IU


1
Feb 17

An assortment of Wednesday things

Do you ever wonder where the days go? They start off bright, or dark, or overcast, as they do. And then you sit down to do some task, and then stand up to take care of an errand, or go over to handle a chore, and then the day is almost over.

Sometimes I am aware of the passage of time only because I realize how quickly it seems to be going. I need more windows in my life, I guess.

And, perhaps, naps.

I did a thing. IUS does a sports show and from that they’ve created a talk show, The Toss Up, which is usually pretty darn smart. And after they tape that show we sit around and talk about it, and a lot of great subtopics appear. One night I said, we should do an after-party. Just a live stream where you fill out the rest of the conversation. A more casual and funny thing. Now we only need a name.

And someone said, “The show is The Toss Up. At the end you say “Toss it up, see if we can catch it.”

Which led to The Catch:

That was the first one. Also, I threw the wadded up paper back into the shot at the end.

I also took a selfie in the reflection of the lens of the jib camera:

And after we were done with recording the show, and the after-show, we had some studio time left, so I grabbed a few people and we had a little anchor practice:

Before you know it, they’ll be off doing cool work. But for now, I stand there thinking “How cool is this, that you can do this? And how cool is it that, at 8:45 on a Wednesday night, you want to?”

This is a 1979 SI cover. Or an illustration on a poster. I found the real one online, I might have to pick it up:

And now, because it is 10 p.m. and I feel these things these days, I’ll probably go read myself to sleep.


31
Jan 17

Live to tape

The unfortunate part about showing off the finished product of a television project is that you can’t really point out all of the other people who are hard at work on these projects. Take these two shows the IUS-TV set produced tonight:

There’s about 10 other people working on the show as it is being created, plus another small handful who have already had their fingerprints on it somewhere or another. And there will be another dozen or so on tomorrow’s sports show, a handful on the morning show that gets produced Friday and then a whole new group doing news on the next program after that. Pitches, production, live reads, graphics, audio and so on. I get to watch all that happen.

Not bad for a bunch of volunteers who have to put up with me.


27
Jan 17

The last line in the song is “Ice to your blood, friends!”

We started a morning show today. Well, Lydia and Gabrielle did:

That opening is pretty great:

Fun fact, I used to do a morning show that used “Morning Mood,” which is a part of Opus 23 of Peer Gynt. And now there’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

I wonder if they know the meaning of the song.

This was their first episode, so it’ll be interesting to see where they go with it. That’s always the challenge, grow something new. Three of the four other shows they are producing right now have been around before we all got here. Last term we launched The Toss Up, a sports talk show, out of thin air. And soon we’ll have a night show to go along with this morning show.

It is cool to see students producing work, creating new things. But to watch them start a new program from scratch, that’s particularly gratifying.

Today passed quickly. I spent no time in front of a computer today. There was a meeting and then that show and then another appointment and then a critique session and some other batch of errands and that was a full day. I sat in a parking lot and started reading the day’s news at the end of the day. That took almost all night. And, now, here we are.


26
Jan 17

Eatin’ with Ernie

There’s a place about three blocks from our building on campus that serves reasonably passable cajun food. Also, they have sweet tea. And it is quiet. And you can sit at a table with Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin. Or you can dine while looking out on …

Which goes nicely with my old line about dining with whomever you are reading, or reading about. So, today, I had lunch with Ernie Pyle in Paris.

Which, hey, the wind chills in both places were the same today. But I bet Parisians didn’t get flurried on during their walks back to the office after lunch.

Ernie walked on these paths as a student almost 100 years ago now. I wonder what he’d think of what he could see here today.

Sports show the students shot tonight:


24
Jan 17

Camera three? Camera two!

I watched two shows get produced this evening. First was What’s Up Weekly:

Sierra and Sheila are going to take you through all the important and cool events going on around town. And there might be some fashion and celebrity gossip thrown in there, as well. They have a lot of fun on that show.

And here is the group getting ready for Hoosier News Source:

Tonight Sophia and Mackenzie are on the desk, and you see Lauren and Meredith who are doing a bit of floor directing and last-minute wrangling before the cameras started to roll. It was a decent-sized show:

This is the best story of the day. What the tweet doesn’t tell you: this was from 1,800 meters away. Her Majesty’s best man did this from more than a mile away:

The story says the bad guys were about to start shooting at a group of women and children.

Best headline of the day: The Girl Behind The Sparkle-Shooting Prosthetic Arm Is Just Getting Started:

The last 10 months have been a whirlwind for Jordan, who was born with a left arm that stops just above the elbow. After Fast Company first wrote about Jordan’s sparkle-shooting arm last March, she’s presented it at events all around the country, including a trip to Disney World, where she won the Dream Big, Princess award. Autodesk and Dremel gave her a 3D printer to use at home, and Awesome Without Borders chipped in $1,000 for filament.

“It’s just crazy,” Jordan says of everything that’s happened over the last year. “Good crazy. There’s no such thing as a bad crazy.”

And, finally, The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece.