The Yankee and our friend Melissa at last weekend’s conference.
I like lamp. From Famous Dave’s.
The candle of truth, lighting the way and solving petty disputes. Whomever can stand the heat longest wins the point.
Who’s there? Through the peephole.
Flamingos dotted the Samford campus on April Fool’s Day.
The meteorological ceiling on the drive home.
The flowering dogwood in our yard.
Plainsman Park panorama, using the free app on my iPhone. The panorama isn’t perfect, but it shows the beautiful weather we had at the baseball game this afternoon. The important part is that this was shot and stitched together on my phone. The important part was not that Auburn fell to number one Vanderbilt 6-2 and was swept in-conference on consecutive weekends for the first time since 2007. We had beautiful weather for a day at the park, though. Click to embiggen the panorama.
I took this picture in a parking lot the other night. The more I think of it the more troubled by the implications of the language. The video may be recorded? It may be recorded 24 hours? Which 24 hours? Are they in sequence? Are just the first 24 hours recorded? Are they pressing record at whim?
Is this a deterrent? Would the bad guys take a chance?
Turns out if you stand there in the parking lot considering this message the staff begins to eye you suspiciously.
Auburn friends will enjoy the best Twitter meme ever. Everyone else will probably find it stupid, even if they can relate to some of the experiences there. Even still, just the names and the shared parts of the culture made for some hysterical reading today.
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Gov. Robert Bentley said today he would cut the state’s General Fund budget by 15 percent once the Legislature passes pending supplemental appropriations to several key agencies.
And Bentley said the condition of the $1.6 billion fund is so bad that he expects to have to prorate the 2012 budget that begins on Oct. 1 anywhere from 15 percent to 45 percent.
[…]
Bentley compared the state’s General Fund to a person who is addicted to OxyContin and is going through a withdrawal period.
“Some times you get DTs like an alcoholic and that’s what we’re going through in the state of Alabama now,” he said. “We going through DTs, but you know what? You’ve got a doctor in charge.”
That’s our new governor. He was a dermatologist in his previous career. These little jokes are going to get old, fast.
The House was founded. It was good, then bad and then ominous. Then it was good again. Then there was Newt Gingrich, Clinton, 9-11. The End.
This evening I started reading Eugen Sledge’s With The Old Breed. Sledge was an Auburn man, from Mobile. He fought in two of the most brutal battles of the Pacific before he turned 21, enrolled at Auburn after the war and had a long and successful career as a professor at the University of Montevallo. The HBO miniseries, The Pacific, was based in part on his book. Just a few pages in, but it is a universally well-received book. I’ll let you know.
Best video of the day? Glad you asked.
Finally, where were you 30 years ago today? I don’t remember that as it happened, but you might. Watching the contemporary television coverage is fascinating.
Now if it only felt like spring. It is cold, and this is no fun. The high was 58 and it dipped into the 40s, but this was the cold version of the low 40s.
Busy day today, class, the newspaper, radiation. Don’t panic. Your microwave, when it is cooking your television wrapped in aluminum foil, emits more bad stuff. Just don’t go outside and lick caterpillars and you should be fine.
I blame this guy, ousted state supreme court justice Roy Moore. He’s more radioactive than anything else in the air around here. Drummed off the bench because he misread the times in defying a court order, badly defeated twice for the GOP nomination for governor and now he’s considering running for president.
In one of my recent comps questions I was asked to design experiments that would help a potential candidate determine a.) if she should run and b.) how she should run. The only solution I did not include was “Float a trial balloon and read the comments.”
Here’s my favorite from that story, the easy majority of which are adamantly against our old friend Roy Moore running for president.
“Roy Moore will become the Shorty Price of presidential elections.”
Here’s longtime political reporter Bob Ingram, many years back now, reminding people of Shorty Price.
There’s a restaurant I occasion with a picture of Shorty Price hanging in the restroom. The guy was such a character that he probably would have appreciated that gesture.
Roy Moore is no Shorty Price, though.
In class today we heard a presentation on social media tools, which was nicely done by the students. I’m working on this and that, elsewhere. Trying to get my act together for the dissertation. I started recycling a bunch of old newsprint today, too. ANd the student-journalists are hard at work putting together their paper for the week. Hard to believe their year is almost over, they’ll only have four more issues after this paper.
Took part in a teleconference tonight with Public Square an online organization with the goal of fostering debate on political, legal and social issues. I mention this because I get to serve on the board of directors there. They are thoughtful people doing interesting work with big ideas. Also, the call was in high definition. I hadn’t realized that had become a necessary function of the conference calling business, but there it was, in beautiful bit rate. The sound effects are still pretty basic, though.
And then there’s this. I’m guessing it will be ugly for two days and then disappear for a long while. Then it will come back again with more ground-shaking, but plausibly odd assertions, which is all you need as evidence in the sporting world these days. We’ve seen these things before, you see.
We’re on the road today. All day. On days like today the road can take you over. To keep that from happening to you, pictures!
Auburn’s Casey McElroy drove in four runs last Sunday, including two in a four-run eighth inning to beat Arkansas and win the weekend’s series.
Dan Gamache drove in a run off this pitch, to help win that Arkansas game, 8-7.
Safe! The Tigers weren’t so fortunate this weekend. They were swept at Mississippi State.
Later that same day last weekend Samford’s women’s basketball team made their first ever appearance in the NCAA Tournament in first round action at Auburn. The Lady Bulldogs fell to a tough Florida State squad, but Paige Anderson played her heart out. She only registered seven points, but was pure hustle. Turns out I took her picture in high school, too, when she won a state championship.
Savannah Hill’s off-balance shot fell for two points. (Sort of looks like a foul in there, too.)
Ruth Ketcham actually played at Auburn for a year before transferring to Samford. She got called upon to run the point late in the game.
After the game Spike, Samford’s mascot, ran into Hairy, who was getting ready to watch Georgia play in the second game of the day. They were very cordial. That bone was not used as a weapon.
So Florida State beat Samford, and Georgia defeated Middle Tennessee. The Bulldogs put FSU away in the next round and then fell to Texas A&M. I now know more about early round action of this tournament than I have in years.
I took a LOMO picture of one of the Live oaks at Toomer’s Corner on my way out of town the other day. Turns out the poison runs deeper than they’d originally realized, so grim news is a bit more grim. Old leaves are falling off just now for new growth anyway, but it will be the warmth that comes with the spring season that really shows how bad the problem is. Meanwhile, the deranged individual who admitted on the phone to poisoning two trees is awaiting a hearing next month.
You can see more pictures in this particular style on my LOMO blog, which I’m doing entirely from my phone. And as cellphone photo sites go, it isn’t bad. I know this because that site gets a lot more spam than this one.
The Yankee and I have this joke where I pretend to get indignant at whatever has offended my sensibilities and I announce “I’m going to go blog about my feelings!” I thought these were tasty chips, but she did not like them, so I said that I would write about it, and here we are.
Presented our paper today on the media participation hypothesis, which suggests that, as political involvement grows reliant on new media formats and technologies, use of interactive public affairs media will produce more satisfaction and efficacy over time as media become more interactive. The concern with this hypothesis, we argue in the paper is one reflected in current research which struggles with logistical challenges that the Internet presents.
That’s what this paper is about: this doesn’t exactly work, that doesn’t exactly work, we need a model to help with understanding new dynamics, and so on.
There were nodding heads during the presentation, which is always a good sign at these sorts of things.
We had a pizza lunch with two of our friends from Mississippi schools and another from Texas. After more sessions and meetings in the afternoon we had dinner with our colleagues at The Flying Fish.
This place was new in Little Rock when I lived here. (Almost a decade ago!) It is delicious. I went to the Flying Fish because it was one of the few places in a re-developing downtown back then; now Riverwalk is a bustling, thriving area once again, thanks to years of development and the Clinton Library. I was glad to see the place was still around. It is, I believe, the best catfish I eat — and there’s a catfish joint in my family.
And apparently it is a regional chain, so the next time I’m in Memphis it’ll be ribs and fish.
Part of the decor:
Outside they light the building with lamps made of outboard motors.
Anyway, the company was the best part. We had dinner with four exceedingly bright and funny people, two old friends and two of them new. Shame we’ll only see them at conferences, it has been a while since I’ve laughed that much, that hard.
So that’s the day: the presentation, the conference and the food. Tomorrow is the drive back home. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.
