Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

But, hey, this will be quick

We had dinner with our friend Paige tonight. Drove up to her house.

She let me take a picture of the famous Rory:

This is only slightly intimidating. I was shooting her cat with my phone. Paige is a photographer on the side. In fact, she shot our engagement:

It was 17 degrees with about nine inches of snow on the ground. Maybe more. We shot those at a park up the street from The Yankee’s parents’ home, a park where she’d played as a child. There’s a pavilion there. Under that roof, there was six inches of snow covering everything.

The next year she shot our wedding in Savannah.

It was well into the triple-digits that day.

It seems we can’t all get together without severe weather, so naturally it rained tonight.

By the time we got back home there was lots of rain.

We ate dinner at a Thai place called Somewhere in Bangkok. Good food, lousy website. The server was … well, she was as American as could be.

Today I fixed a printer problem, which is a piece of equipment normally beyond me. Samford won a huge baseball game in NCAA regional play. I uploaded three pictures to the Tumblr blog.

Also, don’t forget to check out Twitter.

Yeah it is thin. I’m not spending a lot of time on the computer just now.

Friday / history / journalism / links — Comments Off
25
May 12

Historic front pages

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / iPhone / photo — Comments Off
18
May 12

My old self again

I’ve been sneaking in a few rides this week. I huffed through 10 miles yesterday and 15 today, pronouncing myself fully healed from my amazingly persistent neck soreness.

That has been much better for a week and change, actually. The one thing I’ve struggled with since then was riding my bike. Something about being over the bars — in the drops or properly Flemish on the hoods — was giving me aches and pains. The looking up, to keep an eye on the road in front of me, had been bothersome even if I felt normal in pretty much every other way.

So I’ve been stretching my bike chain a bit this week. Whatever fitness I had are gone, but my neck feels better. Limited by time, I scurried around over yesterday’s 10 miles at what is, for me, a respectable pace.

Today I added to that, confident I am OK and just waiting impatiently for my legs to come back.

And so naturally I fell off my bike.

I’m at the top of one side of the hill on which our neighborhood rests upon. This is the largest hill in town — which, again, isn’t saying much compared to places with real elevation, but still. The one slightly tricky thing about it from this approach is that on this particular road you go up from an easy gradient into a slight right curve to a stop sign, which marks the crest of the hill. Now you have a road in front of you that goes from right to left.

I’m turning right, so naturally any oncoming cars from my left are the primary consideration here. Having reached the intersection, l take my right cleat out of the clipless pedal while simultaneously glancing left. There is a car. My shoe goes right back into the pedal. I fell over. (The car did not touch me.)

That was the part that happened the fastest. You know how, when you recount some memorable moment of life or death you have a 45-minute stream of conscious monologue you can return home with? Not this time.

Unclip, car, clip, ground.

And it was faster than that sentence. I landed on my right hip and arm, somehow managing to keep the bike off the ground with my legs. I think I might have gotten my left hand over, too, because that wrist hurt for a few minutes. I have two little scratches on my knee.

I’m fine. My bike is perfectly fine. My pride was slightly wounded.

Then again, I’m not a very good cyclist.

Just like riding a bike? Just like falling off of one, too.

But I got in 15 miles, which is a joke, really. That’s the most time I’ve had in the saddle in five weeks, though, and I finally feel comfortable about building up the distance again. It feels so good to feel good again.

About baseball, ugh.

Beautiful evening to be at the park. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. There were three Florida home runs, though, and plenty of other scores as the Gators beat Auburn 10-1.

At least they’ll be overconfident for tomorrow’s game, the finale of the regular season.

adventures / cycling / Friday / friends — Comments Off
11
May 12

A tale on travel day

Rode my bike yesterday. The Yankee and I set out to ride together, which is rare. Usually our schedules or her regimented training or my desire for long, meandering rides don’t allow us to venture out at the same time and going the same way.

She had trouble with her CatEye, the little computer that measures her speed and distance and time. There is a sensor attached to the bike’s fork and a little magnet attached to a spoke and the revolutions are beamed to the computer on the handlebars which do the math and, there you go, you’re cruising at an admirable speed. But she had problems. And then she fell over. She didn’t crash. She just fell. Still not sure how.

Did you know she was an All-American gymnast and a diver? She’s very graceful.

And so we pointed our wheels down the road chasing one another around the city’s bypass, through the subdivisions that dot the landscape, across the big intersection with the road that slices through the heart of town. After that we hit a new construction zone which covers about six miles of that bypass. Just under halfway around it we turned back in toward the campus.

And then when we hit the bypass on that side of things I called an audible and pointed to home. I did 10 miserable miles. This being the first time I’ve really been on my bike since April 9th. So while my neck and back finally feel better — I’ve tried to change my sleeping posture, which has been a big help — I’ve lost whatever little sliver of fitness I had built up.

Back to square one, then. And if you think that’s frustrating, well, you’re right.

Today is also a travel day. We spent most of the afternoon in the car, headed to Jackson, Ala., a tiny you-can’t get-there-from-here town to the southwest. Our friend Wendy is getting married tomorrow.

Tonight they had a little family get together at the bride’s parents’ home. There was also a shower, which I didn’t have to go to, fortunately. Instead I caught up with friends from Birmingham and Savannah and right there in Jackson.

This is the first time I’ve ever been to Wendy’s hometown. She has, for the entire decade-plus that I’ve known her, complained about how small it is. But they have 3G AND a Walmart. What else could they possibly need?

Tomorrow is the big day, though. We once counted up our friends and thought Wendy’s wedding would be the last one we’d go to for a long time. Never say this. This will be the second wedding we’ve attended in less than a month. We have another in three weeks.

And we’re running out of present ideas.

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4
May 12

Music and demographics and embarrassment

Sometimes I wish I knew something about music, just on the off chance that I’d get to be a part of something musically moving. Like this, for example. At the end of their U.S. tour, Bruce Springsteen took a request from the crowd and the E Street Band played one for Levon:

I posted some Levon Helm videos the day before he died. You can see them all here.

In more sobering news, Birmingham Business Journal reports that Alabama lost 36,100 private sector jobs in the last decade. There are less than 1.5 million private sector jobs in the state these days.

There are 4.8 million people in the state. How can there be that few private sector jobs?

The Census says 37.5 percent of the state is younger than 18 and 7.6 percent are older than 65. So that’s 45 percent young and old. And if you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which is increasingly becoming a funny thing to say these days — there is 7.6 percent unemployment in the state, so that gets us up to 52 percent of the state.

And here’s a list of government populations by city, which is eye-opening. According to that list 135 of the state’s 512 cities are above the U.S. median for percent of government employees. Not sure how that list accounts for residents in unincorporated areas, which are prominent in rural states.

If you aren’t doing mobile media you’re behind:

(G)rowth of mobile video usage is increasing dramatically. 108 billion videos were watched on mobile phones in 2011, almost trebling to 280 billion in 2012. However, unlike apps, this isn’t translating into symbiotic revenue levels. Despite a 23.8% revenue growth, Video is likely to account for a mere 2.4% ($3.6 billion) of total mobile media revenues in 2012.

Food as art, history and sociology. I don’t think about these things this way on my own, but this is a wonderful read:

Q. Shouldn’t we all be more in touch with our food heritage? How can we go about doing that?

A. When you follow a family recipe, you have an opportunity to bring life to your family story. What sustained your ancestors and your parents? It becomes exciting because you can say, “This is what my so-and-so ate to celebrate the end of World War II.”

Michael Twitty, the A above, is taking a tour of the South — he’s calling it the “Southern Discomfort Tour” — a journey to follow his ancestral path across the region, covering almost 4,500 miles.

How not to do television news.

And how to embarrass yourself on air in one easy step. I’d embed the video, but that television station hasn’t discovered that autoplay is evil. So I’ll link to it.

I’ll be showing that in class. If you can watch it more than once, I applaud you. But go watch some more Bruce instead.