Not much new to show off on the site today. Still working on honeymoon photographs. This latest batch will get the series into Athens. That puts the total count north of 320, with the rest of Athens, Vesuvius, Pompeii and one last day in Rome still to add. That also does not count the various panoramas and two slideshows also floating around.
And I still have an hour of video to produce from the trip.
I’m going to have to make a landing page for all of these pictures.
I am so glad I recorded all of this. I wish I could hire someone to do the editing for me.
Elsewhere, just the usual run of the mill stuff. So … back to it then.
Monday / World Cup — Comments Off on Cameras are better than oil on your feet 14 Jun 10
Seven months ago, Dick de Bruin, a Royal Dutch Navy sergeant stationed in the Dutch territory of Aruba, was salvaging an anchor from an American World War II ship that was to be used in a monument. De Bruin’s bright-red Nikon camera, protected in a waterproof case, floated away.
According to the Telegraph and the AP, six months later, Paul Shultz saw what he thought was a rotten tomato floating near rocks in a Key West marina. After a closer look, he realized, underneath a bunch of sea muck that had collected on the case, it was actually a digital camera. Amazingly, the case had protected it and Shultz was able to view the contents of the camera. The only problem was finding out to whom it belonged.
Shultz posted pictures on a scuba diver message board, and they were identified as being taken in Aruba. He then posted on local message boards, and one woman recognized a child in a photo, de Bruin’s son, as being a classmate of her son.
The camera was then returned to de Bruin.
Turns out the camera snagged a turtle along the way. The reptile turned on the camera and there’s video . Follow that first link and you can see what was recorded during its journey. This should be an Internet hit.
And if you go to Youtube, or any other social networking site, you’re liable to find a “Friend BP” ad, asking you to get the latest on their Gulf cleanup efforts. The beautiful thing about social media, as has been discussed here and elsewhere at great length, is the ability for one’s agency to speak directly to the public. In this instance, though, that’s going to look more like spin. I did not friend them.
If anything BP needs good press — if that’s possible for them — just to get back a shred of credibility. The company has already been painted as woefully negligent in preparation, safety and clean up. Social media isn’t going to fix this for them.
Speaking of BP, this is unfortunate. President Obama doesn’t say that in the story, but the headline assigns it to him all the same. I propose a moratorium on assigning blame. It is tiring and counter-productive. What’s more, there’s plenty of blame fir everybody.
Two World Cup games today. Worked out — broke an eight-minute mile for the first time in years and biked a while. Did a little work grading exit assessments of recent graduates, recorded three voiceover projects. Not a bad effort for a Monday.
I have friends who, as children, lived in the same town, grew up and got married. They knew each other in school, they’re from a small enough town that it isn’t hard to find yourself in someone’s orbit pretty regularly from an early age. As they were dating, they realized through the course of many conversations that they’d attended a lot of the same events — circuses, plays and so on — not together, but at the same time. It is a cute story, but a little less impressive than this:
Thirty years ago, when they lived in separate countries long before they met and married, a family shot of little Donna at Walt Disney World captured Alex in a stroller in the background.
[…]
That fateful realization came just one week before their wedding eight years ago. Alex and Donna had been going through old family snapshots. There, in the blurry background of a picture of 5-year-old Donna was 3-year-old Alex being pushed down Main Street at the same moment in 1980 by his father. The senior Voutsinas’s distinctive jet-black hair with its white tuft caught his eye.
If you read the comments you’ll find a handful of similar type stories. Some of them from people who grew up near each other, like my friends above, and others from different continents. It isn’t fate or destiny, but a curious quirk. Given how many millions of people are in relationships it would be more improbable to not hear stories like this.
Want mine? The Yankee and I actually worked at Clear Channel at the same time. Clear Channel is a big, big company, but we were actually in the same market at the same time, working for the same stations, but in different buildings. We just didn’t know each other. We met after we’d both moved on to different jobs, me to al.com and her to television.
Some such instances are obvious, others can be easily explained away, but sometimes the connections defy easy description. For an interesting academic discussion on the matter I point you to Jon Kleinberg. There was an informal Email experiment of Stanley Milgram’s small world theory a few years back.
I have about 230 friends on Facebook. I rarely visit the site, but I feel confident that everyone I know in real life on that site is my friend there. I do enjoy seeing how my friends know each other. Some of them make no geographical sense whatsoever, to the point I’ve had to write strangers and ask “How do you know these two separate, distant people?” The answers usually make a great deal of sense when you hear them. Usually.
They are neat stories, part of many families’ lore. It only helps that the Small World theme song is now stuck in all of our heads.
I recorded this one last December.
Pretty neat, right?
Nothing else to report. I’ve been editing photographs again this evening, having now published 298 from the honeymoon. That gets us through Ephesus, which was amazing. There are more here. Still a few more stops to edit, too!
We’ve been planning our World Cup watch party for weeks. Every day, it seemed, the people that were going to attend and the place we’d watch our historic thrashing of England changed. Up to the 11th hour, it seemed, the location shifted again. Our friend Andrew — who will join the faculty at East Tennessee State this fall — was going to come up from Tuscaloosa to take in the game. He was going to bring some friends, but at the last minute the configuration changed.
We’d decided to watch at an Irish pub and restaurant, the thinking being that the best place to watch the English play would be with a bunch of Irish. This might have been a possibility in Birmingham, there are a few folks from Ireland here. Instead we went to a place in Tuscaloosa. There were no Irishmen, but plenty of Americans.
The referee in the match might as well have been from England. After going down a goal in the fourth minute, fighting off 11 English players, the officials and our own dreadfully thin backfield — can’t we pull some people of Ray Lewis’ size and demeanor into the program? — we watched the Americans fight their way back to a satisfying draw. That’s a victory for the U.S. and probably a total flop for the English side.
When the game was over the music came on, featuring the perfect draw musician: Jimmy Buffett. You aren’t happy with the draw, but pretend you are. We met a grown man in a Cookie Monster shirt. It suited him, and he was just one of the interesting characters. At one point a horn blew. Not a trumpet or a vuvuzela, but a big Lord of the Rings-type horn. It was a colorful afternoon.
Your current time and temperature.
That was what we saw when we got back in the car after dinner with Wendy. In a related story, it is June.
So my goals for the next several days are to edit photographs and watch World Cup. The above is what happens when I try to do either one of those things for very long. The Yankee says that Allie likes me more than she likes her, but in truth it is just because I sit still more. Also, this cat loves walking on your keyboard.
Pictures. Lots of pictures. Started watching the World Cup, South Africa playing well to tie Mexico and France struggling to the same result against Uruguay. Funny how ties are perceived differently for each team. I’ll see all 64 World Cup games this year, just living the dream.
Speaking of living the dream, I had the great pleasure of sharing lunch with two wonderful ladies today. The Yankee and I joined our dear friend RaDonna at O’Carrs — try the chicken salad and fruit plate.
I met RaDonna while working with her husband, Justin, at al.com. He left to go to the Gadsden paper and is now the multimedia director at The Anniston Star. They are the sweetest people you could hope to know, and their son is the coolest boy I know, but they live too far away. Visits with such good people shouldn’t be so rare.
There are now233 photos on the site from our honeymoon. I suspect I might be about halfway through the project. On the one hand it is incredible to see the pictures again and think “Hey, we’ve just been there.” On the other hand I’m ready for a break from editing photographs.
Sick of hearing about it yet?
Simple, quiet, Pie Day for two tonight. Felt like we haven’t been to Jim N Nicks in ages. Mostly because we haven’t been in ages. For a weekly ritual the last two or three weeks have been our biggest absence in the almost six-year-old tradition.
Happily, Ward still recognized us.
Tomorrow, the US kicks off their World Cup run against England.
