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The red ink is on my hands

A few more leaves to mark our fall, which seems to be happening in more pronounced stages than usual this year. The oaks are, how you say, reticent:

Not that I mind. We’ve all shifted clocks and grumbled about that to ill effects. We’re all in various stages of layered clothing — depending on where you live or the thinness of your blood, as some people say — and now the betrayal of the trees. I’m always glad the oaks stick around. Mostly because we have several pin oaks.

Whomever plants pin oaks has never raked the leaves from a pin oak.

Critique meeting of the Crimson today. Story count is up. Layout is good. Quality is sturdy. Art is coming along. Now I need new challenges for them. You can see some of the students’ work here, if you like.

Also did some grading. I entered grades into a spreadsheet. Doing some other things with spreadsheets. I know some people that like spreadsheets. Well, how well can we really know someone who likes spreadsheets?

I prepared files. I printed documents.

Also, last night, I finished the files for the large present that we are delivering this weekend. I got the thing down to 26 pages. It includes maybe 16 sources and three appendices.

Never let the geek in your family prepare documents as gifts.

So that got printed out. It looks nice and clear on the good machine, the machine so important we named a room after it — the copy room. It has color maps end everything.

The document, I mean. Though the copier also probably has maps in its manual. It also faxes. And makes a mean espresso, from what I hear.

Anyway, this was the next thing that happened: I briefly explained the purpose of this file to one of the nice people in my office. She thought it was great. Then she gave me two different types of protective things to keep the file in. Everyone likes this gift. Everyone has thought the idea was nice. Four different people have chipped in. And none of them know the recipient.

But, to know the recipient, you’d want to help even more. That kind of guy.

All will be explained this weekend. I write vaguely about it because it is fun and mysterious, but also just in case he decides to explore the Internet beforehand.

Things to read …

Corpsman! Mother! Jesus! A Marine remembers Iwo Jima for the last time. Chuck Dean, you’ll see, is one of the stronger writers at al.com, but how can it be for the last time?

Jarvis struggled as we spoke. He often had a hard time catching his breath. He told me his doctors were treating him for pancreatic cancer.

“It’s not good,” Jarvis said.

As we talked Jarvis said that years ago he had not wanted to talk a lot about the battle. But later in life, Jarvis changed his mind.

“I came to see that it was important, very important that people understand what happened over there to us, to my Marines. It was important because people need to understand the horrors of war so that they think long and hard before getting into one. And they need to understand that those who fought in the war were just boys, really. That’s all I was. The day after Pearl Harbor every boy at Minor High School went down to enlist, including me. Some of them didn’t make it back. People need to remember them and what they did and why they did it.”

Jarvis paused after a while and looked at me with a thin smile.

“You know Chuck, you might be the last person I tell my story to.”

I told him I hoped not. I told him I was honored to hear it and would be honored to tell it.

He smiled again. “Well, I think you might be the last person I tell it to, and I want to ask you a favor. When you tell it, please tell it good.”

These next two stories? These are not the thing those young men fought for:

Man charged with using stun gun on wife after football bet in Mayville:

Before the game, avowed Packers fan Nicole Grant allegedly bet her husband, devoted Bears backer John Grant, that she would allow him to use a stun gun on her for three seconds if Green Bay lost, according to a criminal complaint.

Grant, 42, found himself in Dodge County Circuit Court the next day after allegedly making good on the bet. He was charged with possession of an electric weapon during an initial appearance. If convicted, Grant could face up to six years in prison.

And this one, Hijacker returns to the United States:

Instead of becoming the next Che Guevara, Potts found himself a foreigner who spoke little Spanish in crowded and often violent prisons. But he refused Cuban offers to return home.

“If you are not able to suffer for the cause you are just a play revolutionary,” he said.

[…]

But the one-time hijacker will return to an uncertain future. Potts was unable to negotiate a plea deal and, while he hopes any sentence he faces in the United States would be reduced by the time he has served, there are no guarantees.

That story is just full of quotes that are the opposite of genius.

Quick links:

I know people that work here: Job fair held for more than 1,100 workers who will lose jobs when International Paper closes

Third cyclist killed near Springhill Avenue in two weeks

ProPublica has found the one “sob story” worth your while: Loyal Obama Supporters, Canceled by Obamacare

When the data mountain comes to you

Independent Campus Journalists Vital

And, finally, I’ve been hanging on to this for a while. May as well use it here. #Story50 tips for the factual storyteller from Adam Westbrook

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30
Oct 13

Signs of autumn: The absence of summer

It wasn’t fall today. It was 75 and clear, which means it wasn’t summer, so it may as well be autumn. The maple in the front yard, already giving up the fight, right in the heart of the tree.

The maples are always the first to quit, but they sometimes hang on a bit longer than some of the others in the yard. In the front yard we have this maple that goes yellow and a towering elm that flares yellow before burning out as a dry orange. In the backyard there is a southern red oak, a white oak and a few pin oaks — the oaks the rest of the oaks would disown if they had hardwood lawyers — another maple that turns yellow and a dogwood that will flame out as a defiant red any day now.

If you could get all of those in one spot they’d surely be a beautiful collection.

Had this in the office today:

I’m not a big pumpkin spice fan, but if you like pumpkin at all, you should try the Hersey’s Kisses. Two was plenty for me, so no need to share. But you’ll probably want to keep them all for yourself.

Things to read …

Or watch. The BBC now has a hexacopter. They have one more copter than I do. Maybe one day I’ll catch up. But check out those shots. (I’d embed it, but the Beeb’s code is ridiculous.)

I was reading last night, in Rick Atkinson’s book, about Lt. Ralph Kerley at Mortain. He only appeared briefly, but it was enough to make me look him up. Whatever happened to that guy? The Internet suggests he mustered out a lieutenant colonel and died in his native Texas in 1967.

He also shows up in this column by The Oregonian’s Steve Duin, which should really change your opinion of the deceased author/historian Stephen Ambrose:

Weiss also was furious that Ambrose had described his commanding officer, Lt. Ralph Kerley, as — after four days and nights of fighting off the Germans — “exhausted, discombobulated, on the edge of breaking.”

Not true, Weiss said: “To the dishonor of the man. Kerley was one of the coolest, most fearless men I’ve ever seen. The way (Ambrose) footnoted that looks as if he got the material from me. If in that little bit of material he took from my book he created that kind of fiction, how many other times has that been done?”

Bob Weiss was a Portland, Ore. lawyer who served under Kerley. Weiss took exception to the Ambrose depiction and then had a nasty bit of correspondence with Ambrose over some other questions of attribution. But, mostly, Weiss was worried about the way Kerley showed up in Citizen Soldiers — which also sits on my shelf, though today I’m a bit reluctant about that.

Kerley earned the Croix de Guerre, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. I was at Mortain for the exact same amount of time Ambrose was, which is to say not at all, which is also to say six days less than Weiss, Kerley and the 120th Infantry Regiment of the 30th Infantry Division. I just read the Ambrose passage again … given his history let’s just call it poorly-written narrative.

Anyway, local veterans are recalling their experiences in the military:

“I flew a B-25. That’s why I’m here,” Buford Robinson said, smiling. “I flew 43 missions.”

From 1944 to 1946, Robinson served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. He fought in the Pacific Theater of the war and participated in the rescue of 500 American POWs at Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines.

Thom Gossom, the first African-American walk on at Auburn and the first African-American athlete to graduate from the university, got a bit of publicity today. He’s an actor today (and author), charming and engaging and wholly approachable. Here’s a story he told at homecoming a few years ago:

Quick hits:

ObamaCare screw up sends callers to cupcake shop

From Buzzfeed: Things That Took Less Time Than HealthCare.gov

How the NSA is infiltrating private networks

Insurance Insiders ‘Fear Retribution’ from WH Amid Pressure to ‘Keep Quiet’ About Obamacare

Broadcast’s Commercial Brake

And there are two new things at the Tumblr site I forgot to mention yesterday, here and here.

Allie? She’s right here:

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29
Oct 13

The Internet’s weakest syllogism

And now a brief lesson on cultural equation, or, the counter to White’s Law. Leslie White argues that “culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased.”

Wikipedia goes on to tell us that White rank-ordered technology thusly:

Technology is an attempt to solve the problems of survival.

This attempt ultimately means capturing enough energy and diverting it for human needs.

Societies that capture more energy and use it more efficiently have an advantage over other societies.

Therefore, these different societies are more advanced in an evolutionary sense.

His point being that our goal and job was to “harness and control energy.” White, who helped found the anthropological studies department at the University of Michigan, wrote this in the 1940s, so we can assume that his understanding of controlling and harnessing is similar to ours. So let us consider, briefly, the Romans. Specifically the Romans in modern England. Provincia Britannia existed from about the years 43 to 409, peaking around 150.

An excerpt from Wikipedia on the Romano-British culture:

Thousands of Roman businessmen and officials and their families settled in Britannia. Roman troops from across the Empire as far as Spain, Syria, and Egypt, but mainly from the Germanic provinces of Batavia and Frisia (modern Netherlands, Belgium, and the Rhineland area of Germany) were garrisoned in Roman towns, and many intermarried with local Britons. This diversified Britannia’s cultures and religions, while the populace remained mainly Celtic with a Roman way of life.

Where’s all this going? The lasting of history, and the harnessing of culture, as an energy:

A superb Roman eagle in near pristine condition, serpent prey wriggling in its beak, has been found by archaeologists in the City of London. A symbol of immortality and power, it was carefully preserved when the aristocratic tomb it decorated was smashed up more than 1,800 years ago – and is regarded as one of the best pieces of Romano-British art ever found.

The preservation is so startling that the archaeologists who found it a few weeks ago at the bottom of a ditch, on the last day of an excavation on a development site at the Minories, were worried in case they had unearthed a Victorian garden ornament.

It will soon be on display at the Museum of London, just 30 days from ditch to gallery. This artifact had to do with the death of someone highly valued in the culture.

And now here are modern artifacts dealing with the life of the middle. A fundraiser and fun event that allows students target their professors:

For as long as YouTube around that’s going to be there. As long as there is electricity to harness and and server to point to, culture is going to have videos like that.

And cool videos like this, worth your while if you’re interested in the genre. The groom here is a graduate from our program. The video was produced by two guys who are also veterans of our department. And they are doing some amazing work.

The One Where Drew Marries Kaitlin from Logan Dillard.

So Drew has great form when tying his shoes. Needs work on the dancing. But he’s a good fella, a good part of the culture, you might say.

Things to read … Another guy riding a bike murdered in Mobile. Bicyclist found dead in Lyons Park, Mobile police investigate. A few days ago this father of three was killed on a bike there. How close were the two murders? Close.

Mobile, according to the people in the comments of both stories, has a problem that they should remedy quickly.

A surgeon at UAB and a surgeon in Atlanta do the same procedure. UAB doctor performs surgery using Google Glass. I remember when, about 10 years ago, I interviewed a doctor who was talking about visiting with patients through a digital interface from some office a town or county or state away. It all seemed only mildly fantastical then. You know, possible, but maybe not for you. You could see how the tech would work, but you want the human doctor. And now, today, this stuff just makes you think, “Of course.” The 21st century is amazing:

It was if the surgeon had another set of hands to help during surgery to replace a shoulder.

Floating ethereally over the surgeon’s own hands, the hands guided and pointed as the surgeon worked the scalpel.

[…]

“It’s not unlike the line marking a first down that a television broadcast adds to the screen while televising a football game,” Ponce said. “You see the line, although it’s not really on the field. Using VIPAAR, a remote surgeon is able to put his or her hands into the surgical field and provide collaboration and assistance.”

UAB doctors say the technology allows a veteran surgeon to oversee and instruct in real time surgeries performed by less experienced physicians.

Some quick journalism links:

What happens when a newspaper plagiarizes itself?

Al Jazeera America Announces Accelerated Growth Plan

Code for journalists, or why journalists should learn code

Also, two things on the multimedia blog. One tortured lead and Two quick social media anecdotes. I changed the template there this evening, too. Now there’s a tea background, which is apropos.

That’ll probably be what they bury me with one day in a hundred years, tea bags. I do love the stuff so. I doubt it will last the millennia and more that the Roman carving did.

books / friends / history / journalism / links / photo / Samford / things to read / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Oct 13

Darth Vader is bad and his assistant is a mouse

I wrote, on Monday, about my lunch book, Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, the last installment of his trilogy on the European Theater of World War II. I discussed Atkinson’s descriptions as “filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.” This passage is in his prologue which, again, is 41 delicious pages long:

One concise paragraph touches on a millennia of history and technological firsts. It offers a description, a quip and a
discarded plan on how to address the English Channel problem. The guy is good.

Who else is good? The staff at the Crimson. We held our weekly critique meeting today. We’re almost a third of the way through their production run and we’re down things like punctuation in quotes and synonyms. They are working hard and showing their talent. I’m quite proud for them.

This video showed up somehow today, in that delightful way that modern life gives you things from so many directions you’re never sure from which they came. It is, as the kids say, completely insane.

Turns out this guy only finished second in this ridiculous display of gravity, speed and a complete disregard for survival instinct.

This is an entirely different kind of ride than I’d ever want to do. The first time I ever heard people talking about mountain bikes they were celebrating the ways they got hurt, like that was the competition. That’s not for me. One of our friends is a big time, travel across the country, day-long race mountain bike types. I sent him this video and he carefully noted “We can’t all do that!”

Not sure that would have been my first response.

But what a great testimonial for the GoPro camera, no? Ours will not be pressed into such a service.

We fired up the grill at home this evening. The Yankee made a London broil. We kissed it with just enough flame and it was delicious enough for seconds. Adam came over to enjoy the flank steak and catch up on a bit of Game of Thrones.

We’ve been watching them all again. They actually get better on the second viewing. There’s a lot you didn’t catch the first time.

For example:

Things to read …
You wonder how Netflix will stay on top of their entertainment niche as others build their own platforms to compete with in-house productions. They have some plans. Five things Netflix is going to disrupt next

The company has big plans for next year, and its executives previewed some of them during Netflix’s Q3 earnings call earlier this week.

This is a topic that’s been going around a few days because of an essay at The Atlantic, which for about 48 hours tried to be something of a continental divide in journalism and education. USC’s Professor Robert Hernandez chimes in. Those required courses in journalism school are there for a reason:

A modern journalist needs to know how the web works, needs to be exposed to and respect all journalistic crafts (including code), and needs to know their role in working with others. And that role is an active role, not a passive one. They need to use these digital tools to produce relevant, quality journalism.

A digital journalist (or web journalist) focuses on producing journalism of the web, not just on the web. That can manifest itself in a diverse set of roles — being the homepage editor, becoming a multimedia storyteller, or developing a news app, alone or with a team. They can use the tools, but they can also build tools when needed.

If you’re a student, I’m not going to debate which path you should take. I’m not even going to debate what level of instruction in digital journalism or code you need to take. (It’s 2013 — are you really arguing against learning technology?)

But what I will say is that, like those other required parts of your education, you are better off for being exposed to it, whether in a journalism career or in life.

How Website Statistics Changed Our Programs

Good news we can all use. Alabama’s economic development prospects improving, officials say:

Birmingham and state economic development experts said plenty of new projects and expansions are looking to invest money and add jobs, but recent history has proven there is a big difference between getting looks and breaking ground.

A panel of economic development experts spoke to members of the Society for Marketing Professional Services Alabama at a luncheon in Vestavia Hills today.

And two items from the multimedia blog:

Twitter, Vine and people the world over make a film

Google media tools

Thanks for stopping by. Much more on Twitter. Hope you have a great day tomorrow.

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22
Oct 13

There is a great rhyme below

I rotate things onto one of my office walls, just like everyone who has large, blank walls. Recently I decided to make a World War II theme. I have two V-E and V-J editions of Stars and Stripes, dusty, yellowed pieces of newsprint from France and Italy. Sometimes they allow me to talk about the appropriate time to use the 72-point font. Sometimes they allow the opportunity to demonstrate how language we use today might be frowned upon in the future. Also, they are just terrific relics.

Some time back our friend Adam gave me a lithograph of his cousin’s World War II plane. And since I decided to make a themed display, this seemed like a great place to put it. You may recall that I met Adam while asking him about his cousin, Dean Hallmark. I wrote a piece about Dean for TWER. Adam is a military man himself, a historian and we became fast friends. So I learned more about the Doolittle Raid of which Dean was a part, and then this poster tube arrived with a sharp print of The Green Hornet.

People should give each other more framable works, I say.

So I wanted to take a picture to send to Adam, since I have a series to show off. This meant moving a piece of furniture. This meant stowing that table elsewhere. This led to me destroying the wire archiving system we use for newspapers. This allowed me to recycle some old stuff I didn’t need to keep anymore. And that brought me back to rebuilding the wire crate structure which grows more precarious by the year.

That led to me cleaning a corner of the newsroom, looking under the sofa for runaway joiners for the wire-crate-frame-finger pincher device that had to have been developed in Eastern Europe.

And, finally, the picture I’d wanted to take.

That’s Dean on his way to deliver — and in this configuration on the wall, the Japanese are ready to accept — his payload. I think about Dean now and again, and what he and some of his compatriots went through:

It was a choppy day at sea and the deck was wet when Dean flew to Tokyo with the rest of the Raiders, dropped his bombs, made a second pass to drop more bombs, and finally made his way to China.

He ran out of fuel though, a by-product of being forced to launch early, and had to put his plane into the sea just off the coast. Dean was catapulted through the windshield in the crash, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body. He was hurt, but he and his fellow officers survived. The two enlisted crewmembers on board drowned.

Once ashore the officers evaded the Japanese for eight days before being captured.

They were tortured and malnourished. Dean’s navigator, Capt. C. Jay Nielsen, grimly wrote of his time as a POW at war’s end.

“They had put straps on (Dean’s) legs and arms and pulled them until he thought his joints were coming apart.”

Nielsen would also tell of having bamboo shoved under their fingernails. Their captors would light the bamboo on fire, demanding to know how they’d gotten to occupied China. Another captive would later write of being water boarded shortly after their capture.

They were about to be executed, Nielsen said, but the Japanese soldiers’ orders suddenly changed. That meant more torture.

Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese military tried Dean, his surviving crew and five crewmembers from another bomber on trumped up charges. Nielsen said Dean dropped 50 pounds and was on a stretcher, because of his illness, during the farcical court martial.

We met Lt. Col. Richard Cole, who was Doolittle’s copilot on the Tokyo Raid, at Adam’s wedding a few weeks ago. We saw Dean’s marker at Arlington this summer:

He was 28 years old at the time. He would have been 100 next January.

I guess I’m thinking about that as I’ve wrapped up the big family project I’ve been working on. I found the last details I’ll likely ever be able to find on my great-grandfather’s time in the ETO. Now I just have to copyedit the text and finish assembling the presentation. I’m disproportionately excited to show this off in a few weeks. Between that and the new book I’m reading I just have the period on my mind.

Had a nice run this evening. I said on Facebook that it was a 5K that didn’t feel like a 5K and, thus, I did not know what was happening. I said that after my run, before dinner and before I had the opportunity to go down a set of stairs.

And then it felt like a run. Now I have the impression it is going to feel like one tomorrow, too.

I did this on a treadmill this evening, because it was already dark and threatening to be coolish, and I’m just not ready for that. On the treadmill there was a television. And on the television I watched a closed caption longform feature of a young baseball player doing something special, saving a life halfway around the world. You’ve got an All American kid, leading his college on the football field and on the baseball diamond. Then, with scouts watching, he gets a call that his bone marrow is a match for a girl in Ukraine. And then you met this beautiful little girl and you spend the next few seconds trying to keep it together on a treadmill in public.

What a good story.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … First a chunk of stories, if any of these headlines intrigue you:

Mobile is the ‘first screen’ for half of 18-34s

Twitter Overtakes Facebook as Teens’ Most Important Social Network

Louisiana police department will post photos of people who exploited food stamp glitch

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

From the multimedia blog: What is important is the money

Perhaps you heard about the student in north Alabama that recently killed himself. It has been in the news a bit because of some indirectly related things. Now his father has come forward, telling an incredibly moving tale:

Adamek said blaming Christian’s suicide on one event is “terribly over-simplistic” and called the national publicity over Christian’s streaking and subsequent death a distraction from the more important story. He explained that his family had been struggling in vain for months to find Christian the help he needed for depression.

“Nobody should have to make more than one phone call to get that kind of help, because there’s just not that much time,” Adamek said.

Adamek declined to go into specifics about Christian’s problems, saying “it doesn’t matter anymore,” but said that the family had tried for months to find the right mental health professionals for his son. They were met with obstacles like insurance issues and a lack of the right doctors.

“We followed every avenue apparently available to us, through the medical community, through the hospital system, but still couldn’t get the necessary diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring that he so desperately needed,” Adamek said.

“We needed to know what he needed. That’s the help we were looking for.”

How heartbreaking that must be. And if the text didn’t get you, the video at the link, will.

And now for something funnier, healthcare and the highly efficient rollout! Jon Stewart:

Surprised he didn’t make a “Glitches don’t get you stitches” joke.