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Friday

Covid-19 / Friday / photo / podcast — Comments Off
8
May 20

To the week … end? To the weekend!

Isn’t this a lovely little Iris from our late afternoon walk? I took several different shots trying to find the perfect angle. The lengths I go to for you, gentle reader.

Fine day for a walk, which is about all that can be said. Days and nights seem like the only distinguishing features right now, and that because of the visual cues. Psychologists, I have read, would suggest this is because the days don’t have the normal distinguishing features. Makes sense. If you don’t have a sport practice or a musical rehearsal to get to, if your weekly book club is canceled, all of the days seem like … Tuesdays, or whatever they seem like to you.

But, then, that’s just your programming. How did that work before the before times? Before all of the serious structure that we’ve anchored everyone too? I suppose they were a different sort of drudgery, more back breaking, and without conditioned air and ice cubes, without an entire universe of streaming distractions.

See? Not so bad, not knowing what day it is, when you think about in those terms.

Tom Duszynski from the Fairbanks School of Public Health at IUPUI in Indianapolis talked with me about where we are with the stay-at-home plans and what could happen next. He’s one of those actual experts you should listen to, so listen to him.

I’m also sending some of his soundbites out to local television stations. Maybe one or two of them will pick up quote or two. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to celebrate the weekend? That is what happens next, right?

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and listen to a few On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

cycling / Friday / photo / podcast / video — Comments Off
1
May 20

It’s gonna be …

Time for a bike ride, and since we went in the late afternoon and we headed generally north and east that means it’s time for a shadooooooow sellllllfie …

It was also the day for me to go the wrong way because I got the roads confused and The Yankee had to chase me down which was no easy feat today because I had good legs and yet she managed to eventually do it anyway because I looked over my shoulder and saw the look on her face and then sat up and, yes, run-on sentences do happen a lot in cycling. It has something to do with the breathing, I think.

So we turned around and went the right direction, determined to not speak of this again. It only added on one extra mile, so she didn’t have to chase me far, because she is a strong rider, but my legs held up throughout the day. This is what’s important, look at that water:

There were people fishing on the causeway as we went through. Everyone is ready to enjoy some nice weather, which we’ve only had it intermittently here. That’s a crime against humanity, I’m pretty sure.

Anyway, that’s just after the big downhill, which one app tracked me at 134.4 miles per hour. I was not going 134.4 miles per hour. That’d be very fast, indeed, and I think the app is wrong in a lot of ways, begging the question: Why?

So you go down the descent then you take a hard left and you find yourself on a road that you can somehow hit 25-27 miles per hour without even pedaling. Then there’s the water and that’s when she caught me:

And then the climb out. This is where our barn by bike feature of the day comes in, and, yes, that is an uphill and not a camera tilt trick:

Is there a video? There is a video. On this particular route the video is from the last smooth, easy part before the hard part, and before the water.

It would be tempting to rush through here and attack the long series of rollers that turn into an uphill before the long downhill and the next eventual climb. It’d be fun to turn this into a bunch of big sweeping sines, as Bill Strickland called them:

I was riding in long, gradual curves that stretched nearly from the right shoulder of the road out to and sometimes past the yellow line on the left, then back and out and again the same.

[…]

The sine curve to me is more of an undulation, an expression of the natural beauty of movement, and the beauty of natural movement: a lover’s body in moments of passion beyond thought, for instance.

Or a bicycle rider in one of those rare interludes when the pure sheer pleasure of being a bicycle rider can be expressed only through an extended series of line-to-line swoops. The road sine is one of the most spontaneous and unsophisticated acts of cycling, and it begins and occurs and continues in some kind of complete state of unexamined and unself-conscious motion.

Bill Strickland is a brilliant writer and I love that description. I do it all the time on the bike. I always think of that passage when I do.

But never right here; never at the fence.

Somehow, I always find myself doing that other ultimate sign of freedom. I get to just the right spot on that road, just ahead of us here, and let it go and coast. I’ll float almost as far as momentum and enthusiasm will take me. And then start working my way uphill.

Talked with Tom Duszynski again, because the world needs to hear from epidemiologists and I’m part of the world and I want to give learned and thoughtful people a place to speak to people who want to hear real things and not bombast.

Wash your hands. And if you’re out on a bike or out on a trail or just in the backyard, have a great weekend.

adventures / cycling / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off
24
Apr 20

Riding into the weekend, and then walking into it

For reasons I’m beginning to understand only a bit, and am not quite yet equipped (or perhaps inspired, or both) to remedy, the videos I shoot on my phone look like compressed garbage when I upload them. What is this, 2012?

Anyway, here’s a little bit of today’s cross-county-line ride. Before the turnaround, and well before today’s flat. So sick of flats.

This, too, was before the flat. Good thing, as this was well away from the house. But you aren’t thinking about any of that when you see turkeys:

Anyway, just before getting back to the house I had another flat. It was on the last big downhill which, in my experience, is the wrong place to have your rear wheel to go down. At the bottom of the hill is a hard turn that leads up into our neighborhood. But I stopped short and figured, ehhh, I’m walking this in.

Because I could try to re-inflate the tube, or swap out to an extra one, right there on the side of the road — like I did just four rides ago! — or I could just walk the last mile in and do all of that in the comfort of my bike room or home-library.

So I walked it in. Problem: bike shoes. So you take those off and walk it in feeling a little ridiculous: spandex, helmet, walking a bike and barefoot. At some point you have to figure the people in your neighborhood, to the extent that they notice you, are just used to it.

Bobet, I hope so.

Anyway, you could be mad at flats, or pleased with the opportunity. If my tire hadn’t gone down I would have whizzed right through here at 20-some miles per hour and not even noticed this redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) demonstrating its cauliflory.

It’s a trait some species exhibit, where blooms can grow directly out of the trunk. Cauliflory, by the way, is ‘stem flower’ in Latin.

And, yes, I looked up the scientific name. There’s only so much stuff I can keep in my head, after all.

Also on the walk back … and this is just after The Yankee got to the house, put her things away and walked back out toward me with my sneakers. Which was great, because half-a-mile barefoot is quite enough, thanks. Anyway, we walked it in together, which was also nice, and we saw this:

And that’s how the weekend begins. I hope yours begins with pretty things and nice gestures, and fewer mechanical issues.

Bloomington / Friday / history / IU / journalism / television — Comments Off
17
Apr 20

Let’s go back in time, but only a little

Last night I held another IUZoomington meeting with a true television legend, Rick Karle. The man won 24 Emmy awards in sports and then decided he’d go over and try some news. There’s more to it than that, there always is. But he’s one of those people students need to hear from. He’s been doing it longer than they’ve been alive, after all.

I told the story about the first time I met him was on the phone, when I was in undergrad. I was calling in scores from a women’s volleyball or basketball game or something. It was a big deal. An OMG, Rick Karle, kind of deal. But, then, he’s from a place where, as a colleague of ours put it, the people on the local news are among the community’s celebrities. And it’s true. Also, the guy’s just good at what he does. Always has been.

So it was nice to see him last night. He talked about what he sees from interns and new reporters coming into the business, and what our gang should be doing to show off the right sorts of things.

Most of the people in the session tonight were sophomores and juniors, but they, and the seniors, all lost a lot in having their campus experience shut down in March. The next four or five weeks of TV would have been really valuable for them, so I’m trying to make it up to them some kind of way.

It’s really nice that so many of the people I know in the working media are so generous with their time to talk with them. (This is the third or fourth one of these I’ve done in the last few weeks, and some of my colleagues in the school are doing others, besides.) It’s a small business, and no one ever forgets where they came from, which is a nice perk.

Let’s look at the paper. We’re going back to this day 103 years ago, which seems apropos, in some respects given our particular moment in time. And this day 103 years ago, it was getting serious.

The sub chaser was the Smith, and it escaped the night. Sub chasers, I’ve just learned, were small, light and fast vessels. They built about 300 of them for U.S. service, and more for France. And there isn’t an easily found repository of what each did. But I did find one reference to the Smith, which sailed on an Alaskan patrol in 1923, so it survived the war.

The subhead of that story talked about the 20,000 Germans killed along the front at Rheims, 10,000 captured and 50,000 injured. Europe was about to enter the third year of this thing, and that’s the second item on the American story. It was a war brutal on a scale we can scarcely understand today. This would have probably been the beginning of the Second Battle of the Aisne, the Neville Offensive. This part was meant to be a 48-hour effort. It launched on April 16th, and lasted into the second week of May. The idea was an entire push across the lines in France, trying to knock back the Germans. Tactically successful, but without reaching its objectives. The Germans had something like 163,000 casualties from this push. The British, French and Russians had something like 350,000.

Of course no one could see that on April 17th, and certainly not from this far away. Across the way there was a message from President Wilson. War was coming. There was no escaping it now.

In between, a student got picked up, and written about in a way that would never happen today. Also, he wore his hair in a pompadour, which is really how you knew something was the matter with the guy.

There’s also a note that the high school was going to show a film, “How to Garden.” And the Republicans and the Democrats couldn’t get along in Indianapolis. There’s a note from a murder trial in a neighboring county, and a piece of propaganda about signing up for the Army and a railway man hurt his hand. But this brief talked about a really bad day.

On the second page there is finally a photograph. It’s showing you how they load lumber in Kentucky.

There are two fashion photos on that page. Then, as now, it probably only applied to a thin slice of the readership. There’s far too much worry about the war, about growing things, about how trains work, for people in their readership to spend time with handsome frocks of satin, georgette sleeves and satin collars and cuffs.

This is across the street from our building at campus.

In 1928 the Ritz Theatre was built in that spot. Later renamed the Von Lee, it had three screens. They played movies there until 2000. Now there are campus offices and a restaurant in the shell of the building. It is, quite literally, a facade.

Fred Bates Johnson did it all.

Really, all of it. He was a school superintendent, a journalist, a disgruntled journalist …

He felt this was still not enough and thought journalism was a “chancy” profession and that courses should be offered to train people in the field. He suggested to the late Dr. William Lowe Bryan, then president of Indiana University, that the university start a school of journalism.

After a faculty study of the proposal, Dr. Bryan asked Mr. Johnson to return to the I.U. campus to be the university’s first journalism professor.

Although a course in instruction in news gathering was taught in the English department for a short time during the 1890’s, Fred Bates Johnson succeeded in getting “The Course in Journalism” added to the curriculum of Indiana University during the year 1907-1908. Also at that time the university published a suggested four-year liberal program as a preparation for journalism.

So he became a journalism professor. Then a lawyer, a soldier, a judge advocate and a member of the Public Service Commission. So he basically started the journalism program that would, in 107 years or so, become The Media School. Thanks, ‘fessor.

And finally, remembering this is 1917 …

Two decades prior, the G.A.R. had hundreds of posts all over this state, and more than 400,000 members across the country. Three years after this notice Indianapolis hosted the national encampment, one of several Indy hosted, but the numbers were falling away fast. There were just 103,258 members remaining by 1920. In 1949, also in Indy, the G.A.R. held their last reunion.

Earlier in 1949 the last Hoosier soldier, 102-year-old John Christian Adams, passed away. (Adams was from West Virginia and moved to Indiana well after the war, but they count him.) The Harry Truman White House sent a wreath.

At that last encampment in 1949 six old men showed up, including James Hard and Albert Woolson. There was a parade. They reminisced. The Marine Corps Band played Retreat. Hard was the last combat soldier. He apparently fought at First Bull Run, Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg. And it is said that he met Abraham Lincoln at a White House reception. Hard died in 1953. Woolson was a drummer boy, but his unit never saw action. He lived until 1956 and was briefly eulogized by Dwight Eisenhower.

You have to move forward a long way before the past is really the past. It’s always been that way, we’ve just never been really keen on accepting it.

cycling / Friday / IU / photo / podcast — Comments Off
10
Apr 20

Why have one when you can have two

Here we are on a nice, hard, slow, windy ride.

Or, for at least my part of it, it was slow. There was nothing to the route. It was one of our most standard courses. I just couldn’t build anything up today. Three days of legs and my legs, I told myself, were exhausted. And before I get too far into this story …

Dr. Joel Wong is the chair of the counseling and educational psychology department in IU’s School of Education. We had a delightful conversation on gratitude, and things to try to keep yourself in good spirits and keep the morale up on the home front.

It’s an interview I wish I could have recorded three weeks ago, but it’s one valuable in all seasons. So give it a listen. And head on over to your favorite podcast provider and subscribe to “On Topic with IU.” You can now find the show on Apple, Google, Stitcher, Spotify, TuneIn and Anchor.

Back to the bike: it was kinda breezy. It wasn’t a headwind-in-every-direction day, but it was a headwind-from-several-nonsensical-directions sort of day. And, look! Here is today’s barn by bike:

We ride by there frequently. The sun is almost always in that same spot behind the building. I should ride by, on some far off day when it gets warm here, in the morning, just to see a little more detail on the east-facing side of the barn. It’s in a nice location. The gentle fields in front and back are always just grass. It never seems like much of a pasture. There are houses close by on both sides. I wonder what they use the outbuilding for.

We pedaled down to the lake, and there’s a turnaround down there, which meant I finally saw The Yankee again, since she was well ahead of me, because I was moving slow. She met me going the other direction and she met me much sooner than I’d hoped. I am sure it showed in my body language. She didn’t go all the way to the lake, she said, but turned short of it at another prominent spot. So I continued on, and I decided to make the trip the whole way down. This meant riding past a colleague’s house, and so I call out his name as I do every time I go by, just to amuse myself. And then there’s the last big left hand curve and you get to the turnaround.

I turned around, and in that same big curve away from it, my bike started wobbling. So I stopped in a safe spot — right in the turn — to check things out. Oh, my back tire is getting low. I carry a small hand pump for just such an occasion! Pump it up a bit, send a note that I’ll be noodling, even slower, on the way back in (on account of my tire) and set out once more.

And I made it about 250 yards or so. Bike wobbles again. Tire completely flat.

So there I am, in the cold and not-quite-dying light, standing in some nice people’s yard, hoping they don’t come out to ask too many questions of me as I change the tube. I had just one extra tube in my little bike bag. So, lever off the tire, pull out the old tube, pump it a bit to see if the tube has any chance of being nursed back to the house. It does not. On goes the new tube.

And now a word about tube sizes. I normally ride a 700 x 23-25 tube. Standard stuff. The 700 is a notation about the wheel’s diameter. The second number has to do with the width of the tube, in millimeters. My extra was a 700 by 18, for some reason. Now, that’s just five or six millimeters, you say. And, sure enough, you’re basically correct! But that’s also reducing the size by about a third! So this is going to be small, inside the wheel’s rim and the tire. Why did I even buy a tube that size? The other issue is that my hand pump doesn’t generate enough pressure to really fill it. So I’m going to be riding on a too-small tube for some reason, at a drastically reduced PSI. But it’ll get the job done, which is the point. I’ll go slow, not a problem today. First I just have to get out of these people’s yard with enough daylight to steer by.

There was plenty of light. I just happened to be standing beneath a tree line. And it was chilly. Here’s my “I can’t believe I’m still wearing jackets in mid-April” shadow self-portrait to prove it:

I’m not wearing those sleeves because it’s such a breathable piece of kit.

The next issue I’m considering while also appreciating the art and the majesty of vulcanized rubber on industrialized aluminum: topography. There’s one significant little hill to get down on my route back to the house, which is about 5.6 miles away from my tube change. It requires speed or braking, or both, because at the perfect bottom of the hill there is a 135-degree turn back to the right. It’s easily manageable when your bike is behaving up to par, and only a concern if there’s a lot of traffic. Traffic isn’t a problem lately, but this tire and tube thing means I won’t be riding at full ability just now.

So I must plan a different route. One with no hills because I, for a change, want to avoid any zippy little descents. Only there’s no such direct, and flat, route of which I am aware. So I went an indirect way, negotiated one little downhill (easily, as it turns out, with some help with the USPS guy who patiently held a few cars behind him without knowing the sort of favor he did for me) and added a few extra miles, which is fine. I need the miles anyway. Grateful for those. Miles are miles, but I’d prefer them under ideal circumstance and not, as I later learned, at 40 PSI on my back tire. I usually ride my tires at 110 PSI. So that’s why it wobbled constantly, I was floating on spongey, foamy rubber and not riding a rock hard ridge.

I know it was 40 PSI because I inflated the tube with a floor pump that has a gauge on it. I went back out to ride the neighborhood road to see if that solved the floaty, bumpy sensation I’d been feeling or if I’d inadvertently damaged the wheel. And that second tube promptly exploded. POP! A crisp firecracker going off a few feet from your ear.

So I’ll go buy more tubes tomorrow. That’s something I’ll be grateful for, too, Dr. Wong.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram. There are more On Topic with IU podcasts. There’s a website for it, too, and you can follow it on Twitter and Facebook. For my slightly more hobbyist shows, head on over to Podbean.