I’m feeling a bit better. I can move some, which feels like too much, but is at least a bit.
It’d be one thing if you got this way by doing something fun, a new adventure or trying a new exercise, but this is from the car or from trying to fix myself or from holding my head wrong while icing my shoulder. And so it is that not just one shoulder, but both are giving me fits. Fourteen months on of this, not quite good as new.
So I’m not moving much, or too fast. Which is great when you have things to do. Today was one of those days of small things that eat away at your day. On its own your email and your reading shouldn’t take forever. Small chores like helping the occasional student or fixing the occasional boom mic isn’t the biggest time sink.
Writing a brief blog posts on the Multimedia site doesn’t take forever.
Getting in and out with the generic haircut is pretty quick. Driving around waiting for dinner inspiration is annoying, but it is only one thing. Watching every major news site fail at streaming the president’s oddly dichotomic speech is another thing.
All of those things become cumulative, I guess. And they’ve been going on for about 14 hours so far. And when you are moving gingerly. Yes, that’s what we’re going to blame. I’m moving slower today. It always comes back to the back.
Things to read that I find interesting.
Your standard 80th anniversary story:
Fifty years of a marriage is a rarity these days. But don’t tell that to Cranford and Myrtle McDade.
The couple (he turns 100 in January, and she is 96) recently celebrated their 80th wedding anniversary, chalking their long-lived marriage up to give and take.
Alas, we don’t know their secret. How you not ask their secret I don’t know.
It is rare that you read football analysis that is so evocative of history. It is almost inconceivable that the comments on a football story actually have something to contribute. But this piece offers you both:
Human empires rise and fall, typically following similar patterns of decay that can be picked out by observant followers of the chain of events. For those who didn’t have the opportunity to take any classes at UT from Professor M. Gwyn Morgan, the parallels to the collapse of the Roman Empire are there to be made. Since it’s instructive to take a big picture look at your program (and it’s no less depressing than considering our prospects against Ole Miss) we’ve provided a glimpse into the collapse of Mack’s program through the lens of epic historical collapse.
NASA says last night’s fireball was the size of a baseball. Also, it was ice. Which one supposes is an educated guess based on something already categorized in space and more or less anticipated or an assumption based on the notion that there hasn’t immediately been any evidence of debris found along the tracked flight path.
Oh look, the international media is reporting more about the questionable ethics and scruples of our own government than the local folks. Can’t imagine why:
A judge on the secret surveillance court was so disturbed by the National Security Agency’s repeated violations of privacy restrictions that he questioned the viability of its bulk collection of Americans’ phone records, according to newly declassified surveillance documents.
Judge Reggie Walton, now the presiding judge on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court, imposed a significant and previously undisclosed restriction on the NSA’s ability to access its bulk databases of phone records after finding that the agency repeatedly violated privacy protections.
The documents, mostly from 2009 and declassified Tuesday, describe what Walton said were “thousands” of American phone numbers improperly accessed by government counterterrorism analysts.
But, as always, if you’re not doing anything wrong the only thing you have to worry about is this tired cliche, right?
Tonight the student-journalists are hard at work on The Crimson. They assure me it will all go quickly. This is the first paper of the year, which almost always means they are mistaken about that. But we’ll see.
As always we’re excited to see what comes of that first issue. I don’t know everything they’re working on — a feature, not a bug — but from the snippets I’ve heard about it sounds pretty intriguing. Tomorrow the paper will be on the stands.
