Winter is coming, and months early. But we were warned. Our friendly neighborhood meteorologists and our bombastic national media chicken littles have been trying to get our attention about it for days. I haven’t doubted the forecasts, but it would be hard to believe based simply on your observation.
It was beautiful today. Chamber of commerce weather doesn’t do it justice. Someone struck a Faustian deal for the conditions we enjoyed today and at least one end of that ill-considered deal was upheld. This might be the end of our peak fall.
(It usually lasts about three days to a week.)
Knowing that it would be the last pleasant day for a while — there are models that suggest we won’t be warm again the rest of the month — I went out for a run this evening. I’ve never been on the trail across the street from campus, but I figured out a way to do a little extra and make it a 10K.
I finished up in darkness, on a part of the path where I couldn’t see my feet. Fortunately no ankles were twisted. But I did run through sections where it was remarkably cooler here than it was there. This wasn’t just my perception, I had to run through it twice. It was like being in a canyon where the temperature drops 10 degrees simply based on the terrain. Only I wasn’t in a canyon. More like a tunnel. An office building sealed off the big road artery, woods were on the opposite side and there was a strong tree canopy overhead.
But it was a fine run. I even did some intervals.
Intervals at the end of a six-mile jog. I do not know what is happening.
Things to read … so you’ll know what is happening.
Happy Veterans Day, indeed, and thank you to my many family members and friends who have served or continue to do so. All four of my grandmother’s brothers served. That whole family is full of camo, olive drab and a sprinkling of Air Force blue. I have had the good fortune to be friends with Marine reservists, Army veterans and active duty personnel and I read a lot. All of that tells me only this, the sacrifice others make through hardship, deprivation and loss are things that the rest of us will have difficulty ever knowing. And we’re definitely blessed in what we don’t know; but perhaps we shortchange all of those between us and that by not having a better understanding.
My great-grandfather would have been 95 today. He served as a combat medic in the Battle of the Bulge.
I had the great privilege of seeing these Marines graduate a few years ago:
A friend shared this link today and it is a reminder that it isn’t just the serviceman or servicewoman who is given a sacrifice: A Marine’s Parents’ Story
And, as I said on Twitter this evening, every war is different, indeed every person’s war is different. But if you read nothing else after the story above, I encourage you to read Ernie Pyle’s A long thin line of personal anguish:
Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out – one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.
Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.
Here are torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits and jumbled heaps of lifebelts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.
That line, for a reason I have never been able to explain, punches me, hard, every time. That entire column, like so much of Pyle’s war work, gets right to the heart of what it is to be in a hard time.
Plenty of wonderful stuff here, Pulitzer Winning Photographer David Turnley’s Advice to a Class of Photojournalism Students:
David Turnley had so much to say on the matter of street shooting and his experiences of so many decades of work, and I was so overloaded with joy and the relevant information he brought to the table based on real experience from a career as a humanitarian and war photographer, that it was hard to capture everything he was saying, but some important things he shared with us did manage to stick with me.
I love this stuff, programs, projects and efforts like these provide some amazing results, “No Local Radio History Is Too Small”:
The task force says radio is “perpetually declared to be a dying medium” but nevertheless attracts dedicated listeners and commercial and public support. The organizers believe radio’s history is a chronicle of our country’s culture and a potential trove for historical researchers, but that much of it is “untapped” because of radio’s live nature and problems of accessibility to content.
Almost every day there’s something in the bygone ether that I wish I could find online. We’ve become great archivists as amateurs, but if you think about the decades of important work that might have disappeared …
We’ll be talking about this in class soon … UGC Use In Local News Is Growing:
TV stations will one day get a large percentage of their breaking news video from viewers, predicted Rebecca Campbell, president and CEO of the Disney ABC Television Station group.
Speaking Friday in a keynote interview at LiveTV:LA, Campbell said producing local TV news is an increasingly interactive affair, with producers using social media to alert followers to breaking news, and viewers shooting video and sending it to newsrooms.
ABC stations are promoting the trend, Campbell added. “Many of our stations brand themselves as ‘Eyewitness News’ and they’ve begun encouraging viewers to become an eyewitness and send in video when they see news,” she said.
This is the fourth such story I’ve seen recently. We’ll be at critical conversation mass soon, Police Use Department Wish List When Deciding Which Assets to Seize:
The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.
In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.
“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”
Carole Hinders at her modest, cash-only Mexican restaurant in Arnolds Park, Iowa. Last year tax agents seized her funds.Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime RequiredOCT. 25, 2014
Mr. Connelly was talking about a practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government, without ever securing a conviction or even filing a criminal charge, to seize property suspected of having ties to crime.
And one of “those” stories. $40G per bird? California cormorants refuse to budge from bridge being demolished:
Now that a crucial section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has been replaced by a new $6.4 billion span, nobody needs it anymore — nobody except about 800 birds who call the decrepit, 78-year-old segment home.
The double-crested cormorants – protected, though not endangered – have nested along the bridge for decades, and have so far shown no interest in relocating to the shiny new section that replaced the eastern section of the famed bridge. Officials have tried pricey decoys, bird recordings and even specially-made nests installed underneath the new span to lure them roughly 100 feet next door. The effort to demolish the old section, damaged 25 years ago in the massive Loma Prieta earthquake, is being held up by the birds’ unwillingness to move, and critics, who say the delays could cost taxpayers $33 million, are crying fowl.
The first two comments I see on that story?:
Gee I wonder how some moonshiners from Alabama would handle this technical problem? LOL
I guarantee you that Alabama moonshiners would handle it with a lot more logic and common sense than the Californians are handling the problem. By the way, I am not from Alabama so here is no bias on my part.
A few scare shells would probably do the job. Just like the ultimate removal of their preferred structure.
Hey, they’ve already built the birds a replacement home.
