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

November, 2012

movies / photo / Storify / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off
15
Nov 12

The last Twilight Twitter fest

Thankfully these dreadful, dreadful movies are behind us. To sum up: somewhere along the way The Yankee started reading these books. She wanted to see the first movie. Figuring I owed her a movie for some horrible thing I made her watch I went along. I made fun of it on Twitter because it was just horrible and over the years this has been an event, making fun of the movies with a running commentary from inside the theater.

It has become a minor hit and, lucky you, I’ve archived them all. That includes the last installment. We saw it tonight, before most of the country, apparently. (I spoiled nothing below.)

The first movie is at the top. If you want to skip to the most recent movie Storify will continue to load as you scroll. Just do a word search for “And now, the fifth bad movie” and you’ll find yourself at the beginning of my last Twilight commentary.

I am glad this is over, though it was amusing to make fun of it and, as always, nice to make so many people laugh.

journalism / links / overwriting / Samford / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
14
Nov 12

Downright magical

Here’s an almost-interesting piece about the future of how you watch sports. You work through the need for cable for your sports fix, baseball’s success with streaming, how other leagues follow what MLB does and the need for cable. Cable is always important:

ESPN might be the pied piper for a different kind of strategy, though. Rather than cutting cable and paying only for what you want (the “a la carte” model), you’d pay one price and get everything, everywhere. Yes, you need cable to get WatchESPN, but once you’ve logged in you’re effectively untethered from your TV. Your cable bill buys you access to all the things you want to watch, wherever you want to watch them, on whatever device you choose. And because it’s the company setting the restrictions for the leagues, ESPN’s platform doesn’t have weird local blackouts, or odd weekend restrictions — you just watch ESPN as you always have.

The Verge is also running a War for your TV series. Stock Gumshoe is using Television 2.0 and the new golden age, and really the The $2.2 trillion war for your living room. There are also the game consoles and emerging gadgets.

And it all sort of leads to this piece, which is worth reading in full and defies excerpting, really. But:

Because the percentage of households with a cable or satellite subscription is now declining for the first time in the history of television.

3 million Americans have already cut the cord, including 425,000 in the past 3 months alone.

And according to Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, those “cord-cutters” are joined by a new group: the “cord-nevers.” A full 83.1% of new households are choosing to live without pay-TV.

[…]

Robert Johnson said about the shaky state of the cable industry last month at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“In the next two or three years, something’s got to give. At some point, the consumer is going to say enough is enough.”

He’s one of the most powerful men in the pay-TV business, warning his fellow fat cats that their bloated, inefficient industry may collapse by 2014…

TV isn’t just the next great transformation of the Internet Age… it’s the BIGGEST one of all.

Since no one likes their cable service, let us say bring it on.

And, of course, it will change things for us in the classroom. Not everything, but quite a bit.

Newspaper critiques. Budget meetings. Award nominations. Well that’s different for a Wednesday. We submit news clippings from the Crimson to a couple of different contests every year.

The deadline for one of those contests is coming up. We’ve gotten about two dozen awards from this organization in the last three years, so we sat around late into the evening finding the best examples today. Next week I’ll have to send them to the judges.

OK, we sat around for part of the afternoon. The rest of it I think I just rambled on for a while, too. It happens.

If I ever ran for office I might be a micromanager. I visit rest stops in my travels — I have to take breaks to stretch my shoulder and back — and the photography is … dated. Not the best image to share with people visiting our fine state. It is probably 14 pages down on the list of priorities, but still, this could be easily fixed.

The one nearest our home has photographs of the football stadium without upper decks. That’s a 32 year old photograph, at least.

Here’s a photo from a rest area in almost the perfect center of the state. It is encouraging you to visit Orange Beach, a lovely place to be most any day, but on this day in 1981 … well, downright magical:

People see that picture and think “Now there’s a group of somebodies. What a great life.” But they don’t realize they haven’t talked in a lifetime.

She’s a new grandmother. He’s now a guy who is coming to question all these years in sales, but he’s been pretty good at it. They gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. They sent cards to each other on all the big days for the first few years after, she always loved the memories of that trip to the coast, he’s silently been kicking himself for drinking too much and remembering too little … but they somehow lost track in that way people do.

Sad, really. She stopped at that rest stop one day, her kids had to go potty. She walked right by that photo.

“I need to go to the beach,” she thought. But she didn’t make the connection.

Or they could be happily married. The new grandkid could be theirs. He might have been a terrible salesman, but really found his stride in retail.

We’ll never know what became of them. But that photograph might live on forever.

Visit me on Twitter. And a new picture on the Tumblr today, too.

Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
13
Nov 12

Three limited stories

Sometimes I get to talk about a bit of public relations in class. I’m a journalist, of course. If I merged all those happy worlds I’d be a branded journalist along the fault lines where marketing and public relations meet. Admittedly this is a very narrow intersection. Even my general training and choices have turned me into a specialist, it sometimes seems.

So last week this class had a public relations professional in to talk about how all of the writing is very important, public relations is very important and — in big shops — the other multimedia skills you can learn right now are increasingly important. Be a general specialist, then.

It is a great specialty.

So today we talked press releases. The format, the style, the approach, all of it. My students were counting down to Thanksgiving — a week-and-a-half away — and you could see it in their eyes.

There was a great deal of commotion today having to do with a new lock in one of my departments. We’d opted to go away from the traditional physical key and get something modern and frustratingly elaborate. The new lock allows for combination codes. And it allows us to give everyone a different number for tracking purposes.

We thought about the two walled, biometric, fingerprint, eye scanner with a platoon of Israeli ex-special forces, but decided against them. We simply had nowhere to stow them when they weren’t on duty.

Instead I have another seven-character string to memorize. There are also two physical keys, of course, because the batteries on the lock system will eventually die. Or there could be an electromagnetic pulse. Or the lock could go rogue and decide to take over the world. Good luck with that, lock. You’re mounted to a heavy door!

Had dinner at Jason’s Deli tonight, where exactly nothing remarkable happened. There was a long line of people who had no idea how to order food for themselves, but they all knew each other and knew most everyone else dining at the place. The cashier now asks if this is the first time you’ve dined there before. One person that works there sees me enough to know better, but this person might be new. She might be a stickler for protocol. This could be the new protocol. Why not? The Chick-fil-A down the street now asks your name.

I think we’re getting a bit too personal with our fast food.

One thing did happen: I’ve noticed Jason’s Deli no longer puts a pickle spear on my plate. Maybe they’re trying to save at the margins. Guess I’ll have to get my money’s worth elsewhere.

I’ll take extra sunflower seeds from the salad bar. That’ll show ’em.

Monday / things to read / video — Comments Off
12
Nov 12

It’s going to be a fake hit

Found this in a book I’m reading, Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1946. I paid $.60 for it, used on Amazon.

This particular copy has been bought and sold many times. There are notes in the margins. They read like critical rhetorical notes, which seems odd in a book of collected journalism. Maybe the book was used for a reporting class like the note says. Maybe those were the pages the owner had to read. One of the owners, anyway. The book has layers and layers of used book stickers common to college bookstores. Seven layers, each telling a story of a high sale price and a pittance for their return at the end of the term. Those stickers are the adhesive geology of some professor who found value in the text and taught from it over and over.

I’m a third of the way through the book and have found two or three stories I’d like to use in class. Or, in a different time, would have enjoyed reading with a professor. I imagine both as small seminars where everyone is incredibly sharp and talkative and asks a lot of questions. What a great special topics of journalism class it would be.

And I began to wonder: How are we going to collate this generation’s batch of excellent reporting? Will there be a book edition?

Rainy day today. Woke up to clouds and they just kept rolling in, piling on top of one another, the day growing dark and deeper and darker until finally one bumped into another and dipped over the full capacity of the cloud. Rained for hours, cold and quiet.

It rained a little more than a half an inch, which should help our extreme drought. A little more than seven percent of the state remains in the dark red on the climatology maps. We’ve been there for more than two years. Rain, even the kind pushed in by the cold, is always welcome.

In the evening we strolled into the movie theater. Rainy days are good for that, too. We watched Argo. Based on a true story. Not without historical inaccuracies. The two best scenes were strictly cinema:

“Nobody is good-looking enough to play me,” Mr. Mendez said with a laugh. “But really, he did a fine job. A lot of the things I told him he took to heart. Especially those moments where you have concern, those 15 seconds of reviewing your plan internally.

“Your gut tells you if it’s going to be OK or not — and if you ignore that, you probably will get into trouble. I saw Ben do that on the screen. The audience just sees him not talking, but I knew exactly what he was doing.”

Like many movies based on actual events, “Argo” takes a number of dramatic liberties. In the film, the rescue mission is called off the night before the six Americans leave Iran; the group makes a nerve-wracking, in-disguise visit to a crowded and noisy Tehran bazaar; Iranian police cars and a truck full of rifle-wielding militants chase the getaway plane on the tarmac.

Though those scenes make “Argo” more suspenseful, that kind of action didn’t happen.

It played to the Hollywood formula, and thus you knew the outcome, but still it gets you in all the right spots.

Here’s an interview with the guy that inspired the Ben Affleck character, Tony Mendez:

It is storytelling of a different kind, but still good storytelling. It is … taut. The editing does the trick.

Thanks for being so generous with your time. Do come back tomorrow. There will be … something.

photo / weekend — Comments Off
11
Nov 12

Catching up

A weekly picture post full of extra pictures is a little bare when you don’t feel especially good. Even still, there is always something to see. So let’s see them.

Allie, nursing me back to health once again:

Aubie is, first and foremost, a ladies man. Here he’s wooing one of the event security people at the game last night:

I’m sure Dr. Foshee did not care for his landscaping being ripped up, but the tiger heart wants what the tiger heart wants, and this tiger wanted to give flowers.

Aubie, by the way, received first place on his 2013 UCA National’s video. He’ll compete in Orlando in January for the UCA National Championship. Aubie is a favorite for another championship.

The Yankee at yesterday’s tailgate:

A birthday card I did not buy. I was asking myself “What does a nine-year-old boy like?” I thought about this card. His mother, my first cousin, would have been displeased:

She’s trying to raise her sons without too much Duke-like influence. If you’ve seen more than one episode of that show you’ll no doubt understand.