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adventures / Instagram / journalism / memories / photo / Rowan / television / Tuesday — Comments Off on No title Tuesday
23
Dec 25

No title Tuesday

When we got in last night, the first thing I did was put my things down.

No, that’s too early, let me back up.

When we got in last night, we stood on the curb at the airport for some time. The place we used as a park-and-ride had one shuttle running to the airport the week before Christmas, which seemed smart. It was cold. We waited. But it was at least night to be out of an airport, off of planes. Our trip began just before 6 p.m. and we landed just after 11 p.m. Not bad, considering we had a short layover in Detroit. It turned out that we took the same plane, so we disembarked long enough to grab a bite, and then get back on the plane. For our first leg of the flight I sat next to a retired Delta pilot. He is now flying rich people around out of Detroit. There are, he said, five wealthy families in Detroit and six jets. Then he showed me his Christmas card from Bob Seger, who is one of those families.

We covered a lot of ground as we were flying over the ground. The styles of flying, how much money people typically earn before they buy a plane of their own, some of his anecdotes, and so on. He asked me what I do for a living, and I told him, and he found this interesting, so we talked about media for a long while. One of my former students is in Detroit, and he has surely seen him on CBS. He was very curious about the nature and process of media, and the conversation gave me more grist for my “people don’t understand what we do” mill.

It goes both ways, of course. I’ve been on many planes, and I can fly one just as well as he could produce a media product. We think we know about other things because of our experience, but it’s not an expertise. He told me the progency of the plane we were on, and told me about the insulation properties of the fuselage. I know nothing about his business. Now, let me explain the basics of local media economic models.

There’s going to be a hypothesis in there, somewhere, eventually.

We left him in Detroit, it was his last work for a week. It sounds like has a pretty good gig for a retired man. On the second leg of the trip I sat with my lovely bride. She watched a documentary, I caught up on the day’s news. I also learned that one of my former students will be on national television on Christmas Eve. She’s a meteorologist, having gone from Greenville, North Carolina to Albuquerque to San Francisco, a real talent, a credible forecaster and now she’s getting turns on national TV.

I bet she could have told me whether I had on enough layers for the curbside cold. Standing there, getting on the shuttle, getting to the car and getting home, might have taken about the same amount of time as either one of our flights this evening.

And so, finally, the first thing I did was put my things down. Then I petted the cats. They were very insistent and full of attitude, as if to say “These are the hi-jinx you could have enjoyed if you’d been here the last week.”

Today, there has been a lot of desperate cuddling.

And a lot of loud complaining.

One of their friends spent the week with them. They had a good time. I saw the photos and videos. I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling with this act.

But the kitties are doing well. And all of the cuddling slowed down today’s grading. This last batch took the afternoon and the first half of the evening. Much longer than necessary, but the class was the class was the class.

I’ll submit the final grades tomorrow, marking the end of the fall term. I’ll take a few days off. And then, starting Saturday, I’ll go back to designing a new class for the spring term. This will be my third brand new class in as many terms, and my 11th new prep in six semesters.

That, if you are not in this business, is a lot.

Instagram / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Ready for turkey?
25
Nov 25

Ready for turkey?

Guess who has been giving me the business for not talking about them here. You guessed it. They get a whole month of highlights, and then I overlook their contractually obligated weekly appearances for a few weeks and the howling, yowling protests I receive … these cats should have been agents. They’d be devastating in negotiations.

Anyway, here’s Phoebe, in between lodging her protestations. She’s surveying her queendom.

On a recent cold night, Poseidon cuddled up next to me, on top of me, and under the covers.

That’s the boy that wants to go outside all of the time. Always needs to be under the covers, but wants to try on the cold of all outdoors.

Here’s Phoebe considering a bit of dust on the steps. I like how the tail curls around the paws.

And here’s Poseidon doing his best noir cat act.

He would have been great in an old noir movie. He’s got real charisma on camera. But he also has versatility. If he couldn’t get top billing, somehow, he could play a good mid-level henchman.

So the kitties are fine. They’re ready for Thanksgiving, and an extra day of cuddles.

And while Thanksgiving is Thursday we did have class today. The university is only closed Thursday and Friday. So we had class today, those of us that showed up. In my criticism class we discussed Mo’ne Davis is finally ready to play baseball again

Back in 2014, when she was on top of the planet, when she was the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series, when she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and getting recognized everywhere she went and fielding requests from what felt like every corner of the country, Davis heard something that she never forgot.

In the immediate aftermath of that wild run in Williamsport, Pa., her coach told her, “Mo, I don’t want this to be the greatest thing you do in your life. I don’t want you to be 35 years old stuffing yourself in your old Little League jersey and signing at a card show.” She took that message to heart.

That was not his plan when he delivered it to her. “When they’re 13, you feel like they’re not even listening to whatever you say,” Steve Bandura says now. He was stunned when Davis, now 24, recently used that quote in a newspaper interview to describe what had shaped her life after that famous shutout. You remember that? Of course she did. Bandura met Davis back when she was in elementary school and had coached her in multiple sports, and he’d always recognized how smart she was, how good a listener, how thoughtful. Of course she would hold on to something like that.

She was invited to the White House. She published a memoir. She struck out Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, she was the subject of a documentary by Spike Lee, and she had not yet turned 15. She kept thinking about those words from her coach all the while.

It’s a good story, and it’s about her, but it’s also about this new baseball league, and the modern star, and the commissioner, and the draft, and Davis’ coach is our real tie to the younger star of years gone by.

The draft for this new league has since taken place. Davis was picked 10th overall. The Women’s Pro Baseball League is scheduled to begin play next May.

We also discussed Cowboys DE Marshawn Kneeland dies in apparent suicide at 24:

DPS troopers found Kneeland’s vehicle crashed on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway. According to the report, Kneeland fled the scene on foot and officers searched the area with help from K-9 and drone units.

As authorities were looking for Kneeland, a dispatcher told officers that people who knew him had received a group text from Kneeland “saying goodbye. They’re concerned for his welfare,” according to recordings from Broadcastify, which archives public safety radio feeds.

Approximately three hours later, Kneeland was found with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Happy Thanksgiving, boys and girls.

That’s a morning-of story, and one of the few breaking news style pieces of copy we’ve looked at this semester, so there were plenty of new things to talk about. And, as a palate cleanser, I ended the day with three quick videos, each with something we could discuss in a useful kind of way.

In org comm, we talked about stereotypes, prejudice and diversity. We discussed the organizational aspects of diversity and inclusion, and we talked the substance of organizational success. You could see them staring at the screen, with my extremely exciting slide deck. You could see them dreaming of turkey.

The blog is taking a few days off. See you next week. When I make my quiet little list of things I’m thankful for, I’ll be including the readers of the site in that list. And, of course, the kitties.

adventures / books / history / Instagram / photo / swimming / Thursday — Comments Off on Happy Fourth
4
Jul 24

Happy Fourth

I am starting to feel better today, thanks for asking. Many of the key symptoms have disappeared. I think I hard-coughed all of them right out of my body this morning. It was a huge fit. More the beginning of a cold than the end, or so it felt. But I patiently sat my way into an afternoon without any other great big symptoms.

And so this afternoon I willed my way into the pool to see what would happen.

What happened was I struggled through 500 yards or so and then spent another several hundred yards wondering when I would find my rhythm. Somewhere along the way in a long swim I just slip into a nice (for me) pace that just sees the laps melt away. I haven’t charted this, but it seems like it should come at a fairly consistent time, right? Only I was somewhere around 1,200 yards today and still wondering when that would happen.

It did not happen.

But I did swim what was, on balance, a solid 1,800. And I didn’t feel the need to roll over and sleep the rest of the afternoon away. It felt like progress.

After which I finished reading John Barry’s Rising Tide, which was an incredible book about the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River.

How can something so devastating be all but forgotten just a century later? At a place called Mounds Landing, the levee gave way and “a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high” came through the crevasse. Weeks later, engineers used a 100-foot line to find the bottom, but they failed. The river had gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

No one could every wrap their arms around an official set of figures for the entirety of the massive watershed, but Barry has some data on the lower Mississippi, where the flood put as much as 30 feet of water over lands where 931,159 people lived. The whole of the country was only 120 million people at the time. Barry continues, “Twenty-seven thousand square miles were inundated, roughly equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. (Months later) 1.5 million acres remained underwater. Not until mid-August, more than four months after the first break in a mainline Mississippi River levee, did all the water leave the land.”

The scale and scope is too big for a series of movies, and maybe that’s why it isn’t in the common zeitgeist. The rural nature of the landscape plays a part here, too. Could you imagine if this could have somehow happened on that scale on the east coast? There are certainly plenty of characters you could draw from. This book fixates on Hoover, of course, and on a few of the key locales. But, then, who would be the antagonists. Here’s one.

The good ol’ boy club of New Orleans would be another. Bankers, the New Orleans establishment and nothing but, and they wiped out two adjoining communities, having made desperate promises about it to save their city. New Orleans dynamited the levee that doomed St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. A day later, other upstream collapses proved New Orleans didn’t need the effort. And, of course, New Orleans civic leaders went out of their to deny the compensation promised to their neighbors. New Orleans’ old money would definitely be the bad guys. Alas, it set the stage for Huey Long. The flood — and Calvin Coolidge’s cold shoulder — returned Herbert Hoover to the national stage. The aftermath played a big role in the great migration, and all of it together was hugely influential of generations of what would come for the region.

The current plan for the river takes some of the old hypotheses and puts them together but, Barry finds some flaws in the mathematics. This isn’t an engineering book, though it does deal with some important issues in easily digestible ways. And, then, in 1973 …

It’s all folly — and we know it.

This evening we went to see the fireworks. (We missed them last year.) They were held at the county fairgrounds and we picked out a spot across a wide field from where they launched. We sat on the side of the road and thought of the past and the future. We were far enough away that it wasn’t noisy, and close enough that it was still pretty.

At home again, we lit sparklers in the backyard. Had a great time of it, too. There were at least three different kinds, because there’s no such thing as a supply chain shortage these days.

I’m trying to talk her into taking sparklers with her everywhere she goes.

It’s not a terribly difficult sell, frankly.

Instagram / memories / Thursday — Comments Off on We moved a year ago today
27
Jun 24

We moved a year ago today

One year ago today we were cramming the last of everything into our cars, taking one last shower, still finding things to pack up, and then, finally getting in those overstuffed cars and driving east. We spent the night in Ohio. (We try not to make a habit of it, but in this case it was a good contingency plan and a great idea, because we were physically and mentally beat — but emotionally upbeat!

That night I wrote:

Moving is a terrible thing. Packing is a tedious, physical chore. And if that’s not physical enough, there’s the move part. This is why people don’t do it frequently, if they can help it. But thank goodness, thank the universe and thank Providence for movers. At 8:30 this morning, precisely when they said, the movers arrived.

The owner of the company is the former student of one of our colleagues. And that professor has hired this company twice for moves, and is about to hire him a third time. A good endorsement.

Four guys come in. Two of them former D-1 football players. All of them strong and young and confident. All of them, “Sir” and “Ma’am” and “May I put my water in your refrigerator?” and “May I use your restroom?” These guys were great.

They were taking our things out of our hands because, as they said over and over, this was their job. And that’s true, but you’d feel like a total heel if you didn’t help.

One of the guys loaded his pickup with the last bit of junk and trash for the nearby dumpster run and followed me there to help us get it out of the way. These guys were great, and they worked hard.

And so have we! I told you about the packing. Things hurt on me, and part of that is a direct result of this. Moving is a terrible thing.

[…]

The thing I learned this evening — while loading up my car, full of a “You want it to go, I’ll get it in here” bravado that was mostly sincere — is that there’s something sad about some of those last few things that you put into the car when you’re moving your entire life.

Oh, some things you need. And I stupidly put my suitcase in the middle of the back seat, so everything is on top of it. Some things are important or are sentimental, and they go in their places. Some things are practical. We needed the vacuum and cleaning supplies for the last run through of the house for the buyers (a nice young family of four, first time home owners). And then there’s whatever else you keep running across in your last half dozen walk throughs of every room. And some of that stuff, dear reader, is just pitiful.

But now, underway, in a hotel, with pizza topped with plans and dreams and contingencies, we are past the hardest, most hectic part of the move. We packed it all. It all got loaded. Everything is in motion. It is almost difficult to believe it all came together, considering where we were on Friday.

Everything that well went well because of these guys. We came across them because the man that owns the business is the former student of a colleague. That colleague had hired him for two moves and was about to use him for a third. Friends, if you get someone that wants to re-hire movers, take note.

We’re not moving anytime soon, but if we were, these are the first people we’d call. They were phenomenal.

I won’t keep returning to the sequence of events. If I did, tomorrow I’d write about driving through Pennsylvania all day and sleeping at my god-sister-in-law’s house (just go with it). Saturday would be about the morning of signing a million documents and the afternoon of the incredible guys from Ballew telling us to stop helping. We did not stop helping. They did not stop working. We were so grateful for them.

Guess what I did for about four hours this afternoon.

It was a celebration, you see. One year in the making.

Instagram / memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off on A double miss!
30
May 24

A double miss!

Completely whiffed on the Wednesday feature yesterday. Whoops. This just a day after I skipped a planned Tuesday feature. It seems that, in my haste to be hasty, I’ve been too hasty. That’s the problem with speeding up, or taking one’s time, or both. Anyway, apologies for missing out on the markers. I’ll return to them next Wednesday. We’ll talk music below. But first … today was a peaceful, relaxing, “What was I supposed to be doing again? Oh, that’s right, nothing.” sort of day.

And then, breaking news via email. Isn’t that something? Wasn’t that something?

Usually, I know about the story before the emails come out. Social media, despite it’s many frustrations, is a swift informer. But I hadn’t been on any of the apps in a bit, and then the New York Times wrote.

My lovely bride was swimming laps at the time. When she was finished I told her the news, and we set about wondering what the comedians and the satirists would say.

I also looked back at what I was doing on this day a year ago. We were in Alabama, and it seems I was looking at the ol’ family tree.

Five years ago, I said one of those bike things that sounds like something profound in a waxy wrapper of nothing. Still seems true, though.

Ten years ago, we were in Alaska.

There’s no way in the world that was a decade ago.

Fifteen years ago, we were in Savannah, and Tybee Island.

Twenty years ago, I stopped by the local civic center, on a whim, which was hosting a model train convention.

Now, I’m no train enthusiast, but there are granddads and dads and children all being kids together, so why not?

I walk in and meet some nice people; one man telling me of some very historic parts of his collection — he’d accidentally been given the paperwork that documents J.P. Morgan’s purchase of an entire railroad; three men talking at length about how best to paint a cliff face and so on. But the best part was stumbling onto a booth with college merchandise.

I found this tapestry that I love. I got it for a song.

Now I just need to figure out how to display it, without it being used for cover.

Funny the things you do, and don’t remember.

We return to the Re-Listening project, which is where I pad the page out with music. I’m doing this because I am currently re-listening to all of my old CDs, in the order of their acquisition, in the car. It’s a wonderful trip down memory lane and I’m dragging you along, because the music is good.

Today we’ll do a double entry, since it is back-to-back of the same act. I picked these up in 2004, but the albums are older than that. If we’re going back to my first listen in 2004, we have to hop in the time machine and go back another decade to when Barenaked Ladies released “Maybe You Should Drive.” It was their second studio album, and went double platinum at home in Canada, where it peaked at number three. It was the band’s first visit to the US charts, sneaking in at 175 on the Billboard 200.

The first of two singles, “Jane” was an instant catalog classic for Steven Page.

There’s a lot of great work from Page on this record. Here’s one more fan-favorite, the second single, which just feels like a deep cut at this point.

I picked up this CD after a handful of the later BNL records, and several shows. So many of the songs I knew. (Three of these tracks are on Rock Spectacle, which was my first BNL purchase.) And so I don’t know when I first heard this song from Ed Robertson, but it’s one of those beautiful works that I’d like to be able to hear again for the first time.

The day I bought “Maybe You Should Drive” I also picked up “Born On A Pirate Ship,” and I wish I remember, now, where I got them. But because I got them together, these CDs have always belonged together. The former came out in 1994, the latter was the followup, released in 1996. It was another hit in Canada, peaking at number 12, and captured more American ears. “The Old Apartment” was a breakthrough single and video, and Pirate Ship went to 111 in the American Billboard chart. It was certified gold four years later. Andy Creegan had left the band, Kevin Hearn came in soon after, but this is a four-piece record.

It is peak 1990s Canada pop.

I still think this is a song about a dog, Catholicism and a bunch of other random things. It’s inscrutable.

People that just knew BNL from airplay — well the Americans anyway — will recall this as their first song.

It used to be that “When I Fall” seemed like it had to be a full, live show performance. But then Robertson played it in one of the Bathroom Sessions, and you heard it in a different way entirely.

Page will occasionally remind you he’s working on a different level. This is one of those times. Seeing it live is the preferable way* to take in this song, so go back with me to a time when it’s amazing we had washed-out-color video and you can’t explain the tracking squiggles to the children of the future. But don’t fixate on that, follow the performance.

That song … Steven Page … it just feels like it should be a misdemeanor to not know anything more than their later pop hits.

*I think karaoke would be another ideal way to hear “Break Your Heart,” but that’s just me.

One of two Jim Creeggan songs on Pirate Ship, this one sneaks up on you every time, which isn’t creepy at all. And for four minutes it just gets better and better and better, and bigger and bigger, even when it lulls, which is a lot of fun.

And here’s Creegan’s other track, which refuses to fit in any pop music mold.

BNL is touring the US this summer, though we won’t be able to see them. We did catch them last year though, which was the third time we’d seen them in two or three years. Everyone wishes Steven Page was still in the band, most everyone has wished that for 15 years, but aside from the 2018 Juno Awards celebration of the Canadian Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, that may never happen. (Though they haven’t definitively ruled it out, and that’s what hope is aboot.) The band stills put on energetic rock ‘n’ roll shows. They’re very much worth seeing.

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