The un-cruelest month

October is just the best, plus Links of the Week: A new Springsteen record, animal senses, and RIP Coolio

Photo by Maddi Bazzocco on Unsplash

Let’s rank the months, worst to first:

12) February

11) August

10) January

9) March

8) June

7) December

6) July*

5) November

4) May

3) September

2) April

1) October

*I would rank July lower but that’s the month Alix and I got married. July is never going to land in the bottom half.

October’s the first full month of fall. Baseball heads into the playoffs. The leaves start to turn. Mums show up in the planters. Apples are at their peak. And as you might have heard, it’s decorative gourd season.

Halloween is the perfect holiday—you dress however you want, and you never have to stress about gifts, because everybody wants the same thing. We have a bit of an issue this year. Alix had to go to Costco the other day, so she went ahead and bought Halloween candy. Our neighborhood gets a LOT of trick or treaters—I counted something like 250 at our house one year—and so we buy these giant bags of fun size candy bars. We don’t usually buy them a whole month ahead of time, though. This will be a stern test of our restraint.

No candy corn, though. Candy corn is terrible. They’re the devil’s Chiclets.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My guest on the latest SouthBound is Ivan Maisel, a legendary college football writer who talks about this season so far, as well as the college football landscape … but we also talk about the death of his son, Max, which Ivan writes about so beautifully in his book I KEEP TRYING TO CATCH HIS EYE.

2. My weekly for WFAE was about the meaning of the equinox, and the wobbliness of our lives.

3. RIP Coolio, whose passing led lots of people online to share stories about his Forrest Gump-like existence. Dude could show up anywhere.

4. For an upcoming SouthBound I’m reading an advance copy of Jonathan Abrams’ THE COME UP, an oral history of hip-hop. It’s excellent, and I feel safe in saying that no matter how much you know or love hip-hop, you’ll learn a lot from this book.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: The American Kennel Club has launched a digital library, which might be fun for you the reader and is a godsend for me the researcher.

6. Another great read (so far): Ed Yong’s AN IMMENSE WORLD, about how animals process the world around them. (Spoiler alert: It’s VERY different than the way humans do.)

7. I can’t say I’ve looked forward to a Bruce Springsteen record lately, but I’m looking forward to this one: He’s doing an album of soul covers.

8. Sorry to see that Trevor Noah is leaving THE DAILY SHOW.

9. To send Coolio out in style, here’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.” I watched this video a thousand times when it came out.
   

   10. And it feels like we have to include Weird Al’s “Amish Paradise,” too.

   See y’all next week, everybody.