food

food / Friday / links / things to read / video — Comments Off on Comet: Avoid green beans, eat doughnuts
14
Nov 14

Comet: Avoid green beans, eat doughnuts

Back to that comet for 90 seconds. USA Today offers us the chance to hear the spooky-beautiful “sound” the thing makes.

Sure, those are clicks and pops in the magnetic field, amplified for the human ear’s range. But why is it, Mr. Smart Space Guy, that science fiction always has a similar sound to the creatures who are chasing the protagonists?

Isn’t that neat? You just listened to a comet. The 21st century is a pretty amazing place. I’m happy to be here in it with you.

Today’s post is brief because there was class — we discussed aggregation and curation — and then reading a bunch of paper that had to do with a news story and then a flurry of emails about it, the last weighing in at something like 1,500 words, with three footnotes. (Pro tip: When you go back to revise and shorten the email and it just keeps growing, press send and walk away.)

Got home just in time for dinner, so we went out with our friend Sally Ann and had a wonderful Pie Day.

The vegetable of the day was green beans. I mention this because, even if you are a huge supporter of the vegetable of the day concept, there’s no way you can stand by green beans as being worth a mention.

I like green beans, but they hardly win any given day. But if you have a recipe to jazz them up, I’m ready to hear about it.

Adding almond slivers does not constitute jazzing up green beans.

I plan on being asleep before it gets late, so you can see why I’ve so quickly come to the green bean portion of the festivities.

I did not have green beans.

Things to read … because you have to provide nutrition for the brain, too.

This is a fine, worthwhile essay about events taking place at the high school level. There are a few issues on some college campuses, but nowhere near as many and, thankfully, not on ours. At the high school level is where you see the pernicious influence. Still, ever vigilant, First Amendment: In land of the free, why are schools afraid of freedom?:

In one community, for example, school officials ban coverage of student religious clubs while permitting coverage of all other student clubs. But in a very different community, administrators instruct students not to report on LGBT issues because a few parents once complained about a profile of a gay student in the school paper.

Under current law, school officials may review what goes into school publications (though they aren’t required by any law to do so). But they may not turn “prior review” into “prior restraint” with overly broad and vague restrictions on what student reporters may cover.

Unfortunately, many public school administrators are either unfamiliar with the First Amendment or simply ignore it.

It must be serious, the AP is writing about it, Facebook’s privacy update: 5 things to know:

Facebook doesn’t just track what you do on its site. It also collects information about your activities when you’re off Facebook. For example, if you use Facebook to log in to outside websites and mobile apps, the company will receive data about those. It also gets information about your activity on other businesses it owns, such as WhatsApp and Instagram, in accordance with those services’ privacy policies.

[…]

Everything is fair game. Facebook explains it best: “We collect the content and other information you provide when you use our Services, including when you sign up for an account, create or share, and message or communicate with others.” Plus, Facebook says it also collects information about how you use Facebook, “such as the types of content you view or engage with or the frequency and duration of your activities.”

This defies excerpting, but it confirms a lot of what you might have read soon after the recent fence jumper, Secret Service Blunders Eased White House Intruder’s Way, Review Says.

I’m trying to imagine my grandparents doing this. Go ahead, give it a shot, Adults Apparently Wanted Underoos So Badly, They’re Already Sold Out.

No?

Last week I was talking with a student and somehow we came to discover the Krispy Kreme Challenge. He’s a sprinter, but now I’m trying to talk him into doing this race — 2.5 miles, a dozen doughnuts and then 2.5 more miles. I’m going to do it in my neighborhood I said, just to see. I found the 2014 times of the race. If I can finish it, I at least won’t be last.

Well. Turns out there’s a Krispy Kreme Challenge in Huntsville, too. The 2-time Krispy Kreme Challenge champion explains how one prepares for 12 doughnuts and 4 miles in 1 hour:

“It’s mostly being in general good shape. There’s two components–running and eating. You can do one or the other, but the skill is to do both. This kind of race is hard to train for.”

This could be a mistake, but I think I might be that kind of guy. This could be a further, more grievous mistake, but next weekend I have a date with the track and a dozen glazed.

food / Friday / journalism / links / things to read / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Meditations on food
10
Oct 14

Meditations on food

I don’t know if you have heard about The Snappening yet, where thousands of Snapchat user accounts hacked or otherwise violated, but this could be a big story. And that led to, perhaps, the most insightful thing I said today:

I said one other good thing today:

Not to make this a culinary thing, but after several Fridays of bad examples, I am disappointed to have to say that the new cafeteria vendor has ruined fried chicken. It seemed to me that they deserved a few weeks under the Benefit of the Doubt accords, and I gave them that. There are a lot of carbs on a daily basis, and the basic foodstuffs seem to rotate on something close to a monthly schedule theme — so we’ve heard. But, and this is important, Friday is fried chicken day. And they’ve missed on all of them so far, in my humble and hungry opinion. Today I noticed the menu and knew it would be no better.

Protip: There is no other fried chicken. Any attempt at making fried chicken in any way not like a grandparent does is an abject failure and poultry abuse.

I apologize for that outburst.

OK, one more food related note, Five Dairy Queen locations in Alabama fall victim to data breach. Thankfully I am not impacted. Hopefully it doesn’t effect you. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I dined at Dairy Queen. I recall the last time I ate at a restaurant that used to be a Dairy Queen. It is a barbecue place now, most remarkable for the way they cut their fries.

That former Dairy Queen is the same place where once, many years ago now, the young lady working said that they had no ice cream for their blizzards. This was in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. I always thought she should have locked the door and called it a day. No one is going for the chicken fingers in July, right?

Back to the point, with every passing data breach story I read I am more and more convinced we’ll be returning to a more cash-based exchange, soon. Customers assume a lot of risk, and they assume those retailers have their networks under control, and, sadly, that isn’t hasn’t always proved to be the case.

Sorry for all of this food talk. In a few minutes we are going to a dinner party. I’m taking my appetite.

Things to read … to whet your appetite.

Couldn’t hurt, but it isn’t a 100 percent requirement, Should all journalists be on Twitter? Think of it this way: there are plenty of community papers out there with a minimal online component, if that. They still cover their market. They are still journalists. Now, you’ll find that some topics demand Twitter or other online tools, of course. Others, the online tools could serve as a great compliment. This is the point the piece tries to dance around in a snarky fashion.

To everything there is a season, Facebook is over for teens – and Instagram and Twitter are the most popular social networks among American children

Anyone surprised? Smile! Marketing Firms Are Mining Your Selfies

This is fun, Save Local History with New Wikipedia Map:

Have you ever wondered which buildings near you are listed on the National Register of Historic Places? If you’ve ever tried to look this up, you probably had trouble finding what you were looking for because until the summer of 2014, there really was no user-friendly way to browse map-integrated National Register listings. Now, thanks to the Wikipedia Summer of Monuments campaign, there is a free, simple, and interactive map that shows all places listed on the National Register.

Ummm … oops? Police sorry for telling wrong family of death:

An Alaska couple knocked on the door of their son’s long-time girlfriend Thursday, intending to inform her that he’d been killed in a car accident.

Karen and Jay Priest instead were stunned when the son, 29-year-old Justin Priest, answered the door. They had mistakenly been told by Juneau police that he’d been killed in the crash.

Karen Priest said her husband started sobbing, and she was in shock.

Told some students this was a big story. I don’t think they believed me, at first. Pastor Juan McFarland of Shiloh Baptist church a trending subject of world’s conversations and media attention

And, finally, the link of moral indignation. School Has Child Sign ‘Safety Contract’:

“They told me she drew something that resembled a gun,” said Rebecca. “According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said, ‘pew pew,” said Rebecca.

She said her child was given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts.

“[They] Asked her if she was depressed now,” said Rebecca.

Without her permission, Rebecca said her child was given the Mobile County Public School Safety Contract to sign stating she wouldn’t kill herself or others.

“While I was in the lobby waiting they had my 5-year-old sign a contract about suicide and homicide,” said Rebecca.

It takes a village. And that’s part of the problem, wouldn’t you agree?

Honestly, this is just about the stupidest thing you could conceive. And it is happening here, which is mind-boggling.

It was a good run, but common sense appears to be losing out.

food / iPhone / journalism / links / movies / Samford / things to read / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Sigoggling
2
Oct 14

Sigoggling

Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.

sunset

And that, as they say, is its own reward.

My other reward was veggies.

dinner

Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.

(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)

Help for victims of sex trafficking: priest Becca Stevens wants Birmingham to do more

This will stick with you, How to Spot a Trafficking Victim at an Airport

Here’s the trailer for American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper, detailing the nation’s best sniper. As movie trailers go, that’s incredibly intense.

This story never gets old, Sportsmanship allows middle school boy to live football dream:

Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.

“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.

Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.

“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”

A friend found the video:

UAB gets $47M grant for low-income education initiative

The Cult of Neil deGrasse Tyson

One System, Two Media: How China, Hong Kong Are Covering The Protests

The second half of this is great, Young Protesters in Hong Kong Have Found an Ingenious Way Around Cyber Censors

Occupy Hong Kong: Macro scale, micro-adaptations

Speaking of adaptations:

Could have told them that at the beginning … Facebook is more important to news distribution than you think, and journalists are freaked out:

At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?

But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?

From the department of obvious things that could be understood but for interest, Editors who don’t use Twitter undercut their pleas to innovate.

If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:

The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?

food / friends / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / Samford / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off on A good man, a good plan and a good brand
24
Sep 14

A good man, a good plan and a good brand

I never met Mr. Davis, but I worked with his daughter, Tiffany. She was fresh out of college and I was about two years removed. She was smart and talented and charming. She was friendly and amusing. She learned a lot and worked hard and got better. She was a lot of the things that we probably all hope we are. She talked about her father an awful lot. They always sounded like a devoted family. He sounded like a good man.

She still is all of those things, by the way. She’s moved out west, but we’re still friends online. I imagine her brother is all of those things too, but we’ve never met. You’ve probably seen him on television, where he comes off as an incredibly likable man who works hard and knows his craft.

It seems to me that to have raised two children like his, you must be some kind of lucky and some kind of parent. Mr. Davis just recently passed away. Rece wrote about his dad, a wonderful and intimate remembrance proving the kind of man he was.

Those are my favorite verses, too.

Spent the afternoon counting things. I do this every year, taking stock of the department. Demographics are important, and one must always know how many of these and those there are, to say nothing of the thoses and thises. I do this every year and this is still the best method I have thought up:

marks

You don’t change the classics. What you can change is the spreadsheet which holds the data and digests it into simple charts and graphs. There are pages and pages of data, and I get it down to one page of information, all thanks to the humble and inconsistent tally marks.

Things to read … because reading leads to pages and pages of information.

First, the quick list of journalism links:

How social media is reshaping news

Harnessing the power of immersive, interactive storytelling

The secret to BuzzFeed’s video success: Data

New York Times is retiring the Managing Editor title in favor of four deputy executive editors

Forest Service says media needs photography permit in wilderness areas, alarming First Amendment advocates

How TV Everywhere strategy is evolving in the world of cable news

Advice for real-time reporting from BBC, Guardian, Telegraph

Tool Called Dataminr Hunts for News in the Din of Twitter

And now for something delicious, The Creation Myth of Chocolate-Chip Cookies:

What’s less certain is why, exactly, Wakefield put the chopped-up chocolate into her cookies to begin with. A few versions of the story have her creating the recipe accidentally—she was out of nuts, she thought the chocolate would melt into the batter, the chips fell into the bowl by accident. Wyman, in her book, argues that Wakefield was too much of a perfectionist to have come upon the recipe so haphazardly. In support of her argument, she cites a few accounts from the 1970s in which Wakefield tells reporters that she’d been planning experiments with chocolate chunks.

And, of course, she had no idea what it would all become. It says she gave permission to Nestle to reprint her recipe. It does not say what she got in the deal. There’s also a link to the original cookie, if you’d like to try it.

Websites Are Wary of Facebook Tracking Software:

Online retailers and publishers are pushing back against Facebook Inc.’s efforts to track users across the Internet, fearing that the data it vacuums up to target ads will give the social network too much of an edge.

Web traffic experts say there is less data flowing from some sites to Facebook, suggesting they have been reprogrammed to hold back information.

Because they figured out what they were giving away, that they weren’t a partner with Facebook, just a vehicle for it.

Snapchat and your higher ed social media strategy:

When this social media tool first came out, many people were worried that certain *ahem* risque behaviour would take place at a much higher rate. However, since its launch in late 2011, it’s became pretty clear that college kids mainly use Snapchat for selfies, pictures of their pets and photos/videos of the events they attend. And seeing as a new study by Mashable reveals 77 percent of college students check their Snapchats daily, it’s definitely an outlet not to be overlooked when planning your higher ed social media strategy.

We’ve considered that, put it on the back burner and considered it again. I’m sure it will ultimately happen. We do like stories, after all.

This I want to see: Coca-Cola vintage ad will be unveiled at Opelika’s Smith T Building Supply:

Opelika-area residents and Coca-Cola enthusiasts are invited to the unveiling of one of the oldest untouched Coca-Cola painted wall advertisements in existence.

The unveiling event will be held on Oct. 9 at 4 p.m., at Smith T Building Supply in downtown Opelika. Historians from The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and community leaders will be in attendance. Vintage bottles of Coke will be given away while supplies last.

The experts think the sign was painted in 1907 or 1908. The ad is being seen for the first time in more than a century. How about that?

cycling / family / food / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Twitter / Wednesday — 1 Comment
13
Aug 14

A 60 year-old ad, a new sign, a race and food

Last night’s adventures in insomnia included this guy.

Jim

That’s my great-great grandfather, Jim. He was born in the winter of 1871, a year when the crops didn’t come in and the cotton caterpillars ravaged what was there. Jim married Sarah in 1904 and and they lived on a farm that her grandfather bought in 1854. They had 11 children. He died in 1953, his wife in 1970. So while I don’t know them, I did meet one of their kid’s, my great-grandfather. But I don’t remember him. My grandmother remembers her grandparents well, but I don’t know much more than what you find in this paragraph beyond where he’s buried. I do like that bicycle, though. So I found some old newspapers online and I’m looking for mentions, but turn up nothing.

I did find this, though:

In 1953 the church ads told you what the evening’s sermon was going to be about. This one wasn’t about Old Hickory Bourbon, or temperance. The topic was “A Methodist sermon by a Baptist preacher.” A different church had an ad in the next day’s paper, the preacher had promised to answer the question of a generation, “Should a woman wear a hat to church?”

The pressing stuff of their time.

I guess that branch of my family didn’t believe in obituaries, or care for the local paper. I don’t find a mention of him there. Otherwise, he must have been the quiet type. You don’t get in the paper until you do something wrong or something bad happens. Maybe that’s a good sign for the couple.

On my bike ride today, something of a casual ride around the greater neighborhood just to get in a few miles, I passed one of the better church signs I know. They’ve got personality here, as noted by most any previous message, one of the best in recent memory suggesting that you bring your sin and “drop it like it’s hot.”

This week’s note:

sign

It is a quiet little church, a lovely little place:

church

I also learned during this ride that I was on one of the local segments that the cycling apps chart as races. Without knowing it, I currently have the eighth fastest time on it for the year. I’ll have to try it again tomorrow to see if I can go any faster.

For dinner, we grilled pork chops and had beans which we discovered a few weeks ago:

dinner

I said to the lady that made them, a family friend, “You must give me your recipe or — ” which was the moment a look of embarrassment crossed her face. ” — or tell me what brand they are, because they are just about the best beans I’ve ever had.”

And they were. And they are. Also, they are from a can — Margaret Holmes. We discovered we didn’t necessarily need the lard — which is fine. The lady that made them, she’s a retired school teacher. She told me that her father, a man I knew a bit, was so old-fashioned the type that would not allow anything in his home that involved shortcuts. In this case that meant no canned foods. He made an exception for Margaret Holmes.

That’s an endorsement.

Things to read … because there’s probably something worth endorsing in here somewhere.

First, the journalism stuff:

How digital retailing could roil local media

Solving the Journalism Riddle — Somehow

Radio Disney Moving Off Air to Digital

If Disney is making that move …

Closer to home, 108 immigrant children relocated to Alabama in last 3 weeks:

Included among the children are those from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who have crossed into the U.S. as part of a massive wave of immigration that has set off a humanitarian crisis and political firestorm.

The data does not include information on where the children were placed or whether they are residing with family members or foster care. The children will remain with the sponsors until a judge orders they be deported; until they turn 18 and are transferred back to DHS; or they are given permission to stay by immigrantion courts.

Finally, Ferguson:

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →