The front:
Inside the card:
Happy Mother’s Day to all those lovely where-would-we-be-without-you Moms!
May, 2011
8
May 11
Arrghh
More from Zapd. (Hard link is here.)
Auburn’s baseball team has looked solid in winning the first two games of the weekend series against Georgia. The bats had been alive, they hadn’t had to go deep into the bullpen and there had been a scarcity of shake-your-head errors.
So naturally we were all optimistic about the third game as Auburn looked to sweep on a warm, beautiful day at Plainsman Park. And this is what happened …
The worst part was the guy standing in the parking deck, watching for free, who was ridiculing the players as they met with children after the game. That was special.
7
May 11
Get your skate on
Brian took us to a roller derby today. He has a friend that plays on a team from Louisiana and they were in Auburn competing this weekend. He came down to cheer her on, we went to see the spectacle.
They ride in a family skate rink with a taped oval track. The announcers have realized that bad sports movie dream of serving as both play-by-play commentary and public address. You can bring your own chairs or sit in the “suicide section,” think of it as behind the end zone where competitors occasionally spill into the spectators. That did not happen in this bout.
They call it a bout. There is an official bout photographer. You know him because that’s what his shirt says. There are six skaters per side on the floor at one time and five referees trying to keep track of things. During the lulls in the action they tell a guy in the infield the recent scores. He writes it on a whiteboard, flashes it to the announcers booth (regular skate rink attendees remember it as the place from which music was played and troublemakers were called out) and they try their best to keep the score and clock current.
They skate two 30 minute halves — it is flat-track and not quite as physical if you recall late night television roller derbies of a different era — and they are all fairly well tired at the end of the thing. It is charming county fair fun. It is lighthearted, not to serious, without airs or presuppositions beyond the notion of home team and visiting team.
We cheered the visitors, since our friend’s friend was on that team. And they won.
These are people who do this for the camaraderie and love of skating. The out-of-towners left their homes at 6 a.m. to skate here at 4 p.m. Some of them were making the return trip tonight. You have to love this sort of thing to do that to yourself.
On the back of the program, which I’m keeping because it will be worth something on e-bay one day, they advertised the after party at a local establishment. Just imagine the Bears and the Vikings gathering together and telling the fans where to join them.
We opted for Mellow Mushroom, where we found the chill fish in the picture above.
6
May 11
Auburn hosts Georgia
Auburn’s baseball team, simultaneously struggling and competing for a division championship, hosts Georgia for a three game series at Plainsman Park. The first game was tonight, an extra innings affair, where I tried out the Zapd app for the first time.
Zapd is intriguing, if a bit limited at the moment. There are no social media or embed options, so what you see below is simply captured in an iframe. (The hard link is here.) What the program does do, however, is create a blog on the fly, via your phone. You can’t import it, short of copying the source file, so it stays on the Zapd server, but this is just one more step in the push button blogging world. (And, again, this is all done via a free app.)
These are a few things I took pictures of and typed out during tonight’s game.
Tigers win! Also, the video was published as text for some reason. Here’s the actual clip:
After the game there were fireworks:
