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IU / journalism / photo / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on Your personal blog experience
22
Feb 22

Your personal blog experience

One overused word is narrative. Another is polarized. Right behind those two is experience.

Ummm, no.

One of the downsides to the phone experience since we all got portable phones in the 90s has been the hang up experience. You just can’t slam the phone down. You removed the phone from your face and … pressed a button. This disappointing experience has continued into the smartphone era. Even worse, the other person doesn’t get a dial tone experience.

Similarly, I can’t have a satisfying tab-closing experience. I read that and could only role my eyes and press the X to close the screen — which I could not do fast enough.

I do not need a personalized registration experience. I need only to beat the human rush and avoid lines.

Whatever consultant told the comms and coding people to write that needs a new kind of working experience.

I saw this this morning.

Modernist avant-garde is now ubiquitous and contemporary, and today I sat in that spot just long enough to contemplate it. What do you suppose those are made of? They’re too high up in a ludicrously tall room to tell.

What do you suppose the artist’s intention was? There’s no sign I saw that offered an interpretation.

What do you think the artist was thinking about when they got this commission? When they were planning this out? When they watched hoisted to the ludicrously high ceiling?

That’s always the real question, really.

The other, I suppose, is how many people have contemplated these same questions? And other questions? And what answers did they conjure for themselves? It’s all a new thing, so probably not many, and who knows, and wouldn’t it be worrying to know the answer to that last one?

Though, some sort of interactivity would be nice. An artistic suggestion box, if you will. What did you think when you saw this installation of glass and aluminum and nylon string? You could see the artist saying “I’ll take all of this into consideration on my next project,” until they saw the replies they received.

Then they, too, will know about the comments.

Studio night, and it was a good one.

That’ll all be online tomorrow, and I’ll share it here. See you then!

cycling / Friday / IU / photo — Comments Off on Come, let us weekend!
18
Feb 22

Come, let us weekend!

It was sunny. But it was cold. We’ll take it because it is Friday.

But only for so much longer, by which I mean about a week, a week-and-a-half.

These are the stages of winter for me: resignation, ignoring it, wearied by it, a brief sense of optimism, and then a sort of disbelieving vexation which is where I will say, more than once, “When will this end?”

The answer is About seven weeks too late.

If it seems like I’ve said this before, that’s because I have. If it seems like I’ve said it this winter, that’s because I most assuredly hav.

I did go outside for a few minutes today. I decided to walk across part of the campus to take a Covid test. This was entirely an excuse to get outside and under the sunshine for a few minutes in between hours under florescent lights. So on with the big jacket, and I walked the four-tenths of a mile from our building to a gym in the School of Public Health, where all of the spitting takes place. Swipe your ID card, answer the three questions — they used to ask about whether you’d eaten anything in the last half hour, whether you had symptoms or had been asked to quarantine, now the staffer there just points to the sign. Only then do they give you permission to move on to the next table where a modern printer with ancient software eventually spits out the little ID label. You must recite the high holy numbers, your birthday, to get the little plastic tube. Then, go around the corner, stand in this converted gym and fill the container. Saliva, not foam, if you please.

And then the walk back. See! The proof of being outdoors in the middle of the day!

I’m still negative. They do the lab work here on campus and the turnaround is usually around four hours. It’s an impressive set up, really.

This is my ride through the northern English countryside. I’m in Yorkshire. This is part of the 2019 world championship course.

An hour doing this was a great way to start the weekend. Usually when I share these silly things I’ve cropped out the graphics, but this is the normal screen view.

That’s a lot to look through, and you can’t make changes. There’s always a chat feature, and for the life of me I don’t know how people can pedal fast and type at the same time. It’s all I can do to sing along to the music.

books / history / IU / journalism / photo / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on The downhill of Wednesday
16
Feb 22

The downhill of Wednesday

Another day hanging out with the great Ernie Pyle. I wonder what he’d say to me today, if he could.

He’d say “I’m almost 122 years old. What do you want from me? And why are you hanging around this statue anyway? Maybe you could go write something.”

The joke is on him. I’m mostly editing today.

I had to give a tour today, actually, and I walked our guest by the little display of Ernie Pyle artifacts, which is when I always say he grew up in a small place about 80 miles to the west. His dad was a tenant farmer there, and the town of Dana was bigger then (population 893) than it is today (population 570).

Then, as now, it’s a sleepy rural community. Today Dana is still a farming community, but maybe also a commuter’s exurb.

If you travel down Maple Street, the one road that the Google Maps car visited in Dana in 2008, you’ll see this.

I did not mention that to our visitor from Chicago, but only because I had to discuss the Roy Howard papers, the Cold War photographs and the paintings from the university’s collection that adorn nearby walls.

A look in the control from this evening’s sports shoots.

They produced two shows tonight, of course. The highlight show, which included segments on the upcoming games, a historic Black Hoosier athlete and this week’s athlete of the week.

They’ve been adding all kinds of elements to that show. And, of course, there’s also the talk show. They discussed Indiana baseball and Indiana softball, which are both kicking off their seasons this week.

Those two shows will be up later this week, and I’ll share them here.

Until then, here’s a look at a few of the other IUSTV shows that they’ve put online in the last day or so. (They keep very busy!)

Here’s the pop culture and campus events show. There’s a subtle little thing in the interview that most people won’t catch, but I was especially proud of, and a new segment that’s just about jokes.

And here’s the news show. I think everything in this episode was done in one take. Easy, casual. Just needs more.

And here’s the film show, which I teased in this space last week.

And that gets us through most of the day, which was an easy 10-hour work day. After the last few works of busyness two 10-hour days in a row doesn’t seem that challenging.

If you find yourself saying things like that “You must ask yourself, ‘Why?’”

I will celebrate by reading myself to sleep. Back to reading Kluger. I got this book for Christmas a few years ago. I read most of it last year, but set it down for some reason or another. As I wrote about a third of the way through it …

I’m in the last 50 or so pages now, and we’re actually in the trial. This is an insightful treat. It’s early-18th century colonial America, the printer has published some mean things about a governor and that’s against the rules in a way that seems draconian to modern American sensibilities. But we learn that, even then, the legal system of the day was still wrestling with the philosophical nature of truth. How can you decide what libel is without understanding what truth might be. It’s a narrowly defined world.

Kluger has the records of trial, and he’s quoting the lawyers verbatim. Some of the themes they were wrestling with then are reflective of the arguments being made right now in Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times. Whereas today it seems the court is weighing what appears to amount to negligence brought on by deadlines against the legal concept of libel, the judges in the Zenger trial are tasked with trying to decide whether carefully written and coded letters published in a backwater colonial newspaper could cause a king to lose confidence in his government officials.

The way the law was framed and the arguments made in such a way that the king seems was a delicate flower, and that his fragility was to be protected at all times. A convenient political and legal cover of the times, I’m sure. The published letters weren’t about the king, but rather about his appointed governor of New York (who was often appointed just to get him out of London, it seems). And since, as Kluger demonstrates, the governor was slotting judges into this trial in the hopes of getting a desired outcome, maybe the letter writers had a point.

Gov. Cosby had been a military officer of some success, married well, and then worked his way up to being appointed the governor of a small Mediterranean island. A personal gains scandal eventually followed him there, and in New York and New Jersey there were salary issues, and oppression and some land problems. Typical colonial stuff, the things that, just a generation later, led to revolution. So you wonder what became of all of these people’s grandsons.

Oh, the letter writers were some of Zenger’s legal representation.

There’s not a moment of Euro-American history in New York that doesn’t work like this, I’m convinced.

books / history / IU / photo / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on I created a new banner, just for this
15
Feb 22

I created a new banner, just for this

Another full day today. Meetings in the morning, studio in the evening, writing and editing and social media in between. Your standard-issue 21st century media expert type day. More on some of that in a moment.

Let’s visit with the cats, since I neglected this site’s most popular feature yesterday. (If you’re new, this is obvious, right? Cats, the web, etc.)

Phoebe is hard at work.

You have never seen a cat relax as hard as she does. There’s a certain intensity to her lazing about, and her stretches, and her naps.

Poseidon found a bird. He will not let us hear the end of it.

I need some things to drown out the cat, basically. Fortunately, I have some video for you. Here’s a Valentine’s Day dating show some of the students shot last Friday.

I’m not sure if that one was rigged or not. But, as ever, I hope for a followup piece, just to find out how the date experience went. (If I read, in 20 years, how this show made for lifelong friends or started a family or something, I don’t want it to be a total surprise, you know?)

We’re all about trying new things and putting everybody to work, and that means a lot of new shows. This is the third new sports show of the year.

And if I can remember correctly, that’s 11 new shows I’ve helped or watched the students launch over the years. At least seven of them are still running. That’s a nice success record, and the success is entirely to the students’ credit.

Tonight, the news division was in the studio to shoot two shows — two of the three oldest continually running shows they produce. We have a freshman delivering the weather.

How cool is that?

We’ve had three primary atmospheric science students delivering weather forecasts for the last several years. All three of them had landed meteorology jobs before they graduated. One had her job waiting for her after her junior year! Another is working now as a broadcast meteorologist. And, maybe, in three or four years we’ll be saying similar things about the new crop of atmosphere scientists. And, to think, that weather segment started as an experiment, too.

Speaking of freshmen, this guy is too. I’ve done this long enough to see people who could work at this craft and turn it into a career. I’ve watched people who give it a try because they were curious, people who do this stuff because it’s fun, or people that find they don’t like this type of work after all (an incredibly valuable learning experience). I’ve also done this long enough to know that, every so often, you can see a person who you know is going to be great. This young man is closer to that last group than any of the others.

What you do in those instances is you try to take credit for all of their success.

I finished The Women Who Wrote The War last night. Nancy Caldwell Sorel published this in 1999, and from this distance it somehow seems a bit older, still.

But this is a fine book woven full of individual anecdotes. Sorel pulled from primary sources and she interviewed correspondents decades after the war. There are some great gems in here. These reporters were bold, and sometimes felt they had to be even more than their male colleagues. In a war zone, that would heighten the danger, right? Some of these names you may know. It’s hard to be interested in journalism and not be familiar with Martha Gellhorn, but a lot of her contemporaries are due to be lost to history, which is a shame.

Take this woman. Ten million people read her in almost 200 papers across the country. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and was one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. Her work made her influential. Her stances and her influence sometimes made her a controversial figure. For a time she was called “the First Lady of American Journalism.” Have you ever heard of Dorothy Thompson?

To say that she could write is almost cheapening the power of words.

Have you ever heard of Lee Miller? This book introduces you to her. She was a New York fashion model in the 1920s. She became a photographer in Paris and, during World War2 she shot for Vogue, covering the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Also, at the end of the war, she used Hitler’s bathtub.

I am mostly struck by how modern that room looks, or how little they’ve changed in the last 75 years.

I could tell you more tales, but Sorel will do it better. If you like those two little stories, scroll back up and buy the book.

And now the hard part is deciding what book to start next. I have an entire book case of Books To Be Read. It is stuffed to overflowing and there’s a small stack growing next to it. There are also about four dozen books on my Kindle app. I want to read them all, but which one first?

These are the dilemmas that I must work through.

Friday / IU / photo / podcast / television / video — Comments Off on To the weekend
11
Feb 22

To the weekend

I was thinking about a passage from Romans, because I recently heard the expression “speaking things into existence.” I’m all for visualization, but the idea behind the saying is at odds with that one part of Romans, chapter four.

And so it was that I was in a meeting with students this morning who were tired and quiet and I thought to myself, “Are we already in spring break mode?” And then I grimaced inwardly a bit. What if you just thought that into existence?

Spring Break is four weeks away. And when that mindset hits, well, everyone is counting the days.

Left that meeting to go to the studio. They were shooting their own version of The Dating Game for Valentine’s Day. Left the studio to go into another studio. Someone is doing an interview and that requires a podcast and that requires a crash course running a mixing board.

And I made it back to the first studio in time to watch this interview. They’re highlighting a short film.

And I learned her film was given an honorable mention at Cannes. Student projects recognized at Cannes! It is easy to be impressed around here.

The two shows they shot today will be out sometime next week. Until then, hang out with the sports gang. This is the highlight show they produced Wednesday, Hoosier Sports Nite.

And here’s the Superb Owl show they did. It’s get amusing.

I like when they have this much fun. It makes it me think we’re doing more than one thing right.

I keep forgetting to share this here. It’s days old now. A little over a week, in fact, but it is still timely and topical. It’s about how we come to know and trust experts and their science. Someone here is conducting studies on that. Pretty cool, if you ask me. Also, Young Frankenstein shows up.

After that, you’ll need this.

And I’ll put on the ritz by … taking a nap.

(Update: I did. It was a great idea.)

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