What I've been up to

I would say nothing but that isn't much of a blog post. I went to what was probably the best rock show I've been to in a really long time. Tiger Bear Wolf played w/ Black Taj last Sunday in Greensboro. If that wasn't enough Birds of Avalon and Tiny Meteors also played. So if you have a band that has a drummer, a bass player, and 2 guitarists who rock you have a new standard to aspire to. The only problem was it came on a night after a football all-dayer and I had to work the next day. Don't worry. I didn't work too hard.

There was also an excellent rock moment this week when I pulled into the neighborhood at lunch time and Strawberry Fields came on the radio. With lots of trees changing colors and the sun shining brightly on that tenth of a mile w/o houses, it had an excellent psychedelic quality. If you want to eliminate all drug use in the world, capture that moment and sell it as a pill. Oh wait that would be drug use too. In that case I think everybody should get hooked on LSD (Leaves, Sun, Dan's car radio).

The most exciting thing to happen w/ the kids was Desmond's class watching Charlotte's Web during lunch at school. Although I didn't get to watch it w/ him, he told me his favorite character was Templeton the rat. This led to 3 days of me doing Paul Lynde impersonations. I don't know that they were good impersonations, but I had a 5 year old laughing the whole time. That's all I can ask for at this point.

The bulk of my free time during the non-football week is spent reading books. I pretty much read nothing but nonfiction. Maria did recommend Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. If all fiction were as good and easy to read as that, I'd probably read a lot more. Oh and I read the Harry Potter books to Desmond and we are currently on the 6th book. That is no small task when you are reading aloud and your audience has a 4 second attention span. Anyway, there are a bunch of sports related books that I've read and would recommend (although none moreso than America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation), but it's the history books I want to comment on. While I was reading The Fighting Quaker about Greensboro's namesake Nathanael Greene I had a hard time following the maps despite the fact that I live in the area most of the maps depict. Granted interstate-40 wasn't on the map, but I at least can recognize the rivers and towns. Still these maps looked like they were 200 years old and while that may be authentic I'd like to point out that North Carolina no longer extends westward to the Mississippi river. A much better use of maps was this summer's best seller Mayflower. There were only a couple of maps spread throughout the book, but I kept going back to them to get an idea of the area they were talking about. And not to suck up too much, but Dr. KK's book White Flight does a really good job of laying out the spread of desegregation in Atlanta w/ maps. I don't know if this is a much welcomed trend in historical books to use current maps, but it really does make it a lot easier to follow. And while probably the best historical book I've read recently (Guests of the Ayatollah) has a couple of maps, it like any other good history book is more about the people, politics, and events of the era that make it interesting.

Finally, I'm w/ Pedro when it comes to firing Dick Baddour. I can't tell if the guy is an assclown or a douchefucker, but he needs to go. There are only 2 sports that make money for a university (and sometimes that number is 0), and if you are only hitting on 25% of the coaching hires on those (and that 25% is a gift from Dean) you aren't doing a good job. Since Pete lives in Carrboro, I say make him Carolina's AD. At least he doesn't have to uproot his family to take on the challenge.