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12
Mar 13

Things I’ve read recently

Tuesdays sometimes get away from me. Of all the days of the week, Tuesday is the one I’d rather keep in order, but that doesn’t always work out. And yet it was a mostly productive day. Students are putting together the newspaper. I did a lot of grading and reading and writing of emails and so forth. Of its own accord it probably wasn’t much, but it is cumulative. It adds up.

So instead of reading all about that, read all about this!

I finished First Man, by Auburn professor James Hansen a few weeks ago. This is the authorized biography of Neil Armstrong, the often misunderstood engineer-pilot-astronaut … why am I explaining who Neil Armstrong was?

This is a fine biography, immensely detailed and well sourced. All but one of Armstrong’s sons took part in in-depth interviews and, of course, the biggest part of the tale leads up to one of the most widely observed accomplishments of all of humankind, so, you know, there are notes for the author to consult.

And despite his analytical, engineering approach to pretty much everything Hansen hints at an engaging Armstrong. He even tells jokes! Which might sound odd of a man considered by so many of his contemporaries considered aloof. He sounds more private, unassuming, and unsure of why you need to know so much about him. Armstrong, after all, only considered himself “a white socks, pocket-protector nerdy engineer,” (pg. 602).

One of the best anecdotes, perhaps, actually involved his wife, Janet:

For the terrors of the landing, Janet again needed to be alone, so she retired to the privacy of her bedroom. Bill Anders decided to join her. Bill and Janet together had given Pat White the bad news that awful night in January 1967 when her husband Ed died in the Apollo fire, and Bill felt he should stay with Janet right through the touchdown. Rick, a very intelligent and sensitive boy, also wanted to be with his mother. She and Rick and been following the NASA flight map step by step, now with Anders’s help. Rick settled on the floor near the squawk box, while Janet and Bill sat on the foot of the bed. (Long after the Moon landing, this led to one of Bill Bill Anders’s favorite quips. “Where was I when the first Moon landing occurred? I was in bed with Janet Armstrong!”) (pg. 480)

Last week I also read No Time for Sergeants which famously became both a Broadway play and movie. I find aww shucks hokum and dialectic reading to wear me out, but this was tolerable enough to get through in a day or two. It wasn’t as funny as the dust jacket implied, but the movie is great, and this scene in both formats is terrific:

It always helps to imagine Griffith in this role:

Mac Hyman attended Auburn for a short while before the war. He lived here. I looked for Hyman in the Glomeratas, but he didn’t seem to make an appearance.

Speaking of Glomeratas, stick around. There’ll be an update to that section later this evening.

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / history / memories / things to read / video — Comments Off
8
Mar 13

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Shelby County, Ala. made The Daily Show earlier this week:

And then Shelby County made the Colbert Report:

So there’s that.

Here’s some stupid:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.

Here’s another one, some 100 students have been suspended for taking part in Harlem Shake videos:

According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.

“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.

[…]

“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.

Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.

When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.

The air, my mother said, used to be brown.

Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.

And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.

At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:

We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”

The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”

Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.

Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:

Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.

history / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
30
Jan 13

Emergence — seemingly coordinated movement

Big storms, bad weather overnight and this morning. Campus delayed opening for a few hours. The most destructive elements of the storm were elsewhere, thankfully, not nearly as severe or widespread as it could have been.

There was a leak in my office.

My desk faces a wall. On the other side of that wall is a part of the campus radio station studio. Behind the wall to my desk’s right is part of the newspaper’s newsroom. The wall to my left opens to the exterior of the University Center. There’s a large, long window that looks out onto a green hill, a parking lot and a tree line in front of the next building up the hill.

From the top of that window there was a long, slow dripdripdrip. Under loud booms of thunder I called the facilities department to see about this leak. Our building is about 60 years old, so there are leaks from time to time. Offices across the hall had a good scare in the last year or so. The radio station had a leak, too, but managed to avoid damage. An office on the floor directly below the newspaper had a leak a few weeks ago. The folks that did the repair work surmised it must have gotten there from the newspaper, but we showed no damage. There are a few ceiling tiles in the hallway that have seen better days.

But now the gutter outside my window is threatening neatly stacked piles of paper filled with lecture notes and classroom exercises.

I met a man today who started his career at Samford years ago as a member of the campus safety department. He told me a story about working a late shift in the guard shack at the entrance in his first few weeks on the job.

A car pulled up, he asked to see some identification. The driver couldn’t produce any. He’d left his wallet and license at home.

The man, citing state law, said “I should make you park your car and call you a cab since you have no license with you.”

The driver said he’d turn around, head home and fetch his ID.

The next day the new guard was talking to his boss, who’d just had a conversation with his boss. They talked about the man he’d encountered last night. Older gentleman. Tall. Well dressed. Turns out the car was driven by Dr. Thomas Corts, the president of the university. The new employee didn’t recognize him.

The president said the man at the guard shack had behaved appropriately. And he should never do that to the president again.

We all had a nice laugh. Corts stepped down as the university president in 2006 and died four years ago. People still tell great stories about him. They all have some lesson in them, which is probably one of those marks of a good man. This one was pretty clear: You never know when you’ll meet someone important to you.

We talked about those kinds of first impressions in class a bit today. We talked career expos, first impressions and so on. It was resume day for the intro class. The Career Development Center led a great discussion on the Dos and Don’ts.

Rule Number One: Don’t use your mother as a reference.

Things to read: 4 TED Talks every journalist should watch.

For 40 years, this Russian family was cut off from all human contact, unaware of World War II:

Led by Pismenskaya, the scientists backed hurriedly out of the hut and retreated to a spot a few yards away, where they took out some provisions and began to eat. After about half an hour, the door of the cabin creaked open, and the old man and his two daughters emerged—no longer hysterical and, though still obviously frightened, “frankly curious.” Warily, the three strange figures approached and sat down with their visitors, rejecting everything that they were offered—jam, tea, bread—with a muttered, “We are not allowed that!” When Pismenskaya asked, “Have you ever eaten bread?” the old man answered: “I have. But they have not. They have never seen it.”

Birds dancing in the sky, beautiful and hypnotic:

I remember discussing this phenomenon in a leadership class once, discussing birds flying in formation. Emergence:

A school of fish or a flock of birds is not controlled by any leader. Instead, it emerges naturally as each individual follows a few simple rules, such as go in the same direction as the other guy, don’t get too close, and flee any predators.

Surely someone made some sort of Aristotelian reference. Of course Aristotle also thought it was transmutation … But Aristotle had a lot to say about rain.

Auburn / cycling / history / markers / photo / site / Thursday — Comments Off
24
Jan 13

A few photographs

Here is a panorama of the historic Auburn train station. Click to embiggen in another tab:

Lot of history in that joint. Jefferson Davis reviewed the Auburn Guard there as he was on his way to his inauguration at Montgomery. That was, apparently, the first presidential review in the Confederacy. This is also the place where students sabotaged Georgia Tech’s football team in 1896:

The Wreck Tech parade, and the pajamas, date back to their first football meeting in 1896 where legend has it that the A.P.I. students snuck to the train station under cover of darkness and greased the tracks. The train couldn’t get stopped at the station and the Tech players had to walk some five miles back to Auburn to get their 45-0 beating.

The last train passenger was called aboard in 1970. Empty for almost a decade now, the last tenant was a real estate agency. The old building needs a lot of TLC.

Here’s a door handle at the train station:

And by the rails, a self portrait at the first sign passengers would have seen getting off the train:

A closer view of a font you’ll never see again:

These shots were part of a brief ride today. I got other pictures today, so the marker series will return next week. That’s progress.

Nothing about the ride felt very good today, though. Nothing about me felt very confident of myself. Just a lousy ride. But I also found an incredible curve I had to slow down through, lest I wind up in the trees. And then I had to ride through a big neighborhood disagreement that involved at least five police officers, two of which I almost hit on my bike because they didn’t look both ways before crossing the street. One of those days.

Here’s a sunset over Agricultural Heritage Park, with the intramural field in the background to the right:

Even “those days” are beautiful.

history / Monday / video — Comments Off
21
Jan 13

history

Things I’ve read recently

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Emergence — seemingly coordinated movement

A few photographs

The dream