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Auburn

Auburn / football / iPhone / memories / photo / weekend — Comments Off
18
Aug 12

A slow Saturday

Someone in our house couldn’t sleep last night. And, for once, it wasn’t me. I fell away to the night at around 2 a.m. — which is late enough, but sadly to normal for me — and The Yankee was up even later. She tried to keep me awake, but I have a secret weapon.

I can’t say what it is, because she’ll read this and know.

So she took a nap today, unusual for her, and I woke her up in time for a late lunch. We watched a football game from Auburn’s 2010 season, the Ole Miss game. The Tigers are 9-0 after that game. Big things could happen for this team. We’ll have to keep watching to see how they fare. But we also broke my DVD player.

I bought it probably seven years ago. I’m a late adopter on entertainment tech. Because I am cheap I was trying to not talk myself into getting one, but a colleague pointed out that it’d work for a while. And, he said, if it broke, I’d be out less than 50 bucks. Think of all the discs you could watch in the meantime!

They weren’t especially expensive even then. But I was thinking about that tonight as I took off the cover and removed the metal casing that tops the disc tray. I’d read extensively — OK, two websites — that guided me through the process of fixing your DVD player. Cheap.

After removing three screws you find yourself at the laser radiation warning. Three more screws and you’re at the center of the component. This is the most accessible technology you take for granted in your entertainment center.

First you make sure the lens apparatus is moving well. That part of the equipment sits on two rails that move it from a resting position to the reading position. Everything seemed to be in working order there. You can also clean the lens. I dug out the rubbing alcohol and dabbed at the thing with a Q-tip.

I took a whiff of the alcohol, and instantly flashed back to 8th grade biology. We had to create an insect collection, and that was the preferred method of killing the critters. Some things stick with you, like trying to center a pin into the world’s tiniest thorax, and the smell of alcohol that lingered long after the grades were handed down by the teacher.

So I cleaned, re-covered, plugged in and listened to the DVD player. Click. Click. Click. The screen said “Disc Error.” It was an incredibly cold message. What do you expect for a cheap Emerson product?

I did it all again. Click. Click. Click. No change. The websites said the next thing to do is junk it and go buy a new one. The laser is too expensive to replace, they say.

I can get a new cheap DVD player at the big blue box store for $35.

We visited the pool this evening, just to dip our toes before the rains came:

We have a neighborhood pool and it is within walking distance of our house. I’ve managed to average getting in the pool twice a year since we’ve lived here. I’m no better this year, somehow. But if I hop in every night for the next week — and if I do laps — I might sleep very well.

Auburn / errands / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Aug 12

A day out

No. A thousand voices scream out at once. No. The voices were all kids and kids-at-heart. No one is ready to see hints of fall. The left, logical, side of the brain says: Squash. The right, intuitive, side screams: Autumn!

And that, in mid-August, is not cool. There will be a time for it, late September, perhaps. That day is not now.

This was at the locally grown, artisanal vegetable place where we purchase an exceedingly abundant basket of vegetables each week. Fresh food, charming people, delightfully disorganized basket procurement process.

That was our last stop of the day. We bought gas, which is riveting. Riveting!

We shop at Sam’s for gas as often as not. They’ve reduced the entire petroleum purchase experience entire an almost sterile environment. Sterile for stone, cement and gas, at least.

There are eight pumps, allowing for 16 customers at a time. There is no store, no cash, no distraction. You focus entirely on the task of purchasing the cheapest gas in town. (Only the prices are going back up again. Cheap is relative.) They have one person staffed there, presumably in case something catches fire.

It is interesting how you can grow so accustomed to the absence of that interaction. The pay-at-the-pump model has removed every human interaction from fueling your car. At Sam’s they’ve stripped it down to solitude. One nice lady, unlike the rest of her colleagues who just stand around, actually mingles with the customers. The first time she does it can take you by surprise. In the last two years, though, I’ve been learning about her life in 15 second increments. I’ll have to start writing that down.

We visited the pharmacy to pick up new medication. We drove through the worst traffic in town. Three of the biggest intersections downtown had no power. Also this is the first week of the semester crush — too many extra families and too freshmen who are still learning their way around town, when to drive and when to lose their keys — that overburdens the local roads.

Police officers were directing traffic. You wonder how long they spend on that at the academy. Do some of the cadets adapt to it better than others? Is there a special commendation? When the intersection goes dark do the dispatchers call him in to run the show?

Does he then think “And I really wanted to take a nap under the overpass today!”?

We visited the meat lab. You buy select cuts from the university at big discounts. It gives you the feeling of living in an old-time company town, spending your income at the company store. But who cares? We bought two New York Strips and four pork loins for 20 bucks.

If only there was a charcoal lab on campus. We’d probably grill every night.

The next, and last stop, was to the market for the vegetables and seeing the squash above.

This, believe it or not, was a big day out. (I can’t complain because, you know, summer … ) Sitting inside for more than a month now hasn’t been ideal, but I’m bouncing back. I wasn’t exhausted when we got home. But I was sore.

I blame the vegetables.

Those baskets are heavy.

Later: Grilled the steaks in a mild, moist August evening. Put on just enough charcoal to kiss the meat, we had okra and mashed potatoes, both from the vegetable basket. Everything but the seasoning was raised nearby. I feel like I need an imported dessert, just to throw things off.

Auburn / collarbone / history / journalism / links / Wednesday — Comments Off
15
Aug 12

Where someone else therapeutically brutalizes my shoulder

No change in my physical therapy this morning. I did the same small exercises as in my first session on Monday.

I think there are two guys running the place with lots of younger colleagues guiding people through their paces. During the massage portion I had the other main therapist. Today was the man moving gracefully into middle age. The therapist looked like the man that sits down a few rows on the other side of your church.

His fingers were a little more narrow than his partner’s, this process takes plenty long to consider good metaphors for the therapist’s digits, but no less painful. His fingers are more the size of a screwdriver handle. He works the shoulder. There are two muscles in the damaged and surgically repaired area that go to the scapula and that, he said, explains the almost-muscle spasms.

He spends a lot of time over the incision itself, a cruel mixture of mild sensation and extreme sensation owing to the vagaries of the damaged nerves and “Hey watch it, there’s a huge surgical cut there!”

The point is to break up the scar tissue, a little now is better than a lot later. Holy moly they can work you over. He raised up my arm, impressed with my range of motion — with a little effort I can put my hurt wing completely over my head, like a touchdown call.

“There’s a big difference” he said, between 180 and 135 degrees of rotation. “Be happy with that. It takes a lot to get there.”

Things to read: Army SPC Josh Wetzel, a Glencoe, Ala. native, was wounded in Afghanistan. I wrote about him this summer for TWER.) The most recent piece of his storyinvolves a now famous picture of the Auburn fan from Walter Reed Medical Center that hangs in the White House:

The president was so moved by us praying with him on his visit that he chose this picture from the film his photographer took, had it blown up, and it now hangs in the West Wing of the White House. We said a prayer around the picture today that it would touch the lives of those who saw it and would be a catalyst for positive decision making in the Obama administration.

Seeing the picture for the first time was amazing but I think the coolest thing about it was the tour guide behind us was showing the next group the picture and said “The family in front of us is the family in this picture and the gentleman in the wheelchair is a one of our country’s wounded warriors.”

In the media think world, Jeff Jarvis says Mobile’s not the next big thing, just a path to it:

We in news and media should bring those strands together to knit a mobile strategy around learning about people and serving them better as a result — not just serving content on smaller screens. Mobile=local=me now. We should build a strategy on people over content, on relationships.

That’s what mobile means to me: a path to get us to the real value in our business.

If you view business as grounded in a relationship (some refer to it as the loyalty of, their customer) then you find that businesses need to create and then restrengthen those relationships. Media outlets, Jarvis says, need to return to that approach. The audience has to be a part of that, which may sometimes be a tricky sell. The next thing, though, would be to also monetize it.

Speaking of money, how much did USA TODAY and the Suffolk University Political Research Center spend on this survey?

Call them the unlikely voters.

A nationwide USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll of people who are eligible to vote but aren’t likely to do so finds that these stay-at-home Americans back Obama’s re-election over Republican Mitt Romney by more than 2-1. Two-thirds of them say they are registered to vote. Eight in 10 say the government plays an important role in their lives.

Even so, they cite a range of reasons for declaring they won’t vote or saying the odds are no better than 50-50 that they will: They’re too busy. They aren’t excited about either candidate. Their vote doesn’t really matter. And nothing ever gets done, anyway.

Fine story to find out their motivations — or de-motivation. There are some great statistical points of interest:

Many of the nation’s unlikely voters report hard times over the past four years. Only a third call their household finances good or excellent. Close to half say their annual household income is less than $60,000 a year. They tend to have lower levels of education than likely voters; nearly six in 10 have no more than a high school diploma.

I love the subhead. “They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a landslide for President Obama— but by definition they probably won’t.”

Maybe “They could turn a too-close-to-call race into a Reaganesque landslide for Romney — but by definition they probably won’t” didn’t sound as good around the newsroom. Or perhaps the assumption is that staying home will, in fact, do just that. The piece estimates that more than 90 million won’t vote. The subhead, then, could just as easily say “They could bolster a growing movement for the resurgent Green Part — but by definition they probably won’t.”

The story notes “Two-thirds of the unlikely voters say they voted four years ago, backing Obama by more than 2-1 over Republican John McCain.”

That is a lot of people staying at home.

Finally, a 137-year glance at the New York City skyline. The earliest picture features only the first tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything changes.

Auburn / history / Tuesday — Comments Off
14
Aug 12

Random Auburn history

Some time back, on a rainy Tuesday, I spent part of an afternoon in the special collections section of the university library. I’d stumbled across an interesting title on e-bay and thought to look it up. The library had it — Good! Saving me a few bucks! — and I went searching for it.

As so often happens I stumbled across something else interesting. Libraries are very distracting.

Since the library was slow, and the librarian didn’t seem too concerned and because I look so trustworthy, he let me sit in the back section of the special collections section. Apparently you are supposed to sit in the front so they can “keep an eye on you” and make sure you are “reading only their material” and not “studying.”

This is silly. But.

So I’m in the back, reading this first-hand account of local history. This is printed on onion paper. These are the pre-World War I recollections of Mary B. Reese Frazer, who authored the 14-page manuscript under her married name, Mrs. W. B. Frazer. At that link you’ll learn that there are a small handful of these personal histories and anecdotes that contribute to the local primary source material. I read two of them. Like I said, it was raining; libraries are distracting.

Anyway, Frazer writes of some of the old preachers in town:

(L)et me give you the name of one of our Ministers: Edwin Champion Baptist Bowler Wheeler Nicholas Dema Stephen Resden Carter Jackson Moore Thomas. He usually signed himself as E.C.D.B. Thomas. We also had another Minister, Parson Jones, who thought it very sinful not to be on speaking terms, which was the case with several of the members of his Church. He made this remark one day in the pulpit: “Won’t speak to each other! Why I’d speak to the Devil; I’d say ‘Good Morning, Devil,’ and walk on.”

I’ve seen that reference to Thomas in two other places, that ridiculous and sublime 13-word name is legitimate. I’ve yet to figure out why he transposed the D and the B in his initials.

The town’s founder? He was dry. Reaching back to the middle of the 19th century, Frazer remembers:

Judge Harper said there should never be a saloon in two miles of the incorporate limits, — but please don’t understand me to say there was no whiskey sold in this town; yes, I am sorry to confess, that whenever it was desired it flowed in plenty.

Earlier this summer the city council voted to make downtown an entertainment district for special events. Open containers. Judge Harper would be less than pleased.

There were 23 doctors practicing in town between 1836 and 1860. Frazer listed eight examples. One of them is a familiar name to local history buffs, John Hodges Drake III. He went off to war as a drummer boy. He came back and practiced medicine here for more than 50 years. No wonder they named a field after him. (The old medical clinic was named after him, too. I spent a term during undergrad photographing renovations there. Not too long after they finished that project they tore the building down.)

Of course there is anecdote about the founding of the university. Frazer talks about how the town was decided by the city leaders and others to be a good spot for a Methodist college. A board was formed. Land was leveled. And then an organizer came through town and decided this spot was too far away from downtown.

If her description is accurate — “The land opposite Mrs. Lipscomb’s residence was the first site selected … This place is now owned by Misses Kate and Mildred McElhaney.” — and if they’d followed through with those original plans, the town’s layout would look a bit different. Google the McElhaney house, built in 1844, and you’ll learn it stood on at least two lots, six-tenths of a mile apart. The university was established between the two locales. But that first lot, at the corner of Gay and Miller, was too far from downtown. Half-a-mile was a long distance in 1856. (The McElhaney house, meanwhile, looked like this. Here are more pictures.)

Frazer describes the big day:

In the summer of 1857 the great day came for the laying of the cornerstone. Everybody, negroes and children were there. Tables for the great dinner were built from the corner of the North entrance gate to the corner of the South entrance gate; small tables under the trees on the left, — in fact tables were galore. (Ed. – By current gate standards, this is a full block long spread of food-covered tables.)

[…]

I was there with my mother and father; of course I was quite a small child, still I remember that I never saw so much to eat in all my life. Visitors from all parts of the country were there; also many celebrities. Bishop Pierce was one of the speakers, and W. L. Yancey of political fame. Reverend E. J. Hamill was the financial agent for the college.

Bishop George F. Pierce was a key member in the Presbyterian church split of 1844. He was a Georgian slave owner and found himself arguing on both sides of the slavery argument and secession. His father, Rev. Lovick Pierce, was considered the most famous itinerant preacher in the South for decades after his death.

Rev. Hamill stuck around with the college for a decade or so. You can turn up references to some of his theological essays and a mention of a run for office. He was a conservative and against secession. The star of the show, though, must have been William Lowndes Yancey. Journalist. Politician. Orator. Fire-Eater. Radical secessionist. He could keep audiences in his grip for hours. He famously won a day-long debate in Auburn after missing almost every other speech. He was ill at his home 50-plus miles away in Montgomery. Someone sent a special train to pick him up. Yancey spoke extemporaneously for more than an hour, winning the day for his side of the debate. He did it that day in 1859 having been ill pretty much all year and the preceding one as well. He was on the wrong side of history and his views repugnant, but the man could hold a crowd.

Frazer, on the laying of the cornerstone: “That was the greatest day that Auburn ever experienced up to that time. I do not recall any day like it since.”

Tailgating hadn’t yet evolved to high art in Frazer’s later days. I wonder what she would think of Saturdays in the fall.

Auburn / memories / photo / weekend — Comments Off
5
Aug 12

Catching up

Welcome back to the weekly installment of extra pictures. It cleans out the files. It gives me content, of a sort.

On with it, then. Still life tomato. We have so many tomatoes around here. We get them in our weekly veggie basket from a store we visit. Some nice people we know brought us some more. They’re just piling up, like every other healthy food here. We are eating so well these days. Only I can’t eat these things fast enough. Life is hard, I know.

If you were wondering about that ladder the other day, yes, I only showed you the top. I like the rail and the sliding and reaching for far, out of reach books. I like the notion of getting lost, leaning on that ladder, in some old passage I’d forgotten about.

I didn’t show you the middle of the ladder because ladders are ladders are horizontal lumber. Here’s the bottom, though:

This is the balcony view at the J&M store on South College. Pretty casual today, but the students come back soon. It’ll pick up.

We developed a theory in undergrad that you could identify people’s age by the name to which they referred to the places that were always in flux. This place, to me, is Lil Ireland’s and, on the left, Ultravox, around the corner. It isn’t Blue’s or Sky Bar or any other place. This is Lil Ireland’s. By the time I was a senior Ultravox had changed hands so many times no one but the townies recalled that name.

I wish the old movie theater was still on this lot, though. The era of downtown theaters is one I’d like to experience, but I missed it by a few years.

I’m sending this picture and telling people they’re tearing it down. They’re rebuilding the brick facade, a nice job for August, I’m sure.