Age 30 – The New Yorker? Really?

Today I turn 37.

37. . .holy crap. I guess I didn’t pay attention the last couple of years because they have flown by pretty quickly. Admittedly, there were a few years that couldn’t get over or be forgotten about quick enough. But come on, I swear I was like 31 just a little while ago.

37 is also a horrific year in celebrity deaths. It’s not like there was any cool drug overdoses of legends or other ways that people were “taken way too young.” At age 37, some serious stuff when wrong.

• Lou Gehrig died of ALS.
• Vincent Van Gogh shot and killed himself.
• Christa McAuliffe died in the Challenger explosion.

Pardon me while I stare blank faced at my computer for 10 minutes thinking of the horrific ways I might die if I go this year. . . WOW. That was fun. Where’s my birthday party hat and candles? Continue reading →

Phillips in 1996 vs. Florida.

Beautiful, tragic, heartbreaking and complicated. Those might be the best words to describe the life of former Husker Lawrence Phillips.

The story of LP to anyone from the state of Nebraska or the world of college football is anything but a mystery. If you followed the Cornhuskers at all in the 1990’s you know the ups and downs of the life of the most controversial runningback in the history of the program.

But what you probably don’t know are the details, reasons and the deep tragedy that was the man who asked Tom Osborne as a senior in high school “Who wears No. 1 for your team?”

Showtime captured the story of LP in 88 minutes better than anyone could have ever thought. Continue reading →

Recently I was talking with a few friends about TV shows and new series to watch. Like a lot of people, I enjoy a good binge session. If there is one thing I have learned to love about Netflix, HBO GO, Hulu and the other apps on my AppleTv it’s that if I don’t have plans, I can easily make them.

Quickly the conversation went from finding new things to watch to “dude, you watch too many shows.”

Is there such a thing? I mean the average American spends 33 hours a week watching TV. Some weeks, I blow that average out of the water. Other weeks, I would say I am right on and maybe even under.

The biggest difference is I don’t spend a lot of time watching network TV anymore. Growing up it seemed like every night of the week there were 2-3 shows that consistently were watched by the Dannelly family. Early on I remember “The Wonder Years” and “Rosanne” to be a couple the family sat around to watch each week.

You also have to understand that for a good portion of my childhood, I didn’t even know NBC existed. Where we lived in the country the over the air signal was limited to ABC and CBS. Because of that I credit my parents nightly ritual of KOLN/KGIN News at 6 (RIP Mel Maines) and Wheel of Fortune at 6:30. Of course this was all contingent on whether or not we were done milking cows, but I digress.

Continue reading →

This spring during my binge watching of Shameless, Billions and a few other shows on Showtime, I noticed trailers for this new show called “Roadies” popping up. I took a quick look on IMDB to see what I could decipher and saw a few things that made me go “meh” and forget about the show.

Most notably “Cameron Crowe” and “Luke Wilson”. I don’t have anything against these guys but when I see them as top billing on a show I tend to not get juiced up to watch it.

Then the show happened for a few weeks and I didn’t watch it. GOT ended and all of my other shows were on hiatus so I decided to give “Roadies” a try for one episode.  Needless to say I got hooked and watched the entire season as quickly as possible. Continue reading →

There is no mystery behind the fact that I like a good show on TV. The evidence lies within the daily conversations I have and when people say “Hey, did you see ____ on Netflix?”

Sadly, yes. The answer is always yes. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Love, Longmire. . .the list can go on forever. Oh, is it a new special from some random comedian? Yeah, I probably have it on my nightly rotation slowly putting me to sleep like a lullaby.

I honestly have to set my TV timer to shut off or else I wake up at 3AM to the glare of my TV screen showing some AppleTv slideshow of tigers and waterfalls. Continue reading →

One of the first things people said to me when I moved from Nebraska to Minnesota was “Geez, that’ll be different.”

Then I moved from Mankato, Minn. to Fargo, N.D. and heard “Oh wow, now THAT will be different.”

So when I first packed up my stuff and took off for Minnesota I kept thinking to myself, “Do my friends and family know something that I don’t know?”

I’d never really lived any place other than Nebraska but given my world during VSN I got to see a lot of the country. I’ll spare you the long drawn out poetic comparisons just to say that we do live in a beautiful country and you should get out and see it. Continue reading →

The Dry Erase Board of Truth.

Standing in front of a mirror naked (sorry for the visual) and really looking at yourself is really the only way to make yourself say, “Yeah, it’s time. I’ve got to do something.”

That along with actually being honest with yourself about all the reasons why you are in the place that you now are and what you are going to do to fix it.

Like so many times before, I’m starting this weight loss journey again with high hopes and expectations. I’ve seen the results of my other stints of working out and what has worked and what has failed. However, this time it’s going to be different.

First, lets go on a trip down memory lane. Let’s call it the “Jason Dannelly Holy Crap What the Hell Happened Weight Loss Yo-Yo of Fun.”

You see for whatever reason I can remember a lot of events in my life and what I weighed at the time. Ask me to remember details of those specific events or even what you told me five minutes ago and I can’t do it. But somehow I can remember these cold hard facts. Continue reading →