The Week in Review
July 10-15
In case you missed any of the newsletters from the last several days, we have a recap for you today.
As I write, Rory McIlroy barely missed an eagle put on #5 and is now up two strokes on Viktor Hovland at “The Open.” A few other guys are charging.
We’re working on something golf-related for early this week in honor of what we used to call “The British Open.”
July 10
But it has a bigger effect on my life than I ever previously realized
“I was going to do a long-form email about this album, but I decided against it.
I’m familiar with a lot of the songs, but doing a deep-dive into simply the first track on the album, ‘Kid Charlemagne,’ is a world into itself.”
Many years after The Royal Scam by Steely Dan was released, I gave myself license to publicly appreciate the band.
The story also indirectly relates to one’s confidence in expressing opinions that may not often be popular—but correct, nonetheless.
The Yacht Rock genre is important here, but not explored in depth. Perhaps we can do that in the future.
July 11
No secret…it is “Knebworth 1990”
The kernel of the idea to review Knebworth 1990 was a video of a Phil Collins live performance of In the Air Tonight from this concert festival.
Great show. Honestly, I’d never heard about it, perhaps because I am not British.
Remnants of the original British Invasion—Clapton and McCartney—are featured.
The second wave of British rock—Pink Floyd (by name) and component parts of Led Zeppelin—were also showcased.
An oft-forgotten era in British rock history was the interlude of the late 1970s—post Invasion, pre-2nd Invasion—where acts such as prog-rockers Genesis and blues-roots wizards Dire Straits, who both appear at Knebworth, came into being.
Finally, as for the “Second British Invasion” we get to see its representation in the performance of Tears for Fears.
There is some discrepancy about what the “Second British Invasion” was all about—how to define it, what acts were and were not part of the official “Invasion,” and so forth. It doesn’t really matter in this case—for this concert in particular—because all of the acts were British and the concert took place in England. The “Invasions” were the Brit rockers coming over to America and taking over its airwaves.
Also, we get Cliff Richard and the Shadows…not terribly well known stateside, but the progenitor of all the rocking mentioned.
https://olearyreview.com/knebworth/
July 12
A tale from the dugout of the 1927 Yankees
Digging back into my archive of baseball history, we go to spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1927 with the Yankees.
We find that Lou Gehrig may not really be the choir boy we know, and we learn of an insult aside from anything four-lettered or hyphenated that will get a coach or player tossed. At least it did 95 years ago.
July 13
What we’ve been reading
And what we think about it
Just that. We’ve had a lot of good feedback on this one, so we will likely make it into a weekly newsletter.
Commenting on what we read? It is the O’Leary Review, after all.
July 14
get shunned from polite society and called all sorts of names
A real problem in this culture, as I see it, is not the lack of education, but the undereducated masses that consider themselves educated. The Dunning-Kruger Effect—a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general (Britannica.com)—explains a lot of it.
While the Dunning-Kruger Effect is still not universally seen as a “cognitive bias” per se, or even a thing at all, what it describes permeates human cognition. We all think we are “smarter” than we actually are in certain realms.
The problem with the corporate media structure in this culture is not that is an institution based on bias and mendaciousness—which it certainly is—but that somehow it wields the power to convince the vast majority of people that the lies and half-truths it produces are the real story.
Take the “Penn State Case,” for instance. It is, as I write, built upon a “nest of lies.”
A travesty of justice at every level, cheerleaded by the most powerful entities in media. Utterly shameful.
We interviewed John Ziegler, the foremost expert on the case, earlier this year for Sportlanders the Podcast. If you haven’t listened to that show, it is high time you do it now. I consider this the most important interview I’ve done so far in my staccato “career” of reporting in—one way or form—over the last two-plus decades.
July 15
“Are you trying to tell me Mikhail Gorbachev could’ve hit my curve ball?”
Ronald Reagan. Baseball. These things “were as constant as anything in my childhood,” and they coalesce quite nicely.
Enjoy the rest of the weekend and hopefully the golf, if you’re into that.
And if you like this newsletter, consider sharing it with a friend (or several) or posting on your favorite social media platform.
Brian O’Leary