Friday

Friday / photo — Comments Off on Meditations on time
4
Aug 17

Meditations on time

I saw this sign while walking about downtown today:

I wonder how long you have to stare at that until you came up with that idea. And when exactly is Kanye time, anyway? It is always time for some things, and common sense tells us that it is never time for other things. But does this artisanally-crafted sign imply that you can park at all of the times that aren’t Kanye time? And when is Kanye time?

Also, this sign, because nothing brings people back into your store after a series of health and sanitation woes like a celebrity ingredientologist!

They’re driving their audience to a website where your ingredients are musical. You can create some interesting stuff from the samples. I plugged in my usual order. It makes better sense as a food than it does as a song, which you can listen to here, but the site itself is really quite impressive.

And, finally, I was in the car, the stereo was blaring, the sun was finally suggesting it would, once again, sink softly below the western horizon, when I figured out something I’ve been pondering for a lifetime. It was the sort of thing that you don’t even know you’re considering it, until the consideration is resolved with the peskiness of a realization. I now know what the best part of the week — in your standard westernized context, anyway — is. The best moment of the week is 7:45 p.m., on a Friday.

What’s better than that? You’ve left the week behind, you have the weekend ahead, there’s a reason the sun is right there and the stereo is blaring. It is 7:45, and that’s … well maybe not legendary, but certainly memorable.

Friday / IU — Comments Off on Are you going to be eclipsed?
28
Jul 17

Are you going to be eclipsed?

If you’re getting ready for the coming eclipse — You can have two minutes of darkness in the daytime, if you are lucky enough to live, predetermined by your family, work and other migratory patterns, in the path of a shadow which was predetermined by physics many many … err … moons ago — then you will enjoy this map from the Washington Post. Everyone will enjoy the trivia and the tidbits there, just as soon as you get used to thinking of the map of the U.S. from a non-Mercator perspective.

There are cool links and interesting tidbits about places big and small all over the eclipse’s path in that map. My favorite:

McCool Junction, Neb., won’t get McCold, but the air temperature during totality drops by an average of about 12 degrees Fahrenheit, according to astrophysicist Fred Espenak.

I’m not going to be in the path of the eclipse, but that’s almost enough to make me want to drive a few hours, just to experience.

And then I remember that, in high school, I worked in a place with a walk in freezer and realize I’ve more-or-less had this experience.

I remember my first two eclipse experiences, too. One was in elementary school and another in junior high. One was an annular eclipse for which we were well-positioned. The other was a total eclipse and we were well off the mark. The only details I remember were that the elementary school let us go outside after a very serious and stern lecture about not looking up. And being unimpressed by the ol’ hole-in-a-piece-of-cardboard method of eclipse viewing.

If you aren’t in a good locale for the lunar shadow making festival, scientists over at Clemson University are going to help you out. They plan to launch a balloon with cameras for streaming. So you can stare into the second brightest thing burning, your computer monitor, and see the whole demonstration of photons and regolith in action. Ain’t science grand?

Arbutus

It is still the summertime — three more weeks of summertime, but no one is counting — and the student television crew is on a roadtrip:

No one made them go, they aren’t in classes and they aren’t doing it for a grade. And they went an hour or so up the road and put together a video package.

Student media is cool.

family / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off on Try the salmon … and definitely the croquettes
21
Jul 17

Try the salmon … and definitely the croquettes

It was a quiet day on campus. The Friday of the next-to-last week of summer classes moves pretty slowly. I spent a few minutes in an audio booth:

At home, the folks are here for the weekend. After work we took them out to a local restaurant, a farm-to-fork joint. It was even called The Farm. I had the ribs:

Other things they have are better.

In the restroom they have a newspaper collage. There was a date, in the collage, Thursday, July 31, 1919. Let’s assume all of the clippings were from that same issue, making this story is 98 years old:

It seems an odd thing to read, all these years later, but people ought to have an opportunity to educate themselves on civics and the issues of the day. So let’s refresh ourselves on the issue of their day. By the end of 1919 a significant chunck of American women could vote in presidential elections. As the world started recovering from the Great War more women throughout the world became able to cast a ballot. That created more pressure here at home and several votes that would give the power to women were lost by close counts in D.C.

In May of 1919 it finally happened. Woodrow Wilson brought the Congress back to vote on a potential constitutional amendment. Missouri ratified the amendment, just a few weeks before the story above was published. Arkansas became the 12th state to ratify earlier in that same week. Readers of this little story knew the amendment was a third of the way toward becoming the law of the land. The summer of 1919 must have been full of promise for suffragists.

Tennessee voted to make the 19th Amendment the law of the land in August of 1920. It took a long while, but over the next two generations of voters, ballots cast by gender started to even out.

No one voted on those ribs, though.

Friday — Comments Off on Hey buddy, can you spare a radial?
14
Jul 17

Hey buddy, can you spare a radial?

After work today I went home and wrote some things and goofed around with the impromptu studio I’m building in my home office.

After that I had to drive up to the airport to pick up The Yankee. Her flight was running late, of course, but that doesn’t mean the driver can be late.

Finally, her plane arrived. I picked her up. Bag in the backseat. Jet lagged passenger in the passenger seat. Violent flat tire before we left the airport.

I changed the tire on the side of the highway on-ramp. I put on a doughnut – an economically-driven decision that a driver never thinks about, which makes no sense when the driver actually needs to use it. And then I drove home. Slowly. Because doughnut tires.

I want a full-sized spare tire, is what I’m saying. And, also, better luck with tires.

So a late night, and it was a bit frustrating. And a little rock hurt my knee when I was jacking up the front end of my car. But, hey, my wife is back. And that’s great! Now, if my head would stop hurting, that would be even better!

See you Monday. Until then, follow along on Twitter and over on Instagram, too.

adventures / Friday / friends / photo — Comments Off on Visiting the middletown*
7
Jul 17

Visiting the middletown*

Wrapped up the week and then hopped in the car and turned north. And I drove through clouds and rain for about two hours.

Here’s my before view:

And after the rain, when I was off the highways and moving between now-flooded country roads, this is the after view:

I met up with The Yankee and her friend, Anne, at a pizza joint. And then we drove over to a hotel near Muncie. She’s doing the Ironman 70.3 tomorrow. I’ll be schlepping some of the gear and trying to stay in the shade. But the ladies will have a great race. Anne’s husband Bill and I will be grilling hamburgers. So it should be a nice Saturday all the way around.

*Middletown was the name given to Muncie in a series of 1920s sociological studies. The name was meant to disguise the city — the people there eventually figured it out — and to suggest a typical small town America, in a conceptual sense. And that is all the sociology you get from my seat in a Best Western. More here Monday. Perhaps check out Twitter or Instagram between now and then.

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