The only thing more terrifying is Thursday, the 13th!
My sense of pop culture, or my need to find such things funny, must have become especially detached lately. Didn’t even realize it was Friday and a 13th until I started writing this.
Happily, nothing terrible happened today. Slept in. Turned in my grades — the semester is done! Rode the bike.
We have a big hill at our house. I am convinced it might be the biggest hill in town — being officially in the coastal plains and all. The ride started with that hill. I do not like this hill in the saddle. The Yankee says “You’ll get used to it.”
Which is the thing that concerns me. That’s the sort of descent that will break something when you get casual about it. I have enough mass to build up some real speed on the thing. And I’m fragile.
So we pedaled a while, had a nice ride and then got ready for the Alabama at Auburn baseball game.
Which got rained out. Friday the 13th strikes after all.
We went out for barbecue and banana pudding instead. There’s always a silver lining in slow cooked meat. (As a general rule: if you find a silver lining in your meat you should send it back, but go with it.)
We visited Moe’s Original Barbecue, which has become a popular stop on Magnolia. I always said a little northern Alabama barbecue would do well here. The first time we stopped in the line was almost out the door. Now the college students have all gone home for the summer and it was merely full rather than packed. And, for the first time at Moe’s, I had the barbecue chicken. It was very good.
The banana pudding still isn’t anything to brag about. Now I just want Dreamland. Or Jim ‘N’ Nicks.
Our Friday night? We bought things at Walmart. We picked up a garden hose sprinkler attachment, socks, a birthday card and other small things here and there. We know how to party.
The seasons have changed in more ways than one. My spring classes are now completed. All that is left is to finish up the grades. Then I’ll turn my attention back to my dissertation. And sweating. With spring gone summer has shown up, starting today. Riding a bike in the 90s isn’t the best idea, but we did that today. Nice ride, too. I should ride more.
Cleaned up some comment spam. The spammers like photo blogs, like my LOMO blog, where I dumped 100 spammers, but the automated text has lately been unfailingly polite.
After that we hit the grocery store. In the figurative sense. The store is made of brick and cement and various other painful looking substances. Hitting it would just be silly when what you really need to do is pick up cereal and sandwich stuff.
Then there was a little reading. And then some more research. Finding obscure Russian scholars is proving a tough challenge. I found seven items from this small group today, though, so that’s a start.
And then there was a baseball game. Auburn hosted Alabama State in a makeup game that was pitched as Fan Appreciation Night. Most people had something better to do (and school is out, further reducing the crowd). They didn’t even announce the attendance, but it was somewhere in the Montreal Expos territory. On the official statistics they called it 1,868. Only if they counted you twice.
(She got counted twice because she’s extra special. )
They might have miscounted the Alabama State pitchers. They had some big guys on the mound. The starter was an all-district center in high school, was listed as bigger than Auburn’s national championship center and I believe it. They just got taller and more impressive as the night went on. Auburn got an early lead in the game and flirted with giving it away before finally winning 7-5.
Lovely night to spend watching baseball, but every night is lovely at Plainsman Park. (This weekend they host Alabama.)
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville will receive a space shuttle orbital maneuvering engine for display as NASA begins parceling out parts of the shuttles. The shuttle program is ending in June after two more flights.
“It’s fantastic,” Center Director Dr. Deborah Barnhart said shortly after the announcement. “Anything having to do with propulsion, that’s us.” Barnhart was referring to the fact that the shuttle’s propulsion system was developed and managed at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
After this summer’s last flight the only place you’ll be able to get a sense of size of shuttle plus rockets will be in Huntsville. Apparently they have the only full “stack” around. And in as much as the shuttle program was a detour of sorts, this is still somewhat sad. Given the nature of things the detour isn’t being corrected with newer and better rockets to the moon and Mars. Right now we’ll be lucky to hitch rides to the space station and send robots out beyond a Terran orbit.
If we stay here at home it’ll just be that much easier for the ads to find us. It is about to become a lot more easy:
Far surpassing the powers of print, broadcast and the web, a host of new technologies is converging on the opportunity to use smart phones to intercept – and influence – the consumer as she walks past a store, wheels through a supermarket or reaches toward a product on the shelf.
The technologies include not only the increasingly ubiquitous GPS-equipped smart phone but also window stickers that broadcast messages, interactive bar codes that instantly link to a website and increasingly sophisticated databases that track your individual activities so they can precisely target products or deals to you.
This has been discussed for several years now, but this particular future is here. How it is received will be interesting. I bring this up to students and they always gringe. They don’t want advertisers to know where they are. But they’ll grow used to it.
Just imagine what Don Draper would do with that. There are a few ideas.
Jeremy Davis can remember a picture he sketched at the age of 3, a squirrel sitting on a stump his mother always held in high regard.
[…]
It took years for him to get from a small town without a stop light to the University of Alabama in 2007, when he truly began to develop his artistic side.
Davis’ decision to return to school after a brief hiatus to earn more money resulted in the ultimate lesson while working on a unique project. Davis is credited with sketching and sculpting what developed into the Nick Saban statue.
Leaving aside the Alabama part and the inherently creepy statue-of-a-living-person discussion, that is a neat story.
Auburn, in keeping up with the Joneses at Alabama and Florida, is unveiling statues of the Heisman winners. If one must have statues I’d prefer a different group of individuals. We venerate football players enough and they’re in little danger of being forgotten, but that’s neither here nor there. The Auburn statues were designed and created by a Montana sculptor. He’s incredibly talented, his work is on display at the University of Texas and across the country, but it would have been nice for an Auburn artist to get the commission. It isn’t like they don’t have an entire academic department devoted to the discipline.
I go straight to the links today because one of my RSS feeds found this morning to be a good time to cough up 209 posts it had been saving for a while. I was goaded into reading them all. And, completist that I am, I would have. But they were all old posts from a year or two years ago. I’ve already read them. So now I’m giving my RSS reader a hesitant look. What else is it planning? And will it carry me away in the scheme?
The problem of the information age, really, is that no one moment will be the SkyNet moment. But any number of them could be the cumulative steps to getting there. By the time you, you pesky human, figure it out, the thing will be over. It will be too late. And then you’ll just try to remember what you learned from Noah Wylie in his gripping summer television series on how to fight back.
You are going to watch, aren’t you? Because this is the sort of information that could be useful at some point.
Class today. More Dreamweaver. That will be the operating condition between now and the end of the semester, as we work our way through the perplexities of fairly powerful software which is useful when it wants to be, and mysterious whenever a student comes up with an outside-the-box idea.
I come back from each class with a small list of things I’ve promised to investigate and resolve because “Why isn’t that working as it should?” is not a fun question for anyone.
Critiqued the paper today, where we were a bit late in getting the dormitory bathroom explosion prank story. We’ve only two issues left on the year. I hope they solve the mystery so we can put it in the paper.
Else we might have to do follow ups on snake sightings. They are prolific on our wooded campus.
Also had the first talk with next year’s editor today. He’s a sharp young man. I believe he’ll have a fine year.
Went to the movie trailers tonight. I watched a movie after sitting through 28 minutes of previews. I go to the dollar theater, so I’m always a little behind, but there are some woofers in these promos. As for the best commercial:
True Grit, though, was pretty good. At least Jeff Bridges is playing the part of Rooster Cogburn, rather than John Wayne saying Rooster’s lines and wishing he were Ted Williams. On IMDB the original film lists Wayne, and then Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf (also considered for the role: Elvis) and then Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. In the modern film the listing is Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and then Matt Damon as LaBoeuf. That’s about right.
Darby, meanwhile, has played in 82 movies and last worked in 2007. Hopefully Steinfeld will still be working in 2051.
Did you see the LOMO blog today? Tree new entries for you there. That’s it for here. More fun will be had tomorrow.
Alabama / iPhone / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off on I must research distractedness — I’m sorry what was I saying? 5 Apr 11
On the road, here’s my self-portrait. That’s an empty section of road, and I’m somewhere in the shadow.
Dissertation meeting today. Spent a few hours with my adviser, talking about my literature and what else needs to go in it. “Add this, don’t forget that, have you considered this other thing?” And then there’s the method. Always there is the method.
My adviser is very good, and very sharp. If you looked just at his vita you’d wonder how he does all of the things he does. And then when you speak with him a few times you see how. It is possible that he is thinking of two or three hefty things at one time.
So that was the morning. And then I held class in the afternoon. The students were finishing up the last of their presentations. These were their presentations on a media outlet they’ve chosen to follow and write about all semester. Their talks have been very good.
After class I had a meeting with next year’s ad manager. She’s very enthusiastic. Also I met for a few minutes with next year’s editor-in-chief. These early conversations with the new students every year are always a lot of fun. There’s always a lot of energy and ideas, and it is neat to see them grow into the jobs.
One more shot from the day’s travels:
Alabama / Monday / video — Comments Off on Whole lotta learning going on 4 Apr 11
Fine, warm spring day today, followed by storms in the evening. Much of town lost their power in the ruckus, but all is well at the homestead.
The day was spent playing with the literature review of my dissertation. The references section alone is about 10 pages. There’s a fair amount here, but there’s a lot to go yet. Starting to figure that out is part of tomorrow’s plan.
