journalism « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

journalism

The bike, rhetoric, the economy, journalism, politicians, link bait

Twenty miles this morning, which was the rough equivalent to midday on Venus. The heat index was 102 and I learned a very important thing on this ride across an eternal purgatory: shade is important.

Can you tell I’m an intellectual?

It has been a while since I’ve been on my bike. My legs felt like goopy clay, churning sometimes, freewheeling at other moments and never answering the call as they should. When the heat kicked in I think my brain went beyond non-autonomous functions like shifting gears and concentrated on things more important like perspiration and demanding I take a drink.

We had here, though, a type of asphalt cement that was being baked again. The county, should they feel compelled, could do road work for half price this month because much of their equipment could be left at the office. The sun is baking everything, including the brains of the road workers. And people foolhardy enough to be riding their bike at the you-should-know-better hour of 8 a.m.

I noticed that the sun was killing me, but when I got under trees, everything felt significantly better. Like a good scientist, I continued observing this phenomenon until I could state for certain that a pattern had emerged. Of course my brain was a hunk of melted chocolate by then, but I had my answer: shade = good. Problem: this road has little shade.

And so I called it a ride, because how much of this do you need, really? (I did get a new picture for the front page, though, so that’s something.)

Which is when I decided to stop at a gas station for a Gatorade where something unusual and unexpected happen. And I will tell you that story below, but I must say this first: I live in a lovely town. Counting the years I attended undergrad here I’ve spent six years in residence. It is a fine college town. The people are friendly, generally decent and helpful and, I think, it is because we all know we’re lucky to live in a nice place. So that’s six years, and aside from the occasional town versus gown thing, and whatever condescension — which was never much, mind you — I received as a student by the locals, I don’t recall having ever experienced a truly snooty moment from anyone. (At least when I didn’t deserve it.)

So the story: I go into this gas station, who’s initials shall remain nameless, but the acronym stands for Quick Trip. There’s an older lady and a younger man working there. I’m going to say they were related, but I have no idea. This is a nice clean place. Good location, all of that. They have two full walls of beverages. I wander in and in my dazed, sizzling brain state look for the Gatorade that will hopefully give me the electrolytes of life.

The young guy walks the length of the store and starts eyeballing me. Not in a subtle way, but in a serious and obvious looking me over way. Like he’s going to ask me if I have any needles, drugs or weapons on me before he pats me down sort of way. I grab my drinks and start navigating up to the counter to pay for my beverages. This takes a little effort because I have my bike with me and don’t want to knock anything off their shelves.

Now, I took my bike inside because I don’t ride with a lock, there’s no place to tie it down anyway and I’m not interested in watching my expensive machine disappear with someone else. Also my phone and other important things were on board today. So I take my bike inside. I’m trying to line the front wheel and the handlebars off so I don’t knock off a can of Dinty Moore with the drops and this requires a pause, a steer and a come-on-brain-work moment. My shadow over here has noticed I’ve stopped, has turned and walked back to study me again.

I get it. And, look dude, I’m wearing bike shorts and a bike shirt. You think I’m stuffing a sleeve of crackers somewhere on my person?

I make my way to the front and my conversation with the lady staffing the register goes like this:

“Ain’t never seen that before.”

What’s that?

“Someone bringing their bike in the store.”

Well, it is expensive and I’m cheap and I don’t want to lose it.

“This is a good neighborhood …”

I know, it is. I live just down the road.

A fine neighborhood, to be sure. And yet you’ve got your boy giving me long hard looks. Lady, don’t judge me. I’m riding a bike. I have on a helmet and an iPod. I’m sweating like Zeus being confronted by Hera. I feel for the hard-working African-American man who kindly held the door for me as I exited and he entered. I can’t imagine what she thought of the young Hispanic male who walked in after that.

“This place is just going to Hades.”

Yes, I’m sure she thinks this, is scared of it and can blame the heat on the confluence of so many undesirable things, sweaty white guy and two men who do not fit into her expectation of a nice neighborhood.

I stood there thinking, I should go clean myself up and come shop here in a more respectable manner, just to see if they recall this visit. But then I thought, No. You’ve been judged and found unworthy. By a gas station attendant. You need not spend any more money here.

I refer you to Smith’s First Rule of Commerce, Marketing and Entrepreneurship: Do not make it hard for me to spend my money with you.

At home I got cleaned up, stretched out, denied aloud that I was going to sleep and then promptly took a three hour nap. My body ran hot the rest of the day, it does that some time, and I took on the task of the daily reading.

The message for politicians who now find themselves adept at the art of brinkmanship: your upcoming vacation may not be as pleasant as you’d like. Even for Congress, people are displeased:

Nor has the spotlight in the past few weeks helped Congress: Nearly one in five independents say they think less of both congressional Democrats and Republicans as a result of the budget negotiations. Not a single one of the independents interviewed now thinks more highly of both sides.

Every now and then the electorate pays attention. And on some of those occasions they peer beyond the soundbites, dismiss the rhetoric, look to their children and they form opinions on you. And that must give you cause to tremble. I’ve had some very interesting conversations and heard still more from several demographics talking about elected representatives lately; there’s a lot of displeasure that can’t solely be blamed on unemployment rates.

My representative’s office did send out a Cut, Cap and Balance email about a week after the legislation was dead. You can imagine what the replies must have been like.

Want an electric car from Chevrolet? No one does, it seems. Sadly Weekly Standard is not allowing comments there. They would no doubt be an entertaining read.

Look. I know who Maureen Dowd is. I know what she does and why she has the pulpit she does. Hasty, red meat rhetoric doesn’t bother me because it is easily dismissed. Curdles the moment you write it and leaves the author with the worst sort of legacy. If that’s what you’re after, good for you. I’ve read this stuff for years, studied it studiously and written about it professionally. But, really:

Most of the audience staggered away from this slasher flick still shuddering. We continue to be paranoid, gripped by fear of the unknown, shocked by our own helplessness, stunned by how swiftly one world can turn into a darker one where everything can seem familiar yet foreign.

“Rosemary’s Tea Party,” an online commenter called it.

If the scariest thing in the world is something you can’t understand, then Americans are scared out of their minds about what is happening in America.

Every view is fine, and every semi-organized group needs yipping attack dogs, too. It gives people a role to play, and maybe a nice seat at a correspondents dinner. That’s great. My visceral problem with op-eds such as these are that, 80 years from now, someone is going to pull this up off that old dusty — What did they call it back then? Interweb? Worldtubes? — and see things like this in the paper of record during a period supposedly beyond yellow journalism, written by those flush in the glow of those would do good with their pen, comfort the afflicted with their FTP and afflict the comfortable with their retweets. And instead of some good copy, or even a nice argument, you get:

Tea Party budget-slashers didn’t sport the black capes with blood-red lining beloved by the campy Vincent Price or wield the tinglers deployed by William Castle. But in their feral attack on Washington, in their talent for raising goose bumps from Wall Street to Westminster, this strange, compelling and uncompromising new force epitomized “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and evoked comparisons to our most mythic creatures of the night.

They were like cannibals, eating their own party and leaders alive. They were like vampires, draining the country’s reputation, credit rating and compassion. They were like zombies, relentlessly and mindlessly coming back again and again to assault their unnerved victims, Boehner and President Obama. They were like the metallic beasts in “Alien” flashing mouths of teeth inside other mouths of teeth, bursting out of Boehner’s stomach every time he came to a bouquet of microphones. (Conjuring that last image on Monday, Vladimir Putin described America as “a parasite.”)

Remember: The New York Times created something called Times Select because they thought all of America would plunk down $50 to read such gems from Maureen Dowd et al. That lasted exactly two years, and was successful for almost none of that time.

And so, because we need perspective, we must once again turn to a comedian:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Dealageddon! – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Compromise – The Super Committee

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

No matter how you feel about it, there’s a reason people trust the guy. It doesn’t take a day on hot asphalt to realize that. Well, maybe it does.

And now we must go buy birthday cards. Because we have a host of people to recognize in August and nothing says “We respect and love your kind and generous contributions to what make us who we are” like a midnight trip to Walmart. More on that tomorrow.

Auburn / football / history / journalism / links / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Aug 11

Football season

Practice starts tomorrow. Here’s a look at last year, a fine photo gallery put together by Oregon Live before their Ducks faced Auburn in the BCS Championship game.

Thirty-something days and counting …

In professional camps, Cam Newton is getting positive early reviews with the Panthers. As always on a sports post, read the comments at your own risk.

There’s other stuff, too, National Night Out, where our neighborhood said “Dude. This is August,” and just recalled that they met people last year. Even the police didn’t bother to cruise through the neighborhood handing out the campaign literature. Now, if someone had been out offering ‘Smores and lemonade …

Speaking of lemonade, there’s the intent of the law and then there’s the intent of the law, and you can add this to your list of communities to avoid — or flock to, as you like — when reading this story:

Police closed down a lemonade stand in Coralville last week, telling its 4-year-old operator and her dad that she didn’t have a permit.

An officer told Abigail Krutsinger’s father Friday that she couldn’t run the stand as RAGBRAI bicyclers poured into Coralville.

And here’s another one, same town:

A mother of six also said her kids had their lemonade stand on 18th Avenue shut down after just 20 minutes.

Bobbie Nelson said she laughed when a police officer told her that a permit to sell lemonade would cost $400.

“The kids were devastated,” Nelson said. “They just cried and didn’t understand why.”

[…]

Mitch Gross, a member of the Coralville City Council, said he believes the city will learn a lesson from this. Gross said he expects future ordinances to apply only for vendors who set out to “make a profit.”

“It was never our intent to shut down kid’s lemonade stands,” Gross said. “We never really thought about it.”

That’s refreshing of the councilman, who admitted openly that he and his colleagues did not think through the two-day ordinance they passed in order to capitalize on a visiting bike tour’s tourist influx. Err. I mean looking out for people. So which is it? Money-hungry or nanny statism? So hard to choose sides somedays, isn’t it?

Do read those comments, where the people are throwing lemons back at the city.

And, finally, what space shuttles and horses have in common:

When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad, there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site.

The railroad from the factory runs through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track …

That’s as fun a tongue-in-cheek mini-essay as you can read today.

That’s enough for one sitting. Try to stay cool out there. The heat index here today was 102.

journalism / links / Thursday / Twitter / video — Comments Off
7
Jul 11

Here’s my hypothesis

And believe me, I have plenty of them …

But this one is basic, straightforward and a bit important: Those who can’t understand Twitter, should reconsider basic communication skills.

Consider these anecdotes, though any you may find will do:

President Obama’s social media gabfest, which swamped the Twitterverse with thousands of responses yesterday, was touted as a rare chance for any citizen to put questions to the Leader of the Free World — but turned out to be just another high-tech, tightly controlled campaign stunt, experts said yesterday.

Or:

Brand new format, same old answers. Reams of hype, most of it delivered in 140-character chunks, couldn’t make President Obama’s Twitter town hall on Wednesday as exciting as promised.

The hour-long event proved to be even less interesting than the average town hall.

Further:

Associated Press journalists have tweeted opinions about the Casey Anthony trial and the New York Senate vote on gay marriage, says Tom Kent, AP Deputy Managing Editor for Standards and Production. “These [two] posts undermine the credibility of our colleagues who have been working so hard to assure balanced and unbiased coverage of these issues,” he writes in a memo. “AP staffers should not make postings there that amount to personal opinions on contentious public issues.”

These are two varied issues, to be sure, but the hypothesis applies. Understanding Twitter includes understanding the strengths and weaknesses. A 140-character format isn’t the place for diffuse, verbose language, like a candidate desperate to hit his campaign points. One must be brief, concise. (All of the things this place isn’t, come to think of it.)

Most importantly, however, one must know that Twitter is simply a conversation.

Which brings us to that last anecdote. Niki Doyle, the social media editor at The Huntsville Times, asked what I thought about the Associated Press memo. They’re chided their employees from voice opinions in social media, saying “anyone who works for AP must be mindful that opinions they express may damage the AP’s reputation as an unbiased source of news.”

Assume, for this conversation, that you find the vast Associated Press unbiased in their coverage. Perhaps you do, perhaps you don’t. But assume.

This policy doesn’t think you can differentiate between human and AP, and not transpose an individual’s opinion to the entire organization. And the policy, while admittedly starting from a difficult spot, demonstrates they don’t yet understand social media (including Twitter). This is a conversation.

The memo demonstrates they don’t trust their people. Most importantly, it suggests they don’t trust their audience to understand the human/reporter conversation-opinion/journalism dynamic.

These two just happened to come along within a few moments of one another today. As I said, find your anecdote; consider the implications. This isn’t the largest issue the White House or the Associated Press (or any other organization) has to deal with, but it is an important one.

Linky things: Atlantis, from the pad. Robert Pearlman, who took that photo, runs collectSPACE which boasts both an unfortunate caps lock issue, but great space content. Do check him out.

Speaking of space, sometimes you see the heavens just a bit differently from somewhere on our pleasant little rock. This time lapse may do it for you. It won the STARMUS astro-photography competition.

Ocean Sky from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

Breathtaking.

Just like tomorrow’s launch, I’m sure.

cycling / errands / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
Jun 11

Doe, John Doe

The out-in-the-country wall post. Saw that on our bike ride this morning, an easy 23 miles out and back. Interesting how hills that once seemed daunting you can work through with comparative ease.

The last time we were out this way there were three names on that sign, but two of them must have settled up. And so I looked up Trey Gunter … and I’m thinking that might be a masterful alias.

What alias would you use? I think I’d cobble together a name from literature, or go with an obscure president.

My name? Cal Coolidge.

Might work.

Visited Walmart because there wasn’t much keeping me from going there. Picked up Miracle Gro. It seems the things that we wish to keep small in the yard grow prolifically. The things we’d like to accentuate need some steroids from Scotts.

Picked up Gorilla tape, which is as strong as sticky duct tape, looks like electrical tape but most certainly is not. I’m going to wrap it on my handlebars, because another over-gripping primate needs to grab hold of my handlebars.

Snacks, more snacks and not any waterproof silicon, which was the actual purpose of the visit. All of the directions instructed you to not apply below the waterline. It is waterproof with conditions. This is not the sort of relationship I wish to begin with sealants.

Links: Your tax dollars, lowest common denominator, governmental humiliator at work in the form of the TSA:

A 95-year-old Barry County woman’s ordeal with airport screening — where a relative says security agents required her adult diaper be removed — has become the latest in a string of national stories on frustrations with TSA procedures.

Lena Reppert, a native of Barry County, was flying from Florida to move home to the Hastings area, where she’s living with relatives who are caring for her, said her daughter, Jean Weber of Destin, Fla.

Instead of a getting a special goodbye moment with her cancer-stricken mother, Weber said the June 18 security check turned in a tearful ordeal because of the lengthy pat down by Transportation Security Administration agents.

“She was subjected to 45 minutes of searching, and I didn’t think that should happen,” Weber said this morning from her home in Destin.

There’s now an update to that story, but the response is thin gruel, but I feel safer already knowing a nonagenarian with leukemia has been ruled out as a threat.

North Korea is starving, perhaps even more than foreign policy guesstimates. Secret footage paints a grim picture:

“This footage is important because it shows that Kim Jong-il’s regime is growing weak,” he said.

“It used to put the military first, but now it can’t even supply food to its soldiers. Rice is being sold in markets but they are starving. This is the most significant thing in this video.”

This sort of thing is not what China and the South Koreans want to hear. When the government falls, or the serfs finally have had enough, those are the two borders and economies that will be directly stressed.

Maybe they should send in these ladies to assess the situation. World War II spy ladies from the OSS have been reunited in their neighborhood:

It was the early 1940s when Bohrer and McIntosh fell into jobs at the Office of Strategic Services, the nation’s first intelligence agency, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and led by William “Wild Bill” Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer and World War I veteran. They were among the rarest of operatives, women working overseas during World War II.

In China, McIntosh, a “black propaganda” specialist, whipped up fake news stories to undermine the morale of the enemy — including an effort to convince the Japanese emperor’s soldiers that their wives were procreating with other men back home. Stationed in Italy, Bohrer analyzed aerial photographs of Germany, helping select sites to air drop and rescue OSS officers behind enemy lines.

Great story.

Auburn / cycling / errands / football / journalism / links / memories / Thursday / video — Comments Off
23
Jun 11

“You gettin’ wet, ain’t ya?”

“Watch out for storms,” she said.

This is good advice. Useless, but good.

I’m on my bike, about 14 miles into the ride when the sprinkling started. Oh, I’d watched out for the storms, but this did me no good. My certainty of the existence of rain did not dissuade it from falling upon me. My awareness of the clouds to my left did not preclude precipitation.

There was a gas station, though, where I managed to take refuge when the wet stuff really started falling. We need the rain so bad I would have stayed under there for a long time, but I was back on the road again in half an hour.

In that time I had two great conversations, each centering around my predicament. One guy asked how far I had to go. When I told him he just laughed. Another man asked if I was getting wet.

No sir, that’s why I’m standing under the awning.

It reminded me of the time in 1994 — during the LSU vs Auburn game*, in fact — that I had a flat tire. My jack slipped and I had to try to pick up the corner of my old Buick by my shoulder. This guy walked by and asked “Have a flat?”

No, I just rotate my tires every 50,000 miles no matter where I am.

You know, it might have been the same guy.

So the rain stopped, my ride continued. And then the rain returned for about 45 seconds. I pedaled on. Stopped at my pre-arranged place to pick up a snack and some replacement beverages. And off I went for the second half of my ride. This is an area I’ve only ridden twice before, so I’m only starting to get comfortable in the hills. I struggle my way through until it is time for a snack … and realize I can’t open the packaging from the bike. So I stop. Still can’t open it. Poke it with a stick, no luck. Find a sharp rock, and suddenly I’m a prehistoric man in sweaty raglan.

Eat my nuts and honey snack, get back on my bike and realize one of my water bottles is missing. Well.

So I backtrack. I go all the way down one road with no luck. Down a huge hill and another road with no sight of the gray and yellow bottle. And then down a third stretch of asphalt.

Where I find it sitting next to a bridge. I had squarely hit the rim-wrecking pothole on the bridge and the bottle fell out of the cage. Probably I was grunting too hard to hear it land.

Now which way? I didn’t want to go up that huge hill again, and it felt as if I hadn’t reached the mid-point so I called an audible and worked my way back home. When I got in and looked at the altered route I found it was a 41 mile day.

Didn’t feel nearly as miserable as I did from our 41 mile trek last weekend. That’s improvement.

And I was only heckled twice, so clearly I’m doing something right.

Farmer’s market this afternoon, where we bought cantaloupe, watermelon, corn (from a different grower), peaches, squash and tomatoes.

I sound so healthy, don’t I? (We had cookies for dessert tonight.)

Random things: Reporters arrested for … reporting. That’s going to court with a great hue and cry.

Publishers to universities: We aren’t the bad guys. Another tough spot for everyone that devolves to control, and impressive markups.

What’s eating college radio? Bottom line issues, apparently, though we’ve been discussing it and the prevailing opinion among WEGL-alumni is that all the good ones graduated. (And I did, too.)

Dumb commercial of the night:

* This is what I missed while struggling with my car. I remember it because the seven turnovers to win was quite ridiculous. My senior year in high school, Auburn was as out of that game as you could be when I blew my tire. By the time I got back to the radio the game was over and they’d done the improbable, and thank you Curley Hallman.

Is it football season yet?