In honor of America, and the U.S. Men’s National Team:
Here’s the team’s hype video:
And, this, easily, is one of the most amazing pre-game packages you’ve ever seen:
If you find a better one, let me know.
The game was revealing and frustrating and pretty much what we expected. Tim Howard was nothing short of impeccable, Belgium was fulfilling their destiny. The U.S. never really played to their potential. The defense still has holes. We lost another starter to another hamstring. And despite all of that it fell to an agonizingly close piece of physics, the bend of an ankle, the arc of one ball and a great, great spirit. The U.S. played hard, even when they weren’t playing well. If the young members of this team improves, and the work that’s going into the larger program nationwide pans out, there are big things ahead. And they’ll play like it.
Tim Howard, briefly, was the Secretary of Defense. He was a lot of things today, becoming the newest and best meme of the day — since that’s the way we talk to one another now, this is worth noting. He was surely impressive, and he deserved a better defense in front of him.
Things to read … because you deserve to have great things to read.
Just the links, because the links should be good enough today.
I ran five miles in 75 degrees with 79 percent humidity tonight. Think I just exercise for Shot Bloks, which is fuel that tastes like candy to me. But you’re not here about that. Right. Back to our regularly scheduled observations.
One of the joys of having a cat around is watching a cat sleep in the sun:
A lot of things have to happen to make that work out. Someone, years ago, had to decide to orient this neighborhood along an east-west axis. Development behind us had to thin out the western tree line to allow the sun through at that time of day. My brilliant wife had to be motivated to purchase that cat condo at some point in time. We had to put it in front of that window and I had to be sitting in an adjacent chair, which we also put in place almost four years ago, to capture the moment. To say nothing of the phone and camera and Internet technology.
All of that so I can say “One of the joys of having a cat around is watching a cat sleep in the sun,” and you know it to be one of the singular truths of pets.
Just file that away under things that the subdivision developer, Steve Jobs and Tim Berners-Lee didn’t think about when they did their heavy lifting. I bet the cat condo people knew what they were doing, though.
Turns out it was made in Tennessee. I’m not sure what bearing that has on this conversation.
Things to read … because reading always gives us answers.
Jeff Bezos is looking more brilliant by the moment, no?
The New York Times’ Lively Morgue featured a photo of speed boat queen Loretta Turnbull. For some reason I did a little more Googling and reading about her, and was rewarded with this quote: “The odds of a shark biting a 67-year-old are remote; I’m going in.”
This video is titled “How video from drones can be useful during news events,” but it misses a big a point.
We, the audience, still need the context of a reporter’s collected efforts to tell us the story. Where was that subdivision damage? Was it from a storm? Why were all of those people gathered at night? What were they protesting? How many structures or lives had been lost in that fire?
It also demonstrates that not all drone videos are created equally.
Forrest Gump was released 20 years ago next month. Finally, there is an Honest Trailer about the film, and it makes a great point about the recognizability of the character:
“And Lieutenant Dan kept his word. The end.”
When I saw Apollo 13 — which was released 19 years ago next week, by the way — there was a woman behind us who was getting caught up and emotional in the drama. Her kid, her child, said “Don’t worry Mama, Forrest Gump is driving.”
My old friend Fin and I went out for a round of golf under the bright summer sun this morning and afternoon. We rode 18 and my clothes still changed colors. I hadn’t realized how much I sweat until I got home. Fortunately the course, which is very nice and super long, is just down the street from our home.
Anyway, here’s Fin pulling off some improbable shot or another:
I had two decent shots today. See that line going toward the pin? That’s my chip from beyond the back side of the green. They’d just sanded them, giving us some excellent lines to read:
We couldn’t play best ball, because we often wind up like this. At least once a hole we are within 10 feet of one another, to the good or bad. I would have thought he’d be much better at this than I am by now. I’m not very good at all. I think he was sand-bagging.
Oh, I played the last four holes or so in my sock-feet because I did this to my old, cheap shoes:
Both shoes, within about a hole of each other. Oddly, I might have played better after I took them off. Something to keep in mind for next time.
Despite the heat I felt much better riding my bike this evening, which was abbreviated to only 14 miles because I got caught out in the rain. Usually I enjoy this, it is funny to me somehow, but today I decided I’d wait it out.
We were in a downpour, though, and I’m standing under the protective awning of a church building, staring at radar and marveling at how this system isn’t moving, it is just content to exist and drip. Then I got a text reminding me of dinner plans with our lovely neighbors. So I had to ride home in the rain.
Raindrops start to sting at around 29 miles per hour, just so you know.
The announcement comes amid widespread interest in newsrooms across the country in what’s been dubbed “drone journalism,” and equally widespread uncertainty about the legality of it. The FAA has severely limited the use of drones for commercial purposes, including newsgathering. It is due to develop new drone rules by September 2015.
“Our hope is that by working cooperatively to share knowledge, we can accelerate the process for CNN and other media organizations to safely integrate this new technology into their coverage plans,” David Vigilante, CNN’s senior vice president for legal, said in a statement. “It’s a natural opportunity to work with our neighbors at Georgia Tech, who have experience and insights into this area.”
I am resting my legs. I am resting my legs because I’ve ridden two days in a row. I’ve ridden a paltry 28 miles on Tuesday and Wednesday, my first two rides on a real bike in a calendar month. Both rides felt like bad first rides. They weren’t even particularly demanding rides. I sought out easy routes. My legs are in no kind of form and that’s unfortunate.
And so it seems clear to me that I need to find a way to travel with my bike wherever I go because this is silly.
I have a lot of catching up to do.
Things to read … because I can catch up there more easily, I’d bet.
The morning meeting is one of two large news meetings each day, with the other at 4 p.m. (For the record, of the 23 people seated around the main table, as opposed to the periphery, seven were women; two, both men, were African-American.)
The focus at the meetings, and The Times, has come a long way since the days when “what’s going on page one?” was the biggest question. Clearly, there’s an effort to make this, more than ever, an “all platforms” newsroom.
But the structural changes at The Times and in the larger media world are even more striking. And therein lies a problem that has no easy solution: how to fully transform for the digital future when the business model — and the DNA of the newsroom — is so tied to the printed newspaper.
How did anonymous sourcing become the rule rather than the exception in American journalism? Journalism professor Matt J. Duffy informs us in a new (and securely paywalled) paper that anonymous sourcing was sufficiently rare in the first three decades of the 20th century that none of the journalism textbooks and guides he examined made mention of the practice. The first textbook mention Duffy encountered was published in 1955 — An Introduction to Journalism: A Survey of the Fourth Estate in All Its Forms, by Fraser Bond. According to Bond, anonymous sources appeared primarily in foreign diplomatic reporting and in those cases that reporters wanted to attribute information from the president.
Luca Forlin, Head of International Product Partnerships at Google, shared several thoughts on where mobile publishing is headed. “There are two things right now. There are two things right now. The first is the around the devices and the second is around usage.”
Around devices, “the interesting element is that we have seen huge growth in smaller tablets – phablets – which are taking a huge share of the market from the bigger tablets. Does that change much in terms of what publishers do? The truth is we are not yet sure. What is clear is that publishers must abandon the idea of designing something one way and move to a world where content actually adapts. Optimisation is really important. The second thing is that, while phablets are taking over, in reality they belong to the smartphone family, which is entirely different from big tablets. That again forces them to abandon their old habits. Small screen sizes require much more simplicity, different design logic and different content.”
Think about it: text is text, but images are hard in some mobile platforms. Some videos work well there, others less so. We have to think not only about the content, but where it is going and, now, how it is going to look in several different places.
Transnational travel in a day is a surrealistic thing. On the other hand, we traversed almost 7,000 miles in a day.
I ran one mile today, having not put on those shoes in a week, and my body feeling pretty terrible both because of that and the travel and the sleepiness and it all just hurt. So I sprinted, which still felt like a slog on my wife’s high school track.
Saw this truck while we were ordering sandwiches. I feel like they got the tint of the paint job just about perfect:
These were our collective fortunes at dinner tonight. One of them makes no sense and, thus, all of the sense in the world:
Things to read: because reading always makes sense.
Sharyl Attkisson, an award-winning investigative reporter who resigned from CBS News earlier this year, says the news media are heading down a dangerous path with attempts to “censor or block stories” that don’t align with their preferred agenda.
“There’s a tendency in the news media, on the part of some managers, to censor or block stories that don’t fall in line with the message they want sent to the viewers,” Attkisson said in an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal. “I think that’s really a very dangerous perspective to have.”
