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Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off
13
Nov 15

Memory week photos, day five

For France:

A dear friend of ours is working in Paris this year. I listened to international radio on the way home as they started sharing the first horrific details. And then one reporter notes that their audience knows more about what is going on than most Parisians right now. So I pulled over to message our friend: You must tell people you are OK right now. But she’d already done it; she was safe.

She was supposed to go to one of those restaurants tonight, but her evening meeting ran late.

And that is the way things happen sometimes.

We’re wrapping up a week of skimming through old photos last week and see where they take us. So far as I can recall, I haven’t published these pictures anywhere. The theme is signs or words.

Here’s our last two for the week.

These are both from last summer’s travels. The first one is in the bowels of the London Tower. They sell these stickers and someone was unsupervised:

I wondered at the time if there was a political statement here — the locals were and are getting stirred up over various European issues — or if this was just someone being clever. Maybe someone was running from England back to Roman Britannia. But I doubt it.

It was our second trip to London. We had a great time. Maybe we’ll get to go back one in the near future. We’ve had a lovely time there both trips.

And, finally, from Berlin, the orange garbage can that says “Give it to me!”

So orange its Berlin. It is a clean city, as you’d imagine. We walked all over Berlin. I think we walked everywhere. We hope to go back to Germany one day, there’s an entire beautiful country to see.

adventures / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off
6
Nov 15

I’ve thought it over

Yesterday I asked where you’d like to be right now? My first thought was my bike. Then I wandered off into some Homer by memory and my contractually obligated Publilius Syrus reference of the month. It was a solid idea and I stand by it.

But also, I have a few other options worth of considering. And this time, no poorly remember Greek

This one’s easy. Who doesn’t love the ocean?

This one is in Oregon, in the woods on the path to the ocean. This is the place I think about when I recall, with fondness, our trip to Oregon. The whole visit was terrific, as my travels usually are, but the views were spectacular. And Oswald West State Park was one of my favorites:

Some people are beach people. Some people prefer the mountains. I like the woods. And if there are woods going to the beach … well, that’s just not something we often have in my part of the world, but that’s two pretty great environments that I’m happy to enjoy. So Oswald West is always a contender in my “Where would you rather be?” contest.

And this one, which is more representative than specific. It is a simple pasture wrapped around a quiet country road in north Alabama. Just a pretty view. I was there on one Saturday, 2006, while The Yankee was teaching a class and I was killing time enjoying a spring morning. Once you look past the ditch, everything from the fence to that big lazy foothill of the Appalachians is worth taking in and visiting often:

So, where would you like to be?

Friday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
30
Oct 15

Signs, but without the Ace of Bass jokes

We started the week with a sign, if I recall. Let’s end it that way, too. I had to go down to the back of the post office area where things are offloaded from trucks. It is a very utilitarian area. It works, it is efficient. I’m sure it isn’t on the campus tours. Doesn’t have to be. The folks there do good work and they do it fast and they know their business. Always very helpful.

There’s an elevator there. And above that elevator is this sign:

And that’s just good life advice.

I mentioned last week how much I enjoy reading the bulletin boards on campus. Here’s another class advertisement that was worth noticing today:

“Can cats have ethics if there is no God?”

I was not previously aware those concepts were not mutually exclusive. But, hey, maybe for cats. I’ll ask Allie sometime. She’s got some Siamese in her and is given to long pontification. But I digress.

“Join the cats of philosophy answer this head-scratching question in … ”

Last week’s class advertisement, you might recall, was for the same class. Those cats are going to cover a lot of ground between Justin Bieber and Johnny Cash and Ceiling Cat and the grammatical error.

Here’s another, from a different bulletin board not far from the first:

“So you want to be a scientist?”

Not if that’s what your lab is creating, no sir.

“Then join the biolgy department on Tuesday …”

I’m not sure where the “Biolgy Department” falls on the organizational chart. Good curriculum, though. Among the more popular classes are Catnip Cultivation 410 and Whisker Weaving 203. (That’s an elective, I’m sure.)

So use cats in your advertising, I suppose.

This is what happened when I got home today. Walk in, put my stuff down and, immediately:

I have it on good authority that she’s not interested in going anywhere. So I suppose this means I should stay here.

Here’s something else I put on the Internet today. You’ve already seen it on Instagram, if you’re following me there. Come on over and follow me.

My first Boomerang branding experiment.

A video posted by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Oct 30, 2015 at 4:32pm PDT

Here’s another Boomerang. It has even less point, which means it has practically none, really. We’re trying to figure out the utility for this app in class. Reviews are mixed.

Boomer-road.

A video posted by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Oct 30, 2015 at 7:21pm PDT

Friday / photo / Samford / windshield time — Comments Off
23
Oct 15

Pretty sure I’ve never talked Carnap here before

I love campus bulletin boards. They give some of the best reading. And it doesn’t matter if you’re talking silly campaign posters or student groups or concerts or even class poster type things. Like this:

At Samford, you’re supposed to get these things approved before you post them. I’m not sure how many people abide by that rule, but I like the idea that someone had to look this over before giving it the campus stamp of approval. And I’d like to think the approving party had a definitive opinion on the question the professor is posing.

Of course, you know if you take that class what the answers will be. (I’ll answer it in a bit.) I hope they wait until at least the third meeting to dive into it.

All of my actual philosophy classes were classical/Western and modern, so right up until the end of the 19th century. I believe that’s where contemporary philosophy begins.

Experimental philosophy would demonstrate a schism along generational divides. According to logical positivism, the idea that Cash still has songs played 60 years after their release would necessarily be compared to the possibility, however slim, that Justin Bieber will enjoy such longevity. Thus, it is a question that can’t yet be answered. Naturalists would say this can’t be proven. The ordinary language point of view would argue that we’re all just mixed up with the words. So, then, Cash might win out just because there’s less abstraction. According to quietism, this question is a push. According to postanalytic philosophy Johnny Cash wins again, though you might not think so.

Deconstruction has to do with showing that the text, or lyrics, aren’t a discrete whole. So I give it to Bieber on this one. Existentialism, well, that’d just depend on the existentialist. I couldn’t say how the phenomenology would shake out on this argument, but the poststructuralist would say the whole thing is a wash because there’s too much interpretation. And that’s the chorus to most songs anyway, if you think about it. The Biebs wins in the postmodern realm, I’m sure, but social constructionism could go either way. Critical theory would say both are fine, but they are both lacking because of this or that. There’d be the desire to consider the artists in their period, and they’d start out that way, but yet various of Cash’s songs would be found wanting, I’m sure.

So I’ll go back to logical positivism. According to one site I’ve never heard of Bieber has sold more than 15 million records in his short career. There’s a big disparity on Cash’s fortunes, but I’m sticking with this 90 million records number I’ve seen pop up in a few places. But, again, that’s over 60 years and record sales aren’t going to be the metric used by the end of the young Canadian’s career.

That, I decided on the drive home today, is basically the analytical gap of that paradigm: the necessary is a true statement in all possible worlds while the contingent hinges on the way the particular world is. David Hume, then, would say that on one hand, both truths — Bieber is better, Cash is better — would fall under relations among ideas and states of actualities. If the idea and the actual didn’t recoil, toss it away, he said. (I’m paraphrasing. I haven’t read Hume in more than a few years.) Rudolph Carnap, if I recall, suggested universal laws cannot be verified they can be confirmed. But then he couldn’t create the formula for it.

So, the answer to the question would be “Yes. Unless it is no.”

Alabama / cycling / Friday / history / photo — Comments Off
16
Oct 15

Remembering the Comers

At lunch today I was reading a forum about race recovery. (And, I promise, I’ll stop talking about this just as soon as the novelty of something I did last Saturday still leaves me feeling wiped out wears off.) The general consensus was that we don’t always know why recovery can take this long or that long. There are things you can do to help speed the process along.

Of course I’m doing very few of those things, it turns out. Maybe next time.

The other consensus was that the duration of your recovery has to do with your overall general fitness. When you think about it, that seems both logically true and annoyingly insulting. I just swam a mile and rode 56 and ran 13. Let’s say I’m in pretty decent shape. Except it is going to take me more days than the average bear to recover.

I did ride for a bit this evening, just plodding along at a slow speed. I think I managed to get into the 20s about four times. So it was a nice, easy 20-mile ride through town. I went up one of the parking decks, just for the view:

That’s Comer Hall, where I spent a lot of my time in undergrad. It is named after Braxton Bragg Comer, the 33rd governor of Alabama, and, later, an appointed senator. Serving in the first quarter of the 20th century he would be considered a progressive. He lowered railroad rates, came out for child labor laws, was a prohibitionist and, also was a big proponent of education, health improvements and conservation. Of course he also served in a time of poll taxes and other segregationist strategies. He went into the governor’s office just six years after blacks were disenfranchised and the Republican party was effectively tamped out in Alabama, something which would take roughly 80 years for the GOP to overcome. Like so many other people and things in the south, the industrialist Comer’s is a tricky legacy.

At home, he and his wife had nine children. They’re all buried in Elmwood, near their parents. One of the sons, Donald, also became an industrialist in his father’s footsteps and would run Avondale Mills while Braxton was in public service. To be of a certain age and from a certain swath of the south and to hear Avondale Mills is to understand the impact of the Comer family on the region. But, then, history is funny like that. When textiles moved away and the economy shifted and commercial impact took on another face, who would know of the legacy of the Comers or their mills or mines? Ans when you think of that you have to wonder, what have we unknowingly forgotten?

Allie, by the way, is very interested in reading some of Comer’s speeches: