With the semester winding down, I indulged myself for three minutes of deleting the garbage from my spam filters. In my Email account the subject lines always amuse. One urged me to think of myself in the crystal clear waters of some exotically named please.
Every day, Mr. Spammer, every day.
I’m getting some nice spam on the block. Some of it appeals to vanity, “Bravo, your phrase it is brilliant.”
I haven’t written anything brilliant here in some time, I’m afraid. Others are just, well, a little overzealous.
Comfortably, the article is in reality the greatest on this noteworthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the extraordinary lucidity in your writing. I will immediately grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Genuine work and much success in your business efforts!
Generally my blog spam is polite. Much of it is complimenting a post or gently disagreeing with something I’ve written. I’m starting to get a lot of comments from the spammers who say they are too busy to comment, but … and that makes us all happy.
And then there’s Yoda, who’s turned to the dark side. “In it, something is.”
Taught the next-to-last class of the semester today. Students are working on broadcast scripts. I went from that to a sales meeting. And from that to sitting in my office working as the paper staff put together tomorrow’s issue. It’s a nice life.
I’m now pulling readings for my comps exam. Want to help? Want to take the thing for me? It’ll only take four days of your time. Don’t worry about the weeks of studying beforehand. You won’t notice them.
I’m probably going to talk about this a lot in the next month. I’m sorry in advance.
As a break I’m reading about the treaties that came about after World War I. Hindsight is a powerful thing, but George, Wilson and Clemenceau, weren’t really doing the rest of the world — or the people from then to here — many favors. These were impossible problems to wrestle with, and fascinating to consider forensically, but everything just leads grimly to Czechoslovakia and Poland. Some of the French knew it, Wilson knew it, but no one could stop it.
It is best if you don’t look for parallels or conspiracy theories. This is, after all, light reading.
Bitterly cold and falling just now. Winter has arrived. Or it has signaled it’s imminent arrival. Honestly I can’t tell anymore. It is easy to personify the whimsy of nature to a point. But when you get to the days of 40 degree temperature swings — as some parts of the state enjoyed today — you go beyond a singular personality. You have to accept the possibility that the weather personification you’ve been building might have a friend in there.
And that doesn’t even get to addressing those delightful outlier days where winter is officially here, but everything stays in the low 60s. Maybe your personification has an ADD consideration. The pharmaceutical companies are working wonders on this sort of thing these days, just ask them. Maybe they have a drug big enough for all outdoors.
I’m sure that day is coming. And that will be the day that Neo reveals Skynet was just a ruse to distract us from the Matrix. And you just thought you had identity issues before that.
So it was cold. Actually, it started warm. I put on a sweater this morning to walk into 72 degrees with a dewpoint of 68. Around here the meteorologists call that disconcerting. After driving through rain storms, one of them so angry that people were tempted to pull off the road, I made it to work in a chill drizzle. And things have been deteriorating, weather-wise, since then.
Photojournalism in class today. Our faculty member that teachers photojournalism offered to come in and give the lecture. It is always nice to see how others do it, especially those who’ve been doing this for quite some time. This particular professor now travels a lot professionally — some gig, eh? — and he brings back these majestic shots from all over the world. He shows a lot of his pictures, and then showed the great Eugene Smith.
It is enough to make you want to grab your camera, shake your fist at the rain and demand a low angled light so you can take tight closeups. People are the thing. I forget that a lot in my casual shutterbugging. You must always remember it if you’re working.
And also, reporting. Even Eugene Smith’s almost-groundbreaking work is lacking if you don’t have the information to go with. Pictures, words, light, pens, all of the above. Photographers are journalists too. I try to make this point a lot.
Two quick links, and then back to it: I cause trouble. The sports guy at al.com sends me these questions and I try to answer them in the most un-antagonistic way possible. Still I get almost 100 comments in 90 minutes.
Don’t read the comments. They’ll hurt your head.
So of course that’s about Auburn and Alabama football. For just a little more, read about this piece my friend Jeremy is putting together on Bo Jackson. Very interesting little letter, there. It might not be your time or your place or the pinnacle athlete of your generation, but put yourself in Jeremy’s shoes. You can interview the Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali or the Bo Jackson of your childhood. What a possibility.
Do read the comments on that one. They are very good.
Later: I don’t expect you to watch this, but I slogged through Under Heavy Fire tonight. Or, as IMDb calls it, Going Back. Sure, lots of films have working titles and international titles, this one just had two different names. I think it was trying to get into the witness protection program. Anyway, I half acknowledged it playing on Netflix and only link to it here because someone went to the trouble of getting the entire thing on YouTube.
I did not embed it, however, because it might be the worst Casper Van Dien movie that has ever starred Casper Van Dien. It is a shame, since it is Casper Van Dien, and his square jaw of truth here just demands respect. But nothing else does. Shame, because the primary story — OK, there is no secondary arc — could actually be an interesting tale. Every place, that might display conventional thought, or logic, or other key things like dialog, this movie is lacking. There is a lot of screaming, and a little acting.
Casper Van Dien is really hoping Starship Troopers 4 gets the green light about midway through this project. He pulls aside one of the other characters for a sidebar and you almost expect him to break the fourth wall and start talking about this movie.
This being a Vietnam-period piece it must be told in the tone of the self-loathing post-modern Americanism. So much so that this may have been geared for an international release. The guy that directed it was also behind three of the four Iron Eagle movies (Did you know there were four? I’ve seen the first two and was contemplating the final films as a joke, but now that I’ve put all of this together I just don’t have the stomach for it. This might be the worst military film to roll out in 25 years, and this guy didn’t direct Iron Eagle III. How bad must that film be?) and Superman IV. So there you go.
Just as a means of comparison: how did these movies fare on IMDb’s notoriously generous star rating system?
Iron Eagle 4.9 stars
Iron Eagle II 3.3 stars
Iron Eagle III 3.2 stars
Iron Eagle IV 2.9 stars
Superman IV 3.4 stars
Going Back 5.1 stars
So I won’t be watching the last two Iron Eagle movies tomorrow.
I will be shooting you one, though, as we make our way into December it is time for the first-of-the-month thematic video. December, hmmm. I hope I can think of something.
My office window faces the north, so I have to go outside for views like this. There’s a nice green lot below my windows and I can see when the sun hits that perfect golden angle. It just so happened I had to make a trip today from my building to another part of campus and I just managed to catch the sun exploding through that tree through the lomo filter.
Students were throwing a frisbee on the quad, the hammocks were empty, young ladies were teaching one another an exciting new cheer that involved a lot of screaming. The sun was peeking between the chapel and the theater. I was carrying a handful of books and binders and things and it was just a marvelous scene. I took more pictures for later.
We had baked apples at lunch, which I only mention because I’ve never noticed them in the cafeteria before. Naturally I tried them. Baked apples are very subjective, of course. No two recipes are the same and no one’s are as good as those made by the person that you’re now thinking of.
My grandmother makes the best apples. She would cut up fruit from the Granny Smith tree in her yard — I never called her Granny, but given that her name was Smith it was a long time before I realized that the variety wasn’t named after her. I don’t know all of her secrets, but I know that my cousin and I would beg her to make them. She’d fill up one of those square casserole dishes, the apples, the sauce and a bunch of mini-marshmallows. We could eat them all in one sitting.
These apples weren’t my grandmother’s apples. They weren’t bad. They had a nice cinnamon taste with a mild bleach finish. My grandmother has never had to make apples for hundreds of people, so there’s that. And it got me into the
spirit of fall, so I’ve no complaints.
Journalism links: It still boggles the mind that publishers, who were slow to accept the changes brought about by the world wide web because they were fundamentally losing control of their ability to be one of a few unique voices, have made their bed with Apple where they have willingly handed over control. Poynter reports:
(T)he November issue of Esquire, its second to be made available as an iPad app, has been held up by Apple’s app review process since mid-October.
The November cover story features actress Minka Kelly, who the magazine named the “sexiest woman alive,” and that apparently is the sticking point in the app being approved.
The Gazette Extra, like everyone else, is trying to find the proper way to deal with comment trolls. Because, as the editor says, “some people can’t behave” his paper won’t allow comments on stories about crimes, courts, accidents, race or sex. That particular paper, it seems, has exceeded that point of critical mass where comments are no longer constructive or dialogical. Even in that thread, on a note from the editor about curtailing vicious comments, the conversation veers wildly out of control. Most every big site has this problem.
Cooks Source — the New England cooking magazine that became suddenly infamous for infringing upon the works of online writers, and then snottily claiming that everything online was public domain — has another petulant letter from the editor on their website. Both Facebook pages they’ve set up have been overwhelmed by critics. And now, at their most popular, the little magazine that copies and pastes is closing shop.
And I wish I could give you a link, but the Samford Crimson is unfortunately not putting it online. The sports section has been running a football pick chart this fall. The university president, the starting quarterback, sports writers and other student leaders have been participating. A math professor has led all season.
Videos: Last Saturday when Georgia visited Auburn for their beat down in the South’s Oldest Rivalry freshman running back Mike Dyer broke the great Bo Jackson’s freshman rushing record. Jackson was there, celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Heisman, and had a nice moment on the sideline with Dyer.
This is the video that aired on AUHD, so imagine seeing this on the big screen at the game, and the audio is the crew’s behind-the-scenes chatter. It makes a nice moment even more entertaining:
I love that last line: Memories. That was just perfect, in so many respects. The guy who produces the the big screen programming, Bo Cordle, is leaving. In fact that was his last game. what a way to go out.
This wasn’t quite as entertaining, but I watched The Red Baron tonight. It is a modern adaptation on the career of Manfred Von Richthofen. Like all movies of legendary war heroes, it is told as a love story. Only this particular love story didn’t actually happen. Because the story of perhaps the greatest ace of World War I needed to be glossed over and fictionalized. I hate when that happens.
Meanwhile, here’s actual funeral footage:
Everyone in that footage is also in the ground now. World War I was a long time ago, said obvious guy, obviously. I just started reading this week R.A.C. Parker‘s history of Europe between the wars. The first handful of chapters are about the treaties that ended World War I. This book was published in the 1960s, so everyone knew where this story was headed. Even still, in the first few pages, it is already heartbreaking because of what even then, just months after that funeral, was something of an inevitability.
As is this stack of things I must grade. So, to my red pen I must now go.
There were a great many low, dramatic looking clouds today. You’ll see some more here and here. In ancient times this would mean the gods were angry, and that the late crops had to come in, pronto. You knew that to be true whenever the gods brought those orange barrels overnight.
(Most think those are about traffic, but actually that’s just a cultural nod, the departments of transportation have a think for old mythologies.)
This cloud formation means nothing today, except that a storm system is blowing out and a higher pressure system is moving in.
Taught today, spent the evening with the newspaper bunch. Took some time working over a survey and playing with QR codes.
Very cool stuff, turning any flat surface into a link. I suspect there’s a better QR reader than the free one I found tonight. (Any tips? Mine isn’t as fancy as the one in that CSI clip.) They’re just begging to become more of a multimedia tool. (But maybe no one will get around to doing that for a while and I can.) If they were a bit more aesthetically pleasing they’d grow bigger, faster, but sometimes the look of things is a slow growth.
Links, upon which journalism was practiced: Staff Sgt. Salvatora Giunta was formally presented with his Medal of Honor:
Obama said Giunta “charged headlong into the wall of bullets.” The sergeant at first pulled a soldier who had been struck in the helmet to safety, then sprinted ahead to find two Taliban fighters dragging away the stricken Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan.
“Sal never broke stride,” Obama said. “He leapt forward. He took aim. He killed one of the insurgents and wounded the other, who ran off.”
As bullets rained, Giunta dragged Brennan by his vest to cover and worked feverishly to stop the bleeding until the wounded Americans were flown from the ridge.
Giunta’s is the first Medal of Honor that hasn’t been a posthumous award since Vietnam. That most surely is a terrible oversight.
I let NPR’s Most Popular box dig up the rest of my reading. Thesetwo were interesting to see right next to one another. One suggesting this conversation about sexuality is a good conversation to have, the other suggesting that talking about it can be a bit precarious. These are conflicting times.
Dave Barry has been felt up at the airport: “Well, I would say whoever wrote that it’s not punitive was not having his or her groin fondled at the time.”
So I’m adding this to my list of unorthodox public policies. First, there’s the Nixon rule: If a president’s approval number ever falls to Nixonian levels you should retire from office, extending arms in a large motion with fingers stabbing the sky in a V, escaping the public eye for a decade or two before trying to rehabilitate your image. (Neither Bush made it there, but Truman did, predating Nixon of course.)
Now, the second of my unorthodox public policies goes like this: If Dave Barry can’t make a joke about what you’re doing, you’ve gone woefully astray and things need to change.
Read this. It will only take a moment. And then flip through the slideshow, enlarging the pictures. What a terrific project. I’m being vague because you should read it.
And now, to IHOP, for a late dinner. I have a craving for pancakes. It was there that I learned the all-important lesson “It isn’t whether you win or lose, but where you eat afterward.”
One night, during a particularly bad semi-pro volleyball game where nothing went right the coach called a time out. We gathered together and tried our best not to bicker. The jokester of the team picked his spot perfectly. In between the “What are you doings?” and the “Pass the ball better!” he said “Where are we going to eat later?”
And then we all went out for chocolate chip pancakes.
