Leap Year Beginning

Welcome to my new blog. I thought February 29 would be a good day to start it, although I may regret it if I want to mark my first anniversary next year. I hope it will last through a first year.

The baseball elements of this blog will contain a lot of trivial baseball curiosities, such as players with the same name, from the same hometown, or with the same birthday.

I am also going to cover popular music from 1955 until sometime in the 1985-1988 time frame. I stopped following the hits of the day by 1989 for various reasons. The last new song I remember is "The Living Years" by Mike + the Mechanics, although I know a handful of ones from later, including "Who Let the Dogs Out", "The Macarena", and "Happy" by Pharrell Williams. I may sometimes talk about pre-1955 songs, including classical music.

No, this is not going to be about Neil Diamond and only Neil Diamond! But one focus of this blog that I have planned is on other artists' recordings or other performances of songs he's written. Another is on other artists' recordings of songs he didn't write but has recorded or performed somewhere (such as in concert or on TV), especially original versions and versions that were hits by other artists.

My focus will be less on the most popular artists and more on lesser-known or less-highly-regarded artists than most pop/rock music writers. I have long said that I find Tommy James and the Shondells to be more fascinating than Bob Dylan. This line should give you some indication of what I want to say in this blog. But artists such as the Beatles and Elvis Presley will show up here simply because I do have things to say about them. In fact, just as I plan to do with Neil Diamond, I plan to have a focus on other artists' recordings or performances of songs any of the Fab Four wrote and a focus on other artists' recordings of songs the group recorded but were not written by any of them. I have a special bit of Elvis trivia planned for March 24 if this blog lasts that long.

I'll also cover other topics that may interest me (and I hope you, too). I am not what you'd consider to be a film buff, and I am not much of a reviewer/critic. But I am on the verge of finishing up a project I began in July 2017 of watching every Best Picture Oscar winner. I'll have some comments on these films, as well as those in another project I've been pursuing of watching one person's opinion of the 25 Best Baseball Movies. I've been watching those in roughly descending order, starting with #25. I have five films to go in each category. The DVDs from Netflix for both Eight Men Out and Spotlight are sitting in my living room, waiting for me to watch them in the coming days. I have other movie projects planned, plus I'll be catching up with others I've missed or want to see again. In addition to these two projects, I just completed a mini one in the past several days of watching both the original (1960) and remake (1986) versions of [The] Little Shop of Horrors. This was for a program sponsored by the Abington Township Library System in Montgomery County, PA.

I'll probably put in things related to NFL football, NHL hockey, and NBA and WNBA basketball. I don't have enough interest in soccer (some of you may call this "football"), golf, tennis, boxing, wrestling, auto racing, and college and most Olympic sports. I may take an interest in Olympic baseball this year and will be rooting for the Israeli team. Consider this blog to be an oasis from the constant coverage of March Madness when it comes up in a few weeks and the Olympics this summer.

I am a longtime member of Toastmasters International and will probably say a few things in support of this organization. Toastmasters, in the new Pathways program, has an elective presentation on creating a blog that I may do in the next few months if I keep this blog going.

Some things you won't find in this blog:

• Politics and some other sensitive issues
• Religion
• Stories about all the bad stuff that's happened in my life, assuming there were bad things that happened, unless they relate to something covered by one of the other topics. An example would be something like (made up example), "This is one of my all-time favorite Elton John songs, but unfortunately, I associate it with the first time I ever got fired from a job."

That's enough for now. This should get better once I get the hang of making entries. If I have enough time later, I will make a post with some Leap Day trivia.