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football / memories / Monday / site / video / weekend — Comments Off
3
Feb 13

Paul Harvey, FFA, Dodge win the Super Bowl

Maybe I’m aging out of the demographic. Maybe a lot of sponsors should demand their money back. Either way it seemed that with costs ranging from $3.8 to $4 million per 30-second spot, the value seemed to be lacking.

Unless you look at all of them as regressions, then even some of the average spots might get some Monday replays. For once the game was compelling, and you could actually leave the room during the breaks. In hours of programming, only spot one stood out.

Blake Harris wrote “So the only time all night the room has been totally silent has been during the Paul Harvey commercial. Everyone was glued to tv.”

You could write an essay why. Some obvious points — Paul Harvey, a way of life, a lack of shrill Madison Avenue attitude and agriculture — jump out.

Paul Harvey was the consensus best broadcaster in the business for generations. There’s not much argument on this, nor should there be. The industry won’t allow anyone like him again, let alone better than him. A statement like that owes a lot to his longevity and his staff, but the man had a voice and an intriguing pace. He had a touch with a microphone and everyone attached to his programming had a deft feel for a central element of society.

And maybe those times have changed. Demographies are always changing, improving and evolving. Maybe the people that could identify with Harvey are just living quietly and being drowned out by the morass of mass media. Maybe there’s a lifestyle of quiet humility and moral rectitude that is just beneath the surface. Maybe the spot appeals to a generational nostalgia for which we long. Maybe that’s gone forever. None of these are particularly true over another. All of those things — celebrated in a spot like that, by a man like that — still exist. They’re just a little harder to see because of all the other noise.

You’ve watched commercials, seen ads, felt the highs and lows of every medium. You’ve seen the Super Bowl spots. Reduce any of these things to their own elements. Make them stand alone, apart, from their advertising counterparts. They can be absurd, necessary of course, but absurd. Take your financial advice from a talking baby. Choose your insurance because an actor is pretending to be snow on a roof. Consider every ad produced since “Sex sells” became the first rule of the creative industry. There’s not much else to say about Madison Avenue after that. Perhaps an ad not designed to shock or titillate is actually a winner

Not to talk about that ad frame for frame, but that long, wide, bleak shot of that Angus at the beginning said so much about what you were about to experience. Paul Harvey was talking to the 1978 National FFA Convention in Kansas City in that speech, extolling the virtues of a way of life that, as a society, we’ve almost forgotten because most of us have never known it personally. Because of economic turns and technology and the postal system and education and all manner of things the farm has typically become a big corporate organization. There are less people doing the hard work to keep us fed, even as the production is increasing.

When Paul Harvey made that speech in 1978 the national numbers were:

Total population: 227,020,000
Farm population: 6,051,000
Farmers 3.4% of labor force
Number of farms: 2,439,510

Things were changing awfully fast. Still are, in many respects. These days only 1.96 million people in the U.S. are farmers or working directly in the agricultural industry whereas the nation is filled with an estimated 315,268,206 people as of this writing.

When I was in the FFA — I had the pleasure of attending five national conventions and served as a state officer in the Alabama FFA Association — the stat in use was that two percent of Americans were farmers. That percentage continues to decline, making a narrow part of the hourglass ever more slender.

There’s a movement afoot, the locavore movement, people that aspire to eat local produce, which would naturally promote a simpler example of farm economics. It must be serious because we’ve mangled words to create a new title for them within the language. Maybe a quiet shift is coming. Maybe there’s just a longing for a more romanticized time. Maybe it is just a great spot, filled with both nostalgia and truth.

Ultimately you take two iconic pieces of Americana, Paul Harvey and the men and women on the farm. (Yes, the spot needed migrant workers.) Put them in a quiet presentation that belies every other spot running against it with a tone that didn’t need to be crafted by a skyscraper executive* and you’ll beat a GoDaddy commercial every time. A Wall Street Journal blog has already called it “The Great American Super Bowl Commercial.”

Put together components that bespeak of a certain quite nobility, and you’ll get that.

Ram is raising $1 million for the National FFA Organization. Here’s how you can contribute. You can support them directly, too.

*Indeed, the Super Bowl spot was actually an updated version of this YouTube video that was uploaded in 2011:

football / Friday / music / recipes / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
1
Feb 13

A recipe, a grand football joke and music

I made dinner last night, a new recipe for us, and very occasionally I share those here. So here’s the recipe.

My dinner started off with a chickpea salad with a homemade dressing. Make the dressing first:

1/2 cup – fresh lemon juice
1/2 cup – generic mild red wine vinegar
3 cloves – garlic
1 teaspoon – kosher salt
fresh black pepper

Mince the garlic cloves. Mix the liquids with the garlic. Add the salt and pepper. While that rests, put together your salad:

1 can – chickpeas/garbanzo beans
1 – large cucumber
1 tray – of grape tomatoes
1/4 cup – Athenos Garlic and Herb Feta cheese
1/4 cup – red onion
Fresh pepper

Quarter the cucumber. You should get around three cups. Halve the tomatoes, which should turn into about two cups. Rinse and add the chickpeas. Pour in the crumbled feta and diced onions. When ready to serve, strain any stray bits of garlic from the dressing and then pour into the salad, tossing to cover everything.

The main dish was ravioli with arugula and romano cheese:

1 pound – fresh or frozen cheese ravioli
1 clove of garlic
1/2 teaspoon – kosher salt
1/4 cup – extra-virgin olive oil
2 – shallots
3 tablespoons – red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon – honey Dijon mustard
3 cups – arugula (It’s a vegetable.)
Pepper to taste

Boil a pot of water while mashing your garlic (over salt) into smithereens, making a nice past-like substance. Drop the ravioli in your pot and stir. Let them boil until they float.

Pour your oil into a small skillet over medium. Add in your new garlic paste and diced shallots. Brown that mixture, which should be about two or three minutes. Then pour over it your vinegar, mustard and fresh pepper. Remove quickly from the heat.

Your ravioli is probably done by now. Drain that. Put it in a bowl, pour in the skillet’s contents and toss with your arugula. This is where your pecorino or parmesan goes. Serve hot. Enjoy a reasonably healthy meal.

Every so often I find something online and think “This, beyond the obvious military and financial and communication purposes, is what the web was made for.”

This is not that, but APAAWWWLLLLO 13 is worth seeing.

As has been correctly pointed out in the comments at SB Nation, Ken Mattingly, so ably played by Gary Sinise, is an Auburn man, and thus should not be cheering. Everything else feels wholly correct, however.

Naturally Forrest Gump is driving the thing.

YouTube Cover Theater: We find covers online and allow the talent of undiscovered folks playing music in their bedrooms and living rooms and kitchens to shine through. It is like every third show on network television, but without the more annoying parts.

Today’s featured covered artist(s) are the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. If you don’t understand their relative importance, open another tab in your browser and do a bit of Googling as these videos play.

First, here’s an older gentleman playing through a ceramic tunnel into the most acoustically vibrant church designed in the galaxy singing American Dream:

Mr. Bojangles:

OK, so this guy is singing this to his grandmother on her 80th birthday at her request. Automatic entry:

Two of these songs were written by Rodney Crowell, so I guess next week we’ll have to feature covers of songs he performed.

I like, even more than covers, on-stage collaboration. Here’s Nitty Gritty Dirty Band, Allison Kraus and others covering a Johnny Russell classic:

This became way more country-folk than I’d intended when I started. Enjoy the arugula!

Alabama / cycling / errands / football / iPhone / memories / photo — Comments Off
7
Jan 13

“Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love”

That’s Thomas Champion, by the way.

But what a day of beautiful light:

That was in the afternoon, sitting in the backyard enjoying the shadows passing through the grass. That was after lunch and a very brief bike ride and some school work. It was before a trip to the big box store and the big warehouse store.

On the way home we saw this light:

It isn’t cold, it isn’t hot, it isn’t really anything at all, just bright and golden and perfect. What a lovely day.

Then the football game happened. In three BCS games the last four years Alabama has outgained their opponents 1,176 to 670 yards. The Tide have outscored Texas/LSU/Notre Dame a combined 100-35. Tonight was a demolition, an anti-climax. A coronation, really, after the SEC championship game.

At halftime Notre Dame’s coach said the best plan was for Alabama to not come back out in the second half. He might have been understating it.

After the game the sideline reporter Tom Rinaldi said to Nick Saban: “Enjoy it if you can.”

All of that said so much.

So my Notre Dame shirt that I got last year during our trip to South Bend was as helpful as I thought it would be. Death, taxes, Saban; Alabama is a dynastic juggernaut.

Beautiful day, though.

football / iPhone / photo / video / weekend — Comments Off
8
Dec 12

Sad football

Stayed up too late last night — this morning, really — and slept in. Made brunch.

Watched some quality DII football, where a quarterback who broke 5,000 yards in a single season. Old Dominion’s Taylor Heinicke broke a record held by the great Steve McNair. Remember McNair? Before his NFL career you heard about him almost every week at tiny Alcorn State. You’ve never heard of this Heinicke guy. But he puts up the yards.

It all ended for him, though. Old Dominion fell to Georgia Southern, with the last three drives of his sophomore season ending with a fumble, a failed fourth down and an interception.

And then the Army Navy game. I always cheer for Navy, the Department of the Navy has always been good to me. As the game progressed I began to think maybe I’d like Army to win.

Just this once. Maybe everyone should know beating their rival at least once during their career. Three generations of Army players now haven’t had this experience. So it would be a good thing for the Black Knights to drive down this field, overcome some ridiculous play calling that should have already meant a tie ballgame, and punch it in in the final seconds to take home the glory.

And then the fumble happened, and then Trent Steelman had a complete meltdown.

You have to feel bad for that guy, a leader among men. He had it. They had it. All of that hard work and then a bizarre fumble on a routine play they’ve done hundreds of times. Heartbreaking. But when a three-star and a sergeant major are trying to comfort you …

Tough stuff. Hate that that is the last moment of real college football for the year, but it is fitting, too.

She couldn’t watch:

Auburn / baseball / football / Friday / music / Samford / video — Comments Off
7
Dec 12

I wrote a review

Dave Brubeck, who invented the notes that landed between the things that you don’t play that mean you’re making jazz, recently died. Everyone that is knowledgeable about his importance to music can talk far more about this than I can.

But someone found footage of a concert he performed at Samford in the 1980s. Not sure why it is in black and white. Just enjoy the show:

Since I mentioned Bo Jackson yesterday … The War Eagle Reader asked me to write a little preview of the 30 for 30 on him, which debuts tomorrow. I had the chance to watch it last night:

The first story is from retired baseball coach Hal Baird, “I saw Bo jump over a Volkswagon.”

The second story, the one about Jackson standing in thigh-high water and doing a standing back flip, is from one of his coaches at McAdory High School. I’ve heard that one from a few different people that fit in that period of Jackson’s young life.

There’s the story about Jackson throwing a football up to the scoreboard before the Sugar Bowl. Randy Campbell told me that one himself.

Dickie Atcheson, his high school football coach, talks about Jackson using a pole vault pole designed for 180-pounders. Bo cleared 13 feet at 215 pounds.

There’s another story where he literally destroyed a batting cage in front of the top scout for the New York Yankees. In high school. With one hit.

Baird didn’t mention the story about hitting three home runs into the lights at Georgia as a freshman. No one told the story about the home run he hit that carried halfway over the football field. The one about when he came back to the high school after his hip replacement. He was still faster than everyone, including the kid that would capture most of his high school records.

Bo Jackson was amazing:

Bo Jackson is amazing. Always will be.

I only wish the documentary covered Bo Bikes Bama. Because HE SCARED TORNADOES OUT OF THE STATE.

You Don’t Know Bo was directed by Michael Bonfiglio (you can read TWER’s interview with him here). It premieres on ESPN on Dec. 8th at 9 p.m.