Now, I like the water. One of my earliest memories is being fished out of the deep end of a pool I had no business being in. As a child the local YMCA had the fish-themed swimming lessons and I made it up to the shark level. I was a certified lifeguard, back in the old style where you had to go get people and in the kinder, gentler, let’s don’t get hurt or sued and throw in a float instead style. I have memories, for some thing or other, of turning blue jeans into a floatation device. I’ve treaded water for more than an hour. I’ve been a SCUBA diver for two decades.
I’m good with the water, at peace with what I can and can’t do there, particularly below the surface. You still have some control of things there. If you know yourself you have fairly defined ideas of your limits, and that is satisfying and comforting; I’m not afraid of the water because I know what I am and what I am not, he said, hoping that sounded wise. But I treat it recreationally.
One thing I am not is a lap swimmer.
Never could hold a straight line. That’s just the basic problem. Olympic and national champion swimming coach David Marsh once told me “You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”
I respect that level of dedication and discipline, even more in the context of things I’d never do. I’m not that kind of swimmer.
So there I was today, cool new reflective race goggles, in an outside lane of an outdoor pool with the temperature hovering around 65 degrees and falling and trying to swim.
I haven’t done anything more than tread water or float on my back in a year or so.
Today I just tried to make the goggles fit. They didn’t. Water got in. I don’t like water in my eyes. So I quickly realized you don’t clear goggles like you would clear a diving mask:
It just brings in more water. Because your nose isn’t inside the confined area, of course. But, hey, the training is never forgotten. So up on the rope line, work on the goggles. Swim a bit, fiddle a bit, swim a bit, drown my eyes awhile. And so on. Finally this was resolved. Finally I can swim. Only I’ve all but forgotten how to breathe. I like to breathe. Breathing, in my book, is vastly underrated. This goes on in a thoroughly unsatisfying manner.
Finally it all comes together. I can see. I can breathe. I can actually think about the stroke. I get through four circuits of the freestyle stroke — really bringing my arms and shoulders out of the water and overhead and down properly — and realize this hurts my shoulder. So the now 10-month old injury and surgery still limits me.
So I do other things, try other strokes. Back to the sidestroke and a modified breaststroke and my favorite: underwater, handcuffed criminal stroke.
But I did 700 meters — a warmup, really — which is more than I would have done otherwise.
Also, it turned cold again today. Chilly, in fact. Downright unseasonable and noticeable, too. I’d complain, but there is snow in places like Iowa and Minnesota that would also like a bit of May, thank you. I’ve mentioned it. Remarked, maybe. But I haven’t complained too much. And if I have, it was entirely good-natured, because some places are dealing with unseasonal May snows.
But I would like spring to come back, because the first part of summer can hurt if it just shows up without a preamble.
Tonight, baseball:
After falling 6-1 to Ole Miss tonight, Auburn is now 16-51 against the SEC in the big four sports — football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball — since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. That’s a bad year.
It took me a long time to come around to the idea that the anchors were still on the air as they completely lost their composure over what has to be the dumbest interview they’ve done in a while.
And then we watched the first episode of this guy’s show the other night. Surely, I thought to myself, there are more interesting Olympians. Smarter Olympians. But the existence of this show suggests otherwise.
It is a good thing, I’ve told people who brought this show up, that he swims really fast.
We had dinner with a large group of people here:
It is one of those places where the door handle is an elaborate set of antlers. Same with the lighting, which is full of antler-pronged ornamentation. The food is all local. The tables and the bar are all hewn from felled local timber and … oh the bountiful quantities of bacon on the menu.
I had the turkey avocado sandwich with bacon and a Caesar salad. Somehow there was no bacon on the salad, but that’s about the only exception on the menu. They do a bacon-drizzled popcorn, which is better than you’d imagine.
The Hound is pretty intense like that. They are casual in their intensity. Or is it intense in their casualness? Who can say. Look at that menu.
I sent a picture of the menu to a friend, an aficionado of bacon. He said “You had me at Big Fat Steak.”
The flames were fueled by raw gasoline, which was stored on the partially emptied barges as they were docked for cleaning at Oil Recovery Co. of Alabama’s Marine Gas Free Facility.
Three people were cleaning the ship when a fire apparently broke out, catching the gasoline and causing the explosions.
They were transported to USAMC Wednesday night, where they remain in critical condition as of 9:15 a.m., according to USAMC spokesman Bob Lowery.
They were the only people on the barges at the time of the explosions, according to Lt. Mike Clausen of the U.S. Coast Guard.
The Triumph, that now infamous hard-luck Carnival vessel? It is taking on repairs just across the water:
“It literally sounded like bombs going off around. The sky just lit up in orange and red,” he said, “We could smell something in the air, we didn’t know if it was gas or smoke.” Waugh said he could feel the heat from the explosion and when he came back inside, his partner noticed he had what appeared to be black soot on his face.
A Franklin County woman was arrested after police said her 2-year-old grandson tested positive for cocaine …
Deanna Leigh Fretwell, 38, is charged with chemical endangerment of a child. She was arrested after Russellville police said they received a tip from the Department of Human Resources, the report said.
The most recent Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program (SNAP) statistics of the number of households receiving food stamps shows that 23,087,886 households participated in January 2013 – an increase of 889,154 families from January 2012 when the number of households totaled 22,188,732.
The most recent statistics from the United States Census Bureau– from December 2012– puts the number of households in the United States at 115,310,000. If you divide 115,310,000 by 23,087,866, that equals one out of every five households now receiving food stamps.
So this isn’t a recovery so much as a series of selectively moving around numbers.
At times like these we must ask ourselves: What would Ryan Lochte do?
Couldn’t watch it. Didn’t want to watch it. Will never watch it, if I can help it. (The War Eagle Reader covered the entire thing masterfully, if you’re interested.)
But Alan Brazzell marks the mood with this beautiful montage from Saturday.
I’d like to know where I was, a week ago today, when my phone told me about the bombs in Boston. I bet I wasn’t far away from where I was today when my phone buzzed to tell me that the remaining suspect had been formally charged. All of that in a week.
As I said to a classroom today, when an Elvis impersonator sending dangerous things in the mail to people in Washington is your fourth story, that’s a bizarre week.
Seems like a lot longer, doesn’t it?
So there’s something new here. I tweaked the sidebar to the right. Took out the Twitter box. (Follow me on Twitter!) Shifted the table that holds all of those buttons at the top of the page and compressed that side altogether.
I did that so I could expand this main content area. And after plugging away at several different stylesheets for a few minutes I had the new look. It is exactly like the old look — which is what is so nice about it — except for the size. The photographs can be bigger, now.
This will look nice on modern, larger, screens. Even looks nice on my phone, so I awesome that means everyone’s experience with the site is lovely, no?
I’m sure it is not. Some 0.08 of my visitors have been here with a 640×480 resolution. We need a rollout for them as well.
Here’s the solution: bigger screens, kids.
Auburn’s athletic director, who is presiding over a major sport 15-48 record against conference opponents since last season’s baseball tournament, is the only AD in the country who has “fisking poor news reports” as part of his job description. This is part of his second open letter in less than a month:
As Auburn’s Athletics Director, it’s my job – no matter how proud I am of Auburn – to carefully review charges made against our program when warranted.
As the facts demonstrate, the article is clearly flawed. I want you to know that I will always act on the basis of facts. I will continue to fight for Auburn University, and I will continue to defend this great institution against such attacks.
Here’s the first. All of this gives the guy a sympathetic ear from a lot of fans who are ready to see him go. It is a curious thing.
But there’s a real and interesting phenomenon at play as well. I’ve grown convinced in the last five years or so that there is a big shift coming in sports journalism. Beat reporters sometimes have to worry about being frozen out by the team they are supposed to cover. Alienate the wrong person, you don’t get interviews and all of that. This is made possible because the programs have figured out the true power of their brand and the tools they have at their disposal. Auburn didn’t go to the media with these letters, they simply published them on their site and let fans know it was there. Sports writers covered it — that is their job — but they weren’t an integral part of the process as a filter. Sports outlets have the tools, the audience and their message. They don’t need the media the same way they once did. (Well, the TV deals, naturally.)
I see this as a reality, rather than a good or bad thing. It just is. In some respects it is good. In other respects, and in particular in the long term, there are some negative worries.
The old saying was “never pick a fight with someone that buys ink by the barrel.” But if everyone buys pixels … well, that’s just even.
Shouldn’t it be making more headlines than it has that the European Union is today insolvent – since its astronomic debt in unpaid bills is nearly twice as large as its annual income? Such is the crisis lately highlighted by its parliament’s budget committee, which finds that the EU now owes 217 billion euros, or £182 billion, as compared with its current year’s income of just £108 billion. Much of this represents “cohesion funding” relating to Eastern Europe, in contracts agreed under the EU’s current budgetary arrangements. But when, at the end of this year, those arrangements come to an end, the rules strictly prohibit the EU from rolling forward its debts from one period to the next. So, in eight months’ time, it will lurch into bankruptcy.
Wherever we now look at the EU, its affairs seem to be in an astonishing mess. There is the ongoing slow-motion train crash of the euro. There is rising panic over the policy of unrestricted immigration, which threatens at the year’s end to flood richer countries such as Britain with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians. As Europe’s economies stagnate or shrink, the EU’s environmental policies fall apart, with the growing refusal of many countries, led by Poland and Germany, to accept curbs on fossil fuels.
In 1970, the first Earth Day was celebrated — okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.
[…]
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
That’s one of my favorite, but there are plenty of gems in that list.
There’s no excuse for getting the facts wrong. It’s a basic rule of journalism, drummed into every rookie reporter’s head: Get the story right. In addition to potentially harming a news outlet’s credibility, erroneous reporting can have devastating consequences, from ruining a subject’s reputation to endangering public safety. Competitive pressure and the desire for scoops can increase the potential for errors.
But reporting mistakes may not be as consequential as they used to be, media observers say.
People are forgiving, to a point, if you acknowledge the problem. Those are errors that apply to the individual outlet. All of these things, however, become cumulative on the business as a whole, a function of trust, and so pieces like this become dangerous.
Here’s the top comment as of this writing: “The fact that this ‘journalist’ doesn’t seem to think mistakes/lies matter is an example of why the pubic doesn’t trust the media therefore they don’t buy newspapers or watch the news.”
Many of the people in the comments tend to disagree with the nature of this particular article. But mistakes don’t matter, we’re told.
It took almost three years, but ol’ Harvey Updyke proved the only thing he’s ever been capable of proving, that spirit goes beyond a football game, that a place is more than a jersey, and heart is more than a scoreboard.
Saturday was the big day, the last roll of the old Toomer’s Corner oaks. It was orchestrated and planned and monumentally huge. (The Auburn equestrian team, which just won a national championship of their own, will get the final honor.)
Thousands upon thousands of people were there. They stood chest to back and shoulder to shoulder and that crowd jammed the corner and the four roads. Everyone had a great time, coming away with that old familiar feeling: this is a family reunion.
For some people it was a refutation of a malignancy of misguided fandom. For others it was an excuse to have a party. For all, it was an opportunity to hear what comes next. Now that the old oaks are coming out of that spot, ending a run of about 75 years, there is plenty to look ahead to.
But Toomer’s Corner always taught me to look back. You didn’t get too many rolls dropped on the back of your head as a freshman before you learn to always be on the lookout. In a way, this too was an opportunity to look back at the fine spirit of something we’ve long enjoyed.
I’ve written about this for The War Eagle Reader and for the Smithsonian and a few other places. I’m always trying to capture this feeling, share the sense so that those who aren’t lucky enough to be there can find their place in it too.
The problem is that whenever you do this, it always comes off as hokey and cheesy. How do you explain this small town thing? This silly little thing that amuses us, that we look forward to, that we’ve lately lamented and, Saturday, celebrated beyond comparison?
The best way to understand a culture is to figure out why the important things are important and why the small things are important. To ask yourself why these things are so is to find all of the silly answers. In this case, it is the celebration of a victory, which started either to emulate the old telegram system that used to send home news of games from far away, or a spontaneous celebration of the joy of having too much toilet paper. There are several theories and apocryphal stories about how and why this began, but let’s be honest, it is just fun. The tradition started out as rolling the trees after big road wins. Today this is a way to continue the game, the event, the championship and the celebration of a moment after the moment is gone.
It is the place where we say “Meet me at Toomer’s Corner,” which means a whole lot more than ‘See you there.’ Town and campus come together here, the corner where everything meets, where we make the 400 yard march from the stadium to the place where we celebrate some more. You see old friends, make new ones and take pictures in one of the happier, more laid back places you can be. This is where the chants and cheers don’t stop, where the players come to join their classmates, alumni and fans.
Toomer’s Corner also taught me to look down. My favorite thing about rolling Toomer’s has always been watching the tiniest Tigers. College students often yield to children in this place where parents let their little ones actually play in the street. They have the run of the place. They’re flinging rolls, they’re turning themselves into Charmin mummies. They’re climbing on the gates, up the surrounding trees and receiving the gift of extra rolls from the big kids.
The picture above was from the 2010 national championship. That was the last time I rolled the corner; that was a memory, a fine one to end on. We make our memories, but we make them for others too, that’s what is happening when Toomer’s gets rolled. These days I catch rolls to give to children, the younger the better. It is more important to me to build their memories.
I like to take visitors, because if you can’t write about Toomer’s Corner and make sense of it, you surely can’t tell someone about it. You simply need the experience. I taught my wife how to throw a roll of toilet paper. She figured it out just in time for the 2010 SEC championship.
I’ve had the good fortune to take my mother a few times. She gets in to it despite herself. A few years ago we treated my step-father to his first football game and his first trip to the corner.
My in-laws came down for their first game in 2010, a quiet non-conference game which was unlike anything they’d ever seen up north. Rolling Toomer’s is unlike anything you see most anywhere, too.
Family, friends, everyone comes away impressed, and that’s after those cream puff games. “You have to remember,” I solemnly tell them “that the degree of rolling Toomer’s Corner is directly proportional to the importance of the win.” They imagine and wish they were here on those nights when covering great distancesyou can find the toilet paper covering great distances
One night I popped a flash on my camera as people rolled the corner and I could see the tiny cotton particulates of celebration floating in the air around me, two blocks away from the trees. That’s a fervor.
Toomer’s taught us to look forward, too. This is just the tip of the experience, but all of Auburn has a way of growing into you. The farther away you get, the more deeply it ties itself to you. The longer you’ve been away the closer you hold it. You’re just starting something here, but you’ll carry the place forever.
Below are the gates. The men that put them in place were staring down a world war, and some of them would go off and find themselves fighting it in the next year. But first they had to finish things up here, and the class of 1917 had to build that entryway. (The eagles came later.)
Saturday we learned that, in the new plan for Toomer’s Corner, the gates will stay in place. And that’s maybe the best news of all. For all that Auburn can be it is important that we always remember who she was before us.
Here’s why: what she was defines who she’ll be. What we become is dictated in some way by what we were. I think of Auburn as an instrument of potential, but as Toomer’s Corner regularly demonstrates, it is also about spirit and heart.
I wrote, two years ago, the day we learned this day was coming, “Auburn and her family are stronger than oak and more sturdy than history. We’re going to say “Meet me at Toomer’s” for generations yet. The power of dixieland is going to be just fine.”
Saturday went a long way toward proving that right, but it is no prophecy. The clues are all around.
We’re all little dots in the immediately famous helicopter shot. We are all the central players in the more narrow perspectives we hold on from the ground. We’re all in those moments from years ago, frozen in other people’s photographs. I always study those pictures with wonder. Where is that woman now? What does that guy do these days? We’re all in the photographs yet to come, too.
There will be more trees. There will be more times when police officers playfully stand there and let the kids roll them, more times where people watch and dance from the windows across the street. Someone is always going to be willing to shimmy up the poles that hold the traffic lights in place. There will be more parents and college students and guests all delighting in the fun silliness of the thing.
At the biggest moment any of us could imagine, I was fortunate to stand under the old trees with my beautiful, talented wife — who I turned into an Auburn woman in the course of a single tailgate, who later joined the faculty — and celebrated a national championship with thousands of friends:
That’s a great memory, but not hardly the best. And Saturday, we were reminded once again, that this has never been about the trees, but about all of those people, our people.
