Just one thing today, a terrific artifact from 1892. This is a newspaper that covered the famous Auburn-Georgia game at Piedmont Park. It was the first ever football game in the Deep South. If you’d like to actually read the copy, which spans more than four columns, you can see a larger version here.
It seems more than the game has changed. The paper notes the average heights of both teams were around 5-foot-6. The average weights were in the 150s and 160s.
Auburn’s senior punter this year, Steven Clark, is listed as 6-5 and 230 pounds. Kicker Cody Parkey is an even six feet and 190 pounds. Auburn listed two wide receivers weighing in the 160s.
Auburn / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on Just a few things, and a bit of stuff 10 Jan 14
It is thundering, which means there is lightning. Accompanying them is rain. Two of those things are odd in January. They haven’t happened since … last January, apparently. So maybe it isn’t so odd. But it sure seems like it. The high today was 55, and it was overcast and that didn’t feel spring-like. But the lightning and thunder helps set the mood.
Can it be spring yet?
Spent a little time uploading 166 photos to Facebook last night. They are all older, pictures from the last 18 months, because I am a rebel when it comes to timeliness. All day people have been liking and tagging and commenting. My Facebook account has never been so successful.
Went to the gymnastics meet tonight. Auburn hosted and defeated Texas Woman’s University 194.875-189.825.
This was their opening meet of their season, at the Auburn Arena. I walked around a bit and strolled through the new “museum,” which isn’t as nice or complete as the old Lovelace facility was. I found this:
Those are the two trophies commemorating the first two Iron Bowls. The statue marked the second game. The cup, which has fallen from the perch just out of the top of the margin, celebrates the first victory.
I hope someone notices that and puts it back on the little display shelf. We’ll check back next week.
Yesterday I wrote here in passing about the documentary shot on Google Glass. Here’s the official site for Project 2×1, and their promotional trailer.
And, to wrap things up, the best 73 seconds of video you’ll watch tonight. Austin Hatch was in two plane crashes and lost his entire family between them. Now he’s back, finally, to basketball:
Austin Hatch says on Twitter is still planning to play for the Wolverines, making us all, for a time, Michigan fans.
The hard-earned trust that the tech giants had spent years building was in danger of evaporating—and they seemed powerless to do anything about it. Legally gagged, they weren’t free to provide the full context of their cooperation or resistance. Even the most emphatic denial—a blog post by Google CEO Larry Page and chief legal officer David Drummond headlined, “What the …”—did not quell suspicions. How could it, when an NSA slide indicated that anyone’s personal information was just one click away? When Drummond took questions on the Guardian website later in the month, his interlocutors were hostile:
“Isn’t this whole show not just a face-saving exercise … after you have been found to be in cahoots with the NSA?”
“How can we tell if Google is lying to us?”
“We lost a decade-long trust in you, Google.”
“I will cease using Google mail.”
The others under siege took note. “Every time we spoke it seemed to make matters worse,” an executive at one company says. “We just were not believed.”
“The fact is, the government can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” says Facebook’s global communications head, Michael Buckley. “We can put out any statement or statistics, but in the wake of what feels like weekly disclosures of other government activity, the question is, will anyone believe us?”
Since it comes down to money and government contracts, no, probably not.
The thing about the football bowl system is that it gives you time to dream and fret and be exposed to endless amounts of hype. It also lets you reflect. I wrote most of the list below at about this time in 2011, the last time Auburn was set to play for a national championship. It was to be their first appearance since 1957. There are people in Jordan-Hare Stadium who waited all that time to watch their beloved team achieve that kind of success. And now we’re going to see them try again for the second time in four years, which is remarkable.
Football is an important part of the culture here, but Auburn is not a football team. Auburn is a community, a history, and sharing in a common experience. Auburn’s biggest dream is realizing her potential and Auburn’s greatest potential has always been her people.
And we’ve got a lot of people.
I want Auburn to win for:
A teacher – One of my favorite high school teachers, an Auburn grad. A girl – She was a big part of the reason I chose to apply to Auburn. Mr. Ethridge – Who gave me my scholarship. He died in 2009. Dean William Alverson – He helped raise that scholarship money and was my academic adviser. He retired just a few years ago. My roommate – He and his family, all Auburn people, and all nicer to me than they had to be during my first two years at Auburn. He’s going to Pasadena, and no, I’m not jealous. Chadd – A friend of more than 15 years, he gave me my start on air, was always full of advice, helped me build an incredible professional foundation. He’s never asked for a thing in return. For Jim and Rod and Andy and Bill and Paul – Auburn athletics wouldn’t sound the same without them. For an old man – I sat next to him during the 2004 season. He said simply, “I went to school here when it was API.” He was impressed by that perfect season, and I’m sure he’s amazed by this season, too. For my wife – She was undeclared until I brought her to her first game but she’s been an Auburn woman ever since. Now she teaches at Auburn and is the director of the public relations program. For the family in Section 52 – They adopted us and let them sit in their section for years. They remember the Barfield years. For the Browns – Another strong, proud, kind Auburn family that have been indescribably good to us over the years. For Shug and Doug and Pat and Terry and Tommy and Gene and Gus – And for all of their coaches and players and staffers, the people fans really mean when saying “We won.”
New additions to the list:
For the Hallmarks – Adam sat through last year and celebrated through this year. He’ll watch this BCS game shivering in some pub in Alaska, on his way to his new duty station. For the tailgating crew – War Drunj Eagle. For The War Eagle Reader – which loves like no other. War Eagle forever.
Mostly, I want this team to win for this team. We’ve seen great years, and this has by far been one of the best and most entertaining in many respects.
I wrote this, one of the few good football things I’ve written, before the 2011 BCS game, when everything those guys played for seemed to be more about everyone else. Now, I’m eager to celebrate a great season — I’ve said for the last three games, that we were going into the stadium to congratulate a team for a great performance this season — for the guys actually in the blue and orange.
Much has been written about this team turning around last year’s 3-9 effort. Less has been said about what these guys have gone through. Some of them are national champions. Some have two SEC championships. They’ve also changed head coaches. Some are playing for their third position coach. Some of them have lost parents. Others have had children. They’ve lost teammates. They’ve battled cancer. They’ve stuck together and demanded so much of themselves.
And still Heisman finalist Tre Mason told reporters: “We owed them that. Putting them through last year, we owed them a season like this.”
But, no, this is about them. They’ve succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of everyone but themselves. They’ve always believed.
We traveled all day yesterday. Up and out of my grandmother’s house, skipping breakfast to her mortification, before 8 a.m. Our route took us across regions both populated and sparse and rural. And also down gravel roads. Not even the good stuff, where the creek rocks have been crushed to dust and spit out to the side by previous generations of tires, but loose gravel roads.
Which might be unfair. It was on a detour. A bridge was out, you see, and the local crew that were in the middle of repairing the structure had helpfully hoisted road closed signs and a detour sign, but no actual detour. So we made our own, on roads that looked very much like what we’d traveled in nearly abandoned portions of Ireland this summer.
And from the gravel roads we made it back to the empty county roads and from there through sleepy southern towns and finally into Atlanta and to the place where we parked our car … just in time to miss the airport shuttle.
No matter, there will be another along in 15 minutes, we are right on schedule and so we are really playing with house money for an hour. So we park, unload the things that are going on the next leg of our holiday travels, leaving behind the first stages of clothes and things. The shuttle comes along, we climb on, meet a new young Auburn fan — he’d just chosen sides before Christmas, apparently, and was very pleased to tell us about the shirt he got for Christmas.
These are golden times, my man, and you’ve chosen wisely.
We got into the airport. I instantly lost track of my wife while fiddling about with a zipper or something on my luggage. That took 17 seconds. At 22 seconds, with my thoughtful, staring face firmly applied, a helpful airline employee asked if I was looking for something.
Turns out she was in the check-in line. (Who knew?) I’d found her myself. We checked. We made it through security, where we probably got ourselves on a watch list by hopping lines. We’d committed to one line before realizing the people there were still trying to reach their spring break destinations. So we changed to something that looked like your typically efficient government operation, rather than a Soviet toilet paper queue.
So down to the terminal train and then we found our gate, grabbed some food, finally and got on the plane. Our flight was uneventful, save for the three year old kid doing a wicked Billie Jean cover off and on.
And I had so hoped that flight would have a talent show.
We arrived in Connecticut, where it is cold, as you would expect. Good thing I brought two jackets! On the one hand, we drove and flew almost a full day. On the other hand, we covered more than 1,000 miles. It was an easy night after that, dinner with the in-laws, hauling luggage upstairs and so on.
This morning, we ventured out into the post-Christmas wilderness, and this:
They had a white Christmas, and there is still a little bit of the stuff lying around. It doesn’t impede anything, but it is cold enough to sit in one spot for four or five days without feeling like it is in anyone’s way.
So today we shopped. A visit to the empty mall here, a quick stop to the reasonably underwhelmed Apple store there. We got in and out of a high end district and hit a big name cosmetics store. We visited a haute couture kind of place for one thing or another — I was dizzy with it all by then — and the lady who worked there spoke with us like we were long-lost nieces and nephews.
She’d heard of Auburn. And it had registered enough that, isn’t there some sort of big game? And some sort of rivalry? It was interesting. People either live it or know of it. Or they are completely oblivious to it. But she had just the most passing knowledge — which, hey, good for her, I guess, a fashion store girl in New England knowing anything about the South and its diversions — and I had to explain how this silly little thing was so much a part of our local culture.
It kind of makes you dizzy.
We hit another place or two and then got our collective acts together. We went, with the in-laws and some family friends, to New York City, tonight, here:
At the Lincoln Center there is a performance of MacBeth, staring Ethan Hawke as the cursed mad king. They play the whole thing for the poetry rather than the emotion. Hawke is a much better mad king than a reluctant and treacherous one. It was a fun show, seeing Shakespeare is always good.
They rushed through a lot of really great stuff — this is Macbeth, so of course it is great — as if they just really wanted to get to the last battle, which felt thin for different reasons. Perhaps if they’d lose the rapid fire delivery, and let the audience think about the spaces in between the lines, the show would feel stronger.
We finally had dinner sometime around midnight, at some cafe on the way back home. My body has no concept of regularly spaced meals any more. We’ll get that fixed tomorrow.
Friday / photo — Comments Off on Our favorite ornaments 20 Dec 13
