We return once more to documenting the county’s historic markers. (Two weeks in a row! Almost a trend!) If you are unfamiliar, I pedaled my bicycle all over the county looking for the markers. This makes the 31th you’ve seen in this series so far:
The field was fallow when I took this picture, but don’t let that fool you. This is an important strip of land. You can read about it on the markers page. And you check out the full run of markers here. (Click through the pins on the map on that page’s banner to explore some of the other local historic locations.)
We landed on a comet today. Sure, you and I didn’t have anything to do with it — well, I, at least, didn’t have anything to do it it — but that’s OK. Sure, it was the European Space Agency and not the Americans, but we landed on a comet. Humanity did that. We did that.
We launched something into space 10 years ago, shot it around the earth a few times, Mars and then set it off on a course to catch up to this comet, this leftover from the universe’s creation.
And then our little science experiment, having made and matched the comet’s trajectory, dropped a clothes dryer full of equipment onto it and are talking with an appliance on a comet. I wonder if GE made it.
Oh, and has anyone seen Bruce Willis or Ben Affleck lately? They could be up there, ya know.
There’s a YouTube video titled “Everything Wrong With Armageddon In 14 Minutes Or Less.”
It is more than 16 minutes long.
And, someday, an alien culture will watch Armageddon. Just think on the stuff we’ve been beaming into outer space as our earliest socio-cultural first impressions.
Things to read … because reading always leaves a good impression.
A Chick-fil-A manager is so irritated at his staff’s use of slang that he compiled a list of terms the employees are forbidden to use. The missive has gone viral in social media.
[…]
“You will speak properly when you walk through these doors,” he wrote. “You are a professional so speak professionally.”
On Nov. 19, Pizza Hut will essentially relaunch its entire brand, changing the food it serves, the way its ordered and even the company logo. There are 11 new signature pizzas, six new sauces, 10 new crust flavors and four drizzles — enough options to allow for 2 billion unique pizza combinations. For the company known for trencherman staples like Stuffed Crust, Meat Lover’s and Supreme, the new menu is the fast-food equivalent of a Hail Mary pass.
“It’s a fear of irrelevance,” says Darren Tristano, a food industry analyst at Technomic. “But the potential to negatively influence their current customer base is certainly there.”
It’s a risk Pizza Hut is willing to take, though they’re hedging bets by keeping those old favorites on the menu. Sales at the nation’s largest pizza chain have been dropping for two years, as Domino’s, Little Caesars and Papa John’s—the No. 2, 3 and 4 chains, respectively—have cut into Pizza Hut’s business.
Although mobile publishing is quickly changing the rules of journalism, newspapers have been dangerously slow to adapt.
This has got to be fixed, because digital natives like BuzzFeed, Circa, Mic, Upworthy, Vice, Vocative and Vox are competing for – and in many cases winning over – the youthful readers coveted by publishers and advertisers.
As discussed previously here, nearly half of the digital page views at many newspapers are occurring on mobile devices. But editors and publishers have been slow to recognize that mobile publishing is as different from print-to-web publishing as television is from cave drawings.
Constrained screen real estate – like the new 1.5-inch Apple Watch – isn’t the only factor influencing the development of content for mobile devices. An even bigger issue is the limited amount of time that publishers can engage with readers.
And this may be bigger. As I also like to say, the only thing that has demonstrated a growth faster that web proliferation is the mobile penetration.
I bet Philae is up on that comet right now, just waiting on something to download to its iPad.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
Back to the Glomerata section, a place we haven’t visited together in some time, a place where I share the covers of all of the yearbooks from Auburn, my undergraduate alma mater. The one I’m showing you here is the 1925 edition, which has been in my collection for some time. But if you click this book’s cover you can see one of my newer additions, the 1924 Glom.
So check out the 1924 cover, when Calvin Coolidge was the president. The governor of Alabama was William Woodward Brandon, a man-of-the-people type who helped build roads and the port in Mobile. He was made nationally famous in 1924 for his role in the Democratic National Convention.
Across the state lawmakers and the University of Alabama were playing political games that would cripple Auburn for years. Money was tight on campus, there was a big controversy between the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service and the Alabama Farm Bureau Federation. By the end of the year the poor performance of a football team and general budget woes would be the beginning of the end for President Spright Dowell. It was a trying time. Most of the names you see popping up in this period now have buildings and roads named after them. Elsewhere radio is starting to explode, Coolidge is the first president to use it, Stalin came to power, Rhapsody in Blue is played in New York. Admiral Jeremiah Denton was born in 1924, in Mobile. George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Marlon Brando, Don Knotts and Doris Day were also born that year.
Anyway, you can walk through all the covers if you start here. For a detailed look at selected volumes, you might enjoy this link. Here is the university’s official collection.
I have a very musical sense about things. I know this: One day, many decades hence, before they put me in the cold ground, there’s going to be a ragtime band playing a few tunes. Some of it might sound like this:
The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the great Allen Toussaint are touring together — they’ve never done that before, somehow — and they played Samford tonight. It was a terrific show. Toussaint has 20 records, two Grammy nominations and the National Medal of Arts award. The band goes back 50 years with a rotating cast of members. Some of the current iteration have been onboard for decades. Seeing them all on one stage feels like you’re reaching elbow deep into the hopes, history, irreverence and dreams of Americana. To see great talent like those men playing together is to, perhaps, get a small inkling of jazz as the American art form. Within it all there are discordant notes and spaces and wandering musicians and multiple instruments and it all comes back together again. Americana. They all count their time in music and New Orleans in generations.
Charlie Gabriel, for example, is 81 and has been playing music for at least 67 years. He has four generations of New Orleans musicians behind him and three generations playing below him.
They did play St. James Infirmary, two versions in fact. One of them was perhaps the happiest tune about death you could imagine. The other was very angry, as it should be. Part of that is in the clip above.
Things to read … because there are clips below, too.
A University of Missouri-St. Louis student who uses an online platform to live-stream protests in Ferguson was hospitalized last week after five or six people threw him out of a church, where protesters had gathered to strategize, and beat him.
The student, Chris Schaefer, began live streaming Ferguson protests and interviews on Oct. 23. But during the protest strategy meeting at St. Mark’s Family Church on Nov. 6, he was not recording, he said in a video from a hospital bed.
[…]
Schaefer told police five or six people assaulted him at the meeting because they believed he was recording the meeting, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a St. Louis County Police Department spokesman. Schaefer ran out of the church to a Walgreens about a half mile from the church, where police responded to a 911 call, Schellman said. Police are looking for the suspects.
New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.
Those hours represent a total across multiple media sources, some of which are consumed simultaneously.
We all need to develop effective (meaning, sometimes, different) messages across platforms within our unifying themes. It is starting to sound like jazz, no?
