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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Just another fine day, where most people struggle with Mondays I can look at this one as one that just came my way, sailing through like a leaf on a calm, moving stream. The weather was delightful. Sunny and warm, a nice change after I had climbed off my bike last night, panting a little more than I should for the regular ride, walk out from under a dark sky into the chill borne of damp clothes and a tiny breeze. That was the first signal of the changing seasons. Today was the rebuttal.
And a fine one it was today, too. Sunny, with high skies. I don’t think that means anything, but I use it on days like today, when the sun is always out of the way of the direction you’re looking, you have just enough clouds to give some perspective and set off the cobalt blue sky.
I was enjoying myself well enough that I drove right past the exit where I occasionally pick up a Whataburger. No matter, there was another one a few stops down. The one I usually hit has great fries and the buns are perfect. And something on the burger there always falls onto my shirt, which I hate, but I can set my clock by it.
The one I visited today, the backup spot, has perfectly reasonable bread, which is to say like most places, but you don’t really talk about it. Now the first one has bread so good you say “Get a load of this bread! Taste the flour signature! Can you smell that baking!?” or whatever you say to your friends. And no one ever says those things, but they would there.
The one I visited today, the backup spot, did not have perfect french fries. And at my regular stop I have had near-perfection in a fried length of salted tuber. They were fine, today, but trending to old. The tea, however, was perfect. The preferred Whataburger has lousy tea.
So, would it be odd to order just the sandwich and fries at the one place and then stop again, later, to get a drink?
They are both owned by the same guy, I read today in that restaurant standard, the food review mounted on the wall. The reporter asked him what he’d have as his last meal. He said he’d have the number two. I prefer the single, myself.
In class today we worked on polishing and editing stories. And so students wrote and rewrote and we came up with new ways for them to see old things. Writing, I tell them constantly, is a process. And you have to love the process. If you become infatuated with what you think is your finished product you’re going to have a hard time in many respects.
I was talking with a glass blower a few years ago, and he said that about his craft. It takes about 10 years, he said, to master the art, and you have to love the work, because you will break your heart breaking glass for 10 years. When he said that I knew precisely what he meant. Though that gentleman, I’m sure, is a better writer than I am a glass blower. But we could relate. And he had huge furnaces.
Never mentioned that I finished reading Hello, Everybody a few days ago. I probably never mentioned I was reading it, either. It is a history of the rise of radio in the United States and the author has plenty of terrific personalities to illustrate his tale, which chronologically starts with KDKA, the famous and historic AM station in Pittsburgh and goes through the end of the Hoover administration. Like so many aspects of society, we find ourselves looking at FDR as a new chapter. In the story of radio, however, the story was prior to and during the Hoover years. He was, as secretary of commerce, the man instrumental in the early years. He played, as president, an active role during the maturation process. All of that is in Anthony Rudel’s book, which starts with the legendary tale of John Brinkley.
All Brinkley wanted to do was to put goat glands into men suffering from impotency and other maladies. And sell people miracle elixirs. And tell everyone about it on his huge transmitter. And get filthy rich doing it. His is a great tale, one of those that is probably slipping away into history, but is worth reading about. And when you read about him, the image you picture looks almost exactly like the man himself. It is uncanny.
That’s just one story. You’ll learn about evangelists, crime and entertainers, including Roxy Rothafel, who was perhaps the nation’s most famous performer during his run. Ever heard of him? Funny how that happens. Turns out, though, that Rothafel was the type that launched a thousand ships. He gave a lot of mid-20th century performers their start. He was an enduring influence on even more. So everyone that was old when I was young, they were young on his show once upon a time.
Also, and most interesting, you can take significant passages of this book detailing the growth of radio. Take out that word and put the words “world wide web” in those places and you’d see incredible parallels.
So I put that book down, which is great because I’ve been reading it forever. Today I picked up Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light. He’s finally finished his trilogy of the European Theater of World War II. They are heady books, filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.
The books are fairly dense, but they are hardly complete. (Which is not a criticism.) The first thing I did when I picked this up today was to flip through the index. No one I’m related to is there. I looked up the regiment my great-grandfather was in. It is listed exactly twice, almost in passing. I’ve recently condensed that unit history into a chapter-sized file for family reading, and those troopers did stuff. (France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, was given to 67 members of my great-grandfather’s division. His regiment alone earned 24 of those. The division scored 651 Silver Stars, 35 Distinguished Service Crosses and one Medal of Honor.) But they don’t even make it into Atkinson’s book. It is a telling example of how big the war was. Hard to wrap your mind around if you weren’t there. Probably impossible when you were in it.
And you’ll pardon me if I get nerdy here: Atkinson’s prologue is 41 pages. It starts, after a bit of scene-setting in Britain (and oh, how Atkinson can set a scene) with the famous meeting at St. Paul’s. It looked something like this:
Though I never bought Selleck as Ike.
Anyway, I made it 10 or so pages in to the Atkinson book over dinner tonight. Good book.
Things to read, which I found interesting today … This was written by the president of the state press association. It is an important, if technical and legal, piece. State Supreme Court demolishes Alabama Open Meetings Act:
“Justiciability.”
“Redressability.”
These two tortuous legal terms were used by the Alabama Supreme Court last month to deliver a devastating one-two punch to Alabama’s Open Meetings Act.
First the court proclaimed that our state legislators do not need to hold any of their meetings in public and do not even need to follow their own rules. Then the court placed severe limits on the qualifications of persons who can sue under the open meetings law, although the law plainly states that “any Alabama citizen” can bring such a suit.
Speaking of media and the law, Samford just announced a six-year journalism and mass communication-slash-law degree track. You can read about it here.
The Associated Press is planning to introduce sponsored articles into the stream of news stories on its mobile apps and hosted websites. The rollout is expected in early 2014, with potential sponsorship deals centered around major events the AP is planning to cover, such as the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the Academy Awards.
[…]
The move to sponsored content is part of a broader effort to open a new line of revenue at the AP, where just 2% of total revenue comes from advertising, including mobile banner ads and units across a handful of websites populated with AP content. Another 13% of comes from services the AP offers media outlets. And 85% comes from licensing content to subscribers such as TV stations, newspapers and websites, where the AP is not hopeful about expanding income.
I fear they will all be even more 45- or 60-second spots in the style of television commercials that get in the way of some important story. The best video ads online are at YouTube, the ones that you can skip. Make a great ad and keep the audience, maybe even for your mini-opera. Can’t hold us after six seconds? Well, you tried. Sorta. Now we’re going to see what Lady Gaga is up to.
This is unfair, as AP’s video is usually quite good, but one of their lead pieces as I wrote this was “Sleeping Driver Wakes Up, Causes Atlanta Crash,” which is almost one of those “We have video, and so this is news stories.” I’d share it with you, but AP doesn’t allow for their videos to be embedded. Maybe they can work on that next.
Oh here’s the actual raw footage, sans the carefully re-enacted emergency phone call that they put into the AP package:
Something the video is strange. It feels incomplete, somehow. Particularly when you read WSB’s accompanying story. Weird scene, bad wreck. But you would have never heard about it if not for the videographer who was already there.
This morning we heard historian David McCullough speak. He filled up a little under one-half of the Arena, which demonstrated that there’s not a good mid-sized venue on campus:
I’ve read McCullough since I was in college, Truman was his first work I bought. He read letters from Mary Jane Truman, complaining to her brother, the president, about how much of an imposition all of this president business had become, his point being “History is about life, not about boring textbooks. It shouldn’t be taught with boring textbooks. It is about humans.”
McCullough also discussed John Adams, the subject of his other Pulitzer winning book. Adams was brilliant, even though most of what you learn about him in school — if even this — were the alien and sedition acts. An unfortunate series of legislation, for certain, but not all the man was by a long stretch. Perhaps you’ve heard about him on HBO. But that wasn’t the extent of the second president, either. McCullough mentioned reading the works of his subjects, and discovering that in his diary Adams would often write one line, “At home thinking.”
“Oh to know what was going on in that wonderful mind,” which gave his audience a little insight into the romantic notion of knowing the people he’s writing about better than he knows anyone else.
History is the best trainer, he said, no matter your field. It was a tough speech, in a way, because there were plenty of older folks in the audience, a few college students and a large group of high schoolers. The landscape was far and wide, then, but he had some universal lessons. I liked this one, which he directed at the large group of high school students who were there, “What a delight to be caught up in the love of learning.”
I use a similar line from time to time. Learning the joy of learning is the true education.
“History is an anecdote to the hubris of the present. It is an aid to navigation in difficult times.”
And then he got chipper. He’d already talked about how we are soft compared to our ancestors, comparing our troubles with previous generations. Think of any medical example and you’ll be on the same page. Everyone with any age on them in the crowd knew what he was getting at. (Meaning people who’ve never used the #FirstWorldProblems configuration before.)
“A lot of people feel our country is in decline. I don’t think so. Our history shows when we have problems we solve them … I am an optimist. I feel the best is yet to come. And on we go,” he said, wrapping up a nice little 40 minute talk.
Got in a quick 20 mile ride in the evening, suffering the entire way. It has been too long since I’ve been in the saddle and it felt like it, especially in my knee. What does it mean when there’s a numbed, hollow feeling where you’d expect a ligament to be?
But it was a nice ride, out through the neighborhood, past the state park and down the waterfall hill. That let’s you cost for almost a mile. But then you have to ride back up another side of that hill, which is about two miles of gentle climbing which is topped by church where there is frequently lots of praying: Please let this hill end. Another turn and then you fall down to the creek bed, over a new bridge and then back out again. A few more miles puts you back in the neighborhood and then you’re just racing daylight.
Tonight I made recruiting calls, which I am convinced are one of those things that make the world go ’round. Think of it. The world is a big place. It takes a lot of things to move the world around. Me calling students and singing praises about our beautiful campus and all of the potential in our program is one of them.
Twice tonight I called, got the voicemail, started leaving a message and then had that person return my call before I’d completed the voicemail. I do not understand this. I prefer to allow a moment to pass, discover what, if anything, the person on the other end of the call would like to share with me. After which, of course, I can turn to the mediated correspondence of choice and contribute my portion, as necessary. Otherwise I’m just making people repeat themselves.
Things to read which I found interesting today … Someone found an 18-foot-long creature in the sea and thought “I must physically haul this monster to the surface and shore, so that others might note its splendor.” So, naturally, you run the smallest version of the photo possible. The monster is big, the photo is tiny and that dog has no camera sense.
It all makes sense if you click the link. And squint.
This is a bit old, but … House members forced to reuse gym towels. I do not think they realize how these quotes play at home, or with the people that are currently out of work — and, thus, at home — because of the shutdown. Politics aside, there’s something to be said about thinking about the quotes you offer media. Skim some of the comments, by the way.
My wife and I just got our updates from Kaiser telling us what our 2014 rates will be. Her monthly has been $168 this year, mine $150. We have a high deductible. We are generally healthy people who don’t go to the doctor often. I barely ever go. The insurance is in case of a major catastrophe.
Well, now, because of Obamacare, my wife’s rate is gong to $302 per month and mine is jumping to $284.
[…]
I never felt too good about how this was passed and what it entailed, but I figured if it saved Americans money, I could go along with it.
I don’t know what to think now. This appears, in my experience, to not be a reform for the people.
Lot of that going around these days.
Me? Still haven’t been told, which is nice. (Is anyone running a Tumblr on these then and now prices? Someone should.)
Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.
The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.
Despite being in intense pain and mental duress, Josh remained alert and compassionate to the limited Rangers that were allowed to visit his bedside. Prior to Josh being moved to Germany for his eventual flight to America, we conducted a ceremony to award him with the Purple Heart for wounds received in action.
A simple ceremony, you can picture a room full of Rangers, leaders, doctors, and nurses surrounding his bedside while the Ranger Regimental Commander pinned the Purple Heart to his blanket. During the presentation the Commander publishes the official orders verbally and leaned over Josh to thank him for his sacrifice.
Josh, whom everybody in the room (over 50 people) assumed to be unconscious, began to move his right arm under the blanket in a diligent effort to salute the Commander as is customary during these ceremonies. Despite his wounds, wrappings, tubes, and pain, Josh fought the doctor who was trying to restrain his right arm and rendered the most beautiful salute any person in that room had ever seen.
Maybe because he is a Ranger, but that story reminded me of this one, from 2009.
Morgan Judge, a sophomore at Fordham University in New York, said she thought it was “cool” last semester when a professor announced that students could text him. Then she received one from him: “Check your e-mail for an update on the assignment.”
“E-mail has never really been a fun thing to use,” said Ms. Judge, 19. “It’s always like, ‘This is something you have to do.’ School is a boring thing. E-mail is a boring thing. It goes together.”
[…]
Brittney Carver, 20, a junior at the University of Iowa, said she checks her e-mail once a day, more if she’s expecting something. Before college, she used e-mail mostly for buying concert tickets. She said she would never use it if she could avoid it.
“I never know what to say in the subject line and how to address the person,” Ms. Carver said. “Is it mister or professor and comma and return, and do I have to capitalize and use full sentences? By the time I do all that I could have an answer by text if I could text them.”
I feel bad for these students insofar as they don’t realize how these quotes come off in the story. But the piece’s general observation is sound. Students don’t often react to email the way that email senders would want them to. That’s a real problem, though I’d never considered email as hard.
Soon we’ll be Snapchatting all of our coursework, one supposes.
