Tigers and Tide are both off today, but they’ll play for pride next Friday. Undefeated Auburn will be on the road, looking to snap Alabama’s two-game winning streak in the series.
I like Auburn’s chances.
Via, The War Eagle Reader.
Alabama
15
Nov 10
Giorno intero di pioggia
Woke up to rain. Considered taking a nap during the rain. I’m probably going to fall asleep to rain. All day weather like this is rare for our part of the world, but we could certainly use it. And normally at this time of year a rain system like this might be pushed through on the shoulders of some seriously colder weather, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.
Winter is not sharpening up the knives just yet, this is the historic and cultural part of the confrontation where the players hop around, throw back their shoulders, puff out their chests and serve notice. The real cold is coming, but there’s going to be another opportunity for a sane patch of warmth to break up this little tussle. Like all people who find themselves in a fight (or a metaphor) in which they don’t want to participate, we’ll cling to that warmth with gusto.
It has already been snowing in Minnesota. But, then, this time last year we had already nice dose of flurries in the Deep South. It’s a mystery.
So I’m back to feeling behind on everything. I’m down to the point of having a mental To Do list rather than a written one, this begins when the list is sufficiently decreased, but in some respects that might even be worse. Now perception is absolutely my reality. One paper to go for the term, three newspapers left in the semester, a small handful of classes left to teach, Thanksgiving, holidays, New Year’s, not forgetting to breathe, etc.
It isn’t that much, really. Or so I keep telling myself. I deliberately left off the Christmas shopping. Who needs real pressure like that?
11
Nov 10
My last class
We met this morning, discussed a book chapter, watched a few videos, talked a bit about experiments and the university’s Institutional Review Board. We talk about them a lot.
We talked about our professor’s newest family addition. His wife just had a daughter. We talked movies — strictly professional — and then we thanked our professor. It was well-deserved; his was one of the better class experiences I’ve had in the program.
I met with one of my committee members and we discussed my upcoming comps question.
I walked out of the building, chatting with one of the journalism professors. Like that, my two years of classes had ended. There’s a final paper in the media effects class, and then comps in January and then the dissertation, but the classwork is done.
I picked up a symbolic gift for my mother. I’ll give it to her next year when I finally finish the entire program. I had lunch a celebratory plate of my favorite vegetables.
It isn’t comfort food, but close enough. The downside being that I fought the rest of the day to stay awake. I didn’t pull an all-nighter last night, but came close. I slept for just a bit, and enjoyed an early evening nap before dinner.
I took pictures of random things, but you’ll see them Sunday. It was a good, tired, fun day.
10
Nov 10
The no continuity update
Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and today marks the 235th anniversary of the creation of a fine force of warriors. There’s a long line of Marines in my family and I’m thinking of theme today. One of them lost a leg in Vietnam, others served in more peaceful times.
A few years ago we watched a battalion graduation at Parris Island. I spent two years there is a child and watched countless graduations. I don’t remember any of them, but I think of the men I saw four years ago. I think of these young Marines today, and I hope they are safe and still serving proudly.
Semper Fidelis, Marines.
That’s this evening at Samford. Evenings being relative. Three weeks ago that same time was the afternoon. At any rate I was walking from one errand to a meeting and had the best view. By the time I made it back to the office it was completely dark. And that shouldn’t happen.
Spent the better part of my night working on a paper for my media effects class. I wrote, revised, edited, re-wrote and moved things up and down until it didn’t make sense any more. That’s when I quit, having achieved a level of perfection that is not easily reached. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and realize two or three things that I should have added, but you should live by this motto: Print early, never second guess.
That’s a great motto, but hardly a practical one. I’ll continue on with this paper until the bitter end — trying to massage every possible detail into a very finite, five-page space — and hope my professor makes sense of it as well.
Random fun: In 1995 Dr. Clifford Stoll could see no future to this Internet thing. Newsweek, a fine brand today weakened by both content and their very name and now being absorbed by The Daily Beast, published his scribblings:
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Remember, this is 1995.
(T)he Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
Sound like any curators (or journalists or producers) you know?
Then there’s cyberbusiness (sic). We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete (sic). So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
He decries the lack of human interaction, the virtual communities and some sense of isolation.
Dr. Stoll’s Wikipedia page says he’s now mostly a stay-at-home dad and sells custom-made blown glass on the Internet. Good for him.
OK, back to that paper, lest it become an all-nighter.
World’s Fair update will be along in a bit.
4
Nov 10
“We are out of potatoes. We have potatoes. We are out of corn.”
Sitting at the red light to make my turn back onto campus I looked out of the window to see a gust of leaves making their adieu from trees. Floating there, in that transcendent space between instrument of photosynthesis and ground matter, they are so graceful. For all of their work on the branches and all of their nutritional value on the ground it is a shame that they are free for such a short period of time.
So I decided to record their moment. This decision always seems to take a long time, in retrospect. And when the neurons finally connect, assess and send the signal that documenting this visually might be fun, I must still pull my phone from my pocket. This can be cumbersome. The screen must be unlocked, the camera accessed and the video feature selected.
Of course this was when the remaining leaves grew resilient, their petioles growing stronger than the breeze.
That is one long red light.
Grand day. Had a class where students skewered the published works of learned authors. Enjoyed a delicious lunch where things were off the menu, and then back on the menu, but the other supporting item was off the menu instead. The poor waitress had to recite the sides three times through the confusion.
Took part in a meeting. Met a new student, the first-in-their-family type. Very nice person.
Punched out of my weight class in a particularly thorny carpentry problem. Longtime readers will recall I have no business even being in that conversation. But screws, the cheaply made international kind, were breaking off at the wrong time. They must be removed so that other screws of decidedly sturdier stuff can be put in their place. I invented a tool that would facilitate removing the offending broken screw.
But only after my super-powerful magnet idea was dismissed.
Turns out it already exists, this tool, but I didn’t know about it. Even still, it is gratifying to know when you’re on the right track, even if someone patented the thing decades ago.
This was the scene when I left this evening:
Samford is a beautiful campus.
Dinner with friends. Our realtor is now a friend. He’s been to our house after we’ve moved in. He didn’t even judge our staging. He had us over to his place for a football party last weekend. We have dinner about once a week now. You probably aren’t supposed to be friends with your realtor, especially if you moved onto an Indian burial ground, but he’s a nice guy and tells the best jokes.
So we had pizza tonight at a place called Little Italy and I brought home the leftovers. These are of the New York style, and while The Yankee has spoiled me on New Haven pies, Little Italy is pretty good stuff.
I just found the obligatory store opening story from two years ago. Those always amuse because the writer inevitably talks about how this new place uses only fresh ingredients. As opposed to, what? Stuff they found in a dumpster around the corner? Whatever fell off the farmer’s truck while he was on his way to market? Something frozen from the Green Giant?
I probably wrote the same thing. Years ago I did a restaurant opening story for a chicken joint just four blocks down from this pizza place. They framed the story and put it on the wall, which was cause for only a slight amount of chagrin when I would later dine there. The chicken was fine, but they had live music and I happened to live across the street from the place, so I found my way there a fair amount. Eventually they moved to a new location, and now Urban Spoon tells me the place is closed.
Those are always the more interesting stories — What did happen to that young couple? — but you don’t see them as much.
Busy and full day. The Glomerata covers will be updated momentarily. Tomorrow will be another full day, I’m sure, and it will come equipped with a full night as well.
