Continuing the mini-feature that began last week, here’s some fun with some of the texts of my maternal grandfather’s education in the rural 1940s.
Here are the two new installments from a book on English literature. Go here for the beginning.
books
19
Aug 11
Things to read
The evolution of sports journalism, as seen by one man who’s covered the Southeastern Conference for 33 years. Turns out it isn’t that much different than the news side of things, though some of those changes took place a generation ago. Take it away Ron Higgins:
Thus, you have bad feature stories. And soon you have little or no feature stories, because of a head coach who then publicly wonders why the media doesn’t write more “great” feature stories about his players.
With no feature stories to write, the news cycle gets amped up even more. Because beat writers are required to blog and tweet every hour, and write something for their paper almost every day, an item that was a throwaway note suddenly gets developed into a news story.
The next day after the coach reads the story or has someone read it for him, he angrily asks the reporter, “How is that a news story?”
If the reporter is honest, he’ll say, “It wasn’t. You left me no choice. I wanted to write a feature story on your wide receiver, but you limited access to him and those around him so much, it was a weak story. So a note became the news.”
THAT is what Dan Mullen and a lot of other coaches don’t get. In their quest to control the messenger, they sequester their program into a witness protection atmosphere of “you can’t.”
[…]
The average reader, looking at this blog, will say, “Wah, wah, wah, poor media. Who cares?”
So, untrained journalists, inflexible coaches and SIDs have ruined it for everyone. And, now, the fans. Higgins was absolutely taken to task in the comments of his own piece.
Here’s his reply:
I don’t ever expect coaches to have a friendly, buddy-buddy relationship with the media that was prevalent through the mid 1970s.
What I would like to see is coaches care enough to have honest communication with the media to discuss problems between the two sides, to develop a level of professional respect.
From the sports perspective, where the “bloggers are untrained as journalists and thus, ill-equipped for the job” has also taken unfortunate root, the problems are that athletic programs are intent on protecting their large investment, their athlete-students and their powerful coaches. The programs know their fans are going to be their fans no matter the media coverage and, just as importantly, they have their own tools — the same tools — to reach out to their public. That’s enough to make any sportswriter nervous.
Or, if politics is your thing here you have the logical conclusion to a Jerry Springer culture:
A Ron Paul supporter in Texas has taken out a full-page ad in a local alternative weekly newspaper seeking women who have slept with the presidential candidate.
“Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry?” asks the ad, which runs in this week’s Austin Chronicle. The ad was placed by Robert Morrow, who describes himself as a “self-employed investor and political activist” and a three-time delegate to the Texas state Republican convention.
Morrow is also the president and single member of the Committee Against Sexual Hypocrisy, which, he says, can help women publicize their “direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, ‘family values’ hypocrite and fraud.”
“I think it’s only a matter of time until somebody credible comes forward,” Morrow told Salon.
The Washington Post asked if we should be OK with this:
It’s not even a personal attack. It’s an ad hoping it can make a personal attack later. Is this really where we are?
“Gee,” this ad says. “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a scandal in Rick Perry’s personal life? Get on that, facts.”
“Rick Perry Is A Family Values Hypocrite*” the ad says. *We still have no facts to support this claim.
Are we okay with this? We shouldn’t be.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle went immediately to the Let’s find out all about Morrow angle.
The coarsening of the political discourse (This isn’t new, and indeed goes back to the days of Jefferson-Adams. I published a book chapter on it last year.) is really a sign that the perpetual campaign lasts for too long.
The Birmingham News’ Sunday circulation is up, mirroring a recent trend taking place elsewhere. The reason:
The sour economy and a popular television show have combined to boost demand for the Sunday edition of The Birmingham News — among both frugal consumers and thieves.
Theft of the coupon-packed Sunday newspaper has increased about 15 percent since the April debut of the TLC show “Extreme Couponing,” said Troy Niday, News vice president for operations. Single copy sales of the Sunday paper have increased about 16 percent over the same period.
“It’s almost as if the market woke up and realized we’ve got coupons,” Niday said.
18
Aug 11
Your average Thursday
Another day of fun and joy, and concerted attempts to maximize my time in the air conditioning. Not sure why, the heat index only made it up to 94 today. That’s a break around here at this time of year.
In a related story: It is August in the Deep South.
So I read and cleaned out inboxes and things like that. Took a trip to the local bike shop where The Yankee had to buy a new tire and tubes. I had to buy new tubes. Your paranoia grows incrementally with each additional ride you take without a spare.
Later in the day I stuffed my little bike bag full of the all-important things, CO2 cartridges, the extra tubes and so on, and hit the road for a brisk ride. It was the evening, it looked overcast and I was chasing the daylight. I got in 20 miles, dodging and weaving around traffic that has suddenly become a lot more dense (the college kids are back) and less accepting of cyclists (the college kids are back?). This could turn into a long lament about traffic and space and all of that, but it is a tired argument. I’m just going to make a custom jersey that says something like “You should move” and have an arrow pointing to the left.
Learned the power of the head shake this evening, though. I was stuck at an intersection and as the light was about to change I tried to clip back into my pedals. Just as I did this, leaning to the left, a car decided being behind me wasn’t as good as being beside me. I glanced back just far enough to see the hood and shook my head as I pedaled in front of him for the next 300 yards. Felt very European. That’ll show him!
I did some research, but it is far from over, meaning there are a lot of open tabs and windows on my computer.
I did this for fun. The Daily Show had a good run at class warfare tonight,
So I looked up some stats. I picked 1980 at (almost) random. The percentage of U.S. households with:
Clothes washer: 73
Dishwasher: 38
Refrigerator: ~100;
Black and white television: 43
Color television: 88
That was in 1980. I picked the year since some insist on comparing President Obama with President Carter. Also, because of Lou Gannon‘s biography on President Reagan. In it, he noted that 4,414 individual tax returns with adjusted gross income of more than $1,000,000. In 1987 there were 34,944 such returns. During that time, Cannon observed, there was a huge increase in the purchase of small appliances and durable goods.
Critics of the new prosperity managed to remain unimpressed by the longest sustained economic recovery since World War II and the steady advance of American living standards. They viewed the Reagan years as an enshrinement of American avarice, epitomized by the “greed is healthy” speech of convicted Wall Street financier Ivan Boesky. Throughout most of the Reagan presidency the complaints of these critics were drowned out by the clamor of the marketplace.
A quarter of a century later, in 2005, these were the same categories, in percentages:
Clothes washer: 82.6, up nine percent
Dishwasher: 58.3, up 20 percent
Refrigerator: ~100, steady
Television: 99.8 percent
Cable TV: 79.1 percent, black and white is no longer listed
More than two TVs:at 42.9 percent
That’s U.S. Department of Energy data, used in a Heritage Foundation report, which also points out that 88.7 percent of American homes have a microwave and 84 percent have air conditioning?
What does it mean? You can decide that on your own. Should it reshape my position? Probably not. It should, however, make one realize that wealth, poverty, success, comfort and pain are relative. After all, the U.S. poverty line for a family of one is defined at $10,890. That income would put you in the 86th percentile on a global comparison according to Global Rich List. It is also longitudinal, and dovetails with class expectations: a very basic middle class lifestyle today would make you look like a king in your great-grandparents era.
Possessions aint everything*, as the poet William Payne wrote, which brings us back to money for groceries and bills and pills. And that circular argument is where we’ve been politically for years. It’s almost enough to make the unassuming sort wonder why right-thinking people would ever get in that business**.
* Air conditioning, I maintain, is pretty stinkin’ vital.
** But you know better.
17
Aug 11
Put the lime in the coconut
If you ever want to get an education, post something just slightly wrong on the Internet. I noticed these Persian limes at the grocery store this evening and put the picture on Facebook, writing something silly like “Persian limes, from Mexico.”
My dear friend Kelly, who is not a horticulturist, but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express near some lime trees once, wrote “Persian limes are just a kind of lime. You know what makes them Persian limes? They aren’t Key Limes.”
One thing led to another and now I have to know all about this particular citrus. Wikipedia tells me they are also called Tahiti limes. Great, another geography-challenged fruit.
They were developed in California. I feel duped.
Kelly, as always, was right though: they aren’t key limes. Wikipedia, and I’ll take their word, says Persian limes are less acidic than key limes and don’t have the bitterness central to key lime’s unique flavor.
We bought the store’s entire inventory of groceries. It was us and the poor gentleman behind us at the checkout line who had to make do with the crumbs we left in the back corner near the dairy section. You’ll be happy to know that we remembered to save the earth this trip and took our canvas bags. (We sometimes forget. Once they made it into the car but not into the store.) The kindly man who bagged our purchase up managed to completely load them up. If we’d chosen plastic there’d be 14,000 bags floating around on the kitchen floor just now.
Those bags, too, have a purpose. We keep a small supply on a hook in the mud room, but eventually it swells out to something you have to bob and weave around, less you take a glancing blow from the big tumor of plastic. You only need so many of the things for storage and secondary disposal.
Really I want to take a competitor’s save the earth bags into our grocery store and see what they do. Would they sack the groceries up without complaint? Would they glare? Would there be a conference? Their big on conferences there. Would they signal in the manager, they are ever-present like you see in the movies set in casinos when the hero makes too much money and the suits get involved. They are much, much, nicer than all of that, but it is remarkable how quickly a manager will swoop in.
Alabama Adventure may be for sale again. This is an amusement park and water park combo near where I grew up. I remember, just after my senior year of high school Larry Langford, who was mayor of Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham, pitched his plan for VisionLand to a room full of high school kids. It was his dry run. He announced the project publicly a few days later. All the nearby towns, he said, would chip in land and money for land and they were going to build this incredible park. It would start a bit small and grow every year. Langford got the land, got the money, got a lot more money from the state legislature and built his park. He even had a statue inside.
He’d go on to being on the county commission and then the mayor of Birmingham, despite still living in Fairfield. And now he’s in jail.
But the park has struggled since not long after it was created. The current owner is the third owner. It was the second owner, after the park went bankrupt (the $65 million project went for just $6 million), that changed the name from VisionLand to Visionland, and finally to Alabama Adventure.
The entire Wikipedia entry is a sad collection of grand ideas that never came to fruition for one reason or another. The place has earned a bad reputation in some respects, but there’s a lot of that going around that area, too. The best part of the place, to me, was that you could spend a day at a real theme park and not have to drive all the way back home from Atlanta smelling like stale water. Home was minutes away!
I had a few dates at the park, and one company picnic. On a separate occasion I took some nice pictures there. Some of those photographs went into my portfolio which helped me get other freelance work. Here’s one of them that just happened to be floating around in some dusty corner of the site. It isn’t the best one, but I loved the water bucket obstacle course part of the water park:
I scanned that eight years or more ago, which is why it is so small. I’ll dig up the original at some point and do it a bit more justice. (Don’t bet on it.)
I enjoyed the lazy river, and never caught any problem worse than standing in the place where the fireworks debris falls. You never think about that, when you’re watching fireworks, but the cardboard and the embers have to land somewhere. Don’t let it land on you.
In my freshman year literature class I wrote a comparative essay on Machiavelli’s Prince and Larry Langford. I’m sure the paper was dreadful, though I somehow recall getting an A on it. Don’t ask me why I kept that memory. Thinking back on it, though, I’m intrigued by how different parts now apply to Langford’s tale. Some of it was all wrong in the beginning, but he grew into the treatise’s notion of idealism (he was vainly spurring on a campaign to bid for the 2020 Olympics in Birmingham when his political realm fell down around him) and then it all turned into a sad, sad parody, as some considered The Prince.
Sometime after the second owner of the theme park came along they removed Langford’s statue. It was the preface to Langford’s version of Machiavelli’s Mandrake*.
Who comes here for obvious references to 16th century Italian comedies? You can raise your hand. It is OK. You’re among friends.
I trimmed the bushes today. Well, one bush. It was so hot that I’d broken into a sweat by the time I’d gotten the extension cord untangled.
So, one prickly shrub, scoop up the trimmings and remember that old saw about discretion being the better part of pruning.
When The Yankee came home she didn’t even notice the trimming. Subtlety is an art form, friends.
We rode our bikes this evening. Or I did. She tried, but had a flat close to home. We are out of tubes, so we’ll have a stock-up trip to the bike shop tomorrow. I got in 19 miles and was not pleased with any of it, really. Seems 10 days off is too many. Now I must recover my legs again.
But I cruised down a road I’ve never been on before, so that was a nice treat. Well, I’ve gone the other way, the uphill side, of that road before. Today I got to see how the road should be attacked: from its highest point.
5
Aug 11
Young at heart, old of ear
Little Jimmy’s grandmother took him to the park after a long day of kindergarten. “Doesn’t it look like an artist painted the scenery? God painted this just for you,” she said.
“Yes” Jimmy said, “God did it and he did it left handed.”
“What makes you think God is left handed?”
“Well” Jimmy said, “we learned in Sunday School that Jesus sits on God’s right hand!”
Silly, but I love that joke. Always made me wonder if a heavenly hand could fall asleep. Someone could blame a lot of problems on that. Others would probably shake their head and agree. Burning needles in an appendage takes it out of a guy, they’d think, I can relate to that.
Dear parents that owe child support, pay your bills. Not only are you depriving your child, you’re embarrassing yourselves:
The best part is the deputy sheriff in his Auburn shirt. They went all out on this sting, except for the location. I mean, “You’ve won tickets to the game of the year! Come down to this abandoned granary to collect!”
You can tell football season is upon us. The team is practicing, students are starting to move back to town, and the summer term has wound down. We’re shopping for shirts. The Yankee wants a jersey for her birthday, and she has numbers in mind. The university seems to be marketing just three jersey numbers this season, and one of them is the one she wants. So that works out well. We hit a few stores yesterday, as I mentioned, looking for the right size and number combination. There were a few more stores today.
But first, the university library, where there is a documentary of some heft that must be obtained. We found it and, then, on the way out, walked by part of the Toomer’s Corner displays. These are the things people left after their poisoning was announced. How weird that still sounds:
They’re going to allow fans to roll the trees again this fall, which has a “roll ’em while you got ’em” feel. I’m not interested. Having had my share, and stood under the old trees during two conference championships, two undefeated seasons and a national championship I’ve more than had my fill. But here’s my feeling:
Yeah, they’re trees, and there are worse crimes against humanity than a crime against a local icon, but if you deprive children of their part of a long legacy we should find a small space under a heavy, cramped jail for you. But that’s just me.
Here’s another neat one from the display:
Here’s more on the collection, including a few other artifacts. The archivists say no one has ever had to preserve something like toilet paper before. The things we celebrate are temporary, the hard part is making the memories last forever.
They are getting the stadium ready. In a month more than 87,000 people will be inside there. It is silly and spectacular and true:
Came home to do productive things. Planned out a presentation for next week, tinkered with the video chat feature of Google Plus. We are living in the future. Somehow the economy didn’t seem so bad in our imaginations, but still, video chat across two states. This is a step up from last week’s test of the platform, where four of us chatted in one room. And by room I mean our living room. It was delightfully geeky.
Jeremy, the host of The War Eagle Reader stopped by for a chat. Did you know he edited the Maple Street Press? Did you know I’m in that magazine? It isn’t bad, though all agree the photo selections and the cutlines could be better. The content, though, is insightful.
He loaned me a book, which I am interested to read. First I must put it on top of the To Read stack and finish the other two in progress. Once upon a time I’d read three at a time. Now I do well to get in two. Seems I’m reading lots of other things, too. Makes me wonder what this does to one’s reading comprehension. Is it really useful if I can later only say “This one book I read … ” or “I recall in … some study or another … ”
Now, I wrote last month about my joy of books, but the one thing that could replace that would be the convenience and joy of search. If I could put everything in a reader and then refer back to the term or author or time I was reading the thing … now that would be something.
And according to the Booth Theory of Commercial development, Google or Apple has that in R&D right now. And when it comes out in six months I’ll only need a way to transfer everything I’ve ever read, ever, into the reader for cross tab indexing.
Well, maybe I could leave out the Black Stallion series and various old Robin Hood tales. Who needs those now? I’ve always questioned the fingers wrapped in the horse’s mane. And the only part of the Robin story I recall better than a movie or BBC episode is that he feebly loosed an arrow from the Kirklees Priory and where the arrow landed was where he is buried. Great tale. Of the many great Robin Hood tales over the last millenium that one, I’ve just learned, is from the 18th Century. I read that as a child at my grandparent’s one summer. Why? It was there.
I may have a reading problem, and it started early.
Barbecue for dinner tonight, risking crowds from a dual graduation/move in weekend. Do not visit a grocery store, Walmart or Home Depot on weekends like this. You take your life into your own hands.
So we stand in line at Moe’s, order our barbecue and then stand around for a table. This is a bit difficult. As reasonable as the food is, they’ve taken great pains to push you out of the door — awkward decor, lighting that is off just so, poorly placed televisions, uncomfortable chairs — but people just sit around. And sit around. And sit ar —
“Ticket number THIRTY-FIIIIIVE!”
We’d only just found a table, having identified a group that put two together, sat with friends and then left. The table for eight stayed joined when only three were there. And so we made our own, grabbed the food, ate and hustled out of there before the loud, live music started.
Some days you feel older than others, I guess.
