Waiting on a Parade?
Posted on October 27, 2004 at 9:28 am | No Comments
Are any other Red Sox fans feeling sort of, well, lost? I honestly don’t know what to do with myself… my brain has absolutely no idea how to deal with what’s occurring in the wake of last week’s stressful, then depressing, then cautiously optimistic, then completely unbelievable Yankee smackdown. This so-far-too-easy World Series can’t really be happening, can it? It’s highly possible that I’m in some kind of sports-induced state of shock. Seriously.
So I’m getting an overwhelming amount of traffic from people searching for “Red Sox Parade Route”, thanks to this post I made just over one year ago, which included this map…
Eleven days ago, on Saturday, October 16th, 2004, the Yanks had just humiliated us 19-8 in Game 3 of the ALDS, and that was exactly one year after Grady got himself fired. We were down three games to none and like many, I’d lost hope. I came real close to opening up photoshop and crossing out the ‘3’ in ‘2003’ and replacing it with a ‘4’ on that map up there. But thanks to one swing by Ortiz and the games that followed, I damn well didn’t needed to.
And barring what could only be called an “Old-School-Red-Sox-Style” collapse (I just knocked on wood several times), we might actually have a real parade route to follow pretty soon. One that doesn’t end up at the bottom of the Charles River. How ’bout that?
Rest in Peace, Mr. Peel
Posted on October 26, 2004 at 9:51 am | No Comments
Like a big bag of bricks from above, I’ve just learned that the best radio DJ of two generations (his older peers and his legions of younger listeners) has died at age 65.
BBC Radio 1’s John Peel is gone. Since the late 1980s, when I started listening to the music that shaped me, I’ve listened to John Peel. Through traded tapes or imported “Peel Sessions” vinyl, and eventually (thankfully) through internet streams, I’ve heard of this man who became the pied piper of independent music, who championed bands like the Wedding Present, Stereolab, and dozens, hundreds, so many, many more. Probably the single most influential new music DJ of all time, and definitely the one who impacted me the most personally.
Musicians dream of ‘making it’ somewhere, of getting to some unnamed place that marks personal success. I had always thought the recording of a live radio session, with John Peel at the board, would be that place. That if someone got there, anything else was extra.
So today, I’ll be listening to this, this, this, and a whole bunch of these.
Rest in peace, John Peel. And thanks for everything.
update: from across the pond, read my friend jo’s tribute here, and check out some good peelie links over at coolfer.