Something happened on Wednesday. The blog went viral in some way that hasn’t happened previously. I think that a West Pointer somewhere--I’m guessing from a class in the mid- to late-1970s--saw my preview of the Hawai’i game on Facebook and sent it out to a bunch of his buddies in a monster email blast. It propagated from there. Alas, the event came without much in the way of statistics from Blogger’s traffic tracking pages, so there are a few other possibilities. But some kind of email chain seems most likely.
Regardless, hello new readers!
Experience suggests that most of you will not stick around long, and that’s okay. As I tell my own classmates, our friendship is not contingent on your reading my stuff. The blog’s traffic has been growing over the years, but this isn’t a Get Rich Quick scheme. It’s the way I entertain myself while I’m on Metro-North going back and forth from New York City.
The blog is intentionally organized as a salad bar. You take what you want and ignore the rest. There is no one else on earth who also likes all the stuff that I like. I get that. You don’t have to like my stuff; you don’t have to like me. It’s fine, really.
Writing isn’t my career. Some people build little ships in little bottles. I write a blog. It is what it is.
1. Hurricane Florence tracker: Storm may bring unprecedented flooding, historical rainfall (Yahoo News)
"This will likely be the storm of a lifetime for portions of the Carolina coast, and that's saying a lot given the impacts we've seen from Hurricanes Diana, Hugo, Fran, Bonnie, Floyd, and Matthew," according to one National Weather Service meteorologist in Wilmington, North Carolina. "I can't emphasize enough the potential for unbelievable damage from wind, storm surge, and inland flooding with this storm."
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| Current storm track, per my daughter Emma. |
I wasn’t gonna cover this because everybody is covering it, but at this point, my literal thoughts and prayers are with you down there. I lived in New Bern, NC, as a kid when my dad was stationed at Cherry Point. It wasn’t my favorite stop on the Marine Corps Mystery Tour, but I still hope that you’re all safe and relatively secure from what looks to be some truly nasty flooding.
Unlike other Teen Titans-centric shows and movies that have aired in recent years, Titans is getting back to the team’s roots—specifically, the arc they follow in Marv Wolfman’s The New Teen Titans, in which Raven brings the group together to battle her father, the demon Trigon.
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| I thought this came out in the 80s, but it looks very 90s. |
Raven (Teagan Croft) is featured prominently in new photos from the series that also show how both Robin (Brenton Thwaites) and Starfire (Anna Diop) will ultimately cross paths with one another. More than that, though, the photos also give us a much better look at how Titans has taken a lot of inspiration from DC Comics for the live-action appearances of its more fantastical characters.
I don’t know that I would call any of the new images “new”. I think I’d seen all of them previously, and it was obvious from the trailer that they were gonna do the Trigon storyline, though probably as part of a slow reveal. If I had to guess, I’d guess that Trigon himself won’t make an appearance until about midway through season 3.
Still not sure we’re gonna watch this. My daughter Emma is a monster comics fan and a specific fan of the Teen Titans. But $75/year is a lot to drop for a single show, especially since nearly everything else they’re putting out has been on Netflix or Amazon Prime previously.
I told Emma that we’d get the service if she committed to reading the curated comics collections that the producers have said they’ll release alongside their new content--by way of originating context, presumably--but she’s old school. She vastly prefers paper comics to comics on her iPad. But if you’re not gonna read the comics, then it makes obvious economic sense to just buy the single-season shows via Amazon or Apple TV.
3. Friday Hair Metal: Ridin’ the Storm Out
My favorite song from REO Speedwagon.
A 10-year-old boy in Missouri is recovering after he was attacked by wasps and fell from a tree house face-first onto a meat skewer.
Imagine trying to explain this to your friends and neighbors.
5. Blame Lane Kiffin for OU-Army pay-per-view (NewsOK)
When Fox network picked up the OU-Florida Atlantic season opener, that virtually assured OU-Army would be relegated to pay-per-view. Even if Sooner officials don’t like it...
Pay-per-view is the most lucrative platform for Fox, since OU fans have a long history of purchasing pay-per-view offerings, even at $54.99, the cost of the OU-Army game.
What a waste. Army is playing this game in order to put its brand in front of a larger television audience; that’s practically the only reason to have this game at all. But now it’s gonna be relegated to some 10K hardcore Sooners fans and a few maniacs who’ll watch anything that’s labeled Army Football.
Fair warning: I’m taking next week off.
I have a new project; it’s kind of a lifestyle / philosophy / cookbook that I’ve tentatively titled “Playing with Fire: A Grill Geek’s Guide to the Backyard Lifestyle.” I’m planning to spend next week working on that instead of on football. The biggest reason I do this here instead of at SB*Nation or Forgotten 5 is that I want to be my own boss and set my own schedule, and I’m finally gonna take advantage of that next week. I’m just gonna do my own thing.
I really want to share the first part of Playing with Fire with you because I like how it came out, but it’s just not ready yet. Hit me privately if you’re curious. After much internal debate, I’ve decided that this is gonna be that rarest of projects, an R-Rated cookbook. So now you’ve got something to look forward to.
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That’s all I’ve got, folks. Enjoy the weekend.
Go Army! Beat Hawai’i!!!
Great post, per usual. However, I feel like you were quoting Big Trouble in Little China with the salad bar simile. :D
ReplyDeleteI do love that movie.
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