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adventures

If the sunset doesn’t distract you the scoreboard might

Sometimes conceptualizing work requires several different techniques. Today’s involved handwriting a bunch of outline-style things from an old semester. Then I had to scribble between all of the lines, merging some things and separating other things. And then I typed all of that up and did it again, removing some things as I went. It sounds easy, and it is, but there’s a lot of thinking that goes on in between those scribbles and merging and separating. Eventually, that became a good stopping point, and I needed to clear the old cobweb attic so that I can return to this again later this week.

Next I need to go through, line by line, lesson by lesson, to make sure all of the dates and the units and the lectures and so on all line up. After that, I’ll have to go back through it once more and make sure the assignments all line up. And then that class will be prepared.

Then I’ll do all of that, more or less (sometimes more) for two more classes. Later this week, maybe by the weekend, this will pick up speed.

You know what didn’t pick up speed today? Me. I set out for an afternoon ride and there was no wind and no legs and that’s really all of there was to it. I did the first half of our river run, which takes you seven miles to, you guessed it, the river. Instead of turning left to follow the route I did something unusual and I turned right. A mile and change down the river road I turned right again, creating the beginning of my double back, as I pedaled through Warehouse Town. I found a map of that area that goes back to 1927. All of the roads we know today are on that map. The land would have been different, of course, they built those warehouses right up to the muddy edges of the slough.

That that road was there a century ago means some kind of bridge was there, too. Now I want to know how long that’s been the route. The little crossroads town has been around since the late 17th or early 18th century. People have probably used that little water inlet in one way or another for all of that time. What all is sitting out there in that muck?

Anyway, you can think about that when you aren’t riding too fast. But when I got into that town I turned left and headed home. For a change, there was no headwind, no wind at all, and so I just tried to keep my tempo up as well as I could and timed myself on little segments, to that tree line, to this stop sign, and so on. I had to get home, get cooled down and cleaned up.

We went across the river this evening to see a baseball game with some friends. Sat in the shade that the parking lot affords (the shade of a car, that is). Someone brought chicken nuggets and other people brought cookies and drinks and we brought some fancy bread snacks. The conversation was pleasant until the appointed time of walking into the stadium. We got in just in time to see the first run scored on a TV screen.

Tonight we were sitting well down the first base line, close to the fair pole. It was a warm evening in the sun until …

And then the latter ends turned into a perfectly lovely evening. And how could it not be a lovely evening? Nice people on either side of us, beautiful views, some woman taking her social media influencer photos below us. The good guys with a lead.

Also, the video board operator likes it when the all-star pitcher gets two strikes on batters on a bad team.

When the hometown team is at bat they have some slickly produced montages. I assume this is meant to be evocative of the city’s iconic clock tower.

Anyway, the good guys scored early, put three more up in the third and added an insurance run in the seventh. Jesus Luzardo scattered four hits across eight innings before giving way to Caleb Kilian, who closed out the game in just his second appearance. The big star of the night was the other new guy, three-time batting champ and four-time All-Star Luis Arraez, who was traded yesterday and drove in two tonight. He was somewhere between San Diego and Dallas when San Francisco moved him. I wonder if he even knows what hotel he’s staying in right now.

Well, tonight, at least, he’s on a winning team trying to move back up in their division. After tonight’s win they’re about five games back, I believe.

The production crew was excited to use the winning graphics package, for sure. The Liberty Bell light lit up and the fans went home happy.

Perhaps no one does local imagery better than these guys. They have a lot they can use, and they incorporate it all. The old Fightin Phils are haunting the stadium, a replica of the Liberty Bell is parked just outside. There are statues, there’s that clock imagery from above. And there’s the graphics with the bell, and a little restaurant bar in the park named after John Pass and John Stow, the two founders who cast, and recast, the bell.

They need more Ben Franklin and cheesesteaks, but there’s enough here they could just rotate through the years. Maybe it’s down to the whims of the Phanatic, himself now a timeless institution. Many schools and professional teams are steeped in their local or manufactured iconography, and they should be — it’s important. I’d tell you why, but I’m saving that for an in-class lecture this fall. Enroll and find out!

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31
Jul 26

Fastest July ever

Happy weekend! I’m making it a long one. There was work, a little, but then my lovely bride and I decided to sit down and read books. First we read inside. Later, we read in the backyard. We know how to party.

The electricians came back to finish the install of the generator. Took them part of a third day to get it done, but at least this time it wasn’t 108 degrees outside. They’ve completed their tasks. Nice guys, unfortunately their shop is a long way away, or I’d call them our local electricians. Maybe they still will be.

And so we have a generator. The local inspector has to come out and inspect all of the gas and the electrical work, and hopefully that will be painless. Our electricians seemed to know what they were doing. The various gas people who’d come out seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure it’ll all look good.

This is how it works. If the power goes out, the system realizes it, and the generator fires up 10 seconds later. When the power comes back on, the generator set up realizes that, and turns itself off. Our job is to keep the air vents cleared, schedule annual maintenance, and, if the generator has to run for long stretches of time, check the oil.

Since we’ve been in the house the power has gone out three times. Once for about three hours, once for slightly longer. The first time we weren’t home, so I don’t know those details. Always in the back of my mind, though, this is the first time in my life that I’ve not lived on a priority grid — near a hospital or nursing home — and it could take a while to have the power restored if there’s a widespread outage. The neighbors talk about a big storm that came through and famously left them without power for a week. And that’s why we, and the neighbors, both have generators now.

Also, we got a shutter fixed today. Somehow some wind got in behind one, bent it over from the top down, and pulled the two top screws out of the siding. It just dangled there for a few days. It’s too far to reach via ladder alone. Also that roof is steep. Also, once in a while I get the impression that I am not as young and as bulletproof as I used to be. Also, that angle.

Anyway, a guy shimmied up the ladder, pulled out the old one, put up our new one (both are plastic, and look roughly identical) and held up a pleasant conversation the whole time — like he’d done this all before.

I promised to catch him if he fell. He promised to not mess up the gutter. He held up my end of the bargain and decided it wasn’t worth testing whether I meant it. (I meant it.)

Thing is, those shutters, pretty standard aesthetic pieces, come in packages of two. So now we have one extra shutter. Hopefully we won’t need it anytime soon. I put it in the store-it-and-forget-it section.

At the concert last weekend, Train did a curious little medley, the theme of which, if any, escaped me. But the crowd enjoyed themselves an awful lot with it.

It’s a party band vibe. A lot of crowd pleasing things, and tons of those local references that make the crowd scream. A lot of energy throughout.

The demographics here make no sense, and that’s probably the best part about it. For every person my age we saw at the show there was one person much older, and three people in their 20s. Age is just a number at a rock ‘n’ roll show. Maybe the demographics never should have mattered.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Sometimes, even writers who have won two Pulitzer Prizers, and/or the editors who edit them, can get punchy.

This is, so far, the only Looney Tunes reference I’ve read.

Col. Donlop was killed at the Battle of Red Bank. It was a poorly conceived assault by the German officer and his British commanders. The Hessians were trying to avenge a previous slight. They thought they had the element of surprise. They did not have the proper tools for a fort siege. They never had the initiative and, ultimately, the battle becomes a big morale win for the Americans.

Some of our colleagues are working at that site even now. Just a few years ago archeologists found the remains of 15 Hessian soldiers there, and the project has become a public and educational dig. Dr. Janofsky is the real sort of archeologist you’d want to meet. The kind that can bring history to life for people who thought they were uninterested. I had the chance to see her speak earlier this year. She’s incredibly passionate about the work and of course steeped in the time she’s studying, but a part of a program that’s using the most modern techniques (isotopic testing of remains!) to further the research. Between the discovery in 2022 and 2024 the researchers have held a few “public dig days” and almost 400 community members have taken part.

Read Atkinson’s book. (If you know how to party like I know how to party, this will be a great start to August for you.

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27
Jul 26

All I can hear now is Aerle Taree: ‘a game of horseshoes’

We went to a pool party, Saturday. Perfect day to spend in someone’s backyard. Just a lovely day. Very nice people. Let me count … about two dozen people. Kids in the pool, burgers on the grill, enough tables to circulate through to drop in on different conversations. Perfect weather. Someone there will have a big birthday next week, so it was one part that and one part getting all of these different people together.

Played a little cornhole, downplaying the skills, lest anyone become awed by my grasp of geometry and physics. At one point, for phone, I was just knocking other bags out of the air with my bags. And then a score was announced and, well, I can’t lose the game. So I started dropping them directly down the hole, which wasn’t as impressive as it could be, but was held in higher regard than it should be.

I resisted the urge to throw up my hands and yell, “I grew up playing HORSESHOES!”

Because I did, and that game gives you life lessons.

Also Jarts, which gives you other lessons, important lessons about parabolic arcs, escape vectors, eye protection, how to pop your hips and turn from a backpedal into a sprint if it really goes bad, and so on.

One of the kids was working on swimming lengths of the pool entirely underwater. We’ve all done that. I still do that. I might do that the next time I get in the pool. The swim was powerful, fast, ferocious. Three widths of the pool were completed by natural athleticism, fitness and youth. I explained lactic acid buildup, fluidity, efficiency, and wall propulsion. Suddenly, five widths became the standard. I think I felt more accomplished for explaining it than the swimmer did for swimming it. This is what it means to coach others: to see the success of others, to manifest an excitement of achievement that belongs solely to them because, if you did not, it’d just look weird when the thing was done to a level you knew possible.

Another, younger, kid I taught how to use a snorkel. I’m not sure if we progressed well into using it as a submerged breathing tool, but he did delight in blowing water out of the top of the thing. This is always what it means to coach others: to enjoy seeing the delights of others as your success.

Ask someone who played any sort of youth sport about something a coach and a team and their sport taught them that wasn’t about the game itself. That’s what it really means to coach others. I’ve never coached a sport, but I had those coaches. It’s invaluable. I coached college students on student media for 15 years — they won a bunch of awards and a lot of them have gone on to satisfying and important work in the media and someone of them just enjoyed their time their for their own reasons. And I think about that aspect of what a mentor or a coach can be when I think about that work. In this case, what is the confidence that grows in seeing yourself improving a skill by 67 percent based on just one conversation? What joy can you provide yourself by seeing how far you can discharge water out of a silly looking bent plastic tube?

Which is to say it was a nice pool party for me, and, also, I won at Cornhole.

We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show last night. Matt Nathanson was the opener. Still doing his breathy-graveling, coffee shop singer-songwriter thing. He was a 15-year-overnight success in 2008. He’s done now something like a dozen studio albums, two live albums, a bunch of EPs. He’s got a great stage presence. Its not every opener that you’re determined to get there on time for, or that everyone around you will shut up for, but we should, and Nathanson is one of them.

It was a night of three acts. More featuring Matt Nathanson later in the week. I’ll have another, different clip tomorrow.

Back to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. (This is not a book club, but if you pick this up and read along we can pretend. Either way, you should consider the book, it is a great, terrific, and informative read.) One of the things that I always appreciate about Atkinson’s work is how he uses these lists as a sort of a daily street-level census of things. The more texture like this you give a story, the more I’m inclined to lean into it. Atkinson always seems to do that in these descriptive ways that never seem too onerous, never lose the thread of where his story is going, and yet gives you real flashes of this moment that we can’t physically inhabit.

Obviously I’m not prepared to fact-check him on this. Possum meat? Few of us are. But he’s a well regarded popular historian and I’m sure this has all been carefully examined to the extent possible. I have no reason to think otherwise, but I often think: how long does it take him, or the people that wind up in the acknowledgments of the book, to pull enough color together so that it can go into this one paragraph? Just the assemblage of information, let alone whatever time it took to write it, re-write it, edit it, re-work it again. And it’s merely a part of his style.

And one more reason I’m enjoying the book and suggesting it to others.

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24
Jul 26

Yankees at Phillies

We went out for pizza last night at a place that serves pizza. This was the place where we discovered honey on pizza — and you should try that before you discount it. You should try it and then think about how you can start smuggling honey into your favorite pizza place because you’re going to start doing that because honey on pizza is good. Also, they were having open mic night last night. We did not sing. But we could have. And some of us would have fit right in.

Look, I don’t sing in front of people. Because what if I’m bad? And you have to weigh that against all of the other things that a person does in public without regard to judgement. So I applaud the people that pursue open mic night, fulfilling a dream, taking a shot, singing their truth, whatever it is. Good for them. I applaud the people who do the things I can not or will not do. But … ya know … listening to some of them … maybe I should?

Anyway, we heard five people while we had our pizza and I marveled at the honey on my pizza. And then a guy took himself to the little corner where the microphone was, introduced himself, said he’d driven an hour-and-a-half to be there, and was so young he talked about how he had to learn these 80s songs. Then he played them, and that young man was good.

So I will not.

This evening we went over the river and to the ball game. We did not have peanuts and Cracker Jack, and that was an oversight on my part. Saw a nice game, though. Both pitchers, Cam Schlitter for New York and Jesus Luzardo for the Phillies were perfect through three innings.

And then, in then Paul Goldschmidt turned a 2-0 sinker into a lead-off home in the fourth inning, just as the Yankees fans began a chant, and Phillies fans started to boo thunderously.

Not so much at the player, but the other people in the stands. That was a Mad Max moment, the sort of thing that make Philadelphia sports fans legendary. It was intense, and funny, and fun.

Here was a bang-bang play at second base. They went to instant replay. They slowed it down from every angle on the big screen and nothing looked definitive. They overturned the judge’s on-field call. That eventually led to a bases loaded moment, but nothing came of it.

That one run home run was the game. It was a true pitcher’s duel. But other things were also going on.

The Fanatic found a way to work in the biggest sporting news of the day. LeBron James is going to spend a little time here, which everyone will most assuredly react to in dignified ways.

I like to think the Phillies front office Slack channel was filled this afternoon with “Who’s got a Knicks jersey?” queries.

Now consider for a second, you’re the Fanatic. You have big feet. You have big furry hands. You have a circumference. You’ve got a basketball. You’re dribbling on grass. And you’re doing it pretty well, all things being equal. And then he backed Not Patrick Ewing to the rim, and jammed it home.

The basketball hype is going to be easy for the next little bit. One of the best players of all time is going championship hunting in your venue? That’ll sell tickets.

And the fans are ready for it, already.

The LED lights across the field, over the right field foul line.

The Liberty Bell light, which stayed silent this evening. When the Phillies hit home runs the light change, hydraulics move the structure, and there’s a stock gong sound. It’s pretty cool. There’s a place in the park called Pass and Stow, named after the two men who cast the famous bell. There’s a replica outside the stadium. This is inside. It is, I am reliably informed, not the actual Liberty Bell.

The sunset.

A different moment in the same sunset.

And scoreboard signage.

My mother-in-law thought the first six innings were a little blah, but the drama caught up to her late in the game. She’s not invested in this one way or the other, but found the whole of it to be rather stressful. It was good baseball drama. I guess he was doing the math, but at some point my father-in-law said he’d been a Yankees fan for mumble-mumble years. Suffice it to say, his whole life. He was impressed by the number, too. Started telling the ushers about all of those years, all of those ups and downs, all of those pinstripes. The man wept when Thurman Munson was killed, got sentimental at the old timers’ games, and was offended on Yogi Berra’s behalf when he was left off a greatest player’s list. (Ask him about that. He’ll make the case, and he’ll be right.) I should ask him if he remembers a particular reason of how and when and why the fandom caught him.

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16
Jul 26

The air is gross

However hot it was yesterday, and the heat index reached 110 degrees, it felt much the same today. The heat index reached 108 today. I am of the opinion that anything over 106 is just pain, anyway. The rest is semantics.

Except for this, those poor electricians were back at it today, running wires and cables and connections this way and that, all so that we might one day have a generator operational. They sweated and melted and crusted over and sweated again. They had to turn the power off today, which they did one minute after their projected time. They predicted we would be without power for four or five hours. And after five-some hours they restored power. We stayed in the house, stayed still and read. For most of the time it was fine; the ambient temperature inside served us well as the sun baked us. I was still handing out water, checking on my guys, trying to stay positive and encouraging them to come inside from time to time. They never really would, but they did enjoy working in the basement the best.

We hired these guys, and their company needs to make money and they need to make money, and we’d booked this however far in advance, but sending these fellows out this week, during another intense heatwave, seemed rude.

I poured them water, scooped them ice, offered every little solution I could think of. When it felt like inside of the house was getting too warm I thought to go check in with them again for the fourth or fifth time. When I came back in, the house, which had felt warm a few moments ago, felt absolutely delightful. And that, friends, is relativity.

Still a third man, a gas man, came to the house this afternoon, too. His job was to run a bit of gas line from the new gas meter to the new generator. I think we’ve exhausted the electricians with the conditions and the demands of the job. They will come back again in a week or so to finish up the work. And then the final connections will be made. And then some municipal inspections of their work must be done. And then we will have a generator. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we lost power sometime between now and then?

Anyway, near the end of the month, sometime in the very early part of next month, we should be set. One less thing to worry about, which we don’t worry about.

But, you know, different people have told us how many of our neighbors have gotten generators around here. Apparently it’s been a big acquisition since 2020. Indeed, as we stood outside looking at the latest work today you could see two of them sitting patiently next to neighboring houses. And, soon, we’ll be set up just so, too.

May we never need them. And may those guys get re-hydrated this evening.

Speaking of books, I finished Carry Me Home. I’ve been putting my observations on Bluesky, for some reason. Here’s the first batch. And so here’s most of the rest of them. I have one or two more that I’ll put here tomorrow.

That footnote, though.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 8, 2026 at 12:20 PM

One of the things that people told themselves, and one of the things McWhorter repeats now and again, is that the real problem was one of peer pressure. People didn’t want to be ostracized from their class and people because they treated others with kindness or decency or fairness.

Which …

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 8, 2026 at 12:20 PM

We turn, now, to the Children’s Crusade.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 9, 2026 at 12:43 PM

We should remember that a 12-year-old in this story is 75 years old today.

Living memory.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 9, 2026 at 12:45 PM

Beyond even the nuance in this incredible well-told story, the occasional human insight, the glimmers of social realization, things that read like an actual spiritual conversion, is fascinating. It doesn’t happen to everyone, and certainly not at the same times, but there are these moments …

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 9, 2026 at 12:50 PM

Minimal experience, but quick to violence, loved confrontation, so, of course, qualified. An “addled racist” said NYTimes’ Howell Raines.

Crying scapegoat, Lingo ran for sheriff of Jefferson County (where much of this story is focused). He lost. He died of “a heart ailment” in 1969.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 10, 2026 at 1:22 PM

These Wallace anecdotes exist within a few dozen pages of one another. In retrospect they can read almost as an explanation, an excuse, “We’d no idea, ” a “It’s out of our hands,” which is common. But that’s the compression of time. People understood — for good, bad, or worse — what he was.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 14, 2026 at 12:23 PM

After the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls, Chuck Morgan gave a speech so moving, so powerful it got national attention, and ultimately pushed him out of town, to Atlanta.

digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/coll…

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 14, 2026 at 12:23 PM

The period in which my peer group grew up … and why so much of this book is a revelation…

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 15, 2026 at 2:34 PM

Quick aside, the Civil Rights Institute is a fantastic visit.

The book ends with this, “America’s city in a valley, but out of the depths rose a city upon a hill. Beauty from destruction. There is magic in that."

But there are multiple epilogues, because of timing and cosmic inquiry.

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 15, 2026 at 2:37 PM

After “Carry Me Home” was published came a new round of trials. I covered the Blanton trial. (I don’t think I used the “closure” framing.)

Asides: Rudolph, not involved, but in common, was captured, tried and sentenced. US attorney Doug Jones later became senator and is now running for governor.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 15, 2026 at 2:46 PM

There are, functionally, four epilogues in this book. Some of them necessary due to timing, others due to contemporaneous events that have echos of the past. McWhorter spent 20 years putting this together and so it doesn’t seem indulgent at all. Here is her summary of the book’s thesis.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 16, 2026 at 12:43 PM

I have one or two more that I’ll embed in this space tomorrow. And, of course, we’re on to the next book, which is also a great read indeed.