Auburn’s baseball team, simultaneously struggling and competing for a division championship, hosts Georgia for a three game series at Plainsman Park. The first game was tonight, an extra innings affair, where I tried out the Zapd app for the first time.
Zapd is intriguing, if a bit limited at the moment. There are no social media or embed options, so what you see below is simply captured in an iframe. (The hard link is here.) What the program does do, however, is create a blog on the fly, via your phone. You can’t import it, short of copying the source file, so it stays on the Zapd server, but this is just one more step in the push button blogging world. (And, again, this is all done via a free app.)
These are a few things I took pictures of and typed out during tonight’s game.
Tigers win! Also, the video was published as text for some reason. Here’s the actual clip:
After the game there were fireworks:
friends / weekend — Comments Off on Happy Easter 24 Apr 11
After a long night of driving across half the state and change we woke up early for Easter. The bunny had to know where to find us.
The Yankee said last night “Do you mind if we don’t race back?” She wanted to conserve gas. She is smart and thrifty. And then five hours later she said “Why did that take so long?”
Because we drove slow?
By then we were very sleepy.
So Easter services this morning, and then a birthday party this afternoon. Our realtor-turned-friend is celebrating his 30th. So we’ve counted 109 years of birthdays in the past 18 hours. I’m exhausted.
We had a lunch that was straight from Garden and Gun. The potato salad was actually from Barefoot Contessa (and should be served at every relaxed formal Southern function, but Garden and Gun does recipes, too. The cake was Easter-themed and old-fashioned coconut. Very moist. And the coconut shavings were individually dyed green.
And now we begin the search for discounted Easter candy.
A new warning came down Friday that a line of storms would bring wind and hail. So, naturally, you go outside.
And we might not have received the 2.5-inch diameter hail we were promised …
But this was painful enough. We’re standing in the garage, between our cars and the ice starts racing down from the sky. Brian’s car is in the driveway, unprotected by the safety of any roofing or tree limbs.
A tarp! I have a tarp!
Knowing that hail storms are brief, but violent, I took the most direct route, which was around the exterior of the house. Barefoot. And when I got to the back of the house it really started coming down. And that began to sting. Hail on soft, moist earth isn’t so bad, even for a tenderfoot. Hail on cement is not a lot of fun.
I race back, now covering my head with the tarp.
I have a tarp! I need a plan!
We decided to cover the windshield.
About eight seconds after we have the great green piece of protective plastic spread out evenly — which exposed tender skin to more angry ice — the hail stopped falling. The yard was covered. There were abnormally large piles of the stuff everywhere. There was an unearthly moisture in the air as the hail steamed itself into oblivion. It looked like an X-Files setting.
The car was undamaged.
The Yankee got these two tigers from the balloon guy at Niffer’s the other night. We see him there often. This has become his regular gig the last few years. On weekends he is at the baseball stadium in clown makeup making balloons. He’s often here or at parties, or delivering a manifesto on the current political climate, while he makes a balloon beanie hat. The guy’s talented. He said it took him about two years before his hands could create while he chatted with customers.
Nice guy. He carries a duffle bag stuffed full of balloons. He said he spends thousands of dollars a year on the stuff. This is his job.
There’s a feature story in that guy.
I found her, in the checkout line at the grocery store, reading the Enquirer. Hard to believe this has been six years. Beth Holloway has a new show coming out. (The good people at WBRC struggled with the math on that story.)
“Vanished with Beth Holloway,” will follow real life cases of missing persons; digging into the mysteries behind them and searching for clues to solve the cases.
I liked it better when John Walsh and Robert Stack did that show.
The shrubs are trimmed. At least the ones in the front yard. You can’t see halfway down the side of the house or the lovely foliage in the backyard from the road, so they don’t exist. And, hence, they will be sheared to within an inch of their life on another evening.
But my, doesn’t the front look good. Except for the shrub right by the garage. It has an unruly spot. It has the bangs of a seven-year-old boy who wouldn’t sit still in the barber’s chair. And one along the side, where I sliced off the new growth to reveal … big odd holes in the shrubbery’s formation. It looks like the swamp scene from Flash Gordon. This terrified me as a child.
I think it was because Timothy Dalton is the antagonist.
The rest of that clip plays out after Flash tricks Barin into thinking he’d been poisoned by the evil creature with the hero climbing down the vines. Barin says to the fog “Oh thine chase is on! But I will use my resources poorly and pursue him myself, giving these fine green jump-suited fellows the early weekend.”
Then there’s more fog, some oddly pliant quicksand and then hawkmen. Just your average day in the yard, really.
That movie only made back about 80 percent of the original budget. They’ve probably made up the difference in licensing, syndication and DVD sales. Meanwhile, this is interesting: George Lucas had hoped to remake the original Flash Gordon (1936), but when he learned that Dino De Laurentiis had already bought the rights, he wrote Star Wars (1977) instead. Sam J. Jones, who played Flash, was last in front of the camera in 2007. Now he is the CEO of an international security company providing diplomatic and executive protection for high profile clients around the world.So I guess that worked out.
So, yes, half the shrubbery has been brought under control. The rest later this weekend. Brian showed up mid-afternoon. The storms followed soon after. And hail. We got hammered by frozen pellets of angry intention for about 90 seconds. It covered the yard.
It hurt my head. I’m just going to save that story and a few more pictures for Sunday.
Dinner with Brian and Shane, our realtor, and his Brian. We ran into two of The Yankee’s students at Niffer’s. We should really find a second place to eat.
We spent the evening staring at the radar. The Yankee knew what was coming: Brian would unveil his newest meteorological toys and have about 15 views between us. Everything missed us. Part of town lost their power, but nothing blinked at our blissful cottage. The bulk of the storm was well north, and then, late, some that hit to our west.
At midnight, as the threat of anything dangerous happening in our little corner the death toll was four ranging, from Oklahoma through Alabama. One small central Alabama town was digging itself out from a direct hit in the late hours and had several people missing. Tomorrow’s news already looks grim.
Presented our paper today on the media participation hypothesis, which suggests that, as political involvement grows reliant on new media formats and technologies, use of interactive public affairs media will produce more satisfaction and efficacy over time as media become more interactive. The concern with this hypothesis, we argue in the paper is one reflected in current research which struggles with logistical challenges that the Internet presents.
That’s what this paper is about: this doesn’t exactly work, that doesn’t exactly work, we need a model to help with understanding new dynamics, and so on.
There were nodding heads during the presentation, which is always a good sign at these sorts of things.
We had a pizza lunch with two of our friends from Mississippi schools and another from Texas. After more sessions and meetings in the afternoon we had dinner with our colleagues at The Flying Fish.
This place was new in Little Rock when I lived here. (Almost a decade ago!) It is delicious. I went to the Flying Fish because it was one of the few places in a re-developing downtown back then; now Riverwalk is a bustling, thriving area once again, thanks to years of development and the Clinton Library. I was glad to see the place was still around. It is, I believe, the best catfish I eat — and there’s a catfish joint in my family.
And apparently it is a regional chain, so the next time I’m in Memphis it’ll be ribs and fish.
Part of the decor:
Outside they light the building with lamps made of outboard motors.
Anyway, the company was the best part. We had dinner with four exceedingly bright and funny people, two old friends and two of them new. Shame we’ll only see them at conferences, it has been a while since I’ve laughed that much, that hard.
So that’s the day: the presentation, the conference and the food. Tomorrow is the drive back home. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.
