Day: January 27, 2025

Have I mentioned I’m a sucker for oral histories before?  Well, Vero knows this and she finds the greatest oral histories involving topics I enjoy.

This was another one of those books that were hanging around the house and I would read a page here and there when I could.  But no more!  2025 is clearly the year to stop doomscrolling and start reading books.

I thought this book had a slow burn of a start.  Things started getting interesting for me when they started playing proper gigs in Seattle.  It was also really interesting to understand how mindboggling it was to be the number one musical celebrity on the planet when you weren’t even thinking of that outcome.

I did find the end of the book a bit weak.  An entire year is fit into two chapters.  HOWEVER, perhaps that is sometimes how oral histories go…you get a lot more information about the time someone spent with a band, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lof of interaction with the band and others once they became huge and were surrounded by security or had to run off to do TV interviews and sign autographs.

For mega-fans of Nirvana, it’s a great read.

Last night I was watching Sierra at gynmastics.  A typical gymnastics class for her lasts 1.5 hours and goes like this:

• Warm up (running around, doing pushups, etc.)
• Move onto different sections of the gym…balance beams, trampoline, tumble track, etc.

Around an hour into the class I notice Sierra’s class come back to the exercise area and doing running drills and pushups and burpees and you name it, they did it.

I’m watching girls collapsing, girls yelling “I’m having a heart attack!” and I was thinking “What is going on here?”.  Sierra looked winded but she kept doing what she was being asked to do.

Turns out the entire class was being punished because most of the girls weren’t listening to the instructor.

Sierra couldn’t believe how she was punished along with the others because she was staying quiet and doing what the instructor asked her to do.

I remember this being a classic form of punishment when I was a kid.  It never made any sense…usually the good people in class aren’t the ones that are going to stand up to the troublemakers and make them follow the rules!  So the good guys get punished for no reason whatsoever.

I was hoping that in the year 2025 we would have more targeted forms of punishment but as Sierra’s body can attest the day after, I guess not!