Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

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5
Dec 25

It’s all fun and games, until the geese answer back

We were standing outside, doing some outdoors chore, or talking about it. We were in the backyard, near the kitchen corner of the house. I’m sure we were pointing or looking or otherwise considering a plan of action. This is what I do. I work in the home office for a few hours, and then I go find something else productive to do for a while. Then it is back to work. Study breaks and work breaks are both useful. And this particular one involved being outside in the cold for a few minutes. That’s when I heard it.

honk.

Honk.

HONK HONK.

HONKHONKHONKHONKHONK!!!

I looked up, putting my eyes where my ears told me to go, toward the east. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and trained it on the sky, waiting for the geese to fly through the frame.

“QUITTERS!” I yelled, so as to be heard over their honking.

OK, I muttered it to myself. We have neighbors, after all.

Somehow the geese heard me anyway.

“We’re not quiting,” they said between honks. “We’re just going over to a field a few miles west of here. You know that. We’ve seen you over that way.”

Of course geese have recall and distinguish between humans.

Also, please note the skies.

It was 3:16 p.m.

Friday / history / journalism / photo / Rowan — Comments Off
21
Nov 25

There are many questions

We had a faculty meeting today. Many speeches and introductions. It is part of moving into, and creating, a new college. There are many questions, we don’t yet have all of the answers, but good and talented people are working on it. Answers will be found. These things don’t happen overnight.

Here’s how overnight they don’t happen. We’re in a one-year status quo pattern. As that happens many new procedures are implemented. It’s the first year of a three-year fact-finding and solution-creating process. Sometimes it seems like three years might not be a long enough for that. Sometimes you’re made aware of all that goes into it. And then you’re made aware of all of these other things too. And then there are concerns you aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot that goes into it. You can see that even if, like me, you’re only familiar with just the trees in your section of the giant forest. And people get highly specialized, of course. Also, this is not a thing that happens all of the time, these big department-college merger things. No one specializes in that. But campus communities do love making committees, and sometimes you get some great work out of them. I’m sure that’ll be the case in this instance.

This meeting was held in a building with a big auditorium, because this new college is a huge college and it needs the space for meetings such as these. Down the hall from this auditorium are the offices of the RTF department, and parts of the journalism department, which is moving in there. And on the walls are a lot of old newspaper front pages. These are always such great displays. Maybe I’m one of the only people that stops to look at them, but that’s why they’re there.

Those walls have framed prints of local and campus papers, as all journalism departments seemingly have. The farther you get from this January 1991 issue, above, the less frequently new pages appear. It occurs to me that one of the less important, but nonetheless sad, side effects of ending newsprint is that one day we’ll have no more displays such as these. The last yellowing page on the wall there is a 2018 installment of a local paper (then in the process of being assimilated by a larger entity) running their Super Bowl edition. I wonder who was in charge of deciding which ones to keep. Some are obvious, some may take a little more contextual appreciation.

You could study the look of this paper, and I have considered it. For its day, that’s a strong small paper design. The layout only feels long in the tooth to my 2025 eyes. You’re nine years into the influence of USA Today and all of the influences that emanate from there. I can’t speak to the history of that particular publication, but a quick glance at their digitized archives on newspapers.com suggests they were pretty responsive to industry and consumption trends in that era. Most importantly, it is sharing the information you need, and you know there’s more inside.

Also, there are no ridiculous SEO headlines. It was also all done locally. In 1991, the layout was made with some relatively basic software. If they were using QuarkXPress, this paper was very much an innovator. It would be five more years before a version worth talking about was released. It’s also possible that they did a lot of that with razors and glue. Old school.

Not that you came here for a lot of thoughts on old software. Not that you knew what you were getting here to end the week. I didn’t know either, to be honest. I also don’t know what we’ll have here next week. There will be something, though. We’ll need to check in on the kitties, for instance. There will be some other stuff, too. What will it be? It’s a good question. There are many questions. We’ll find out together.

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14
Nov 25

Bad words on poor words

First thing this morning I had a meeting. And then I spent the rest of the day writing. And also writing. And then there was rewriting. My process is to put a lot of words together in my head. Then drop them onto a page. And then stir them all up until they don’t make sense to me anymore.

I changed up the process somewhat because when I was working on this particular thing one night last week I turned it into a literary exercise. It felt good, even then — even as? — I knew that was all going to come out in the next draft. It was an exercise of getting it out of my system. Now, I am writing something so tediously specific no one will want to read it.

It’s a gift.

There are many styles in all of us, I am sure of it. We must only turn the right valves. And there’s an art in knowing which ones to use at a given time. Some people, I thought, today, never seem to heed those warnings. They just write the thing they wanted to write, the thing they needed to write, putting their magisterial collection of words and thoughts together in the way they must be written, this time. Or so we’d like to think. Even people that know the craft can get so caught up in the brilliant work of others that they are transported far, far away from the idea of drafts and editors. I don’t write like that, because it isn’t in keeping with what I do. Consequently I’m probably not good at writing like that. But it’s fun to dream about onomatopoeia and sizzling verbs and alliteration that affects us all.

I like to read it, though.

So I wrote the day away, which was fine. It was pleasant. It’s what I needed to do. I enjoyed it. I would print out a draft and sit in the window and read the thing I’d just written word-by-word. I am trying to develop a self-editing process for that. I think it would improve my output. It would make some of my writing better. At the very least, it would be a thing I could enjoy. With that objective in mind I’ll just keep doing it until I figure out the process. Then I’ll do it because it is a process.

Tonight we saw a comedian. We saw three comedians. Two of them were the opening and feature acts. It was a large arena show and I wondered if a comedian, on a big stage in a big venue like that, knows when he is bombing. The opener was not having a good night. He gamely plodded through. The feature act was better. And this is how it should be. We’re warming up the crowd for the headliner. The headliner who is doing an arena tour. And working on new material. But also offering to do a greatest hits set.

In a way, this is kind of sad for Bert Kreischer. He’s been closing with this bit for years and years now. It’s become Freebird. People yell it out to him. It’s paying the bills, and that’s great, but he hasn’t had to write a new finish in ages. So now he has to write an almost finish, but it can’t be bigger and better than his Freebird. What a fine line to have to thread.

He’s also doing these big arena shows and saying this is where he’s working on the stuff for his next special which will be recorded next year. I know even less about comic writing than I do about any other style of writing, see above, but I’d rather you work on that in small clubs. There’s a different intimacy there, and a tradition to honor. And it would fill. Tonight, he had about two-thirds of a basketball venue filled and were scattered and unpolished and it just wasn’t a good feeling. Also, a lot of empty seats.

I didn’t know, until recently, that there was such a thing as a showbiz review of stand-up comedians. By chance I ran across a review of this tour. The critic was dismissive of the effort. I thought, maybe the writer isn’t a fan of the genre. Maybe this person is new to stand up comedy. Maybe Kreischer had an off night. The critic said maybe Kreischer has run out of things to say. Maybe the critic was right.

The other possibility is that he’s too busy living the gimmick. I’m not sure when he can write while doing all of the things that his outsized personality and persona require. I’m sure there’s a process here. I’m sure he never sits down and thinks, “I wish I could write the most boringly dense thing possible that no one will read.” I’m sure his special next year will be good.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
7
Nov 25

Photos I forgot to share

Rather than spend this time discussing today’s committee meeting — we looked at some material we’ll distribute on campus next year — or the rest of the day spent staring at words on a screen, I thought I would try to once again impress you with some photographs. These were things I shot earlier this week and, as the title says above, I forgot to share them here.

This was, I believe, from Sunday night. If you hold the phone just right you can tilt the lines whichever way you want them to go, of course, but this was the true representation relative to my position on the ground, no adjustments necessary.

And while that was in the nighttime this is fully in the afternoon, Monday specifically, when I had a little race with my sheep herding friend. He was pretty fast that day.

Here is my shadow selfie, as he is cruising through a little town. I set a PR on that segment, despite sitting up for a few photographs.

I like this one for all of the colors, one season’s palette is giving way to the next. And, also, it looks like some forgotten frozen plain. Except it isn’t forgotten — I’m here. And it isn’t frozen. Yet.

And then just up the road, this spot is only slightly evocative of an African savanna. But it’s only the colors on the ground and those couple of trees poking, and the bright appearance of the moon that bring that to mind.

In fact, the moon was watching over the neighborhood. These trees are much more familiar trees. I see them every time I come in and out.

For appearances sake, I hope they’ll hold on to their leaves just a bit longer. Until the first week of March, let’s say.

Anyway, this is the weekend when I will catch up on some things. I have been behind on some work for a few days too many, and concerted efforts will be made to get back up to level. And then Monday will come and we’ll start this again. And then I will catch up on next week and I will start in on some other projects where I am woefully behind.

But, first, I must go deal with some leaves myself.

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31
Oct 25

Happy Halloween

There is a metal bowl of candy on the bookcase nearest the door. The kids are coming up at irregular intervals. I can hear the entire transaction, which seems a lot faster than I recall as a kid. They are up the stairs and off the porch briskly, though each comes with a “trick-or-treat” and also a “thank you.”

One pair of kids came up to the porch, one stumbling up the stairs in their costume. And the the other stumbled down the stairs in their costume.

Maybe those miniature pumpkins we put out are really crash buoys, and I didn’t realize it.

I think we missed at least one kid in the sugar distribution process. Maybe she came back around later. Surely she did not do without.

This ritual gets out of control in some places. Once we lived in a neighborhood where people literally bussed in their kids from afar. They’d deplete your candy stores right away, and that was before the chainsmoking teens showed up. Here, we had one set of young teens, the neighbors we may never otherwise meet, but the rest were fairly young from the sound and looks of things. That’s nice, some of the older folks in the neighborhood have noticed, with a sigh, that the place is aging around them. The sigh comes because they realize it is aging with them. But lately there’s been a youth movement, witness the Halloween traditions! And maybe people are coming from afar.

There may be leftover candy.

We played our part in tomorrow’s sugar coma until about 8:30, and then the door was closed, the lights were off, and the ninjas were deployed from their barracks out back to return to their evening surveillance.

There is leftover candy. No, the ninjas can’t have any. We need them hungry and light on their feet, just in case there are any tricks over night.

Before all of that, I took the recycling to the inconvenience center. When we first moved here I had to take the garbage there, to the place across town, hence my clever little nickname. After a year we got curbside garbage delivery, finally. And now I just take the recycling. Today I loaded the car up with a repurposed outdoor garbage can, an oversized storage bin, a kitchen-sized garbage can and two big armfuls of cardboard.

I tried, and failed, to remember the last time I went there. Maybe it’s been a month. That’d be great. And it would also make sense. The recyclables were threatening to push us outdoors.

Anyway, it’s easy there. You drive up, back in. There’s a great big bin for cardboard. (Break down your boxes! Sometimes I do.) There are two bins for garbage. Another for scrap metal and one for mixed use stuff. This is where the plastic and glass go and I assume it’s all just melted in a weekend bonfire down past the tree line. But it makes me feel better. I have saved the earth. I have dispensed and disposed of all of that, so that some of it may be reused again.

I think we now send out almost as much recyclable waste as garbage, which is … good? We’re pretty streamlined on both. And the cats help with repurposed cardboard.

On the way back home, I was stopped at one of the two red lights right by this temporary installation.

This was set up right in front of the bank. Across the way is the little local performing arts center, and the store front of a nice guy who makes high end fountain pens. He’s currently selling 10 pieces with wood and copper that came from Old Ironsides. You can purchase one for $1,250. As much as I appreciate the novelty and historical heft that you can apply to that, I don’t understand that income bracket. I don’t understand how anyone could lay that out and then put a pen on their desk, or in their coat pocket. Or use it. Or put it in a display case some way. Or even a safe.

One day I hope he’ll let me come in and bring non-historical wood and turn a pen of my own. He invites students to see the process, because junior high kids are always ready throw down big bills for fountain pens, why not the rest of us? Surely he has slow days. Surely this could be an easy way to make a few extra bucks. Surely that chunk of wood I picked up that one time, from that special place, can make a nice, personal piece in no way approaching the price of a mortgage payment.

Maybe I could compensate him with leftover candy.

Happy Halloween!