Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

cycling / errands / Friday / photo — Comments Off
13
Mar 20

To the fruits ahead

My first full work-from-home day in several years, it turns out. I used to do this quite frequently at a previous stop. Once you are in the right groove, it can be quite productive.

I remember I found that the advice to keep a schedule was something that worked well for me. So I set the alarm, get home, have a breakfast snack, do the morning read of news, cringe at what I’m reading in the news, and then remember I have saved 20 minutes of commute here, plus the time ironing slacks and that sort of thing.

It is important, for some reason, to address the mop on top of my head. And it is important, for some reason, to wear some sort of shoes.

So give that a try, if this sort of thing is new for you. And remember, grace and patience. Even with yourself. Perhaps especially with yourself.

We went to the grocery store this evening, which is basically just a morbid fascination I have now. Even though we’re now ready to cut way back. Today I discovered a new thing in the produce section. This is a jack fruit. You can pick it up for $1.99, but lift with your legs and not your knees. These ran about 20 pounds each. Why, yes, I did weigh them.

Jackfruit, I’ve just learned, is a unique tropical fruit native to South India.

It has a distinctive sweet flavor and can be used to make a wide variety of dishes. It’s also very nutritious and may have several health benefits.

Just once, I want a site like this to say, “The flavor is meh. And you can only use it in one or two things anyway. If you don’t already have a natural taste for it, or if it doesn’t remind you of home, don’t worry about it.”

The description I just read, however, sounds interesting, and I’d like to try it sometime soon.

Got in the third bike ride of the year this evening. Hopefully the weather will soon warm up to the point where we stop picking our spots for rides, and I stop counting the progression.

No photos, because those don’t come until after the first few rides, when I remember how to do this properly. A little more fitness would help, too. Also, I need it to warm up for photos, since my full-length gloves discourage photos.

But it was a nice, easy, 20-miler. And as soon as I stop counting the progression of bike rides I can start counting the addition of extra miles. That’s a goal for this year. More miles, more miles.

Friday / Instagram / IU / photo / running — Comments Off
6
Mar 20

There’s a pun here

There was a miniature conference in the building today. I wish more people had attended. The students who were presenting their research had some interesting topics and they’d worked quite hard on their papers. Maybe it is a function of doing this on Fridays, or the subject matter, or the weather or the publicity, but this is what they saw.

The 3D printer version of a giant sloth skeleton is a good and attentive listener, though.

The sloth will be with us for two more weeks, and then he’s going elsewhere. He’s actually already moving, he’s just doing so very, very, very slowly.

That’s the easy joke. And you’re right to take the easy sloth joke. How many sloth jokes are there? Let’s count …

I went out for a run to count sloth jokes, and over the course of four miles I came up with two. There are two sloth jokes. “Google, how many sloth jokes do you know?”

…

Turns out there are somewhere between nine and 16 sloth jokes, depending on how critical funny has to be to your conception of a joke. I would tell you all nine to 16 sloth jokes but that would be very time consuming.

That’s the other sloth joke I had without Google’s help.

Anyway, I hope you, like Poseidon, are ready to leap into the weekend.

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Poseidon gonna Poseidon.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Mar 6, 2020 at 6:34pm PST

Friday / IU / photo / television / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 20

Ever see a two-year punchline pay off?

Unannounced. Unheralded. Barely mentioned. We’re to that point now, were you don’t even acknowledge that more of this happened today:

I don’t even think that was in the forecast. So, naturally, it snowed all afternoon and into the evening. At least it will be sunny tomorrow, and we may hit 60 degrees on Sunday.

I was thinking of that as I walked up the street to Studio 5, where this took place.

We tell students you have to do a lot of boring work to get the good stuff, sometimes, and today was one of those times when it paid out.

For two years this show has wrapped every episode with the joke “Tune in next week when Jesse Eisenberg and I …” and some silly activity. Tucker’s said that for two years. Today the punchline paid out when Eisenberg, who’s in town visiting family, declined a dozen other requests and spent a few hours with our show.

At the end of the show he did a bunch of the things the show had been promising. The production went well. That video was from my phone; the actual show will be released Sunday and it has real production value. The crew were thrilled.

It was a great moment for them, and he was so gracious with his time and input. We’re all terribly excited with how it all came together.

After work it was to the grocery store. I bought many items and nearly broke the self checkout system because of it. One needs supplies, though, and sometimes a great many supplies. A problem with the self checkout is that you must put your item in the bagging area, which is finite. And if you move things out of the bagging area, or don’t put an item immediately in the bagging area, the register is not pleased. Do that enough and you start getting warning sounds. Donk! Donk! And if you do that enough an error message appears on the screen: someone will be coming to assist you.

Not that I need the assistance.

Not that anyone is coming.

It’s a symptom of our times, I suppose. A system designed to element staff has reduced staff to such a degree that there’s no one serving in an oversight capacity.

And if you’ve ever stood in line behind a person in the self checkout area — or me, this evening, I suppose — you’d wonder how prudent that is. But, hey, Friday. Weekend ahead, groceries going in the trunk …

I had to type it three times. The first two managed to come out grocers. As if I was stuffing people in the back of my car just because of where they worked. What a way to begin a terrible short story: “He never liked florists. Or butchers. Something about the way they smiled and smelled. Cashiers and stockers, they were guilty by association, and so they’d have to go, too. Not all at once, of course. There was only only so much you can steer in a cart, just so much you could put in the trunk of the car. But if you are precise, if you are crafty, you could manage before the next bulk mail circular went out, or the store owner really noticed.”

Which, hey, for the first draft of a bad short story, might be OK. Feel free to work on it this weekend, punch it into something good.

food / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off
21
Feb 20

We are leaving the week behind

Quite a few years ago we impulsively pulled into a Sonic. I feel silly saying that because, really, how often does one pull into Sonic as part of a plan? We’re coming back from the beach and decided we wanted blizzards. We parked, the guy’s voice came over the little speaker and we placed our order, feeling a little like we were in a different era. Maybe they’d skate our snacks out to the car. Maybe it would be just like you imagine.

We aren’t Boomers and the guy wasn’t a carhop. He shuffled slowly, painfully, aimlessly, like there was nowhere to go. Like he didn’t know which of the other empty spaces this order was supposed to go. Like he didn’t know what to say.

“We’re out of spoons. Can I interest you in a fork?”

The blizzard is an ice cream with a thick viscosity, but, no, you can’t interest me in a fork. (We went to the drive-thru at the McDonald’s next door and said they’d forgotten our spoons and they, of course, gave us two.)

That was the precise wording, though. “Can I interest you in a fork?” So polite and, yet, absurd, that we committed to memory, added it to the lexicon and turned it into a perma-punchline.

The Sonic orbited a grocery store. I just measured the distance on Google Maps. It is 618 feet away. So my near-incredulous “Walk across the parking lot, walk into that Publix and buy a box of plastic spoons,” remains on point.

Today I got to make the joke again. Because we went to Chipotle (again) and they were out of forks.

Chipotle on Kirkwood, I observed, should join forces with the Sonic on Whitemarsh Island. Between them, they could maybe they could put together a full set of plasticware.

Have you ever tried to eat rice with a plastic spoon? It can be done, but you shouldn’t try to do it if you can help it.

Also, that same out of order note has moved down the line.

Gerald, the fictional third shift leader in charge of liquid refreshments, really is the worst.

Here’s the classic Friday evening photo. See ya, work week:

There’s not much better than putting it all in the mirror, is there? And sometimes if the car is pointed in the right direction you get lucky with the sideview.

One of the few things better? Terrific pizza:

We went to Indianapolis for the night, which meant we went to nearby Carmel for a decent pie. Because, again, in a college town with 46,000 students, you can’t get a superlative slice. Mellow Mushroom should always be closer. We’d be there every week.

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14
Feb 20

Happy Valentine’s Day

And a cold one it is. But the sunny is out, and it became one of those days when the sun made all the difference. If you were dressed in the appropriate amount of layers.

This was the view this morning. Just look at that fog rolling of the creek.

Here is my official work Valentine:

That’s a giant sloth skeleton. Well, it is a 3D-printed recreation of a giant sloth. Story goes that he was discovered on the banks of the Ohio River in the 19th century. Sometime later he was donated to the university and the fossilized remains were on display in a science building. Then, in the 1940s, the bones “got thrown out.”

There’s a bigger story there. That story may be lost to history, but anything told, misremembered, perhaps obfuscated and then glossed over 80 years later becomes an easy recitation of “facts.”

Eventually, it was decided by the Office of They that the sloth should be put back on display as a part of the university’s ongoing bicentennial celebration. Only, no one has the bones. But better than fossils, we can reprint them. Technology is grand! Some of the bones were apparently not lost to history, carelessness, conspiracy or whatever it was. And they were used as a model, along with careful consultation of other ancient sloth specimens. Ultimately, it became a collaborative effort among several aspects of the university, which was probably the most important thing. Our part is … hosting the sloth. The original didn’t sit in this building, but this one is, for a time. The orientation is unfortunate. It is pointing at the newspaper’s offices and it really shouldn’t. Apparently he’s going on tour after Spring Break. A very slow tour, I’m sure.

Had a cookie:

I walked down to the local little cookie bakery where they make custom-ordered treats. Made a video of it for a friend, shared the cookies with some people in her honor. I made sure to enjoy one for myself.

And I saw this on the way to the car after the day’s work was done. Tulips! Sun!

I want to be heartened by this, but I won’t be tricked. Not this year. I remember the video from this morning, after all. And I’ve come to realize: after you see the first tulips here, you still spend two months in sweaters and coats. Three winters, lesson learned.

OK, here’s an important part of the cookie video:

Happy weekend! Find yourself a cookie. Probably you deserve it.