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Auburn

Auburn / cycling / errands / iPhone / Thursday / video — Comments Off
4
Aug 11

All of these things squeak or squawk

This being the first week of August it is time for the annual television programming party. Yes, modern TVs feature the automatic channel surfing feature, which can resolve the situation in a matter of moments. Yes, our television is modern.

Also, we have a DVR with a tuning card the cable company provided rendering this automatic tuning feature useless. They’ve also provided a printed cable pamphlet written by a sugar-addled copywriter and a regularly changing lineup that amazes and confounds simple viewers like me.

So the process begins, ignoring the guide, which is a programming feature, and manually flipping through the channels manually. Writing down the stations that exist, making note of the station and then continuing on to the next one. I worked through the first third of the array today, noting we receive four home shopping networks, more Jersey Shore than any teen needs and, in my Super Digital Ultra Deluxe Package 3000 I can’t have Morgan Freeman educating me about wormholes. Oh, I know the Science Channel exists, I can get the icon in the user interface, but not any of the programming.

When we first moved in we had the Science Channel, and it was soon taken away. For one brief period we could watch the show, and Morgan Freeman narrated the heck out of it. And then it was gone. Through the wormhole, as it were.

Worked. Emailed. Read. We also visited World Market, where I was told to come back on Tuesday, or possibly Thursday, to find the thing I’d wanted on Monday. The young lady at the front walked me through two of the stands at the front, did not find it and made a phone call. “Come back,” she said in a hopeful, helpful way. And so we did.

And we looked, not finding the item du jour again. And then another lady helped me find the proper label. That was a nice service. I like World Market, and you will too.

See? They made it easy for me to spend my money there today.

Then we started birthday shopping. The Yankee has a particular item on her list, and now we must find it. So we’re looking for summer sales, and hit three stores, finding the right size, but the wrong details, or the right details but the wrong size, and so on. We’ll hit a few more stores tomorrow.

In the meantime, the farmers market, where we picked up a watermelon, cantaloupe, okra and peaches. Dropped them off at home and visited one of the neighborhood parks.

The Southeastern Raptor Rehabilitation Center was performing an owl release, and they turned it into a big evening party. Live music, food, raffles, bouncing things for the kids, Aubie, the winged ones. I made a video:

And when we got back home we rode our bikes, a quick seven mile evening.

Very warm, nice summer day, lovely in every way. Hope yours was too.

Auburn / football / history / journalism / links / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Aug 11

Football season

Practice starts tomorrow. Here’s a look at last year, a fine photo gallery put together by Oregon Live before their Ducks faced Auburn in the BCS Championship game.

Thirty-something days and counting …

In professional camps, Cam Newton is getting positive early reviews with the Panthers. As always on a sports post, read the comments at your own risk.

There’s other stuff, too, National Night Out, where our neighborhood said “Dude. This is August,” and just recalled that they met people last year. Even the police didn’t bother to cruise through the neighborhood handing out the campaign literature. Now, if someone had been out offering ‘Smores and lemonade …

Speaking of lemonade, there’s the intent of the law and then there’s the intent of the law, and you can add this to your list of communities to avoid — or flock to, as you like — when reading this story:

Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville last week, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn’t have a permit.

An officer told Abigail Krutsinger’s father Friday that she couldn’t run the stand as RAGBRAI bicyclers poured into Coralville.

And here’s another one, same town:

A mother of six also said her kids had their lemonade stand on 18th Avenue shut down after just 20 minutes.

Bobbie Nelson said she laughed when a police officer told her that a permit to sell lemonade would cost $400.

“The kids were devastated,” Nelson said. “They just cried and didn’t understand why.”

[…]

Mitch Gross, a member of the Coralville City Council, said he believes the city will learn a lesson from this. Gross said he expects future ordinances to apply only for vendors who set out to “make a profit.”

“It was never our intent to shut down kid’s lemonade stands,” Gross said. “We never really thought about it.”

That’s refreshing of the councilman, who admitted openly that he and his colleagues did not think through the two-day ordinance they passed in order to capitalize on a visiting bike tour’s tourist influx. Err. I mean looking out for people. So which is it? Money-hungry or nanny statism? So hard to choose sides somedays, isn’t it?

Do read those comments, where the people are throwing lemons back at the city.

And, finally, what space shuttles and horses have in common:

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track …

That’s as fun a tongue-in-cheek mini-essay as you can read today.

That’s enough for one sitting. Try to stay cool out there. The heat index here today was 102.

Auburn / cycling / football / history / iPhone / memories / photo / weekend / World Cup — Comments Off
17
Jul 11

Sport, sport, sport, steak, ice cream

We are watching the 1989 Iron Bowl, it is like giving an education, really. The Yankee, you see, was up north and not yet interested in football. When she moved to the South she said her allegiance was for sale. Whatever big time football game someone took her to first would be the team she’d cheer for.

I took her to an Auburn game, and she was hooked.

Here’s Carl Stephens with some of the best words in the world. I recorded that at the game that night. We sat in the upper deck, on the west side over the 20 yard line. As we’d only been dating a few short months by that time I was trying to play it cool and not sound too overwhelming, but there’s so many things you have to know about this place. How Auburn played that night wasn’t one of them, as the Tigers came out flat in their season opener. But that was 2005.

This is about 1989. For some lovely reason the local television stations have taken to filling weekend programming with old Auburn football games this summer. This is brilliant television, really, and there’s no better choice than the first Iron Bowl in Auburn. Pat Dye called it the most emotional moment in school history. David Housel, who’s never been shy about bad historical hyperbole, likened it to reaching the promised land. The players that played there that day said the place has never been louder or more crazed or desperately intense.

Take it away, Jim Nantz:

Is it football season yet?

So we’ve watched the first three quarters, and it is great to see Reggie Slack — who’s selling insurance these days after a cup of coffee in the NFL and a Grey Cup appearance in the CFL. The third play of the game:

It is nice to see Keith McCants again, who was just an incredibly talented, scary good football player.

He’s had some legal problems, but by all accounts is the guy you root for. And he’s lobbying, on his Facebook page, to be on the next season of Dances With the Stars. Seems that his career is now mostly Retired Star Football player, but becoming a star in the South may let you do that. The best part is just hearing the crowd and the marching bands, before the stadium was filled with piped in music. You can forget the original atmosphere if you aren’t careful.

Haven’t shown her this yet:

Seriously. Can it be football season now?

Rode 38.5 miles on the bike today. Felt very nice and the sun only came out late in the journey. Saw this:

It is like they are saying “A payphone! Use me!” This now costs $.50. I couldn’t tell you the last time I used a pay phone, so this $.15 increase was a novel surprise. Perhaps the calls should get cheaper as demand has gone down …

I would say pay phones, perhaps like pawn shops and check cashing stores, should be a status indicator, but that phone was at a nice gas station in a fine part of town. We got Gatorade there and pedaled on.

Great soccer game today. The U.S. women’s side was quite good, but not great. The Japanese played solid, but not spectacular. The Americans couldn’t close the deal and the Japanese ladies would not quit, coming from behind twice to force penalty kicks. And from there the sense of inevitability gave way to a little disbelief. But the Japanese were great and deserving winners.

More to the point, that was 120 minutes of great, clean sport, played well by two teams. It was wonderful see a contest about the game, not about some scandal or overwrought subtext — the healing of Japan thing got overplayed, but that was unavoidable. This was 11 a side playing hard and, for the most part, playing very well. Great experience, even if the other team won.

Now if only the spectators and media would be more interested prior to the Big Game, but perhaps one of these days. What was intriguing was how the narrative for the Americans was not about gender or equality, but about sport and competition. There’s a subtle shift that started taking place in the televised coverage that is worth noting.

Steaks on the grill tonight. We low-grilled the meat, baked potatoes and fried some okra. After dinner we commemoration National Ice Cream Day by buying a pint on a cone at Bruster’s. They close at 10. They aren’t really amused when you show up at 9:45, but we got the obligatory ice cream celebration in just under the gun.

It is a tough life, I tell you.

Auburn / cycling / history / links / photo / Thursday — 1 Comment
14
Jul 11

Stuck in the 1930s

Rode my bike today for the first time in eight days. Rode Wednesday of last week, overslept Thursday, broke the bike on Friday, got it back Tuesday, was rainish Wednesday and here we are.

So we set out and I pedaled on for about three miles. Hit a stop sign to wait for The Yankee — and make adjustments to my saddle — when a fine little wave of nausea rolled over me. The sun is shining, the heat is blaring and I’m hunched over like the guy who might have had the bad borscht. Oh I was fine, it was just the dizzies and the light headedness that got me. I’m blaming the eight days off.

Figuring the last thing anyone needed was an embarrassing blackout incident I called it a ride and, slowly, pedaled my way back home. So, after watched three days of wonderful Tour de France coverage, my triumphant return was just shy of nine miles. That’s just disappointing.

But I’m fine, thanks.

Spent a little bit of time tracking this guy down:

That’s Earle Smith, Alabama Polytechnic class of 1930. He’s a 2nd lieutenant in the University’s ROTC in this photograph. He was also a baseball player, the football team manager, a member of the literary society and other things during his time in school.

He’s important because The War Eagle Reader was running a feature on him. Seems that just before the war came to him in North Africa, he took a tour of the deserts of Egypt. His guide walked him up to the Sphinx and, as the story was retold goes, he paid the guide to look away and hand over a chisel. Smith (no relation) chiseled War Eagle into the old monument.

And then he got his nose bloodied by Rommel before ultimately defeating Hitler.

What happened to the army captain after his sandy vandalism is a modern mystery. The story made its way into the student paper in 1944, so one presumes he came home from the war. He’d majored in secondary education so I assume he taught for 10 years or so before the war got in his way. Maybe he came home and was able to easily get back to the business of raising his kids and wondering how his students got such wacky thoughts in their heads. He would have been teaching right up until the mid-1960s, after all.

But that’s just speculation. The Internet doesn’t know what became of the man.

I’ve been having this conversation with a guy out west about a relative he had who fought, and died, in the Pacific. Maj. Adam Hallmark is the modern military man. His fourth cousin was Dean Hallmark, who I wrote about earlier this year. Interesting little story.

Anyway, Adam has come across big stores of new information since we first talked and he sent me some pictures this week.

This is thought to be Auburn, possibly campus, in 1936:

Dean Hallmark would recognize just 15 buildings on campus today, not counting the president’s mansion and the chapel.

This is Glenn Avenue:

I haven’t driven the length of it yet for the express purpose of comparing it to this photograph, but I’m betting nothing in this picture remains. And it is a shame about that motorcycle.

UPDATE (Sept 13, 2011): Adam just forwarded along pictures of the ticket books athletes received to attend sporting events back in the 1930s. This is his fourth-cousin’s and, as you can see, is in excellent condition:

It was also never used:

Before magnetic strips and photo IDs they had a funny way of making sure you weren’t stealing someone else’s ticket:

General appearance? I bet you couldn’t say that today.

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4
Jul 11

Happy Independence Day

Fourth of July finale in Auburn.

God bless America.