journalism « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

journalism

Charming, unseasonable, rain

It’s rained all day. It started last night. A nice, light, mild rain. It was almost polite, this rain. And it’s continued like that. Presumably it fell overnight, politely. And it has done so all day today, a considerate guest, happy to entertain and also to leave the soil damp, and the grass greener.

It has also cooled everything considerably. We didn’t hit the 60s today … that’s company for ya. We’re due more rain the rest of the week, but it starts warming up a bit tomorrow. And, next week, summer arrives.

But, today, I’ve spent some of the time enjoying the view. And drawing up plans for the fall term. (I now have two weeks of one class mapped out in my mind!)

Also, I made a few more cufflinks today. I have all the materials here, but have been holding off for the summer time. I figure I’ll do a few at a time.

Also, I have a lot of cufflinks.

In a few minutes, I’m going to iron some pocket squares. (So, by Friday, I’ll be on to cleaning closets. I really need it to warm up, and/or to get my bike back on the road.) I have even more pocket squares.

But, first, let’s check in on the kitties, since they are the stars of the site’s most popular regular feature. It is pretty easy to see why. Phoebe is just posing it up on the stairs.

Poseidon has no time to pose, he’s too busy using his nose.

Yesterday afternoon, this was on the porch. Ordinarily we buy this at the store, but my lovely bride told me she found a great deal online. Then she told me the details and the prices were so low they must have been ~INSANE!~ Or something. That’s all great, but every one of those things is 42 pounds.

Someone had to carry those around the corner to the porch. I love saving money, and I’m happy when we buy in bulk. But, as I moved those bags in from the porch, and then through the hallway, laundry and into storage in the garage, I was offering silent apologies to the delivery person.

This weekend I finished Molly Manning‘s War of Words. She’s the law school professor and best selling author of three mid-century histories. I bought this one in 2023, and finally opened it on the Kindle on Friday night.

It is a well researched, and very breezy look at the efforts of giving reading materials to the citizen soldiers of World War II.

Perhaps the most important letter to the editor that Yank dared publish came in April 1944, when Corporal Rupert Trimmingham shared a story about a cross-country trip he took with eight other Black soldiers on army business. They traveled from their home base of Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana.

In Arizona, Fort Huachuca was a source of pride. As the Arizona Republic reported in 1942, the fort was “home of the splendid 93rd Infantry Division, [the] first all-colored division to be organized in World War II,” and “one learns in a hurry at Arizona’s Fort Huachuca” that “America’s colored citizens . . . make some of the nation’s finest and most efficient fighting troops.” Trimmingham, used to Arizona’s customs and attitude toward Black troops, was amazed by how differently he was treated by the Camp Claiborne community.

According to Trimmingham, after a one-night layover in Louisiana, he and his fellow soldiers discovered that “we could not purchase a cup of coffee at any of the lunchrooms” because, “as you know, Old Man Jim Crow rules.” Trimmingham continued:

The only place where we could be served was at the lunchroom at the railroad station but, of course, we had to go into the kitchen. But that’s not all; 11:30 A.M. about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions: Are these men sworn enemies of this country? Are they not taught to hate and destroy … all democratic governments? Are we not American soldiers, sworn to fight for and die if need be for this our country? Then why are they treated better than we are? Why are we pushed around like cattle? If we are fighting for the same thing, if we are going to die for our country, then why does the Government allow such things to go on?

And so Trimmingham closed his letter to Yank by asking a question that “each Negro soldier is asking. What is the Negro soldier fighting for?”

When Yank published Trimmingham’s story, a flood of letters poured into Yank’s mailbox. Nearly every message to Yank spoke to the indefensibility of treating enemy combatants with greater respect and courtesy than a fellow American. “Gentlemen, I am a Southern rebel,” a letter by Corporal Henry S. Wooten Jr., began. “But this incident makes me none the more proud of my Southern heritage!” Wooten continued:

Frankly, I think that this incident is a disgrace to a democratic nation such as ours is supposed to be. Are we fighting for such a thing as this? Certainly not. If this incident is democracy, I don’t want any part of it! … I wonder what the “Aryan supermen” think when they get a first-hand glimpse of our racial discrimination. Are we not waging a war, in part, for this fundamental of democracy? In closing, let me say that a lot of us, especially in the South, should cast the beam out of our own eyes before we try to do so in others, across the sea.

Hundreds of letters agreed with Wooten’s sentiments.

Sergeant Arthur Kaplan complimented Yank for printing Trimmingham’s letter and said, “It seems incredible that German prisoners of war should be afforded the amenities while our own men—in uniform and changing stations—are denied similar attention because of color … What sort of deal is this?”

“I’m not a Negro, but I’ve been around and know what the score is. I want to thank the YANK . . . and congratulate Cpl. Rupert Trimmingham,” wrote Private Gustave Santiago.

One missive, signed by an entire outfit, laid bare the hypocrisy of the army’s policy on racial segregation and the government’s claim that this was a war for freedom. The unit explained, “We are white soldiers in the Burma jungles, and there are many Negro outfits working with us. They are doing more than their part to win this war. We are proud of the colored men here,” they said, and “it is a disgrace that, while we are away from home doing our part to help win the war, some people back home are knocking down everything that we are fighting for.” Ironically, this letter remarked that soldiers from other Allied nations had marveled at the racial diversity of the United States Army and how all troops worked cohesively together. Were they masquerading a lie? It angered them to know that German soldiers were being treated better at home “than the soldier of our country, because of race.” The letter closed by stating, “Cpl. Trimmingham asked: What is the Negro fighting for? If this sort of thing continues, we the white soldiers will begin to wonder: What are we fighting for?”

Trimmingham’s letter provoked such outrage that it commanded the attention of the home front. The New Yorker published a fictionalized account of Trimmingham’s story in June 1944, which was reproduced repeatedly in the New Yorker’s books of “war stories” over the following decades. A dramatic skit about Trimmingham’s story was aired on national radio. And when Yank produced a volume of its best stories, Trimmingham and the letters responding to Trimmingham’s letter were included.

Months after his original letter was published, Trimmingham appeared in the pages of Yank again. “Allow me to thank you for publishing my letter,” he began. Every day brought a fresh batch of letters from fellow soldiers, many from “the Deep South,” who condemned the treatment he had received. “It gives me new hope to realize that there are doubtless thousands of whites who are willing to fight this Frankenstein that so many white people are keeping alive.” If white allies would “stand up, join with us, and help us prove to their white friends that we are worthy, I’m sure that we would bury race hate and unfair treatment,” Trimmingham said.

Here are Trimmingham’s letters, which are often held up as important sequence of events in the eventual integration of the United States military. As a soldier, Trimmingham served as an electrician in the Army Corps of Engineers. Born in Trinidad, he emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. After the war he went to work for Singer Sewing in Indiana and became naturalized citizen in 1950. He lived the last 30 years of his life in Michigan, where he died in 1985.

There’s a part of one chapter covering publications initially aimed at WACs. It seemed that two things were true, a lot of people resented WACs serving in a time of war. And a lot of male soldiers were reading women’s magazines.

Given male troops’ appetites for women’s periodicals, it was a sound conclusion that WACs would not be the only ones reading the magazines and newspapers that were being printed by and for them. And if more men read serious articles about the important war work the WACs were doing, the animosity most male soldiers felt for the WACs might dissipate.

And thus, in lieu of the Stars and Stripes, there was the Service Woman newspaper, which covered stories about women serving in the army, navy, marines, coast guard, army nurse corps, and navy nurse corps. Its coverage was comprehensive and showcased the importance of the work being done by women—from saving lives in combat zones to enduring long periods of captivity as prisoners of war. Those in the European theater replaced Yank with Overseas Woman. This magazine reported on WAC scientists, female doctors, and women who were test pilots for the Army Air Corps. Articles explored what work might be available to women after the war and how the war might change traditional gender stereotypes. Rather than read what men thought women should do, Overseas Woman was an empowering periodical that did not underestimate the intellect or ambition of its readers.

There were also smaller-scale newsletters for individual posts, like Fort Des Moines’ WAC News, which confronted the “malicious and untruthful reports about the Wacs.” One issue included an interview with a civilian correspondent in Algiers, who insisted that “one Wac was doing as much work as two or three men soldiers could do,” and that the correspondent was told by “General Eisenhower and various other officers … that the Wacs were so valuable to the American Army in North Africa that they wished they had ten times as many as were there.” WAC News also had some fun with the army’s double standards, reporting how WACs proudly hung photographs of “pin-up boys” in their bunks. And when the WAC News celebrated its second anniversary in print, Milton Caniff and Sergeant Sansone joined forces to create a congratulatory cartoon featuring their famous characters, Miss Lace and Wolf. Over six thousand copies of the paper were printed, and one thousand were mailed to posts across the world. If anything would lure male readers to this servicewomen’s newsletter, seeing their favorite cartoon characters emblazoned on the front cover was an ingenious ploy.

Here’s a bit more on Miss Lace, which was a big hit with service men, and more on The Wolf.

Another thing you get out of this book is some nice overviews of specific unit newspapers and newsletters. You’re only as good as your source material and in this Manning really proves her work. There were a few thousand publications for the people in uniform, most of them stateside and in Europe (because MacArthur was a thin-skinned egoist). So I looked up the newspaper for the 35th Division, which was where my great-grandfather served, in the 137th Infantry Regiment as a combat medic. I saw a few examples online, and it’s interesting to see how the paper evolves and improves as their circumstance changes. Here’s a rag they put out in December of 1944, just days before the Battle of the Bulge began.

That’s Sgt. Junior Spurrier, who, the next March, would receive the Medal of Honor for what he did in November 1943.

For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy at Achain, France, on 13 November 1944. At 2 p.m., Company G attacked the village of Achain from the east. S/Sgt. Spurrier armed with a BAR passed around the village and advanced alone. Attacking from the west, he immediately killed 3 Germans. From this time until dark, S/Sgt. Spurrier, using at different times his BAR and M1 rifle, American and German rocket launchers, a German automatic pistol, and hand grenades, continued his solitary attack against the enemy regardless of all types of small-arms and automatic-weapons fire. As a result of his heroic actions he killed an officer and 24 enlisted men and captured 2 officers and 2 enlisted men. His valor has shed fresh honor on the U.S. Armed Forces.

Spurrier lost a brother in the war, and had his share of struggles when he returned to civilian life. But there’s no getting around what he did when the push was on.

Manning, the book author, has it that there were 4,6000 unique newspapers created, produced and published by soldiers during and around the war. Some of them were made with great skill, and sometimes they were made on the backs of old reports, or with whatever resources they could scrounge together. (It was a war.) She didn’t have them all, of course, but imagine everything we could learn, big and small, if we had copies of all of those little publications. That’s what her book is trying to allude to, and it’s a good read of overlapping interests. And I’ve got another of her books on my Kindle, too. But, first, a funny memoir.

journalism / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Jan 25

First day of class

The first installment of the new class, International Media, went … OK. It’s syllabus day, which is an easy day, but also tedious. You just talk about the class in a meta way, and little is conveyed in terms of knowledge or thoughts challenged. But don’t you know they know where the various policies are in this 10 page document. They know what they’re getting into, at least.

And what they are getting into is a newly designed course. And my first class that will be taught in 75 minute sessions. The last two years I’ve been online, or leading three-hour classes. I have to figure out what 75 minutes feels like. I apologized preemptively for these sorts of rough spots.

At least there’s a clock in the back of the room. Except I realized, that’s not a clock. It’s a timer. (For public speaking classes, I guess.) I noticed that at the last moment, and managed to get everyone out with a moment or two to spare. So it’s a new class for me. A brand new course design. It’s being held in a time block with which I must get reacquainted. And it takes place in a room I’d never even seen until I walked into the room after the previous class filed out.

We made it out together.

Now we’ll see how many of them come back on Monday!

I stuck around the office for a few hours to do some work, and then set out for the drug store on the way home. I shopped for, not drugs, but vitamins. And I saw this sunset on the last chilly leg of the drive.

My suit got a compliment today, so at least I did that part right. Now I just have to iron for the twice-weekly meetings between now and May.

So as not to dive too deeply into the minutiae, The Washington Post is dying of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. They begged off running endorsements before the election. Some of their stellar newsroom members have left in protest of that, and some other things. The tenor is really changing in that venerable old newsroom. And no less than a 40-year veteran of the place, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was publicly critical of a recent editorial they published. These are all the by products of choices they’ve made, either at the hand of the new boss or the insistence of the owner, one of the oligarchs presently prostrating himself before the president.

Funnily, Jeff Bezos came up in passing after class today. It was one of those questions a student asked on the way out the door. It was a simple answer, one the student didn’t know, and that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone knows the things you know. But in that class they’ll learn a few of them. And we’ll probably wind up talking about Bezos and the Post. I’ll try to pretend not to be disappointed in the venerable old rag when we do.

But, then, I saw this ad as an interstitial ad on one of their stories. And, friends, I can tell you a whole table full of their sales and marketing people sat down together and wrote this nonsense.

Right after that I saw the first mentions of the indefinite pauses to the NIH process. This is important, important stuff. It’s difficult to state how vital the NIH grants become to local economies, to the fields they fund, and to the scholarship they help create. And we just … stopped them today. Even if you wanted to start the panels back up next week, even if you did it without change — and you know that won’t be the case — we’ll have done some real damage to the whole system. A system which is, in fact, one of those things we run better than just about anyone else in the world.

This isn’t just some small nonsense we’re talking about. Some colleague(s) at my current employer are working with some NIH grants on various small business grants. I don’t know the details, but it’s likely some scientific entrepreneurial enterprises. I looked up the grants at one of my alma maters. These are the departments that benefited from NIH money in fiscal year 2025 at UAB.

For FY 2024 UAB received $334,417,936 from 612 awards. This is critical money as states continue to cut back on university funding and administrators and scholars are forced to find their financial support elsewhere, as in these previous reliable grants. You wonder, now, how rickety the whole higher educational system is.

Not that that medical research is a worthwhile reason to maintain a sense of urgency or continuity. Not that there are patients around the country desperately trying newly developed techniques or therapies or medicines that might stem from those grants. Not that people around the world benefit from them daily. If you’d like to approach this from a strict dollars and cents perspective, by all means. NIH reports that for each dollar they dole out, it turns into almost $2.50 in terms of economic activity support. That chart also represents a few hundred jobs from highly skilled experts. Who knows if it is too early to worry about a brain drain, but hamstringing specialists and experts is certainly a dangerous strategy.

The largest beneficiary of NIH grants in FY 2024 was the famed Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which earned 1,512 grants that totaled $857,947,550. Most of that, $821 million or so, goes into all of the amazing research they do there. You know, cutting edge Johns Hopkins.

What could possibly go wrong?

cycling / journalism / memories / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Nov 24

New month stuff to distract you, also a new front page look

It occurred to me yesterday that this is the first presidential election cycle since 1996 when I haven’t spent all day and all night in a newsroom or at a campaign watch party.

So all day I’ve just been doing … normal stuff. Is that what everyone does?

My first election as a cub was a midterm election, where I interviewed a man immediately after he found out he was elected to Congress. You could hear the excitement and hope in his voice. He would become a two-term governor. I also interviewed a man who became a senator, who told me I asked too many questions and hung up on me. I spent some time at a watch party where a mayor spent part of her evening hitting on me. (She’d had a few beverages.)

My first presidential election I spent in the studio, and at two watch parties. A woman who was running for local office, who’d spent the entire campaign deliberately not speaking to me, lost that night. It was fun to catch her eye at the end. But I was also trying to localize the Bush-Gore race. That night I took a brief nap in my car before going back inside the studio to go back on the air the next morning.

I was in the studio for the 2004 election, but I don’t really have any strong memories about the night. By 2008 I was back on campus, and I had to convince the students I was working with that it might be a good idea to talk to people on campus about their votes and hopes, and report on their reactions to a historic night. I’d been on that campus for a little over two months at that point, and it was eye-opening.

In 2012, the initiative in that same campus newsroom was better. They were also putting to bed their paper on that Tuesday night, so they were excited, and it was another long night. All of these were long nights.

In 2016, on a different campus, in brand new facilities, someone got the bright idea that we should try the new equipment, all of it, at the same time, and turn that into a showcase. And, fortunately, most of it worked.

By the time of the 2020 election, we were used to all of that new production equipment, but we were working in a Covid environment, which didn’t make the day any shorter, just still-surreal.

And now I’m filling my day in other ways, which is satisfying.

Anyway, the normal stuff was very normal. I have a lot of grading to do this week. It’s all piped into a CMS and that interface helpful tells you how many documents I have to work your way through. Seeing those numbers pile up, it feels like having a headache in a dream. It’s a disembodied feeling, and you know it is supposed to hurt, but you can’t feel it, which somehow makes it more daunting.

So I have 148 things to read and assess. Most of those 148 things require feedback. You want that to be useful. And since I’m forever saying the word “substantive” it should be feedback that has some significant use to it. In truth, the feedback is a lot of fun. You can make all sorts of connections, try to help students make the next leap, introduce a new concept or two if a student is interested in it. And if a student is interested in it, I find that the feedback might be the most fun part of running a class. It just takes time and care. This batch take three or four more days to get it all in. And then the next round will roll in Monday night.

I’ve also done the monthly cleaning of the computer, deleting a bunch of files I no longer need, updating some templates and updating some statistics.

Oh, and I also updated the images on the front page. They look a lot like this.

Go check them out. We’ll wait here for you.

Those are from Monterey Bay, California. I took those on a March afternoon, while we were waiting for our lunch order to be called. It was quiet, but busy, and the waves were also busily doing their job, and also quiet. At least in my memory, now. It was a beautiful afternoon. We’d driven up the Pacific Coast Highway a bit to be there, in that old cannery-turned-tourist town, and we were about to go visit the aquarium.

That is the third or fourth set of photos I’ve put on the front page from that trip. And, it turns out, I took more photos from that beach than I realized. I could run another set easily enough. In fact I might! I saved those photos of sand and rocks and water until now, to get us through a bit of the colder weather that will be here, eventually, though it felt like a warm summer day here today.

I also need to add some new buttons to the front page. I’ll get to it at some point, when the grading gets done.

Since we’re in a new month, I updated my chart for the year’s bike mileage. This means nothing, but I think about it a lot. After each ride I update the spreadsheets — plural, because why just look at a little data when you can consider it in more than one way. This chart is the main way I consider my progress.

And as you can see from the lines, what I’ve actually done, in that blue line, is well above where I was at the same point last year, which is the red line. That green line is just an arbitrary number I use as a linear measure.

I wonder at the end of each month how legitimate this is. On those last few days I compare the miles again, and compare it to earlier iterations of that same month in previous years. And there’s a list where I have ranked the months I’ve ridden the most. And so near the end of October I saw that the month was my most productive October ever — humble though my productivity be — and it had a real shot to become the second most productive month of all time. There was no way I was going to catch February 2024. At the same time, September 2024, January 2023 and November, 2023 were all ready to be knocked down a peg. And so I started riding with that in mind. It seems disingenuous, somehow. To my brain, that is. The parts of me doing the work would argue it’s quite real.

Like I said, this means nothing.

Anyway, I went out this afternoon for an easy 20-mile ride. And because of the time change I was racing daylight to get home.

That photo is timestamped 4:43 p.m. Bring on the solstice, so the days get longer again.

Though this day and night have been plenty long. So much grading still to do …

journalism / music / photo / Re-Listening / swimming / Thursday / video — Comments Off
12
Sep 24

The press section put me over the top

This will be quick, because I am behind. (Watch this now become a 3,000 word, two-hour post.) It was a lovely day, foggy this morning, but then the low clouds turned into mist and it all rolled out just before noon. The mercury got to 81, found that this was an appropriate effort for mid-September, and stared there. It was all delightful.

Two news items piqued my interest today. If you get two a day, you’re probably working too hard at it. If you get more than two a day, you’re probably living in a decade-long election cycle and you should put down the phone, close the computer, and walk away. So I stopped at two.

This first one, simply because I came up with a slogan that should appeal to two opposed elements of modern society, Republicans who think their pets are at risk from their neighbors, and anyone else that would like to not catch an illness from a sick neighbor in denial.

NJ Republican governor candidate introduces bill to outlaw wearing masks in public

A Republican candidate for New Jersey governor introduced new legislation Thursday that would prohibit people from wearing masks in public, just weeks after a similar bill was passed in Nassau County on Long Island.

The bill would prohibit masks in certain circumstances, but even its sponsor, Sen. Jon Bramnick, acknowledged that it is a long way from passing.

[…]

According to Bramnick, there are people using masks to disguise themselves and commit crimes, and that’s who he wants this bill to target.

He believes that ultimately it would be an additional charge when a crime is being committed and that “legitimate mask wearers have nothing to fear.”

The bill would make it a petty disorderly persons offense for people to congregate in public while wearing masks or obscuring their faces in some way to conceal their identity.

Legitimate mask wearers. Police will know the difference.

Look, politicians who need to demonstrate their tough-on-crime bona fides push these sort of proposals, without a single care about putting high risk and immunocompromised people in greater danger, all in the hope of squashing protests and heightening surveillance. That’s all we’re talking about here.

But here’s my idea. And it works as a slogan or bumper sticker.

You can’t eat the dogs or eat the cats if you are wearing a mask.

The newsroom’s editorial board calls this what it is.

Start with this basic question: What if a troublemaker simply decides to disguise his face with large sunglasses and a hat, instead? Are we going to criminalize sunglasses and hats, too? Where will it end?

Not to mention all the enforcement and constitutional problems that this bill presents. Even with an exception for people who wear masks for medical reasons, it’s a threat to personal freedoms, because it leaves it up to the cops to decide whether someone has a legitimate medical reason for wearing a mask at a public gathering.

How will they know that? It’s subjective. And based on past experience, we know what that means: Police will disproportionately stop and question Black and brown people, who have also been the most likely to continue wearing masks to protect against COVID-19.

And, as Jim Sullivan of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey adds, this “overbroad and vague” bill “also gives law enforcement the ability to target people based on their political beliefs.”

This think piece … from Dan Froomkin, curiously enough, is just about the most frustrating thing you’ll find today.

Trump’s mental capacity is now topic one

The Donald Trump who melted down on the debate stage Tuesday night is not a well man.

He sounded like a lunatic. He expressed his belief in things that simply aren’t true. (Think: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”) He was easily distracted. He repeated himself. He lied egregiously.

Is he competent to be president?

That’s a question journalists should be asking, prominently and relentlessly, until Election Day.

[…]

Concerns about Trump’s mental state are hardly new. They’ve been raised for years on social media, in opinion columns, and on cable TV. But they’ve generally been avoided by traditional news reporters.

The good news is that this is officially no longer a story that’s too hot for reporters to touch. A permission structure has been established — by the New York Times’s star political reporter Peter Baker no less.

PERMISSION?!? I yelled to no one at all. PERMISSION? NOW YOU HAVE PERMISSION?!?

I said Froomkin, curiously enough, because he started Press Watch for a particular reason.

Press Watch is an independent non-profit organization devoted to encouraging political journalists to fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable. It is funded by donations from readers and the philanthropic community.

The Trump era, like never before, has exposed the weakness of the elite media’s refusal to be seen as “taking sides” in matters of public interest — even when it comes to verification of facts and democracy. As a result, corporate political journalism ends up spreading lies instead of shouting the truth. It engages in false equivalence that normalizes outrageous political extremism.

[…]

This website is intended to agitate for change. It encourages reporters to fight disinformation more enthusiastically and effectively, especially when our democracy and people’s lives are at stake. It identifies best practices that others can emulate. It urges the reality-based parts of the industry to explicitly condemn Fox News and other far-right propaganda outlets as disinformation operations.

People who love journalism are deeply troubled by the media’s loss of credibility with the public. Press Watch’s view is that we lose credibility by not fighting more assertively for the truth.

Permission. You don’t need permission. Or political cover. You need the support of your publisher and to inform your audience. A person, any person, running for high office is always under the microscope. Or should be. I can’t image how the news business has lost it’s credibility.

Permission.

It was a lovely afternoon for a swim, so I swam. My arms and feet took me one mile, but I ended up at the same place I started from. And that’s laps, to me. I say my feet, but it was mostly my arms. I am not a good swim kicker.

I keep forgetting to kick. Then I remember, and I kick. For about 15 yards, maybe less, and then I stop again. And a lap or so later I’ll remember, Kick! And so I kick. Maybe 10-15 years, and then I forget again. And I did this today for 1,720 yards. It was nice.

Back outside for the nightly chores, the view above was peaceful.

You can hear kids playing, and a few adults chatting up the street. It’s a perfect, mild THursday, and why wouldn’t they be outside doing those things until deep into the evening?

Let’s dip our toes back into the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. So, I figured, why not write about them here, too? Pad the site! Content is king! And there’s nothing better than 20-year-old content!

Or so I told myself before I sat down to write about 2003’s “Long Time Coming,” Johnny Lang’s fourth studio album. I picked this up in 2006 or so. And, for me, it’s a record I’d listen to once in a long while. It doesn’t find a lot of extended play or repeats. Lang was a gifted performer — sadly, he’s had some health issues that took him away from music — and it’s important to remember here that he was 22(!!!) when he released his fourth album. But, with the exception of a few moments this one doesn’t really stand out as his earlier efforts did. It made it to #17 on the Billboard 200, which was his best placement yet, and great for mere mortals. His live record at the Ryman, in 2009, would climb to the second spot on the blues charts. And that makes sense, the guy was a seriously talented live perform.

This record, though, it wasn’t highly received, and while it hasn’t aged poorly, it isn’t a fine wine. And the Re-Listening project isn’t meant to be a review. I’m just posting music and occasionally trying to summon up a memory to go with a song. But I don’t have any here, because it just didn’t get that many spins. Right from the first track, you can feel the genre fusion beginning. There’s a bit of a lot of things on this album, and maybe that’s part of the issue. And, again, the guy’s 22 years old.

I’ve always thought this song should be on infinite rotation in produce sections across this great land of ours.

Tell me that you wouldn’t happily puzzle over the ripeness of that pineapple during that chorus.

If blue-eyed soul and blues had an exemplar … well, there are many … this would be one, too.

And that’s sort of the difficulty here. Lang had been blowing away critics and fans since he was 15 or so. Here, it just felt a little workmanlike.

As we realize, over and over, music is a strange business.

And there we go. Fifteen-hundred plus words. As I said, I’m behind.

adventures / history / journalism / links / markers / photo / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Jul 24

I really buried the video here

I’m feeling mostly better, thanks. Progress is progressive, and I’ll take every positive signal possible. Now, it takes twice as long for the fatigue to kick in, and so on. By next week, or perhaps next month or next year, I’ll be approaching the maximum allowable approach to 100 percent.

This allows for time, which I am told must be accounted for. I don’t necessarily agree with that. One could say I don’t believe it, because I don’t believe it. I’m sitting in this chair and I feel great!

I only believe in time when I must crawl around on my knees for something.

That’s not entirely true. I only believe it when I have to stand up, after crawling around on my knees.

A wise person learns when to be careful of one person’s criticism. A singular critique, no matter how nuanced, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how accurate from an independent perspective, is just that.

But then there’s this.

It’s something news leaders should really do some soul searching about. Are we doing our job of informing the American public so that they can do their job of voting in an informed way? If many people don’t know the facts, the media needs to take some responsibility for that.

That’s Margaret Sullivan, the former editor of The Buffalo News, where she was also the vice president. She is the former public editor of the New York Times (a position they axed, wholesale, a while back, for times just like these) and media columnist for the Washington Post. Sullivan is the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and is currently doing some terrific work for The Guardian. I’m not being critical of Sullivan, indeed I agree with her here.

But there’s two things here. Three things. First, she’s 100 percent correct.

Second, that this is a position we are in, that this is a thing that needs to be said — and ignored — says a great deal. We shouldn’t have to be doing this sort of soul searching, because we should already be doing this sort of soul searching. The responsibility is baked in and, often, ignored. This is the civic duty in which we were all trained, and which is now so often put aside for clicks, subscriptions, outrage. Dismissed for access, favor and larger corporate interests. The business model, in this configuration, hamstrings itself and everyone dependent upon it.

Third, and the less obtrusive, point, now that I’ve given you a thumbnail of Sullivan’s impressive bona fides: who are the news leaders here? Hers is only one pen, and she is well regarded by her peers. Sullivan does her part in trying to set tone. This interview with Public Notice, a quality independent outlet, furthers that conversation somewhat. At least she uses “We.” There’s a complicity in the problem, and she knows it. (And, if you read that, you do to, now.) For a media critic to have a criticism is proper. For it to go unheeded, for the sake of a dollar, with so much at stake, is a dereliction of civic responsibility.

Separately, but also related …

Some 16 years ago (give or take), there was this notion that companies and events would hire journalists to cover their programming.*

This, I guess, is what that mutated into. NATO’s newest weapon is online content creators:

Mingling with the top brass and world leaders at the NATO summit in Washington this week will be some fresher faces on a unique mission: social media influencers recruited to improve NATO’s image with young people.

NATO invited 16 content creators from member nations including Belgium, Canada, the United States and Britain to attend the summit. The United States is running its own social media mission in support. An additional 27 creators were invited to the summit by the Defense Department and the State Department, which last year became the first Cabinet-level agency to establish a team dedicated to partnerships with digital content creators.

The creators have large followings on platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and cover topics ranging from politics to national security to news, current events and pop culture. In the space of 48 hours this week, a band of creators met with top officials from the most powerful institutions in D.C., including the Pentagon and State Department. At the White House, they met with John Kirby, President Biden’s national security communications adviser. At least two creators were granted interviews with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The tools, of course, exist to reach desired audiences directly. And now an enterprising entity can. This will come with varied results, of course. Some such influencers may have a great grasp of their subject matter. Perhaps more than a parachuting journalist. This could be useful. Some could have less. This could become propaganda.

Think on that awhile. With the news media diminished, and avenues to the public zeitgeist easily and readily available, what are the best approaches for an agency or nation-state to deliver its message? And who defines “best?”

It’s a brave new world out there, where the Huxleyan and the Orwellian meet.

*Yes! Our best media thinkers invented corporate hack stringers for everyone!

We went for a bike ride with one of The Yankee’s running groups. She’s running with two groups. One of them has a subset of people who do triathlons. And, once a week, they do a brick workout. They go out for a ride, and then they run.

So we went to that nearby town. Parked at one of the group member’s houses, and went out for a ride. This was the ride before the group ride. We just went … that way for a while, and then turned around to go back for the group ride.

So it was a warmup ride. Also the headwinds were about 15-20 miles per hour. I worked quite hard to stay on her wheel.

And then came the group ride. They all just go out … that way … at their own pace for a fixed time. The diea is that they all return to the starting place at roughly the same time for a quick run. I am not running just now — I’ll get back to it one of these days — so I just kept riding into those headwinds.

When I turned around, I saw some bramble berries, so I stopped and had a few of those. Anyway, it all turned into a nice two hours. A 36-mile ride that felt pretty good after my recent almost-illness.

From today’s adventure, to a previous bike ride, then.

It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 40th installment, and the 72nd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.

The state really should get around to updating some of these signs …

Pea Patch Island Heronry is the largest Atlantic Coast nesting ground north of Florida for wading birds. Originally a dredge disposal site, this vegetated high ground has been a nesting habitat for nine species of wading birds since the 1970s. It is one of the few protected areas available for these birds. Pea Patch Island supports between 5,000 and 12,000 breeding pairs annually.

Wading birds are highly social and thrive in noisy crowded colonies. However, the habitat available for these birds is being threatened by oil spills, industrial pollution, and pesticides. Protecting the heronry is critical to the survival of these species. By observing the population of these wading birds, the health of the wetland can be determined. A low population can be an early warning sign of environmental changes in these areas.

The heronry shares Pea Patch Island with historic Fort Delaware. It is a designated nature preserve with limited access and is managed by the Division of Parks and Recreation.

Local folklore has it that a boat loaded with peas that ran aground on a mud shoal in the 1770s. The spilled peas sprouted, mud caught in the vines, and so the island grew. Today they call it Pea Patch Island.

The seasonal ferry will take you there. And that’s what the heronry marker is about, ultimately.

As for the island on which it sits, In 1794, the island appeared on a map from the first time. Around that same time Pierre L’Enfant — you remember that name, he designed Washington D.C. — suggested that the island should be used as river defense. The installation burned in the 1830s. A new fort there became a prison camp during the Civil War. Pea Patch Island was only about 75 acres in size at the time. It was abandoned in the 1870s, but briefly came back to life during the Spanish-American War, and saw some service in World War I and World War II. It got larger in the interim. Earth dredged from the river was dumped onto and around the island in 1906, giving it the modern size, about 300 acres.

It’s a state park. There’s the fort, and the birds, and that’s it.

The marker, above, also features illustrations of some of the birds you’ll find there, and their approximate nest heights.

Great Blue Heron (50 feet, tall trees)
Black-Crowned Night Heron (15 feet, small trees)
Little Blue Heron (1-2 feet, shrubs)
Great Egret (40 feet, tall trees)
Snowy Egret (5 feet, shrubs)
Yellow-Crowned Night Heron (30 feet, small trees)
Cattle Egret (3 feet, shrubs)
Tri-Colored Heron (2 feet, shrubs)
Glossy Ibis (low shrubs)

If you go over to Pea Patch Island, take your bug spray.

If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.