Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.
And that, as they say, is its own reward.
My other reward was veggies.
Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.
(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)
Help for victims of sex trafficking: priest Becca Stevens wants Birmingham to do more
This will stick with you, How to Spot a Trafficking Victim at an Airport
Here’s the trailer for American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, detailing the nation’s best sniper. As movie trailers go, that’s incredibly intense.
This story never gets old, Sportsmanship allows middle school boy to live football dream:
Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.
“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.
Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.
“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”
A friend found the video:
UAB gets $47M grant for low-income education initiative
The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson
One System, Two Media: How China, Hong Kong Are Covering The Protests
The second half of this is great, Young Protesters in Hong Kong Have Found an Ingenious Way Around Cyber Censors
Occupy Hong Kong: Macro scale, micro-adaptations
Speaking of adaptations:
Could have told them that at the beginning … Facebook is more important to news distribution than you think, and journalists are freaked out:
At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?
But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?
From the department of obvious things that could be understood but for interest, Editors who don’t use Twitter undercut their pleas to innovate.
If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:
The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?
