This year I listened to 57,251 minutes of music, accounting for 8,315 songs and 3,629 artists. So more songs and more artists than last year, but less total time.
Finally turned the heat on yesterday. Set a new record and made it in to November for the first time ever, so that’s something (I guess?).
It was sunny with a high of 57 yesterday, so theoretically we could have made it. Cooler and cloudy from today on out, so not sure we would have lasted any longer. But yesterday morning it was just too cold in the house and not worth waiting until afternoon for it to marginally warm up. Thus, heat.
Lately this blog has felt more like a time capsule, capturing my thoughts at any given moment in time. Elections are a massive tipping point in history (in the sense that a major change happens based on a single result, marking a stark change), so it seems like a good time to capture those thoughts just a week out.
In 2020, after four years of Donald Trump and in the midst of the divisiveness of a pandemic response, I wrote a book called Better Politics, Please.
It was hopeful.
Maybe naively hopeful.
On January 6, 2021, as the nation witnessed a violent attempt to overthrow an election—an unprecedented assault on our democracy—that hopeful book felt worse than naive.
Here we are four years later, barreling toward the 2024 election. Are our politics any better? Please?
Yesterday former President Donald Trump made a series of racist attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, challenging her biracial identity. I try to bite my tongue on the latest controversy of the day (and often fail), but this is just nuts.
It’s really wild (and kind of gross) to watch people struggle with race and not understand being biracial or mixed race in 2024. You can have more than one identity, and that’s not inconsistent. Claiming one of those identities does not negate the other.
White people claim multiple European roots and celebrate both—for St. Patrick’s Day it’s “I’m Irish!” and for Oktoberfest it’s “I’m German!”
Using my father’s last name does not mean I disowned my mother’s family. I can claim both.
So it’s been a long week. Yeah, there was that whole political tsunami on Sunday. Feels like an eon since then. (And the energy… feels like it’s only ramped up since then, for what it’s worth.) But I’m more talking about locally and my reporting with West St. Paul Reader.
This week we ran seven stories in five days.
Multiple stories that we broke and some exclusives. It’s big stuff like a long-time restaurant leaving and a 115-year-old historic mansion torn down, and what should have been simpler stories like a library renovation—that some how drew the ire of anti-library trolls (BTW, did an update on that story Friday night, because book nerds love library plans!).
Sometimes a blog like this works best as a time capsule. What did I think at the time? Our perspective tends to distort over time, so capturing an honest assessment in the moment is important for the sake of accuracy. With politics and history, doubly so. Everything seems inevitable in hindsight. But at the time it often didn’t feel that way.
And politics in the last month? Oof. From President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, to the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, to Biden withdrawing from the election and Vice President Kamala Harris taking the mantle—it’s been wild.
I could write about this for days, but nobody wants to read that. So I’m going to try to capture my thoughts in short, quick bursts. Here goes nothing…
Haven’t had a good Star Wars rant in a while. About time, huh? So the Acolyte just finished its first season on Disney+. Pretty much every new Star Wars thing lately gets panned, no exception here, and as usual they’re wrong. Acolyte is intense and fun. Screw the haters—here’s why.
If you don’t remember Kinzinger, he’s one of two Republicans in Congress who served on the January 6 Committee and one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach President Donald Trump. I profiled him in my 2020 book Better Politics Please.
It’s an interesting book, perhaps not as polished and slick as some political memoirs (and he gives us the mercy of not rehashing his entire life in excruciating detail like most political memoirs), but a solid snapshot of politics from the Tea Party to the Insurrection.
It’s been an incredibly busy spring season. I’m just now catching my breath at the end of June. I’ve had a few milestones—including 20 years of business, five years of local news, and a kid graduating high school—that make me a little introspective.
