At the intramural swim meet, it was the Auburn Master’s, of which The Yankee is a part of, versus all the various fraternities, sororities and any other group that heard there was pool time available.
The Yankee took part in the diving competition and swam in three events. She was a diver in college, so maybe she’s a ringer. She won on the one-meter board:
Not everyone’s dive was as nice or innovative as hers. I have a great unfortunate dive to share later in the week. Here’s the tease: I said to the judges “Give that guy extra credit for volume! You heard the smack! He earned those points!”
She also swam in three races, the 50-free, the 100-free and the 4×200 relay.
She placed fourth in the first two races. She cleaned up in the relay, though, swimming the best time on her team and, perhaps, the entire pool. If she could apply that 50 as an individual race she would have qualified for nationals. Not bad considering she’s been on the swim team for less than a year. She’s pretty fast.
Also, she made faces at me:
We had dinner with friends at a Mexican restaurant, where the chips flowed with abandon. At home we caught up on a bit of television. It was pretty much the best kind of night.
The Samford Crimson launched a new look this week for the last quarter of their academic year’s publication run. Looks pretty sharp:
Also there’s a new Target now open just down the street.
Here are two more quick shot of the inside layout. They worked hard, had extra meetings, were excited and it shows. This section is designed by our Society of Professional Journalists award-winner features editor Megan Thomspon:
The sports section is designed by SEJC award winner and sports editor Clayton Hurdle
I tinkered with that page in InDesign last night after they’d finished it. It is solid.
I left a meeting discussing the Crimson to drive over to a television station. CBS 42’s Bill Payer was giving my class a tour. Here he is showing off their mobile production unit:
They built that from the ground up two years ago. They didn’t copy anyone, just built what they thought they needed. They got everything right, except they forgot a kitchen and restroom. Payer tells me that the station could burn down around them and they could go on the air from this truck and cover the news.
Being at CBS meant a chance to see the always welcoming Mark Prater. We sat in the studio and pitched around ideas while, downstairs in the studio, the students were hearing a bit of breaking news. Seems some officers were out serving a warrant on a woman and she sliced them up with a box cutter.
Three officers were taken to the hospital for treatment. Another was treated on the scene. Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley reports:
There was also a big fire leading the news cast, and as I told the news director, the days I really miss it are the days when I am watching a newsroom buzz. He invited me to join in, but I figured they had it covered. Kaitlin was reporting, after all.
I left her a voicemail while I was outside and it was gray and cold and windy. She called me back while I was in the library, but I needed to leave anyway. She was on the way home from a movie, trying to get back before winter fell, so she could sit and enjoy the rest of her evening in a warm, dry place. We talked about old friends and impossible things we did and our general awesomeness among other things. We’d sent her flowers earlier in the day and she’d texted me but now she said in person on the phone that they were beautiful and colorful, which is exactly what I’d hoped for.
She had a little smile in her voice when she said it, which was the other thing I’d hoped for, and constituted the best part of the day.
A nurse who doesn’t save lives, state land without flags, dangerous breakfast treats and it all starts … now.
Do not get ill, destabilize your vitals or otherwise threaten to die in this place:
The executive director of a senior living facility in Bakersfield defended its policies that apparently prohibited a nurse last week from giving CPR to an elderly woman who was said to be barely breathing and later died.
“In the event of a health emergency at this independent living community our practice is to immediately call emergency medical personnel for assistance and to wait with the individual needing attention until such personnel arrives,” Jeffrey Toomer, director of the facility, said in a statement on behalf of Glenwood Gardens.
“That is the protocol we followed,” he said. “As with any incident involving a resident, we will conduct a thorough internal review of this matter, but we have no further comments at this time.”
Bakersfield fire dispatcher Tracey Halvorson pleaded with the nurse on the phone, begging her to start CPR on the elderly resident, according to the 911 tape released by the Bakersfield Fire Department.
“It’s a human being,” Halvorson said, speaking quickly.
“Is there anybody that’s willing to help this lady and not let her die?”
The woman paused.
“Um, not at this time.”
We’ve maybe, possibly, lost our way.
But the poor nurse, who was then having a really bad, no good unfortunate day, managed to be heard on the 911 recording. “She’s yelling at me,” she said of Halvorson, “and saying we have to have one of our residents perform CPR. I’m feeling stressed, and I’m not going to do that, make that call.”
Small-town folks struggling to put up a monument to veterans: It sounds like something straight out of “Mayberry R.F.D.,” but for residents of this Central Coast town, it feels more like “Catch-22.”
After three years, the privately funded $60,000 monument, which is sponsored by the American Legion and would be placed on a sliver of land owned by the California Department of Transportation, is still unbuilt. The sticking point has been opposition from Caltrans to the monument’s use of the American flag and the agency’s apparent reluctance to allow the display of words — such as “United States” — on the monument’s military emblems.
[…]
In an interview, Peter Adam, the supervisor representing Orcutt, was unequivocal about the idea of striking the flag from a veterans monument: “That’s a degree of crazy we shouldn’t allow.”
The policy stems from a First Amendment case where the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Caltrans should not have allowed removal of activists’ antiwar banners from a highway overpass while U.S. flags were allowed to fly. Caltrans, then, decided to bar all flags from state roads. The plaintiff in that suit, by the way, is quoted in this story. And they are as mystified by it all as you are right now.
Our great-grandparents would be ashamed of all of us. Bureaucracy in general, however, is thrilled.
And we haven’t even discussed pastries yet. But we will.
A seven-year-old Maryland boy has been suspended from school after biting his breakfast pastry into a shape that his teacher thought looked like a gun.
Josh Welch, a second-grader at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, said he was trying to nibble his strawberry Pop Tart into a mountain.
“It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun but it wasn’t,” Josh said. “All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but it didn’t look like a mountain really and it turned out to be a gun kinda.”
But when his teacher saw what he had done, the boy says she got “pretty mad” and he knew he was “in big trouble.”
Josh is in the second grade. He should know the difference between mountains and firearms, even if his school doesn’t. Here’s the letter home to concerned parents.
Assault pastries! That sucrose-laden confectionary treat is a loaded weapon! Suspended for two days, young Josh and his friends will no doubt realize how silly the authority figures in their school are behaving.
When I was in high school one of our teachers built and demonstrated a potato gun that fired off rubbing alcohol. She would run through the halls, burst open doors and shoot — wait for it — a tiny nerf basketball at people. It was hysterical. It was also the 1990s, so get off my lawn, I guess, with your “nurses” and your flags and your Pop Tarts.
It is time for another installment of Catching up, the weekly post that allows extra photos to finally go some place. WordPress tells me this is the 100th installment of Catching up. Not sure what to make of that.
The guys in Section 111 that heckle the opposing team gave me a shirt this weekend. I made them laugh with a few witticisms of my own. Didn’t have the heart to tell them we were doing this years, and years before they showed up. But that’s a nice shirt, and I subscribe to their philosophy on how to confuse and amuse the poor players from the other team. The 111 guys definitely have their moments, and now I get to pretend to be like them. Here’s the front and back:
She appears to be studying the computer screen intently:
Started a new book tonight. I’ve finished two others recently, and I’ll try to mention them here tomorrow. But this is from Marshall Frady’s Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey. Something about this book might make you rethink the South, or journalism, or both. I don’t know for sure yet, but that’s the vibe I got early on. Here’s an early passage on Huey Long and George Wallace.
Even before that I was making a mental list of who should read this collection of essays. I bought this book, published in 1980, off Amazon in the fall of 2011 for $4.25 (as a library book sale, apparently) and it has been sitting patiently in my To Read bookcase ever since. Now it seems you can’t pick this up anywhere online for less than $76. So I did OK.
Here’s the review on Amazon: “You feel the thing he’s writing about, you understand it, you see it, you want more – this is everything writing can do.”
