Surgery, that is. Saw my ortho today for the latest check up. I waited in his waiting room for 40 minutes. First time I wasn’t just whisked inside. I waited in an exam room for quite some time too. He spent about four minutes with me. Checked my range of motion, heard my complaints and said everything was coming along just as it should. Even my complaints are normal.
That’s the finest titanium from Germany. Hopefully the screws are of equal craftsmanship. There’s no need to have six screws loose.
I wrote, a while back, about Fabian Cancellara:
This is what I don’t understand: Professional cyclist Fabian Cancellara broke his collarbone at the beginning of April. He fell in a race in a bad way. He had a quadruple fracture. I’ve seen the X-ray, it was bad. And yet, just two months later, he won the prologue of the Tour de France and held the lead for days. I’m not making a comparison, because that’s just foolish. Cancellara is a terrific cyclist and a hard man, but how did he do that?
I asked the surgeon about that.
“Hey, doc, clearly this guy is a superior athlete. I’m not what he is, but how did he do that?”
“Training, therapy, incentive.”
“I know that’s his livelihood,” I said “but how did he endure that?”
“That’s not your livelihood is it?”
“No.”
“Then don’t worry about it.”
I’ll just console myself that he spent more time lying on the ground than I did. They put him on a gurney. I walked off.
I have older memories. I remember a few things that happened in the place where we lived when I was four. That’s about where it starts for me. And it is increasingly foggy up until about … I dunno … 15 minutes ago.
Sometimes I wonder about the false memories. The oldest memory I have, as I have described it, didn’t actually exist. We never lived in a place with a yard like that, I’m told. Did I see Empire Strikes Back in the theater? Or was it a re-release of the original Star Wars? Do I remember the I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke campaign? It started long before I was born, but did it run long enough for me to eventually notice? Or was that some reproduction?
Picking out what is right and what is wrong on the conveyor belt of your brain is like pulling getting that one bad grape. Squishy and bitter. And it puts you ill at ease about the next grape, too. Ancient memory is a tricky thing, but for as long as I can recall I’ve wanted bookshelves with a ladder attached to them:
I have a lot of books. We turned a room in our home into a library. It has a fireplace. This is serious. We have bookshelves in other rooms because there isn’t enough room in the library. And yet we still don’t have enough books for the bookshelf ladders. You can’t have one. You need at least two. That’s the mark of a good library.
I saw that one in a bookstore today. We hit two today, after a late breakfast. I found the book I wanted at the second bookstore. It wasn’t on the shelf at the first place, but I did see an employee playing checkers on his computer. It was slow. Bookstores here will pick up in the next few days, though, when the college kids come back to town.
You know who doesn’t come back? Anything to Olympic venues. Surf around and you’ll find plenty of complaints about facilities rusting away in Beijing or going to seed in Greece. Apparently they aren’t even showing up to begin with in London:
After a week of unusually quiet streets, idling cabs and easily navigated shops, fears of the Gridlock Games have transformed into complaints about the Ghost Town Olympics.
Experts say tens of thousands of foreign tourists without tickets to the Olympic Games appear to have decided to skip London, bowing to official warnings of stifling overcrowding — a forecast that ignored the lessons of other Olympic host cities that have emptied out during the Games over the past 20 years. In even larger numbers, these experts say, Britons themselves, including tens of thousands who normally commute to work in London, have heeded official appeals and stayed home.
Aside from that timeless crutch of the lazy journalist, “experts say” there are plenty of lessons here. The biggest two are maybe it is a good thing Chicago didn’t get the Games. Maybe bids should be limited to cities with the venues already in place or cities … elsewhere. Boondoogle: not in my backyard.
By the way. I wrote last week about Auburn’s first Olympians. Here is a picture of the first one, Snitz Snyder, taken from the 1928 Glomerata.
He ran in the 400 meter race in 1928. If he had the race of his life — the race he qualified with was a national record, 48 seconds — he might have made the medal stand. For comparison: the world record in 1928 was 47 seconds and the U.S. record today is 43.18.
Snyder came home and became a legendary coach in Bessemer, Ala. He has a football stadium named after him today. The gentleman standing next to him is the great track coach Wilbur Hutsell. The Auburn track and field facilities are named in his honor.
I did a bit of hasty counting today. At one point this afternoon Auburn athletes, as a nation, would have ranked 44th on the all time Olympic medal list. The Tigers are coming after YOU, Kazakhstan. This list doesn’t, of course, count the Jimmy Carter 1980 Games. There were a few guys on that U.S. Olympic roster projected to compete for medals in Moscow. Impressive stuff for a university.
One other Olympic note of limited use, the most retweeted thing I wrote on Twitter today: NASA is landing something on a DIFFERENT PLANET and airing it live. Your move, NBC.
You start noticing third party effects when people you’ve never heard of start retweeting you. When you see it more than a few times you start to wonder about it. I ran that Tweet through a tracker and found it reached something like 28,000 accounts. Of course not all of those people were online at the time, but that’s still a nice statistic for a piece of sarcasm. The conclusion, we’re all happy to complain about NBC.
I began following this Smithsonian blog on Tumblr last week. (Follow my Tumblr, too!) They are quick hits, and mostly pictures. I traded out a few other sites for this one. (I’m trying to cut back.) But this one is worth seeing, and this post today proved it. The person that uploaded it asked “What’d be going through your mind in this photo moment?”
I’d be thinking This is the GREATEST thing that has EVER happened to me!
There aren’t enough explanation points in that air tank. I’d suck it down to 200 pounds in no time.
When the real serious rains blow through now we think about the 2009 West Virginia game. I wrote about that and have some nice pictures to memorialize the day. (Rain was in the forecast and I wisely left my big camera at home that night.) We sat in that over-crowded concourse for an awfully long time and I wondering: How many places could you be crushed like this for … almost an hour now and watch all of these people maintain their good spirits? Not many, I’d bet.
Is it football season yet? We’re only about four weeks away …
This isn’t a national favoritism, but a concession to bias against theatricality: Aside from admiring a bit of stagecraft Olympic opening ceremonies are pointless. Their just flippant pieces of performance art, and let’s leave it at that, OK? The guys tongiht in the ultra neon Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band uniforms, interspersed with the men in top hats doing the British running man are lost on me.
That’s alright, right? There’s no merit in the contradiction of a world now smitten with ecological motifs pumping in carcinogens to remind audience members of the Industrial Revolution. Yes the fumes they pumped in for authenticity are a drop in the bucket (Or, as organizers said: Here’s what you missed when you sat out Beijing!) but it sends the wrong vaporous message. Kind of like monsters in hospitals and in your beds. Good night kids!
Or maybe I’m concentrating on the wrong things. J.K. Rowling was there and she, as we learned from the NBC narration — how on earth would we know what to make of all of this without Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira vapidly explaining things — “made it cool” for kids to read again. If I may be an Olympic buzzkill: parent’s fault.
Rowan Atkinson was Rowan Atkinson and that makes you think of all the other prominent Brits you hoped you’d see: McKellen! Bowie! Jagger! Waters! Idol! Idle! You got Daniel Craig as James Bond and you could be cynical about that, but it was a cute bit with the queen.
And while I was disappointed that the kids in the musical portion of the show hadn’t bothered to learn the words to Bohemian Rhapsody I found it more off-putting that Munich and World War II were ignored altogether. Those were decisions made by the British Olympic Association. NBC’s decisions were equally unfortunate. Saudi Arabia has female Olympians for the first time ever, not that you knew that from watching Lauer and Bob Costas pun away the evening. Here’s their entrance. Worse, perhaps, was the empty mention Costas gave the organizers for not including a tribute to Munich. He’d promised to call out the IOC, but his little spiel was so tepid it felt like someone got to him. And NBC left out a tribute to victims of the 7/7 terrorist attacks. That editorial decision was made so you could see Ryan Seacrest could make sure cameras saw him next to interview Michael Phelps.
But that’s just the opening ceremonies for you. The local guy gets up to express his pride. Everyone has had a colorful party and everything came off just as they intended for the evening. And then he introduces the head of the IOC and you think whatever you think of vague international organizations without oversight.
I just show up for the torch. We discussed this tonight. Our home’s foremost expert and researcher of all things Olympics and I rated the torch experiences of our lifetimes identically.
The world was different. Los Angeles was different. The torch was different in 1984. Gina Hemphill ran through the dark tunnel and into the evening light, carrying a torch and the opening of the Los Angeles Games and the genes of her grandfather — Alabama-native, Olympic great and Hitler beater-extraordinaire Jesse Owens (perhaps you’ve heard of him?) — into the coliseum. She ran a lap around the track and even the athletes were exuberant. They rushed to greet and encourage her, and they almost blocked her path, twice. “Everybody can say they had an Olympic moment,” she said years later, and it felt like we had. Maybe it was because the Soviets stayed home.
She handed the torch off to Rafer Johnson, a decathlete from the 1960 games, who looked in 1984 like he was still ready to go for the gold. (Today he might merely compete, but to be fair, the man is 77. Looks great, too.) He sprinted up that long, long line of steps and stood above the world, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. He held the torch over his head and the flame caught, going through the Olympic rings and up to the cauldron above. It would have been even more dramatic at night. Olympic producers would get wise to television’s needs soon enough.
There was a different kind of oversight in Seoul, where they loosed hundreds of white doves into the stadium and jets drew Olympic rings in they sky with their contrails. Sohn Kee-chung brought the flame into the stadium, he was running knees high, waving to his countrymen. He was the first Korean to medal at the Olympics, at the Berlin Games in 1936, in the marathon. He passed the torch to another person, who ran it under the cauldron, who shared the flame with three others. Those three took the world’s slowest elevator ride to the to top, while the rest of the world said “OK, now what?” in 126 languages. When they got there, several of the doves were … well … if you watch this you’ll realize no one thought this through:
We’ll come to a day when we think of everything from the 1980s as washed out and blocky, a Baby Boomer response to cubism, I’m convinced of it. Archived video online will be the reason. There’s a period where everything from the advent of color television to about, oh, 2003, just doesn’t YouTube very well.
Someone else was also concerned about that when it comes to the 1992 Barcelona Games, and so they uploaded a Spanish-language high-definition version of the torch ceremony. Herminio Menendez, a sprint canoer who won silver in 1976 and a bronze and silver in 1980 ran in the flame, which looked brilliant in the night sky. He ran a lap around the stadium under a lone spotlight before passing the flame to Juan Antonio San Epifanio, who won a silver on the men’s basketball team in 1984. Now Epi is one of the greatest basketball players Europe has ever known, so it was fitting that he ran around and then through the Olympians to find Antonio Rebollo, the now famous, anonymous, archer who competed in the Paralympic Games for Spain:
In reality, he had not actually landed the arrow in the middle of the cauldron – he had fired it way outside the stadium as instructed.
Organisers dared not risk his aim failling short and landing into the grandstand and instead told him to fire it directly over the target area… some pyrotechnics-helpful camera angles would take care of the visual effect.
By then though, the opening ceremony had become an Olympic event in itself – longer than the marathon and much less gripping on a spectator level.
Ruins it for you, doesn’t it?
The Americans brought out four-time discus gold medalist Al Oerter to bring the flame into the Atlanta Games in 1996. Oerter handed off the flame to bronze medal boxer Evander Holyfield, who invited Voula Patoulidou, the first Greek female medalist, to join him. Together they ran to four-time gold medal swimmer Janet Evans who took the torch up the long, long ramp. There the music stopped, and over the stadium you heard people calling his name: Muhammad Ali.
Pretty dramatic stuff. Especially when you wondered if that remote line rig was going to work.
For some reason my memories of the Sydney Games are a bit dimmer, but it is visually arresting still. Herb Elliot, an Australian gold winner in track and field brought the flame in. These Olympics celebrated the 100th anniversary of female competition, and so a host of Australia’s female medalists carried the flame around: Betty Cuthbert, Raelene Boyle, Dawn Fraser, Shirley Strickland, Shane Gould and Debbie Flintoff-King. Finally it came to a young woman, Australian aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman, who wore a white body suit and ran up flights of white stairs, through an orchestra and then walked on water. She lit the water at her feet, which burned in a circle and then rose above her. Now we’re just letting the engineers show off:
And that makes it less interesting, really. By the time that Greece rolled around in 2004 there was a wire walker flying through the air, and then two more, floating above the Olympians. They pantomimed a long running stride, which allowed NBC to take a commercial break. (You just come to loathe NBC after a while, don’t you? I’m sure every other network in every other country took that break, too. The Games had long since become a television program.)
Nikos Galis, a prominent Greek basketball player started the final stage of the torch run. We learned that Pele, Nelson Mandela and even Tom Cruise (OMG!) has carried this torch. Do you think these guys use a good anti-bacterial soap after the honor of carrying the torch? So many people handle the torch — and even Tom Cruise! — that’s just an invitation for a cold.
The Greek torch was a handsome one though. Not overdone, just right.
Galis dished to Mimis Domazos, a famous Greek soccer player from the 1960s. Then came hurdles champion Voula Patoulidou. (Surely making her one of the few people who’ve carried the flame in more than one Olympics.) She passed the torch to weightlifting medalist Kakhi Kakhiashvili and he delivered it to Ioannis Melissanidis, the 1996 floor exercise champion in men’s gymnastics. Finally the flame found Nikolaos Kaklamanakis, a gold medalist in sailing.
He … well, let’s let the dispassionate voice of Wikipedia tell the tale:
The torch was finally passed to the 1996 Olympic sailing champion Nikolaos Kaklamanakis, who lit a giant cigar-shaped tapered column resembling a torch — not, as usual, a cauldron — to burn during the duration of the 2004 Summer Olympics. As Kaklamanakis ascended the steps to light the cauldron, the cauldron seemed to bow down to him, symbolizing that despite advance of technology, technology is still a creation and tool of humanity and that it was meant to serve humanity’s needs. The ceremony concluded with a breathtaking fireworks display.
Seemed … symbolizing … breathtaking … That’s good editorial tone. Also the writer of that passage seems to think that tech still works for us. How quaint.
More wires at the Beijing Games. And there was a children’s chorus singing things that may or may not have been words. Seven of China’s most respected Olympic medalists ran the torch around the outside of the stadium and ultimately the final honor fell to Li Ning, the country’s biggest winner at their first Olympics, in 1984.
And at the end, it just looked like that occasional firework with the impossibly fast fuse: a terrifyingly good idea that could have gone either way:
Li Ning probably had the worst view for the footage of those previous torch relays, which was perhaps the nicest touch of the show. Maybe it was that feedback or perhaps it was some other reason, but the air walking trend has at least been halted.
Let the people run, we say.
We also agreed that the Barcelona lighting was the best. But now that I recall there were shenanigans I might have to return to the 1984 and 1996 Games for my favorite piece of Olympic theater. That’s probably just an American bias, though.
Went out for our weekly breakfast today to Price’s Barbecue House. The Yankee I ordered, I grabbed a table so I could find a seat safely. I’ve become very protective of my self since the injury.
I have the BLT with egg and cheese. She has a biscuit. We split an order of hashbrowns. We glance at the news, watch the people, and try to guess at the athletes that sometimes come and go.
My favorite time is after we eat. When we’re just sitting there in the quiet and slow late morning. That little part of the week is one of my favorite, and should last much longer.
After that we went to James Brothers Bikes, the local bike shop we chose to frequent because most of the people that work there are great, and none of them identify with flower power. They are great for advice and for all of the smaller things I might need to buy.
I prefer a bike shop in Homewood for maintenance, I think, because when I ask them about things, or to do things, they jump right on it.
But James Brothers is great. The Yankee bought me a trainer the other day and had to stop back by to pick up the front wheel mount. They’d been out of stock because no one buys trainers in the summer. That’s a winter activity. Or an injured activity. And since I can’t ride on the road for five or six weeks I need a new activity. Anyway, when they found out I was hurt (“He was just in here!” and I had been. I bought some chain lubricant just four days before I hurt myself.) they gave me a nice store-branded glass as a consolation prize.
(I can’t ride the trainer for several more weeks. I can rest my hand on the handlebars right now, but I can’t put any weight on it.)
So we picked up the front wheel mount and said hello. They asked about my recovery and I demonstrated my toughness by taking off the brace, which I don’t even wear anymore anyway. And then we promptly returned home, where I could sit in my chair and rest my aching shoulder for the rest of the day.
I’m sore. I’m tired of hurting. And tired. I haven’t had a decent night of sleep since hurting myself and being tired isn’t helping matters much. So instead of complaining, let’s just change the subject.
I sat at this desk the other day:
It belonged to flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker when he was running Eastern Airlines.
Race car driver, pilot, ace, war hero, Medal of Honor winner, businessman and more, Eddie Rickenbacker is one of the great American icons of the first half of the 20th Century. He died quietly, almost forgotten in 1973. My history professor, the great W. David Lewis (1931-2007) of Auburn University, talked glowingly of Rickenbacker. He researched, for 15 years, his hero — including during the year or so I took his classes — and his book, came out in 2005.
Lewis was a character, full of life and passion for his varied interests. He was a renowned professor of the history of technology, loved cathedrals, pipe organs and, of course, aviation. I saw the autobiography, thought of Dr. Lewis and picked it up. On of these days I’ll pick up my professor’s book; I have to after reading these reviews.
I also met a man last December who worked for Rickenbacker at Eastern Air Lines. He told a story of having a real bad flight, being worked up about and then giving Rickenbacker, the president, an earful … only he didn’t realize who he was talking to. Rickenbacker nearly died in a plane crash in 1941 (dented skull, head injuries, shattered left elbow and crushed nerve, paralyzed left hand, broken ribs, crushed hip socket, twice-broken pelvis, severed nerve in his left hip, broken knee and an eyeball expelled from the socket) and was adrift in the Pacific, dangerously close to the Japanese, for 24 days in 1942. Rickenbacker won his Medal of Honor for attacking, on his own, seven German planes, shooting down two in 1918. He also won seven Distinguished Service Crosses. Eddie Rickenbacker knew a few things about having a tough day (His book begins, “My life has been filled with adventures that brought me face to face with death.”) so he let the indiscretion slide.
Because Dr. Lewis wrote the definitive biography on Eddie Rickenbacker, he was also able to convince his estate to donate many of his papers and belongings to Auburn. That desk sits in the special collections section of the RBD Library.
You aren’t supposed to sit at that desk, the librarian told me, but “You don’t look like your up to anything, though.”
So military and aviation buffs should now be jealous that I’ve sat at the great man’s desk. I could have opened the desk drawers to see what was inside, but that seemed a more private thing.
Instead, I read some turn-of-the-20th century recollections from some of the old locals. Some of those notes will get shared here, too, eventually. Probably in the next few weeks when I’ll basically be confined to the arm chair.
