In New Orleans, this is the Cathedral of St. Louis King of France (a minor basilica).
The first church on this site was built in 1727. In the 60 years that church stood, parishioners saw colonial children and the children of slaves baptized inside. At least a dozen people were buried inside. Change came after a fire ravaged the neighborhood in 1788. The “new” church was finally finished in 1794, and a quarter of a century later the central spire and the clock face went in. The bell still rings today. Restored in 1844 at the order of the Baroness Pontalba, the church had already seen two presidents, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor. It was restored and rededicated in April of 1976 for the bicentennial. The church still considers “the greatest moment in the history of the St. Louis Cathedral was the visit of Pope John Paul II in September, 1987.” He celebrated an outdoor Mass for over 200,000 on the New Orleans lakefront.
I think the night shot was better:
The building next to the Cathedral is the Cabildo. It was the seat of colonial government and is now a museum. The original building was destroyed in the same fire, of course, and this one was built just before the down of the 19th century. Among other things, the Cabildo was the site of the Louisiana Purchase transfer ceremonies in 1803. It was also the home of the state’s Supreme Court during much of Reconstruction.
Across the square, in our foreground, is a statue of Andrew Jackson, who looks wild and crazed on his horse. It fits.
Here’s a shot from the Tremé Brass Band.
But you really need a video of the Tremé Brass Band:
We walked five miles. We had gumbo and red beans and rice and a po’boy. We met some people from Atlanta. We saw amazing musicians on almost every street corner. It was a fine evening.
We had lunch on the beach. We ate sandwiches while we watched the waves. Not a bad way to spend the noontime hour:
I saw a turtle:
This was our path to the beach:
We took a run this afternoon, an easy 3.57 mile jog along the beach and the road beside it. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon.
Oh, you wanted to know about the wedding? This was the site, on Fort George Island:
The Timucuan Indians called it Alicamani. They were met by the French explorer Jean Ribault, who found his way near this spot in 1562. The home itself is named in Ribault’s honor. The Spanish pushed the French out, of course, and then the British overran what was then San Juan in 1702.
In 1736 James Oglethorpe, the governor of Georgia and our friend from Savannah, named the island and his fort St. George here. The Spanish took over the region once again in 1783 and then three Americans became the owners of the island. Two of their plantations still exist.
After the Civil War the island fell into the hands of a carpetbagger from New Hampshire. Then came the trains, and the yellow fever and a fire that wiped out much of the little island. In the 1920s came the first car. The Ribault Club was built in 1928 and was, from the start, a playground for the affluent. Recently it underwent a four-year renovation and hosts parties and weddings and, oh look, here comes the bride:
Her father walked her down the aisle. Later, he offered a toast to his daughter and new son-in-law. He was shaking so hard I’m not sure how he saw his notes. But it was a beautiful speech. Very nice man.
Here are Kristi and Chadd, just after they exchanged their vows:
And their first dance. Chadd is a smoothy. Who knew?
The big finish:
It was a lovely ceremony. For dinner we sat at the Auburn table. Everyone there was just a little older than me. They said I was the one that picked up Chadd’s pieces when they all graduated and moved off to the real world ahead of him.
“Really” I said, “he was the guy that helped give me my start. It was a small thing, maybe, but … ”
So you were the one with the puppy dog eyes.
Probably, yes. If I look at the path of my career it is easy to see how integral he was to a lot of my progress. I was thinking about that when Chadd’s brother offered his best man toast. It was a great speech, about how consistent and dedicated and unflinchingly moral Chadd is. As a speech it felt right in every sense, and it was wonderful to be there to see the start of this new part of his life.
I had a four-and-a-half mile run this morning. I felt it through the first part of the afternoon. And by felt it I mean “Would you mind getting that for me so I don’t have to get up? Or even raise my arms?”
My office has been hot all week — spring almost shows up and they finally figure out the heat in our part of the building. That, combined with a base temperature that stayed around the “Oh yeah, we ran a lot this morning” range, I’ve tried not to move so as to not break into a sweat. This is considered a problem in my world. I’m pretty fortunate, I know. I’m starting to get into the running.
I do not know what is happening.
Had guest speakers in class this afternoon. Jeff Thompson is the executive editor and Madoline Markham is the managing editor of Starnes Publishing, a five community newspaper chain in the Birmingham metropolitan area. They talked about what Starnes does and what their careers held before their current stops. Somehow we got into a metaphor about how journalism is like heroin production. (It was a supply/demand example and turned out to be useful.)
We talked about all of the bad stuff. How hard it is to land the job. The hours you sometimes work. The frustrations that you sometimes encounter. I want the students to have a worts-and-all perspective. Give ’em everything, I always say.
I asked “Short answer, is it worth it?”
So you are listening to a guy who takes on the crusty, hard-bitten, cynical newsman role. You let him go on and on until you think he’s turned off the entire crowd, two classes worth of students, and then he gives a sheepish little grin.
“Yes. Winning is good. Every small victory is a big thing.”
The amount of data collected on the Internet is overwhelming. Facebook alone collects 500 terabytes a day. As of 2013, there are 667 exabytes of data flowing over the Internet annually. And these numbers, as hard as they are to wrap our heads around, are only going to continue to increase — rapidly.
In the journalism sphere, massive data collection has produced data journalist roles. These writers and editors use data collected by third-party agencies to create some of the most viral images on the Web. Anytime The Atlantic publishes a map of the states with the highest poverty levels, they use big data. Anytime The New York Times publishes a quiz about where your accent comes from, they use big data.
These stories and photos get shared hundreds of thousands of times and are driving much needed traffic to publishers. This is about much more than an interesting listsicle. Data journalism is about taking big data concepts, visualizing them for the audience and showing readers who they are — or at least, who the data says they are.
This, as they say, changes a great deal about the active role of journalism. Read on to see how.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, sat in his small office at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva and started work on a new system called the World Wide Web.
On Wednesday, that project, now simply called the web, will celebrate its 25th anniversary, and Mr. Berners-Lee is looking ahead at the next 25.
But this moment comes with a cloud. The creators of the web, including Mr. Berners-Lee, worry that companies and telecommunications outlets could destroy the open nature that made it flourish in their quest to make more money.
This is an important topic, so here’s another excerpt from the same story:
The idea behind net neutrality is simple: The web material we see on our laptops and smartphones, whether from Google or a nondescript blog, should flow freely through the Internet, regardless of its origin or creator. No one gets special treatment. But companies like Verizon hope some people will pay more to get preferential treatment and reach customers quicker.
“The web should be a neutral medium. The openness of the web is really, really important,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s important for the open markets, for the economy and for democracy.”
He worries that people online have no idea what could be at stake if large telecommunications companies took control of the web and the type of material we now have access to without any blockades or speed barriers.
(U)sers coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.
[…]
The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do.
Two Alabama men will travel the country opening lost and abandoned safes as part of a new TruTV series called “The Safecrackers”.
The show, which will center around locksmith Phil Crawford and his safe-cracking partner Blaze, will allow viewers to get a look at lost valuables from various eras as the duo tracks down and cracks a range of safes, including giant bank vaults, intricate antique safes, armored vehicles and more.
I hope this is, shall we say, less fake, than the warehouse storage shows.
Medal of Honor recipient Ola Lee Mize dies at 82. The story doesn’t offer an appropriate summary, so I’ll do it the old fashioned way. The son of a sharecropper, Mize would become a member of special forces, serve in Korea and VIetnam. It was in Korea, when he was about 22, that he took part in a fierce battle which would ultimately make him a recipient of the Medal of Honor. His face was supposedly so badly burned that, after the battle, his officers couldn’t even recognize him. He retired a colonel.
M/Sgt. Mize, a member of Company K, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. Company K was committed to the defense of “Outpost Harry”, a strategically valuable position, when the enemy launched a heavy attack. Learning that a comrade on a friendly listening post had been wounded he moved through the intense barrage, accompanied by a medical aid man, and rescued the wounded soldier. On returning to the main position he established an effective defense system and inflicted heavy casualties against attacks from determined enemy assault forces which had penetrated into trenches within the outpost area. During his fearless actions he was blown down by artillery and grenade blasts 3 times but each time he dauntlessly returned to his position, tenaciously fighting and successfully repelling hostile attacks. When enemy onslaughts ceased he took his few men and moved from bunker to bunker, firing through apertures and throwing grenades at the foe, neutralizing their positions. When an enemy soldier stepped out behind a comrade, prepared to fire, M/Sgt. Mize killed him, saving the life of his fellow soldier. After rejoining the platoon, moving from man to man, distributing ammunition, and shouting words of encouragement he observed a friendly machine gun position overrun. He immediately fought his way to the position, killing 10 of the enemy and dispersing the remainder. Fighting back to the command post, and finding several friendly wounded there, he took a position to protect them. Later, securing a radio, he directed friendly artillery fire upon the attacking enemy’s routes of approach. At dawn he helped regroup for a counterattack which successfully drove the enemy from the outpost. M/Sgt. Mize’s valorous conduct and unflinching courage reflect lasting glory upon himself and uphold the noble traditions of the military service.
He is believed to have killed as many as 65 members of the enemy in that one engagement. In his career, he earned five Purple Hearts:
“That terrible night in 1953 in Korea at Outpost Harry was one I would never want to repeat,” he wrote in a foreword to “Uncommon Valor,” a book about Medal of Honor recipients from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Too many good young men . . . gave their lives to take or hold that miserable piece of high ground.”
In conclusion, the embarrassing gentlewoman from Texas:
Serious question:
Who's more dumb, Sheila Jackson Lee or the people who keep voting her into office?
Still so very, very tired. Like I said, this is the kind of tired you don’t get over.
So, as I vainly try to recover a bit of energy, here are some historic front pages from Louisiana newspapers. The ULL journalism department is collecting and displaying these throughout their building. It looks quite nice. The earliest one they have on their walls is an issue from when John Kennedy was killed. One of the profs told me he found it in the attic when he moved into his home. It was in great condition; someone just forgot it when they moved out.
The most recent addition to the set is another big moment. The few here are just a sample, enjoy.
Tomorrow, I hope. I’ll feel a bit more like myself.
The thing about the football bowl system is that it gives you time to dream and fret and be exposed to endless amounts of hype. It also lets you reflect. I wrote most of the list below at about this time in 2011, the last time Auburn was set to play for a national championship. It was to be their first appearance since 1957. There are people in Jordan-Hare Stadium who waited all that time to watch their beloved team achieve that kind of success. And now we’re going to see them try again for the second time in four years, which is remarkable.
Football is an important part of the culture here, but Auburn is not a football team. Auburn is a community, a history, and sharing in a common experience. Auburn’s biggest dream is realizing her potential and Auburn’s greatest potential has always been her people.
And we’ve got a lot of people.
I want Auburn to win for:
A teacher – One of my favorite high school teachers, an Auburn grad. A girl – She was a big part of the reason I chose to apply to Auburn. Mr. Ethridge – Who gave me my scholarship. He died in 2009. Dean William Alverson – He helped raise that scholarship money and was my academic adviser. He retired just a few years ago. My roommate – He and his family, all Auburn people, and all nicer to me than they had to be during my first two years at Auburn. He’s going to Pasadena, and no, I’m not jealous. Chadd – A friend of more than 15 years, he gave me my start on air, was always full of advice, helped me build an incredible professional foundation. He’s never asked for a thing in return. For Jim and Rod and Andy and Bill and Paul – Auburn athletics wouldn’t sound the same without them. For an old man – I sat next to him during the 2004 season. He said simply, “I went to school here when it was API.” He was impressed by that perfect season, and I’m sure he’s amazed by this season, too. For my wife – She was undeclared until I brought her to her first game but she’s been an Auburn woman ever since. Now she teaches at Auburn and is the director of the public relations program. For the family in Section 52 – They adopted us and let them sit in their section for years. They remember the Barfield years. For the Browns – Another strong, proud, kind Auburn family that have been indescribably good to us over the years. For Shug and Doug and Pat and Terry and Tommy and Gene and Gus – And for all of their coaches and players and staffers, the people fans really mean when saying “We won.”
New additions to the list:
For the Hallmarks – Adam sat through last year and celebrated through this year. He’ll watch this BCS game shivering in some pub in Alaska, on his way to his new duty station. For the tailgating crew – War Drunj Eagle. For The War Eagle Reader – which loves like no other. War Eagle forever.
Mostly, I want this team to win for this team. We’ve seen great years, and this has by far been one of the best and most entertaining in many respects.
I wrote this, one of the few good football things I’ve written, before the 2011 BCS game, when everything those guys played for seemed to be more about everyone else. Now, I’m eager to celebrate a great season — I’ve said for the last three games, that we were going into the stadium to congratulate a team for a great performance this season — for the guys actually in the blue and orange.
Much has been written about this team turning around last year’s 3-9 effort. Less has been said about what these guys have gone through. Some of them are national champions. Some have two SEC championships. They’ve also changed head coaches. Some are playing for their third position coach. Some of them have lost parents. Others have had children. They’ve lost teammates. They’ve battled cancer. They’ve stuck together and demanded so much of themselves.
And still Heisman finalist Tre Mason told reporters: “We owed them that. Putting them through last year, we owed them a season like this.”
But, no, this is about them. They’ve succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of everyone but themselves. They’ve always believed.
