I have been playing with code. This will be a fun format for the occasional piece.
Here are the fruits of both my bike ride, figuring this out while I was struggling up a hill and taking pictures. I could talk about it, but it is all in the new Big Stories section.
I won’t use that often, but it does have some nice flexibility and really lends itself to long form essays. I like it. Seems to work well on the phone, too. What do you think?
I could write about other things, but aside from doing some work, watering a plant, riding my bike, taking those pictures, editing them and building that and doing some more work … well, that’s been pretty much my day.
Plus there are several words on the Big Stories page. Check it out.
Alabama’s second baseman, Kyle Overstreet who is really quite good, committed an error in the sixth inning tonight. Naturally the helpful fans at Plainsman Park pointed this out.
By then Auburn had the game under control. They found their first lead in conference play, which came in their 66th inning of conference play. The Tigers’ bats came alive again in the fifth, putting four more runs on the board and Auburn finally won one, 6-3.
Check out the highlights, particularly the gem in the ninth inning at the three minute mark:
So, now, Auburn is 10-43 against the SEC in the major sports – football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball – since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. It has been the worst year ever since Title IX in terms of a cumulative conference record.
But a beautiful day otherwise. Got out for a quick ride on the bike and was about seven miles from home on a quite road that has been closed because the bridge two miles down was out for construction. I heard a nice ting!-ting!-ting! doppler off to the left and behind me.
It seemed important to stop, to see what had just fallen off my bicycle. And I was happy to realize that the brakes were still working and the wheels weren’t falling off.
Finally I realized it was the metal clamp that holds my bag to the seat post and saddle rails. So we spent a while looking for the parts. I’d hit a bump and something felt loose, so up and down the shoulders, stomping on plumes of grass and bending over to peer at ever dark piece of material near the roadway.
After about an hour I found the metallic piece, realized that was the only part I was missing, so that’s a win. I only have to replace two screws. And get home in time for the baseball game, managing only an impressive 10 miles for my troubles.
But I had a turkey burger for dinner, we closed down a restaurant with our friends Adam and Jessica and that somehow makes it all better.
It was a good afternoon as we head into a great weekend. Hope yours is even better!
We have half the grapes that we started the day with. And one less navel orange. Also, the leftover spaghetti from last night disappeared. And then I was full for about an hour. But white grapes only last so long and I had to talk myself out of an extra lunch. Miles on the bike speed up the metabolism, or so I tell myself, and I want to eat everything.
Strange since my energy was all over the place yesterday. I chased The Yankee around town, counting my second, third and fourth wind. These things should be more predictable, but yesterday I was left amazed at how I couldn’t find my legs to get over this hill, but soft-pedaled over the next one, with my legs feeling bored with it all. The body is an amazing thing, and a body on a bicycle is a curious miracle, all balance and whirring and swaying and moving forward. I’m not a good cyclist. Usually I do well just to stay upright. Balance and whirring and all that. At my best moments I’m either trying to make nice little circles with my feet or, if I’ve given up on that, I just try to make it all look casual. That’s also impossible.
But, 30 more miles yesterday, and I really need to start putting more miles back in. We got home just as the wind picked up. She’d forecast the afternoon perfectly. Meteorologists call her for input, or they should.
And now back to work today, the cold week of spring break is over, replaced by a cold regular week.
In class today we talked about films, which means a lot of clips of special effects. One of the students found a five minute EXPLOSIONGANZA of CGI that just melted everyone’s brains. Oh, for a few scenes of expository. Or even a Stallone quote.
When they talk about film they also talk about awards, which everyone loves except me, apparently. I’m fine with it. I did enjoy the Oscars poster someone showed off. It had the statue in the foreground surrounded by floating lines from memorable award winners. I saw this famous line and thought about adding in some running commentary — we’d recently talked about civil rights, the 50th anniversary of various events in Birmingham and across the south, how critical a time that was and how there is such a great museum just over the mountain — so bringing up In the Heat of the Night would have been perfect.
I decided against it. I’m not sure kids born in the 1990s would understand 1960s Mississippi and why all of this was so important. Even the television show was off the air by the time my oldest student was born. Sidney Poitier, though, he just gives you more every time you watch that quiet moment.
Everyone always remembers this, perhaps a cinematic first:
They filmed most of In the Heat of the Night in Illinois because of conditions in Mississippi. The country’s come a long way in those two generations.
I call that Tumblr page “Extra stuff in an extra place.” That is, perhaps, the most apt thing I’ve ever written.
And, finally, I’ve watched this twice now. It will be the best five minutes of your day on the web.
If you’ve never read the Wikipedia entry on Ode to Joy, you should.
Back to work for me, have a lovely evening you. See you tomorrow, when there will be more on Tumblr, more here, always more on Twitter, another Glomerata and who knows what else we can find.
I saw a fire as I rounded for home. I believe someone was doing a prescribed burn to clear out the underbrush, but there was no one around.
I sit there for a moment or two, looking or waiting for someone to come back to the fire, but no one is around. The occasional car or truck cruises through, slowing down in the smoke and haze, and I’m taking pictures. So, great, someone probably think I started this. I did not.
The sun was just to that point of getting to ready to let go and the world was quiet, except for a little whirling wind over distant crackling. It was as if a great thing had been done, but the environment didn’t know what to do with it. There was a stunned feeling. There was an anticipation.
Love the woods, but not a fan of this fire. Just down this little country road there was a house and in the driveway of that house there was a man who made a big point of waving at me as I went by. In his yard was another small fire. I assume he was taking care of the serious business of the controlled burn. He wave awfully emphatically.
Most importantly, no one stopped me to ask if I did it. i did not.
Atlanta by nightfall, we picked up the in-laws for the weekend. There was a former basketball player waiting at the airport and giggling teens and people who were happy to take their picture with him. There was a family looking for their Marine and a limo driver flagging down clients with names on his iPad. Everyone was walking to the left of everything. It was amazing and awkward at the same time.
Sort of like Segways, which are now appearing at the airport. Because navigating the crowds isn’t challenging enough on most days. Who needs a Segway here? There are already shuttles and a train. There are wheelchairs and carts. I suppose if you’re working there and going back and forth you could use something that moves at slightly faster than walking speed that’d be the way to go.
I drove in that, trotted across a parking lot in that and then watched it from indoors fall on the quad at Samford. It is a rainy day. That’s about an inch of rain, apparently. I question our precipitation measuring methods. This was a lot of rain.
Hard to conceive that yesterday looked like this:
That was about 20 miles into my ride yesterday evening, about halfway back down the home road. It gives the impression in this stretch of riding on a ridge line. I’m not sure why, there’s no real drop off and houses dot the right side. But the pastures on the left tend to slope down a tiny bit, so you feel like you’re riding high and on top of everything. Only the hill you just crested isn’t that much of a hill, really, but everything is relative and when you are surrounded by rollers you can be King of the Molehill.
In a few more weeks, and a little to the right of that shot, there will be the most amazing wildflowers. A few days after that, and back down the hill to the left, there will be a yard filled with eight-foot-tall flowering bushes. This is a fragrant area.
Anyway. Being a rainy Monday, I made today Copeland Cookie Day in my class.
Dr. Gary Copeland was one of our grad school professors. He died last January, just after his retirement which was doubly sad in that he was so very much looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren.
He was the kind of man that people just don’t stop missing, I think. I had the honor of being invited to a Facebook page in his memory that remains active even today.
And so I wrote there that it was Copeland Cookie Day in class. In honor of the great man and his epistemology and ontology class I pick a day each semester, put a picture of his on the board, tell them about this colorful character, feed the students cookies and, most importantly, talk about things that aren’t on the syllabus.
It is one of everyone’s favorite classes. Mostly because of the cookies.
Dr. Copeland was the instructor of my first class at Alabama and was on my comps committee. He was one of the good ones, and I like telling students about him, and his Copeland fests and taking students out to eat and his general kind and giving nature.
When I wrote about it this afternoon on Facebook 16 people liked it, most of them his former students. At least one professor said he was going to make his own Copeland Cookie Day and word is getting around our department that I do this. He would laugh at the silliness of it. But he was a giver and would have enjoyed it, too, I think.
So we talked in class about trips we’d taken so far and how some people who have similar majors from elsewhere are waiting tables or how someone read a survey about how it was a tough career. And those things are important to hear, but for freshmen and sophomores there are a lot of positives too. At the end of the day its not unlike most other things: work hard at it and good things can come to you. Dodge raindrops where you can, look fondly back on sunny days and forward to even nicer ones.
It is that time of year, where the weather always seems on on the cusp of ever nicer days, and we’re all looking forward. The oncoming Spring Break isn’t a bad excuse, either. Not that anyone is counting the days, the number of which is four.
