Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

Friday / IU / journalism / links / photo / video — Comments Off
17
Feb 23

En garde!

Here is shaky visual evidence of my first robin(s) of the spring — another of the false signals. The first being two days in the 60s. The next will be emerging tulip leaves. But, for now, a small flock of robins are flittering around looking for worms.

It was snowing on me at the time.

We are 63 days away from spring arriving here.

Also, does it look like that robin might be a bit of a litterbug and a smoker? I think that robin is a bit of a litterbug. And I have to think that this bird is setting itself up for some longterm health problems.

This was going on in the studio this morning.

Members of the university’s fencing club came to give a demonstration for the morning show. I talked with their two student coaches. Fencing, it turns out, is a thing that enjoys competition against other club teams and varsity programs. They said there’s a big difference between varsity and club teams. And, sometimes, they face off against teams that have people in the Olympic pipeline. That, they said, is another sort of thing altogether. It was interesting to hear them talk about that. And, having run by an Olympic distance runner, and swam in a pool lane next to an All-American, I can appreciate, a little, what they’re saying.

So I said I just wanted to get all of this kit and then spar a bit with my lovely bride on the walking path near our house, just to make the neighbors wonder what is going on. Apparently the equipment isn’t that expensive. They priced it all out, and I figured it’d be more.

But the skill, I don’t have any of those.

What was fun, though, was watching the fencing team members give a crash course to the show hosts, and then watching the two of them face off.

That was good fun, and now I have one more anecdote about the things that take place in our television studios.

Here are some things to read.

A new study found that having at least one conversation with a friend a day increases happiness and lowers stress levels.

A new study published in Communication Research sought to find out what types of conversations people need to have, and how often they should have them, in order to improve their well-being. The researchers found that having at least one conversation with a friend can increase happiness and lower stress levels by the end of each day.

“While other research on well-being focuses on things like grateful thoughts or journaling, my focus as a researcher is about what we can do in our interactions to improve our well-being. This gives us a valuable list of things people can do to improve their days,” Jeffrey Hall, one of the researchers, told VICE.

Previous research showed that talking about one’s problems can reduce stress, strengthen our immune system, and reduce physical and emotional distress, but this study suggests that people don’t necessarily need to bond over their misery.

Hall and his team identified seven types of communication that are commonly found in social interactions: catching up, meaningful talk, joking around, showing care, listening, valuing others and their opinions, and offering sincere compliments.

Most stories about active research want to jump the gun, but this seems straightforward, which is a good sign.

So talk to more people, I guess.

Just not in front of your devices.

Google exec says Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded:

Google’s Nest smart devices are always listening — their microphones detect loud noises and cameras track sudden movements in a home, and can start automatically recording at any time.

Because of that, Nest owners should probably warn their house guests that they’re on camera, according to Google devices chief Rick Osterloh.

When asked by a BBC reporter whether homeowners with Nest have such an obligation, Osterloh first said he hadn’t considered it.

“Gosh, I haven’t thought about this before in quite this way,” Osterloh said. “It’s quite important for all these technologies to think about all users… we have to consider all stakeholders that might be in proximity.”

Osterloh then acceded that warning houseguests about Nest devices’ recording capabilities is proper etiquette, stating that he already does so.

Do you see the contradiction?

Then again, we’ve come a long way with reconciling contradiction.

COVID-19 is a leading cause of death in children and young people in the US:

COVID-19 was the underlying cause of death for more than 940,000 people in the US, including over 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged 0–19 years. Until now, it had been unclear how the burden of deaths from COVID-19 compared with other leading causes of deaths in this age group.

[…]

Among children and young people aged 0 – 19 years in the US, COVID-19 ranked eighth among all causes of death; fifth among all disease-related causes of death; and first in deaths caused by infectious or respiratory diseases.

By age group, COVID-19 ranked seventh (infants), seventh (1–4 year olds), sixth (5–9 year olds), sixth (10–14 year olds), and fifth (15–19 year olds).

COVID-19 was the underlying cause for 2% of deaths in children and young people (800 out of 43,000), with an overall death rate of 1.0 per 100,000 of the population aged 0–19. The leading cause of death (perinatal conditions) had an overall death rate of 12.7 per 100,000; COVID-19 ranked ahead of influenza and pneumonia, which together had a death rate of 0.6 per 100,000.

This is where I always bring up my carefully researched polio trivia.

The polio epidemic in the United States peaked in 1952 with 57,000-plus cases. That year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with paralysis. Stark contrast.

And if you want to see another sort of contrast …

Why does the South have such ugly credit scores?:

“The reason why credit scores are so low in the South has gotta be connected to medical debt, because that’s the most common type of unpaid bill that people have,” Braga said. And the South, he said, easily has the highest levels of medical debt in the country.

Of the 100 counties with the highest share of adults struggling to pay their medical debt, 92 are in the South, and the other eight are in neighboring Oklahoma and Missouri, according to credit data from the Urban Institute. (On the other side, 82 of the 100 counties with the least pervasive medical-debt problems are in the Midwest, with 45 in Minnesota alone.)

And sure enough, when you look at areas across the nation where adults are struggling to pay down medical debt, they have similar credit scores.

That’s some map. Click through and check your county.

And then go out and have a great weekend. You’re due!

Friday / music / Re-Listening — Comments Off
10
Feb 23

This evening was pre-empted by sleep

Saturday update: There’s the Re-Listening project, but nothing else to report. After work I went to the house and sat down. And then I had dinner. Then I did the dishes. Then I fell asleep and slept for about 12 hours. So this’ll just have to do for Friday.

Sometimes I have been guessing when I picked up a CD. Sometimes I have a specific memory of that, when, how it came to be. I suppose it’ll continue to be like that as we go forward in the Re-Listening project. Paradoxically, there might be more guessing the farther along that we get. (I’ll blame the web for that in due time.) Today, we’re doing a bit of both. There’s something distinctly remembered here … and … yet …

“All For You” was released in January 1997 and I picked up Sister Hazel’s “… Somewhere More Familiar” soon after, when it was released the next month. It’s a happy, jangly pop record. The record went platinum in the U.S., peaking at 47 on the charts. “All for You” is the single you couldn’t avoid that year, and it made it #11 on Billboard’s charts.

I remember driving up U.S. 280 in the early hours of one morning playing and re-playing this track, learning the words to this song.

I remember I stopped at a Chevron for a bathroom break, looked at the newspaper box — remember those? and saw a stunning Birmingham News headline. But, and I’m looking at a quarter-century-old archives to verify this, the rest of that little anecdote is a false memory. The timelines don’t match up. So much for that story.

Anyway, “Happy” was a late-breaking single.

I saw Sister Hazel a few times, small clubs, festivals. Good times. They liked to tell you they were from Gainesville Florida, like their origin story was punctuation.

This always struck me as a sweet song.

Otherwise, after a time, the sound gets a little repetitive. It’s a good time, easy breezy sound, though, and I’m always happy when they came on. I played this CD a lot around my apartment. Upbeat stuff helps with late night work, I guess.

Sister Hazel, another band celebrating the 20th anniversary of a record this year, are still touring. They have nine dates booked this spring. I wonder what members of a band and their crews do with these thoroughly achievable schedules. (There are a few documentaries about touring road crews out there. It seems like a daunting job.)

adventures / Friday / music / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
3
Feb 23

Who has purple eyes anyway?

And what are your weekend plans? Did you ease into them? Rush into them? Have them foiled by bad news at 3 p.m.?

The risk adverse should stop taking meetings at about noon on Friday, for that very reason. But that’s not a problem here. The sun is out, warming nothing, but the sun is out. I kid, of course. It got up to 55 degrees today, another effort at that first gut-wrenching stage of winter tricks. “Look, it’s almost over!”

I know better. More winter, as they say, is coming. I don’t know when, or why, but it will.

I’m equally prepared for the second stage of winter tricks, too. The first signs of the tulips will be upon us in a week or two. The unsuspecting will herald this as a sign of spring. We know better, by now.

Turning back to the Re-Listening project, and back to late 1996 or very early 1997, the car was today and yesterday filled with the sounds of two guys from Texas. Jack O’Neill and Cary Pierce met in college, where they were theater students at SMU. They made themselves as a duo, building an incredibly loyal audience in the folk and alternative rock scene. If you liked tight harmonies, 12-string guitars and hyperactive live shows, this was a good band for you.

I caught up to them just under a decade into their career. I played their cover of “Please Come to Boston” and their original “Three of Us in a Boat” on the air whenever I could manage. And then, in some way that I’ve forgotten now, their record “Finest Hour” came to me. This is the first track on that record, and the first time, I think, that I heard them with a rhythm section.

There is a slice of their audience that regarded this as their most anticipated, and most disappointing record. A full band took something away, they argued. And the dynamic of O’Neill and Pierce was hitting a rough spot. Few seemed all that happy at the time, as I recall. But, still, this is a catchy little pop tune. It’ll come back up again.

Classic formula here, you have to bring things down a notch on the third track. They hit three continents, nine countries and 45 states, before going their separate ways for five years. Then they got back together. Older, wiser, less youthful exuberance, same quality performances, from what I’ve seen online of late.

One of the best songs on the record. And we’re going off the strength of the theme, the peppy chorus, the creative use of mahogany hair, juxtaposed against a lyrical great force that takes the narrator to a … ferry. Aside from that, though, great song, and “Vineyard” is one of their signature tunes.

They started doing what they called “Destination Shows,” which, if anything else, caters to a maturing audience with purchasing power and no sense of rock ‘n’ roll whatsoever.

These shows are a whole new fan experience where people can enjoy gorgeous scenery, share delicious food & wine and have “campfire”- type access to their favorite band. It’s a vacation and concert in one. Each Destination Show provides a unique experience dedicated to the local culture: Napa/Sonoma vineyards at sunset, a ranch in Austin Hill Country, high society in Dallas, a two-mile-high a private club in Aspen, amazing history at the Biltmore in NC, a 14,000 square foot hacienda in San Miguel de Allende, MX – and the list goes on.

“We have been doing destination events for 10 years now and they have been a huge hit with our fans and have allowed us to make so many great new ones along the way,” said Cary Pierce. “I think these events continue to grow and sell out because people want more than “just a show” – they want an experience. They want to create lasting memories, explore a new place or visit an old favorite. In some cases, we’re offering them a trip of a lifetime. We’re finding there a lot of people that really value these experiences.”

That actually sounds like good fun … oh no … I’m an aging audience member!

Anyway, this one is a bit of a departure, and it works because of that.

Remember, a few embeds ago, I said we’d hear more about “Trials.” Here’s the hidden track remix.

The other half of the album, to me, all sounds like this one. Not my favorite, but there’s a half dozen tracks I still enjoy, more than a quarter-century later, on a record that was something of a wash, and that’s pretty great.

Happily, Jackopierce is still working. They released a new song last month. They’ll be in Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina on the first weekend of March.

I took a bike ride last night. I had intended to use Thursday as a rest day, but The Yankee invited me for a quick workout. A good rule of thumb about bike rides is to never turn down an invitation. So I did a quick hour, got 17 miles through Zwift’s Makuri Islands. I found one more Strava PR, on a sprint that doesn’t matter. Also, I was treated to this neat scene as I rode through one of the virtual villages. It was a good place to use the many different camera angles.

So what have we learned? Rest days are important — they would be if I was doing high volume, I’m doing average volume — but accept the invitation.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 55 routes down, 65 to go.

To the weekend! To the miles ahead!

cycling / Friday / Indiana / memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / video — Comments Off
27
Jan 23

There’s a lot here for a Friday

Here’s a question — and it is a real and earnest question. I, being from somewhere sensible, don’t have a lot of experience with this. But if it snows on Wednesday, and your car still looks like this on Friday morning, would it be inappropriate if I got out at the red light and scrapped all that stuff off your car?

Here’s another question — again, asked in all earnestness. If the car in front of you, and the car behind you, has the same idiotic problem, which car should I prioritize?

“Two days, y’all,” he said drawing out the y’all, so that you might understand that it is a word of his people, not just something he has appropriated from others, so you realize, This guy is from the South, and he has found your snow care … wanting.

I spent much of my morning working on my calendar. It’s riveting stuff, I tell you, but February is now planned to a fairly granular level. No one ask me for anything, please, lest we upset the applecart.

In the middle of the day I realized that not everyone knows the expressions “song and dance” and “dog and pony show.” I’m not sure if that’s a generational issue, or perhaps I was misheard. Either way, it will surely make me self-conscious. I sometimes tell people to break a leg, in the show business sense, but there’s going to be a day when someone doesn’t know the phrase, and I’ll sound like a callous, violent person.

“He was very helpful. He asked me twice if I had any questions before he left. And then he told me to break bones. But the weirdest part of all was, he said it in a kind of cheery voice.”

I’ve got to work that out of my lexicon.

Late in the day I had the chance to watch people use a state-of-the-art studio and control room as props again. This never fails to amuse. I also met a folklore major, who taught me a bit about folklore. I now feel as if I can enroll in a folklore 101 class, sneak in late on the second day and be ready to learn.

Folklore is fascinating, as an area of study. I was in their building in October, and admired some of the class offerings on the walls. Some looked worth trying, not that I’d be a folklorist, whatever that actually is outside of the academy.

Looking at classes years and years later, when the pressure is off and it doesn’t matter so much, is an interesting exercise. And, you find, your horizons broaden when you’re not contemplating tuition.

I left the office promptly at 5 p.m. today. First time since Monday. Saw the daylight and some sunshine on the drive back to the house. First time since … I’m not sure when. Maybe Monday, but nothing is jumping out at me. Could it be last Friday?

Anyway, the days are slowly getting longer, which is encouraging. The view in the backyard this evening was even more so. What’s that blue stuff back there?

It is the first sign of spring, if you’re desperate. It’s the first time you’re going to be tricked by the prospect of spring, if you are foolish. There are three stages to this trickery. This is the first stage.

I’ll be foolish. I’ll take it. It isn’t spring, not even close. But that doesn’t matter so much when you see the sun and sky actually, finally, beating up the clouds, even if it is just for the small part of one day.

The next CD in the Re-Listening project is another media update. I had “Throwing Copper’ as a cassette, even though it was released in 1994. (Remember, late adopter.) So in late 1996 or early 1997, I had to get a CD copy because I still wanted to play it a lot, because it was the 90s, and I was young, and Ed Kowalczyk screamed a lot. And the rhythm section on that record is pretty decent.

“Throwing Copper” was the mainstream breakthrough, after two smaller records and an EP. And it was a huge success. Two of the five singles went to number one, and “Lightning Crashes” sat atop the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for ten straight weeks. After it had been on the Billboard 200 album chart for a full year, the record hit number one. It sold eight million copies in the US alone.

It is amusing to me that these guys were all about 24 when this record was released. Picked up straight out of high school, dictionary in hand and angst to share.

Since it was that broadly popular, and since this was a tape-to-CD upgrade for me, and because it is getting late into the evening, here’s just two quick tracks from later in the album. I always enjoyed this bass line, even as the song goes well against the general feel of the rest of the record.

And then Kowalczyk goes full Kowalczyk three-and-a-half minutes in.

This was the hidden track, and the slide guitar is so atypical, and works so well. It still doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this was on as I drove away from campus today, and it still works.

I saw Live three times in concert in the next few years. They put on some great shows. Then the music got more exotic, and then the tensions within the band got weird. I’m trying to make sense of it on Wikipedia now. The singer left, or was uninvited or something. The band continued without him, which seemed weird. He sued them. Then the original band got back together for a time, then fired one member. There was another lawsuit, and now Kowalczyk is the last original member still playing under the name. That’s the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I guess.

Since I premise the Re-Listening project as a quick stroll through the memories that got pinned to some of this music … I remember, and I am being as vague as possible here, a job I had in high school. I worked with a guy who was a college frat boy. He was funny, goofy, nice, and guaranteed to fall into some sort of trouble. You know the sort. There was a young woman who worked there, too. She was nice, attractive and guaranteed to be trouble. You know the sort. They got pregnant. “Lightning Crashes” was their song, which, I mean … really.

But that was 1994. To be young just then brought a certain set of choices, just as any other period. I wonder how long those two lasted.

I got in a quick ride before dinner tonight, tapping out 33 miles on Zwift, racing to finish before the batteries on all the necessary devices died. (The speaker didn’t survive the ride. My phone and iPad just barely did.) Tonight I got in two routes in France. I set three Strava segment PRs, somehow.

This lighthouse spins as you’re riding through the digital countryside of northern France.

I’m in an interesting place for the month. Earlier this week I compiled my highest volume months of bike riding, in terms of miles. It’s still a humble number, but this month was in 9th place overall. After tonight, this month is now my third best month. Tomorrow, it’ll be second. Maybe I can make it my most prolific month before it’s over.

May as well get something out of January.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 48 routes down, 72 to go.

cycling / Friday / memories / music / photo / video — Comments Off
22
Jan 23

‘Sigh’

I’ve never had a clever idea for a personalized license plate. And, wouldn’t you know it, the best idea only occurred to me when I found it, already in use.

(You might note that, in the reflection, I am wearing gloves. Today was the day that broke me. But my fingers stayed warm.)

There are only two problems with that plate. First, it’s on the children’s hospital tag. Hard to discern what we’re saying here. Second, I suppose the state wouldn’t sell you an ellipse. A few dots on the end would have made the thing.

“Sigh … ”

I guess you could always put that on a mug or a thermos or something. Still get much of your point across, but not in traffic. But then, there are vinyl clings for that. One for the front bumper, and one for the back.

I’d actually like two light kits for the car. One that says “Sigh” and another that says “Hey thanks.” Light those up, front and back, at the appropriate times, and you could convey a lot of messages. I’d be better with that than the horn. There are certain places where the horn is a complex form of communication, but where I’m from the car horn was a solo angry note. Or, if you ever watched poorly scripted dramas, it could also indicate “My brakes are out! Get out of the way!”

Come to think of that, you don’t see that as a TV trope that much anymore. Maybe automobile manufacturers have figured something out about brake technology since the 1970s. Or maybe all of that is on Amazon Prime, or Apple TV. We don’t have those, so the tropes could be in full force over there.

I had a nice long meeting about documentaries today. This is probably the third of these meetings I’ve had, and this meeting was the conclusion of the second or third email chain about them. We’re going to be watching a lot of documentaries at work over the next couple of months, which is exciting.

I also had a short stint in the television studio this afternoon. Someone needed to shoot a quick promotional video, so the studio became a set. I enjoyed watching people moving around chairs and using state-of-the-art cameras as props.

Also, I have begun a surely losing battle with YouTube. This would be difficult to describe, even if you cared, which you don’t. Everyone has their own struggles with YouTube, or they don’t. And, sure, I’d Google the problem if I knew how to describe it, alas.

Our dystopian, but not because of this, future: when you can’t figure out the right search terms to find the answer for how to solve a YouTube issue.

This is a strong contender for my First World Problem of the Year.

Sigh.

We return to the Re-Listening project, where I am playing all of my CDs in their order of acquisition. It passes the time, gives me something to sing to in the car, and something to fill a bit of space with here. These aren’t reviews, but a bit of memory, and a bit of whimsy, as music should be.

We are, I think, getting close to the music getting quite good again, but I digress.

The year was 1996. My on-again and off-again girlfriend suggested a movie. If memory serves we had to erase some lame movie experience from our collective memory. I wish I could remember what that one was (and I’ve tried) but I remember this specifically: when the credits rolled, we stood up to leave and she said, “This movie needed more explosions.”

So the next one was Twister. I think we blew off something that seemed important, but was anything but. That was the sort of thing that appealed to her sensibilities — low key rebel that she was. And so it was that we found ourselves in one of those old theaters that instantly feels a little dirty and dusty and spent the afternoon with Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes and all the rest.

Sometime soon after I picked up the soundtrack.

Incidentally, the first two tracks on that soundtrack also appeared on records that we’ve recently visited here. The third song is an inscrutable Tori Amos track. (I wasn’t ready for Amos yet. But a different girlfriend, a few years later, helped remedy that, and even took me to a live show.)

I don’t know why this is, but I love every Alison Krauss song I’ve ever heard, and I own none of her music, except for two or three soundtrack appearances.

Hard to believe this is Mark Knopfler’s first solo single.

In addition to those, and the Van Halen and Rusted Roof indirectly referenced above, there’s a who’s who of forgettable tracks from big pop names here. There’s Soul Asylum, k.d. lang, Lisa Loeb, the Red Hot Chili Peppers for some reason, and the Goo Goo Dolls.

At the end is this song and … I think this might be my favorite Stevie Nicks song?

I’m too young for Fleetwood — and it’s an ever-shrinking list of things I’m too young for these days — and I never really got the Stevie Nicks appeal. But I like this. Probably it’s the Lindsey Buckingham medley.

The next album was the second effort from Bush. We recently ran through the 1994 debut in this space. They had a huge success there, but most of the record doesn’t appeal to me anymore. Their next release, this release, from 1996, even less so. But i remember being disappointed by it then, too. It’s a stinker. But what do I know? It topped the Billboard 200, though I’ve always found everything aside from the first single to be easily forgettable. I don’t care about this record at all. It’s an endless run through empty metaphors from the emo thesaurus, with hasty licks that are, I guess, fills.

Where their first record seemed like a polished parody of the grunge style, this one swung too far in the opposite direction. Wikipedia would like to convince me that this is generally held up as “the last ‘grunge’ sounding album of the 1990s.” Let’s think on that without thinking on in too hard. Did anyone release a record with overdriven guitars and out-of-tune vocals after November, 1996 …

First of all, this is a silly exercise. It’s a loosely labeled genre. No one in it liked the term, none of them. Soundgarden’s last album came out a few months before and they broke up in 1997. Alice in Chains was in that weird hiatus with Layne Staley — and Boggy Depot doesn’t seem to apply. Kurt Cobain was dead. Pearl Jam was still working, of course, but trying to be anything but grunge by then. So maybe Chuck Klosterman was right. Maybe Bush is the Warrant of grunge. Funny that it would be the British band to be there, simply because of timing.

Everything that came after was mislabeled as post-grunge or broadly, and hilariously, mislabeled as “alternative.” Much of it was the return of “corporate-formulated music to regain the footing it lost when swept out by the success of ‘Nevermind.'” Grunge used to be defined as a rebellious counter to all of that. More cynically, it was viewed as cheaper and quicker to produce, and there was a time and place for it. The time was the late-stage Gen X crowd and the 1990s. The place, I suppose, was their ethos. But we all went to work, too, and time marched on. And then the Spice Girls marched in.

Thankfully, the Spice Girls are not the next record on the Re-Listening project, nor will they ever be, but that’s for next week.

I had another quick bike ride before dinner. Just 21 miles, because the next segment was going to be 14 more and I didn’t know how I’d feel about that, plus there was dinner to consider and it was getting on 7:30 and, I couldn’t even use the “time got away from me” excuse, because, look! The moon!

The little things in Zwift delight me so much. The stars twinkle. This stage had a few drones flying overhead for some reason. (You can select an overhead camera view, and maybe that’s why they are they. That’s what I’m telling myself.) And the moon moves back behind that mountain. It is setting, and this happens to fast, because you are riding through simulated days and nights, but it also makes sense given the terrain and the path of your road and how that changes your perspective.

But, I think, when you see the moon in Zwift it is always a full moon. This seems like poor, or overly romanticized, programming. An always full moon would be a problem. It is, or isn’t, full from our planetary view because of the relative positions of the earth, moon and sun. So if the moon always looked full then the earth is out of the way, or, to be more accurate, the moon isn’t in our orbit. Big tidal consequences. Let’s assume it drifts away with some appreciable-to-human-eyes speed. The angle of the earth may shift widely. Our days would get longer, and some time after that things would get really bad here. Seasons would probably change a fair amount. Who knows what would happen at the then-wobbly poles. And I guess it depends on when, in our solar transit, that the moon decided to let go as to where it would wind up, but that could create a whole series of issues in the solar system, too. Zwift might want to fix that, just in case.

In case of what? The moon is watching a bike riding video game and getting ideas?

Sigh.

2023 Zwift route tracker: 38 routes down, 82 to go.

Happy weekend!