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You still have to lick envelopes?

I sent letters today. Actual correspondence. With stamps and everything!

Now I’m exhausted.

I also had to prepare new copies of my transcripts for the dean at Samford. Once upon a time you walked into an office or made a phone call and started the process. These days, of course, it is all online. Also, this costs money. I have three colleges to send away to, so it costs a few bucks.

Interestingly the price varies. It seems my grades at one school are more valuable than the other two.

So, to review, you pay tuition to have the privilege to go to classes. You earn your grades. You pay to graduate. Years later, you must pay again, to retrieve the grades you earned.

Terrific scam.

One of my schools charged $11. Another $12. Another $15. The third-party firms will ship an electronic version of your grades, a PDF, which will self-destruct after three views. Printed “allowed.” Copying? Not allowed.

Linky things: Somebody had to do it, may as well be John Archibald, writing the “if only everything else were as important here as football” column:

And never, ever, accept mistakes you could correct.

Alabamians — Alabama and Auburn fans alike — accept no less from their football teams. It’s amazing what they accept off the field.

Alabama was fourth-worst in the nation last year in robberies, and fifth-worst in murders, according to CQ Press.

It ranked in the bottom five in overall health last year, according to the United Health Foundation. It was 49th in obesity, infant mortality and premature deaths.

The state was 47th in teaching math and science, according to the American Institute of Physics.

It was in the bottom 10 in traffic fatalities per vehicle mile, in poverty rates and energy consumption per person, according to the census.

Alabama is not No. 1. Unless you count our highest-in-the-country rate of diabetes.

If life in Alabama were football, somebody would be fired.

Alabama’s last daughter of the confederacy has died. Someone in the comments of the last daughter story says that her father was 81 when she was born. Apparently they have pictures, too. One presumes of sometime after her birth. She is survived by, among others, her brother, who is the last surviving son of the confederacy.

That’s a lot to wrap your mind around, but then the last Civil War widow died just eight years ago.

State of the Media: This is from Vocus, a media software firm:

152 papers ceased operations in 2011. Of the papers that closed, not one major daily went under—the first year since 2009 that a top-tier paper didn’t shut down.

[…]

(T)here were a total of 195 magazine launches in 2011 with the unveiling of new consumer titles taking a modest hit.

[…]

(O)nline streaming of television shows and newscasts continued to increase.

[…]

(T)raditional radio continued to prove it’s a survivor, despite evidence that the majority of people prefer to get their news elsewhere. In all four quarters, reports showed growth in radio listenership.

Vocus’ full, optimistic, report will be out later this month.

adventures / errands / friends / history / iPhone / memories / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
3
Jan 12

I did not use the tape

Lovely day. Even the Committee on Greatest Day Ever, which meets quadrennially in a secure location in the Pyrenees, will be required to consider it for an international honorable mention. It only gets the purple ribbon because it is an especially cold day. This is unnecessary, and will be waited-out until a pleasant April day comes along.

Late breakfast at the Barbecue House, where the place was empty and thus the hash browns were plentiful. Mr. Price, if you’re keeping track, is back to not remembering me. He asked if we needed a menu. No thanks, I’ll just have the usual.

Stopped by world headquarters of The War Eagle Reader. We visited with one of Jeremy’s daughters, talked about tomorrow’s stories today and met Torch, official co-cat:

Later I visited Lowe’s, because they’ve offended me less than Home Depot. (The next time I need a hardware part I’ll visit Home Depot, because I hit up Lowe’s this time.) I needed to address an issue in the kitchen sink. Not the sink itself, but an attachment, that retractable spray hose. Not the spray hose, though, but rather the little plastic circle bracket it rests in.

The old one cracked in two before the holidays. I removed all of the cleaning supplies that live under the sink, crawled inside, reached around and through the various pipes and traced the hose up to where it attaches to the plumbing. There was no easy way to get to it, everything was by feel and felt awkward in every way. This was not going to be an easy task.

So at Lowe’s I walked around with the Confused Looked of Resignation until someone in a vest stumbled across my path. I’d been in three sections by then, when he asked “Can I help you find something?” I was surrounded by sinks at the time, but this was the wrong place to find a sink accessory attachment, which was four aisles away.

The good news, the gentleman told me, was that this is attached at the hose, not under the sink. That’s much better. But you have to buy both the nozzle and the flange. Used to be, he said, that you could buy just the flange, but no more. I picked up the cheapest one, which almost matched the one in our kitchen thinking, That might explain somethings.

There are instructions inside. On the outside it says you’ll need an adjustable wrench, adjustable pliers, needle nose pliers and pipe thread tape. I have the tools, or can make do, but I needed the tape. Found it two aisles over, nearer the sinks, so things are well organized. The tape cost $1.06.

Got home, where we had company. Visited for a while, talking of football and jobs and weddings and things.

Later we visited Target, where we received a gift card for Christmas. We decided to pick up frames and continue the house decorating. We walked out with seven frames, two of them will hold a trip we took to San Francisco four years ago. We framed a lithograph from Rome and two pieces from Greece, from our honeymoon two years ago. Good prints take time, you know. You have to study these things, consider them for taste and durability, before you commit them to a frame.

And then, like later tonight, there’s the pulling out the paper examples, replacing the mattes, cleaning the glass and making it all fit together again. And then there’s the difficulty of finding the proper wall. Where will the sun accentuate the proper setting? Will the ceiling fan reflect off this frame?

These are difficult questions.

Anyway. Saw this at Target:

In one swift, 8×10 motion the designer managed to offend at least two different groups of people. Keeping calm having to do with the Blitz, rocking on antithetical to the stiff upper lip of the English establishment. But when rock has become over-produced pop, and with rocking on now meaning a third thing entirely, we’re really just dumbing down the argument. There is no need, the artist suggests, to understand the origin of these expressions, their historical antecedents and how these two things are actually tied together by pushing against one another. Just appreciate the juxtaposition and this wicked awesome line art of a Flying V. And so it will be that a 13-year-old will have a cute, possibly ironic mantra for the Twilight generation.

Later still I returned to the sink fixture. Turned off the water, made the source pipe leak. Emptied the entire two cabinets in a hurry, mopped up the water, fixed the leak and carried on. The instructions tell you to remove the old sprayer, but not how. (It unscrews. Not to worry, though: I have an advanced education.)

Popped off the little clamp, removed the washers. Dropped one washer down the sink, where it fell perfectly through the drain.

Pull the hose out of the sink, putting the flange in place, feeding the hose back through. Insert the new washers, apply the new clamp. Screw on the new nozzle, turn on the water, give everything a try.

It works!

And then I completed reorganized the things under the cabinet.

Thing I’ll take the pipe thread tape back to the store. It never appeared in the directions, nor did any of the wrenches or pliers, so now I’ll be awake all night wondering if I’ve managed to manufactured by own leaky faucet.

Even still, wonderful day.

errands / memories / Thursday / video — Comments Off
27
Oct 11

A lot of talk about talk

Alabama’s new and controversial immigration law makes an appearance on the Colbert Report:Comedy as commentary is difficult to overcome, is it not?

Class this afternoon, so much of the morning was devoted to preparing there. The students were writing fake stories. Here are the details, write a story based on what you know. There was a fake story about a shooting death, another about a prominent local company moving their operations overseas and one more on a car fatality with alcohol involved.

These exercises are important, because the place we put ideas and the words we use to get there are critical to a story. For most people, winding up in the news is not a pleasant experience. We don’t need to make things worse with a misplaced modifier or some other syntax error.

The future! By Microsoft:

I scrolled down through the comments, hoping the very first one would have some incredible insight. The first three, however, noted that Microsoft envisions better tech in videos than they produce. And then a big argument about Apple and St. Steve inventing the tablet. Also, within about three minutes of each other different people thought this was the loneliest future they’ve ever seen, or the coolest thing ever and “I want one now!”

I’m glad to see that typos will still be a part of our future. Check out the 2:55 mark.

Also in the future, Roy Moore wants his old job back. The last time he had that job he was fired by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary. I remember covering that story like it was yesterday. November of 2003 he lost the job, but this fight had been going on for months. I remember sitting in my studio, watching video from Montgomery and a man in a red flannel shirt, red-faced, veins throbbing, screaming at the top of his lungs demanding Moore’s Ten Commandments monument be put back. I was concerned about that guy’s health. Wonder where he is now.

Because I love myself I visited Walmart tonight. I know! And this after getting a haircut yesterday. Haircuts are one of my least favorite chores, because of the conversations. These are is especially awkward if you go to one of those places where you never see the same person twice. The conversation, then, demands a very basic, elevator level of commitment spread out over a longer period of time than a three floor ride in a large box.

The lady that cut my hair this time smelled of cigarettes. She disliked the cold. She could not decide if she’d seen me before. (She had not.) And she had trouble breathing. The guy that’s cut my hair the last two times, elsewhere at an actual barber shop, scares me a little. And his finished job is a bit severe. The lady yesterday, though, did a nice job on everything but the sideburns. This is remarkably hard, trimming things to be level; no one ever does it right and is no longer something that can be judged.

Everything else, though, centered on the awkward conversation. I like conversation, but the hair chair isn’t the place. Cab drivers need conversation because some of them are already on the edge. Plus there’s the where are you going, where have you been, who will you be when you get there mystery of cab rides. Most any other place a little chit chat is fine. Rapport is great, fishing for repeat customers is understandable, making people feel at ease is applauded. I want you to concentrate on what you are doing. Don’t jam my eye with the clipper. She almost did last night.

Having survived, though, why not go to Walmart tonight? Taylor Swift has a line of greeting cards now. Bing Crosby warned that Santa Claus is coming to town. We change the clocks in two weeks. Halloween is this weekend. This might be a little early.

The checkout line was … post office-like in it’s slowness.

Maybe it was the guy trying to get information from the cashier about her coworker so he could go flirt. There’s another awkward conversation, at least no sharp instruments were used.

errands / Friday / memories / music / Samford / site / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
21
Oct 11

Hedge hogging

The most productive accomplishment of the day was in trimming the hedges. This is no small thing, as our house is surrounded on three sides by shrubbery. I’m not sure why the southernmost side is bare.

Everything along the front, save the door, the sidewalk and the garage, are bordered with green, growing things. All but one segment was trimmed. The lucky ones — and isn’t that just like a bunch of bushes, bragging to their neighbors? “You got chopped up, but I’m still here. Look at me grow! — I left alone because they’ll probably be dug out of the ground in a few weeks. Others along the front got lowered, including one that borders the garage. We’ve developed a little contour into it for the car’s side mirror.

There are also two at the end of the drive. These must be maintained to preserve the proper turning ratio as one backs out of the drive. This requires the acquisition of surveying tools, and chalk lines. I am the only person in America going through such precise measurements.

The unintended benefit, or consequence, is that one of them is growing around the mailbox post. I’d let it grow over the thing, but that would probably violate some nuance of the neighborhood and only make the mail carrier mad.

I do all of this, by the way, with the 24-inch Black & Decker Hedge Hog, which is like mounting an M-60 onto Excalibur and plugging an extension cord into the hilt. You hit the trigger, feel that dual blade action, wave it above your head and know: your kingdom is only limited by your vision.

And municipally recognized property lines.

Trimming up the northern side of the estate required the ladder, because there are some bushes on steroids on that side of the house. Two of them would have been easier to reach from the roof.

So I’m standing on the top of a multi-use ladder. We have a transformer of aluminum that makes shapes that are only limited by your imagination, and not its contortion. I dutifully set the ladder into a standard A configuration, straddling the center hinge point with a foot on either side. I realized I couldn’t reach the very back of the bush. OK then. So I find myself standing on the top of the A, in the hinge-point, waving about a whirring 24-bladed saw with shark teeth moving at 2,900 strokes per minute.

My kingdom is suddenly a lot less interesting from this vantage point. I climbed down quickly.

The curious thing about the greenery here is that there is a lot of variety. Once the offending shrubs are out of the front there will only be one place surrounding the entire structure where you see two of the same species next to one another. I haven’t yet decided if that’s a feature or a bug. If you had to dig them all up, every annoying root, what would you replace them with? Uniformity or everything that could grow in this climate?

And that’s the sort of thing you think about as you rake away the leaves leavings. That’s some way to start your Friday evening.

YouTube Cover Theatre, where we see the talent that people have, until the advent of webcams and the Internet, people were hiding in their homes. Since Irecently watched the George Harrison documentary, we may as well check out covers of some of his work.

The Beatles weren’t my band. I like them fine, they just don’t belong to me. Wrong generation. But, if I had been in the right group, I think Harrison would have been my favorite of the bunch. And since you can’t have Harrison without the band, we’ll start with a cover of All Those Years Ago:

That looks like an impossibly difficult tune and he did a nice job. Then he leaned back against his den’s wood paneled walls and enjoyed the rest of his evening.

This cover of My Sweet Lord has received 26,000 views, which may be the largest count that we’ve ever seen in YouTube Cover Theater. Aside, is it just me, or has this song always sounded like it should be appropriated as commercial bed music?

One of the cool things about the Beatles, I would think, would be introducing what has essentially become timeless music to kids. I mean the clean cut, less drugs portion of the catalog. And while this is essentially a Paul McCartney tune, Harrison wrote the main riff, which is enough of an excuse to show a cute cover by a father serenading his daughter for her second birthday.

When she’s older she’s going to be humming Beatles tunes and won’t remember why. Then she’s going to stumble through her dad’s YouTube uploads and it will all click. It will be adorable.

Hard to believe it has been 10 years since George Harrison died. I was doing a network newscast at the time, the last segment of which was a 30 second spot and outro. That day I just played this song for 30 seconds and signed off:

Just for fun, here’s a recreation of Harrison’s Bangladesh Concert with members of Wonderous Stories, Alan Parsons Live Project and more, covering Wah Wah:

Other things happened today, too, emails and organizational things. We’ll have wrapped up the latest big project at work by the first part of the week, it seems my part has largely been completed, except for showing up at the various events next week. Homecoming at Samford means advisory council meetings and wall of fame induction ceremonies and all of the attendant activities.

With those things now completed I can return to other work. Like digging up shrubs.

errands / movies / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Aug 11

There is a quiz at the bottom of this post

Visited the financial adviser. She advised that I should have more money. This must become a repetitive part of her day. But, then, the degree of serious intonation could change on grave market days. Now you really need more money.

I am reminded of the line from the country song, some one told the narrator that Wall Street fell, but, he said, he was so poor that he could not discern the problem or understand, really, the implications as it directly related to his hard scrabble lifestyle.

Instead, his father went to work for Roosevelt, moved, and bought appliances. And the middle of the century was born.

Where can people move today? The moon. What a great concept this would be. Now all we need is a catchy name and acronym. Lunar Citizen Division. When they get up there they can build the solar system’s largest LCD screen, which would be perfect. On those clear nights you could watch reruns of Seinfeld, and forget about all of your problems down here. “Sure, the financial adviser said I needed to think about my medium term investments, but Jerry’s date has man hands! No soup for her!”

Our friend the financial adviser is very nice, happy, laughs a lot and complimentary and optimistic. I suppose they all have to be at this point, right? Besides, she works on the second floor of a two-story building. Not a lot of options there like you read about from the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties gave way to the Howlin’, Splattin’ Thirties. No one speaks of these things if they don’t have to. (And, of course, no one wants to see that happen today for a variety of reasons. I only mention it to say the following.) We leave such heavy lifting to Jean Claude Van Damme.

What a terrible movie. But the most recent quote on YouTube is great: “Man, 2004 is going to awesome!”

I suspect that it will, young man, I suspect that it will. Someone else, meanwhile, commented about a plot hole in a Van Damme film. And that’s why you should never read YouTube comments.

He’s still working, by the way. Four movies this year and three next year, so good for him. You’ll see none of them, and they’ll all have a fighting chance of being better than Time Cop.

Mowed the lawn. Specifically the back of the property. The front and sides were shown who is the landscaping boss around here at an earlier date. I was drenched, not from exertion so much as humidity. We will soon need new ways to define area stickiness. Gross, hardened syrup sometimes just doesn’t cover it as a descriptor.

Also cleaned one gutter, pulling some 38 pounds of leaves and sediment from the aluminium tray. This is good news: they are well mounted. If that had been shoddy craftmanship they’d have landed on the ground long ago.

This was the first real exercise of our new ladder. It is one of those folding, finger-pinching modular jobs. One ladder which can take on 35 shapes. You must make your own transformer noises, but I spend a considerable part of my youth in the 1980s, so this is not a problem.

I’m not sure how many of the positions the ladder creates will actually be useful, only that we can reach our largest ceiling, and yet the thing is light enough to be carried by one person and can be stowed without drastically changing any current storage plans. I meticulously work on storage plans, carefully arranging the stacking and order of things on the likelihood that they will be needed in any emergent scenario. Occasionally I realize I’ve mis-prioritized, or worse, mis-judged the odds of a scenario and must reshape the attic, or the garage or some other small area. It doesn’t keep me up nights, but I have had moments of clarity about these things in that fugue before you open your eyes in the morning.

So the ladder fits in the scheme of things nicely. Until it bites off an index finger. And you could see that happening.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting on the coupler for the washing machine. That’s an inconvenience. And I have some words on slides. Now I am memorizing the things I want to say around them. It is an unfortunate waste of your morning to see someone read word-for-word, from a screen. I give one lecture in one class where I do that. And that is the first one. I put up lots of words, speak slowly and repeat them. This is crucial information for that class that should stick with the students for years. And, then, I tell them never to do that in a presentation. But be sure you got the completeness of my very important message.

After that my presentations are usually one or three words each. I have not yet reached that higher level of existences where my PowerPoint presentations are nothing but bad clip art. Perchance to dream.

Today’s pop quiz: What does this butter and the United States economy have in common?

The answer is not: neither one should be left on the counter.