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Friday

Eagle talons are stronger than a gator’s jaw

Isn’t he cute? He’ll peck your eyeballs out.

When the day was done and the weekend begun we let our feathers down. This is a screech owl. We also saw two kinds of vultures. Did you know that they are very curious about circles? It has to do with how they find food. So if you make a circle with your thumb and forefinger they will stick their head right through it looking for meat.

We met all different kinds of hawks from the Raptor Center. We renewed our friendship with the golden eagle Tiger (War Eagle VI):

We saw her last football game flight a few years back. I have great pictures of her from there.

We also saw Spirit, the bald eagle, again:

This is the Football, Fans and Feathers program, where the raptor biologists and volunteers show off their charges. They fly them from release buildings right over guests’ heads. So, yeah, I have a few nice pictures. You can see them all in the photo gallery.

At Pie Day we sat in the romantic South’s Oldest Rivalry corner at Byron’s. That’s the painting that was hanging directly over the booth. There was also the famous Dye-Bryant hunting photograph, a shot of the scoreboard from the first Iron Bowl in Auburn. These are tidy little pieces of local lore. We were eating barbecue under them all.

We retired home for pie. We picked up an Oreo ice cream pie last week for The Yankee’s birthday. She pronounced it excellent, so we’ve been nursing it until tonight.

Journalism links: Be aware of the punctuation on your resume. I’m convinced this is never perfect. Or that it changes. I blame the screech owl. The block by block summit was a great watch today. They are promising archived video soon. Do check it out if you’re interested in community journalism. And, finally, one more good argument for location-based reporting:

(B)ecause this person is announcing to the world that they’re there, that increases the likelihood that they’re willing to talk. Instead of going to a place, or cold calling, or going up to people and interrupting them or going on a fishing expedition, you can find very specific eyewitness sources.

Working reporters can make things like Four Square and Gowalla an incredibly valuable resource. I’m still not interested in using them as a personal tool.

YouTube Cover Theater returns and this week’s tribute belongs to Coldplay because … mostly because I like this one, which validates everything I need to know about the band:

I liked this one more before I realized it was Coldplay, but this young lady does a nice job here:

She has a few more covers on YouTube, and they’re all great. I am a new Orla Gartland fan.

One more:

Give people a camera and a few spare minutes and they’ll show you their art.

And, just for fun, here’s Coldplay explaining their relationship to Billie Jean and her kid:

Tomorrow: Football! See you there. (And don’t forget to check out the raptors.

Friday / friends / photo / Pie Day — Comments Off
17
Sep 10

Friday is Pie Day, Birmingham edition

Busy, full, long day. So just pictures. Hit the gym this morning, and then worked through the afternoon. Visited with friends at The Red Cat:

That’s Brad, Jennifer, The Yankee, Andre and Betsy and Brian.

It was just like old times which is, to say, awesome.

And then we hit up Jim ‘N’ Nicks for Pie Day.

Which was always great. Then we drove home, getting back about 90 minutes later than we’d hoped. Hence the brevity. Tomorrow, football.

Friday / photo / Pie Day / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
10
Sep 10

Friday is Pie Day

This is necessarily brief, as other typing demands have absorbed a great deal of the day. It is a conference submission day, you see, and these papers must simply get out the door. I could write about writing, but so many people do that with greater flair.

I could also write about the literature review I proofed or, even better, the abstract I crafted this afternoon. It was an interesting one, I thought.

There was rhetoric, too, and that’s always fun. Again, you can get far better rhetoric elsewhere, I wouldn’t presume to impose my qualitative limitations upon you.

So that was pretty much the day, yeah. Until Pie Day, where …

… that isn’t supposed to be on the menu.

We returned to Byron’s tonight, because they have delicious beans and potatoes. They slice the potatoes across the width and do nothing special to them when they cook them, but they are delicious. They were out of chick and ribs tonight. Apparently you have to get to these places early.

We sat in the romantic Punt Bama Punt corner:

The barbecue there is good, but Byron’s, a converted Dairy Queen, doesn’t have pie. So we visited Publix, picked up an apple and brought it home. We concluded our date night by watching Date Night. At just 88 minutes it felt very short, but that’s probably about the right length.

There was enough humor in the story. Steve Carell was Steve Carell and Tina Fey put on a wig and looked like Rene Russo for a while. You get the sense that about 80 percent of the movie was ad lib, which works well for the premise. There are plenty of one-liners in there. No doubt they are all aimed at a generation of people who grew up reciting movie lines in place of having a real conversation.

“He turned the gun sideways! That’s a kill shot!”

One of my family friends is a now retired police officer. He tells a story of responding to a shots fired call where two guys emptied two clips shooting at one another from nearly point-blank range. Nobody hit anything. Investigators figured that the two gang members had turned their guns sideways for that cool movie “kill shot.”

I’ve tried it with a water gun. I can’t hit the cat for anything with the thing turned sideways.

Time once again for YouTube Cover Theater, where we surf the popular video site and look for people paying tribute to their favorite artists and showing off a significant talent of their own. (I like covers.)

I randomly picked Guster this week, which turned out to be harder than it should have been. They’re a pop band, after all. So two of these videos are from seriously aspiring musicians, which goes a bit against the spirit of this concept, but they still work here.

Here’s Demons:

Just two guys, Vanderbilt students I think, strumming along at in the breakfast nook at home, nicely done.

Here’s a Pennsylvania group, The Vulcans, that asks “Am I trying to hard?” The guy running the camera says “You’re in an art studio, wearing a vest and Aaron is already playing a guitar. We’re trying too hard.”

The sound is nice though, it almost has that disembodied, music hall quality to it that is hard to reproduce in a stereo. Plus, I really love that song:

What happens when you take a Massachusetts band and turn them into bluegrass? I had to find out:

I think they’re just a group of guys that named themselves after a river in Illinois, but they have a lot of videos.

Speaking of videos. And of Google Instant — we were speaking about that yesterday, remember? — here’s a Billy Joel visualization:

Good luck getting that out of your head before the night is over.

adventures / Auburn / football / Friday / iPhone / photo / Pie Day / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
3
Sep 10

Friday is Pie Day

Football

Are you ready for football? This is week two of the high school season. Drove by this one this evening as the team was warming up. I’ll try to get to a high school game this fall, the school I covered many years ago is doing very well, but we are especially excited about college football. That, of course, begins tomorrow.

Reading and class prep today. And resting. Strained my back at the gym this morning. Did squats and everything was fine. Did what I think of as the jail break exercise — the move started years ago by some anonymous person is slowly digging through the corner of the cinderblock wall — and everything was fine. Did a curl and dropped down a weight. Did another curl and my back tightened up. Wisely, I put the weight down.

A comfy chair and a heating pad this evening have helped. I’m fine, just moving a little gingerly. Tomorrow I’ll be good as new.

Pie Day tonight at Mama Q’s. We had the chicken tonight, which was delicious. The dutch apple pie, we decided is a consistent winner. Give them a visit.

We checked out the soccer game tonight. The fans got a great show.

At the AU soccer game

(I downloaded a pseudo tilt shift application for my iPhone — two of them, actually, but I think one is a bust — and I’m playing around with it a bit. Now I have to figure out which subjects look best in the tilt shift style. My apologies in advance.)

Florida State was controlling things with a disciplined effort on the ground. They snuck in a goal in the 28th minute and Auburn struggled against the fifth ranked Seminoles through the middle portion of the game.

In the 73rd minute Auburn’s Lydia Townsend found a glaring hole in the center of the FSU defense. She chipped in the ball over the goalkeeper on a breakaway.

Tigers celebrate

Florida State scored on a header in the 83rd minute and Auburn answered with a goal in the 87th minute to force overtime. In college they play two sudden death periods of 10 minutes each. After that you just settle for a draw. With two minutes remaining in the second overtime, so in the 107th minute, Katy Frierson picked up a loose ball outside the 18 off of a corner kick and struck the ball home.

Here’s Frierson earlier in the game:

Frierson over the ball

And here the Tigers celebrate the game winning goal:

Tigers celebrate

They are celebrating Auburn’s first win over the Seminoles since 1995 and the first win over a top-five team since 2004.

I’ll have more pictures in the photo gallery early next week.

Which leaves us with the last installment of the evening, YouTube Cover Theater, where we turn the place over to people pouring their talents and odes and ambitions or fears out there for our consumption. Tonight’s featured coveree is Duncan Sheik. We’ll start out with an incredible rendition of She Runs Away:

And now, for your listening pleasure, we have a nice run at That Says It All:

Sheik, apparently, has written a musical. Here’s one of his fans’ playing his favorite tune:

And, finally, we’ll hear from the original artist himself as Duncan Sheik covers … Radiohead?

Who doesn’t enjoy a good cover?

Who doesn’t enjoy football? Are you ready? Tomorrow Auburn has Arkansas State. Look for us. We’ll be the ones in blue.

adventures / Friday / friends / iPhone / photo / Pie Day — Comments Off
27
Aug 10

Friday is Pie Day

If you need the ultimate time wasting device for your iPhone — and if there is one thing iPhone users need, it is something on which to waste their time — I suggest Draw. Hey, it is an app that let’s you draw with your fingers. There are at least three dozen of these and they might all have the same nice Email or Twitter feature. I picked this one, though, because of that. And, also Kelly is using it.

“(A) picture is worth a thousand words, but you only get 140 characters if you type. I’m clearly coming out ahead!”

You can’t argue with logic like that. Of course, Kelly is an artist. Also, she is drawing on an iPad. I am not artistically inclined and my digital canvas is a bit smaller.

You need one other thing for this time wasting activity: someone to whom you can send your brilliant masterpieces. (It isn’t spam if they laugh out loud.) By brilliant masterpieces I mean stick figures. And by stick figures I mean drawing a poorly envisioned thing and then labeling it with an error and chicken scratch so the viewer can understand that is a car, or a dinosaur, or a comb.

For example:

sliced bread

So pick your person carefully. They need patience and laughter and they have to have the personality to download the app themselves and send you some of their own artwork.

All evening I’ve been sending pictures to Brian, And then I’ll send a picture to The Yankee. I am emailing this to her, having composed a piece of art on my phone, emailed it through my wireless network — so into the other room, through the router, down the cable line, out to the Internet Email Headquarters (conveniently located only three-quarters of a mile from my home) where it is then beamed to a cell phone tower, possibly outer space, back to another tower, and ultimately down the cable line, over the wireless network and into her phone.

She is sitting next to me on the sofa.

These are truly amazing times in which we live.

Anyway. Draw. It is wonderful. And silly, but that’s what Friday evenings are for.

Friday is also Pie Day, of course. We’re on week three of the new Pie Day experiment. We’ve tried Mike and Ed’s, which is owned by neither Mike nor Ed. They had pie, but the barbecue wasn’t of the style we prefer. We’ve tried Chuck’s, which is housed in an old and infamous Dairy Queen. They had good barbecue, but no pie.

So tonight, we visited MaMa Q’s:

Mama Q's

Someone will correct me, but I believe this is the former home of Chuck’s, or a former barbecue place of the same name. Either way, the place is nearly empty, but it had turned into a messy evening. The reviews were very promising. Today was rib day — we’ll have to set them straight on that — and you could have a Southern style dry rub or the house special, the Chamorro style.

We got one of each, just to sample them both. And both were very good. The Chamorro is probably more of an acquired taste, as it features a soy, sugar, ginger, vinegar combination of things. The dry rub isn’t the best I’ve ever had, but I’ve had the best dry rubbed ribs in the world. MaMa Q’s can can fall on the short list with no problem.

We actually met MaMa Q. Mrs. Quitugua was working the counter. Her husband, who said he was not a big fan of sweets, recommended the pie. We tried the dutch apple:

Pie

They buy their veggies fresh from the farmer’s market. So they run out of some things, but fresher is always better. And while they do not have a romantic Punt Bama Punt corner we camped out under an old Butter Bread ad, near the television. We felt good about our ribs while watching some guy pound down wings on a show called Man versus Food.

And the pie was delicious. So MaMa Q’s made the cut into the second round, I think. Meanwhile, the Pie Day adventure will continue next week.

Happy weekend!