Nonsequitur Life

July is not my friend.

We revisit this tirade every year.

I’m stuck in this phase of making these monthly posts out of obligation to my bank account because I pay for this domain and it’s expensive and I hate that it’s sitting here untouched because my brain is barely functional. I want to get back to having fun with dumb experiments here, but fuckitall I do not have the energy.

Today I woke up with Cheap Trick’s The Flame drumming through my head so loud I was almost expecting it to actually be playing somewhere in the room.

Anyway.

I was on my way home from one of a multitude of recent appointments during afternoon rush hour, and whilst sitting still between barely rolling, emergency lights lit up my rear view mirror. Traffic parted, leaving a path down the center of the road, and the cop car zoomed through. Traffic re-merged and continued to crawl. A few minutes later, there were more lights, traffic parted, and a pickup truck towing a motor boat (County Sheriff? Maybe?) came through. Traffic re-merged and continued to crawl. A few minutes later, another cop car came through.

By the time I got a mile down the road to the daily choke point of the bridge crossing Ye Olde Mississippi, there were four cop cars blocking a lane on both sides of the road, with officers standing on the bridge on both sides, and farther down the river, I could see more lights, probably the motor boat looking for an access point to the water. Once traffic got through that bottleneck, things resumed to a normal pace and I finally got home nearly an hour after what should have been a ten-mile, sub-twenty minute drive.

AND THEN THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE NEWS ABOUT POLICE ACTIVITY ON THE RIVER.

Rude.

In other news…

Bob and I just spent two weeks watching a Grand Sumo tournament, because apparently we like Sumo wrestling now. Neither one of us cares at all about any sports, but a while back, one of the Twitch streamers he watches regularly raided another channel that streams live Sumo coverage from Japan. Bob started watching it out of curiosity and started showing me bits and pieces and this last tournament we both sat down to watch it.

The coverage is all in Japanese, so the [Canadian] streamer provides his own English commentary and does a good job explaining what everything means. There’s so much ceremony and ritual to the sport and I think that’s one of the things I like about it. Also, there’s a glaring lack of the fragile male dramatics of American professional sports because the wrestlers are expected to conduct themselves within strict guidelines, especially at the higher ranks.

There is a fifteen-day tournament every six weeks and it lasts nine hours a day. We don’t watch all of it (Nine. Hours.), mostly just the top division matches, but Japan is fourteen hours ahead of us, so those matches run from two to four in the morning. So we catch it on the replay the next day. We’re learning all kinds of new Japanese words, and what all the rituals signify, and we’re developing favorite wrestlers, and it’s a fun thing to watch together.

And say what you will about their roundness and weight, but those guys have insane muscle and could crush skulls with their thighs.

Also half of them are young enough to be my children.

Jinx is a big fan of the theme song and its random English words.

She’s been working on perfecting her Shiko while bringing in the monthly Last.fm stats.

—

Top 10 Most Played Artists for June 2025…

1.) Billy Joel … 158 plays

2.) Splender … 154 plays

3.) Panic! At the Disco … 152 plays

4.) Ingram Hill … 122 plays

5.) The Killers … 117 plays

6.) O.A.R. … 93 plays

7.) Stage … 33 plays

8.) Brandon Flowers … 32 plays

9.) Nine Days … 31 plays

10.) Matt Nathanson … 30 plays

Honorable mention: Fall Out Boy, The Fray, Better Than Ezra, The Monkees, Avicii, The Young Veins, Gin Blossoms, Train, Elton John, Toad the Wet Sprocket

Total of 1,132 plays of 448 tracks from 101 albums by 37 artists.

—

Just Between You and Me Lou Gramm