March « 2013 « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

March, 2013

Auburn / books / history / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
12
Mar 13

Things I’ve read recently

Tuesdays sometimes get away from me. Of all the days of the week, Tuesday is the one I’d rather keep in order, but that doesn’t always work out. And yet it was a mostly productive day. Students are putting together the newspaper. I did a lot of grading and reading and writing of emails and so forth. Of its own accord it probably wasn’t much, but it is cumulative. It adds up.

So instead of reading all about that, read all about this!

I finished First Man, by Auburn professor James Hansen a few weeks ago. This is the authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, the often misunderstood engineer-pilot-astronaut … why am I explaining who Neil Armstrong was?

This is a fine biography, immensely detailed and well sourced. All but one of Armstrong’s sons took part in in-depth interviews and, of course, the biggest part of the tale leads up to one of the most widely observed accomplishments of all of humankind, so, you know, there are notes for the author to consult.

And despite his analytical, engineering approach to pretty much everything Hansen hints at an engaging Armstrong. He even tells jokes! Which might sound odd of a man considered by so many of his contemporaries considered aloof. He sounds more private, unassuming, and unsure of why you need to know so much about him. Armstrong, after all, only considered himself “a white socks, pocket-protector nerdy engineer,” (pg. 602).

One of the best anecdotes, perhaps, actually involved his wife, Janet:

For the terrors of the landing, Janet again needed to be alone, so she retired to the privacy of her bedroom. Bill Anders decided to join her. Bill and Janet together had given Pat White the bad news that awful night in January 1967 when her husband Ed died in the Apollo fire, and Bill felt he should stay with Janet right through the touchdown. Rick, a very intelligent and sensitive boy, also wanted to be with his mother. She and Rick and been following the NASA flight map step by step, now with Anders’s help. Rick settled on the floor near the squawk box, while Janet and Bill sat on the foot of the bed. (Long after the Moon landing, this led to one of Bill Bill Anders’s favorite quips. “Where was I when the first Moon landing occurred? I was in bed with Janet Armstrong!”) (pg. 480)

Last week I also read No Time for Sergeants which famously became both a Broadway play and movie. I find aww shucks hokum and dialectic reading to wear me out, but this was tolerable enough to get through in a day or two. It wasn’t as funny as the dust jacket implied, but the movie is great, and this scene in both formats is terrific:

It always helps to imagine Griffith in this role:

Mac Hyman attended Auburn for a short while before the war. He lived here. I looked for Hyman in the Glomeratas, but he didn’t seem to make an appearance.

Speaking of Glomeratas, stick around. There’ll be an update to that section later this evening.

Alabama / cycling / memories / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
11
Mar 13

A very rainy Monday

This is today:

I drove in that, trotted across a parking lot in that and then watched it from indoors fall on the quad at Samford. It is a rainy day. That’s about an inch of rain, apparently. I question our precipitation measuring methods. This was a lot of rain.

Hard to conceive that yesterday looked like this:

That was about 20 miles into my ride yesterday evening, about halfway back down the home road. It gives the impression in this stretch of riding on a ridge line. I’m not sure why, there’s no real drop off and houses dot the right side. But the pastures on the left tend to slope down a tiny bit, so you feel like you’re riding high and on top of everything. Only the hill you just crested isn’t that much of a hill, really, but everything is relative and when you are surrounded by rollers you can be King of the Molehill.

In a few more weeks, and a little to the right of that shot, there will be the most amazing wildflowers. A few days after that, and back down the hill to the left, there will be a yard filled with eight-foot-tall flowering bushes. This is a fragrant area.

Anyway. Being a rainy Monday, I made today Copeland Cookie Day in my class.

Dr. Gary Copeland was one of our grad school professors. He died last January, just after his retirement which was doubly sad in that he was so very much looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren.

He was the kind of man that people just don’t stop missing, I think. I had the honor of being invited to a Facebook page in his memory that remains active even today.

And so I wrote there that it was Copeland Cookie Day in class. In honor of the great man and his epistemology and ontology class I pick a day each semester, put a picture of his on the board, tell them about this colorful character, feed the students cookies and, most importantly, talk about things that aren’t on the syllabus.

It is one of everyone’s favorite classes. Mostly because of the cookies.

Dr. Copeland was the instructor of my first class at Alabama and was on my comps committee. He was one of the good ones, and I like telling students about him, and his Copeland fests and taking students out to eat and his general kind and giving nature.

When I wrote about it this afternoon on Facebook 16 people liked it, most of them his former students. At least one professor said he was going to make his own Copeland Cookie Day and word is getting around our department that I do this. He would laugh at the silliness of it. But he was a giver and would have enjoyed it, too, I think.

So we talked in class about trips we’d taken so far and how some people who have similar majors from elsewhere are waiting tables or how someone read a survey about how it was a tough career. And those things are important to hear, but for freshmen and sophomores there are a lot of positives too. At the end of the day its not unlike most other things: work hard at it and good things can come to you. Dodge raindrops where you can, look fondly back on sunny days and forward to even nicer ones.

It is that time of year, where the weather always seems on on the cusp of ever nicer days, and we’re all looking forward. The oncoming Spring Break isn’t a bad excuse, either. Not that anyone is counting the days, the number of which is four.

Auburn / baseball / friends / photo / weekend — Comments Off
10
Mar 13

Catching up

The one day of the week when you can count on even less being here. So we make up with it with pretty pictures. More often than not, though, they are very average. They often have reasonably interesting stories though, so let’s stick with that.

From the swimming and diving meet last Thursday. Did I mention The Yankee was a diver? She’s twisting here, and she probably doesn’t like that, but it looked cool:

Did I mention she won? This guy, meanwhile … As I suggested to the judges, a diving coach and whomever else was standing nearby, if you make a sound, you earned extra points. Have a heart, judges of America:

Those dives were off the one-meter board. And, yes, you can spring high enough to generate enough velocity to land with a resounding smack that catches the attention of everyone in the natatorium. It happened.

Here’s The Yankee swimming:

She was warming up for her three races. She won one of them, a 4×200 relay:

And they aren’t just out there for giggles. There were some serious competitors on that pool deck:

I am disqualified as I can’t swim in a straight line. We all have our burdens in life.

To the baseball! This is a fan from Brown. He’d come all the way down from Rhode Island, avoiding winter and enjoying our beautiful pre-spring weather and walked over to tell the hecklers in Section 111 that he’d enjoyed listening to them all weekend. That was pretty awesome.

Here are a few more crowd shots from Plainsman Park. There’s a story below, too, so keep scrolling.

Auburn claimed a sweep of Brown with today’s 6-3 win behind Rocky McCord’s 6 2/3 innings and eight strikeouts. This is his last pitch of the day:

Here are the game highlights.

But the man of the hour was Brown head coach Marek Drabinski. He’s also coaching third when Brown is at bat, and that brought him a weekend’s worth of good-natured ribbing from the hecklers.

By late Saturday he was even talking back to that section of the crowd a bit. Hecklers were trying to get him to stand in his box, but he refused:

Fans were chatting with him and ultimately trying to bribe him. At one point we invited him to sit in the stands. It is hard to imagine Skip Bertman or Jim Wells getting that offer. Appealing to Drabinski’s northeastern tastes the offer became “Dunkin Donuts if you’ll only get in the box!” On Sunday afternoon he asked where his Dunkin was. We had to sadly tell him that our Dunkin Donuts wasn’t running yet. But it would be built by next season, if only he’d bring his team back down.

He teased us all with the box. He’d walk over to the edge, look down and walk away. He’d slink over and put one foot in. He’d come back later and but one foot inside the box and just over the other foot above the box. On Sunday he promised he’d get in the box later.

And at the end of the game, with his team down, but rallying to try and avoid the sweep, Drabinkski walked over to the box in the last at bat.

He’d disarmed us all with his charm by then. The guy was enjoying himself with the hecklers, and they were enjoying his good spirits.

Coach of the year? Coach of the year. And a great reminder of what college sports is supposed to be. We all kind of hope he brings his Bears back down this way next year, so we can treat him to Dunkin. And make him get in the box.

That was the most fun we’ve ever had with a coach, easily, including when you can see the hecklers getting into their heads.

Finally, here’s a picture of my friend, Stephen’s, daughter. It was her first Auburn game, but she loves baseball:

I took a picture of their family together at the park, four generations. What a great way to wrap up a weekend at the park.

Then I went out for a bike ride. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

Auburn / baseball / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
9
Mar 13

Hey, it is Saturday

Slept in, late breakfast. Enjoyed the beautiful day, with the late afternoon spent entirely at the baseball park. There’s the hint of spring into things again now. The pear trees are blooming. The Japanese maples have exploded. We have roses. The mysterious flowering bush we can’t identify has tried twice to impress us with its yellows. The dogwoods will be next, and several of the trees have buds on them.

The days are getting longer, and there’s the overwhelming sense that you’ll make it to another spring. Love that feeling.

Auburn hosted Brown for game two of the weekend series. JUCO transfer Michael O’Neal commanded a complete game shutout as the Tigers beat the Bears 6-0.

Brown’s head coach is a character, and he’s been entertained by the people on the third base side of the field, but perhaps not as much as he’s amused us. I’ll write more about him tomorrow.

I saw this nice lady walking her dogs as we headed home. I snapped a shot just because the disparity of the dogs amused me. And then I got home and realized I caught her in mid-expression:

I like to think she’s saying “Dude. Not when I have a doggie bag in my hand.”

Later: The officially sanctioned baseball highlights:

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / history / memories / things to read / video — Comments Off
8
Mar 13

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Shelby County, Ala. made The Daily Show earlier this week:

And then Shelby County made the Colbert Report:

So there’s that.

Here’s some stupid:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.

Here’s another one, some 100 students have been suspended for taking part in Harlem Shake videos:

According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.

“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.

[…]

“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.

Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.

When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.

The air, my mother said, used to be brown.

Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.

And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.

At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:

We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”

The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”

Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.

Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:

Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.