Overtime with Kyle Brennan

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Kyle Brennan

Round of Applause

NBC’s coverage of the Olympics will feature me this summer. Well, not really, but I’ll be working with NBC throughout the Olympics in helping manage the website, NBCOlympics.com. I’m pretty pumped about this, considering the Olympics are my favorite event on the planet and I was fully prepared to sit at home for 17 days in a row to watch as much of the Games as I possibly could have. To answer your question, no, I won’t be going to London. I will be going to Stamford, instead, to work in a fancy office building in the wee hours of the morning. I can’t wait. And by the way, my internship with WFSB-3 is going pretty well, too. You may have heard me doing a couple of interviews last Friday night. Perhaps you’ll hear me again sometime.

The WRHS Hall of Fame Class of 2012 deserves an extra round of applause this week with their induction on Thursday night at Woodland’s academic awards night. Star athlete Shane Kingsley, retired English teacher Joan Krantz, and the 2001-02 Region 16 Board of Education are the honorees in the hall of fame’s second round of inductions. Shane was simply my favorite athlete ever to watch at my alma mater not only because of his incredible skills in three sports but because he was going to do everything he could in every game to win. Krantz helped mold Woodland’s curriculum and AP program, which helped me graduate college a year early. And the 2001-02 Board of Ed took on the once-in-a-lifetime task of overseeing the first year of a brand-new high school. Congratulations to all three inductees.

Room remodeling is always a great deal of fun. For a guy who always has a ton of trouble keeping his room clean in the first place, I like changing the look around an awful lot. My latest project came when I decided to spice up a display case my uncle Dave gave me when I was knee high to a grasshopper (I’ve always been a huge fan of that phrase). I had some objects in there that were totally nonsensical and irrelevant, so I took the doors off and filled each of the nine sections with a display of something fancy and/or important to me. I’ve got a section devoted to the Red Sox, another to the Jets, another to Quinnipiac, another to Woodland, a few for photos, and a few for other likes. The problem is that I have no idea where to put any of the stuff that I took out originally. However, if you would like consultation on room remodeling and redecoration, I am at your service.

Jonathan Quick and the Los Angeles Kings were one game away from winning their first Stanley Cup as of this writing Wednesday morning. (You’re allowed to stop reading if you don’t know what the Stanley Cup is.) The reason this is so exciting is that Quick is a Hamden native, and my pal over at Griff’s Chicken Shack (if I haven’t written about Griff’s, I’ll have to include that soon) says he’s going to try to attract Quick to the Shack on his day with the Cup. This is unlikely to happen, but the mere prospect is quite cool. Besides, Quick is an American goaltender, which is among my most favorite things in sports.

My wagon has been a trooper so far this summer. (I know most of you all love my car updates, so here it is.) Last week, I drove out to Stamford, Rocky Hill, Litchfield, Hamden, and Ansonia for various purposes, and my Mercury was purring all the way. It’s running like a charm since my dad and I (but mostly my dad, I’m there for moral support during major projects) replaced a few parts on the old girl. The goal is to drive the car into the ground, so hopefully she sticks around for a while longer. I’m not really in the position to get my new Chevy at the moment. (Spoiler alert: My next car will be a Chevy. I will not purchase a foreign vehicle.)

Chorus of Boos

The French Open is my least favorite tennis major to watch every year. I never understood clay court tennis. Maybe it’s a generational thing and the fact that I’m not really sure why tennis is played on material that I used to play with in middle school art class. Americans are terrible on the clay nowadays, and I think you all are pretty clear on the fact that I lose interest in international competitions when the United States has no more representatives in the field. And finally, I can’t see the ball on the court. Somehow, I can see the ball much more clearly on Wimbledon’s grass courts than Paris’ dark orange clay. One of these days I’ll upgrade to an HDTV and see if that helps the cause.

NBA fans are the worst. I don’t really care about the NBA in the first place, but I’ll watch some late-round playoff action because it does turn into real basketball the deeper the playoffs go (one-on-one, pick-and-roll basketball is coma-inducing). But the fans I have to endure on Twitter are brutal. Based on some of the tweets I’ve read so far, apparently the officials must be terrorists from Miami who only call fouls against the Celtics, although they’ve won three games in a row. Oh, and you’re not employed by the team, so if you say “we” won or “we” played well, stop it.