the neighborhood to see where all the cheering, horn honking, and fireworks I was hearing were coming from, I had to stop three times to avoid hitting people dancing in the streets (twice in a single intersection), to say nothing of all the people on the sidewalks cheering.

I actually opened the window in my apartment just before Obama’s speech to see if people were cheering, more than half laughing to my self at the thought that not only would people be yelling (a la the movie Network), but that they would be doing so loudly enough that I could hear it.  They are.  You can hear them at least 5 blocks away.  They’re all the way up and down the street (mostly clumped around the bars).  It’s well past midnight, and the cheering has been non-stopped since Obama hit 270.  If anything, it just keeps getting louder (I have some feeling alcohol might be involved to some slight degree with that :) ).

I will say the fact that Obama mentioned the New Deal in his speech gave me occasion for notable pause, but if you hadn’t guessed from my posts this last week, I’m also happy to see McCain (the ’08 model) and Palin as far from the White House as you can get.  If nothing else, regardless of policy, I think the message it sends to the rest of the world is something to be thankful for.  After the winner was declared, and it really hit me that this is the begin of the end of the Bush era, my first thought was, “huh, so I wonder if this means we can go back to being proud of being American again?”

As I’ve said, I don’t always agree with Obama’s economic policies, but I’m glad to see one of the rarest of breeds politicians headed to the White House – one I can respect even when I disagree with him, and, just as importantly, one that seems to feel the same way in return.

Economic hardships aren’t as tough if you can respect and appreciate the people around you, and have a sense of dignity as a country.

On a lighter note, my favorite moment of the night- Barack Obama telling his daughters that since he won they’d be getting the new puppy he promised.  That alone seems to sum up so much.

In short, see my previous post.  Now, lets get to work on those sundaes.

Go vote.

I’d rather live in a place with 90% voter turnout and a well informed populous, who choose a government that I don’t agree with, than a place with 50% voter turnout and a poorly informed populous, who choose a government I love.

Okay, so really, I rather a place with 100% well informed voter turn out, Ron Paul as President, a free puppy that walks itself, and endless ice cream sundaes that taste great and don’t make you fat, but, I’ll take what I can get.

Vote.