Last field trip of the semester today. I took my class to meet the nice people at Hoffman Media, who runs an always-growing office not too far from campus. They just bought a new magazine last week, Louisiana Cooking. I believe that’s nine special interest magazines under their banner these days.
The students learned about layout, scheduling, food photography, menu prep, circulation strategies AND got a tour of some of their six test kitchens.
No wonder the students always think that’s one of the better trips of the year. You should see the food stored in those pantries. They test every recipe, and re-test it, before it goes in the magazines. They say the only downside is when their cooking fish, or Mexican first thing in the morning.
The journalism and mass communication department’s awards picnic was this evening. Some two dozen awards and honors were given to people I’ve had in class or worked with in the student media.
Some of them I had in their freshman classes, and now they’re getting set to graduate. They grow so fast …
Last night I watched a bit of Apollo 13 for the 478th time. Love that movie, even the parts where it diverges from history, it does so a bit apologetically. I can take that. It is one of the better film adaptations of a book — in this case the book — that I can recall seeing.
Up the dial a bit Forrest Gump was also on. It allowed me to tell the movie theater story, where a woman in an Apollo 13 screening was frightened for the crew’s safety. Her son said something like “Don’t worry mom, Forrest Gump will get them home.”
I mention all of this because that little tale is cute, but mostly because I wanted to post this video, which is one of the most deliberately underplayed, intense lines ever.
Turns out that’s Ron Howard’s mother playing the part. Jean Speegle Howard was still working until shortly before she died in 2000.
That quote isn’t from the Jim Lovell/Jeffrey Kluger book, but the real Blanch Lovell is in there, scroll down just a bit:
I bet she would have delivered that line with even greater elan.
