September, 2010


22
Sep 10

Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium

Washington

This reminds me of the Bessemer City Councilwoman who foolishly thought she could claim an endorsement from the local football coach — as if no one would follow up on that. Except that lady, in her brilliant moment of mayoral campaigning, managed to Photoshop a picture of herself with the coach at a golf tournament. Of course the coach had made no such endorsement. And, also, the councilwoman’s campaign made a poor Photoshop effort. You can still see the coach’s wife’s hair in the image.

But this is completely real, of course. This young man traveled north and secured the endorsement of our most famous Founding Father. There’s no Photoshopping here. He has another poster standing beside the famous Rocky statue in Philadelphia. With endorsements like those he has to be a campaign favorite.

I love SGA posters. There’s another guy who is using a Forrest Gump theme. The young ladies all have cute designs and slogans, most that rhyme. There’s another campaign who has pressed Ron Burgundy into service. These are amusing popularity contests.

We critiqued the Crimson for about two hours today. They didn’t want me looking over their shoulder last night, and I was happy to oblige them, so we went over it line by line today. For only being three issues into their run the finished product was encouraging.

I picked a lot of minor details and a few obvious things that shouldn’t have escaped their attention. There’s no such thing as a perfect newspaper, but I’m pleased with this issue and still think they hold a great deal of potential. They had coverage of the gubernatorial debate and a Pulitzer winner. There’s also a story on record student enrollment and on Eleanor Clift’s visit.

Clift has covered a lot of great stories, but her own tale is a good one. She was a 1970s newsroom hire when you didn’t see a lot of female reporters. Someone assigned her to cover a darkhorse presidential candidate, some peanut farmer from Georgia no one had ever heard of. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, and the tradition is that the reporter that covered the campaign follows the president-elect. Clift joined the White House press corps and the rest is history.

That story is a good one. They agonized over it for a long time, they said, because they knew Clift would read it. I’m going to threaten to send every story they write for the rest of the year to the Newsweek veteran.

You can see the full issue here.

Busy day. Started at the gym early this morning, where the biggest problem I had was in almost pinching my pinkie off on the Smiths machine. You’d think, since they named it after me, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but the left hand re-rack is a tricky maneuver. So I nicked the skin off the top of my knuckle, pinching it between the bar and rack. This flies into my fundamental goal of going through life with all of my appendages intact, so I’ll just move a little more to the right next time.

Visited al.com today. I think this was my third visit since I left there in 2008. My desk is still empty. Prime cubicle space like that simply can’t go empty, though, so they call it the “Kenny Smith Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium.”

After that a meeting here, lunch there, sales talk, the paper itself, and then studying.

I had to renew my IRB certification tonight. Required every two years for people doing research with human participants, mine was winding down. So I read the things you have to read and took the quizzes you have to take and now I have the nifty little certification to put in a filing cabinet and forget.

Meanwhile my lifeguard certification is woefully out of date. I can’t pull you from a pool, but I can give you surveys and run psychophysiology experiments with you.

If, that is, my IRB proposals are accepted. I have one of those due tomorrow. The Yankee helped (a great deal). And then there’s the reading. Another 100 pages to stumble through tonight. It looks like another after-midnight bedtime.


22
Sep 10

1939 World’s Fair

Cameras as big as buildings!

Celebrating humanity!

And the age of see-thru avant-garde faces highlighting the mass communications era!

The world was growing up right before disbelieving, wonderous and sometimes horrified eyes. You can see three more images of that progression here.

If you want to start at the beginning, go here.


22
Sep 10

Catember, Day 22

Allie

“The really great thing about cats is their endless variety. One can pick a cat to fit almost any kind of decor, color, scheme, income, personality, mood. But under the fur, whatever color it may be, there still lies, essentially unchanged, one of the world’s free souls.” – Eric Gurney


21
Sep 10

Teeming Tuesday

I’d like to try putting a few more things into a Tuesday, just to see if it is possible. Tuesdays are the fullest of days. Met with the boss. Tried, and failed, to install a new printer on my new iMac.

Called the tech guy who, happily, could not install it the first time. If it takes him two attempts I don’t feel so bad.

Had lunch. Met with the WVSU news director. We talked about Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, who is on campus this week. She’s been in classes and student meetings and will deliver a big lecture tomorrow night. She’s got such a great story, really. But more on that tomorrow.

Tried to meet with a student, but missed. Made copies of everything for my class. Held class, delivering a spelling test, talking about news leads and doing wholesale news rewrites.

We made fun of typos. There were two on the most recent cover of Soap Opera Digest. I can’t find a link and can’t bring myself to upload it here, but the designer has forgotten their rules on apostrophes.

And then there was the paper. The students have worked on it all night. I get a question here, make a joke there and listen and tell stories. Now, around midnight, they’ve announced they’re going it alone. I offer to copy edit the first few editions with them, but they rightly want to remove me from that process. This is the moment where they pedal away, around the block and you’re just so proud to see them go.

Tomorrow they make it back from their circuit around the block. We’ll critique the whole paper. We’ll talk about how to improve their technique, steady lines, standing, brakes and falling. Hey, I might keep this bike metaphor. You’re just so proud.

I decorated a wall in my office.

StarsandStripes

Those are Stars and Stripes announcing the end of World War II. The one on the right is the Paris Edition announcing the Germany surrender. I found that paper purely by accident at a place called The Deal in an artsy Louisville, Ky. That was the same day, incidentally, when I decided to build the half-hearted black and white section of the site.

It was a nice day. I’d spent a long weekend visiting the folks. They took me to a local funky, artisan restaurant and just down the road we found that store. It doesn’t deal in antiques. Or in things that feel like antiques. Everything is from that frozen moment when your grandparents stopped trying to be contemporary. Much of it was familiar, but vague. You could understand the function of all the merchandise, but if you weren’t from the period the why could be lost on you.

We ate at that restaurant and used bookstores and a record store and that shop. It was a great day.

They were stored in a desk pretty close together, the pictures and the newspaper, and they might have once belonged to the same family. There was also a Red Cross map of Paris. The woman sold it all to me for next to nothing, just glad to get it out of her way. She’d much rather sell mid-century modern furniture and clothes.

My step-father bought me a little bookholder there, too. It is sitting on top of one of my bookshelves and holds Winston Churchill’s history of the war. A friend sold me all six volumes for $20. He bought them from a library and realized he’d never read them. I Hope to one day. Maybe I’ll bring that newspaper home next summer and read the books underneath the authentic newsprint.

The paper announcing the Japanese surrender is also from Stars and Stripes, the Mediterranean edition of the military paper. It is a bracing headline, but that too will be a teaching moment. What is contemporary and acceptable today might not be a name that people approve of years from now.

I don’t have a great story for that paper, though. I bought it from e-bay. I wish I’d asked the seller to try and explain that particular issue’s history. Someone thought enough to bring it home from Italy, or thereabouts, but now we’ll never know the details.


21
Sep 10

Black and whites

My, how fashion has changed. In this week’s series of old pictures we see argyle on children, ridiculous clodhoppers and America’s last bonnets.

All this and more from the snapshots of people who lived a lifetime ago. It isn’t ghoulish if you imagine them as merely very old.

Four pictures, starting here. See the entire series from here.