Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

Friday / music / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
11
Feb 11

YouTube Cover Theater

Just the fun stuff today as most everything else wasn’t really a lot to talk about. So we’ll play the music, making the point once again that the world is full of artists in their bedrooms, kitchens and garages and they just needed YouTube to come along and help show them off.

This week’s featured artist being covered are Minnesota’s favorite sons, and one of my favorite bands, The Jayhawks. They have a large catalog and a small, devoted following. There aren’t a ton of covers on YouTube, but what you get is choice.

From Rainy Day Music:

I’d be willing to bet a lot of Jayhawks people find this to be an underappreciated song, this is Smile, from the album of the same name, as performed by Marco Ferri:

I might have put Russ in this space before, but here he’s playing The Yankee’s favorite Jayhawks song, Angelyne, in split screen, on a 2kulele.

That’s also from Rainy Day Music. We make up our own lyrics to that one. Usually it has to do with pancakes.

There doesn’t seem to be a proper cover of my favorite Jayhawks song, from the woefully under-appreciated Hollywood Town Hall, so I’ll just put the official video here:

It is startling. I’d say “They look so young!” And then I realize that video is almost 20 years old. Mark Olson, the guy with the straw hat, turns 50 this year. Gary Louris is sneaking up on 60. Two years agoOlson and Louris recorded an album. They’re due to release another record in what is considered their classic band lineup later this year.

Auburn / Friday / iPhone / photo / Samford / video — Comments Off
4
Feb 11

Just another Friday

Woke up to the rain, and the rain may have it. The rain did have it, all day. All through hours of reading and countless Emails detailing the details of things which ought to be detailed and still more things lacking in detail. But, in the interregnum between Emails details will form.

My inbox is now sending me notices that I’m running out of space. This must not stand. Tomorrow I’m deleting the junk and the sent mail and the trash, first thing. I need the space so that I can receive further information about the details.

I’ve booked rooms for an upcoming conference. Finally just picked a place, now that I have a headcount. We’ll be staying two miles away, meaning we can put on the game faces on the drive over.

Even the hotel booking requires more details. I’m told I must procure a special form, call again and fax it to the hotel desk.

And since the hotel has accepted my AAA discount I had to call to inquire on the whereabouts of my new membership card. My AAA membership was given to me as a gift from my step-father last year and I’d thought of letting it lapse. But then the College Park Battery Debacle changed my mind. So I renewed the membership, but never received the card.

Turns out they have our old address in the system. Which is unfortunate, of course, because the post office, in cost cutting measures, has committed themselves to forwarding only some of our mail. It takes nine-to-12 business days to get the new card. That might be cutting it close. So they’re going to Email me a temporary card. That’s probably going to take eight business days.

We busted a camera in December. Apparently it was mounted on a tripod, but the tripod had no counter weight. A gust of wind knocked it over, and gravity did the rest. The LCD screen took the brunt of the blow.

These things will happen. These things, I’ve learned today, will be expensive.

It took two separate efforts and seven phone calls to find the right people to give me details, though. The guy in Illinois who does the work says he’s complained to Panasonic about the price. I’m sure he wasn’t the first. I know he won’t be the last. Finally we can get it fixed, though.

And the day went on like that, accomplishing the little things so they can be moved out of the way for bigger things. It seems backwards, somehow, but that’s the way of it some days.

I wrapped up my evening making more recruiting phone calls. That’s a fun thing, calling high school students looking to make their big college decision. Many of them are very excited that you’ve called. It is time-consuming, though. You think you’re making great progress and then you look over the spreadsheet to see just how far you have to go. But at least the young students are usually very interested in hearing from you.

After dinner we went to the gymnastics meet. Auburn didn’t have their best outing tonight, but it was enough to take a comeback victory over struggling Kentucky, 194.625-194.450. Here’s senior Rachel Inniss, striking a Heisman pose. I wonder if anyone has mentioned she’s doing it backward.

Inniss, according the university release, claimed her fifth individual title of the season and her third on floor, tying her career-best 9.900 for the fifth time. So maybe the backward Heisman is working out alright.

Friday / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
28
Jan 11

YouTube Cover Theater

Nothing of import to share, just a day of Email and reading and phone numbers. So we’ll get right to the good stuff, the magnificent return of a weekly feature that proves the point there is plenty of art out there just waiting for a play to show off, like YouTube.

The premise is that a musician is picked and we display a small handful of non-professional musicians covering their work. The musician this week is actually a band, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros. They started out with their initial success online, so who knows where the people you watch today will end up.

First off Eric Smalls offers up his take on a song called Janglin. You’ve probably heard the original in a commercial here and there. Smalls makes it a bit more mellow. His mother, if you read the comments, really likes it. You might too.

Andy Glover plays 40 Day Dream and he gives it a nice little sound.

This is the song for which most people know Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. There are predominantly more covers of this tune on YouTube than any of their other ones. And while I don’t generally like kids singing, because it is just novel or odd or both. (But not your kid. Your kid sounds great.)

This little girl is adorable and and will blow you away.

That video has 5.8 million views. And you can see their website here, which I think just got invented toward the end of that video.

As for the band, they have a really cool three-page website.

Here’s how they play Home, on Morning Becomes Eclectic, which has remained one of the best radio shows in America for decades.

Enjoy the next cover you hear. There’s usually a great deal of love behind them.

Auburn / Friday / friends / iPhone / memories / video — 1 Comment
21
Jan 11

Swimming in Internet problems

Charter. Internet. Problems. This problem has lingered on for three weeks.

The people on the phone have been nice. The technicians that have visited the house have been nice. There is a great disconnect between the two aspects of the company. It has been my experience that any company with the word “Communication” in its title doesn’t do an especially good job communicating within itself.

So we’ve had Charter troubles for a good long while and everyone who’s had the experience understands. Finally I became a little more insistent on the phone yesterday. A serious, sturdy fireplug of a man visited, fixed things and left. But the problem wasn’t fixed. So I called again and they rescheduled, but the guy apparently didn’t return last evening based on the phone call we didn’t receive. So we called again today, when the problems continued again, and I talked with a supervisor.

She listened patiently, said the guy had returned last night for outside work (but the story changes, so who knows) and professed her inability to do anything more than give a little discount before sending someone else out.

Someone else came out and worked outside, a condition upon which I insisted, as every variable inside had been tested and approved. We shall see.

All of this fussing, though, has resulted in two different Charter employees following me on Twitter. I told one of them, as I told Helen, the supervisor, that Charter needs a secret handshake. I appreciate that things occasionally go offline and need repair. I’m willing to accept it on good faith that the company has been responsive and is trying to find and fix the problem. By and large that has been the case during all of this. The frustrating part is having to detail all of this to each random person I meet on the phone.

“That’s a good idea!”

Write up a memo, then. Get a raise.

Brian is here, and Wendy too. They’ve each come to visit for the weekend. Brian made it this afternoon and we took him to the swimming and diving meet. Brian was a swimmer and The Yankee was a diver. I have watched both on television and covered the sport, but just sit and nod to their observations.

Auburn has one of those powerhouse swimming and diving teams. They have 13 national championships in the last 15 years or so. When I was in school I did a coach interview show where I had the great pleasure of regularly speaking with then-coach David Marsh. He coached 22 Olympians at Auburn and 89 individual NCAA title winners. This is the most important thing I learned from him.

“You have to respect someone willing to spend hours and hours, swimming hundreds of laps, to shave a thousandth of a second off of their best time.”

When David Marsh talked about swimming you sat quietly and listened.

So Auburn (the men were ranked sixth, the women 12th) upset visiting (5th/6th ranked) Florida, proving Tigers are better than Gators in the pool. Florida does well at distance, however.

But the sprints today were all Auburn. This is the men’s 50-free:

Auburn’s swimmers Adam Brown, Karl Krug and Marce Chierighini swept the top three places in that event.

Wendy got in this evening as the rest of us finished a delicious dinner The Yankee made. Tomorrow we’re going to Auburn’s national championship football celebration.

adventures / Auburn / Friday / history / links / memories / photo — Comments Off
14
Jan 11

A good deed, an ending, a beginning

I caught an escaping dog this morning while out pounding the pavement. There was a collar on the pooch, so we called, wonder who was named Colby. Turned out that was the dog. A big white pekapoo, or some such, out free and intent on telling the other dogs within sniffing range about it.

When Colby’s owner caught up to us she said the dog was more trouble than her kids. He’d figured out a way to get through the bushes in the yard. Maybe the children haven’t mastered that technique yet, but the dog is escaping every time if the deterrent is shrubbery.

Anyway. That was the beginning of the day. Good deed done. The day’s going to end with a bite of frozen yogurt, so it has rounded itself out nicely.

In between there was reading and a little more reading. There was also a delicious steak dinner, my balloon post from yesterday got picked up by The War Eagle Reader. Also I had a little chat with a member of the governor’s office that is leaving Montgomery today.

Bob Riley returns home — or to his lake house, his home is getting water damage repairs, apparently — after eight years in the governor’s mansion. I was a cub reporter when he was first elected to Congress. Interviewed him on election night. He was a very nice man, who could have been self-important, but was willing to entertain questions from a kid who didn’t really yet know what he was doing.

He’s not without his critics, of course, but there’s no denying the mark he’s had on the state in two terms. And, if half of the things for which executives get credit or blame are really directly related to his efforts, it has been a good administration.

The economy has slowed everywhere, of course, but there are several vital aspects of the state now leading the way in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a decade or two ago. There are car manufacturers everywhere. Mobile is poised to become a boomtown with new naval contracts and airline deals and shipping growth. Birmingham has completed the transition from being a steel town to being a medical center and a biomedical hotbed. Huntsville will grow as more military comes that way. Education, which has never been a strong area for bragging in Alabama, got some good news just today:

The report, dubbed by Education Week as the most comprehensive ongoing assessment of the state of American education, ranked Alabama 25th among all states and the District of Columbia for overall grades and scores on the report card. This is the first time Alabama has ever ranked ahead of the national average in the overall education quality.

[…]

(T)oday Alabama students are outpacing the rest of the nation in improvements in Reading, Math and Science scores and Alabama ranked 4th nationally in gains in the graduation rate between 2002 and 2008.

Not a bad bit of news to hear on your way out the door. Also, a few huge and ancient lawsuits against the state were resolved during Riley’s eight years. He also pushed some useful ethics reform bills late in his second term.

There are criticisms, to be sure, but if inauguration day is about hope and promise, the day you leave office should be something of a victory lap. Riley — and every member of his cabinet whom I had occasion to interview, come to think of it — was always considerate to me professionally. I tried to follow along on his re-election campaign for my master’s thesis, but that didn’t work out. Even so, his people were cordial.

This evening we went out to the gymnastics meet. This was the first home meet of the year for Auburn, and the first meet in the new Auburn Arena. Pictures and blurbs below:

The answer to a trivia question no one will ever ask: Who had the first routine for the gymnastics team in Auburn Arena? Allyson Sandusky. She also won the beam routine in the Arena opener.

Kendall Swartz scored a 9.750 on bars, putting her at fourth in the meet.

Lauren Brzostowski’s 9.800 was good for second on the beam, behind her teammate Allyson Sandusky.

Laura Lane’s 9.750 was good for third overall on the floor, an event the Tigers swept.

Rachel Inniss scored 9.900 to win the floor routine. Something about this pose seems familiar. Feels like I’ve seen that three times before, around here.

The Auburn gymnastics team got their first win of the season against No. 25 LSU, 194.775-194.475. The gymnasts performed for a crowd of 4,190 on hand to see the Tigers’ first meet at the Auburn Arena and the first victory for new head coach Jeff Graba. Auburn and LSU were tied after one event, but the Bengal Tigers took a lead halfway through the meet. Auburn, which began the season ranked 15th, pulled away in their final two rotations on the beam and floor. Petria Yokay won the all-around with 38.750.

It is really nice to be at a gymnastics meet and hear “War Eagle” after events.