Just discovered I had a piece run in the Smithsonian Magazine. Sure, it was a submit-your-own kind of thing, but that hardly matters, does it? But I’ll take it and stick it next to “Published by ESPN and “appeared in almost every major broadcast market” as small professional successes.
Stumbled into each one of them. The major market work happened because I was at the scene of something interesting — the first victims of the DC snipers (John Allen Muhammad was executed 18 months ago), bad storms, my good timing to be in D.C. when the Iraq War started, sports scandals (Chris Porter is in trouble again) and so on. Just bumped into Jim Caple at the ballpark, which turned into a nice little photo gallery for ESPN, piggybacked on a nice package I did on Rickwood for al.com. I wrote the Smithsonian thing when I should have been studying.
See, kids? Procrastination can be good. So is timing.
In other news: I’m still sore from where standing water beat me up this weekend. Sometimes I feel a little bit better, and then other times I am less than ideal. This will take some time, it seems.
I’m not complaining, mind you. I have been perfecting that story, though: Did I tell you about the time my wife beat me up? She’s strong.
Or: Did I tell you about the time I leapt from a plane, thwarted three ninjas mid-air, lost my chute and landed in a convenient lake, cartwheeling to a halt with a bruised up body? Those ninjas weren’t nearly as strong as my lovely bride. (Sometimes we must suffer for our art.)
If you see me moving a bit slowly the next few days, you’ll know why.
That tree will haunt your dreams. I want to go back to Big Lots, buy it and bury it so it doesn’t frighten little children.
Would anyone like to hang it, instead? Or maybe put it in a lake as a fish reef?
Pedaled around the southern part of town today. Again it was very cool. The high today was 68 degrees. I set out down the hill of death and up the two hills of shame, took a right at the light and raced past the back of the subdivision. Turned right, passed a school, up two huge hills where I geared up as far as I could and still had to just put my head down, grit my teeth and make mind-deals. Just 20 more strokes and you’ll be there. OK, five more.
Crossed the interstate on the narrowest overpass in town, dodged traffic on the bypass and then cruised through one of the great old neighborhoods. When I made it to campus I turned around, cruised the neighborhood the other direction, got caught by a bunch of buses on the bypass and then made it home feeling strong.
Later I went back downtown to see about a watch. The crystal needs replacing, and the jeweler at Ware’s with whom I spoke could not see through the scuffs to read who made the watch.
It’s a Fossil.
“Oh,” she said shaking her head sadly. There’s bad news here. “Fossil doesn’t let us do any work on their watches. They have some sort of warranty deal, though.”
And then I asked the wrong question. Is that pretty much a standard thing? Would that be what the rest of the jewelers in town would say if I went asking?
“You could try Walmart, but we have some of the best jewelers in the state right here …”
Right. Well then.
She was happy to not help me, though, so there’s that.
So I went to the bike story, because I have this issue with gears and hoped someone would answer my question. But the answer was no better than what I’d read. Score one more for the Internet. Now if it would just get me up the hills a bit easier … (That’s web 4.0, I hear.)
Started watching The Pacific tonight. Made it through the first two discs, thanks to Netflix. We’ve seen Guadalcanal and Pavuvu. This was all promoted, when it debuted on HBO, as the Band of Brothers of the Pacific Theater. And the men that fought there have long had a legitimate claim that their stories have gone unnoticed through all the retellings of what happened in Europe.
The series, four episodes in, is fine. It is no Band of Brothers. I’ve seen that many more times and read Ambrose’s book that spawned the series and two memoirs (Dick Winters’ and Lynn Compton’s) around it. That story was much more about the camaraderie. I’ve only read one of the memoirs (Eugene Sledge’s) that was the source material for The Pacific, and will one day get around to Hugh Ambrose’s book. So far, this one is about the sun and palm trees and firefights at night and grim desperation in the daytime. But there are six more episodes to go, maybe it will get there.
The island hopping miseries are an interesting thing. Somehow you wonder if you’re getting the full story, but if you look around at enough perspectives you realize how this may have been a period of the deepest deprivations (from both sides) of man and maybe you don’t want to know every little terrible detail.
Finished an article I’ve been working on. The task was this: write a 2,000 catching-up-with profile. And the focal point gave me a lot of coachspeak and platitudes. Not that I blame him. The interview was fine — the coach is a very nice guy and has always been an accommodating gentleman — but coaches get in the habit of speaking like coaches. They’re always a little bit leary, because you never know who’ll read the thing. That just carries over, hopefully not at home, but whenever someone breaks out a recorder or a notepad.
So write 2,000 words on a series of humble “doing greats” and “we’re excited about the season” and “one game at a time” and “we see it as a business trip.” This took a bit of creativity.
I’d written about 2,200 words and then cut a few hundred, which just made the thing better. I wrote one ending, but decided against it, so it became the end of a section. And then, to finish the story, I wrote back to where the tale began.
Sent that off, it’ll be on shelves this summer, wrote this and now time for bed.
Oh, when I took out the garbage tonight I noticed I could see my breath. May in Alabama. It was 48 degrees.
Washington Post sports columnist — and former Redskins beat writer — Jason Reid was the Timothy Sumner Robinson lecturer at Samford University this spring. He spoke with many classes, the staff at the Samford Crimson, the radio station WVSU and more before delivering his Robinson lecture which focused on social media and sports reporting. Here’s a small sample of some of his advice to students early in the day.
The lecture series is named in honor of Timothy Sumner Robinson, a 1965 graduate of Samford University. He covered the Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the Johnson White House and, most famously, Watergate. Even amidst Woodward and Bernstein, Robinson wrote more front page stories for the Post than anyone.
Sumner would become a lecturer, an editor in Los Angeles (where he covered the Rodney King trial, the riots and the O.J. Simpson trial) and then Excite, Alta Vista, NBCi and AOL/Time Warner. He was a renaissance man before his time. His family, all charming people, put on this lecture each spring and it has become a highlight of the campus calendar.
(As an experiment: I took this audio via the open air microphone on my iPhone using the free Recorder & Editor app. I edited it in the app. I took the photograph with the iPhone’s camera and then put the two together in iMovie on my desktop machine. If I can move the file, as a wav, from the app to iTunes I could have produced the entire thing by phone. This process worked pretty well, otherwise, but the microphone picks up soft speakers best within two or four feet. A proper mic, or moving to the speaker, is desirable for good quality. Old radio guy that I am, I have a few other audio recording apps in line to try.)
The U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville will receive a space shuttle orbital maneuvering engine for display as NASA begins parceling out parts of the shuttles. The shuttle program is ending in June after two more flights.
“It’s fantastic,” Center Director Dr. Deborah Barnhart said shortly after the announcement. “Anything having to do with propulsion, that’s us.” Barnhart was referring to the fact that the shuttle’s propulsion system was developed and managed at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
After this summer’s last flight the only place you’ll be able to get a sense of size of shuttle plus rockets will be in Huntsville. Apparently they have the only full “stack” around. And in as much as the shuttle program was a detour of sorts, this is still somewhat sad. Given the nature of things the detour isn’t being corrected with newer and better rockets to the moon and Mars. Right now we’ll be lucky to hitch rides to the space station and send robots out beyond a Terran orbit.
If we stay here at home it’ll just be that much easier for the ads to find us. It is about to become a lot more easy:
Far surpassing the powers of print, broadcast and the web, a host of new technologies is converging on the opportunity to use smart phones to intercept – and influence – the consumer as she walks past a store, wheels through a supermarket or reaches toward a product on the shelf.
The technologies include not only the increasingly ubiquitous GPS-equipped smart phone but also window stickers that broadcast messages, interactive bar codes that instantly link to a website and increasingly sophisticated databases that track your individual activities so they can precisely target products or deals to you.
This has been discussed for several years now, but this particular future is here. How it is received will be interesting. I bring this up to students and they always gringe. They don’t want advertisers to know where they are. But they’ll grow used to it.
Just imagine what Don Draper would do with that. There are a few ideas.
Jeremy Davis can remember a picture he sketched at the age of 3, a squirrel sitting on a stump his mother always held in high regard.
[…]
It took years for him to get from a small town without a stop light to the University of Alabama in 2007, when he truly began to develop his artistic side.
Davis’ decision to return to school after a brief hiatus to earn more money resulted in the ultimate lesson while working on a unique project. Davis is credited with sketching and sculpting what developed into the Nick Saban statue.
Leaving aside the Alabama part and the inherently creepy statue-of-a-living-person discussion, that is a neat story.
Auburn, in keeping up with the Joneses at Alabama and Florida, is unveiling statues of the Heisman winners. If one must have statues I’d prefer a different group of individuals. We venerate football players enough and they’re in little danger of being forgotten, but that’s neither here nor there. The Auburn statues were designed and created by a Montana sculptor. He’s incredibly talented, his work is on display at the University of Texas and across the country, but it would have been nice for an Auburn artist to get the commission. It isn’t like they don’t have an entire academic department devoted to the discipline.
I go straight to the links today because one of my RSS feeds found this morning to be a good time to cough up 209 posts it had been saving for a while. I was goaded into reading them all. And, completist that I am, I would have. But they were all old posts from a year or two years ago. I’ve already read them. So now I’m giving my RSS reader a hesitant look. What else is it planning? And will it carry me away in the scheme?
The problem of the information age, really, is that no one moment will be the SkyNet moment. But any number of them could be the cumulative steps to getting there. By the time you, you pesky human, figure it out, the thing will be over. It will be too late. And then you’ll just try to remember what you learned from Noah Wylie in his gripping summer television series on how to fight back.
You are going to watch, aren’t you? Because this is the sort of information that could be useful at some point.
Class today. More Dreamweaver. That will be the operating condition between now and the end of the semester, as we work our way through the perplexities of fairly powerful software which is useful when it wants to be, and mysterious whenever a student comes up with an outside-the-box idea.
I come back from each class with a small list of things I’ve promised to investigate and resolve because “Why isn’t that working as it should?” is not a fun question for anyone.
Critiqued the paper today, where we were a bit late in getting the dormitory bathroom explosion prank story. We’ve only two issues left on the year. I hope they solve the mystery so we can put it in the paper.
Else we might have to do follow ups on snake sightings. They are prolific on our wooded campus.
Also had the first talk with next year’s editor today. He’s a sharp young man. I believe he’ll have a fine year.
Went to the movie trailers tonight. I watched a movie after sitting through 28 minutes of previews. I go to the dollar theater, so I’m always a little behind, but there are some woofers in these promos. As for the best commercial:
True Grit, though, was pretty good. At least Jeff Bridges is playing the part of Rooster Cogburn, rather than John Wayne saying Rooster’s lines and wishing he were Ted Williams. On IMDB the original film lists Wayne, and then Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf (also considered for the role: Elvis) and then Kim Darby as Mattie Ross. In the modern film the listing is Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross and then Matt Damon as LaBoeuf. That’s about right.
Darby, meanwhile, has played in 82 movies and last worked in 2007. Hopefully Steinfeld will still be working in 2051.
Did you see the LOMO blog today? Tree new entries for you there. That’s it for here. More fun will be had tomorrow.
If ever there was a device that science needed to bring us, it would be the one that tells us what our animals are thinking. There’s no thing as fascinating as the inscrutable, unknowing of knowing that goes on inside of a furry creature’s —
“SQUIRREL!”
You’re hoping for more, of course. Something just before Aristotle, and a full stop or three before Che because, let’s be honest, when the plotting gets too intricate, we’re toast.
So I’m sitting on one end of the sofa pecking away at the keyboard and The Yankee is sitting on the other end reading and she jumps up, crosses my lap, confusing the computer with the intricate kitteh combination of things she touches simultaneously while walking across the keyboard and track pad.
Did you know a Macbook can open a transwarp conduit? Oh the key combination is a bit more detailed than the digit-twister required to do a screen cap. I’ve yet to figure out how to fire up the tachyons, but I’m sure the Thinking Sphinx will demonstrate it before next weekend is over.
Where would we be without cats? I mean, aside from asleep at 7 a.m. like I should be? She thinks differently. I’m thinking of inventing a feline tossing sport.
On campus today there was class, where we are in full-on learning Dreamweaver mode. If you can sympathize, you can sympathize. If you can’t, don’t try. Dreamweaver, I mean. Don’t try it. Hire a third-party. Go push-button. Or write your code by hand. (I do. I find it relaxing. There’s probably a small problem with that.)
The student-journalists at the Crimson are churning out another copy of the paper which will be on newsstands tomorrow.
Over dinner I started a new book. I finished Sledge’s With the Old Breed. For me it was a fast read — which is saying something — and a look into the war in the Pacific. The focus is on Sledge’s war, not an overview or a recounting of general’s. Particularly you gain his insight into the horrible fighting on Peleliu, which has been all but forgotten, and the long trials of Okinawa.
The book went largely undiscovered for some time, but has always been well praised. It is a straight forward and feels as honest as a memoir possibly can. Sledge’s telling is gripping, but at times it feels as if things are missed. I’m calling it the passage of time from enduring those terrible experiences and writing it, but also possibly the desire to not put ink to paper. That reads as if he glossed over things. He did not. There’s more gruesome detail in this book than anyone should ever have to endure, but you get a sense that it isn’t everything.
Sledge came home after the war, the Mobile, Ala. boy had become a man and he enrolled at Auburn University. He’d settle as a professor at the University of Montevallo and live out his days in relative peace. This book was a key part of HBO’s miniseries, The Pacific.
That was the book I finished last night.
The book I started today was a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law. She picked it up, she said, because it seemed like something I would like. She was right. Every review has glowed and the subject matter is great. This is Daniel Okrent’s Last Call, the story of Prohibition.
I’ve read the first chapter thus far, and am hooked. I’d like to share with you a paragraph:
When Dr. Dioclesian Lewis showed up in town, he could usually count on drawing an audience. Dio, as he was called (except when he was called “beautiful bran-eating Dio”), was no doctor — his MD was an honorary one granted by a college of homeopathy — but he was many other things: educator, physical culturist, health food advocate, bestselling author, and one of the more compelling platform speakers of the day, a large, robust man “profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own ideas and the uselessness of all others.” He was also the inventor of the beanbag.
