‘My Dad’s Friendship With Charles Barkley’

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Shirley Wang, writing at NPR:

When Charles Barkley’s mother, Charcey Glenn, passed away in June 2015, Barkley’s hometown of Leeds, Alabama, came to the funeral to pay respects. But there was also an unexpected guest.

Barkley’s friends couldn’t quite place him. He wasn’t a basketball player, he wasn’t a sports figure, and he wasn’t from Barkley’s hometown. Here’s what I can tell you about him: He wore striped, red polo shirts tucked into khaki shorts and got really excited about two-for-one deals. He was a commuter. He worked as a cat litter scientist in Muscatine, Iowa. In short, he was everyone’s suburban dad. More specifically, he was my dad.

This was a great read.

‘The 1975 – Notes on an Exceptional Year’

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The 1975’s Matty Healy sat down with NME to talk about the past year, and their upcoming album:

People get confused, they can’t understand why a lad their age wouldn’t be wanting to be in The Courteeners or be in a punk band more than my band. It’s because it’s done, lads, it’s done. We’ve done it. It was great but we’ve done it. It’s like, white men shouting has been done so many times and the interesting perspective in punk is where women are. But that’s why there are interesting bands like Idles who deal with stuff like fragility and toxic masculinity. If there’s meaning, it’ll resonate.

Apple Music Comes to the Amazon Echo

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Apple Music is now available on the Amazon Echo:

To set up Apple Music on the Echo, open the Alexa iOS app and go to the Music section of the app’s Settings. You won’t see Apple Music listed as an existing service, so tap the ‘Link New Service’ button, which will list Apple Music along with several other services.

Once you’ve logged in with your Apple Music credentials, the Apple Music Skill is enabled, which allows you to say things like ‘Alexa, play my New Music Mix on Apple Music.’ You can separately set Apple Music as your default music service, which lets you use Alexa to request music without specifying ‘on Apple Music.’

I’ve been playing with it all weekend and it works great. It doesn’t (currently) have access to your entire iCloud Music Library, so things in your personal collection aren’t available, but the millions of songs on Apple Music are all available, as are your custom playlists.

Liner Notes (December 14th, 2018)

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I’m ready for the weekend.

In this week’s roundup I talk about the massive process of cleaning out my iTunes/Apple Music library, including finally splitting up a bunch of live sessions I had ripped into individual tracks, getting back into some comic books, and then go through my usual weekly media diet from the past week, plus share ten songs I loved. The supporter Q&A post can be found here.

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