Is “music appreciation” still a thing in elementary schools?

I fear not. In the United States, anyway, so much emphasis is placed on mastering the basics — reading, writing and ‘rithmetic — that soft stuff pertaining to “art” tends to be jettisoned.

Which is too bad, because being exposed to the great music of the western canon is a good thing. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and, more recently, Copland, Gershwin, Mahler …

We had music appreciation in eighth grade at my elementary school, First Lutheran, in Long Beach. It may have come from time carved out of the day; it also may have been played during lunch, which we often took at our desks. I know Mr. Paul Brott, the principal of the school, was behind this.

At first, I was vaguely annoyed at the idea of “classical” in the classroom, but it would go along and I would hear a passage and perk up and say, “I know that!” In many cases, it was music in the background of Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons. Or maybe even from TV — Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” was used as the theme song of the Lone Ranger western.

Sometimes, Mr. Brott would play something he thought was particularly evocative. Story-telling. Perhaps Le Mer, by Debussy; Peer Gynt by Grieg. Or something like the Grand Canyon Suite, by Grofe.

Which is a long introduction to today’s earworm: The fourth movement of Ferde Grofe’s best-known piece of music.

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This post was inspired by a piece that appeared in The Telegraph, a British newspaper, in 2015, during the Fifa Women’s World Cup.

In it, the author came up with “11 reasons why women’s football is better than men’s”

I have been watching women’s soccer for the past few weeks, and thinking about it, as the distaff version of the European Championship moves along in The Netherlands.

And going through The Telegraph piece from two years ago … I find that I agree with several of the author’s claims, especially pertaining to wealth, simulation/cheating and ego.

Here are the five that resonate with me, with my comments:

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Another story, another alarming connection between NFL players and brain damage.

How long can the league semi-ignore this and hope it goes away?

That $765 million settlement the NFL made in 2013, concerning former players with brain damage … now seems so 20th century. It is going to cost the league more money than that. A lot more.

The latest? A scientist looked at the brains of 111 NFL deceased veterans and found signs of CTE (chronic trauma encephalopathy) in 110 of them.

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This could be when the “too good to be true” moment arrived for the 2017 Los Angeles Dodgers.

There they were, stampeding through the season, threatening to eclipse records for “games won” in Los Angeles (102) and even Brooklyn (105), and then on a Sunday afternoon in Chavez Ravine left-hander Clayton Kershaw, walked out of a game in the second inning with lower-back pain, and the long-term fitness of their best player is in question again.

Having an 11.5-game lead in the National League West, as the Dodgers did at the end of the day, is a bit of comfort in terms of a playoffs appearance, but when a team loses the best pitcher in ball, well, there’s no replacing “the best”, is there?

Let’s look at this two ways: One is via the Notions of an Amateur Back Specialist; the other is where Kershaw and the Dodgers might be heading.

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Maybe Magic Johnson as club president is worth the price of tickets. Brandon Ingram, the second-year forward, could move the needle, too.

But most observers seem to think it is Lonzo Ball who is the key to the Lakers selling a lot more season tickets than they did a year ago.

And now they are gone. No more season tickets for 2017-18.

This contrasts with a year ago.

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Not long after Landon Donovan was pushed into giving up international soccer, by U.S. national soccer’s blundering coach Jurgen Klinsmann, I took a look at Landon’s record 57 goals for the U.S. national soccer team and broke them down by categories.

That parsing of his production appeared on this blog on August 9, 2014 (along with this link to a video of all 57 of his U.S. goals) and, no doubt, represented what I thought would be some of my last observations on the matter.

I believed Landon’s goals record was safe, certainly over a 5-10 year horizon. I wrote: “No one else is close, unless you consider Clint Dempsey, trailing by 18, to be close.”

Donovan was only 32 when he announced his international retirement, later in 2014. Dempsey was 31, which is considered “old” for forwards, these days, and I discounted his chances of catching the attacking midfielder perched at 57 goals.

Turns out, Dempsey was just getting warmed up, and his output in the ensuing three years has been remarkable — to the point that he caught Landon at 57 goals tonight in a 2-0 Gold Cup semifinals victory over Costa Rica.

(This item has a list of Dempsey’s 57 goals, and the file features individual links to each of them. Meanwhile, here are Landon’s 57 goals.)

Barring something strange, Dempsey will break Donovan’s record, perhaps as soon as Wednesday, in the Gold Cup final versus Mexico or Jamaica.

But at this moment the two of them are sitting on the same big number, so let’s compare what they have done, with their 57 each.

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I worked with several Scots while in Abu Dhabi. One day I asked one of them why Scotland is so bad in cricket. He looked at me like I should already have known the answer.

“Because we never get enough good weather to finish a match,” he said.

The best golfers in the world got to experience some of that brusque British weather today, and they weren’t even in Scotland.

About two years of every five, the British Open is played in England, and this is one of those years. The golfers are playing near the coast of the Irish Sea in Southport, a bit north of Liverpool, and the poor golfers got heaping helpings of Scottish weather without actually visiting the north end of the island.

Which actually is a big part of making the British Open interesting. Golfers can be nearly sure of at least one day of awful weather which separates the men from the boys … or the Brits from everyone else or the luckiest from the best.

In this case, Justin Spieth survived pouring rain and wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour at Royal Birkdale to hold a two-shot lead over fellow American Matt Kuchar.

It was the sort of weather that would keep an Angelino indoors. Actually, it might have kept a lot of people in “sunny” London indoors, too.

Said Charl Schwarzel: “I’ve always found it very difficult in these conditions. I said to my caddie, as much as you want to challenge yourself, really it’s just luck. You’re hitting these shots, and the ball is just going wherever.”

“Yesterday, with a little bit of a breeze, you can really play golf and move the ball. The way it was out there, it’s not much fun.”

This was the weather report ahead of today’s second round:

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This is odd.

When the French take vacations, they nearly always take them in late July and August, and they overwhelmingly take them in their own country.

Which means those of us in the south of the country, where the dependable sun is, can expect a major influx of visitors from the north choking the major roads.

But it comes with a twist.

Much of the mass migration comes on the same handful of days. Which just seems silly.

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Things got weird in the U.S. versus El Salvador soccer match in the Gold Cup last night a game won 2-0 by the Americans.

Both Jozy Altidore and Omar Gonzalez alleged they were bitten by Salvadoran players and Altidore said he also had his nipple twisted by his biting attacker, Henry Romero.

(Embedded at this link is video of the incidents involving Altidore.)

The U.S. Soccer Federation apparently has a photo of teeth marks in the shoulder of Gonzalez and has turned it over to officials of the continental championship.

It led to some amusing/damning quotes from the U.S. side.

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It all has seemed strange and magical.

Twenty-two games into the 2017 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers were 10-12. They already had injury issues and it looked as if they would have their work cut out for them in a division where the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies looked formidable, even if they were the preseason choice to win the NL West.

On June 1, they were in third place, and on June 7 they were 35-25 after losing three in succession and five out of seven.

Since then?

Excellence. Dominance. Craziness.

The Dodgers have won 30 of their past 34 games to climb to 65-29.

Tonight they won their 10th straight, 1-0 in south Chicago, to give them two 10-win runs already this season. They hold a 10.5-game lead in the NL West with 68 to play.

How did this happen?

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