basketball

basketball / Friday / IU — Comments Off on Shooty hoops, and the last day before vacation
11
Mar 22

Shooty hoops, and the last day before vacation

There was a game in the daytime. And people took time to watch it. There were 10 tall men running around on a glossy wooden floor. Five guys wore red and the other five wore white. There was this big orange ball and none of the guys wanted it, no matter what color they were wearing. They would throw the ball back and forth and back and forth until, eventually, one of them would put the ball in this big orange hoop. That made a guy in the opposite uniform take the ball and he’d bounce the ball back the other way, and he’d pass it to his friends, but his friends didn’t want the ball. And, really, they were all just too polite to say much about it. So they’d just look for a way to put it in that big orange hoop.

And at the end of it all, the guys wearing red were happier than the guys wearing white.

And what it was was basketball. And when Indiana won that meant they would advance to the finals in the Big Ten conference tournament and, presumably, clinch their bid to March Madness.

No meetings were canceled in the making of that game.

I did have two meetings today, though. That took up a quarter of the day. And the rest of the day was spent thinking of sun and sand and shade and being in the water. Which is where I’ll be until this time next week.

basketball / IU / television / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on There was basketball
10
Mar 22

There was basketball

I had a meeting canceled today because the people in the meeting wanted to watch the basketball game. And yet I still somehow had that meeting? Not sure how that happened.

At least they saw a good one?

If that’s not for you, maybe this is. Ernest Shackleton’s lost ship, Endurance, has been found after 107 years. This 4k footage shows the preserved vessel almost 10,000 feet below the surface. Shackleton was on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, when his ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and was slowly crushed. The crew escaped, camped on the ice, watching their vessel and their means of survival destroyed before them. And then the ice beneath them started to crumble. As it disintegrated, they launched lifeboats, and endured (see what I did there?) a miserable 720 mile, stormy journey to escape. And now, 107 years later.

Also, just last month, the British Film Institute (BFI) released restored footage of that expedition, including when the ship’s mast collapsed. Shackleton was adamant the film be saved, and it’s now a key part of early 20th century Antarctic exploration history.

Isn’t that something?

Here’s something else. More sports! These are the shows the sports gang produced last night. First up, let’s talk-talk-talk about basketball.

And you can also get the highlights and look ahead to all of the other sports in full swing around here.

And here’s still more sports talk, but this time with a broader range of subjects.

And now I have to go do laundry tonight, so I can pack tomorrow.

basketball / IU / photo / television / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Counting days
9
Mar 22

Counting days

I went to a meeting at 9:30 this morning. I left work just after 8 p.m. In between I had to start writing things for next week, set up a meeting, opened a studio for another project, answered every email and probably some that weren’t sent. So a perfectly average 10-and-a-half-hour day.

Spring break next week will be fun. I am looking forward to taking a few days off, to be sure.

But we have to get through a few more days, first. And the studio wrapped up the day. It was sports, tonight.

And there was a lot of basketball. Both of IU’s teams are looking for a spot in March Madness. The women are a sure lock, as we learn from this panel talking about what’s to come.

The women are likely poised to make a deep run in the tournament. The men need to do a little work in their conference tournament to get a dance card. These next few days will be key for them. And those sports shows will be online tomorrow, or so, and I can share them with you then.

Tonight, though, you can check out the two shows the news division produced last night.

They brought in one of the nation’s foremost experts on Russia and Vladimir Putin for an in-studio interview. This is good stuff.

And the dance team is, like the rest of us, dancing toward spring break.

Two more days!

basketball / Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off on She shoots …
6
Jan 17

She shoots …

No, this was not spooky at all this morning:

coat rack

My office has the three coat hooks behind the door. I’m not sure why there are three. It is a small office — just me in here — and it surely won’t get three-coats-cold. But it has been plenty chilly the last few days. So gloves and a scarf came to work today, as did the heavy leather jacket. And so I used all the hooks. Didn’t want any of them to be left out, lest the mishape a coat, so I used them all and created an unholy beast.

But at least its a warm and inviting one.

Here’s something else a bit weird. In the microwave the cook sensor found something it didn’t like last night:

toes

Oh, sure, we made scissors jokes and Big Lebowski jokes and then this morning I noticed the other corner of the clock display. Clearly the magnetron inside knows something is wrong. You wonder if the cathode or the anode has the bigger problem with cooking toes.

(I had to read a bit about magnetrons to make a joke, so it seemed like there should be some internal conflict there.)

This morning, Allie is securing the perimeter from birds:

toes

The Yankee put a bird feeder right outside that window and it seems to be working for everyone. This is the morning routine now: push a hooman (me) off the bed, enjoy the heated blanket for an extra half hour after he gets up, set up camp guarding the library windows from the offensive birds.

Those birds are a morning problem. They don’t seem to be an issue later in the day.

She does a great job keeping the birds outside.

At work we got to tour the Cuban Center at Assembly Hall. There’s a giant green screen room and some high end broadcasting gear going in. They are building up facilities to run all of the video screens in the athletic facilities from there. The original scoreboards are on display outside of the newly renovated gym. Inside the actual court there are 28 cameras making the new FreeD technology. You’ve seen this, the cameras in certain venues where you can see a key play in the game from a revolving series of angles.

It takes two people to run, a pilot and a navigator, and right now there are 11 people in the world that know how to do this.

Eleven. That’s the legitimate number. And if you want to get into the technology, IU is the only place in the world to do it. Soon, major soccer leagues and Major League Baseball will have this technology in all of their stadiums. And it all started with a small Israeli company, recently purchased by Intel, and the Cuban Center here at IU.

Also, being Indiana, there’s basketball, of course:

By transitive properties The Yankee is now a five-time national champion.