Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

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5
Sep 14

You just go faster

Nothing like having your last event of the work week being a meeting, and then being stood up. I waited for half an hour, no word, and left.

I’d have rather had the meeting, and been done with it. Who knows when it will happen now. On the way home I had this view as a brief consolation:

But, hey, we got to talk about story ideas in class today — always a fun topic — and I still made it home in time to get an hour on my bike. I need more than one hour at a time, of course, but you take it where you can get it.

The Yankee and I set out together, but she said “See you at home,” which I took to mean, “Go have fun,” which really meant “Go hard.”

That was the plan, at least in two places. There were two courses I wanted to try to conquer today. One seemed easier than the other, but I had zeal for both of them. At least until my lungs gave out, which has a direct relationship to zeal. I was halfway up the long slow hill that marked the course I hoped to mark a new best time when everything seemed to give way. I pedaled harder, but it seemed I was going slower. I told my legs and lungs I wanted nothing to do with their protests, but they protested anyway.

And when I got home and checked the app I discovered that I had sliced 48 seconds off my best time on that course. That gave me the course lead over the next best time, by one whole second.

On the back half of my route today was the other course I wanted to master. And there it started to rain on me. Also, it was getting close to get dark. I ride on that particular stretch of road frequently, but this was only the second time I have timed myself on it. The course is designed for someone who can go all out for three straight miles. This isn’t my strength — I don’t really have a strength, I think — but we are all full of weaknesses and average talents of one sort or another. I dropped 1:38 off my last timed trip down the course and now I have the fast time on that segment, too.

On the last rode before the clouds came back again and I was rained on again. The twilight had turned to a full on flirt with the night. Two police cars passed me going the other direction and I expected one of them to turn around and give me some grief. But I pedaled furiously and made it home in the last embers of the day. The Yankee wasn’t very far behind me. I’d gone hard, and she did too.

Then we went out for Pie Day.

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29
Aug 14

And, now, a pet peeve

This, surely, happens to everyone. It can’t be that the only people in the western world that do this are wherever I happen to be. It must happen to you, too.

When one approaches the common dual door, one should always steer toward the one on the right. Not to the one that is open. That just impedes traffic, and is kind of lazy.

Also, it makes me wonder why I’m holding the door for you. I’m trying to get through it, after all, and this is my side.

Class today, where we discussed story types. We discussed this amazing story. More meetings, too, just wrapping up the first week. One or two more weeks of administrative and meeting minutiae and things can get down to normal.

And then phone calls, and then the drive home and the traffic therein.

I made it in just in time to push my bicycle around part of the town. I got in 15 fast miles before daytime turned to the latter part of twilight. My cycling app says I set three personal records on various segments. I also took the first place spot on an uphill course. (This defies all logic and previous performance. The reality is that not many people ride on that road.) Despite all of that, I need to be stronger and faster. I need to ride more.

I blame all of my door-holding.

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22
Aug 14

The barber, the check writer and the pie maker

I made the mistake of getting a haircut today. Going to my barber on a Friday afternoon is like going to most people’s DMV, or my local post office.

He’s a nice fellow, good, easy small talker. There are nice family photos to study as he cuts your hair. He does a fine enough job of it and he’s the cheapest guy in town — those his prices are going up, and we’ll have to talk about that.

Everyone in town has figured this out, I guess, and everyone goes there. And so you wait and wait, but it is a break from other things, one supposes, and the television is on an endless loop of some sporting thing or another. He’s the kind of guy that’s on a first name basis with people and sometimes he remembers me, but my strategy is to cut short and ride on that haircut for as long as possible. So I could be easy to forget in the blur of faces he sees every month.

We talked about the VA and pensions and the Bulge and Iraq today. Once, when his shop was slower and he remembered who I was, he picked my brain about various shenanigans going on in the journalism industry. Another time he almost carved a junk out of my ear and sent me on my way home bleeding and, I think, with the haircut incomplete. Scared him. It bled so well it scared me too.

Today he nicked my neck a little just below the hairline and applied some demon-infused, artisanally crafted pain juice on it, smeared a white powder on top of that and then smacked my neck. He was a combat medic. He knows what he’s doing, I told myself.

After that I visited various book stores about town, with this weird white caking powder on my neck. No one said anything about it.

We went out for dinner. It is Friday. Friday is Pie Day:

“Clinkies!” as we used to say while trying to not stab each other with forks.

The server gave us fist bumps for ordering pie. Surely he was thinking “I didn’t even have to upsell these people!” And then he let us choose the color of pen used to sign the receipt. I went with the hunter green.

Things to read … and, sadly, none of these are written in a hunter green font.

Security for journalists, part one: The basics:

Just as you can take steps to reduce the physical or legal risks of journalism, it’s possible to protect yourself in the digital realm. This two-part post will cover the basics of digital security for journalists. It’s impossible to learn everything you need to know from a couple of articles, but my hope is to give you enough of the basics that you understand what to study next.

Even if you’re not working on a sensitive story yourself, you need to understand digital security because an attacker can harm other people by going through you. This post contains generic security advice that everyone in journalism should heed, with specific advice about simple things you can do right now to improve your security.

Govt-blacklisted journalists and the growing info grip:

David Sirota reports on “How Government Blacklists Journalists From Accessing the Truth” stating that “The public is being systematically divorced from public policy, which is exactly what too many elected officials want.”

[…]

“In recent years, there have been signs that the federal government is reducing the flow of public information,” Sirota writes, agreeing with a growing consensus from many Washington D.C. journalists.

Sadly, there’s no surprise there.

This thoughtful essay from a student-journalist, I will not be returning to Ferguson:

There are now hundreds of journalists from all over the world coming to Ferguson to film what has become a spectacle. I get the sense that many feel this is their career-maker. In the early days of all this, I was warmly greeted and approached by Ferguson residents. They were glad that journalists were there. The past two days, they do not even look at me and blatantly ignore me. I recognize that I am now just another journalist to them, and their frustration with us is clear. In the beginning there was a recognizable need for media presence, but this is the other extreme. They need time to work through this as a community, without the cameras.

Gov. Bentley announces creation of Alabama Drone Task Force

I read aloud a bit of Willie Morris tonight. I’ve been searching for examples of excellent writing to share with students, so I had to raid one of the bookshelves in our library. This won’t be the one of Morris’ that I share, but it is worth a read. This is when he was writing from Oxford, Mississippi and remembering his time and a love on Long Island, New York. The complete essay isn’t online, so a brief excerpt:

She would say, “You’re not too old and I’m not too young.” But she was the marrying age, and she wanted a baby. The love we had was never destroyed; it was merely the dwindling of circumstance. How does one give up Annie? Only through loneliness and fear, fear of old loves lost and of love renewed – only those things, that’s all. The last departure came on a windswept October noon of the kind we had known. We stood on the porch of my house and embraced. “Oh — you!” she said. She lingered for the briefest moment. Then she was gone, a Tennessee girl with snow in her hair again. She married a local boy and now has two little daughters, I hear on good authority from Long Island. The years are passing, and don’t think I haven’t thought about it.

The man could write. But he was perhaps never better than when he’s writing about home (which is why whichever Willie Morris piece I hand out in class will have at least two references to jonquils). Happens to a lot of us, I suspect.

Do you ever get the feeling Patrick Stewart is just cooler at everything?

I do.

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15
Aug 14

There is Star Trek at the end of this post

We went for a run in the middle of the day, because running takes less time, and we haven’t done it in a while. Here’s the more-sunny-than-you-realize path.

I discovered today that I’m big on the mind deals — slightly different than Ray Romano’s mind bets. Today’s was fairly straight forward: if you stop running, you’re going to run another mile.

I did not have to run the fourth mile. I had a fairly decent time on the 5K. But not fast enough.

I do not know what is happening.

As I finished the run, I was looking for some shade, stepped under a promising pine tree and found this guy:

That’s the Actias luna caterpillar. You might be more familiar with the luna moth version. I didn’t see one of those, but I did watch that caterpillar climb and climb:

There’s probably a metaphor in there, or we could just be impressed by the closeup quality of my phone’s camera. Probably a metaphor in that, too.

Brian came down for a weekend visit. He and I went to Niffer’s for dinner. Turkey burgers and corn nuggets are for dinner.

Afterward we spent the evening in the pool. Colleagues and neighbors were there. It was a fine time with friends and more friends. We stayed so long the bottom of my feet are raw. And we’ll probably go back tomorrow.

Things to read … to prepare for tomorrow.

Alabama’s unemployment rate at 7 percent

The Re-Return of Chuckie Keeton

Inside the College Football Hall of Fame playground in Atlanta:

First and foremost, know this: This isn’t your father’s Hall of Fame.

Often ignored for nearly two decades in South Bend, Ind., the College Football Hall of Fame in Atlanta represents today’s game and media world while respectfully giving a nod to the past. The National Football Foundation’s decision in 2009 to move the Hall of Fame into the deep South symbolizes how the sport has changed demographically and through television.

Located within a five-minute walk from the Georgia Dome and the future Atlanta Falcons stadium, the Hall of Fame craves connectivity and a personal experience above all else. There are interactive videos and games, selfies with digital face paint, countless screens, and a field for activities and events.

It sounds like a nice experience.

Now the fanfic looks better than the source material …

Interestingly, everyone you see in that prelude has played multiple characters across the sprawling Star Trek franchise, except for … Richard Hatch. This is his first time in Rodenberry’s universe. They’re making a movie out of it. They’ve received more than four times their Kickstarter goal and their making a feature film, of the independent variety. It’ll be low-budget but, if you watch the entire prelude, you can see there’s some really great quality there. And Garth of Izar.

“Donors will receive either a digital HD copy, or a DVD or Blu-ray copy, depending on their donation level. It will also be released for streaming on YouTube for all to enjoy sometime later!”

The movie is in pre-production now, according to IMDB. I find it a bit more exciting than it probably should be.

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8
Aug 14

You can see it coming

The you-can’t-see-this-enough idea meets with the notion that life exists to be recreated as a Techmo Bowl video game and provides us with this piece of art, which, really, we should have seen coming:

You can quibble about the jersey colors, but there’s a still of Chris Davis and his grandmother (at 3:20 in this video), canceling out that quibble. And then there’s a screen shot of Bo Jackson’s Techmo status, which is the only real quibble. He was never average in Techmo Bowl.

Things to read … because reading interesting things makes us all superlative.

Because it would be a disaster if they did … Dear Twitter: Don’t use an algorithm for the stream:

If Twitter were to implement an algorithmic feed, it would lose its point of differentiation that would likely damage its de facto real-time information/news status unless a greater value proposition was offered (although it’s hard to see what this would be). Both as a professional tool for journalists and a point of record for regular users, Twitter offers a totally different kind of feed than say Facebook does because of its unfiltered stream of forced brevity. Every tweak with photos, cards and potentially new sell buttons drastically changes the delicate balance on the nuance — a nuance that should be protected.

Twitter is noisy, but it can be calmed.

The piece goes on, making excellent points that won’t be heard enough.

The answer is, it depends. Should you outsource your social media? And that article will help you figure out your best path.

This is India, but still interesting, and short-sighted. Newspaper asks staffers to refrain from tweeting other outlets’ stories

If you’ve read enough job advertisements and know how to read between the lines, this is an interesting collection that Jim Romenesko is offering. Here are the job descriptions for Gannett’s ‘Newsroom of the future’

This is just what it says it is, an all digital, invaluable resource. Verification Handbook: A definitive guide to verifying digital content for emergency coverage

This isn’t a standard thing, but it happens. And the HuffPo piece might have pulled back the curtain a bit too far for the comfort of some. Spy Agency Stole Scoop From Media Outlet And Handed It To The AP:

The government, it turned out, had “spoiled the scoop,” an informally forbidden practice in the world of journalism. To spoil a scoop, the subject of a story, when asked for comment, tips off a different, typically friendlier outlet in the hopes of diminishing the attention the first outlet would have received. Tuesday’s AP story was much friendlier to the government’s position, explaining the surge of individuals added to the watch list as an ongoing response to a foiled terror plot.

HBO trails in profits, but this is another in a series of interesting media tidbits in the last 18 months. Netflix now has more subscription revenue than HBO

This story is about health issues, and rightly so, but it applies in a lot of other respects, as well. What ails Appalachia ails the nation

Whoa boy. Relief official says Ebola crisis more serious than reported:

In stark, often chilling congressional testimony on Thursday, an official with a relief organization responding to the Ebola crisis in West Africa labeled efforts to control the virus a failure.

Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.

[…]

At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa.

Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

It is virulent, sounds exotic, comes from an unfamiliar place, travels well and there are scary films about this general health theme. You can just see the panic coming.