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Poor rickshaw guy. They made him carry six people and their cooler. Hope they gave him a nice tip.
The professionals now clean Toomer’s Corner by hand:
Sunset over Montgomery.
Clouds over the Samford campus.
For more pictures, including all of Catember, go to the September photo gallery, which is now live.
(Update: This has been re-printed at The War Eagle Reader.)
Auburn lost to Clemson today, an ugly 38-24 defeat. Clemson outplayed the guys in orange and blue, ending a 14-game streak in the series that dated back to the Korean War. Most importantly it also ended Auburn’s 17-game win streak, which dated back to the Outback Bowl at the end of the 2009 season. It had been 659 days since Auburn last lost. One year, nine months and 21 days. Since Nov. 27, 2009:
That’s the day the Tiger Woods story broke.
President Obama sent 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
More than 1,000,000 World Cup tickets went on sale in a big international farce.
President Obama accepted his much ballyhooed Nobel Prize.
As the World Turns was canceled.
The world’s tallest man-made structure, the Burj Khalifa in United Arab Emirates, opened.
The earthquake in Haiti claims 230,000 confirmed deaths.
The Vancouver Winter Games.
Volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull, an ice cap in Iceland, disrupted air traffic across northern and western Europe.
The Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11, and beginning a horrible ecological disaster.
S&P downgraded Greece to a junk rating.
Scientists suggested, through a genome project, that Neanderthal and humans might have interbred.
Nine activists were killed in an Israeli Navy forces raid on a flotilla attempting to break the Gaza blockade.
Spain won the World Cup.
Wikileaks.
Monsoons lead to flooding in Pakistan. Over 1,600 were killed, and more than one million were displaced.
The World Health Organization declared the H1N1 influenza pandemic over.
Thirty-three miners in Chile were trapped 700 meters underground, and returned to the surface after being trapped for a record 69 days.
The International Space Station, in October of 2010 took over the record for the longest continuous human occupation of space, dating back 10 years. (Now that’s a streak.)
Researchers at CERN trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second, the first time in history that humans have trapped antimatter.
Harvey Updyke.
Flooding and mudslides in Rio de Janeiro killed more than 800.
Auburn won the 2010 National Championship.
The Tunisian government fell.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned, leaving control of Egypt in the hands of the military.
The 9.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the eastern portion of Japan, killing more than 15,000 and leaving another 8,000 missing. Emergencies are declared at four nuclear power plants.
The United States and a host of other countries become tangled in the Libyan Civil War.
Some royalty got married in London. Americans cared way too much.
Osama bin Laden killed. Party in the USA.
Syria and Yemen are in turmoil as the Arab Spring continues. There have also uprisings or unrest in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia and more.
The world’s first artificial organ transplant was achieved, using an artificial windpipe coated with stem cells.
NASA’s space shuttle program concluded with the return to earth of Atlantis.
76 people were killed in twin terrorist attacks in Norway.
NASA announced that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured photographic evidence of possible liquid water on Mars during warm seasons.
Clemson beat Auburn. Stanford (Stanford!) holds the nation’s longest winning streak.
Oh the things you can get done on a Monday!
Set some hours. Wrote a lot of emails. Volunteered myself onto a panel. Worked on my car. Read and tinkered with two papers. Watched some television. Washed my car. Vacuumed the floor mats.
The floor mats, people.
Sure, when you throw it down into one fast list it doesn’t seem like much, but there’s some heft to that list.
At least three of those things involved Microsoft Word, after all.
And since you’re not interested in any of those things in the slightest, have some pictures. I found this quilt hanging at the city library yesterday:
The quilt was sponsored by American Field Service of Auburn, which now has a different name, I believe, but is a youth organization. Each panel is a little bit of the local history — and judging by the content, somewhere from the mid-late 1970s — so this safely fits into the realm of folk art. Here’s Old Main:
Old Main, built in 1859, was the first building on Auburn’s campus. Classes were held there. It served as a hospital during the Civil War (when the university was closed). It was destroyed by fire in 1887 and replaced by the iconic Samford Hall.
Here’s the lathe, which has now remarkably been mentioned here twice in the span of eight days:
Built in Selma, Ala. during the early part of the Civil War it was intended to make military supplies for the Confederates. They tried to move it to Georgia to keep it from being captured, and it was ultimately buried in Irondale, near modern Birmingham. It later was moved to Columbus, Ga. and worked through the end of the war boring cannons. After the war it was used in the coal iron industry. In the 1950s it was presented to Auburn. Also, the legend goes, if you stand in front of it under a full moon and say some random thing or another it will move three times and make all your dreams come true. Or something.
People don’t talk about it much anymore, I guess most everyone who can relate to it are all gone now, but the rail depot was a vital part of the community. It even figures into the football lore. The depot still stands. It was a realty office for three decades after the trains stopped rumbling through. Now it is empty and is considered a state sight in peril.
Reading that link you’ll learn it was the third one in town, designed by a student in 1904. The last passenger ticket was sold in 1970. Here it is today.
Mississippi State tried, but they couldn’t get the job done. Auburn held on late — this was the final play and if Chris Relf, the upside down guy, landed on the other side of that line we’d be in overtime — to extend the nation’s longest winning streak to 17 games.
War Eagle forever. 41-34*
*Auburn has won 67 straight games when scoring 30 or more points, a streak dating back to 1996.
Slept in. Watched television. Also, I think I might have taken a brief nap.
In the afternoon and evening I put together two lectures for class. I did laundry. Took a few Catember pictures. We enjoyed the rain, read about the wind damage to the north and tried to be productive. I fought the urge to indulge in that nap.
Labor Day.
It was dreary and raining. There were no big outdoor events and they would have been canceled anyway. We had four tornado warnings — just another day in the south — in our county. Two of them nearby. It would seem we were bracketed on either side, but we heard of no damage and saw none in our brief foray out.
Watched a bit of the Miami at Maryland game. That is one ugly uniform. Sports producer Dennis Pillion said it best:
These Maryland uniforms are just as terrible as everyone says. It’s like a crash test dummy mated with a crusader.
They call it Maryland Pride, but they should call it a corporate billboard. As this is all a design to merely get people talking about Under Armour (Look! It worked! Your unis are as dreadful as Nike’s! Have a nice day.) this is a shameless aspect of college football, the most direct and obvious exploitation of college football players in an industry built on a series of even and uneven exchanges of services.
Now, Auburn is an Under Armour school. And the schools have seemed to flex some muscle in whether they are willing to have these random designs put upon them. Auburn, full of staid and conservative people when you get right down to such decisions, have resisted the urge to make major changes to the uniform insomuch as it is a brand. I would encourage them to retrench.
It is an interesting discussion, though. For whom are these designs made? High school kids? Football recruits? It probably works for them. Television’s talking heads? Uniform changes for the studio fashionistas are a hit-or-miss thing beyond the purely “They’re talking about us” The older alumni? That’s where any given program’s money comes from, and I doubt they like it insofar as tradition is a big component of what they appreciate.
And after seeing the fashionable offerings by the big two uniform makers this weekend I’m inclined to welcome a return to Russell (which has the Samford apparel account) or Adidas. Because Maryland Pride is a technicolor folly.
Dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger tonight. And now I have that much more to work off this week. Totally worth it, though.
He said, with the memory of an Oreo milkshake still fresh on his mind.
