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Baltimore, continued

We landed at Thurgood Marshall Airport and "ubered" to the city at about noon. Unbeknownst (?) to our driver, the Baltimore Marathon was taking place at the same time, so the middle of downtown was blocked off and traffic was gridlocked. The upside was we were able to see much more of Baltimore than we otherwise would have had we been able to drive directly to our hotel on the harbor. For example, I can tell you that the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) has a large campus. It probably took us almost two hours to finally arrive at the hotel. Thankfully, we were able to check in and relax in our room a bit, which we desperately needed after our adventures since 5 AM. So after watching Fulham lose to Arsenal on the television in our room, we went out in search for food. We found some at Kneads Bakeshop. It's a spacious place with deli sandwiches, coffee, and scruptious pastries. After eating for the first time since Detroit Metro Airport, we ventured along the harbor...
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On the way to Baltimore

We took the Michigan Flyer bus to DTW. It was the first time we'd ever done that. Besides having to get up at the ungodly time of 4:45 AM to get to the bus stop in East Lansing, it was pleasant. More later...
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My new-found love for football (not the American version)

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I'm watching the Major League Baseball playoffs as I write this (Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Cincinnati Reds in the National League wildcard series), but it's the rare time recently that I have had a baseball game on.  The sports that I have enjoyed in the past just don't excite me much these days. Maybe my break from baseball has to do with my favorite team, the Tigers, being essentially unwatchable for the last month or so of the season (though they did actually beat the Cleveland Guardians today in the first game of their playoff series. So maybe there is life in them yet). Football--or as the rest of the world outside of the U.S. knows it--"American football," hasn't grabbed me either. What it really comes down to is this: I am increasingly reluctant to sit down and watch a game that takes 3 1/2 hours to play with almost constant commercial interruptions. Over the last three years, in a change that has been gradual, my sport of choice is Premier League footbal...
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Orwell (not the book you think) and musings about "Dear Leader"

I will not be writing about the hatemonger and his demise last week. Instead, I will begin by writing about George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London . Well, for four days I have been away from working on this post. In that time, the guy whose name rhymes with "Gnarly Jerk" has been elevated to martyr status by dear leader and his rogues gallery of sycophants. And just yesterday, Jimmy Kimmel was, for all intents and purposes, canceled for having the audacity of joking about dear leader and Jerk. The dark cloud of fascism is right on top of us. It's deeply disturbing. Back to Orwell. I liked Down and Out. The best   part was his description of working as a plongeur (dish washer) at an upscale hotel (the Hotel Lotti) between the Place de la Concorde and the Louvre. The hotel is still in business and looks to be still upscale. If I'd known about in when we were in Paris, I would have sought it out. The book gets bleaker in the second half when Orwell leav...
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The Swerve (into September)

As I write this, news broke that there was a school shooting in Minneapolis. "Murica doing what it does best...and just the excuse "Dear Leader" needs to send the National Guard to the Twin Cities (I am only half-kidding), extending his authoritarian tentacles even further. Sorry to finally get back to this blog and immediately start in on a downer. I am returning to this post four days later. I finally finished reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. It was the heaviest reading I'd done in a long time, and a good primer into the world of Epicureanism, the search for ancient Roman manuscripts, Poggio Bracciolini (a seeker of said manuscripts), and how Epicureanism and Atomism flew in the face of Catholic/Christian orthodoxy. Advocates of this forward-thinking philosophy often paid with their lives. This was a dense but ultimately rewarding reading experience, a little bit out of my comfort zone, but that can be a good challenge. So now...
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SuburbsFest Grand Rapids

I attended one evening of one day of the annual Rockin' the Suburbs SuburbsFest. Having already blown through 96 or so hours of vacation time for Europe, I wasn't sure I'd have enough for two days, plus I need to save up for trips to Baltimore and Savannah. So even though the fest was in Michigan (or maybe because the fest was in Michigan) I only went for one day. I'm not sure why I feel the need to explain myself, but there it is. The one night I was there (Saturday night), it was pretty, pretty, pretty good (as Larry David might say). I saw several podcast friends, as well as the RTS "house band" Frank Muffin, the Stick Arounds (from Lansing), and an excellent young band from GR/west Michigan called Money Soup. When I say they're young, I mean it. I'm not sure any of them are over 21 years old. They play a funk/soul/jazz/pop hybrid and write their own material. I'm astounded at how good they are at such young ages. Their drummer, Lainey, is a pur...
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A Post for July

July is, amazingly, almost over, so I'd better get a post in. It figures that after being so prolific during our European vacation, I'd go silent for almost the entire next month. I'm at that stage in which I can't believe there was a time that I spent 2 1/2 weeks in Europe. It now seems like a long time ago, even though it was only a month ago that we returned home. July has been marked by a lot of dog-sitting bookmarked by a podcast recording on July 3 (Book Bound podcast) and friends wedding on July 5--and a Tigers baseball game in Detroit with some other podcast friends (from Rockin' the Suburbs). This is also the month of Wet Leg and their excellent new album Moisturizer , which I was skeptical about but now absolutely adore. They have to be one of the most promising bands to appear in a long time. Moisturizer eclipses their first album. "CPR" is undoubtedly my "song of the summer." It's just so catchy, breezy, humorous, and fun.
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