This is downtown Homewood, late in the evening. Had dinner on the southside with a college buddy. This was part of the drive afterward:
Normally this road isn’t so empty, but Homewood rolls up the sidewalks by 9 p.m., even during the Christmas season.
A wide version of this is now one of the rotating footers at the bottom of this page. There are now 17 of those. The bottom of the page has to catch up, though. There are 38 images in the header. Reload often!
More grading tomorrow, and the last class of the semester.
Pearl Harbor links. One of my uncles, if I am remembering this story correctly, was at Pearl Harbor soon after the attacks. This is him, a few years ago:
Here’s a story from yesterday about some young local boys who rotated through there in 1943 on their way to the Pacific front.
Every now and then I tell a story about something like this, because it astounds me that a lot of these people were my students age. Like these kids, who happened to be in Hawai’i to play football when the Japanese flew in. That’s a great read. And it is hard to imagine those could be my students.
The Yankee came to campus today. I’d planned to give an extra credit quiz in my writing and editing class and she asked if she could do it. I’ve been telling my students how strict a teacher she was and today introduced them to Dr. Smith.
She picked out a bunch of spelling words from their list. The first three were easy, “See, I’m not so bad” and then she started giving them much more challenging words.
At the end of it all they decided they liked her quizzes more than mine.
That’s only because they know who’s grading them.
Speaking of the JMC department, check out the new promotional video:
I didn’t have anything to do with making that — the office of communication created that — so I can safely brag about it. Looks slick.
We visited Surin West for Thai tonight, which we haven’t been able to do in quite some time. It was a cold night and a big helping of chicken noodle bowl would have been wonderful, but that is only a lunch item. They will not make it in the evening for some reason. I’m guessing it has something to do with how they have to age the sprouts.
So I found a new dish: the pad woon sen. Sometimes you just have to grin, cringe and go with what the helpful waiter suggests. He did not disappoint tonight.
Tonight, the students are working on their last paper of the semester. I am grading. Always, always grading. Started this morning grading press releases. I’ll end the day grading broadcast scripts.
At least the stacks of papers are growing more manageable.
Just for fun, ABC 33/40’s Brenda Ladun, who is all kinds of awesome, struggled through this little story the other night:
He was president of Samford University, some 143 years ago, two campuses and one name ago, when the place was still known as Howard College. The statue, seven feet tall and tipping the scales at a metric tonne, was delivered to Samford two years ago after a long tour in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol.
He was replaced there by Helen Keller, and so now he’s back on campus. Not that he’d know this place. Birmingham wasn’t even a town then.
Curry, was a Mexican War veteran, Alabama lawyer and member of the state legislature, the U.S. Congress, the Confederate Congress and an officer in the Confederate Army. Later he would become a Baptist preacher.
He was also a Horace Mann universal education disciple. Booker T. Washington proclaimed “There was no man in the country more deeply interested in the higher welfare of the Negro than Dr. Curry.”
Curry was appointed president of Howard College in 1865, where he served for three years. Later he was an ambassador to Spain.
The sculpture had been stained by tobacco smoke and marked by generations of U.S. Capitol visitors with pens, proving people are stupid. But he was cleaned for his return to Samford, where he is on display in the Beeson University Center. He has a (presumably) unauthorized and sadly dormant Twitter account. And, now, is wearing what is presumably a university sanctioned Christmas hat.
Had a nice conversation with the fiancee of a former student today. (She is designing at Oxmoor House here in town.) He is a storyteller. Check out some of his recent work.
Among other things, he’s also working as a research assistant on the first authorized biography on Jerry Lee Lewis. Those will be interesting interviews.
That would be the tale you told at every gathering, if it happened to you. It was just another day in Jerry Lee’s world.
Just another fine day on campus for me as well. I taught about broadcast writing today, and focused on radio scripts. We’ll do television next week.
So I did the spiel, told some of my own war stories and showed written examples. We talked about the active voice and visual structure and actualities.
I gave them two stories from the paper to re-write as an exercise. “This one,” I said, “is probably a 30 second story. This one is probably 45 or 50 seconds. Write them out and read and time them.”
I wrote a version of the longer story. It was 42 seconds.
It has been almost eight years, but I’ve still got that clock in my head.
A series of meetings punctuated the beginning of my work day. Check in with a colleague about the big upcoming journalism awards submissions that must go out tomorrow. Check in with my department chair for the regular this and that. Check in with another professor to make sure we’re on the same page about a class session later this week. There’s another professor with whom we must organize the awards submissions.
Then I ran into someone else I needed to speak with, and so we had a brief meeting at the top of a stairwell.
Make sure everything is graded for this afternoon’s class, nurse the printer through another round of printing things. I’ve been pointing out the eventual demise of this machine for a few years now. One day it’ll day, or they’ll replace it. Until now, CMND-P, which stands for Pray.
Staple all of those things which just got printed. Go to class where students are writing things that need writing.
And then to the Crimson, where the student-journalists are busy putting out another paper.
After a while, I went out for dinner. Stopped by the bookstore to look for a particular magazine for research. There was a book signing, featuring some science fiction writer I don’t know and his new book of which I am not aware. Not really my reading genre. The place was jammed, with little hope of walking or browsing.
So dinner, then. Stopped at Jason’s Deli in the mall where I met a couple who’d been at the book signing. Said he was a nice guy, who stopped and talked to his readers and signed all of his books, not just the new one. The restaurant employees, experts on book signing dynamics since the chain often has them, said a crowd that size would be there until midnight, easy.
Thought, then, I would go up the street to the other bookstore to look for the magazine we need. This was the scene:
Shame, really. This Books-A-Million always had great sale racks. Though, like every Books-A-Million, the tome you wanted was inevitably the 1,000,001st book. Never seemed to have the thing you’d want. Still, there were a lot of things in there. The entire back wall was magazines. I read an important newspaper in there one day. Another day I found myself making an important decision in the local section. I liked that bookstore.
They closed in September, the sign on the door said. Now, there’s only this:
As I mentioned this summer while in Portland, there’s really no need to buy anything in bookstores anymore. But still, this is a sad turn. And, yes, I appreciate all the many contradictions in this paragraph, but there is something useful about browsing a bookstore. There is a great deal of charm in spending part of a lazy afternoon aimlessly looking through the books. Now you’ll just have to do it somewhere else.
And now back in the office. The student-journalists are working on their paper in the newsroom. I’m working on the journalism awards submissions. This will require more work tomorrow. I’d bet we spend about three full days on this when all is said and done.
And that will be tomorrow, when the things have to be postmarked and shipped to the judges.
That’s via The Daily State. (Update: That site later noted the most prominent sponsor of that bill has lost his job as head of the senate rules committee. Sen. Scott Beason has been … less well-measured than the governor.)
It has been one of Newsweek’s signature ventures and a staple of American political journalism since 1984.
Every presidential election season, the magazine detached a small group of reporters from their daily jobs for a year to travel with the presidential candidates and document their every internal triumph and despair — all under the condition that none of it was to be printed until after the election.
Then two days after Election Day, the sum of their reporters’ work would appear in the magazine. But the ambitious undertaking, known inside the magazine simply as “the project,” is no more. Newsweek, bleeding red ink and searching for a fresh identity under new ownership, has decided the project would not go forward this election season.
They’re blaming the faster news cycle, because rich, in-depth coverage gets trumped in 140 character increments. But not always.
As indulgent journalism goes, this was good stuff, but the bigger problem for the series is money. Following the campaigns at length is an expensive proposition. Shame, too. I stopped reading Newsweek years ago, but always picked up this election edition, but it will be no more.
There is an alternative.
Politico and Random House have teamed up to produce serialized campaign e-books that will be released in four installments as the presidential race unfolds. The first is due out Nov. 30 and already has a title: “Playbook 2012: The Right Fights Back.”
Might be worth checking out.
Speaking of e-books, the Los Angeles Times is publishing their first one, an expanded version of a two-part series, one of their most popular stories of the year. They’ve got several more in the pipeline, which seems a good idea. That might be a nice piece of supplemental content in the near term.
Otherwise your typical Monday, preparing for classes and things. Wrote a current events quiz I decided not to give. Did some more reading. Watched Pirate Radio, marveled at the music and the musical anachronisms. The movie was set in 1966, but a lot of the songs were newer than that. And there was a great Seekers line, but they were never played, as far as I noticed. This wouldn’t fit into the feeling of the film:
The writing was rather witty, the title of this post comes from late in the action, though not much that took place was unexpected. Still, a fine thing to listen to in the background. This was in the movie, but it is from 1968:
Same deal here, two years too young, but a fantastic song:
Cutting edge Australian rock from 1966:
And I could have put Dusty Springfield here, or the Isley Brothers. But a 1962 Otis Redding track is in the movie, and so it really isn’t a consideration:
Wondered where the day went, even as it was full of little things here and there that filled up the afternoon. Today having already slipped into some realm of memory, and tomorrow remaining out there on a horizon of possibility, maybe it is more important to know where tomorrow is going.
