Four Things on a Friday: A Personal Round-Up

I want you guys to appreciate how busy I got this week. It's college football Week 0, both AFF podcasts ran over an hour this week, and I'm looking for a cover artist for The Return of Dr. Necropolis. And let me just note that as much as I love that title, "The Return of Dr. Necropolis" is long and a bit cumbersome for an actual book cover.

Sigh.

If you missed it, we had a truly outstanding AFF Army Football Show this week. Shannon Horne's husband Paul Horne joined us for an in-depth dive into Army's O-Line. I can pretty much guarantee that you've never heard anything like this before. 

It got surprisingly mathematical. Paul went straight for my engineer's heart.

Anyway. I am trying to write here a little more often, so here goes.

1. My Buddy Sean Gave Me a Quote.

I love this cover so much
it sent me down a rabbit-hole.

Sean Smith, my plebe year roommate and author of Rank Absurdity and Even a Dog Enlists, Why Not You? gave me a quote for Dr. Necropolis this week. I can't possible put all of this on the cover, but here's where we are right now.

"Dr Necropolis takes comic book tropes that have been done to death and twists them like a pretzel, spinning a back-alley supervillain tale with unexpected bite. While its warped super-history and neo-Noir York grit recall Alan Moore’s Watchmen, to his credit Danno E. Cabeza has his own thing going here, crafting a world that somehow feels both comfortably grounded and vividly, defiantly weird. Crucially, he does this without losing sight of why this stuff was so much fun in the first place, never thinking himself too serious an artiste to gift us with a Radical Robot Rampage when the situation calls for it."

I'll own that Sean owes me a slightly more concise re-write, but I still found this pretty damned flattering.

2. I Hit the Mountaintop Yesterday

I had good stuff in the water yesterday -- for once -- and wound up doing my entire swim workout as one long set. Basically, I did 3 x (3 x 200 Free) on descending intervals, 3:05, 3:00, 2:55 plus one extra, aerobic-paced 200 to give me an even 2000 yards. With that, the set went almost exactly half an hour.

I hit an incredibly powerful, almost manic runner's high about midway through the set and tried to ride it up through the back half. Friends, I felt really good and got faster as the set got harder. Then I went into the gym, still riding the high, and cranked out another forty-five minutes of weights to the sweet, sweet sounds of Rage Against the Machine. By the time I left, I felt better -- and higher -- than I'd been in months.

The upside, obviously, is that I had a good workout, to the point that I can still feel the faintest aftereffects this morning. Part of me is still glowing. The downside, though, is that it can take eight or even twelve-plus hours for something like that to wear all the way off, and as noted, I can still feel. Which means that I also still felt it when I was trying to sleep last night -- and even when I woke up to go to the bathroom at 4:30 am this morning.

I'm now in a weird headspace. My mind feels sluggish, and my eyes hurt, but my muscular and aerobic systems are ready to crank out a metric century on the bike for a PR.

At some point, I am going to crash, and it's not going to be pretty.

3. AFF has a New Marketing Intern

My daughter started with us this week. She's a senior Psychology major at Clark University in Worcester, MA, working in a 4+1 Master's Program that will eventually see her with an MA in Marketing. So she needs a portfolio, and for the time-being, she's building it with AFF.

So far, she's taken over most of our social media, pulled and recaptioned this week's clips from the College Football Roundtable, and rewritten and reorganized our weekly mailer.

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For what it's worth, I told her that I didn't think recaptioning these shorts was worth the time it takes, and she responded that, "They look the way I want them to look." That was a good answer.

Long term, Emma wants to design an Army-Navy t-shirt for us and maybe eventually put together a one-minute Tik Tok-style weekly show summarizing the biggest key points from that week's content. We'll see how that goes.

4. Stratford speed cameras ticket thousands of drivers in first month (CT Post)

The following is strictly local news:

Nearly 4,900 motorists were ticketed here in July by the half dozen new automated speed cameras.

According to data provided by Mayor David Chess' administration, 4,861 violations were issued between July 1 and July 31 within the three targeted school zones at Nichols and Second Hill Lane elementary schools and Bunnell High School.

Prior to that period, drivers just received warnings for travelling 10 miles or more above the limit. 

Nobody likes Big Brother, but this is such an obvious, common-sense approach to traffic enforcement that I can't see how anyone can be mad at it, especially since it's only targeting school zone.

***

That's all I've got, friends, but if you haven't yet, do me a favor and subscribe to the newsletter I put together last week to support Dr. Necropolis. I promise to send you just one email per month, and anyway, I'm gonna need your help getting the word out about the book. 

Happy Friday!