As with all my annual lists, this only pertains to books new to me in 2023, with no re-reads from previous years (and there are always a handful of re-reads…looking at you, Alan Furst). Without further ado, here are my favorites from this past year, in order.
Read moreFive Spooky Podcasts for the Halloween Season
When you really love Halloween and eerier aspects of autumn, it always feels like Spooky Season is right around the corner, no matter if it’s high summer or the depths of winter. And when it gets to be late August and early September, I start to listen to some of my favorite spooky old radio shows I’ve downloaded over the years, or audiobook short stories that give me the chills. And of course the creepier podcasts that help me get me through the day. We all have some go-to favorites, but if you’re looking for recommendations for something scary to listen to as we enter the best time of the year, these are the five I’d recommend (in no particular order).
Read moreHeel Spurs: Top 10 San Antonio Players Who Make Great Heels and Villains
The San Antonio Spurs have had a reputations of being a straight-laced, team-first squad for decades, to the point where many fans think they’re boring. This is thanks to the humble, nice-guy leadership of legends like David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Avery Johnson, and so on. The “buy into the system” expectations for this team are as clear as the black and white on their jerseys. But there’s silver in those jerseys too, a gray area for players who are harder to tame and buck at the heavy-hand placed on them by Pop and the front office (affectionally know by Spurs fans as PATFO). Now this list is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and like great heels in wrestling, these are the Spurs players who took a turn toward villainy, providing some drama (be it entertaining or franchise threatening) for a team that is unfairly treated as vanilla, as plain paper, as drama free. They’ve been anything but over the years, thanks to these thorny Spurs in our heels.
Read moreA Look Back at Our Challenge to Find the Greatest Soda for Ice Cream Floats
Two years ago this summer, two ambitious scientists commenced the long, laborious, diabetic adventure to discover the best soda to use for an ice cream float. Using Stewart’s Vanilla as the constant throughout, and breaking the dozens of soda options down into six specific categories, these two meticulous analysts…no, dare I say HEROES…taste tested each soda and vanilla ice cream combo using a rigorous system of metrics and scoring to determine just what soda is the best for floats. Th results were not what either expected, and you can read about each part of the investigation within.
Read moreMy Top 10 Books of 2019
As with all of my annual “best books of the year” lists, these don’t have to be “new” books, but they’re all new to me, and the list includes no re-reads, only first-timers. I’m pretty happy with this year’s overall batch. These are the ones that kept me up late into the night flipping pages and reading on, and as usual, I cheated a bit and added more than 10!
Read moreThe Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Six and the FINAL RESULTS
And so we have come to the end of our scientific jaunt into the deepest realms of the ice cream soda float universe…or something like that. We have come to the final round, the root beer round! And once I reveal the final results of the best root beer soda to pair with vanilla ice cream, I will also share our final tally of the winner in each category. (Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)
Read moreThe Ice Cream Soda Float Challenge, Round Five
After exploring the various flavors of Cola, Cherry, Pepper, and Cream sodas paired with vanilla ice cream, we have arrived at the largest and most diverse round of them all, what we’re going to call the Fruit Round. Now not all the sodas here are technically fruit flavored. For example, Big Red is technically a red cream soda, but we are not going to explore a round of that specific type, and it didn’t really fit the regular cream soda round either, so here it goes, alongside the other bright rainbow-esque colors and flavors of the fruit sodas. Our possibilities were almost endless here, but we settled on eight and only eight, partially so our hearts don’t stop beating from diabetic shock.
The sodas include Big Red, Stewart’s Key Lime Pie, Grape Nehi, Orange Nehi, Flathead Lake’s Huckleberry, Coke’s California Raspberry, Coke’s Georgia Peach, and Swamp Pop, a strawberry flavored soda popular in Louisiana.
Yeah, that’s a lot of fruit soda…
(Cover Image: “Root Beer Float” by Sharon Drummond.)
Read moreRanked: Every Album by The Cars
The Cars have been one of my favorite bands since around the time I transitioned from middle school to high school, which was the mid-90s, perhaps an odd time to become a fan of 80s New Wave. Nevertheless, I would listen to them obsessively on my Walkman cassette player and later on my Discman—so super cool, I know! Or rad! Or whatever we were saying back then. Anyway, after Ric Ocasek’s unfortunate passing this September, I revisited those Cars albums and decided to rank them in order of my personal favorites, because I’ve already done the same with so many other favorite bands, including my favorite of all time, Tom Petty, so why not The Cars? With that said, let’s go!
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