“I’ll be out here for days. Phew. Hurting my knees!”

How many of these do you have to do?

“All of them. A lot.”

He’s painting all of those little fence posts. The new look, Charles says twice, will match the paint scheme on the entrance gate down the hill. He’s sanding and scraping and painting and he figures it’ll take him two or three more days. He says it is about 15 minutes or so per post. But, when he’s down, they’ll all match the entrance gate, you know what color green it is, he says for a third time.

There is not a dot of green paint on his white pants.

A gentleman walks by as we’re talking and they know each other. He shifts the little cushion he’s kneeling on, happy for the break. Happy to be outside, happy for nice weather. And, when he’s done, they’ll be easier to repaint the next time. They’ll already match that gate.

I took this picture like this, with his face underexposed, for two reasons. I noticed, in the few minutes that I talked with him, that none of the students passing by even seemed to notice he was there. They were too distracted thinking about their next deadline or the latest drama or whatever was going on in their phone.

Second, I’m forever telling our journalism students that the best stories we never write about on campus feature the people who make the place neat, keep it so clean and treat it so lovingly. We’re only here for a few years. For some of these folks, this is a career. And the beautification of things is an important aspect of the job. We take a lot of things for granted.

Things to read … so we don’t take everything for granted.

The Mysterious Polio-Like Disease Affecting American Kids:

More than 100 cases of a polio-like syndrome causing full or partial paralysis of the arms or legs have been seen in children across the United States in recent months, according to doctors attending the annual meeting of the Child Neurology Society.

Symptoms have ranged from mild weakness in a single arm to complete paralysis of arms, legs, and even the muscles controlling the lungs, leading in some cases to a need for surgery to insert a breathing tube, doctors said.

The outbreak, which appears to be larger and more widespread than what has largely been previously reported by medical and news organizations, has neurologists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scrambling to find out what is causing these cases and how best to treat it.

“We don’t know how to treat it, and we don’t know how to prevent it,” said Keith Van Haren, a child neurologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. “It actually looks just like polio, but that term really freaks out the public-health people.”

10 Tips for Delivering Awesome Professional Development

The star makes all the difference … Slow STARt: Fewer than 1 percent have registered for new secure IDs:

Alabamians are slowly moving toward new federal identification standards the U.S. Department of Homeland Security says will go into effect sometime in 2016.

As of most recent numbers, about 37,000 Alabamians have registered for a “STAR ID,” the new secure driver’s licenses and identification cards that in coming years will be required for things such as boarding airplanes and entering federal facilities.

That’s fewer than 1 percent of the state’s estimated 3.8 million licensed drivers and ID card holders.

The state literature on the subject is here. Aside from additional documentation to get that little star, I haven’t yet seen an explanation as to how this is helpful — or keeps you safe — or why it is important. But, hey! If you don’t fit neatly in the arbitrary schedule the state has established here, you can pay for a new license because you’ll need that star! Don’t ask why you’re getting taxed again; just pay, I guess.

This is super cool. Why The New York Times built a tool for crowdsourced time travel:

Flipping through old magazine and newspaper ads is like throwing the switch on the world’s simplest time machine. Suddenly it’s 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts have just made the round trip from the moon, Abbey Road just dropped, and for the low price of $29.95 you can enjoy an “electric computerized football game [that] lets you and your opponent call offensive and defensive plays.”

This is the benefit a paper like The New York Times finds in its archive: the ability to pluck moments from the historical record out of the past — the small steps and giant leaps, but also the assembled fragments and cultural artifacts that often share space on the page. While you can dig deep into the stories of the past with TimesMachine, uncovering specific ads isn’t as easy. The team in The New York Times R&D Lab wants to rectify that with Madison, a new tool for identifying ads across the newspaper’s archive. What makes Madison different is that it relies on Times readers — not a bot or algorithm — to do the tricky work of spotting and tagging the ads of the past.

I wish every news center could pull this off tomorrow. I’d love to see that.

Talked about this profile in class today, Michael Jordan has not left the building:

Back in the office after his vacation on a 154-foot rented yacht named Mister Terrible, he feels that relaxation slipping away. He feels pulled inward, toward his own most valuable and destructive traits. Slights roll through his mind, eating at him: worst record ever, can’t build a team, absentee landlord. Jordan reads the things written about him, the fuel arriving in a packet of clips his staff prepares. He knows what people say. He needs to know, a needle for a hungry vein. There’s a palpable simmering whenever you’re around Jordan, as if Air Jordan is still in there, churning, trying to escape. It must be strange to be locked in combat with the ghost of your former self.

Smoke curls off the cigar. He wears slacks and a plain white dress shirt, monogrammed on the sleeve in white, understated. An ID badge hangs from one of those zip line cords on his belt, with his name on the bottom: Michael Jordan, just in case anyone didn’t recognize the owner of a struggling franchise who in another life was the touchstone for a generation. There’s a shudder in every child of the ’80s and ’90s who does the math and realizes that Michael Jordan is turning 50. Where did the years go? Jordan has trouble believing it, difficulty admitting it to himself. But he’s in the mood for admissions today, and there’s a look on his face, a half-smile, as he considers how far to go.

You live with the notion of age and you grow to realize it is coming for you. Maybe you even make your peace with that in your own good time. Either way, there are some institutional figures, you figure, to whom entropy should not apply. Michael Jordan is one of those. I can slow down (even more), MJ should be able to dunk from the free throw line forever.

This only gets harder and stranger, I suppose. With everything so mediated, movie stars will remain trim and handsome through all time, musicians will always rebellious and Jordan will be young in highlights forever. Who ages when everything is available for recall and repeat?