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‘Four years (prostrate) to the higher mind’ is doubly ironic

This is quick, because I am doing class prep. We’re reading two stories in Criticism tomorrow. In Org Comm we’ll be talking about the very important and incredibly interesting definitions of communication. It’ll probably be the slowest week in that class for the semester. You need baselines for everyone, though, because there are students from multiple majors and it’s important to make this approachable. Next week will be more fun, this week is definitions.

That’s what I’ll tell them tomorrow.

And there’s also my online class, which is new. Three new classes to wrangle, every week, between now and December. It seems like a lot to me, but I’m gamely going to try.

And that’s why this is quick.

For some reason, even on a mild day, the irrigation systems out in the fields look refreshing. This was part of an easy 20 mile ride on Saturday afternoon. It was one of those days where I set out to go this way, got halfway there, and then went that way instead. It was a good day for that.

Sure, it was right out of the neighborhood and then a mile and a quarter down to the stop sign. There, instead of going straight, I turned left. We go this way sometimes, but I don’t do it often when I’m on my own. It’s an up and down thing, and then you cross a busy intersection — if you can catch the light — and go by the warehouses that they’ll never finish building or fill with inventory. Down to the river, and back up through some farm land and you can keep going down that road, where you’ll eventually run into a town, and the big river, and have to change directions, or you can turn early. This is what I did today. There are two or three roads that you can turn onto that will lead you back to another road that can point you home. But we rarely cut those short, and so it’s a guess: Is this a road that crosses over to the highway, or is this a road that dead ends in a corn field?

And so I’m going down this side road, hoping it is an in-between road, trying to remember if I remember it or not. The features don’t really help. It feels right, but not distinctively so.

Then, the road bends to the left, and forks to the right. This is where a white Cadillac decided to pass me in a slow and unsafe way. (Thanks for that, young person driving your grandparent’s Caddy … ) She went left. I went right, and I was rewarded with distinctive features. I was on the road I wanted, a double tree-lined affair that was quite and pleasant and demanded you sit up and go slow — which wasn’t a problem for me.

Eventually, I ran into this sign.

If you turn right, you’d go this way, and wind up down at the river, or someplace.

If you turn left, you wind your way to another tributary, but the highway which will take me back toward home.

I stood there and felt the sun and listened to the wind for a few pleasant, long minutes. It was the perfect time of day in a lovely little place and I had it all to myself, all of it. And maybe that’s the reason we should ride bikes.

OK, here’s the last clip from last week’s show. Four, from me, is a pretty decent amount of restraint. Anyway, because they’ve been at it for four decades now, the Indigo Girls obviously have to play the hits. And they’ve long established their most mainstream number as a regular big finish. It got a lot of people in the door, and those people won’t let you leave without it.

(I wonder how long a show would be if they played all of everyone’s favorites. We already wound up taking a late train out of town, and they didn’t play all of my favorites this time. They can’t play them all. They should play them all.)

Anyway, the regulars are counting songs and they know it’s about to come and OK, everybody sing along. And also here’s three-time Grammy Award winner, and holder of Four CMA awards, Jennifer Nettles, to help us out too.

I hope we get to see them again next year.

adventures / cycling / Friday / Indigo Girls / music / photo / video — Comments Off
12
Sep 25

Fire from the years

I wrote this out in outline form, went away and did some other stuff, and then came back to it. The first two notes were

Meetings.

Chairs.

I had meetings all morning. One of the meetings, no kidding, was about another meeting in a few weeks. At the end of meeting we discussed future dates for other meetings. It was run efficiently, and with good cheer. I took the notes. We ended right on time, having completed the full agenda which was, again, mostly about another meeting.

That other meeting will be a brief appearance. A few people from this meeting will attend that meeting and discuss what we do at these meetings.

There will be slides.

The next point on my list was “Chairs.” I have no idea what I meant to say there.

On today’s bike ride I tried out some new sunglasses. I needed to update my drip.

The frame better matches my helmet and the lenses are blue, though it doesn’t seem obvious there. The lenses are also bigger than any glasses I’ve worn before, but that’s the style, and aren’t we slaves to style?

The problem is right at the top, just above the bridge of the nose. It rubs right into the interior part of the helmet. It seems like there should be some space or flexible bend there or something, but alas.

The little Giro logo rubbed off the front of my helmet, I think from one day when I was working on a flat tire and leaning on the saddle. I’ll scrape it off eventually, but for now, it amuses me. It looks like bad video game faux text.

This was the sunset at the end of the ride.

We timed that up pretty well, but only because we were going fast. I had a few massive splits — well within the “fast” category. I can only do that for four or five miles at a time, though, and humility comes to me quickly, usually in the form of a headwind. Sometimes a small hill.

Here’s another shot from Radio City Music Hall’s iconic neon. We had a nice visit there on Wednesday to see Melissa Etheridge and the Indigo Girls. It was my third time seeing Etheridge and … I dunno … the 10th or 12th time I’ve seen Amy and Emily, but it was my first concert at Radio City.

And so here’s “Kid Fears,” with Etheridge singing Michael Stipe’s part. That song is now 36 years young, but all of the people that have come through to sing along keep it fresh. Listening to the crowd enjoy it is still a great deal of fun.

I think I’ll put one more clip up on Monday. They had another special guest at the end of the show, and it’s worth pointing out.

But that’s for Monday, and now it’s time for the weekend, which I will spend doing some work for next week’s classes. The life of glamor that I can tell you about …

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
5
Sep 25

Saw an aerodrome, was transported

After a day of reading and prepping and typing away at my keyboard, I went for a little early evening bike ride. The wind was up, my legs were down and it was slow, but that’s OK. We got vaccinated last night and so I blame the quality of the ride on the conspiracy theories floating through my system.

There was a new-to-me road I wanted to see so I pedaled my happy little self toward the winery, but turned right before I got there, marveling at how I was easily doing 18 and 19 miles an hour up this hill on Wednesday, but doing considerably less than that today. I turned right and then left, and went down this road.

This looks flat when you’re on it and in this photograph.

But it is actually a little downhill. It bends off to the right at the tree line and then toward a creek bed. But the wind comes from that direction, usually, and it is actually a difficult down hill some days. Some days I have to shift to an easier gear to get down the hill. Some days coming from the other direction, up the hill, is easier than going down the thing.

In fact, today going down it felt unusually strong and I was doing about 17, but with minimal effort. And with no legs and post Covid vaccine (which we got last night) I felt a bit sapped and didn’t want to put any effort in. Later, as I reversed this route exactly, I came up the hill almost twice as fast.

That road alters reality, is what I’m saying.

I enjoyed some nice time under the trees elsewhere along the route.

And then I finally worked my way over to the new-to-me road. There used to be a little airport here. It was originally named after the town, but then it got a new name in 2021, when a private company bought it and dubbed it the Spitfire Aerodrome.

That’s just a great word. A great combination of words. It’s evocative of times far enough away that we mistakenly romanticize them. No one says the aerodrome without thinking of dirigibles or dashing pilots with silk scarves and leather jackets or barrage balloons or search lights piercing the sky and … they closed the joint in 2023, to make way for yet more warehouses no one needs.

I rode there it just to see what was at the end of that road. How often can I see an aerodrome? What’s there is a fence, through which you can still see two or three buildings, which look to be in still-good shape. The runway seems to be intact, as far as small municipal runways go. This is the view on the way back out.

I got back just in time to clean up for dinner, and fill the evening with tales about how the new microchips ow floating in my system have made me even slower.

cycling / football / links / photo / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
4
Sep 25

From here to there, to space and back

Here’s a photo I shot in the backyard tonight. The bright one, low and just between the tree crowns, is Jupiter. The second largest thing in our solar system, itself larger than what our puny little brains can contemplate — and pretty small itself, in the larger scheme of things — is just hanging right there. It’s bright enough to be captured by a cell phone camera, even as a little smear of light.

You know that big red spot on Jupiter? That’s a storm. It’s been raging away, a single storm, for at least almost 200 years.
This is the view when Voyager approached in 1979.

That was just two years after Voyager 1 launched. And now, 46 years later, the probe is the thing we’ve cast farthest into the night. Voyager 1 began the summer 15.5 billion miles from home. Scientists predict it will be one light day from Earth in November of next year. If distance is success, it is more successful than anything that we’ll launch in our lifetimes.

Sometime, in the next 10 years, for any one of a variety of reasons, we’ll lose contact and control of Voyager 1 forever.

Which is a lot to think about, when you’re just standing out back. What is far away? And what is farther than that?

I wrote something on Tuesday and we published it on Tuesday and I haven’t mentioned it here at all. Shame on me. This was a quick look at what ChatGPT thought of the first weekend of college football.

It immediately tried to tell me that Ohio State and The Most Definitely Back Longhorns are archrivals. I don’t expect a distributor of ones and zeros to know this, but five games played across 20 years does not an arch rivalry make.

Incidentally, Google’s Gemini got that right. The preceding is a sentence seldom uttered or typed.

ChatGPT goes on, trying to summarize a key point from random games. I didn’t ask for specifics, so it is guessing that I’d care about Michigan’s big day rushing against New Mexico. Justice Haynes tallied 159 rushing yards and three scores against the Lobos, a team that was 126th in rushing defense last year. It presumes I also had a peculiar interest on Nebraska’s Dylan Raiola. It tells me he threw two TD passes against UTEP. But…the Cornhuskers played Cincinnati, not UTEP. (UTEP fell to Utah State.) Dylan Raiola is a QB at Lincoln, and he did throw two TDs, though. ChatGPT mentions Purdue’s 31-0 “statement win.” That was a 31-0 trouncing of Ball State. If that’s a statement in West Lafayette this year, the Boilermakers are in for another horribly long season.

The point I’d like to make here is that I randomly picked three of the bullets ChatGPT offered me. One is wrong on the face of it; another is lacking any of the nuance your football hating relative could have brought to the conversation. Also, I spent three minutes Googling all of that to check its work.

Go ahead and subscribe to that newsletter. I’ve got an idea for another piece for next week.

Today on campus I had my second classes. Criticism and org comm — most of the students came back and some new ones came in. In criticism, we did our first high altitude pass of what media criticism is about, and started to speculate on why it is important. In org comm, we announced our fantasy football teams. We’re going to play football as part of our larger classroom experience. In groups of three or four they’ll all run a franchise and apply the things we learn across the semester. Some of these people are very eager to do this, which is great.

I gave both classes my second off-topic lecture. I do this three times a term. The first day, Tuesday, I talked about my hope of helping students discover the joy of learning. I do that by talking about a former student who is doing some really incredible things out in the world, simply because she wanted to take on new things.

Today, we talked about being safe around cyclists. We have a vested interest in this, of course. I told them about Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, which was just a year ago last week. They know of it, being that they were local boys and Johnny was a big time hockey hero and Matthew was, to a different degree. But they don’t know the details. So I share a little of that, and then point out that in a few weeks my lovely bride and I will celebrate the third anniversary of her horrible accident after a tangle with a pickup truck. Three ribs, shoulder blade, destroyed collarbone, muscular damage and a concussion. It took her more than a year to get back to her normal quality of life.

I used to give this lecture, I told them, a bit differently. I used to tell students that I won’t say what color bike I ride, or what color my helmet is, because I want you to be safe around all the cyclists you might meet. And remember, I’d say to them, one of them might be me. And I have your grade in the palm of my hand.

I would do this with my very dry sense of humor, putting my right index finger in my left hand for syllabic emphasis. In the palm. Of my hand. At the end of one semester a young woman said to me that I got into her head with that, and it made her nervous every time she saw a cyclist. That wasn’t my goal, so now I explain the whole joke.

And now I’ll hope they give cyclists and others more room when they pass.

Next week I’ll start a class by saying “Who here drives a …” whatever car gets too close to be between now and then. I’ll drive this point home all term. I’m changing attitudes a few dozen people at a time. I wonder if they’d be willing to listen to me go on and on about Voyager 1.

cycling / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
3
Sep 25

Two strikethroughs

Visited a new dentist today. This was after making an appointment in the spring. And about four days of text messages asking, over and over and bloody over to confirm the appointment. After which the emails started. And, each of them asking you to pre-register.

The things a dentist’s office now asks new ~~patients~~ customers these days is positively invasive. More so than most of the tools on that rolling stainless steel cart, even.

This place is a big operation, and they’re operating in an old house, which is pretty customary around here. This one is a sprawling joint. It was difficult to find the exit when my perfunctory appointment was complete.

They took about 45 x-rays. How my brain still works, I don’t know. She said I had good teeth. Here’s the new gimmick. You go in for a checkup, but then you have to go back for cleanings. We’re not doing separate appointments for each every six months.

But otherwise, it was fine. I really, really, really don’t care for hands in my face. It’s not the dentist, or the dentistry. It’s the personal space. It’s the hands.

And also the realization that this is about selling you things as much as health care. Our previous dental expert always had something to offer you, and it was all vital and grim. But it was never the same thing twice. A few years in, you start to notice.

I had a nice late evening ride. It was just 21 miles, around the extended neighborhoods, if you will. All of it was familiar, but I tried to do things in different orders.

Here’s the sod farm, I ride by here in one direction or the other quite frequently.

And here’s some of the ubiquitous corn, and my shadow selfie.

This pasture is always empty, as far as I can tell.

Here are a few of my old friends.

And some of my newer friends.

Finally, my racing buddy. When I go down his road we often chase one another. A nice break, I guess, from his job herding the sheep.

Sometimes I win. Sometimes he wins. He must have somehow known I was coming today. He got a head start and I ~~couldn’t pass him~~ let him win.