After hours cake in an after-hours newsroom. I passed through the campus paper’s office as they were wrapping up the 155th birthday celebration of the IDS. Think of that, a student newspaper for 155 years! I have a reprint of the original front page, and, today, I had the last piece of cake.
Didn’t taste a day over 135 years old.
Also this week we learned that one of the writers of that august publication was a finalist for a prestigious national Hearst Award, continuing a 12-year consecutive streak of having a finalist or winner from IU. Also, the current editor-in-chief of the paper was named the photojournalist of the year by the Indiana News Photographers Association.
Furthermore, we learned that a podcast two of our interns worked on are nominated for an NAACP Image Award this weekend.
Other students were raising money for a high school newsroom this week. Game design students saw the video game debut at Steam’s Next Fest, and still more game design students rolled out their game for sale this week.
Fight devious rats! Get hired by using your demon powers!
One overused word is narrative. Another is polarized. Right behind those two is experience.
Ummm, no.
One of the downsides to the phone experience since we all got portable phones in the 90s has been the hang up experience. You just can’t slam the phone down. You removed the phone from your face and … pressed a button. This disappointing experience has continued into the smartphone era. Even worse, the other person doesn’t get a dial tone experience.
Similarly, I can’t have a satisfying tab-closing experience. I read that and could only role my eyes and press the X to close the screen — which I could not do fast enough.
I do not need a personalized registration experience. I need only to beat the human rush and avoid lines.
Whatever consultant told the comms and coding people to write that needs a new kind of working experience.
I saw this this morning.
Modernist avant-garde is now ubiquitous and contemporary, and today I sat in that spot just long enough to contemplate it. What do you suppose those are made of? They’re too high up in a ludicrously tall room to tell.
What do you suppose the artist’s intention was? There’s no sign I saw that offered an interpretation.
What do you think the artist was thinking about when they got this commission? When they were planning this out? When they watched hoisted to the ludicrously high ceiling?
That’s always the real question, really.
The other, I suppose, is how many people have contemplated these same questions? And other questions? And what answers did they conjure for themselves? It’s all a new thing, so probably not many, and who knows, and wouldn’t it be worrying to know the answer to that last one?
Though, some sort of interactivity would be nice. An artistic suggestion box, if you will. What did you think when you saw this installation of glass and aluminum and nylon string? You could see the artist saying “I’ll take all of this into consideration on my next project,” until they saw the replies they received.
Another day hanging out with the great Ernie Pyle. I wonder what he’d say to me today, if he could.
He’d say “I’m almost 122 years old. What do you want from me? And why are you hanging around this statue anyway? Maybe you could go write something.”
The joke is on him. I’m mostly editing today.
I had to give a tour today, actually, and I walked our guest by the little display of Ernie Pyle artifacts, which is when I always say he grew up in a small place about 80 miles to the west. His dad was a tenant farmer there, and the town of Dana was bigger then (population 893) than it is today (population 570).
Then, as now, it’s a sleepy rural community. Today Dana is still a farming community, but maybe also a commuter’s exurb.
If you travel down Maple Street, the one road that the Google Maps car visited in Dana in 2008, you’ll see this.
I did not mention that to our visitor from Chicago, but only because I had to discuss the Roy Howard papers, the Cold War photographs and the paintings from the university’s collection that adorn nearby walls.
A look in the control from this evening’s sports shoots.
They produced two shows tonight, of course. The highlight show, which included segments on the upcoming games, a historic Black Hoosier athlete and this week’s athlete of the week.
They’ve been adding all kinds of elements to that show. And, of course, there’s also the talk show. They discussed Indiana baseball and Indiana softball, which are both kicking off their seasons this week.
Those two shows will be up later this week, and I’ll share them here.
Until then, here’s a look at a few of the other IUSTV shows that they’ve put online in the last day or so. (They keep very busy!)
Here’s the pop culture and campus events show. There’s a subtle little thing in the interview that most people won’t catch, but I was especially proud of, and a new segment that’s just about jokes.
And here’s the news show. I think everything in this episode was done in one take. Easy, casual. Just needs more.
And here’s the film show, which I teased in this space last week.
And that gets us through most of the day, which was an easy 10-hour work day. After the last few works of busyness two 10-hour days in a row doesn’t seem that challenging.
I will celebrate by reading myself to sleep. Back to reading Kluger. I got this book for Christmas a few years ago. I read most of it last year, but set it down for some reason or another. As I wrote about a third of the way through it …
And after 145 pages* of incredible German, English and colonial New York 18th century background, it begins.
*On page one, no kidding, a sentence begins "And yet, posterity knows very little about Peter Zenger …"
I’m in the last 50 or so pages now, and we’re actually in the trial. This is an insightful treat. It’s early-18th century colonial America, the printer has published some mean things about a governor and that’s against the rules in a way that seems draconian to modern American sensibilities. But we learn that, even then, the legal system of the day was still wrestling with the philosophical nature of truth. How can you decide what libel is without understanding what truth might be. It’s a narrowly defined world.
Kluger has the records of trial, and he’s quoting the lawyers verbatim. Some of the themes they were wrestling with then are reflective of the arguments being made right now in Sarah Palin’s lawsuit against the New York Times. Whereas today it seems the court is weighing what appears to amount to negligence brought on by deadlines against the legal concept of libel, the judges in the Zenger trial are tasked with trying to decide whether carefully written and coded letters published in a backwater colonial newspaper could cause a king to lose confidence in his government officials.
The way the law was framed and the arguments made in such a way that the king seems was a delicate flower, and that his fragility was to be protected at all times. A convenient political and legal cover of the times, I’m sure. The published letters weren’t about the king, but rather about his appointed governor of New York (who was often appointed just to get him out of London, it seems). And since, as Kluger demonstrates, the governor was slotting judges into this trial in the hopes of getting a desired outcome, maybe the letter writers had a point.
Gov. Cosby had been a military officer of some success, married well, and then worked his way up to being appointed the governor of a small Mediterranean island. A personal gains scandal eventually followed him there, and in New York and New Jersey there were salary issues, and oppression and some land problems. Typical colonial stuff, the things that, just a generation later, led to revolution. So you wonder what became of all of these people’s grandsons.
Oh, the letter writers were some of Zenger’s legal representation.
There’s not a moment of Euro-American history in New York that doesn’t work like this, I’m convinced.
I finally got to try my new bike shoes this weekend. To recap, I bought these on Monday …
And I decided on Monday evening, to my great frustration, that I needed to get new cleats. The gray ones you see here are the old ones. The new ones are black and yellow. They arrived on Thursday, I think, and I installed them and, most importantly, they clipped in properly to my pedals. I do not understand the old problem. The problem has been corrected, I have moved on.
So, yesterday, I got to do this.
And I went faster than I’ve ever gone on that particular course. Two loops, felt easy. It must be the shoes. (Probably it was a lot of rest in my legs.)
These are the earlier model and, thus, less expensive version of the Torch line. The 2.0 cost about $50 more and boast a stiffer carbon sole — meaning a more efficient power transfer. Surely that doesn’t apply to a duffer like me.
But it felt yesterday like it might apply. I’ll try to keep that in mind in 10,000 miles or so.
Anyway, the fictional place I rode was not over the ocean. The islet Zwift uses is in the Solomons. There is one village there, the internet tells me, but no roads.
I wonder if I can talk my lovely bride into a Valentine’s Day ride.
Let’s go back 50 years and down to Selma. It’s the Times Journal, which traces its origins back to 1827. Started life as the Courier, had its press burned during the Civil War, later through a series of mergers it became the Times Messenger, then the Times-Argus, the Selma Times and the Morning Times. Then, in 1920, the paper merged with the Selma Journal to become the Selma Times-Journal, a historically great local paper. Let’s see what was happening in 1972.
Coal strike in Britain was shutting down about eight million jobs. Bombings in Belfast, Nixon prepping for his historic trip to China, and a few bussing stories make the front page next to that rather anonymous standalone Valentine.
Oh, isn’t this a sweet photo on page three.
They did not last. John died in Illinois, in 2008, and was survived by another wife, who he’d only recently married. Carolyn died in south Alabama in 2006 and was also survived by another husband. That man, who doesn’t figure into this newspaper at all, helped design the plaque placed on the moon in 1969. (Her widower died just last year.) But the two above did, perhaps, get married. The names of surviving children in their obituaries match.
The first woman to graduate from AU in building construction.
She passed away last month. In her working life she contributed to projects at Florida Southern College; the University of Florida; the Cathedral of St. Luke in Orlando and Disney World. It’s no small thing to have your work create something people will value long after you’re gone.
An inside editorial.
Good. I’m glad we fixed that.
Oh, this is just lovely. Mom had never been able to cheer him on in a college game, and she surprised him here. He posted 22 points and 15 boards that night.
Nate earned two masters degrees, was a chaplain in the Air Force, worked his way up to becoming Col. Nate Crawford, retiring to Florida in 2006. He’s still down there, as far as I can tell. One of his sons went to the same military academy a generation later.
A half-page double truck ad that starts on page six.
This is 1972, but forced air wasn’t a mystery. How should you use your heater? Turn the heat up until you’re comfortable. Note the temperature on the thermostat. Repeat as needed.
Oh, on the next page:
I grew up with Louie the Lightning Bug (he was developed in 1983, and I had a sweeeeeet glow-in-the-dark Louie shirt.) And though I know of Reddy Kilowatt historically, I was a bit startled to see him here, in 1972. Turns out he declined in usage in the 70s and after. Fuel shortages hurt the mascots first, it seems.
This was the view the first thing this morning, as I walked into the building thinking of the to do list of seven big items that needed attention today. These were the seven things that needed to be done, around all of the small things that sneak into your day and chip away at your time and attention. Somehow, those seven things became a list of 10 things.
I managed to get eight of those things done over the course of the day, and pronounced that a win as I headed into the studio this evening.
That’s a sports show, because it’s Wednesday. All of their shows will be uploaded later this week. I’ll be sure to share them here.
Meanwhile, here’s a show the news division shot last night. They got everything in they’d planned, and they ended on time. Now we’ll start adding extra things back in.
I’ve learned a few things working with student media over the last 14 years. One of them is this. Resets are fun — they haven’t been in the studio since December, and they’ve changed directors, too — but building on momentum is an encouraging sign of the program’s health. I’m proud of them for that.
Patron saint of IU journalism, Ernie Pyle, would be proud of them too. He told me tonight that I can’t complain about the long hours — a 10-hour day, today, after yesterday’s 11-hour day — because he’s on deadline and, as you can see, Ernie is still banging keys on his Corona.
He’ll be there when I go in gray and early tomorrow, too. Because he’s a statue.
The daily duds: Pictures of clothes I put here to, hopefully, help avoid embarrassing scheme repeats.
It is difficult to make this suit work.
But I occasionally do enjoy trying.
I’ve lately realized this is a silly feature, and it’s going away, but not today. I’m going to end on a strong one.
