Our last two posts will be reversed this year. We usually write something like a Christmas letter in this space this week and then do a Top Posts entry in the days leading up to New Years Eve. I still want to do that, but I need to think a bit about the State of Casa Cabeza before trying to sit down to write about it. We lived through a chaotic end to this year with much, MUCH more chaos seemingly on the horizon. I'm not totally sure how to sum all that up just yet.
With that in mind, we'll do our Top Posts of 2024 this week, and if you're interested, you can look for my State of Casa Cabeza post at some point next week.
Before we get into this, I should maybe note that a LOT more of my attention goes into As For Football these days than goes into this blog. So where previous years might've seen a good bit more posting generally and posts with thousands of readers, this year we had a couple dozen posts with readership that topped out at just over 220.
Friends, this is fine.
Truth is, I already feel quite a bit more famous than I ever wanted to be and have tried to share less about my personal life as a direct result. More to the point, parasocial relationships feel weird on my end. I might be willing to lean into that a bit if I felt like I was getting what *I* wanted out of it, that's not what happens. You might feel like you know me because you listen to our podcast every week, and that's fine. It's good! It means that we're creating a relatable product. But what *I* want from this -- beyond just the success of the show itself -- is more donations to my Swim Across the Sound team and, at a reach level, for folks to buy my memoir. AFF's success is great, but it hasn't translated in those ways. I therefore try to keep it a self-contained project.
Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate that you like our show. However, I'm not going to share more of my personal life just to help As For Football.
So. With all of that said, we can now present our Top Posts of 2024. I've decided to present these strictly in numerical order with a couple of little-loved personal favorites down at the bottom of the page. In each case, you'll see the title first, followed by the number of readers in parentheses.
Top Posts of 2024
Touring My Trophy Case (102)
I reorganized my trophy case, going from two rows to three. In the process, I added a few things that had previously been either in our library or in our china cabinet, and I removed a few things that either weren't true trophies or that were redundant with other stuff that was already in there.
Alas, this proved to be kind of a middle stage of this particular project. I expanded this thing again to four full rows about a week after posting this and have continued reorganizing in the weeks since I first started. I should probably publish an update, but that'll have to wait for the off-season.
Journey Into Madness: The WiiM Pro Plus & Our Household Sound System (115)
With this post, we've now written three times about our never-ending journey towards building a high(ish)-end sound system in our house and on our back deck. While I don't know that we're necessarily done with this project, we're done for right now. Thus, this post serves as a cross between a write-up of lessons learned and an exorcism of the madness that's developed from starting to learn about this stuff in the first place.
This was by far my favorite project of the year, both to execute on the ground and as a writing challenge about the nature of obsession.
#AsForDynamite: Pushing the Boundaries (118)
After watching Will Osprey's match against Kyle Fletcher a few weeks ago, the guys are Wrestletalk said something to the effect those two guys had pushed the boundaries of what's possible in pro-wrestling in 2024. For what it's worth, this is what I personally like most about AEW. They not presenting the same old staid, expected crap. They are at least trying to take the art form in a new direction.
The #AsForDynamite project did not really get over. But this post did okay, probably because it's less about pro-wrestling than it's about finding and exploiting one's particular marketing niche.
#AsForLax & a Personal View of Sports Psychology (121)
Announcer Nikolai Busko called me out twice during Saturday afternoon’s broadcast of Army Lacrosse versus Lehigh. The first time was awesome. The second time, though, I felt bad about it.
It’s funny because I don’t think of myself as any kind of expert in a lot of sports and certainly not in reference to college lacrosse. But because of As For Football, folks sometimes take what I say seriously. That’s great a lot of the time, but at the point when it feels like what we say might start getting back to the coaches or especially the players, that’s where it makes me feel a little weird.
Did you ever have a hobby that got so totally out of hand that you wound up with sponsors and a team of people working to help you develop it?
Strange experience.
I often commiserate with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the sense that Doyle longed to write something besides Sherlock Holmes, but none of his other creations ever worked out with anything like as much success. He even killed off Holmes at one point, only to have the public literally freak out and demand that he bring the Great Detective back.
Anyway, this post veered off from talking Army Lax into my personal sports philosophy, so I dropped it here rather than on AFF. It got to be about me, so I put it on my blog.
Swim Across the Sound 2024 (132)
The Swim is an annual charity race sponsored by St. Vincent's Medical Center to benefit cancer patients in Southwest Connecticut. The Swim doesn't pay for cancer treatments. It pays for all of the things that insurance doesn't cover.
At last year's banquet, Swim organizers told us about a woman that the event had helped the previous year. This poor woman found out that she had cancer just a few weeks after her husband died unexpectedly. Quite apart from the enormous human tragedy of both losing her partner and finding out that she was facing a deadly disease, she also lost both her primary and secondary sources of income through no fault of her own. Not only was she without her husband, not only was she facing cancer, she and her children were -- suddenly -- looking at maybe losing their house, too.
Who the Hell Do I Think I Am? (2024 Update) (194)
This is a little explainer: Who the Hell do I think I am?
I first published this when I initially joined the Bluesky social network. A lot has happened since then, so I'm re-upping it with an update as of November 2024.
Hi, my name is Dan. I write under the pen name Danno E. Cabeza.
Let's Reboot Miami Vice! (221)
It took some doing, but I finally convinced my wife to watch the original Miami Vice with me via Amazon’s FreeVee service. We’d just finished The Sopranos, and for as much as we enjoyed The Sopranos, I gotta say we're both enjoying Vice a good bit more. Part of that is undoubtedly down to nostalgia. My wife and I were both 80s kids. Most of it, though, comes from the vibes, which were immaculate at the time and remain unchanged even to modern eyes. I have therefore started wondering what a modern reboot of Miami Vice might look like.
Here’s my idea.
Turns out that a decent number of people liked this idea. Cool.
Honorable Mentions
These posts were not much loved, but *I* liked them.
A Short Story About Sleep & Drinking (39)
I went over to my friend Bill’s house one weekend about 2.5 years ago to watch college football. We got HAMMERED. Once I called my wife & told her I didn’t think I could drive safely home, she said, “Fine. See you tomorrow,” & the gloves came off.
Think: ugly college party weekend, but I was 48.
This story culminated in my seeing a dietician for about six months this year, and do you know, that really helped me. I haven't said this anywhere else, but I think Army Football badly needs to hire a new dietician or nutritionist, and in fact, that a significant portion of their failure at the Army-Navy Game this year probably lies with their rest and nutrition plan. I mean, they were already giving away at least 10% on the field by having played twice as much football as Navy over the previous month. To make up the difference, they needed immaculate execution with their food and sleep plan, and from what I saw, it did not look like they got that.
As Coach Monken always says, you have to control the stuff that you can control and not beat yourself. For athletes, this starts with sleep and food. Unfortunately, most of us don't start realizing this until we've become, like, 51 year old endurance athletes. At that point, you either have to work meticulously at everything or quit.
I really want to know if the team fed their players a big steak dinner on Friday before the game. Because that seems like a "football guy" thing to do, but because of the length of time it takes to actually digest steak, it might have created the low energy we saw on the field Saturday.
Regardless, I'm quite sure that if you gave the Army Team's training, sleep, and nutrition schedule to an actual expert, he or she could show you where the discrete mistake(s) lie.
D&D: Penguinoids (51)
Noble but rare and often somewhat reclusive, the Penguinoids of the polar regions live in settlements scattered across the polar tundra. Many fear outsiders, but a select few venture forth to trade and to see the world.
A fun, silly project written for my daughter Emma.
No comments:
Post a Comment