Mini round-up: Slap bets, Delbert McClinton and ATX

A handful of things that brightened my August:

This spawn of Mumford & Sons and techno music (neither of which I enjoy):

Entertainment Weekly’s excellent Season 9 coverage of “How I Met Your Mother”:

(Discovered: TheSlapbetCountdown.com –indicating the next slap will be doled out on Nov. 18–, the return of Ellen D. “Nobody asked you, Patrice!” Williams, and the growing awesomeness of Cristin Miloti as the mother.)

My aforementioned favorite country single of the year that I reviewed over at Country Universe:

And this Texas road trip classic:

…re-discovered during my second consecutive trip to my college town this summer, which never (ever, ever) gets old:

Happy September!

Ted^3 and Barney^3, “For The Longest Time”

So much love for this performance from a wonderful, crushingly sad episode of “How I Met Your Mother” (finally):

Ode to Barney Stinson

…or something like that. Check out my latest post on “How I Met Your Mother” over at the Houston Press.

Sound Bite: The happiest show on television

“How I Met Your Mother engages in a certain amount of magical thinking. It believes in signs, in the power of coincidence and the broader meaning of things that seem unimportant. It’s not afraid of fairy dust and the idea that if the sad, difficult things hadn’t happened, the good things wouldn’t have happened either, because everything is part of a whole.

It doesn’t always work … But when they get it right, it’s a very elegant and thoughtful larger story about how crushingly sad things have to be placed into a context beyond themselves. It doesn’t really have to show you the mother; it’s not a show about her, even though its storytelling structure is critical. It’s a show that has a specific vision of how life works, and that vision is basically a happy one. It might be one of the happiest shows on television, and I continue to be grateful for that.”

- Linda Holmes in this beautifully written NPR post that captures the reasons why I fell in love with the show. It was written a few months before I discovered the show (how it took me seven years, I’ll never know), but I stumbled upon it when I mined the “HIMYM” writers’ Twitter feed. Yeah, it’s like that.