February « 2011 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

February, 2011

adventures / Alabama / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
13
Feb 11

Catching up

Where we pad Sunday with pictures that never made it to the site. Poor, sad pictures. Don’t want their feelings to get hurt.

“Come to the blog on Sunday! Everyone looks pictures on Sunday!”

Yes, that one is small, but click the image to embiggen. This one has been sitting in my iPhone for a while. This is a parking lot in Homewood, Ala. Can you guess what I was doing there? Shot, and automatically stitched together by the free Panorama app. Not perfect, but, again, it is a panaroma shot from my phone. What an age.

Sunset over Auburn, Ala.

This will not be an inexpensive repair. Lesson: always counterweight your tripod.

Sometimes the sun catches you just right.

I love peanut butter as much as the next guy, but who needs six pounds of it at a time?

Church, read, studied, wrote, raked leaves. I have one of my four comps questions now sufficiently researched. (At least I hope.) Three more (all in various stages of progress) to go!

Come back tomorrow as I fret about two of those remaining questions.

But now, The Yankee and I are going out for early-Valentine’s Day/dating anniversary dinner.

(Six wonderful years!)

Alabama / Samford / site / weekend — Comments Off
12
Feb 11

Not quite silence

I’m not saying that this place will be dead silent for the next few days (two weeks, really). But this is the stretchiest of stretch runs. A lot of things are coming up in the next two weeks, work- and school-wise.

I figure you don’t really want to hear about image events or ideographs, within-subjects and between-subjects design, qualitative and quantitative research in political communication and the intricacies of recognition, recall and learning anyway.

So give me two weeks to navigate through all of these things and emerge from the brain cloud on the other side. There will still be a few things here, just to say I’ve written something here every day, but it will probably all be as thin and bland as this. I appreciate your understanding, you quiet and kind masses who come read this stuff.

(All 14 of you are delightful people, really.)

And I won’t ask you yet, because it would just lead to cramps, but soon I’ll hope you cross your fingers for me.

Friday / music / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
11
Feb 11

YouTube Cover Theater

Just the fun stuff today as most everything else wasn’t really a lot to talk about. So we’ll play the music, making the point once again that the world is full of artists in their bedrooms, kitchens and garages and they just needed YouTube to come along and help show them off.

This week’s featured artist being covered are Minnesota’s favorite sons, and one of my favorite bands, The Jayhawks. They have a large catalog and a small, devoted following. There aren’t a ton of covers on YouTube, but what you get is choice.

From Rainy Day Music:

I’d be willing to bet a lot of Jayhawks people find this to be an underappreciated song, this is Smile, from the album of the same name, as performed by Marco Ferri:

I might have put Russ in this space before, but here he’s playing The Yankee’s favorite Jayhawks song, Angelyne, in split screen, on a 2kulele.

That’s also from Rainy Day Music. We make up our own lyrics to that one. Usually it has to do with pancakes.

There doesn’t seem to be a proper cover of my favorite Jayhawks song, from the woefully under-appreciated Hollywood Town Hall, so I’ll just put the official video here:

It is startling. I’d say “They look so young!” And then I realize that video is almost 20 years old. Mark Olson, the guy with the straw hat, turns 50 this year. Gary Louris is sneaking up on 60. Two years agoOlson and Louris recorded an album. They’re due to release another record in what is considered their classic band lineup later this year.

iPhone / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
10
Feb 11

Snowy Samford

Started snowing in Birmingham around 6 p.m. and didn’t let up, they say, until around midnight. It didn’t snow enough to cancel classes, but there had been a great deal of sledding in the wet stuff and the roads seemed to stay in good shape.

Not sure if it ever really got above freezing today. Everything seemed to stay in place, and the imagined stillness that comes with snow was a nice sight … to see from indoors.

Here are a few pictures from campus this afternoon.

Is it spring yet?

history / iPhone / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
9
Feb 11

Space, the modern frontier

Today was a day. This video was one of the nice highlights.

Also I had great conversations with two students, one just to chat, and the other to encourage. Those kinds of conversations seem to happen outside of the classroom, in a hallway or office. I really enjoy having that opportunity.

Otherwise things got accomplished. I am now only one phone call and one online form away from having all of the important small things off my To Do List. Lots of meetings and ponderings and talks and cameras and other things that somehow, remarkably, fill up a day. But that’s all mostly done for now.

Which means I can return to the important large things on my To Do List.

Also it snowed this evening over half the state. I’m just going to flip the calendar to March if that’s OK with everyone.

Just for fun: I’m having my lunches with Robert Remini’s The House, which is a history of the House of Representatives. I’m to the point now where Kentucky legend Henry Clay has come to Washington, but there were a few entertaining passages just before he arrived. One section noted that church services were held in the original, temporary parts of the capitol building. The Marine Band played along as church goers sang hymns. But that was discontinued because, as Remini quotes Margaret Bayard Smith, “it was too ridiculous.”

In Washington.

Also, he lists the congregations that worshiped there for a time. “Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, an Anglican, a Unitarian (that caused an uproar).”

Oh, to be glib in history.

Tonight was a doo-wop night for my listening pleasure — the iPhone, when you get a good song, sounds like a good and proper transistor radio — but first I heard Linda Rondstadt. So we’ll end with a video, much as we began. We’ve marveled at science, we should wonder at art: