Fred Stobaugh, whose wife Lorraine died in April, has no previous musical experience and wrote the song on a whim for a competition.
He submitted his handwritten lyrics by post and, although the contest was online-only, the organisers were so moved they put the words to music.
Oh Sweet Lorraine is number seven on US iTunes and has 1.9m YouTube views.
Billboard magazine said the song had sold 6,000 copies so far, placing it at number 49 in its rock digital songs sales chart.
The track is also in the iTunes charts for Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg.
There’s a short film about it. If you read the above, at least watch the second half:
He’s not a songwriter, or a musician, or a singer. So when the studio brought him the song he was hearing it for the first time. You almost feel like you can see it all, almost 75 years, right there in his eyes.
Are there covers? Can we turn this unexpected hit and lovely story into another installment of YouTube Cover Theater? There are covers.
And that’s enough to get us off to the weekend. Hope yours is great!
One of the first emails I received this morning was the first I’ve received on the Affordable Health Care Act. It included this line: “Unfortunately, we do not have details on the exchange coverage or the rates to share with you at this time.”
And this starts in October.
Though, right off the top, there are $65 in fees, and “we do not yet know what the rate increase will be.”
Thanks, Congress.
So I wrote our hard working and now long suffering HR director and asked a few specific questions. You can imagine the stress that gentleman is under.
In the evening I received this tweet:
Was so scared to drive within 20 ft of a biker today in fear that it was @kennysmith because MY GRADE IS IN HIS HANDS. #heholdsgrudges
I tell my students “One of the perks of being in the front of the class is having your pet issues. Here’s mine. Be careful of cyclists. Move over three feet,” and so on. Be careful when you pass them, I say, because you never know when it will be me and I get to grade you.
This joke always does pretty well. And she laughed at it, too.
Someone asked me on Facebook one day how to pass a cyclist. I got it down to five hints:
First: Wait. Just a second. Let a little road get out in front of him or her. She has the same rights the car does, etc.
Second: Know that waiting for 15 seconds until oncoming traffic doesn’t exist isn’t going to make you late.
Third: Just ease over to your left and pass, when clear. Some cities have a three-foot law. Think of that: that’s an arm length, but do err on the side of wider berths when you can. (Not everyone is a champion bike handler.)
Fourth: You don’t have to honk your horn. Unless you are driving an electric, I can hear you.
The programming director at Shoals Radio Group said he is puzzled how a promotional for a local radio station managed to excite many students and parents into believing bombs would be exploding today at area schools.
Rumors of school safety being in jeopardy have steadily increased since promotionals began Monday to bring attention to a format change at Star 94.9. The rumors prompted some parents to keep their children at home today instead of having them attend class as usual. Police and school officials also increased patrols in some schools in an effort to ease fears.
[…]
The promotional, which will continue until Friday when the format change is officially announced, is built around the thought that aliens have taken over the radio station and are trying to figure out what type music appeals to humans.
You can hear the promos here. How people got worked up about them remains a mystery. “Aliens with perfect diction!”
Every now and thenSpencer Hall feels the need to prove he’s a better writer than the rest of us. Give the guy a good story and watch him work. Read this (too long) excerpt and you’ll need to know the rest:
Kurt Vonnegut said that his chief objection to life in general was that it was “too easy, when alive, to make horrible mistakes.” This is what offensive line coaches live with: the notion that for every five simple circles drawn on a board, there are a nearly infinite number of possible threats looming out in the theoretical white space. Offensive plays give skill players arrows. Those arrows point down the field toward an endzone, a stopping point, a celebration. Those five simple circles stay on the board in the same place, and are on duty forever.
They are rough men in the business of protection.
Herb Hand is an offensive line coach at Vanderbilt University, where he might not even be were it not for a long line of random events. Hand got a job at Glenville State under Rich Rodriguez in 1994, a team whose base offense–the spread option that redefined modern football–depended on a play that in itself was the result of an accident, the zone read. A quarterback simply pulled the handoff from the running back, read the defensive end, and turned a mistake into deliberate and deadly strategy. Other coaches might have dismissed it entirely. Rodriguez did not, and now it is run at every level of the game from Pop Warner to the NFL.
Hand would work under Rodriguez at Clemson, and then followed him to West Virginia when Rodriguez was hired to replace Don Nehlen. Hand would recruit, coach tight ends, and recruit, and do all of that in exactly that order, because recruiting is an important activity that sometimes is interrupted by bouts of college football. One of the places Hand recruited was the talent-glutted state of Florida, including Orlando, where on April 27th, 2006 something would hit him in the back of the head with an axe.
The axe blow to the back of the head was a different kind of pain than normal.
And then you finish that story and you think: Great, that’s how we start football season. With teary eyes.
Which is fine, I guess, because we have football. You know, I’ve waited almost my entire life to enjoy picture-in-picture. The technology was rolled out in 1983. I’ve had two televisions that had the tech, but never had the necessary cable setup. Now, on this second television to feature PIP we finally have the opportunity to use it — and during football season! — and I can only manage to watch the same game twice.
But Gatorade ads look great when you see them in double vision!
So picture in picture is, so far, disappointing. And the New Directv setup lasted seven quarters of football, watching and switching between channels, before quitting. So there was a call to tech support. They flipped the magic switch and unkinked the hose on their end. A reset and a reboot later and it works again. Hope we’re not doing that all fall.
Even if we are they’re already proving more competent than Charter ever was.
We’ve been watching the last quarter of the 2010 football season on DVD as a way of preparing for the college football season, which opens tomorrow night. Last night we saw the SEC championship game, which I think I only saw the one time, live. It was an emotional thing, that day. Still fairly stirring.
Tonight we watch the national championship against Oregon. It has its drama, but it isn’t terribly exciting in some respects. Knowing the outcome is, of course, anticlimactic in a small way. The win was the thing, but that SEC championship game was the most complete effort of that amazing season. And knowing what it meant, and knowing it came at Darth Spurrier’s expense made it all the better.
All of which is to say nothing new, except this. It was this video that really made me look forward to this season.
Ronnie Brown is a bad man. (Hard to believe it has been nine years since some of that footage was shot.) The New York Restoration Choir sounds great. Bring on the football.
Would you like a bit of history? NPR has a great piece on what was one of the rhetorical inspirations for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. You can hear it! I knew the provenance of the imagery, but I’d never heard the original speech before. It is fascinating in every way, though that’s not really the voice I imagined Pastor Archibald Carey Jr. having. Give it a listen.
NASA is looking for a rock. It’s got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can’t be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can’t be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can’t be a speed demon. And it shouldn’t be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.
The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA’s human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.
It just doesn’t sound like the same agency in some ways, but there is some boldness in the plan, if you read on.
Here’s a conversation that delves into the origins of online scholastic journalism. Before WordPress, before a lot of tools, you had to hand-code everything. Now, not so much:
Yet there persists an odd notion that a newspaper staff is more deserving of awards for its online journalism and that its online work is more authentic if they built their website or even their WordPress theme themselves. There’s a confusion in this logic –– a failure to distinguish the tool from the content; we only tend to see this confusion when working with newer tools. No one would question the value of using a word processing tool and writing on a computer over using a typewriter. No one would question the value of using desktop publishing software and new printing technology over hand-set type. No one would question the value of a photo taken with a digital camera over one taken with a film camera and printed in a darkroom. That’s because we’ve recognized that Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs, InDesign, PhotoShop, and digital SLR cameras are tools that allow our students to do better work.
We now need to make that same recognition with our understanding of WordPress and its templates. Buying a good WordPress template is the same as buying Adobe CS7 or buying a new digital SLR camera. CS7 won’t create your design for you, a camera won’t take its own pictures, and a WordPress template won’t write and publish stories, photos, and videos in a timely and relevant manner. New tools create new efficiencies and new opportunities –– they allow us to report better, write better, design better, and connect with our audiences better, and our national contest and critique standards need to evolve to reflect the new realities of the tools used for web publishing.
I bolded my favorite part. This debate isn’t restricted to online tools designed for efficiency versus the most laborious method possible. Value the journalism over the tool, or the medium for that matter.
One more PBS thing, a series of serious and concerted thoughts on a digital curriculum from Dr. Cindy Royal:
what I am proposing is curriculum in which digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.
Most programs have courses at their core that introduce basic skills, things like Media Writing, Media Law and Introduction to Mass Communication. Other programs also require courses in Media History or Mass Media and Society. I propose we flip and reconfigure these courses with a digital emphasis.
That’s worth a read if you’re interested in journalism or pedagogy.
Did I mention I renamed my work blog? I renamed my work blog. Made it a little more inclusive, avoids any university branding concerns and just sounds more vaguely fun. So check out the creatively titled Multimedia Links. Several new posts this week as we’ve gotten back to the classroom:
The weather was incredible for an August Saturday. Sunny, clear and bright and the mercury never got more bold than 81. This has, so far, been the year of the anti-seasons. So far, there’s nothing to complain about any of it, really.
We had a nice and easy 25 mile ride today. Even with the milder August weather you have to plan ahead. I had 64 ounces of water on the bike. I had 16 ounces of electrolytes and a giant cup of chocolate milk when we got home. And I don’t hydrate enough.
I think I’d have to drink my body weight.
We visited Target, where we bought Target things like household items like frames and cat toys. Because Allie has no toys. Just ask her.
Fortunately she likes the new toy. It is a couple of pieces of vinyl wrapped around a flexible frame. It opens up to a square size, and the top has four holes in it. On two of the sides there are also holes. Inside are two toys — and we put in a few more. The cat then roots around for the bits of fur that smell like catnip and the globs of plastic that make ringing and tingling noises.
Within a few minutes she’d gotten so fixated that she was attacking her own foot. Also, it looks like a game of Feline Twister.
Why hasn’t some disreputable huckster tried to sale that yet?
We visited the grocery store, where I remain convinced the seafood counter is manned by a moonlighting Chris Isaak. He told us this particular type of Alaska salmon isn’t as fishy. We didn’t believe him when we put it on the grill later in the evening, but by the time it landed on your plate he was proved right.
I bonded with the cashier about picking and shelling purple hulled peas. It was obvious that no one listening in on that conversation had any frame of reference. Some of them were mortified.
Spent part of the evening watching NFL preseason coverage. You forget, in the offseason, that the NFL isn’t terribly exciting at all. But in August, any football will do.
The first college games are next Thursday. Everyone is counting the days.
Had a morning appointment. Showed up right on time, owing to the slow car in front of me, the other car that couldn’t figure out turning lanes and a search for a parking space that could be described as too-warm porridge.
Visited with the nice lady sitting in the desk inside the fish bowl. She took my insurance card — because this is my third orthopedic guy to check out my shoulder and collar bone. In return she gave me the clipboard of paperwork. What are you allergic to? Have you had an of these diseases? Did your paternal great-great-uncle have any skin sensitivities to latex?
So you do all that, you know the drill. And then you wait for your name to be called. Other names are called. You start playing the same game you do at a restaurant. “They came in after we did and they’re already eating!”
I decided that, at 75 minutes, I would go ask when my 10:30 appointment was going to take place. At 74 minutes they finally called me back.
And that’s just the waiting room wait, of course. Wouldn’t it be great if the doctor was already in the examination room and he was waiting on you?
Another X-ray. And then a spirited round of playing with the display knee joint sitting in the exam room.
So we talked about the last year. He tested for nerve damage and said there was none. He tested for rotator cuff problems and said there were none. He touched my hardware and I decided I’m going to pinch, hard, the next person that does that.
He looked at my X-ray and said things look good there.
The problems, he said, are muscular, hardware or skeletal. He said he just took a plate out of someone’s collarbone that was so severe the poor guy couldn’t wear a jacket. Said the guy felt better the night of that removal. I don’t think that’s my problem. I’m guessing 90 percent of my issues are muscular.
But first we’re going to test for the skeletal. Sometime next week I have to have a bone scan. No idea what that’s about.
Oh. Radiation. Patience. One thing you don’t want and one thing I need more of.
Also, this doctor, who is apparently nationally renowned for shoulder surgeries, says I should have been in a sling for six to eight weeks. Had him repeat that.
My surgeon had me out of my immobilizer in a week. (I had to ask. I couldn’t remember. I don’t remember a lot.)
I take it I shouldn’t be happy with that.
Indian for lunch. School stuff for the rest of the day. Speaking of school:
Excited to be going back to play at Jordan-Hare to play in 2014!
Here’s the official release. Pat Sullivan almost beat his alma mater on the last trip. He put a huge scare into Auburn for 45 minutes. It was a great performance.
More sports: Google wants to buy the rights to put the NFL on YouTube. Remember where you were when this happens.
We had dinner with a friend — who will remain nameless because of this transgression — and standing in the parking lot, under the stars and lightning, we learned he’d never heard this song.
I did not realize you could be in your 30s and say that.
