Movies & TV
- Hitman: The Ricky Hatton Story — maybe just called Hatton? Caught this on the flight home from London. Hatton’s rise was squarely in the middle of my peak boxing phase, so it was great to watch a recap of his career and relive his ups and downs.
- Six Schizophrenic Brothers — an unbelievably tragic story. The documentary spent a little time at the end explaining the biology/psychology/sociology of how this might have happened, but it was on my mind from the top so I was hoping they’d dig into it more.
- The Boys (season 4) — the most over the top show on the planet continues to one-up itself, and I can’t look away.
- The Bear (season 3) — the episode “Napkins”, which builds the backstory of the lovable Tina, is one of the best episodes of TV I’ve seen in a while, and the spiritual successor to “Forks” from last season.
Reading
- Out There Screaming — this anthology of Black horror writing edited by Jordan Peele was fantastic, with a little bit of everything ranging from creature features to psychological terror to world-ending apocalypse.
- Four Thousand Weeks — most of this book boiled down to common sense and pragmatism, but there were a few practical takeaways that I think could help my day to day. I love the idea of having 2 to-do lists — one “closed” that is limited to a fixed number of items (say 10), and another “open” list that just feeds the closed one. I currently have a “today” list with 58 (!) items, so I could use some stricter rules for what I put on my plate.
Music
I caught And So I watch You from Afar and Caspian at The Belasco in downtown LA. In the vein of my experience seeing M83 earlier this year, it continues to blow me away when I go to a show expecting a certain type of music (melodic, instrumental) and end up experiencing these massive, face-melting sounds. More please!
In more casual listening, I randomly had the Alabama Shakes come up on an Apple Music station I loaded up for some backyard lounging, and got totally hooked on them for a little while.
Miscellanea
I got Ashley an Ooni pizza oven for her birthday, and it’s our new obsession. We did a trial run at home, and quickly gained confidence in our pizza launching and rotating skills. It’s kind of mind-blowing that the oven heats up to over 900 degrees and cooks a full pie in about 60 seconds.
We decided to debut it for real while we watched the Olympic opening ceremonies with a few friends and family over. It was a hit, and became a true collaborative effort as we had pizza runners and slicers jumping in to keep everything flowing.
