Alabama’s second baseman, Kyle Overstreet who is really quite good, committed an error in the sixth inning tonight. Naturally the helpful fans at Plainsman Park pointed this out.
By then Auburn had the game under control. They found their first lead in conference play, which came in their 66th inning of conference play. The Tigers’ bats came alive again in the fifth, putting four more runs on the board and Auburn finally won one, 6-3.
Check out the highlights, particularly the gem in the ninth inning at the three minute mark:
So, now, Auburn is 10-43 against the SEC in the major sports – football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball – since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. It has been the worst year ever since Title IX in terms of a cumulative conference record.
But a beautiful day otherwise. Got out for a quick ride on the bike and was about seven miles from home on a quite road that has been closed because the bridge two miles down was out for construction. I heard a nice ting!-ting!-ting! doppler off to the left and behind me.
It seemed important to stop, to see what had just fallen off my bicycle. And I was happy to realize that the brakes were still working and the wheels weren’t falling off.
Finally I realized it was the metal clamp that holds my bag to the seat post and saddle rails. So we spent a while looking for the parts. I’d hit a bump and something felt loose, so up and down the shoulders, stomping on plumes of grass and bending over to peer at ever dark piece of material near the roadway.
After about an hour I found the metallic piece, realized that was the only part I was missing, so that’s a win. I only have to replace two screws. And get home in time for the baseball game, managing only an impressive 10 miles for my troubles.
But I had a turkey burger for dinner, we closed down a restaurant with our friends Adam and Jessica and that somehow makes it all better.
It was a good afternoon as we head into a great weekend. Hope yours is even better!
“It is tough,” she said, “to be that enthusiastic at that this time of day.”
She meant the morning, trying to wake up for breakfast, which is something to be excited about. And it was delicious:
And then it was cloudy and cold. Well, there was that part of the afternoon were it rained. That really changed things up. All week long. That’s pretty much been the way of it this week.
Today we learned that Harvey Updyke could be back on the street by May. I’m over the guy. He has so many probation conditions I’m sure he’ll get picked up again before too long.
More importantly something collapsed at the newly renovated terminal at the Birmingham airport. A family was hurt. Turned out they were standing under one of those large flight info screens when it fell off the wall. I was listening to the fire department scanner chatter. Three rescue units were there. And then a fourth and fifth were dispatched.
Meanwhile they were answering calls to an elderly person with trouble breathing, a teen who couldn’t see and a car crashing into a power pole. Listening to a scanner is addictive.
Late in the evening we learned a 10-year-old died in the airport accident. The people that picked up the info screen off the family said it weighed between 300 and 400 pounds. The mother had some serious leg injuries. Her younger children were also taken to the hospital. They were on vacation, returning home, and just passing through the Birmingham airport.
In a happier story, the US played Costa Rica in a World Cup qualifier and someone thought booking this in a Colorado venue in March would be a good idea. Craziest non-soccer game I’ve ever watched at the international level:
Welcome back YouTube Cover Theater, where we celebrate the talent of regular people who are playing on their sofas, at their bars and on their decks, in front of a camera and, now, the world. We do this by choosing a feature act and showing off covers of their original work. This week’s inspiration is Old Crow Medicine Show:
James River Blues:
There have been some 5,200 views of that one. I can’t believe this one of Caroline has less than 2,000:
This one just looks older because of the sepia:
Every other Old Crow Medicine Show cover is of Wagon Wheel. So we’ll just go to Mumford and Sons:
Hope you have a great weekend, and that it is a little warmer and a little drier where you are.
Google Reader is shutting down. Google is killing off a power tool used by their power users, citing low traffic and growth.
So, naturally, in everyone’s attempts to find suitable replacements other reader services are crashing under the strain. This is a low traffic tool to Google now, though they haven’t seemed to entertained the idea of just letting the thing live without their touch — which wouldn’t be much different than the way they’ve treated Reader anyway.
Jeff Jarvis, who literally wrote the book on Google:
This is the problem of handing over one’s digital life to one company, which can fail or unilaterally kill a service users depend on. Google has the right to kill a shrinking service. But it also has a responsibility to those who depended on it and in this case to the principle of RSS and how it has opened up the web and media. I agree with Tim O’Reilly that at the minimum, Google should open-source Reader.
The killing of Reader sends an unfortunate signal about whether we can count on Google to continue other services we come to need.
“Organization is key,” said Eileen Melnick McCarthy, senior communications specialist at the Canadian Foundation for Healthcare Improvement in Ottawa. “Remember the reporter is your client, so do what it takes to ensure they get what they need.”
There are six tips, including pre-plan, notifying the media, being prepared and more.
How do you walk up to strangers and ask them questions? How do you get people — tight-lipped cops, jargon-spouting experts, everyday folks who aren’t accustomed to being interviewed — to give you useful answers? How do you use quotes effectively in your stories?
That one also has several helpful tips including, you guessed it, be prepared.
Salon takes a negative view of the media ecosystem. It defies excerption, but here’s the final ‘graph:
There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When managers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard students with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to “success.” No one has ever made profits doing quality education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make their money by not teaching. In digital news, the same dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion.
The move is part of a broader expansion the company is making into television and digital
[…]
For magazine publishers, many of whom are struggling with shrinking readership, building an online portfolio is seen as crucial as both a promotional platform and a new revenue stream.
From Best Buy to CVS and from Kroger to Macy’s, the biggest buyers of newspaper advertising have launched sophisticated smartphone apps to establish increasingly direct and profitable relationships with individual customers.
These efforts should give publishers the shivers, because this new channel represents a major threat to the retail lineage that constitutes half of what’s left of the advertising sold by newspapers – an industry, lest we forget, whose collective print and digital ad sales are less than half the record $49.4 billion achieved in 2005.
Smartphone apps appeal to retailers, for starters, because they are far cheaper than buying full-page ads and preprint inserts in newspapers. Perhaps even more compelling to merchants is that apps enable them to precisely target offers to individuals, thus achieving not only happier customers but also fatter tickets at the checkout line.
A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.
Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.
“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”
The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.
According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.
“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.
[…]
“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.
Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.
When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.
The air, my mother said, used to be brown.
Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.
And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.
At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:
We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”
The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”
Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.
Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:
Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.
I’m not feeling any better, really. Mostly because I can’t sleep, I think. I wake myself up coughing and then 30 minutes later I wake up looking for handkerchiefs. So, this evening, it was time for the gymnastics meet and The Yankee said “Do you even want to go?”
Since it is just the sinuses I can not-breathe there as well as I can here. And, besides, this was the big fundraiser event.
Also, we had to see if Auburn could score 196+ for the sixth time in a row. They did. That’s a program record and even if you know as little about gymnastics as I do, it is an impressive record.
Even more impressive, the gymnast who won her fourth all-around of the season is only a freshman. The ladies are ranked 11th, the highest they’ve been in four years. They set a program-record high score just last week. There’s a big future ahead for this program.
There are video highlights in that link. I’d share them here, but the athletic department has chosen not to write an embed code for them.
We had pizza tonight, which was not as good as breakfast was this morning. This has been a strange little illness when it comes to food. I’ve maintained my appetite, but I’ve found nothing especially interesting to eat all week, except for breakfast this morning. I’d been looking forward to that for days. And it was delicious.
Now I’m going to see if I can break my streak of two consecutive nights of tossing and turning.
