I managed to sneak out for a late day ride today. I probably won’t get another one for a few days, so it didn’t seem important to go far or ride hard. So I stopped and took two pictures, which I should do more. It isn’t like I’m setting any great records or chasing anyone anyway.
Above is a stretch of road on the local time trial circuit. I tried the race against the clock one time. I am no good at it. So I just ride it as part of most every other route. Today I did it on the bike half of my ride, a measly little 15 mile circuit. But I got all the good curves and some of the better hills in, at least.
This one is a bit closer to home:
You ride on down the road, turn into a subdivision and then out the other side. You go over a little roller and turn again there’s a little hilltop finish that I always imagine is a big race finish. Except I never really beat my best time. Tonight I was pedaling and it was apparent there was nothing in my legs and yet there I was, straining and trying and wheezing and there was a car waiting patiently behind me.
Which is fine, because he passed me, a few more turns were taken and I managed to pass several cars. Sometimes, now, I can do that. It usually involves a downhill tailwind and a distracted driver who is out for a Sunday stroll to admire the scenery. But still. I did it on a Thursday night, and that’s something.
Called my grandmother this evening, to check in after a recent doctor’s visit. She told me all about the football she watched this past weekend.
Also, she’s now planning a trip to Canada in the spring. It seems my mom and step-dad mentioned this scenic place they’d discovered. “I figure I deserved it by now,” she said. Now both my folks’ mothers are going on this trip.
A growing percentage of middle-class Americans say they have saved so little for retirement that they expect to work into their 80s or even until they either get too sick or die, according to a recent survey.
Nearly half of middle-class workers said they are not confident that they will be able to save enough to retire comfortably, according to a Wells Fargo survey of 1,000 workers between the ages of 25 and 75, with household incomes between $25,000 and $100,000.
As a result, 34% said they plan to work until they’re at least 80 — that’s up from 25% in 2011 and 30% last year. An even larger percentage, 37%, said they’ll never retire and plan to either work until they get too sick or die, the survey found
It seems like every survey similar to this finds some slightly different numbers — perhaps someone should do a meta-analysis — but there are some common themes emerging. The role of news on Facebook:
(A)bout half of adult Facebook users, 47%, “ever” get news there. That amounts to 30% of the population.
Most U.S. adults do not go to Facebook seeking news out, the nationally representative online survey of 5,173 adults finds. Instead, the vast majority of Facebook news consumers, 78%, get news when they are on Facebook for other reasons. And just 4% say it is the most important way they get news. As one respondent summed it up, “I believe Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it.”
However, the survey provides evidence that Facebook exposes some people to news who otherwise might not get it.
Here is some navel gazing about web design. Ignore the headline. WYSIWTFFTWOMG!:
Since we’ve been using computers to make websites we’ve tried to make them like print. Of course, early on, that was fair enough. It was familiar. We knew the rules and tried to make the web like it. Even now, with the realisation that the web has changed – or rather, we’re being honest to the way the web is. It never really changed, we just tried to make it something it wasn’t – we’re still enforcing a print-like mental model on it. Not necessarily us designers and developers, though. This is coming from people who write and manage content. Just like printing out an email before they send it, they will want to preview a website to see how it looks.
The problem is this: The question content people ask when finishing adding content to a CMS is ‘how does this look?’. And this is not a question a CMS can answer any more – even with a preview. How we use the web today has meant that the answer to that questions is, ‘in what?’.
Here is the only thing in America getting smaller. The Incredible Shrinking Plane SeatPeople have an idea in their head, given the cost and security and the herding indignities and now the shrinking seats, of how far they are willing to drive before they’ll resort to flying. You have to think those numbers are going to slide a bit more when people enjoy these … intimate … tiny experiences.
Well, tomorrow is Friday, and I hope yours is as big as possible. Do stop back by when you can. And, of course, there’s always Twitter.
I managed to get on the bike just in time for a quick 20-mile evening ride. When I got home there was about 15 minutes of daylight left, so that was well-timed.
I rode my bike to the bank. (I’m doing errands! On a bicycle! So ecologically sound!) I did the local time trial route and then climbed up one side of the town’s biggest hill. (Big is relative. It is actually fairly small.) At the top of that hill I changed my plan and turned left instead of right. And, before long, I saw this:
What is that? And where is that? You can almost make it out in the pond’s reflection. The building behind the art is the local art museum. It is now 10 years old. It is a fine museum. It has this weird, rusted, house.
And the house seems to have thrusters attached. Which explains the satellite dish on the side.
But not the spare tire or the cinder block on the front porch of the rusted house space ship.
Or the chicken wire and large (for scale) water valve:
The medium is, in part, called Found Objects. Which means the artist, professor Robbie Barber had this stuff in his or his neighbors’ yard or an abandoned lot, repurposed it, or recycled, or re-used it to earn an honorable mention in this juried art contest. And we’ll get to see it for a year.
Influenced by science fiction, toy design, both folk and outsider art, and found objects in general, Barber fuses these influences to create hybrid objects of fantasy, the results of which are often humorous, ironic or visually poetic in nature. Dreams of Flying depicts a shotgun shack that is transformed into a spacecraft of dubious reliability. While reminding us of the inherent dangers of space travel, this sculpture also depicts the ultimate escapist dream of flying.
What did you get out of it? I perceived the inherent dangers of going into space in a poorly conceived home. (This was Prince Lonestar’s other spaceship, I guess.) I liked the curved display stand best of all.
I was going to say something broad and silly like “every type of modern art has failed, except architecture,” but that sounds simplistic. Except it’s true. Atonal music? No one cares. Abstract painting? It had its vogue, reduced everything down to a canvas consisting of one color (Red #3 – a title of a Great Work, or an FDA additive designation?) Modern literature flirted with styles that required no particular aptitude – automatic writing, cutting up bits of newsprint and rearranging them – but words require structure, or it’s phoneme salad. Modern sculpture masked its irrelevance by substituting size for detail, so you’d be overwhelmed into thinking this enormous hunk of metal that looked like the Hulk broke out of a boxcar had significance, but eventually it turned into “installations” and “assemblages” that relied on the artist’s ability to recombine instead of create.
And you nod in understanding, even if you don’t agree. But most of us do. And the rest of us are just too good to acknowledge it, maybe, or smarter than others. You may not know what art is, but you know that an assemblage of pipes, siding and shingles and rust. You know that stuff when you see it. And now you know it can remind you of the perils of interstellar travel
Other works are on display outside the museum. I’m going to show them off on Sunday.
We ran into the owner of our local bike shop out and about tonight. It was every bit one of those situations where your mind recognizes some facial aspect in an encoded memory file. But the file is locked away because you are actually in the next town over. It is night. He’s in a nice shirt. This is a Chinese restaurant (I wanted soup) and he belongs in a polo behind a counter tapping keys and turning wrenches and talking about races.
Context means so much, but you’re relieved because you can see the neurons in his head scrambling to make the exact same connections.
We’re all constructs to one another, in some ways. We were at a dinner party last week and talking about this very thing. When was the first time you saw a school teacher of yours in some place that didn’t have “School” at the end of the name? Mine was at a movie theater. Changed my relationship with that lady forever. She was suddenly more than the person with a classroom at the end of the hall. Now she had interests, great passionate pursuits and a crystalline sense of humor.
I was young. It took a lot to overcome that teachers-exist-only-at-school construct, but only a little to prove the point.
Then earlier today we saw one of the other guests at that dinner party walking down the street. “She looks familiar … Oh that’s … ”
I wonder if she knows Danny, who runs the bike shop.
I wonder if either of them have seen the art at the museum. Probably the woman has. She was an art professor.
Three tremendous paragraphs, in Life Magazine, written about one of the most contemporaneously important photographs published in the middle of the 20th century. Still important, too.
Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?
Those are not the reasons.
The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .
This is from some recent ride. Certainly not the one I had this evening. I know where the side roads on tonight’s ride go. I did not know where this road went.
I’m going to post that photo again as a test of a new tool I’ve just discovered, an immersive, interactive photo sharing tool called ThingLink.
There’s something of an unwritten rule (and we have many rules) about the unknown road. You don’t look on a map. You don’t ask a fellow rider. If you want to know where that road goes, you travel that road. And before you do that you stand at the head of it, take a photo and then run it through a filter. Then you ride down the road.
It was a dead end.
If you please, put your mouse over that photo. See those little circles? They are all interactive. Most are just notes. There’s one link and one video. And so it is apparent to me right away, this is a useful tool.
Anyway, I rode 20 miles today, I discovered a new tool there and did some other things, all less interesting than those.
I’ve been wondering lately, if you were building from the ground up, what would your marketing/newsroom/studio/entity’s goal be? Or, what era are you building to? Online TV/video market to be worth $35BN by 2018
I had a terrific conversation this weekend, one of those where the other person really crystalizes your thinking in a spare sentence or two. That conversation, with an Army major of strong personal convictions, had to do with standing up for the smaller, weaker, more vulnerable person, and it applies to this terrible story, a sad tale where that did not happen. Felony Counts for 2 in Suicide of Bullied 12-Year-Old:
Brimming with outrage and incredulity, the sheriff said in a news conference on Tuesday that he was stunned by the older girl’s Saturday Facebook posting. But he reserved his harshest words for the girl’s parents for failing to monitor her behavior, after she had been questioned by the police, and for allowing her to keep her cellphone.
“I’m aggravated that the parents are not doing what parents should do: after she is questioned and involved in this, why does she even have a device?” Sheriff Judd said. “Parents, who instead of taking that device and smashing it into a thousand pieces in front of that child, say her account was hacked.”
[…]
“Watch what your children do online,” Sheriff Judd said. “Pay attention. Quit being their best friend and be their best parent. That’s important.”
We had deer burgers on the grill tonight. First time I’ve had deer that way. Adam came and prepared the patties, an animal he’d taken himself. The Yankee made fries and sauteed onions. I started the fire, easily the weakest part of the meal. But the burgers were incredible.
We watched Game of Thrones. He is now through the end of the second season. Don’t spoil it for him.
This morning we heard historian David McCullough speak. He filled up a little under one-half of the Arena, which demonstrated that there’s not a good mid-sized venue on campus:
I’ve read McCullough since I was in college, Truman was his first work I bought. He read letters from Mary Jane Truman, complaining to her brother, the president, about how much of an imposition all of this president business had become, his point being “History is about life, not about boring textbooks. It shouldn’t be taught with boring textbooks. It is about humans.”
McCullough also discussed John Adams, the subject of his other Pulitzer winning book. Adams was brilliant, even though most of what you learn about him in school — if even this — were the alien and sedition acts. An unfortunate series of legislation, for certain, but not all the man was by a long stretch. Perhaps you’ve heard about him on HBO. But that wasn’t the extent of the second president, either. McCullough mentioned reading the works of his subjects, and discovering that in his diary Adams would often write one line, “At home thinking.”
“Oh to know what was going on in that wonderful mind,” which gave his audience a little insight into the romantic notion of knowing the people he’s writing about better than he knows anyone else.
History is the best trainer, he said, no matter your field. It was a tough speech, in a way, because there were plenty of older folks in the audience, a few college students and a large group of high schoolers. The landscape was far and wide, then, but he had some universal lessons. I liked this one, which he directed at the large group of high school students who were there, “What a delight to be caught up in the love of learning.”
I use a similar line from time to time. Learning the joy of learning is the true education.
“History is an anecdote to the hubris of the present. It is an aid to navigation in difficult times.”
And then he got chipper. He’d already talked about how we are soft compared to our ancestors, comparing our troubles with previous generations. Think of any medical example and you’ll be on the same page. Everyone with any age on them in the crowd knew what he was getting at. (Meaning people who’ve never used the #FirstWorldProblems configuration before.)
“A lot of people feel our country is in decline. I don’t think so. Our history shows when we have problems we solve them … I am an optimist. I feel the best is yet to come. And on we go,” he said, wrapping up a nice little 40 minute talk.
Got in a quick 20 mile ride in the evening, suffering the entire way. It has been too long since I’ve been in the saddle and it felt like it, especially in my knee. What does it mean when there’s a numbed, hollow feeling where you’d expect a ligament to be?
But it was a nice ride, out through the neighborhood, past the state park and down the waterfall hill. That let’s you cost for almost a mile. But then you have to ride back up another side of that hill, which is about two miles of gentle climbing which is topped by church where there is frequently lots of praying: Please let this hill end. Another turn and then you fall down to the creek bed, over a new bridge and then back out again. A few more miles puts you back in the neighborhood and then you’re just racing daylight.
Tonight I made recruiting calls, which I am convinced are one of those things that make the world go ’round. Think of it. The world is a big place. It takes a lot of things to move the world around. Me calling students and singing praises about our beautiful campus and all of the potential in our program is one of them.
Twice tonight I called, got the voicemail, started leaving a message and then had that person return my call before I’d completed the voicemail. I do not understand this. I prefer to allow a moment to pass, discover what, if anything, the person on the other end of the call would like to share with me. After which, of course, I can turn to the mediated correspondence of choice and contribute my portion, as necessary. Otherwise I’m just making people repeat themselves.
Things to read which I found interesting today … Someone found an 18-foot-long creature in the sea and thought “I must physically haul this monster to the surface and shore, so that others might note its splendor.” So, naturally, you run the smallest version of the photo possible. The monster is big, the photo is tiny and that dog has no camera sense.
It all makes sense if you click the link. And squint.
This is a bit old, but … House members forced to reuse gym towels. I do not think they realize how these quotes play at home, or with the people that are currently out of work — and, thus, at home — because of the shutdown. Politics aside, there’s something to be said about thinking about the quotes you offer media. Skim some of the comments, by the way.
My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.
Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is gong to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.
[…]
I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.
I don’t know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.
Lot of that going around these days.
Me? Still haven’t been told, which is nice. (Is anyone running a Tumblr on these then and now prices? Someone should.)
Today we learned that yesterday’s problems with my bike were all about the index shifting, and almost entirely human error. That last part is not surprising, but it allowed me to receive a free education today, and probably, when I left the bike shop, they talked for an hour about how they could sucker me into any deal at this point.
So I got to ride around a bit on one of what will surely be the last really warm days of the year. Tomorrow will be splendid, and rain will come in over the weekend, even if Karen is breaking up in the gulf. That’s fine. No big storms necessary, just the rain. And behind that some drier, cooler air. Soon after will be the time the maple leaves will abandon ship, pushing aside the women and the children to fall from their sturdy branches, only to look up and realize they could have stayed around three or four more weeks.
I’m of mixed emotions about the whole thing this year.
But it was sunny and warm and I saw one other person on a bike late this afternoon. That was a kid on the side of the road, straddling his 26er with his right foot propped up on the curb and looking back behind him. I asked if he was OK, he nodded, and I dodged more traffic at the light. From the bike store I decided to find out where this side road, Longleaf, goes — because neither asking nor consulting a map will do. And about halfway down the road I remembered where I’d once before noticed this street name: on some other hilly road I’d rather not think about. Curiously I recalled that just as I got to the one big hill on Longleaf.
Then back into civilization, carefully denoted by the Shell station in the middle of nowhere, then a trailer park and then a few odd and end service businesses. Back up to campus, past the vet school where people walk across the four lane road without a care in the world these days, and then beyond the frat houses and through the athletics side of the campus.
Now I’m in a weird part of the day where to be in the shade is to be in a spot too dark for sunglasses, but it is still fairly bright when there are no trees, so I had a lot of one-hand eye practice today. There was a small, slow climb, I discovered another road on which it isn’t the last roller, but the next-to-last one that really hurts. Finally, back down toward home, through the growing intersection, into the neighborhood and so on. It was an easy and quick 20 miles, except for that one hill.
The Yankee said she saw me. She was going to the grocery store from somewhere just as I passed through that area. Said I looked good. Didn’t want to honk at me. Everyone else does. Usually it is the “You’re going too slow!” variety.
Otherwise there was school work, reading papers, grading things, dreaming up class possibilities, following the news, and so on.
Speaking of which …
Things to read, which I found interesting today …
A year after daily publication ceased in Alabama and New Orleans, media market is ‘fractured’ is about Advance’s moves in New Orleans, Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile and Pascagoula, Miss. New Orleans has seen a Baton Rouge paper move in to give some competition and a daily publication outlet, so that dynamic market is interesting in different ways. Along the I-65 corridor …
The past year has been “a black hole for news in this city,” says Doug Jones, a Birmingham attorney who rose to national prominence for reopening and successfully prosecuting the infamous 1963 16th Street Church bombing case while serving as U.S. Attorney for the Northern Alabama district.
Jones said he and his wife are contemplating dropping their Birmingham News subscription in favor of the still-daily Tuscaloosa News, based some 60 miles south, which is testing the competitive waters by offering subscriptions in some Birmingham neighborhoods.
[…]
Combined average Sunday circulation at Advance’s three Alabama newspapers declined about 8 percent during the same period, with then-nascent digital edition circulation having little effect there.
[…]
“What I’ve seen, at least in this first year, is because of the reduction in resources committed to local reporting, we’ve experienced a dramatic decrease in quality news available to the community,” said Jim Aucoin, professor and chair of the Communications Department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. “Investigative and enterprise coverage just isn’t there anymore.”
Birmingham lawyer Jones specifically criticized al.com and what he characterized as its generally superficial coverage. “You go online and there are all these teasers, but when you click on them, there are just two or three paragraphs,” he said. “And there’s no decent national coverage. Hell, we can’t even get good coverage of University of Alabama football anymore.”
I’ve never known Doug Jones to lie to me, but that as an absolute twist, stretch and tearing of the truth. As they say, ‘Bama gonna Bama.’
If they don’t say that, they should. Anyway, one more blurb:
Readers in highly technologically savvy Huntsville may be less troubled. “I think al.com has responded reasonably well to the increased [digital] demand by providing convenient and free online access to the state’s major newspapers,” said Eletra Gilchrist-Petty, associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “Overall, there do appear to be more strengths than limitations associated with al.com.”
Disclosure: I used to work for Advance. It is a private company, so the financial figures quoted in the Poynter piece are more of a learned guess from industry analysts. I can say this, which is relevant to my time there which ended with my return to academia several years ago, Advance’s al.com property is an impressive financial performer — largely on behalf of all of that Alabama football coverage. They know their audience, even when they should know better. So the point about looking at last year’s move by Advance as “not something that was done for an immediate payoff” is a good one.
I have faith in their numbers and in their revenue stream. I’m concerned, as others noted in the excerpts above, the link in the previous paragraph and some other material that has previously landed in this space about some of the content quality. I hope, and suspect, that will get worked it in the near future.
In our state Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, the three cities most directly effected by the shift last year, are the three biggest metros, boasting about half the state’s population. Clearly, there are a lot of people impacted by the daily miracle. (More than just the ones who read it, I’d argue.) Birmingham, if I recall correctly, is now the nation’s largest city without a daily newspaper. I’m not at all concerned about the medium. I’d rather we focused on the journalism. The more investigations and deep reporting, the better. The more people asking pointed questions of politicians, the better. The less time spent analyzing the quarterback and his girlfriend, the better. That’s not so much about the viability of the company as the company’s role in many communities.
The Alabama is one of the great success stories of Birmingham. It is a beautiful and historic facility that went from near demolition to once again becoming an event destination. You can’t see enough movies or concerts there. The last one I watched was The Godfather, which was the first time a digital print was ever played in that now almost 90-year-old theater. Also, the famous marquee was once a background of my blog:
And if that isn’t something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.
He was charged with aggravated assault, resisting arrest, terroristic threats and disorderly conduct because someone got alarmed, called the police and then, according to police, got a little belligerent. (His lawyer says the cops have it wrong and went to the First Amendment in his public airing of grievances.) He was also suspended from campus. He’s due in court later this month. It should be an interesting one to watch.
And now, YouTube Cover Theater the sometimes occasional Friday feature which allows people using their cameras, computers and their musical instruments as a demonstration of how much talent is hiding out there in the world. We do this by picking one original artist and finding a small handful of people covering the (usually) popular tunes.
This week’s featured performers are Hall and Oates. I selected them because I saw this video, one of the van sessions, from Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers. What’s a van session? You’ll see. Press play:
Also, there is a kazoo. A kazoo, people.
They sound so nice, don’t you agree? That band is touring, which stretches the purposes of YouTube Cover Theater, but there’s something intriguingly hypnotic about watching a full band play in a moving van.
Here are the Miller Brothers, who could be playing in a Ramada Inn Airport near you with that sound:
Take two young guys, a Korg and some bad hairpieces and … well, these guys just need more views. Help ’em out:
Apparently they recorded that for Hall-Oates-Ween last year. Fitting.
You know that frame YouTube displays before you play the video? The one on this video doesn’t do the performance justice:
Hall and Oates are still out there rocking in America, this performance was from this spring:
And now you can feel old: She’s Gone was on an album released 40 years ago next month.
