Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

adventures / Friday / iPhone / overwriting / video — Comments Off
12
Aug 11

Back at home

Caught a two more sessions, had lunch with a friend, listened to my adviser give some tips on a panel and then we rushed to the airport.

And these are my parting thoughts about St. Louis. The cynical consensus seemed to be that people would have preferred a different conference location, but that could be that folks found little to do downtown, diagnosed the WiFi as lousy and had already experienced a 6 a.m. fire alarm.

I’ve only been there twice, and the first visit to St. Louis was on a long layover that let us discover the cross-town trip on the MetroLink to the arch, an eye-opener for many in our little group, and a few minutes at the arch. I’m no expert. There might not be a lot to do, as some people claimed, after you’ve seen the arch and the Cardinals and gone to either Six Flags or Budweiser, or for the hearty, both. But we didn’t come to do those things. St. Louis has seen some hard times, like most everyone else along the Mississippi, even when it wasn’t the Big Muddy that brought those times downstream. But the people we met this trip have all been friendly and kind. If you so much as walk around with a curious look on your face people were willing to stop and offer directions, even if you didn’t need it. People were chatting with strangers in the “We’re all in this together” sense, even if you didn’t know what you were in.

We’re long on hospitality where I’m from, but they have no shortage of it in St. Louis, either.

I did not get to try the barbecue steak sandwich, but maybe next time.

Our hotel was nice. We crashed with a friend, and the pullout sofa could have been much worse.

The airport, is another tragic matter. It took 52 minutes to join the security line and make it through the other side of the metal detectors. A careless TSA guy almost crushed The Yankee with a tall stack of those ubiquitous gray tubs. He did not notice or care. The people working there know they are in a bad spot, the passengers let them hear it, and there’s not much they can do.

They have five detector screening stations. Three were opened. And this was not, we’re told, an unusual crush at the checkpoint. “We don’t have enough people” muttered the second ID checking person. Really? There’s only 20 percent of the country unemployed or underemployed, and most of them would look good in blue. St. Louis County was at an unadjusted 8.8 percent earlier this summer, and everyone is convinced these numbers have been depressed. It doesn’t get much more shovel-ready than a small government job, and yet here we are.

This isn’t about jobs in St. Louis, though, that nightmare is about staffing. This is being two waiters short on Valentine’s Day, only Valentine’s Day is every day.

So we’d arrived at the airport with just over an hour to spare and barely made it to the plane in time. That was nice, but at least my shoes and toiletries are safe. Oh, and the people in line, the poor regulars that fly through this airport frequently, they secretly loathe the place. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. This is what air travel has become.

Oh, and this:

Home, after an inordinate pause to get a jetway in Atlanta. That narrowed and closed our window for barbecue in Newnan, where we learned about the town’s two Medal of Honor winners, Col. Joe M. Jackson and Maj. Steven W. Pless. They received their medals on the same day, and the legend goes that LBJ said something like “There must be something in the water down in Newnan.”

Read the details about what those two great men did and you’ll realize: he was right.

Dinner in town, pizza at Mellow Mushroom, marveling at the suddenly full streets. Everyone is back in town, marking the almost-end of summer.

It could go on a bit longer; I wouldn’t mind.

adventures / Auburn / books / football / Friday / iPhone / memories / photo / video — Comments Off
5
Aug 11

Young at heart, old of ear

Little Jimmy’s grandmother took him to the park after a long day of kindergarten. “Doesn’t it look like an artist painted the scenery? God painted this just for you,” she said.

“Yes” Jimmy said, “God did it and he did it left handed.”

“What makes you think God is left handed?”

“Well” Jimmy said, “we learned in Sunday School that Jesus sits on God’s right hand!”

Silly, but I love that joke. Always made me wonder if a heavenly hand could fall asleep. Someone could blame a lot of problems on that. Others would probably shake their head and agree. Burning needles in an appendage takes it out of a guy, they’d think, I can relate to that.

Dear parents that owe child support, pay your bills. Not only are you depriving your child, you’re embarrassing yourselves:

The best part is the deputy sheriff in his Auburn shirt. They went all out on this sting, except for the location. I mean, “You’ve won tickets to the game of the year! Come down to this abandoned granary to collect!”

You can tell football season is upon us. The team is practicing, students are starting to move back to town, and the summer term has wound down. We’re shopping for shirts. The Yankee wants a jersey for her birthday, and she has numbers in mind. The university seems to be marketing just three jersey numbers this season, and one of them is the one she wants. So that works out well. We hit a few stores yesterday, as I mentioned, looking for the right size and number combination. There were a few more stores today.

But first, the university library, where there is a documentary of some heft that must be obtained. We found it and, then, on the way out, walked by part of the Toomer’s Corner displays. These are the things people left after their poisoning was announced. How weird that still sounds:

They’re going to allow fans to roll the trees again this fall, which has a “roll ’em while you got ’em” feel. I’m not interested. Having had my share, and stood under the old trees during two conference championships, two undefeated seasons and a national championship I’ve more than had my fill. But here’s my feeling:

Yeah, they’re trees, and there are worse crimes against humanity than a crime against a local icon, but if you deprive children of their part of a long legacy we should find a small space under a heavy, cramped jail for you. But that’s just me.

Here’s another neat one from the display:

Here’s more on the collection, including a few other artifacts. The archivists say no one has ever had to preserve something like toilet paper before. The things we celebrate are temporary, the hard part is making the memories last forever.

They are getting the stadium ready. In a month more than 87,000 people will be inside there. It is silly and spectacular and true:

Came home to do productive things. Planned out a presentation for next week, tinkered with the video chat feature of Google Plus. We are living in the future. Somehow the economy didn’t seem so bad in our imaginations, but still, video chat across two states. This is a step up from last week’s test of the platform, where four of us chatted in one room. And by room I mean our living room. It was delightfully geeky.

Jeremy, the host of The War Eagle Reader stopped by for a chat. Did you know he edited the Maple Street Press? Did you know I’m in that magazine? It isn’t bad, though all agree the photo selections and the cutlines could be better. The content, though, is insightful.

He loaned me a book, which I am interested to read. First I must put it on top of the To Read stack and finish the other two in progress. Once upon a time I’d read three at a time. Now I do well to get in two. Seems I’m reading lots of other things, too. Makes me wonder what this does to one’s reading comprehension. Is it really useful if I can later only say “This one book I read … ” or “I recall in … some study or another … ”

Now, I wrote last month about my joy of books, but the one thing that could replace that would be the convenience and joy of search. If I could put everything in a reader and then refer back to the term or author or time I was reading the thing … now that would be something.

And according to the Booth Theory of Commercial development, Google or Apple has that in R&D right now. And when it comes out in six months I’ll only need a way to transfer everything I’ve ever read, ever, into the reader for cross tab indexing.

Well, maybe I could leave out the Black Stallion series and various old Robin Hood tales. Who needs those now? I’ve always questioned the fingers wrapped in the horse’s mane. And the only part of the Robin story I recall better than a movie or BBC episode is that he feebly loosed an arrow from the Kirklees Priory and where the arrow landed was where he is buried. Great tale. Of the many great Robin Hood tales over the last millenium that one, I’ve just learned, is from the 18th Century. I read that as a child at my grandparent’s one summer. Why? It was there.

I may have a reading problem, and it started early.

Barbecue for dinner tonight, risking crowds from a dual graduation/move in weekend. Do not visit a grocery store, Walmart or Home Depot on weekends like this. You take your life into your own hands.

So we stand in line at Moe’s, order our barbecue and then stand around for a table. This is a bit difficult. As reasonable as the food is, they’ve taken great pains to push you out of the door — awkward decor, lighting that is off just so, poorly placed televisions, uncomfortable chairs — but people just sit around. And sit around. And sit ar —

“Ticket number THIRTY-FIIIIIVE!”

We’d only just found a table, having identified a group that put two together, sat with friends and then left. The table for eight stayed joined when only three were there. And so we made our own, grabbed the food, ate and hustled out of there before the loud, live music started.

Some days you feel older than others, I guess.

adventures / Friday / iPhone / video — Comments Off
29
Jul 11

Video from Oregon, Washington

Back home now. Cleaning, hosting company, having fun. Here’s a hasty little video I put together from the trip. There’s B-roll, tight shots, sweeping vistas of beautiful country. Pretty much it is a (bit short of being a) masterpiece of iMovie production quality.

But full of lovely memories.

adventures / Friday / history / iPhone / photo — Comments Off
22
Jul 11

Oregon pictures, Day Three

Hit the beach!

The first white person here is believed to be William Clark — who did not lose a bet to Meriwether Lewis, really what happened was they Googled themselves, found a small accounting firm in the northeast named Clark and Lewis LLP and decided on their own brand. He and his team crossed what they texted back to Jefferson as “OMG, Worst. Mountain. EVAR.” before seeing the ocean and finding natives processing a beached whale.

Clark did not use AT&T, who’s coverage is somewhere down in the Five Bars and Lousy range in this region.

So they traded with the locals for whale oil and blubber, turned around and noticed there were suddenly condos everywhere. Such is beach life.

Cannon Beach was originally named Ecola, which was borrowed from the local stream. Ecola, not E. coli. We ate lunch today at a place named Ecola. They have their own boat and bring in their own catch from the Pacific which, I don’t know about the depth of your experience, is the way to go.

The water is chilly. The beach isn’t dirty, but the sand is darker than I’m accustomed to seeing. There are great rock formations to enjoy at the coastline and dramatic rolling hills rushing down into the sand. This is a beautiful spot.

Later, on the advice of someone who lives in Portland, we set out for the quiet Oswald West beach. You park on one side of the road and then take a path beneath it and through these woods:

This is a stream that is escaping into the ocean at Oswald:

Some people love the ocean, others find their home in the mountains or feel natural on a plain or a steppe, but I could stay in spots like this forever:

Here’s Oswald, in panorama. Click to open in a new window and magnify:

This is a shallow cove and a favorite of the surfers. It feels primitive and unspoiled and perfect. I brought a few round stones home, thinking I’ll put them in my office, so I can remember that sun and those waves and part of an afternoon walking over driftwood.

I shot it in my free iPhone app Panorama which isn’t perfect, but is very free. This one didn’t work very well because I stood in shade and shot sun-shade-sun. Now, though, the finished product — stitched by the app — looks wonderfully dramatic.

We went south for the next town, thinking we would find dinner, but nothing inspired us. On the way, though, we found this terrific view:

You see that and begin to wonder “How spoiled are these people?”

So we came back up to Cannon Beach for dinner, found some family-owned chain where the menu said “Not much has changed since the 1950s.” And to see the dishes, you’d think Yeah, my grandmother ate this. Even the pictures of the food on the menu looked dated. How does one make lemon slices and broiled shrimp look dated? The apathy of the staff was incredible. We ate there because of the view of those giant rocks on the shoreline and because we wanted to see the sunset on the beach. Our waiter, who was a little too old and just a few hits away from a Grateful Dead concert in his head, was only too happy to hold us up, but we just did make it.

If you’re curious and you know the area, here’s your hint:

More importantly, the sunset:

Those big haystack rocks. In fact one of them is called Haystack, but I believe that one is farther up the beach:

Those are my best cell phone pics of the day. The following are some of my D-SLR photographs. There are lots of kites on Cannon Beach. Some of them will find their way into my trip video.

Wild berries in macro at Oswald Beach West:

Need a hiding place?

The Yankee enjoys the side of Oswald Beach:

There’s sand in the center, separated by a wooded estuary feeding into the ocean. The beach, which is probably less than 250 yards, is framed by woods on one side and a rock face on the other side. Whomever donated or sold this land to the state did not understand what they could have done with this real estate, but generations are lucky they did share it.

Walking Cannon Beach at sunset:

The Yankee wraps up her day in style:

Tomorrow we go back to work.

cycling / errands / Friday / video — Comments Off
15
Jul 11

No, we need the small shrimp

The good people at the grocery store must think we are trouble, or in trouble. It doesn’t take long before we are playfully picking on one another there. I fuss about the bill, the size of the box, why we are there two days in a row. And on and on. Today, the cashier a nice older lady who just liked to be out working and around people, did not exactly know what to make of us.

She should have seen us pondering the bananas, or looking for the quinoa.

Not sure what that is, but there are precisely two options for the grain, just down the aisle from an entire United Nations of rice selections. Perhaps it is the failed supply that could not go into Grape Nuts. There was a cereal I always wanted to try.

Maybe at an early age it was the Seinfeldian paradox that interested me. You open the box, there’s no grapes, no nuts. What gives?

Maybe it was the notion of breakfast on the beach, or the punctual milk man. Perhaps it was the poor man’s Sally Kellerman, or the guy who was the first person in his circle to hear Michael Bolton AND got the Grape Nuts jingle.

So, yeah. At the store again. We’re making dinner from a recipe book tomorrow night and that requires the precise amount of vegetables and seafood treats, and also a spice called Old Bay, which seems like something that should be discovered in your great uncle’s medicine cabinet. (I was informed we had the Old Bay. Good, I thought, I’m not spending $2.26 on that.

Grape Nuts is still around, but struggling. Wikipedia blames the many owners of Post. I think it was this spot:

It is an SNL bit with no soundtrack, a bad idea with a microwave, and a repudiation of every suburban Aspen thing the entertainment industry would dare imagine about the rest of the country.

You can imagine how that conversation started.

“We’ll need flannel, frost on the windows, a woman undisturbed by a studio in her kitchen and quiet kids who know when to shut up and just eat their cereal or they will go to school hungry!”

That was shot in 1993, and it comes off like everyone in the frame is over-medicated before it became the raison de-pharm. And it was all downhill from there. Microwave your milk? Again, Mom?

Anyway. It was raining when we were ready to leave the grocery store. We’d packed along the save the earth bags and then forgot them in the car. I’d offered to fetch them, but felines and canines were demonstrating terminal velocity in the parking lot. The nice, clean cut young man who helpful packed our plastic bags and secretly loathes the chore of it offered to carry them out. I laughed and said, Good for you. I didn’t think you’d offer to get rained on. But no need, sir.

These people have no use for conversation with you. They seem surprised that you’d try. Their dynamic is groceries? Outside? Are you sure?

One guy chatted me up last fall, one of the guys who would not take no for an answer. He was one of those types of people you meet and, later, you have a tinge of relief that door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen are no longer working your neighborhood. He would be this man. He wished to talk football. And also washing dishes.

He would have been marvelous at selling the first six volumes of the set, but you’d have trouble maintaining the pretense of needing books H through Z.

We need rain. We are in a severe drought. And it has looked all day as if it would rain. Really, I don’t recall a summer with more of a threat of rain, but less actual precipitation. One eye spent most of the day watching the radar, studying little blips moving in every direction, wondering if the famous Southern boomers would develop from nowhere.

Finally, after hours of this, I grew frustrated with waiting for the rain and hit the bike. My plan was to make a big loop around the neighborhood. It gives me two entrances toward home and one area with stores that can be a refuge if necessary. This was a bad ride, even by my considerably low standards. Cramped my calf, burned up my quads and couldn’t hold a pace. I did only 12 miles and the rain was the only thing I paced. I am surprised and disappointed by how poorly I feel on the bike after just a week off. But i’ll lower the saddle a bit again tomorrow and see how that feels.

Mostly, I have to remind myself, I am not these guys:

Tour all weekend, the 1989 Iron Bowl tomorrow, the Women’s World Cup final on Sunday. Great weekend of sports. Also there will be riding and crabcakes and coding. Oh, yes, we’re doing work this weekend! I’ll be coding and staring at magazines and spreadsheets until my eyes hurt.

Much like riding the bike, or visiting the grocery store, this doesn’t take long.