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This is the conclusion of a mini-section on the site dedicated to poking fun at the illustrations in some of my grandfather’s old books.
Remember, this isn’t an examination of elementary school in rural Alabama of the 1940s, but just a good excuse to show reprints of pictures. Here are the next two pages from a science text. You can also see selections from his literature book.
This is the continuation of a mini-section on the site with the purpose of enjoying and poking fun at the illustrations in some of my grandfather’s old books.
Remember, this isn’t an examination of elementary school in rural Alabama of the 1940s, but just a good excuse to show reprints of pictures. Here are the next two pages from a science text. You can also see selections from his literature book.
Halifax Media Holdings, which recently purchased The Tuscaloosa News and The Gadsden Times and a handful of other properties from the New York Times. Poynter reports:
About 30 employees of the former New York Times Regional Media Group were notified Friday that their new employer, Halifax Media Group, has decided to lay them off and offer severance packages. The other 20 were offered positions, but only if they relocated to Daytona Beach, Fla., where Halifax is headquartered.
A letter accompanying documents distributed Friday said Halifax “has reviewed the company’s Tampa operations to see where additional efficiencies can be achieved by eliminating or consolidating certain job functions and operations.”
Employees “who were offered a package were told that they wouldn’t be given severance if they speak to the media or publicly discuss the situation,” said one source. A second source confirmed the confidentiality clause …
There are more cuts on the way:
Those local news organizations also have their own journalism and sales staffs, who can expect to hear more lay off news over the next month or so.
By the terms of the sale, Halifax could only lay off a maximum 10 percent of the 2,000-person staff, but that requirement applied only to layoffs that occurred at the time of closing.
Selling those properties to Halifax only did so much good for the New York Times. While their paywall has been somewhat successful GigaOM says it doesn’t come close to closing the gap. “Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.”
Yelp? Hurting for dough.
Income-Age gap? Growing.
And now that I’ve found three stories to slow down your Saturday, here’s this reason I love the Internet: Jedi Betty White.
I watch Golden Girls from time to time, I’ll admit it. I can’t stand the theme song, but if I can jump into an episode after that I’ll be hooked for the duration. White’s character is really the only one I never especially liked, but watching the actress is a different thing. Estelle Getty’s character has always been my favorite. Rue McClanahan was always on the periphery to me, Betty White played the comic relief. Bea Arthur held it all together, and sometimes tore up the room. Here’s the end of a great speech at the end of the fifth season premiere. She’d been blown off by her doctor and then saw him out at a fancy restaurant where she confronted him:
It is the sort of thing you think about when someone you care about talks about their doctor and whether they like him or her. The camera pulls and Dorothy goes back to her table and there’s Dorothy setting up the comic relief, and Sophia stealing the show, as she often did.
I’m certain that clip has made its way around to restaurant managers, however. You might need to find your own solution when you get stuck in that spot.
Visited the local bike shop today, which I do believe is about two steps down from going to a coffee house. A few less chairs, a few more expensive products, but everything else is the same.
The Yankee is two-thirds of the way through a bike fitting — centimeters matter, particularly when you’re talking about long rides and various stresses and strains on the body. This is a multi-step gets the process, a by-feel mixture of what the bike expert thinks looks right, and then several rides where you go back and tell him what this infernal device is doing to your back or your shoulders or what have you. Once you get things well fit you can feel like a rocket. Until then you’re just tinkering and trying to find something that doesn’t make you miserable.
I did mine myself last summer. She said my knees were spread out all over the place so I moved the seat post about eight microns over the course of a weekend until I found just the right height. When I found a place that didn’t strain my knees or over-burden my upper body I wanted to launch fireworks and mark that spot in a paint that the world’s worst CSI agent couldn’t miss: Place Seat Here. Mine probably isn’t perfect — my bike is a little small for my build, after all — but nothing especially hurts.
And, as I told the owner of the bike shop today, lately it feels like I’m not riding my bike so much as going along for the ride. I’m holding on more than propelling the thing. It is a nice feeling, silly as the explanation sounds. Bill Strickland calls it the flow:
a discussion of the merits of such a route will ensue, incorporating concepts such as traffic, slope, wind, sun, gravel and the ever-ethereal and thus impregnable defense of “flow.”
I’m the “flow” guy, by the way.
This is inane behavior, I know. But it is important in the way that things that are absolutely without importance are important.
I think Strickland and I are on the same page, at least. If you find Strickland’s flow — which sounds like a submariner’s geographic map notation — maybe you can get to what Jean Bobet called la volupte:
The divine surprise comes when you discover that beyond enjoyment lies the thrill of la volupte. The voluptuous pleasure you get from cycling is something else. It does exist, because I have experienced it. Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity. It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions. At the risk of raising eyebrows, I would maintain that the delight of cycling is not to be found in the arena of competition. In racing the threat of failure or the excitement of success generates euphoria at best, which seems vulgar in comparison with la volupte.
The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.
I wonder if the guys in the local bike shop have read all the great French philosophy on cycling and — oh, he’s going to answer my question now.
I had two, actually. One about chain maintenance, to which he whipped out a tool from the sky above and told me how to build a clock that runs on bike chains. You can’t help but like this guy. He’s just so passionate and giving with everything he knows, and he knows plenty. My other question was also about the chain and how mine seems to have a “Shift, Dummy” signal. He pulls that tool out again, a silver boomerang shaped thing that is not unlike a dipstick and shows me another function. He tells me what I’m describing could be one of three things, or just me being in the wrong gear.
I’m not a very good cyclist, I keep telling you this.
The Yankee, meanwhile, has her bike attached to a trainer. The back wheel is slightly elevated so that she can pedal and work the gears and the front wheel is in a giant plastic contraption designed to keep her in one place rather than crashing through a handsome wall of ultimately vital, expensive brand name accessories.
They adjust, tinker, reset, and we’re all just chatting away about geometry and ergonomics and you’d not believe how many different terms they bring into cycling just to mystify the casual listener, or how many ways I will analogize the things he is saying just to make sure I have it all right in my head.
We talk about warm ups and routes and races. He races. He has more than one pair of cycling shoes. I do too, they are called the tennis shoes I ride in and the the tennis shoes I learned very early hurt my feet when I try to ride in them. (Those are now simply my gym shoes.) The Yankee builds a good pace and pronounces the fit worth trying. She picks up a few accessories. Her bike is now once again fancier than mine.
Back at home, as the day is beginning the long slow sigh into evening, we decide to go for a short ride. We have about an hour of daylight and she wants to try her new clipless pedals. We do a few laps on the empty street in our neighborhood. We pass the little boy who lives next to us, intently focused under his Incredible Hulk helmet and pounding away on his training wheels. I cruise by him quickly, hoping he likes speed, and chuckling that it might concern his mother.
The Yankee and I decide we will ride our bikes through the neighborhood and back up one of the more popular routes in town to the local grocery store. We need charcoal. If we both go one person can stay outside and watch the bikes. I pull out one of those ridiculous drawstring backpacks that we picked up as a promotional gift at a swim meet figuring it might hold the charcoal on the way home. One day those backpacks might hold extra water if I find myself making a really long ride in the summer. A quick visit to the store will be a good test.
We head through the neighborhood, down the hill, through the stop sign and out through the entire subdivision, two people on bicycles laughing like crazed people on bicycles. We can’t do this ride leisurely, because The Yankee has new equipment and wants to test it. Also, we are competitive.
Around the part where all of the old ladies live, the ones you can unfortunately startle if you pass by their house when they’re out to get the mail, we’re streaking along at what is, for us, a good pace. Sprints are relative, dear reader. She has an extra gear in her bike, and perhaps an extra something else when it comes to short distances. I do well to stay on her wheel. But when the hills come — we have moderately sloping hills, nothing massive at all — I can create some distance between us.
I settle in at a nice pace and beat her to the grocery store, but I know I won’t for long. Her new equipment, the bike shop guy said, is going to give her another mile per hour on her average. The gear is a great equalizer. (I, suddenly, need new gear.)
She stays with the bikes. I go inside and find a seven-pound bag of charcoal. I think the 12-pounder might fight this drawstring backpack, but let’s work up to that. I pay. I’m in my full cycling kit and no one at the store even blinks.
“Can I bag this for you?” one of the employees asks.
“Can you put it in this one?” I pull off the blaze orange backpack and he doesn’t hesitate. What do you have to do to give these people pause?
We head back home. In this direction that popular road is more like a drag strip, which is why it is so popular in that part of town. I put my mass forward, which is now even greater with seven pounds of briquettes strapped on my shoulders and cruise down the road. This is a straight path, the first feature being the turn back into the intersection, a 90-degree right-hander that is never a problem.
Unless you’ve changed your weight distribution. What I can normally do from my bike lane into the right-hand car lane now takes up every inch of asphalt. There was no diving into that corner. It was more like watching a big glop of something sliding down the back of a spoon. Not especially viscous, not in any way pretty. Then more sprinting, the last of it really, for soon the remaining route turns into an uphill push back home, which sits up higher than everything else in the ZIP code, apparently. At least it feels that way on my bike.
Just before the bottom of that last sprint is a roundabout, which offers the most technical aspect of this particular ride. You have to swing to the right to get into it, even from the bike lane, but then swing back to the left to avoid someone’s well manicured lawn. But you can’t do that too early, because there are potholes and bent bike wheels waiting for you if you do. Also, I have charcoal on my back. It doesn’t interfere with my riding — I didn’t even notice it on inclines — but it is certainly impacting my swooping.
And I like swooping.
I make it home with no more difficulties and feeling confident I can carry a small amount of dead weight on my back while riding. The Yankee rides up soon after. I note the times on our computers, just in case it is the last time I get back before she does. I’ll want to remember this moment, because it was a great day.
How great? I didn’t even mention the morning yard work, which could not diminish it, with all of its attendant scratches and scrapes and cuts from the flower bed. That’s how great.
Twitter is set to censor content to their service in some countries when necessary:
The company announced Thursday that it could start censoring certain content in certain countries, a sort of micro-censorship widget that would pop up up in a grey box on the Twitter feed.
“Tweet withheld,” it would read “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country.”
Twitter explained the change in a blog post on Thursday: “We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.”
Twitter is growing up. There’s some censorship angst among the commentariat, but people have to remember: Twitter is a business. They’re not in the business of changing laws that we’d find unpalatable here at home.
When you look into the details there is a degree of transparency to the process Twitter is putting in place.
Information wants to be free. People need to speak with other people. This move by Twitter might limit this particular tool in times of domestic turmoil in hotspots, something else will always emerge. Or work arounds will be found. (Indeed, it seems that took just a few hours.)
In short, Twitter could have done far more here, which would have been far less.
This is reckless and frightening:
Hawaii’s legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.
The bill was introduced last week and a legislative committee met this morning to discuss the bill, which is even more far-reaching than the federal analog.
The legislation was abandoned by its author sometime around that committee meeting:
Rep. Kymberly Pine, an Oahu Republican and the House minority floor leader, told CNET this evening that her intention was to protect “victims of crime,” not compile virtual dossiers on every resident of–or visitor to–the Aloha State who uses the Internet.
“We do not want to know where everyone goes on the Internet,” Pine said. “That’s not our interest. We just want the ability for law enforcement to be able to capture the activities of crime.”
Pine acknowledged that civil libertarians and industry representatives have leveled severe criticism of the unprecedented legislation, which even the U.S. Justice Department did not propose when calling for new data retention laws last year. A Hawaii House of Representatives committee met this morning to consider the bill, which was tabled.
What will they think of next? Brain erasing? Oh yeah …
For decades scientists believed that long-term memories were immutable—unstable for a few hours and then etched into the brain for good. Research now suggests that recalling a memory causes it to revert temporarily to an insecure state, in which the recollection can be added to, modified, even erased. “Memory is more dynamic, more fluid and malleable than we thought,” says neuroscientist Daniela Schiller of Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
That idea, brought to the fore about a decade ago, has opened up a new controversial research area exploring the possibility of deleting, or at least muting, parts of human memory with drugs or targeted therapies. Some experts have found that a drug used to treat high blood pressure works to unseat recollections; others are testing novel biochemical means or behavioral interventions to interfere with unwanted remembrances
The application is still limited in trials, but the implications are fascinating.
Unemployment numbers: This came from Todd Stacy, an aide to Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard. The speaker presented numbers showing Alabama’s unemployment percentage diving below regional and national averages. One hopes the good news continues.
(Disclosure: Years ago Hubbard was my employer. Nice gentleman, too.)
I did not ride today. The Yankee pronounced it yucky, and I had no desire to ride in such a condition. (She did though.) Truthfully, the conditions didn’t bother me much, but I noticed my legs were sore before I even put my feet on the floor this morning.
Better to take the day off, I figured. Clearly I have a lot of work to do towards realizing my larger cycling goals. Tomorrow, though, I’ll have a big day in the saddle.
So I worked instead. Emails, syllabi, networking, reading. I do so much reading that someone should write a book about it. No one would read the thing, though. Except me.
The fun reading is fun, at least. Last night I finished Mark Beaumont’s The Man Who Cycled the World. Eyeing a plan of about 100 miles a day, Beaumont started in Paris, rode through Europe, the Middle East, across India and part of Asia. He suffered through the barren portions of Australia, raced through New Zealand and then crossed the U.S. (He got mugged in the States, perhaps making Louisiana as memorable as his experience in Pakistan.) Finally he made it to Portugal, Spain and back to Paris. He shaved two months off the world record.
It is an interesting premise, and a Herculean feat of speed and endurance. The read becomes a bit repetitive. That’s hardly a fault, though. The guy is writing about the most repetitive thing one can conceive: “I pushed my feet around in circles for six months. And, also, saddle sores!” So the intriguing part is the mental grind, and that’s probably one of the hardest things to write about. By the time he reaches the southeastern U.S. his point is made.
There are a few inaccuracies in his recounting, and it feels like he was still writing the thing while trying to overcome the bicycle burnout. The thing that amazes me is how much of his trip he managed to not research, because you think you would devote a great deal of time to that.
I was hoping for more people and vivid descriptions, but he’s an adventurer who wrote a book rather than an author who developed great calves and cardio. If you aren’t intrigued by cycling or ultra-endurance sport this book probably isn’t for you.
Had dinner with Shane and Brian tonight. We visited Logan’s, where they have a new menu. You can gorge on peanuts and rolls and get the marrow of a steak bone along side a sodium supplemented potato, all for $7.99.
I told a joke.
Shane: “Country people don’t say ‘extension’ they say ‘stension’.”
Me: They don’t need ‘straneous letters.
The waitress thought the joke killed. Of course, she was new. Maybe she didn’t know any better.
This is the continuation of a mini-section on the site featuring, and making jokes about, the illustrations in some of my grandfather’s old tomes.
This isn’t really a glimpse into what an elementary student in rural Alabama learned in the 1940s, but just a good excuse to show reprints of watercolors. Here are the next two pages from a text on science. You can see the beginning of that book here. Go here to see selections from his literature book.
