Musical Nostalgia

Every now and then I revert back to the tastes of days past and listen to music of the 1990s. I specify 1990s because I have also been known to listen to music from the 1890s or even 1790s but the subject of this entry will be the music that was being created as I was coming of age. The mid to late 90s was when I began making that great pilgrimage into adolescence. This is the time when most people experience the greatest number of changes in the shortest amount of time. The physical, emotional, and intellectual changes are abundant as each day has its successes and disasters. The perception is that the whole world is watching your every step and the slightest mistake will be witnessed by thousands. Tomorrow seems so far away in the eyes of a teen and each day is truly lived like it will be the last. Some of us even come close to that on a few occasions. I think that the music one listened to during this time always holds a special place.

The music that I listened to during adolescence was my choice. It sounds simple but its quite profound because prior to that I was just listening to music in my environment. I was listening to what my parents listened to. I come from a highly trained musical family, which I'm sure will be the subject of future blogs, so we listened to anything from Bach to the the music of Singing in the Rain to 70s bands like Chicago and KC and the Sunshine Band back to the music of The Wizard of Oz and Mozart. Some of it I still like today, some of it I have long since rejected, but the point is that I was not choosing to listen to this music. It was around me and it was all I knew. The music that you discover on your own takes on a significant meaning.

When I flipped on my first little clock radio I chose to listen to bands like Matchbox Twenty, Creed, Alanis Morissette, Third Eye Blind, Barenaked Ladies, REM, and Stroke 9 among others. I chose to listen to songs like "She's So High" by Tal Bachman, "Linger" by The Cranberries, "Leaving Town" by Dexter Freebish, "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus, and breakthrough revolutions to me like "Name" by The Goo Goo Dolls and "Long December" by Counting Crows. I could go on and on. One summer I mowed lawns and everytime I got paid I asked my mom or dad to take me to Hastings and I would buy another album. That was back when people actually bought CDs. It is difficult to debate what is good and what is not when it comes to music because it's all a matter of taste and opinion. That being said, the hit songs of today just don't measure up according to my tastes. It makes me think we are at a new low point regarding what kind of music is popular.

That's okay though because the music is still out there somewhere. Whether the artists are struggling to survive or have long since faded into obscurity the music is still there. Since that time my musical tastes have broadened but I ocassionally get nostalgic when I hear a song from that era. I appreciate the music of the 90s that was with me in that metaphorical roller coaster called adolescence. A time when things seemed so complicated but were actually so free.

Frustration into Experimentation Part II

And now for the moment you have all been waiting for - a update on my experiment from my entry titled Frustration into Experimentation. If you have read that entry I'm sure you're sitting at the edge of your seat, your mouth getting dry from anxiousness, the suspense so brutal you just can't take it anymore. If you have not read that entry then read it. If you have not read it and don't want to, fine, I'll sum up. There is a girl in one of my classes that dominates the discussion and I have set up an experiment to quantify just how much she monopolizes the class. Over a period of three weeks I kept count of how many times she spoke out in class, the total amount of class time she spent talking, and the percentage of class time spent having to listen to her. Now for the numbers. If you're a stats person (not many people are) you might enjoy this.

Bear with me as a blog post is not the best place for a data table because of alignment problems. But I'm sure you'll be able to follow anyway. The numbers will be ordered as follows: Number of times subject spoke in one class, total duration of time spoken, percentage of class time spent with subject speaking.

12 1:55 4%

14 3:03 8%
18 1:31 3.5%
6 0:53 2%
10 2:48 7%
15 2:46 6%

Mean = 12.5 2:09 5.7%

Median = 13 2:20:30 5%

Range = 12 2:10 6%

There you have it! Can you imagine being in a 45-50 minute college class and one person who is not the professor speaking this much? I have to admit that the last few days she has gotten better. But not after being on the receiving end of a few comical, not-so-subtle hints from other students that her talking has become excessive. In case you want more, never fear, I am not yet done with this experiment. Next, I will perform these same operations on all the other members of the class combined and do a comparative analysis of the two groups. Thank you for indulging me in this little experiment. I am well on my way to new discoveries in the social sciences.

Back from Hiatus

It has been about a week and a half hiatus since my last blog. Much has happened since then. The purpose of this entry will be to catch up on the latest significant occurrences in my world. First off, a follow-up to my previous entry about the Detroit Pistons.

The Pistons went on an eight game losing streak. It was their longest since the 1994-95 season. They looked to be in absolute disarray when the improbable happened. With their next two games against two of the top five teams in the league on their home floors it looked as though the losing streak was bound to reach at least ten games if not more. But on Friday night they handed it to the Orlando Magic, a team that despite having its best season in more than a decade, cannot seem to find an answer to the Pistons. Detroit won 93-85. Then today an even bigger upset occurred as the Pistons beat the defending champion Boston Celtics. Detroit had an all around impressive game as they won 105-95. How can a team lose eight in a row and 17 of 22, look on the brink of disaster, and then turn it all around in three days to beat two of league's best teams? Well, the aforementioned (in previous blogs) Allen Iverson did not appear in either game with a back injury. This put Richard Hamilton back in the starting lineup, a place where he has been a fixture for the past six years in Detroit, until this season when he was bumped to accommodate Iverson. Hamilton scored 31 and 25 points respectively and had a great all around game against Boston adding 9 assists and 6 rebounds. Is there a correlation between losing against every opponent that came the Pistons way over the last two and half weeks then Iverson goes down with an injury and they beat two great teams away from home? I don't know. You do the research and tell me.

The university that I attend holds an annual Spring Sing where the fraternities and sororities each put on a ten minute show that follows a certain theme. It is a competition with prize money. This year the theme was children's books and my fraternity did Where's Waldo?. The premise of our show was that Waldo is a valliant hero who has just received an award for his acts of bravery. He subsequently disappears without a trace and his girlfriend Wenda hires Detective Gum Shoe to try and find him. It featured other classic "Waldo" book characters such as the troublesome convict Odlaw and the quirky, Kramer-esque Wizard, played by me. The show had a 1920s mystery feel, centered around Detective Shoe's witty monologues, and featured live music reminiscent of classic mystery films. As it turns out the detective was just a scapegoat for Wenda to look innocent as she and the other characters try to get rid of Waldo for good by shipping him to Antarctica. Our show was comical, intelligent, suspenseful, plot-twisting, and just plain entertaining. In addition to original live music played by members of the fraternity, it featured dancing, a rap, and an edge of your seat fight sequence - all in ten minutes! Everyone that witnessed said we would either win or at least get second place. According to the judges, however, our show was only good enough for third. That still won us $300 in prize money and more importantly it built a sense of comradery and accomplishment among the fraternity. Despite the results (which were still pretty good) we were still very proud of our performance. I could write an entire other entry on the travesties of mass appeal and popularity that seem to fit the criterion to win a competition such as this but I'll save it for later.

That is about enough updating for now. The Detroit Pistons seem to be a recurring theme in my blogs. It is the golden mean of basketball season what can I say? My school's spring sing was fun and rewarding even though I thought my frat was robbed by the judges. Soon I will give an update on my experimental study as mentioned in a previous blog titled Frustration into Experimentation.

Mama said they're'd be seasons like this

If you have read previous blogs you know that I am a Detroit Pistons fan and I will be through thick and thin. Right now is definitely thin. Last night the Pistons lost their fourth straight game. While the loss was disappointing it was not surprising. This season Pistons fans have had to endure more losing than we are accustomed to.

In the National Basketball Association each team plays 82 regular season games. If a team wins 50 of those games then they have really accomplished something and are probably regarded as one of the league's top teams. The Pistons have won at least 50 games in each of the last seven seasons. During that span they made it to the Eastern Conference Finals six times, the NBA Finals twice, and won the NBA Championship once in 2004. Just last season they finished with the league's second best overall record at 59 wins and 23 losses. This season has been an entirely different story so far. As of right right now we are approximately two-thirds of the way into the season and the Pistons have lost 25 games. They have already lost double the number of home games this year than they did all of last year. In November they lost three straight games and I thought the world had ended. That was before they lost five straight in January and you can imagine what I thought happened to the world then. Currently, they are on a four game losing streak with an absolutely brutal schedule up ahead. Their next seven games are against playoff bound teams with five of them on the road.

Despite all this, they have had a couple of bright spots this season. One occurred in late December and early January when they won seven in a row. The other occurred when they started the season by winning their first four games. What happened between then and now to put the Pistons in such an unenviable position? They pulled off a blockbuster trade that sent Chauncey Billups to the Denver Nuggets in exchange for Allen Iverson. Coming into this season Iverson had the third highest scoring average in NBA history. Adding someone like that can only make your team better, right? Apparently not. Chauncey Billups had been the Pistons' team captain for the last six years and won the Most Valuable Player award in that 2004 NBA Championship. Taking him out of the mix, regardless of who replaced him, was going to put the team in major transition mode. I had a bad feeling the day that this trade happened, but can one player really cause the team to plummet so fast? Probably not. Another factor is that they have a rookie head coach in Michael Curry. I do not think that Michael Curry is a bad coach by any means. He has not been a head coach in this league long enough to be judged anyway. Any rookie head coach of an NBA team is going to have his rough patches. I guess it's the "nature of the business" as they say.

Despite all the disappointing aspects of this season, there are certainly some positives. If the regular season ended today the Pistons would still be in the playoffs. They have shown signs of brilliance by beating five of the league's top six teams at various points. And fortunately, the future is brighter than the present. They have a core of very talented players with lots of time left in this league and come this summer they will have $20 million to spend to add even more talent to that core. You have to take the good with the bad and the Pistons have been so good for so long that the bad was bound to happen sooner or later. However, there is still more basketball to be played this season. You never know, maybe they will surprise everybody. In the immortal words of Chris Berman, "that's why they play the game."

Walt Williams

Not many are familiar with the name Walter Allen Williams today. He is a retired gentleman living in Brownwood, Texas, the place of his birth, who volunteers for the city recreation department. Each Saturday during basketball season he controls the scoreboard for youth basketball games. It was here that a met him about a year ago because I am a referee for these basketball games. He is a nice, fun guy who is easy to talk to and has plenty of wisdom. But there is much more to Walt Williams than he lets on. You may be more familiar with the name if you were a Major League Baseball fan in the 1960s and 70s.

Williams played in the MLB from 1964 to 1975. He played for the Chicago White Sox, Cleveland Indians, and New York Yankees. He was commonly referred to as "no neck" because he was short (5' 6") and had an incredibly muscular physique (over 30 years after his playing days he still has that muscular physique). He was known as being a very popular, fan-friendly kind of player with an infectious personality. Oh yeah, he was no slouch as a ballplayer either. Williams played outfield and committed just 19 errors in 565 games for an almost unheard of .981 fielding percentage. In 1969 he played for the Chicago White Sox and boasted a batting average of .304, sixth best in the American League. That season he had a strikeout rate of once every 14.3 at bats making him the 5th most difficult player to strike out. On May 31, 1970 he got five hits, two RBIs, and scored five runs in a 22-13 win over the Boston Red Sox. For his playing career Williams appeared in 842 games, got 640 hits, 33 home runs, 173 RBIs, 284 runs, and had a lifetime batting average of .270. In 1988 he was an assistant coach for the White Sox. Last year when I asked him about his baseball playing days he just kind of shrugged and said, "in college I was better at basketball."

Speaking of basketball, today Walt Williams told me a pretty interesting story. Nancy Lieberman is a basketball hall of famer and one of, if not the, best women's basketball player in history. In 1975 while playing with the New York Yankees, Williams said in an interview that he really liked playing one-on-one basketball and that he had never lost a game. Nancy Lieberman, who was living in Brooklyn, New York and had recently been named to the USA Women's Olympic Basketball Team, got word of this and challenged him to a game of one-on-one. Williams accepted and they ended playing in front of over 4,000 fans in New York City. I asked him who won and he looked up at me, paused, and said very matter-of-factly, "I've still never lost a game of one-on-one." I laughed. Later on, between games, we shot baskets together. He's still got a pretty good shot for a 65 year old former pro baseball player. Actually, Walt Williams has a pretty good shot for anyone.

259

That is the number of consecutive games the Detroit Pistons had sold out at The Palace of Auburn Hills, their home court. That streak, which began over five years ago, ended tonight. January 19, 2004 was day one of the streak, about five months prior to the Pistons winning the franchise's third NBA championship. Over the course of the streak Pistons' fans have been honored to see some great teams as well as many past, present, and future NBA greats. Names of the past that stand out are Ben Wallace, Corliss Williamson, Lindsay Hunter, Chris Webber, and of course Chauncey Billups. Fans are currently graced by the presence of players like Richard Hamilton, Rasheed Wallace, Antonio McDyess, Tayshaun Prince, and Allen Iverson. And a special treat has blossomed right before our eyes this year in the form of Rodney Stuckey. These players have taken much different NBA career paths and have very diverse resumes but they do have one thing in common. They have all donned the red, white, and blue jerseys and stepped onto the Palace court. The past five years have each seen 50 win seasons including a franchise record 64 wins in 2005-06. They have seen the Pistons make it to the Eastern Conference Finals every year and the NBA Finals twice. What is quite possibly most important though is that the last five years at the Palace have seen nothing less than exciting basketball result in a winning tradition.

The reason for the streak coming to a close tonight is probably a combination of a less than stellar season for the Pistons and the sputtering economy. It seems as though the Pistons have been in transition mode all year since the November 4 trade of three time all-star and former finals MVP Chauncey Billups to the Denver Nuggets for former league MVP and perennial scoring champion Allen Iverson. The result thus far has been an unpredictable team that has defeated four of the league's top five teams but has also lost to some of the league's worst teams leaving us scratching our heads. To this point they have a 26-21 record which is still in the upper half of the league but not quite up to Pistons' standards. Another possible reason for the streak ending now is that prior to tonight the Pistons had lost four straight games at home and six of their last seven. A more pragmatic reason, however, is the receeding economy that has significantly affected the city. Detroit is known as the motor city and the Michigan economy is propelled by the auto industry. Needless to say, there have been hard economic times in Michigan lately and in particular Detroit. This entire season people have been slower to buy tickets. It is normal to buy tickets to a professional basketball game three or four months in advance but this year the trend has been to purchase only a week to ten days in advance. Of the streak, Pistons.com's official beat writer Keith Langlois wrote, "It took a worldwide recession, the likes of which most of the world’s 7 billion people have never seen, to bring it to an end."

What is perhaps the most incredible aspect of the sold out streak is that The Palace of Auburn Hills has the largest capacity of any NBA stadium at 22,076 and was built about twenty years ago making it the third oldest NBA stadium. So the streak of 259 consecutive sold out games came to an end tonight, February 4, 2009, a night that the Pistons' faithful saw their team defeat the Miami Heat 93-90. I would not be surprised if one day in the not too distant future the headlines read: 260 - Pistons break former sold out record. And I can guarantee that if and when that happens I will still be a fan.

Birthday Celebration = Kitchen Calamity

It has been a little over a week since my last blog. Ordinarily I would like to blog more frequently but it was a busy week and I chose to use my time doing other things. Some possible topics that I would have covered, however, are the super bowl, a rodeo, or more basketball. Regarding the super bowl I would have mentioned that the officiating was horrid, Bruce Springsteen was downright atrocious, and the commercials were mindless. The game, though, turned out to be pretty exciting. But that is old news now and not the purpose of this blog. The subject of this blog will be my girlfriend's birthday.

My girlfriend of just over a year and a half had her 21st birthday yesterday. Her name is Olivia. I like her name - its original but not bizarre. There is much more to her that I like than just her name but I'll spare anybody who might actually be reading this. In the weeks leading up to it when the subject of her birthday came up I would simply say, "on your birthday I'm kicking you out." And I did. Yesterday at about 5 o'clock I kicked her out of her own apartment. Then I took over her kitchen and went to work. I then proceeded to make more messes than that kitchen has probably ever seen, caused the smoke alarm to go off which I solved by pulling out the battery and opening the backdoor, and served an elegant, manly yet romantic dinner in about an hour. I cooked two pan-seared oven broiled rib-eyes topped with bacon and wild honey barbecue sauce accompanied by mashed potatoes with cheese and bacon bits, oven toasted french bread, and a dinner salad. It sounds scrumptious but that kitchen was chaos! I now have a new respect for people who can prepare an entire meal at once. There was no time to breathe. It was like juggling a beach ball, a flaming torch, a poodle, and a machete knowing that if anything was dropped you would go starving. Bad analogy.

Nevertheless, everything came out well and Olivia really enjoyed it. For dessert we had a red velvet birthday cake on which I spelled out Happy Birth Day Olivia. Yes, birth day was two words because I ran out of room on the top line. As for the gift, I got her an Ed Hardy perfume set with body lotion and a purse perfume or something like that (I'm not well versed in describing things of that nature). What I do know is that I thought it smelled excellent. Olivia thought so too and really appreciated it. I sincerely enjoyed putting on this birthday celebration for her. In the future, though, it will only be special occasions like this that I cook anything besides meat.