Growing up a sports-obsessed teen in the early 1980s, I have distinct memories of the Dunbar basketball team. I never saw them play in person, but I read dozens of stories about them (Baltimore had three daily papers back then, and I read each sports section cover to cover) and watched them on the news. […]
I have spent years with one philosophy – cable TV is not the devil. Some people I knew would brag about how few channels they had, and I would point out all that they had missed. I defended cable prices by saying that we got value for what we paid. But over the past couple […]
I don’t know why I did it. Several years ago, I started to watch Friday Night Lights on Netflix. I wanted to understand the inside jokes I heard from family and pop culture. I wanted to feel the power of Coach Taylor. I wanted to see every football game come down to the final play. So I watched […]
I love The Breakfast Club. The movie came out during my junior year of high school. I was a wrestler (and can dissect the strengths and weaknesses of the portrayal of a high school wrestler ad infinitum). I could identify in different ways with the other characters. The theme song was the theme of my girlfriend’s […]
I tried to resist, but I had want to weigh in with an alternate view on the kerfuffle about participation trophies for young athletes, sparked by NFL player James Harrison taking these kinds of trophies away from his 8 and 6-year-old sons because they didn’t “earn” them. So if you are predisposed to dislike the […]
Thirty years ago, R.E.M. released Fables of the Reconstruction. The album has taken almost mythic qualities among the band’s canon over time, mainly because no discussion can avoid the problems the band had during the recording process. In short, they were stuck in England where the weather was horrible and producer Joe Boyd pushed them in […]
I will lose a friend tonight. Actually a bunch of friends as Cougar Town broadcasts its last episode. Go ahead and make fun. I have heard all the jokes. The ones about the bad name. The ones about the quality of the show. The ones about pretty much anything that ignores the fact that the […]
I have to admit, I used to do this. I still might do it on occasion, but I try to avoid this particular annoyance as much as possible these days. Partially because I realize it doesn’t matter, but mostly because I have realized how stupid it sounds. People have to stop bragging about not doing […]
I was supposed to post these last week, but forgot. I wrote it and had it saved, but totally forgot to post because I was headed to Vegas. So here you do – the “minor” awards for The Brians which are actually more fun than the real thing. The Dorian Gray Award: Felicity Jones for […]
Now that we have that silliness known as The Oscars out of the way, it’s time to focus on the real awards – The Brians. In case you don’t know, these are the awards recognizing the best in film for movies which I saw in the theater the previous year. This is a big year […]