April « 2012 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

April, 2012

Your most unusual ice cream

One of my annual projects took me snooping around campus today. Our printer brings us some of the plates from the newspaper as keepsakes. This is the day when they are delivered, and I spend a while searching for them.

My investigation led me to this door and the sign above it:

After what happened to your other hand, you’d think you’d learn, right?

Something I wrote on my student blog, The classes we wish we’d taken.

A professor friend in Texas wrote “The class I most wish I had taken is probably ‘How to Find Buried Treasure and Pick Winning Lottery Numbers.'”

They didn’t offer that in my undergrad curriculum.

The Yankee, Brian and I visited Bloodhound for dinner tonight. It is the hot new place in town, described to us as having specialties of bourbon and bacon. Looking at the menu, there’s nothing healthy at the place. We had to visit. Here’s their description:

Bloodhound is a family owned restaurant, bar and live music venue featuring over-the-top American classics, top shelf bourbon, 28 craft beers on tap, and a music line up sure to knock your socks off. Our atmosphere was designed to be warm and welcoming- think hunting lodge, antler-pronged barn setting with the hustle and bustle of old time Alabama. Our music venue is separate from the restaurant and dining area with it’s own bar, stage, and local art displays.

I had the bacon, turkey and avocado sandwich, which was great. The dijon really made the dish. They also offered free popcorn, popped in bacon grease. Tasted like popcorn.

It is a fine-food place in a casual atmosphere, keeping the slightly upscale prices. The meatloaf will set you back $16. Brian said it was delicious. I don’t doubt his evaluation, but have a hard time ordering a $16 meatloaf.

A big component of the place is the everything-local motif. They even offer honeysuckle ice cream. Seems they go out and collect the stuff in the spring. It takes bags of the flowers to make a gallon of ice cream, but it smells and tastes exactly like honeysuckle.

A little bit of the ice cream goes a long way, though.

Begs a question, though: what’s the most unusual flavor of ice cream you’ve ever tried?

Bunch of stuff on Twitter, and new things on Tumblr.

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24
Apr 12

The long day

Last week we had the board members from the Alabama Press Association on campus. Today, it is Gene Policinski, the vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center in Washington D.C.

Things are hoping around here.

Policinski met with student-journalists at the Crimson this morning. I treated him to a mid-morning snack after that and he told me how he got in the business, where he’s been and his upcoming projects. Very interesting — and nice — guy.

The department took him and a few students to lunch at The Rotunda Club, the exclusive dining arrangement on campus. We ate in a beautiful wood-paneled room with monogramed plates and personal attention.

I hope whatever organization that normally dines there was able to make do with vending machines.

We had a student media committee meeting, electing next year’s editors for the literary arts magazine, Sojourn, the yearbook, Entre Nous, and The Samford Crimson.

This evening Policinski was the featured guest at the Timothy Sumner Robinson Forum. This is a Samford program named for a 1965 alumnus. The Robinson family hosts the event each year in honor of Timothy, who was a veteran of The Washington Post and the National Law Journal.

At the Post Robinson had more Watergate front page stories than anyone. He’d go on to work at NYU, and then head west to pioneer much of the first online media work.

Here’s Policinski speaking in Bolding Studio about the constitutionally “unique role” of journalists in the political and legal system:

He notes “We have turned to an era where we talk to people directly.”

He applaud bloggers and citizen journalists, but notes a difference between what they might do and what a committed court reporter could offer as coverage. He’s right, and it isn’t about the journalism, but about the legal system. There’s a need, he says, for more legal training, which is part of a big project he has coming up soon with his many professional affiliations.

The state of legal reporting is in decline, but not because of the people covering it, but by volume. Meanwhile, he says, the journalism profession is “if not walking away from it is turning away because of other pressing issues.”

Great to have him on campus, though it made for a long day (and after that there was still the newspaper). It was worth it. You can follow him on Twitter @genefac.

Don’t forget: Tumblr and Twitter.

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23
Apr 12

Just pictures

Breakfast here, in honor of the weekly tradition:

And then it was on to campus, where I wondered what kind of shrubbery this might be:

And then it was class, resumes and so on. It was a full, full day.

That’s why this is what you have this.

But you also have this: the return of the Tumblr. The thing has been dormant for quite some time, but I’ve recently stumbled across a few nice, inspiring ones. So I’ve changed the look, twice, adopting a free theme in the cheapest traditions of this website and then tweaked the code.

It will never be much, the Tumblr blog, but random things from my phone can easily be uploaded through the app and that will be enough to let us point and giggle.

More tomorrow.

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22
Apr 12

Catching up

This is the post with the pictures that couldn’t find a home elsewhere this week.

Found these grits at one of the places where we buy our local vegetables — we have three places. We don’t buy grits there, though. We don’t buy grits.

You’d make fun of the way cats sleep, and then you wonder: What do I look like when I sleep? And that ends that.

Auburn still produces phonebooks. They put 1,800 on each pallet. There were 10,000 or so sitting on this sidewalk. They’ve been there for months:

Graffiti has no point. Some has even less:

Haley Center has seen better days. It almost feels as if they’ve stopped trying. Note the guy hanging on:

This is the heel of the Bo Jackson statue outside Jordan-Hare Stadium. (Yes, a statue honoring a living person is odd.) This is what defenders so most often:

This is the heel of the Cam Newton statue outside Jordan-Hare Stadium. No idea why they are different:

The best view possible of Parker Hall:

Lovely daises:

We attended the memorial ceremony honoring three Auburn students that have died in the last year. Two of natural causes and one in a car crash. Very sad:

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21
Apr 12

The three Heisman statues

Finally got to see these today. They’re quite impressive. And at a reported $100,000, they better be.

(A statue of a living person is unfortunate, but we’ve already crossed that bridge.)

The unveiling, last weekend, with Pat Sullivan, Bo Jackson and Cam Newton all in attendance:

Wish they’d used an Auburn sculptor — remember what Shug said — but the Ken Bjorge from Montana did fine work. (Here he is working on the Heisman bust which is a bit of disembodied creepiness.)

Maybe the best part is the strategic positioning, with the official Heisman portrait of each man looking over the statue. Nice touch.