history « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

history

What are they doing to the salt?

Crimson folks doing Crimson things:

Those are three members of the editorial staff at their budget meeting tonight. Some others are outside of the shot, but they’re there and they’re a good group. They’ve been getting a lot of compliments, and they deserve them.

They are fun, too. It is easy to get sidetracked with them, but the diversions are worth it. Tonight we discussed the movie Face / Off — and you should see the photos from that conversation. Three or four of us know the movie and we tried to explain it to the others. This is not an easy movie to describe to people. “And then John Travolta, played by Nic Cage, who is now a bad guy … ”

So you start throwing in other actors, who weren’t even in that film, to really make it fun.

“And then Sean Connery says … ”

I saw this tonight while standing at the counter and waiting for my burger. First thought?

Seasoned with what?

The more you think about it, the You know what my salt needs? Some flavoring. But what would go well with salt just now?

And what does Nic Cage think about that? The good Nic Cage, I mean, who is really John Travolta. What if one of those guys wants unseasoned salt? What do you do when the other one says he wants salted salt? Why is my burger taking so long?

Things to read … because that never takes too long.

Great question! As journalism and documentary film converge in digital, what lessons can they share? You might see more mini-docs to address the issue of time, more partnerships from unexpected places and, at last, what I think could be the coolest job in the industry: a historist. The historian journalist, or journalist historian, is a wholly unappreciated idea.

In reality, you’ll probably see a lot more interaction. Virtual Reality will be a part of this, among other things.

Mobile payment has already hit a a security/trust issue, Apple Pay rival CurrentC just got hacked:

On Wednesday, those taking part in the CurrentC pilot program received a warning from the consortium of anti-credit-card retailers called MCX, or Merchant Consumer Exchange: The program was hacked in the last 36 hours, and criminals managed to grab the email addresses of anyone who signed up for the program.

MCX confirmed the hack, adding what’s become a go-to line for any company that loses your data: “We take the security of our users’ information extremely seriously.”

Protecting it is another thing, however.

State agency to investors: Prepare for Ebola-related scams

‘Unusual’ Russian flights concern NATO:

An “unusual” uptick in the size and scale of Russian aircraft flying throughout European airspace in recent days has raised alarm bells for NATO officials that come amid other provocations already rattling the West.

Multiple groups of Russian military bomber and tanker aircraft, flying under the guise of military maneuvers, were detected and monitored over sections of the Baltic Sea, North Sea and Black Sea on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Those flights represented an “unusual level of air activity over European airspace,” according to a press release from NATO.

Adding to the concern — none of the Russian aircraft filed customary flight plans or maintained radio contact with civilian aviation authorities or used any of their onboard transponders.

These surely are interesting times.

It is about time this story is being told on film. MY Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes:

Would you risk your life to save a stranger? And never talk about it? MY ITALIAN SECRET tells the story of Tour de France cycling champion Gino Bartali and other Italians who saved lives during WWII.

Or if you prefer the 30 for 30 method: What if I told you a man saved 800 lives in between three Giro d’Italia wins and two Tour de France titles?

This is not that film, but it does summarize the story a tiny bit:

Bartali apparently rarely even brought it up, which brings us to this quote from the man himself: “Good is something you do, not something you talk about. Some medals are pinned to your soul, not to your jacket.”

Pretty profound for a guy that just moved his feet around in small circles.

adventures / Friday / history / photo — Comments Off
26
Sep 14

Travel day

We’re traveling to Augusta for a race on Sunday. At a red light in tiny Jackson, Georgia, I saw this historic marker.

I like markers. They give the passerby just enough information to be of slim interest. Some of them may even go home, or to their phone, and look something up on Wikipedia. Or they could just be things you race by without reading even the minimum. Or you could at least get a glance from the header. “Noted Indian Trail” being the most benign one ever.

This was an important trail though, ultimately becoming the Old Federal Road, which connected Savannah to what would become Fort Stoddert in modern Mobile. The Oakfuskee Trail had routes to spots in northeast Alabama, to Oakfuskee Town which was west of Dadeville, Alabama on the Tallapoosa and several other places in between. From those paths came roads and on those roads and in those natural harbors and rivers came towns and cities and that is an important path.

Yes. I would love a used tire, and thank you.

Is there a big market for used tires?

Near home there is a “Bubba’s Medicine Shop.” The place may be great, I don’t know, but I imagine it would be hard for me to shop there. I’m a Big D’s Discount man, myself:

I wanted there to be an incredible backstory for Mr. Big D, especially after this next shot:

Here it is, from the Progress-Argus, and it is the story of a family owned business, two generations worth. Big D is now owned by Fred’s Pharmacy, out of Memphis. Barrett Hoard sold it last year. His father, Danny, was the pharmacist Big D. The mural went up after Danny died a few years ago.

Local lore that I just made up suggests he held every pill bottle up to the light to make sure the free peppermint was on top. He looks like a guy from whom you’d be comfortable picking up an antibiotic.

Danny Hoard bought the store from Parrish Drugs in 1973.

In Jackson, for some unknown reason, there are several pink houses.

Maybe it is in the medication.

We arrived in Augusta safely, just in time for dinner. We met friends at the hotel, they checked in, up from Florida, just as we did. On Sunday we are doing a half Ironman. We’re probably not prepared, but it will be a fun weekend.

history / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
25
Sep 14

What a picture

He’s judging you. The nose looks worn and with a sunburn that has been hard-earned. He’s trying to disarm you with a half smile, but he can’t fake it well enough.

He’s throwing that arm up on the car door, all casual, like he’s talking about the weather. But he’s showing you his watch. Time is short. He isn’t going to put a lot of his time into you disappointing him. You can see it in his hand. He’s already getting antsy.

She, on the other hand, is sending mixed messages. The classic closed-arm pose: she’s not interested, shining through his semitransparent arm. But also there’s that lovely and warm smile. She won’t put up with it, but she cares about you anyway.

That is Harmon and Grace Dobson. Harmon founded Whataburger. He married Grace in 1955, somewhere between store number five and 20. He died in a plane crash in the 60s. Grace ran the place until the early nineties. She passed it along to her son, who broke the 500-store mark. Grace died in 2005 after building an empire and raising three children. No wonder she could hit that pose.

I saw that last night and thought it was an interesting setting, even without any context. The young man and the older woman. It all makes sense now, except for Harmon’s see-through arm. I’ve seen a few photographs of him, and he has one of those mugs that just fits right into the time, whenever it is, 1950s, Somewhere, Texas. He’d been a bush pilot, a diamond courier, a car salesman and a wildcatter. No wonder he looks like he’s in a hurry. Just leaning here for a moment.

Whereas, Grace, even when she stepped down from the day-to-day was still seen with reverence. The company execs didn’t like to boast about what their success for fear of her hearing. Just leaning here for forever.

Things to read … because reading stays with you forever.

This guy is racing in Chattanooga this weekend, My Finish Line Road: Winning the Battle in Chattanooga:

Like so many others, I was hooked. I progressed to longer distances and in 2012, signed up to complete my first IRONMAN—IRONMAN Arizona. Training was going well and my wife and I welcomed our third child (our first girl) that July. Three weeks later, after a morning workout, I began having severe abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital. Scar tissue from my previous surgery had wrapped around my small intestine and twisted it over on itself. I was rushed into emergency surgery. My IRONMAN dream was over—for a time.

Recovering from surgery brought some dark days. I had doubts about whether I could do an IRONMAN with this disease, and if I even wanted to try again. This was the first time I had ever truly felt beaten by the disease. As I was feeling sorry for myself, Hurricane Sandy threw me a curveball and forced me out of my funk. The building that housed my dental business was inundated with over eight feet of water. Everything was destroyed. The next few months were a blur as I healed from surgery while trying to rebuild my business. I had no time to feel sorry for myself.

You read those things and you realize how amazing people are, and how much of everything is just a mental exercise.

This is a personal story about a SR-71 coming apart at more than three times the speed of sound. I’m just going to excerpt one quote, because that should be enough to get you to read the whole thing, Bill Weaver Mach 3+ Blackbird Breakup:

I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be to have survived one disaster only to be done in by the helicopter that had come to my rescue.

Talk about your bad days.

Starting to hear more about this now, Save the press from the White House censors:

So we were uneasy to learn that some reporters have been pressured to alter their reports by the publisher, aka the White House. While some of the emendations and deletions (a presidential aide’s swoon, a politically charged Obama joke) might seem frivolous, what’s at issue here is precedent. This represents the peak of a slippery slope we don’t want to go down. And that’s why we think it’s time to for the reporters to begin putting out their own pool reports.

The practice of the White House disseminating the reports dates back to the paper era, when reporters obtained poolers’ notes from copies that White House press assistants placed in bins in the White House press room. Today’s technology offers an opportunity to liberate the pool reports.

This is pretty interesting, but it makes you think “Southern” has changed. That’s good in a lot of ways, but it ain’t Ransom or Warren or Tate, The Southernness of being: Nationally recognized poet wrestled with the legacy of civil rights violence:

For the boy, the poetry first showed up in the trees behind his family’s home in Gadsden. The words came to him through the sunlight in the loblollies, with the swallowtails in the pines — in the Alabama he knew and loved on that Etowah-Calhoun county line.

For the man, the poems appeared in the names on a stone outside the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. These words came to him through the stories of 39 men, women and children, martyrs of the civil rights era — people Jake Adam York never knew, who died in an Alabama he didn’t understand.

“He used his poetry to take on the beauty and the responsibility of being Southern,” said his mother, Linda York.

Taken too soon, York died at 40 in 2012. He liked LL Cool J and Run DMC, it says. But who didn’t? Allen Tate would have loved LL.

Kidding. Tate wouldn’t have understood, or cared for LL Cool J at all. But he did, during his third marriage, have an affair with a student of his, a nun. Wikipedia says a citation is needed for that, but even if it is wrong that’s a story dying for a lyric …

His first, and second, wife, was novelist Caroline Gordon, who was a great Southern writer. She died in 1981 in Mexico. Maybe that means she passed through Texas. Maybe she enjoyed Whataburger.

cycling / history / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / Monday / photo / Samford / things to read / video — Comments Off
15
Sep 14

The man on the wall has no comment

It occurred to me that I’ve never noticed the bas-reliefs of any other governors in Alabama. Perhaps I’m overlooking them or am drawing a mental blank. Maybe this is a lasting affection for George Wallace. Perhaps part of it is that George Wallace was governor for so long, from 1963 to 1967 and then from 1971 until 1979 and again from 1983 to 1987.

Here he’s standing in front of the restroom door:

That rest area was built during the 1970s. Maybe it was a boom period.

A bit ambitious, wouldn’t you think?

I had a nice, easy 30-mile ride yesterday. It should have been longer. I climbed more than 1,200 feet and rode for under two hours. I topped out at 37.7 miles per hour. Twenty percent of the ride was over 20 miles per hour. (Which is slow for most, but pretty nice for me.) Most importantly, it didn’t all fall apart in the last few minutes. It reminds me that I should ride more.

Things to read … to remind you that I should ride more.

I’m always circumspect about a small thing, like a small sport, playing big social roles. But we all have our roles to play and we all have our spheres of influence, I suppose … Biking Toward Women’s Rights in Afghanistan:

The Women’s National Cycling Team of Afghanistan is only a few years old. Its 10 members, most between the ages of 17 and 22, have yet to finish a race. But they are determined to persevere in their chosen sport despite multiple barriers, and are aiming to ride in the 2020 Olympics.

Men driving by insult them. Boys along the road throw rocks at them. Sometimes they don’t have enough money to buy adequate food to fuel their rides. Every day, they are reminded that it is taboo in Afghan society for a woman to get on a bicycle. And still they ride.

“They tell us that it is not our right to ride our bikes in the streets and such,” says Marjan Sidiqqi, one of the young women on the team. “We tell them that this is our right and that they are taking our right away. Then we speed off.”

[…]

Galpin says that for the generation of girls coming of age in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, bicycling is another manifestation of the freedom to be an educated person in the society. “Young women who are in university and high school, young women who are educated, their families have promoted that and helped that happen,” she says. “These young women look at it very cut and dry: ‘My brother can ride a bike, why can’t I?’ They’re cognizant that they have this right.”

“We cannot become a hero by sitting at home,” she said.

This is called neuroplasticity, or the amazing things the human body can do … An adult woman was found to be missing her cerebellum:

So essentially, it took less than a decade of life for the rest of her brain to pick up the missing cerebellum’s slack. The fact that the patient is alive and thriving is incredible. This is only the ninth time that doctors have found someone to be missing a whole cerebellum, and most of the others have only been discovered after their early deaths.

She was given a photograph after 9/11. Every year at the anniversary she’s tried to find the people in the picture. This year, the mystery was solved … Mystery Solved: The People in the 9/11 Wedding Photo

I saw the first part of this story yesterday in the paper, and it is worth reading today … Beulah’s David Eastridge battling back from life-threatening accident:

Balance has been one of the toughest parts for David since the traumatic brain injury. His depth perception in his left eye is still affected, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain balance at times. It’s why he wears that soft helmet whenever he does anything that requires movement.

He climbs stairs, but only to show off. Sutlive has shifted focus away from that because of the progress David has made. Now
they spend time on the treadmill. David has to hold the railings, but he gradually begins to pick up the pace.

Sutlive asks him: “What’s the fastest you can go?”

“Let’s show them,” David enthusiastically responds.

He reaches 3.1 mph on a slight grade; a brisk jog. Five weeks earlier, he couldn’t walk on his own.

Tough kid, that.

If you watched the Georgia game this weekend you might have noticed when the announcers mentioned this story. It is a pretty nice, quick little news package:

And, finally, here’s a little feature on Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field … Recapturing a Game and Days Gone By. The story is told through the eyes of the author’s 77-year-old mother-in-law and is understandably precious.

If you like baseball history, I did a decent podcast about Rickwood several years ago. I’ve also sold photos of the nation’s oldest active baseball part to ESPN.

The good old days. Today was different than all of that. All of my days are though, that was eight years ago, after all. Instead of interviewing David Brewer, I was discussing tips of interviewing with students in a classroom.

I always find myself bringing up the time I was asked to interview the congressman who’s best hunting dog had just died, or the times I annoyed governors, or that a newly elected (and still sitting) senator tried to insult me. Grieving interviews, funny interviews, boring interviews, the ones where you know the person is lying to you, and all of the different ways to get answers from your sources. Good stuff, good times.

I wonder what it was like to interview George Wallace. (He died in 1998, but I met his son once, in passing.) Maybe I should stop back by that bas-relief.

history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
11
Sep 14

A sign teaches us the history of veganism

Enjoying Catember? A photo of the cat every day, what a great gimmick, eh? Today’s features a recent night where she judged me worthy of a lap visit. I reached for my phone to try to take a picture and she leaned right in. She has never been phased by my DSLR. Point the phone at her, though, and she protests, moves or leaves. Or bonks the phone, ruining the shot. She’s uncanny that way.

And she’s as feisty as ever, too.

I did not realize we had such a think in the 1940s.

You would think our old family members, in the peak of life, would have thought “The war is over and I am alive. I am eating a steak. Later, I’ll have a pork chop, and possibly a meat soup. Tomorrow we’ll try that new Milo’s place.”

Actually, a 2008 Time article says the word was coined in 1944. Wikipedia says Englishman Donald Watson came up with it in Leicester. They were bombed in the Blitz in 1940 and more than 100 were killed, hundreds more injured and more than 250 homes destroyed, but they weren’t in the front lines otherwise and was considered something of a sanctuary for around 30,000 people. The area was important for air training and uniform production and, later holding Axis POWs. And, less famous for the man that was inspired by his time on the farm to become an animal rights activist.

Did you know there is a World Vegan Day? November first. Steak? Pork chop? Or meat soup?

I kid, I kid. I eat less meat than I used to, most of the time. But, occasionally you just need to use your canines.

Things to read … because reading puts meat on your bones.

Zach Brown is a former student of mine. He was the editor of The Samford Crimson. Now he’s a Fulbright scholar traveling in far-flung regions of the world bring English and pop culture coolness to people in different, dusty places. This is part of his journey: Mountain passes to Gharm, Khujand, and Panjakent.

Elsewhere in the wide world … The ongoing Damage to the Venezuelan Economy:

Venezuela’s annual inflation rate has risen to 63.4%, the highest in Latin America, according to official figures published on Tuesday.

The figures are the first released by the central bank since May, which has led critics to accuse the government of withholding data for political reasons.

This is going to be important, and I don’t want you to be caught unawares.

Also important … Ebola is ‘devouring everything in its path.’ Could it lead to Liberia’s collapse?

Here is a collection of Sept. 12, 2001 newspaper front pages. The thing I find interesting is how they are all different. With so many hub-and-spoke operations in place today that wouldn’t be the case with a huge national story today. There would be a great deal more homogeny.

Closer to home … Professional football returning to Birmingham:

The new North American Football League says the Birmingham Freedom will begin play next spring, along with franchises in Columbus (Flight), Hartford (Merchantmen), Kentucky (Thoroughbreds), Memphis (Kings), North Carolina (Redwolves), Orlando (Sentinels) and Virginia (Crusaders).

We’re number five! We’re number five! Alabama ranks as one of the most tax-friendly states in the U.S.

And now for some quick links on various media subjects of the day:

Is Virtual Reality The Future Of Journalism?
5 charts: The shifting landscape of digital video consumption
Seeking to bolster websites, TV stations hire newspaper journalists
Looking for new photo, video, audio, multimedia or FTP apps?
How to Setup the NPR App Template for You and Your News Org

Finally, there is this piece, which is pretty great … ESPN3 grows its offerings with student productions:

On Saturday, the Mercer Bears from Macon, Georgia, will play their first Southern Conference football game against Furman. Fans can watch it on the ESPN3 Web stream, even though the Bears football program is only one year old. Mercer decided to take advantage of an ESPN3 initiative that allows schools to join the network.

“We’re one of the first in football to pick that up and run with it and self-produce an event for ESPN,” said Mercer Athletic director Jim Cole.

It took an investment of $150,000 to upgrade the university’s TV production studio, get some high-grade cameras and pull fiber cable throughout campus. But, Cole says, joining the ESPN network is money well spent — even if it’s only their Web stream.

“I’m looking for name ID for Mercer,” Cole said, to showcase Mercer to potential students around the country. “Kids understand what ESPN means, so we view this as a recruiting advantage as well,” he said.

ESPN gets inexpensive programming, students get experience and exposure, teams get airtime, schools can use it to recruit. There’s a lot of win-win in that setup. I wonder about the details behind the line, “ESPN3 has different deals with each school,” but if that works out for a Mercer or whomever, more the better.