Breakfast this morning at Barbecue House and then to campus. Well, first I had to stop for plaques.
Next weekend is homecoming at Samford and one of the many festivities is our department’s Wall of Fame. Two individuals are being inducted this year, one an alumnus from the 1930s that I mentioned here last week and another gentleman who was a longtime public relations pro here in town. Part of the honor is a very handsome plaque (there are also speeches, bios, headshots and so on), which required the trip today to the awards and engraving store. It is helpfully named Awards and Engraving.
I’ve been in charge of this particular task for three years now. The guy is starting to recognize me. He also trusts me to leave with the efforts of his hard work without paying him. He seems convinced we won’t be packing up the university this weekend.
There is a tempting vacant Bruno’s parking lot nearby for any schools looking to move, though.
Samford has been here since the 1950s, though, I doubt the facilities people will uproot the joint after the game Saturday. Before that, Samford (or Howard College as it was then known) was in East Lake. Apparently that campus was never going to be suitable, something the university officials realized about 15 minutes after moving up from Marion. So, they spent 36 years in Marion in the 19th Century, 70 years in East Lake and 54 right here. The building holding my office has been around since the beginning.
I wonder what my office space was originally intended for.
“For now, we’re just going to hold chemicals and files up here. But in five or six decades, well. Everything will be different.”
So there was class. A few groans over the current events quiz and then the joys of discussing infographics. I showed off the work of Megan Jaegerman and an assorted collection from the always excellent infographics The New York Times puts out.
And then the bad. This PDF is so overdone as to be laughable, but it is a soap opera timeline, so maybe that was their point. Even still.
No paper tonight. The Crimson is publishing on Friday this week because of homecoming. So they’ll put that to bed on Thursday night. I’ll be hard at work on other projects between now and then.
One fine fall day each year, usually in October, and always when Auburn is playing on the road, nearby Loachapoka holds their annual Syrup Sopping. The town of less than 200 grows by something like 15,000 percent for crafts, music, visiting and, of course, the local syrup.
Amazing how much this has grown in the last decade or so. Syrup Sopping started in 1972 and it is nothing like I remember from undergrad, at least in terms of the size. It takes an hour just to get down there now.
But, then, Loachapoka has always been a town of extremes. It was a boomtown that became a small town. At one point in the mid-19th century this was the largest town in this part of the state, because of the railroad.
The town gets its name from the Creek Indian, and means either land where turtles live or are killed. The first white settler came in 1836, and the natives moved west, mostly to Oklahoma, some willingly, some by force of treaty or arms.
Jefferson Davis ate in the town, Stephen Douglas campaigned there against Abraham Lincoln. They mustered more than three regiments during the Civil War.
After the depression of 1873, a massive fire that same decade and alternate railways coming online the place all but dried up.
They saw their first airplane in 1917. Imagine how that must have felt to a bunch of farmers.
You just can’t get better syrup from sorghum and ribbon cane, which is the basis of the festival and what brings you back for more. There’s crafts and food and even a little music, but the syrup and the honey, that’s the point.
Over at one of the antebellum homes they set up a gooseneck trailer as a stage. Someone’s 10-year-old son’s band was playing in the afternoon. They were a rock band. Didn’t get to see them, but here is their Facebook page, where you’ll learn they’ve played three gigs. So, they are young, but they have the terminology down.
We did see a bluegrass band, Volume 5 that was quite good. The vocalist could do a fair impression of Dan Tyminski, as the man standing next to me observed “He sounds just like them Soggy Bottom Boys. What was it, ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ That was the name of that song!”
Well, no, that was the movie, which also had a song Tyminski reprised. While he was a little short on details, he had a good ear.
And then Volume 5 thought they’d lighten the mood by covering “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.”
It was about as inspiring as the Auburn game. LSU is good, Auburn is young, can’t block, was on the road with a new starting quarterback in Clint Moseley who noted that “Sulligent’s defense was fast too.” Sulligent being the last team he played in high school. After the game he said he thought Sweet Water was fast, but the top college football team in the nation was in a different league than the traditional 2A high school powerhouse.
Woof.
Auburn will have better days. No one expected anything but a visit to the woodshed this week at Baton Rouge, but still. If not for a garbage-time touchdown this would have been the biggest blowout since 1948. The Truman administration! That’s pre-Shug Jordan.
As it was, the 45-10 loss is merely the biggest since the second George W. Bush administration and the 2008 finale against Alabama. Things got better after that pretty quickly, and they’ll turn around for these guys too.
They’ve survived their stout October schedule, winning two more games in that stretch than many thought they would. There’s talent for the future, but they’re still growing up today. Next week Auburn hosts Ole Miss, who’ve lost 10 conference games in a row. With a win over the Rebels Auburn would be eligible for a bowl game already.
Even still, it was a hard one to watch. LSU is good. And so now I’m looking forward to the inevitable disappointment of the 1 vs. 2 LSU-Alabama game in a few weeks.
” … wants to be friends with you on Facebook” was sitting in my inbox this morning.
But they should send these with a greater nod to suspense. I’m already friends with everyone that a.) I know today who b.) wants to be my friend and c.) is on Facebook.
A new invitation is either spam, which isn’t exciting, a mistake, which may as well be spam or some new person I’ve recently met. I haven’t made any new acquaintances in the last few days.
This leaves one possibility: some old person.
Of course you know that in the first two words of the email. There’s the name, and the higher part of the brain speaks with the lower part of the brain, and they conference in the memory section and the assessment nodule for a big decision. Is this a person? The person? Shall we be friends? That is to say, make it digitally official, because permission has been sought.
Go up to the next person you meet that you like and say “I want to be your friend,” while holding up a “Confirm” button. It can’t me any more awkward an interaction, but I digress.
In the first tow words, the name of this person, you know. And I knew this name, even as it was a slightly shortened version for the man of the boy I once knew. After I pushed the little blue button and spent a few seconds looking through his profile and the first two or three pictures I was sure. Same guy. By then you know what the person is doing with their life.
Now. If you’d approached me any time within the last 10 years and told me what his job would be I would have thought “Yeah, well, that figures.”
Which makes you wonder. How often do career paths and life choices surprise you when you discover lost people online?
Most everyone I’ve stumbled upon, or sought out, seem to be doing well for themselves. There are lots of young families, successes and just a few difficult-sounding jobs. Most of them just seem to be in the places you would expect. That’s not uninteresting, for some that’s just knowing which path takes us where you need to be.
I suspect the online platforms have reshaped reunions. No one has to be surprised, anymore, about what became of anyone else, how they look and if they’re still with that dolt they wasted their time on when they were young and foolish and —
I just discovered a Facebook page about my high school. The theme is “You know you went here if.” Most of it is banal or beyond prosaic. One comment says “If you assumed school was closed on the first day of hunting season.”
Before that you can find a post for people who still live in that community alerting parent/alumni to watch out for a green truck that seems to be lurking near a truck stop. There’s also a death list. A few people have developed a master list of people that have died. A grim and valuable service, no doubt.
Ha. I love this. That community was basically two parallel roads, and in between was the school and a set of railroad tracks. Probably half of the student body had to cross the tracks to make it to school every day. There was an old gentleman who lived right next to the tracks. Just found a note about him. Once my mother insisted we take him a little fruit basket, and now I’m very glad she thought of that:
He was my grandfather. Everyone just doesn’t know what it meant to him for all of the kids to go by and wave to him. He passed away in 92.
He’d sit on his porch every morning and afternoon in his co-op cap and overalls and wave. If it rained, or he did not feel well, he would wave from one of his windows. He’s been gone 20 years. His house has been gone for almost as long, but judging by those comments generations of people think of him every time they have to slow down for those railroad tracks.
That’s enough Facebook for this month.
Class prep today. I wrote a terrific lecture on photojournalism. As an experiment I’m blending pictures I’ve taken with pictures working photojournalists have shot. We’ll see how many times I’m found out. I’m guessing: each time.
Justin Elliott writes that The Washington Post “chose an image of a bearded protester seeming to assault a cop to illustrate a movement that has been overwhelmingly — almost without exception — nonviolent.” The image shows an Occupy Wall Street protester with his arm around a police officer’s neck. Andrew Burton, the freelance photographer who captured the image, tells Elliott that he doesn’t know what sparked the confrontation and that due to the melee he didn’t even know he had captured that image until later. The ”vast majority of the protests have been incredibly peaceful,” Burton says.
And people think confrontation is news, mostly because it is. But is it representative? The debate continues.
There’s also a current events quiz, featuring exactly no questions about Occupy Wall Street. I would pass it, says the guy who wrote the thing, but it won’t be an easy one to take if you hadn’t been reading or watching the news.
A new section of the site:
These are some of my grandfather’s books. I inherited them a few years ago, and have been scanning a few of the images inside his old texts. Figured they’d make an interesting section, so here we begin. Just a few pages a week, starting with the English literature textbook. Some are intended to be funny, others insightful. Hopefully you’ll find them all interesting, especially if you have a taste in 60 year old books.
There’s a small tidbit in this book that will come up in a few weeks that show my grandfather’s road from a young age, too.
This post was written while listening to the George Harrison documentary. There’s a moment with an archival Harrison interview were he talks about the “inward journey” of meditation and “far out” in the same sentence. There is, of course, an overwhelming discussion on the drugs, and a dire need for a razor and sharp scissors, but that’s just the period. (Hah, here’s a history of the band in hairstyles. They were so in tune with the universe back then, you know.) I recommend the documentary …
Steve Jobs has died. I learned about it on a machine he’d touched when it rolled off the factory floor in Asia. I’ve watched with bemusement at the hyperbole rolling around amongst the Apple fans in their grief.
Yes, Steve Jobs was a brilliant entrepreneur. Yes, he has made computing simpler for many people. Yes, people love his products. Yes, Apple, under Jobs’ influence, has done a great deal for my industry. There are counterpoints to that argument, too, however. Jobs was also a driving force in the entertainment industry and others as well. Some of his accomplishments are without modern peer.
Of course, his family and friends are mourning a great loss. The Apple world is in fits over who can grieve the most.
So far tonight I’ve seen Edison, Michelangelo, Ford and “This generation’s Disney” comparisons.
Truly, I want to bury a time capsule to be opened in the year 2511 and asking people if our descendants have heard of a guy named Steve Jobs. Because five centuries later people still pack rooms to see this guy’s work:
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Steve Jobs biography is not my chosen field, but let’s consider societal loss against corporate success, Jobs has always taken his share of criticism for an apparent lack of charitable contributions. (Making your children happy via Pixar doesn’t count.) It is possible he looked at Bill and Melinda Gates and other philanthropic billionaires as self-serving publicity hounds while doing countless good deeds without fanfare. Until this news comes out, however, I’m sticking with “Titan of industry dies young” rather than “Jobs in iHeaven.”
My condolences to the Apple fanbase remain, however.
Appropriate remembrances are due in the loss of the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth who also died today. Shuttlesworth was one of the last three surviving founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
One of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the South, he survived at least three murder attempts and refused to be silenced. While his contribution was not singular, he was a part of changing our society in real, human terms in oppressive times.
Auburn lost to Clemson today, an ugly 38-24 defeat. Clemson outplayed the guys in orange and blue, ending a 14-game streak in the series that dated back to the Korean War. Most importantly it also ended Auburn’s 17-game win streak, which dated back to the Outback Bowl at the end of the 2009 season. It had been 659 days since Auburn last lost. One year, nine months and 21 days. Since Nov. 27, 2009:
That’s the day the Tiger Woods story broke.
President Obama sent 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
More than 1,000,000 World Cup tickets went on sale in a big international farce.
President Obama accepted his much ballyhooed Nobel Prize.
As the World Turns was canceled.
The world’s tallest man-made structure, the Burj Khalifa in United Arab Emirates, opened.
The earthquake in Haiti claims 230,000 confirmed deaths.
The Vancouver Winter Games.
Volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajökull, an ice cap in Iceland, disrupted air traffic across northern and western Europe.
The Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11, and beginning a horrible ecological disaster.
S&P downgraded Greece to a junk rating.
Scientists suggested, through a genome project, that Neanderthal and humans might have interbred.
Nine activists were killed in an Israeli Navy forces raid on a flotilla attempting to break the Gaza blockade.
Spain won the World Cup.
Wikileaks.
Monsoons lead to flooding in Pakistan. Over 1,600 were killed, and more than one million were displaced.
The World Health Organization declared the H1N1 influenza pandemic over.
Thirty-three miners in Chile were trapped 700 meters underground, and returned to the surface after being trapped for a record 69 days.
The International Space Station, in October of 2010 took over the record for the longest continuous human occupation of space, dating back 10 years. (Now that’s a streak.)
Researchers at CERN trapped 38 antihydrogen atoms for a sixth of a second, the first time in history that humans have trapped antimatter.
Harvey Updyke.
Flooding and mudslides in Rio de Janeiro killed more than 800.
Auburn won the 2010 National Championship.
The Tunisian government fell.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned, leaving control of Egypt in the hands of the military.
The 9.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit the eastern portion of Japan, killing more than 15,000 and leaving another 8,000 missing. Emergencies are declared at four nuclear power plants.
The United States and a host of other countries become tangled in the Libyan Civil War.
Some royalty got married in London. Americans cared way too much.
Osama bin Laden killed. Party in the USA.
Syria and Yemen are in turmoil as the Arab Spring continues. There have also uprisings or unrest in Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia and more.
The world’s first artificial organ transplant was achieved, using an artificial windpipe coated with stem cells.
NASA’s space shuttle program concluded with the return to earth of Atlantis.
76 people were killed in twin terrorist attacks in Norway.
NASA announced that its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured photographic evidence of possible liquid water on Mars during warm seasons.
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