This coming weekend is Memorial Day weekend, in addition to also being the much better-known “Louisville City visits Bethlehem/Chester Steel” weekend. Memorial Day formally marks the beginning of summer vacation SZN, the other bookend being Labor Day.

There are lots of Memorial Day traditions, including visiting the local military cemetery, thanking veterans for their service, watching car races, the NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championships (anyone? anyone? just me?), conning your friend who owns a boat into letting you ride in it and eventually drive it very badly, or conning that same friend into letting you crash at his/her lake house. Or just firing up the grill for the first time all year only to horrendously over/undercook those burgers you bought for the family. Grippos for dinner again, I guess. BTW, if you want to read a funny missive about the summer holidays and grilling while also picking up a failsafe way to barbecue chicken thighs, look no further. I’ve done it before but can’t convince certain members of my immediate family that eating meat with bones in it is totally fine, so I don’t get to use that recipe/method as often as I’d like.

One Memorial Day tradition that you might not have heard of is engaging in fierce debate over how the holiday first came to be. Believe it or not, there is a Center for Memorial Day Research at Columbus State University in Georgia. Much of that debate centers on which side of the American Civil War started the tradition of decorating graves of servicemen killed during that conflict, whom on which side deserves credit for the idea, and what date these remembrances began. What’s slightly more certain is that the practice began sometime around the Civil War and has persisted to the present.

How about some soccer stuff?