John Steffen – Page 4

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Marquette vs Georgetown

Post date 2015/01/24

What an exhilarating hoops game. This dude named Matt Carlino went crazy for Marquette and almost singlehandedly won the game for them against a considerably better Georgetown team. He started the game out with four straight three pointers then hit a shot with one second left to tie it up. Then he gets a steal at the 0.9 second mark and almost wins it for them. In the end Georgetown won, but it was a great game. There were 15,300 people at the BMO Harris Bradley Center and it got pretty loud. Milwaukee is a great city and the Marquette campus is near everything. The Iron Horse Hotel rocked it, as did the Smoke Shack, Holey Moley Doughnuts, and Anodyne Coffee(and liquor). Great town.

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Babette’s Feast

Post date 2015/01/21

I contend that Gail and I saw this movie about 20 years ago. She disagrees. After watching it again, I still contend that we saw it in the mid 1990s and she still contends that we’ve never seen it, together at least. Who cares really. Just know that I love (and loved) this movie.

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Bike Snob

Post date 2015/01/17
Tags sports

I don’t own a bike but I consider myself a cyclist I guess. I mean, I commute a lot for work and and run errands on a Divvy bike and I did a 30 mile ride last year on a borrowed bike (trained with multi-park-n-go Divvy rides). So that’s my cyclist street cred, where do I stand bicycle nation?

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The Art of Fielding

Post date 2015/01/09
Tags pop-fiction

The last book I was read was The Art of Racing in the Rain, so I’m on kind of a The Art Of… streak. Both books were similar in that they used with the artistic side of sports as a background for stories about human relationships. Now that’s a genre I can get behind!

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The Equalizer

Post date 2015/01/02

Denzel Washington is a top provider of entertaining violence. You don’t feel guilty watching a shoot-em-up if someone with Denzel’s acting chops is involved. That’s just me rationalizing stuff again, but there is an element of truth to it.

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Wild

Post date 2015/01/01

I loved this movie. Loved it. Loved it. Loved it. It could be that I harbor this desire to hike a big long trail like Cheryl Strayed did. Or it could be that I just like messing with outdoor equipment. Or maybe it’s inspiring for me to hear about people pushing beyond their limits. Regardless, this movie hit all those notes smack on!

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The Art of Racing in the Rain

Post date 2014/12/28
Tags pop-fiction

This book is narrated by a dog and the reader is the only one who can hear him. When I think about it, the narrator can only be heard by the reader in most books, unless written in first person, so I guess it’s not that weird. But this book was written in first dog (vs first person, get it?), so the dog narrator has the chance to interact with story versus just narrating, but only the reader can hear his voice since dogs can’t talk. Once I gave it some thought, I realized how slick this was.

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Unbroken

Post date 2014/12/26

The story of Louis Zamperini is pretty awesome. The guy ran in the Olympics in 1936, then went to WWII, then crashed in the Pacific and spent like two months on a life raft, then got captured by the Japanese and spent two years in a prison camp, then forgave his captors and ran the Olympic torch through Japan when the Olympics were in Nagano. The movie, however, wasn’t as great as his life, in my view.

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Drinking Buddies

Post date 2014/12/13

It’s interesting to reflect on Chicago-based romantic comedies in my life time. I cannot even come up with a handful and I don’t necessarily thing they’re all that great. Sure, one specifically, could be crowned somewhat of a standby and potentially used as the measuring stick, but I’d probably be ridiculed for making the proclamation.

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Mockingjay Part 1

Post date 2014/12/07

Gail and I see these Hunger Games movies reflexively. Same with Divergent. We didn’t read the books and we don’t have any sort of connection to the stories really besides the fact that our nieces like them. They’re just kind of cool I guess. It could be the big draw for us is sci-fi, which we seem to consume a lot on the screen but not so much in books.