“If by chance I seated myself to write, she very slyly, very tenderly, seeking protection and caresses, would softly take her place on my knee and follow the comings and goings of my pen — sometimes effacing, with an unintentional stroke of her paw, lines of whose tenor she disapproved.” – Pierre Loti
Not my most inspired writing efforts. (It is late, I am tired.)
So I made up for it by offering you more of the uninspired writing.
Let’s blame the pictures, shall we?
At any rate, see the latest from the Black and White section. Or you can start at the beginning.
I like to think I’m pretty healthy and fairly lucky because I don’t have any chronic aches or pains. They are coming, no doubt, but I’m in denial. The little things that crop up, I just ignore them. If I don’t acknowledge their existence, they don’t exist.
I’m talking run of the mill things here. My foot does a weird thing in the morning, I just keep moving. If my arm were falling off, I’d go see a specialist. All things are relative.
Since I am so young and healthy and tough and stubborn I don’t mind complaining to you, dear reader about my hip hurting for no reason whatsoever. I only mention it here to point out the joy of walking across the length of the quad to deliver a piece of paper only to realize the same person also needs two more pieces of paper. So that’s another walk when, really, all I wanted to do was sit down.
But I’m fine, otherwise, thanks for asking.
Talked about leads in class this afternoon. I did about an hour and 40 minutes on the first paragraph of a story. We teach the art of lead writing as something that should be less than 30 words. We can discuss it at length. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a handout on the art of lead writing that was less than one page of advice.
I have a few nice exercises on lead writing though, and they all center around Centerville. That’s the same town that was under siege in last week’s hypothetical examples. In this week’s hypothetical news stories there was a suspicious fire at a Centerville school, a plane crash landing at the airport and news from the city council. They passed a contentious ordinance. In the exercise the address of city hall was mentioned, Elm Street.
Should have seen that joke coming.
I have a good editing class though. They’re opening up more and more. About half the students are talkative. I wish the others added their input too. And when I figure out how to do that I’ll be the most popular academic of which you’ve never heard. But my peers will respect me for sharing the secret. We’re all working on the mystery of full participation, I think.
That will be a project for next semester.
At the paper tonight. The Crimson students are working hard.
I’m a student tonight, too. I’m doing a little studying. I have an exam (I can count them on one hand now) this week, so there is a lot of reading, and only a little of this and that.
I’m skimming research methods and psychophysiology. That’s fun. Actually it is. Many of the articles and chapters we’re reading in this class are well written, which isn’t always the case with academic tomes. If you can work through it and understand it the content is valuable.
This being my last class it is also, happily, one of my best classes. It’d be better if there was no tests …
Links: The new clearinghouse for political accuracy, Bama Fact Check intends to be a statewide collaboration. It was started by our friends at The Anniston Star and The Tuscaloosa News. It is hoped that other newsrooms will join them.
Did you ever think you’d see the day? World War I is over. I have this picture, from April 1918, in my home. Click to embiggen.
That’s at Auburn, of course. The scene is only recognizable to modern eyes because of Samford Hall in the background. The parade field where the students are standing is now all roads and buildings and sidewalks. But the important thing is to realize that those were college kids, in the spring of 1918. Some of them were facing the possibility of going to Europe that summer. The shooting wouldn’t end until that fall.
Here’s how they celebrated:
(P.R. “Bedie”) Bidez led the Auburn Band (under the name of the 16th Infantry Regimental Band) into Europe during World War I. As the band crossed the Rhine from France into Germany they struck up Glory to Ole Auburn to celebrate the Allied victory.
And they’re all gone now. There’s only one World War I veteran left in the U.S. Frank Buckles is 109. Hopefully he’s still celebrating today.
“Are cats lazy? Well, more power to them if they are. Which one of us has not entertained the dream of doing just as he likes, when and how he likes, and as much as he likes?” – Fernand Mery
I had a great tale to tell you about today. It was going to be so exciting and wonderful. It would have left you smiling all day, that’s how good this story is. The stuff of dreams and laughter and happy children with puppy dogs. Just joyous stuff.
Instead I’ll tell you about the refrigerator.
Yesterday we broke it.
To be more precise it broke on us. Yay. Something else broke. Finally, however, something broke on its own. That’s a first. It was the same old story though, boy meets girl, girl goes into kitchen. Girl wonders why her feet are wet. Girl discovers the water is coming from the freezer. Girl mutters under her breath. Boy walks in and discovers what the girl’s already discovered.
Everything is melting. The good news is that at the end of the month there is precious little in our fridge and freezer. A few drinks, a door full of condiments, a couple of cheeses and pasta. In the freezer there was chicken, pork and a few containers of ice cream.
And ice. Lots of ice. Though we found it on the floor in its more playful physical form.
To Google. And then to the Whirlpool site. And to the phone, where the helpful voice helpfully points out that the helpful help line isn’t exactly helpful on Sundays. Everything breaks on Sundays.
If that’s not the name of an emo album within the next year I’ll be disappointed.
I discovered the downside to cultivating so many friends who prefer sarcastic humor. I asked for advice on Facebook and Twitter and none of you were any help. Punchlines, sure. Advice, nothing. (You should all be ashamed!)
Because learning is sometimes retroactive, I learned that there isn’t much you can do for a refrigerator as a consumer. We consulted manuals, both hard copy and digital. We surfed the forums. The refrigerator is only eight years old. It worked Friday night. It is plugged in and still humming. The lights work, no breakers have been tripped. None of this made sense.
We called the nice, patient and thoroughly sensible home warranty people. They find a local company. They are, as one might reasonably expect, closed on Sundays. They like emo music.
So, the warranty people tell us …
Hey, that’s the name of the band. “Check out the new album from The Warranty People: Everything breaks on Sundays!”
The warranty people tell us the repair man would be out tomorrow, which is today. The company’s name is a set of initials. Their voicemail is a chipper young woman who’s just proud, proud, proud to be recording this outgoing message. I liked my chances.
The repairman, our new best friend, came out today. His name is Rambo. He looks like what might have happened if John Rambo had, instead of being a West Coast drifter, turned into an HVAC, refrigerator guy who preferred a gray jumpsuit.
He walked right in and identified the kitchen area, tipped off no doubt by the counters and various kitchen accoutrement and paraphernalia. We really should disguise the room a bit more. Also the ice coolers stacked with our hopefully still chilled foodstuffs are a good hint.
We’d moved the surrounding clutter. I’ve already inspected the back of the refrigerator, which is much like my inspection under the hood of a modern car. Everything is … there. Few pieces sneak out under cover of darkness. (I lock up, and the parts lack the height and opposing thumbs required to negotiate the door.)
Rambo pulled off that little piece of cardboard at the bottom of the refrigerator. Yours probably has one too. It is dusty in there. And I hope yours is as well, otherwise this is just embarrassing. He looked and he poked and he turned on his flashlight. He removed a piece. He shook it. It rattled.
“That’s definitely your problem,” he declares.
Turns out this is the starting whatsits on the compressor and it has burned up, hence the rattle, which is apparently the part that is broken. It is a common piece, he said, and he looked to see if there is one in his truck.
There is not.
He must order the part. Hopefully, he says, it will be here this week.
Now look, Stallone, I understand you can’t control FedEx. I appreciate that you’re only covering your bases. But don’t you think it would be a little odd that a common piece can’t be identified, located, put on a truck and shipped here before the week is out?
Can I just go down to the local hardware shop, show them this thing — taking care to rattle it, so they know it is broken — and ask them for a replacement part?
I paid Rambo, who is a very nice guy. He said he’ll make sure the part gets ordered today, which is good, because I have three coolers of food and ice sitting on the floor. He promised to come back as soon as the part is in to make everything nice and frosty.
We bought dry ice at the local dry ice distribution center. (They also offer groceries, it turns out.) And I learned why you don’t touch dry ice. You can get an exposure burn in just a few seconds. Fortunately everything is cooling, because I have solid carbon dioxide in my kitchen.
Of course we had an extra refrigerator before we moved. We just had to sell it. For some reason it was agreed that an extra set of every appliance was being just a bit too overcautious. We regret that decision today. We let the old one go cheap too, according to my hasty and desperate searching this weekend. But we let it go to a couple who were in a similar situation. Hopefully the karma will be repaid in the form of a quick repair.
We ate freshly thawed chicken tonight. No one is ill or dead. (The long awaited second album from The Warranty People … )
So let’s keep count: air conditioner (in August, which has to be worth two points), the shower and the refrigerator.
To cheer us up, the best part of the Internet today is here:
This is a news website article about a scientific paperIn the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
The entire piece is worth your time. I can only assume that the author had a few minutes before his deadline, but none of the things in the press release folder or quick searches on Google inspired him. We are the better for it.
Monday history: First, check out this video from 1970. Unfortunately I can not embed it, because the site is from 1972.
That road, quiet and peaceful and uninteresting as the clip is, is now a big road in Birmingham. It was quiet in that shot in large part because the corridor was brand new. Construction started in 1962 with the first blast through the mountain. The cut was completed in 1967, the highway opened in 1970.
In part this corridor helped boost development in the southern suburbs. Homewood, Vestavia and Mountain Brook and even Hoover were there (though Hoover was brand new), but they hadn’t yet realized their full potential.
Driving through the mountain you can see about 150 million years of history, including a vein of the red ore that was so vital in the city’s early prosperity. The roadwork yielded a new species of trilobite. Not a computer measurement, Acaste birminghamensis was an ancient marine anthropod. The area, because of the geology lesson it provides, is one of seven Alabama National Natural Landmarks.
So that was then, 1970. This is now:
Note the changes. Note the similarities. Should have driven it during rush hour instead of mid-morning.
That’s enough for one day. if you have a little plastic cube (that doesn’t rattle) which can be somehow magically plugged into my refrigerator, please leave a comment.
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