I had these shots from my ride on Sunday and I’ve been staring at them. The colors are beautiful. The light is perfect. The road just sings to you. There’s a great whir, whir, whirring in my imagination from the rubber tire on the road. When you get close enough you can smell the clay:
On my bike I am always trying to ride hard and fast, because I am not fast. But in my daydreams I’m lazily drifting onto the center line, where the road noise is different, quieter. When I have the space to ride on a painted lane I always wonder if it moves faster. Maybe the paint makes less friction, somehow. It is quieter. There’s just your breathe there, just the whoosh of the wind in your ears. And then you can really see the things around you:
Not far from there at all, really, I looked up the road and saw the prettiest site I’ve seen on an otherwise normal, and freshly paved, ribbon of road:
And I started doing the only other kind of riding I know how to do, the slow back and forth tilts from the shoulder to centerline, making big swooping curves over the asphalt. Sine waves. Sign language.
In my mind I’m sitting on the saddle. In reality I’m sitting in my office chair, wondering why it is lately less comfortable.
Some friends and I have a little joke on Twitter we call Why I Love The Internet This Week or #WILITW. Usually the subject matter is a video, but the premise is always “Without this amazing tool, we would have never had the opportunity to enjoy this.”
But for the Internet. I gave you this week’s entry:
Isn’t that adorable? Two cheers for the Wallkill Mighty Mites from Wallkill, New York. But now let’s watch it again and analyze some of the constituent parts. The first thing you notice, while keeping in mind this is in slow motion, that the entire team was running through that sign no matter what. That’s an admirable esprit de corps from such a young team so early in their season.
The second thing is the cheerleaders. Those girls never gave up the fight, and that’s a great demonstration of boosterism and support.
Which brings us to the mom in the foreground. She held her end of the sign for several waves of the team to break through. That’s dedication. That’s belief. That’s probably a mom who thought her son could get through the thing.
As opposed to the woman holding the other end of the sign. She literally turned her back on the pile up.
Meanwhile, the cheerleaders are cheering and clapping and jumping. And a half dozen kids will always remember this, all through their football careers, and they’ll never feel the need to be at the front of the team to break the paper on the high school gridiron.
The good news is they brushed it off and, apparently, won the game.
I got in a 43-mile ride yesterday evening. I was hoping for about 46, but I had to cut it short because of darkness. So I came home the slightly shorter way, with the big hill, which I was in no condition to deal with after 43 miles, thinking I need to start my rides earlier in the day.
My route was an amalgamation of two that I’m familiar with. It took me through a modern residential area, a shopping mecca, a historic part of town and then out through the countryside. I sailed by the old union headquarters that is now apparently a church and another old plant that will probably never have a new tenant. I was almost clipped by a pickup and the trailer he was hauling. And I worked my way back out into the countryside, where I turned off of a road with a name onto another with just a number.
The road bottoms out at a creek bed and you’re surrounded by judgmental cows and someone shooting a nail gun nearby. I went by a man sitting on his porch and another working on his roof. I cruised by the brand new post office that is shiny and new for a community that consists of a church, one store and a volunteer fire department. Just past that is a stop sign and that store, a junk store, where I years ago discovered my love for junk stores. If you go straight you find yourself on about a mile of the worst chip/seal pavement you can find in the rural South. But then you go under some trees, round a curve, pass a pasture and you find yourself on a brand new and nearly pristine asphalt and large rollers.
I did about five or six miles on that, surrounded by red clay and pine trees and only the most occasional house, before I turned around for home. I stopped there and took a few of the pictures that were shared here yesterday, where I was talking about the lumber yard and old wood. I also took this picture there:
What is in those woods? The whole road which, again, has always been eerily empty, is covered with various posted and no trespassing signs. But a human silhouette target sign? I didn’t previously care about that gravel path, but now I’m curious.
Things to read … because reading keeps us curious.
In short, while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically in every mature market (US, Europe), the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacular fashion. It grows in two dimensions: the spinning aspect, with more highly capable people, most often former seasoned writers willing to become spin-surgeons. These are both disappointed by the evolution of their noble trade and attracted by higher compensation. The second dimension is the growing inclination for PR firms, communication agencies and corporations themselves to build fully-staffed newsrooms with editor-in-chief, writers, photo and video editors.
That’s the first issue.
The second trend is the evolution of corporate communication. Slowly but steadily, it departs from the traditional advertising codes that ruled the profession for decades. It shifts toward a more subtle and mature approach based on storytelling. Like it or not, that’s exactly what branded content is about: telling great stories about a company in a more intelligent way versus simply extolling a product’s merits.
With the president-felling image of Woodward and Bernstein still hanging over the profession, and a geekily hip narrative of data-driven analysis pointing to a new future, few journalists like to acknowledge the role PRs play in their stories. Many are well-informed, professional, clever, helpful and fun. Some are former colleagues. Some become friends. But for most journalists, it is an involvement we put up with warily. PRs are spinners of favourable stories, glossers-over of unfavourable facts and gatekeepers standing between us and the people we want to get to.
But as journalists bemoan such PR obstacles, they rarely admit an important fact: the PRs are winning. Employment in US newsrooms has fallen by a third since 2006, according to the American Society of News Editors, but PR is growing. Global PR revenues increased 11 per cent last year to almost $12.5bn, according to an industry study entitled The Holmes Report. For every working journalist in America, there are now 4.6 PR people, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.2 a decade ago. And those journalists earn on average 65 per cent of what their PR peers are paid.
On Friday night, in front of thousands of friends, family members and fans at the Gopher-Warrior Bowl, that is exactly what happened.
Principal Lorimer Arendse, now in his fourth week at the helm of Grand Prairie High School, was let in on the plan shortly before halftime and the planned announcement of the homecoming winners.
“In all my time in school, this is probably the greatest moment I’ve ever experienced as a principal,” said Arendse, who has five years of prior experience in school administration.
The weekly post of extra stuff, full of extras that haven’t advanced beyond the lovely level of stuff. Here’s the stuff, then.
Scary thought I had the other night in the parking lot, “Is it possible that I’m getting tired of Whataburger? Is that the reason I stood beneath that sign, watching it like it was flying away?”
A few not-quite-wild brown-eyed Susans:
I believe this may be a thin-leaved sunflower that had just popped up in a walking path and was hanging on to the end of the season. Life finds a way:
Oh, just the most perfect pine cone in the world. At least this side of it was:
I put new handlebar wrap on my bike. Looks great, was very frustrating to get on and will be dirty instantly. But, finally, my handlebars match the saddle. I pulled some of it out of place on my first ride with it this afternoon, but it rewrapped easily enough:
I call this one, The Colors of My Day:
I wonder what is down that path. Through the woods there is a saw mill. You could smell them chopping up old lumber this afternoon. Old lumber, I decided, has a more dull smell on a calm afternoon. The new, green, good stuff has that crisp bite in the nose. What was floating around today just made you want to sneeze. But what is down there?
My first thought was that the light at 6:30 is lovely. My second thought was that there shouldn’t be a 6:30 on a Saturday morning.
And if there must be a 6:30 on a Saturday morning, I should remain blissfully unaware of it.
Nevertheless, there we were. And by we I mean me and my running shoes:
We did the Marie Wooten Memorial Run today, a scholarship fundraiser. There were bananas:
And other snacks:
We saw our friend, the theater director, and another guy The Yankee knows from the pool, who is a librarian. The woman who was running with Dean Wooten the day she was killed was there to run, as were a lot of dogs. They need fuel too:
While we didn’t win place on the podium — we weren’t racing, though — The Yankee did win a hat as a door prize:
And we posed with our friend, Emily, who ran with us.
I ran home, another two miles and change, because why not? Yesterday I had a rambling ride through campus and town and the suburbs to put a simple 22 miles into my bike. Tomorrow I’ll have a longer ride. Now I’m going to watch football. This will involve a great deal of sitting. I’m OK with it.
It occurred to me that I’ve never noticed the bas-reliefs of any other governors in Alabama. Perhaps I’m overlooking them or am drawing a mental blank. Maybe this is a lasting affection for George Wallace. Perhaps part of it is that George Wallace was governor for so long, from 1963 to 1967 and then from 1971 until 1979 and again from 1983 to 1987.
Here he’s standing in front of the restroom door:
That rest area was built during the 1970s. Maybe it was a boom period.
A bit ambitious, wouldn’t you think?
I had a nice, easy 30-mile ride yesterday. It should have been longer. I climbed more than 1,200 feet and rode for under two hours. I topped out at 37.7 miles per hour. Twenty percent of the ride was over 20 miles per hour. (Which is slow for most, but pretty nice for me.) Most importantly, it didn’t all fall apart in the last few minutes. It reminds me that I should ride more.
Things to read … to remind you that I should ride more.
I’m always circumspect about a small thing, like a small sport, playing big social roles. But we all have our roles to play and we all have our spheres of influence, I suppose … Biking Toward Women’s Rights in Afghanistan:
The Women’s National Cycling Team of Afghanistan is only a few years old. Its 10 members, most between the ages of 17 and 22, have yet to finish a race. But they are determined to persevere in their chosen sport despite multiple barriers, and are aiming to ride in the 2020 Olympics.
Men driving by insult them. Boys along the road throw rocks at them. Sometimes they don’t have enough money to buy adequate food to fuel their rides. Every day, they are reminded that it is taboo in Afghan society for a woman to get on a bicycle. And still they ride.
“They tell us that it is not our right to ride our bikes in the streets and such,” says Marjan Sidiqqi, one of the young women on the team. “We tell them that this is our right and that they are taking our right away. Then we speed off.”
[…]
Galpin says that for the generation of girls coming of age in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, bicycling is another manifestation of the freedom to be an educated person in the society. “Young women who are in university and high school, young women who are educated, their families have promoted that and helped that happen,” she says. “These young women look at it very cut and dry: ‘My brother can ride a bike, why can’t I?’ They’re cognizant that they have this right.”
“We cannot become a hero by sitting at home,” she said.
So essentially, it took less than a decade of life for the rest of her brain to pick up the missing cerebellum’s slack. The fact that the patient is alive and thriving is incredible. This is only the ninth time that doctors have found someone to be missing a whole cerebellum, and most of the others have only been discovered after their early deaths.
Balance has been one of the toughest parts for David since the traumatic brain injury. His depth perception in his left eye is still affected, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain balance at times. It’s why he wears that soft helmet whenever he does anything that requires movement.
He climbs stairs, but only to show off. Sutlive has shifted focus away from that because of the progress David has made. Now
they spend time on the treadmill. David has to hold the railings, but he gradually begins to pick up the pace.
Sutlive asks him: “What’s the fastest you can go?”
“Let’s show them,” David enthusiastically responds.
He reaches 3.1 mph on a slight grade; a brisk jog. Five weeks earlier, he couldn’t walk on his own.
Tough kid, that.
If you watched the Georgia game this weekend you might have noticed when the announcers mentioned this story. It is a pretty nice, quick little news package:
And, finally, here’s a little feature on Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field … Recapturing a Game and Days Gone By. The story is told through the eyes of the author’s 77-year-old mother-in-law and is understandably precious.
The good old days. Today was different than all of that. All of my days are though, that was eight years ago, after all. Instead of interviewing David Brewer, I was discussing tips of interviewing with students in a classroom.
I always find myself bringing up the time I was asked to interview the congressman who’s best hunting dog had just died, or the times I annoyed governors, or that a newly elected (and still sitting) senator tried to insult me. Grieving interviews, funny interviews, boring interviews, the ones where you know the person is lying to you, and all of the different ways to get answers from your sources. Good stuff, good times.
I wonder what it was like to interview George Wallace. (He died in 1998, but I met his son once, in passing.) Maybe I should stop back by that bas-relief.
