These are the shows the students produced last night.
This one took a little doing, but it came together in the end.
And the talk show followed. They found themselves in a tiny bit of a time crunch, but you’d never notice it here if I didn’t point it out to you, which is a great credit to the people you see in the program.
And some of that rolled into the rest of the night, which was the post-production meeting of which I was enthusiastic about last night. It made for a late night, but a useful one.
This morning it was back in the studio almost first-thing for another show. And then I ended the day in the control room while another show was being produced until 7:30 p.m. That means I was there until 7:30 on a Friday, but it also means students were working at their craft that, late, too. You surely can’t question their dedication when you see them doing that.
But now, finally, the weekend. May yours be all the things you’ve been looking forward to all week.
IU / Thursday — Comments Off on Thursdays are the days that fall into place first 1 Apr 21
I wore an eggshell blue shirt and stuffed a bright yellow pocket square in my jacket and said “This, finally, is spring time!”
And this morning we had snow flurries. It is April. We are fools.
But it was nothing but mildly demoralizing. The day was the day and the day was gray. The Yankee and I had lunch together after her class. She returned to research, I returned to the office and, then, the studio.
The studio was full of people, a delightful condition in April. There’s always a bit of drift owing to competing interests and other jobs and so on. But we were full up tonight. Happy, energetic people making shows about sports.
We had a nice long talk after the shows, and the sports directors were a-buzz with the possibilities of what is to come. They’re thinking the right way, aiming the proper direction, and they must just have the energy for it. I told them they’re at a hinge point. Each year is an installment. In 2016 it was chaos. We spent 2017 stabilizing the thing, some positive things started happening. Then, in 2018, the students began building a lasting culture. Last year, 2019, they were working on making it professional. Today, that evolution continues.
These are small victories over the course of time, an organic thing built by dozens of people. Some of them are just names to the students doing it now. Most would be complete strangers. That’s the way of it, but it’s a great shame.
There are the tiniest little elements of a lot of people — from bits of script artifacts to music, from shot selections to graphics — built into the shows they shot tonight. Some are off working in TV across the country. Some people are at big national networks. And some are making their marks in other businesses entirely, but they were in the room too, somehow. Today’s successes from yesterday’s successes, and all that.
I’d write more, but it’d be too much and I have to be back in the studio in the morning anyway. And I’ll have some more shows to show you then.
IU / photo / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on The only thing I didn’t phone in today was this post 30 Mar 21
Took off from work today. Called in sick, by which I mean I woke up at about 7 a.m. and wrote a message in the Slack app and went back to sleep.
Here’s the bottom line. If you’ve ever been sick in your life you’ve felt worse than I do today. I almost have a headache. I almost feel like I have a sore throat. I have the mildest fever modern technology can observe. I am supremely tired. In fact, I’ve spent much of the day in bed. My chief complaint, then, doing my part to stay safe and help ensure the safety of the people around me, is general fatigue.
Well, I’m tired a lot anyway, so a long nap is a nice treat. And so long as I don’t have to move around a lot I can forget how weary I feel. Tomorrow will be a bit better, I’m sure. And the next day, too. And we’re already counting down the days to full vaccination, two weeks from yesterday.
After that we look forward to safely, carefully, seeing vaccinated family. My in-laws are already considering dates to visit, and that’s great! They’re vaccinated and outside their own two-week window, and so we can soon have a nice reunion soon, after some 17 months apart.
That’s what it will take, pragmatic choices, careful decisions. We’ve done that for a year. We’re comfortable continuing in that way. There won’t be any big crowded events or restaurants or exotic travel in our near future, but that’s OK. I appreciate the idea that we’re all a part of the field study. Experts are trying to determine how the vaccines and the real world are working together. And when you think of it in that light a slow and careful transition to more conventional behavior seems like obviously the right choice.
For the immediate future, then, my vaccine will feel a lot like a mental relief. The efficacy data of all of the shots are incredibly promising. People that have devoted their life to this work are very encouraged about what they’re coming to understand and what it will mean for us. And, until that’s written in stone, I can behave cautiously. I’ll be wearing masks at work for the foreseeable future anyway, but in two weeks I’ll feel better about our prospects in general. Some weight may be lifted. Perhaps I’ll lesson the decontamination procedures at the door of the house. Personal Space Guy won’t feel as invasive, eventually.
I’m still going to be mystified by Can’t Cover My Nose Man, though.
Now we’ve just got to get the rest of the populace on board. The concern has to be in the laggard adopters of the vaccine. We are all just treading water until everyone gets a bandaid on their arm.
I saved the cats until today, because it seemed like there wouldn’t be much more going on here. They are doing great, of course. Mostly because they did not get shots this week.
Phoebe has the serve.
She looks as tired as I feel, here.
I’m not sure what Poseidon was doing under the table, to be honest. Maybe he’s practicing to become a repair cat. Who can tell with him.
He seldom explains himself, after all.
Probably he spends most of his time wondering why we think he should feel compelled to explain himself. That’s a cat thing, surely.
There is a podcast to share. This is the one I recorded and edited last Friday. I referred to it vaguely in this space, as well. And now you can listen to it. It was a delightful conversation about children and teens and a year of Covid. There’s a fair amount of “Kids are resilient, but …” And it’s a fine conversation about a fascinating topic with, unfortunately, few definitive answers at the moment.
I came to find, after the fact, an old feature story about Jerry Wilde, the professor I’m talking with there. Some years back he received an organ transplant from a former student. What an impression one person must have made on the other, to inspire them to do so in kind.
And to wrap up a day where I’ve done nothing but sleep and have all of this to show for it, this is a show the late night crew shot in Studio 5. It’s getting meta and awkward, but that’s all in character.
As promised some two weeks ago, there is a new look to the front page of this humble website. Here is a hint as to the current theme.
And you can see the whole presentation if you just click this little link. That’s from a little flowering tree in the backyard. In a few more weeks it will meet it’s full glory. But we’ll probably be featuring a different look by then.
Quite day today, for the most part. I worked on questions for an interview I recorded late this afternoon. The last official act of the week was editing it. I’ll publish the thing on Monday. It was pleasant. A thoroughly delightful chat with a delightful guy. And, like so much of life, there were few concrete answers. You know that going into a lot of things, it doesn’t ameliorate the feeling after the fact though. He said as much, at one point, too. Occupational hazard for him, you see. He’s spent his whole career in that world. He recounted a conversation he had when he was in college. A friend of his who was studying physics just couldn’t comprehend the inconclusive nature of the soft sciences. You could sum it up as ‘I could work a lifetime on a problem and not be able to see it through. Or know the result. Or know if I was correct.’
I guess we all make peace with some sort of limitations.
Or, maybe, if the idea of that makes you a little twitchy — as it does me — the limitation is misplaced. The journey is the destination and all that. I’m sure a great many books have been written about that approach for the goal- and the task-oriented. There’s a bookstore shelf full of those somewhere. Each with a less satisfying resolution than the last. They say things like, Sure you need provisions from the grocery store, but did you see those clouds in the sky? And have you ever really wondered how those things made it to the store and then found yourself at a working farm asking questions about the history of dairy farming? And why did you drive there, anyway? What does that say about us? That we are slaves to cars, the ultimate sign of freedom? And what of the lives you touched along the way?
Anyway, while it was a little perplexing from an issue-conflict-resolution perspective, it was a fine interview. I’ll put it here Monday.
We do have some sports videos for you. Students produced these last night and they were ready for you, piping hot and fresh, this morning. Highlights and updates, updates and highlights:
And if you want to hear people pick their favorite baseball teams as a pre-season analysis, then we’ve got you covered there, too.
I had a conversation about changing sports just to see how the strategy would change. What if you took two timeouts away from basketball? What if you really only played those last five minutes anyway? Say the XFL had the opportunity to really explore their rule changes before Covid came around, what does that do to your play calling? What would happen if the NCAA took a rooting financial interest in elevating women’s basketball and tried to make, you know, money off the thing? What would that look like? Suppose there weren’t end-of-inning resets for baserunners in baseball. What takes place then? Why not send the Detroit Tigers and the Pittsburgh Pirates down to AAA ball for a year, since they clearly aren’t playing well where they are?
(The answers are: The games would be 15 faster. The games would be 90 minutes shorter. It gets more aggressive. We may never find out because the NCAA is full of shortsighted leadership. Also, they’d pass the buck until they could claim the victory as their own, brought on solely and only because of their fearless leadership. You’d routinely have baseball games will final scores like 19-8, fewer utility infielders, more speed, larger pitching staffs and team psychologists to help ballplayers cope with it all. And who says the Tigers and Pirates aren’t already playing minor league ball?)
I had this conversation with some students who haven’t yet been bored enough to think up things like this. But there comes a day, some day when the only game they can watch are the Detroit Tigers … and they’re going to start thinking these things through.
But hopefully it won’t be on a weekend. A weekend! Which is upon us now! Have a delightful one!
IU / photo / podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on Life is full of color, and also a podcast 25 Mar 21
While this isn’t where I post all of my little outfit choices — last week notwithstanding, when I was really just trying to share … something — I was rather proud with how this one worked out. You shouldn’t, they say, mix prints. But what do they know anyway? A small plaid and some small polka dots? That shouldn’t be a thing. And your pocket square, they say, should be a mild contrast, to compliment the other thing. A complimentary contrast, if you will. No one really says that in this context, but maybe they should. Anyway, blue and purple are next to one another on the color wheel, and so maybe this shouldn’t work. But it seemed like a good idea this morning, and I think it was.
Maybe it doesn’t work, but I thought it did.
It got an emoji-filled comment on Instagram, which is where I’m putting these, so I can sorta keep track of them. But now I wonder if I should put them in another other place.
I bought these flowers last month. Seemed like a good idea that morning. But as that particular day went on I grew irritated at something that was, of course, of vital importance. I don’t recall what it was. Something was off — or something wasn’t working right, or it was a hard day at work, who knows — and I’d committed myself to going to the store, which has become a stressful exercise over this past year.
So I bought flowers in a bit of a mood, basically. And maybe that was the secret. They lasted until this week. We refilled the vase three times. Five weeks on one little batch of cheap fresh cuts.
Maybe it was the indirect light, or cutting the stems at an angle, or the thickness of the vase, or the quality of the water from the tap. Probably it was that I put so much sugar in the water. Or the mood? I hope it was not the mood.
Now, would you like to hear about the day’s Zoom meetings? Or how I taught someone how to edit audio this afternoon, but just listen to this instead.
It seemed a good topic. And it seemed a decent enough almost-commercial. And, as it turns out, it was quite interesting. The more I thought about the questions I would ask the more I convinced myself this was a good topic. How do college admissions work in a shutdown pandemic world? If you can’t give tours, how do you tell your story? If you can’t show it off, how do you sell the student experience?
Serendipity stepped in, too. As I was working through the two weeks-and-change of trying to get a date figured out with her assistant the university announced they would allow on-campus tours once again. Outdoor tours. Small groups. I saw one the other day, on my way to take a mitigation test.
I am giving one in a few weeks to a young man who has written me throughout the year, eager to see what his college experience will look like. It seemed a good idea, it turns out, because it is.
