The Auburn University Marching Band, in the pre-game:
New quarterback Cameron Newton is already a star, setting a school record in his first game, collecting 171 yards rushing. Here is a series of photographs from just one play, a ridiculous 15-yard scramble where he broke six tackles on his way to a first down:
Newton also had a 71-yard touchdown run, the longest run from scrimmage for Auburn since Tristan Davis’ 2005 75-yarder. His total was also the most in a debut by an Auburn player since Rudi Johnson ran over Wyoming in 2000. His 171 yards rushing broke Phil Gargis’ single game record for a quarterback.
Newton also completed 9-of-14 passes for 186 yards and three touchdowns, accounting for five Auburn touchdowns in all; that’s just one shy of the school single-game record. Auburn beat Arkansas State 52-26.
Before games at Auburn the football team takes the short two block walk to Jordan-Hare Stadium from the athletic department. They’ve been walking down this hill for years and, at some point in the 1960w this became a very organic, ground-up tradition. Young fans would line the road and greet the team, cheering them on to victory even before they were in the stadium, even before they were in their uniforms.
Fans still re-create the tradition. Tiger Walk is two hours before kickoff. The picture above was taken an hour before that. Far up that street is where the players begin. And, as the coaches said yesterday, for young players Tiger Walk itself can almost be like playing another game.
Here’s the video, shot from my iPhone at the end of their walk, just as the players are about to enter the stadium.
Travis Williams, a former Auburn player who is now a graduate assistant for the team, produced a video that they played in the stadium just before the game. It is OK here, but best seen on a screen 30-by-70 foot screen inside the stadium.
Are you ready for football? This is week two of the high school season. Drove by this one this evening as the team was warming up. I’ll try to get to a high school game this fall, the school I covered many years ago is doing very well, but we are especially excited about college football. That, of course, begins tomorrow.
Reading and class prep today. And resting. Strained my back at the gym this morning. Did squats and everything was fine. Did what I think of as the jail break exercise — the move started years ago by some anonymous person is slowly digging through the corner of the cinderblock wall — and everything was fine. Did a curl and dropped down a weight. Did another curl and my back tightened up. Wisely, I put the weight down.
A comfy chair and a heating pad this evening have helped. I’m fine, just moving a little gingerly. Tomorrow I’ll be good as new.
Pie Day tonight at Mama Q’s. We had the chicken tonight, which was delicious. The dutch apple pie, we decided is a consistent winner. Give them a visit.
We checked out the soccer game tonight. The fans got a great show.
(I downloaded a pseudo tilt shift application for my iPhone — two of them, actually, but I think one is a bust — and I’m playing around with it a bit. Now I have to figure out which subjects look best in the tilt shift style. My apologies in advance.)
Florida State was controlling things with a disciplined effort on the ground. They snuck in a goal in the 28th minute and Auburn struggled against the fifth ranked Seminoles through the middle portion of the game.
In the 73rd minute Auburn’s Lydia Townsend found a glaring hole in the center of the FSU defense. She chipped in the ball over the goalkeeper on a breakaway.
Florida State scored on a header in the 83rd minute and Auburn answered with a goal in the 87th minute to force overtime. In college they play two sudden death periods of 10 minutes each. After that you just settle for a draw. With two minutes remaining in the second overtime, so in the 107th minute, Katy Frierson picked up a loose ball outside the 18 off of a corner kick and struck the ball home.
Here’s Frierson earlier in the game:
And here the Tigers celebrate the game winning goal:
They are celebrating Auburn’s first win over the Seminoles since 1995 and the first win over a top-five team since 2004.
I’ll have more pictures in the photo gallery early next week.
Which leaves us with the last installment of the evening, YouTube Cover Theater, where we turn the place over to people pouring their talents and odes and ambitions or fears out there for our consumption. Tonight’s featured coveree is Duncan Sheik. We’ll start out with an incredible rendition of She Runs Away:
And now, for your listening pleasure, we have a nice run at That Says It All:
Sheik, apparently, has written a musical. Here’s one of his fans’ playing his favorite tune:
And, finally, we’ll hear from the original artist himself as Duncan Sheik covers … Radiohead?
Who doesn’t enjoy a good cover?
Who doesn’t enjoy football? Are you ready? Tomorrow Auburn has Arkansas State. Look for us. We’ll be the ones in blue.
I’m going to wonder this for years — perhaps long after the chore is no longer mine, perhaps long after I’m in a different place in life entirely — but how does the organizing of a one day workshop take up so much time? My task these last few days, and for the next several days, will be to call teachers.
Do you know when the best time to catch teachers at work is? During the day.
Do you happen to also know what they typical spend their day doing?
Aren’t you surprised some office assistant somewhere in America hasn’t gone crazy and hacked up phone lines? After all, this is only the 6,428th time it has been said this school year, “She’s in class!”
So that was the morning. Emails and phone calls and searching for Email addresses and the proper person for whom to leave a message.
The afternoon I spent putting the final polish on the syllabus I’ll hand out tomorrow. I’m teaching an editing class this term. I’m giving spelling tests, among other things.
I don’t remember how this was received when I was in a similar class way back then, but I’m sure we thought the idea of a spelling test was a novel idea. And then we took those tests, carefully calculated to find the most challenging words in English or other languages that might one day be used by an American journalist. Having come full circle I’ve included some of those words on my list.
Tomorrow, on the first day of the class, I might also give a quiz. Set the tone. Or, as the hip kids say “Be THAT professor.”
I’m going to show a video, though, so I can also be THAT professor. And I’ll talk about typos in banners and semi-permanent paintings and … well, there is always this example if you really need one:
It was supposed to say “hopefuls,” but “when we’re typing and the computers freeze, sometimes it takes so long to unfreeze that we completely forget what we were trying to do when it froze,” explains the editor.
I’ve no doubt that was simply a horrible mistake. The Alligator is a fine paper. And the explanation strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The excuse could use a little more punching up. “We forget” might not satisfy the aggrieved parties.
We grilled out tonight and I reminded myself of a painful less. When lighting fire to the grill, be careful you don’t catch an ember in your eye.
I’d never forgotten that one, actually, it is always good to say out loud, however.
What I did forget was the exact inventory of what was going on the grill. Two pork chops, I thought, I can be economical with the briquettes. But I’d forgotten the corn until The Yankee came home and reminded me that I’d requested roasted corn. So there was an attempt to cook everything over the small mass of charcoal. That proved unsatisfactory. So I spread a few more of the magical black rocks that give fire on the other side of the grill. And now I have a flame discrepancy. So I let it burn and then covered the grill thinking I’d starve the fire. Which I did, right out.
So now nothing was grilling at the proper pace and, really, this is the worst part of my day. Life is so good.
The pork chops were good. The Yankee has this nice seasoning that we must now order online. Stores stopped stocking it, so messengers from Jakarta now deliver it to our door. It goes great with pork and is the sort of thing that makes you think it should stand well on any dish. But, then, if you put it on fish the salmon would stand up and say “Keep it on the swine, friend.”
The corn was a little under-done, but 45 extra seconds on a grill for a fresh ear of corn is not a catastrophe.
Last thing for the night is a fun new iPhone app I discovered. Storyrobe is a free app that let’s you make slideshows (as mp4s) from your photos. You record narration, control when the image flips and can share your project via Email or YouTube.
The finished product is a bit small, but this could be a useful app for a journalist on the go, or to share events with friends and family. Or even storyboarding jokes. We’ve been doing that tonight too. You’d have a hard time finding something free that can make you laugh for as long as this has done.
You have to know all of the ways you can use the tools you download. Knowing the silly ways are important, too.
No? OK, then. I agree. It is too hot, still, for all of that. I spent a little time in the evening — when it wasn’t 1,000 degrees, but rather 997 — taking a few pictures to give us something else to chat about on the site. You didn’t demand it, but I knew you were thinking about it, so here are a few bits of local history.
Drake was still listed as the university surgeon in 1927, so he must have worked right until the end. They named a building after him, the medical clinic. It was still in operation when I was in school, but by then had earned an unfortunate reputation. The students joked you were only diagnosed with strep throat or pregnancy if you went in for a visit. I served as the official photographer of a renovation project at Drake while I was still a student.
These days, the clinic is gone. The new medical facility is across campus, the old spot now home to a sparkling new engineering facility.
As for Drake’s military service, noted on the original marker, he rode with the 53rd Calvary during the Civil War.
The 53rd Alabama Cavalry Regiment, Partisan Rangers, was organized by increasing the 1st Cavalry Battalion to regimental size at Montgomery on 5 November 1862. Recruits were from Autauga, Coffee, Coosa, Dale, Dallas, Lauderdale, Lowndes, Macon, Monroe, Montgomery, Pike, Tallapoosa and Wilcox counties. It proceeded in a few weeks to Mississippi. In moving from Columbus to Decatur, in Lawrence, a portion of the regiment was there equipped and proceeded to join Gen’l Earl Van Dorn. This battalion was in the fighting at Thompson’s Station, and at Brentwood. The regiment was engaged in the fight with Union Gen’l Grenville Dodge at Town Creek and in the pursuit of Union Col. Abel Streight. Soon after, the 53rd joined the main army at Dalton as part of Gen’l Moses W. Hannon’s Brigade, Gen’l John Kelly’s Division. It operated on the right of the army as it fell back towards Atlanta and was engaged in constant duty. When Union Gen’l William T. Sherman reached Atlanta, the 53rd was the principal force engaged in the daring raid in his rear, whereby a valuable train was destroyed. It was then at the heels of Sherman as he devastated Georgia and the Carolinas, and it took part in the last operations of the war in that quarter. It surrendered a small number with Gen’l Joseph E. Johnston at Durham Station, Orange County, NC, on 26 April 1865.
I’m sure it was miserable.
Incidentally, to ride with cavalry you had to weigh less than 165 pounds.
There doesn’t seem to be a good picture of Dr. Drake, but if you look here you’ll find him third from the right, on the front row, at or around 69 years of age.
Here’s one more:
Dr. Charles Thach, who’s marker reads:
Guided by a humble faith in the Christian religion he dedicated his life to the education of the youth of the South. The lives of Auburn men made larger by his influence and the institution to which he gave forty years of loving service, and of which he was president from 1902 to 1921 are his real memorials.
“And whosoever of you will be the chiefest shall be servant of all.”
Not a bad thing to have said about you. The University’s historians continue:
Following (API President Leroy) Broun’s (1902) death, the board elected Thach, an API graduate who had spent his entire career at the school, to succeed to the president’s office … Thach immediately launched a campaign to bring the school’s financial needs to the attention of the state legislature at its upcoming session.
[…]
In June, 1906, Thach began preparing the board of trustees for the upcoming legislative session. He called their attention to the higher costs of scientific education over that of classical education and warned that they faced a choice: either support scientific education and thus allow Alabama’s natural resources to be developed by Alabamians or ignore it and the state’s resources would be developed by outsiders, a euphemism for Yankees.
It goes on like this for a while, the first 1o years of Thach’s tenure as president focusing a great deal on raising money. This did not sit well the University of Alabama. If you keep reading the link you see the good old fashioned classism at play. There were promises of money from the legislature that never came to fruition and they haunted Thach’s administration for the second decade of his tenure. He needed buildings, he got empty words and stalls. Those issues were somewhat resolved after World War I and the end of Thach’s time in office, but there were many ramifications to the funding problems from the Progressive Era.
Here’s the only picture of Thach I have, from the 1918 Glomerata:
He’s probably writing an alumni there, probably asking for money, the two things for which he’s generally remembered. Today, he has a building and a street named after him.
