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journalism

Math and rain, and also traffic

I drove through that this morning. As it was later described, by several people, as “Suddenly here” and “hurricane-like.”

That last description came from a writer, so we’ll excuse the hyperbole. Even still, it was an imposing wall of active weather.

And I drove through two of them. The second was less impressive, but no less guilty of fraying the nerves of other drivers. Apparently it has been a while since it rained here — checking the drought monitor, why, yes, severe and extreme drought — because no one remembers how to drive in this stuff.

“I seem to recall something about hazard lights and … what was that other thing? Oh, BRAKES!”

Usually, applying a little less pressure to the accelerator and coasting to a speed slightly more comfortable allows one to press on, but not these good drivers. No sir. Today was a 45-mile-per-hour rain, which is to say that’s the speed I could safely maintain on the interstate in the heart of the storm.

Old timers remember a time of a 10-mile-per-hour rain, but their grandchildren, at Thanksgiving, just sigh and roll their eyes. “Not the monsoon story again, grandpa … ”

I recall stopping more with my grandparents in the rain than I’ve done myself, and my grandfather was a truck driver. He’d know from road weather. I have stopped for rain exactly twice in my driving career. Once it was raining so hard I mildly feared for my life. The other time it was merely difficult to see. And I believe it was late in the day and all the crazies were on the road.

No problems in the storms today, though, happily. The pine tree frontier was uneventful. Made it back to civilization just as the roads dried and the traffic thinned. I was able to stop by an engraving shop and ordered gifts for this year’s inductees to the Samford JMC Wall of Fame. Two gentlemen, alumni, success stories, are going on the great wall. They also need plaques.

Visited one of my banks, where I filled out paperwork. I will not be surprised at all to receive a phone call in three weeks informing me that the paperwork was incorrectly done and will need further attention. The helpful young teller was new and she knew as much about this particular procedure as I did. And I’m sure this will cost me $6. Processing fees, you understand.

On campus I received marching orders. I marched to and fro, doing things that were asked of me. I discovered, just before class, that I’d almost duplicated a colleague’s plan, almost to the letter. This required a last minute change of plans for my afternoon lecture.

I discussed math for journalists. Everyone wins.

Here I wrote some other things, my browser crashed and the WordPress draft sequence didn’t kick in. This is frustrating, but you’re not missing much. There was a story about bumper-to-bumper traffic and how, for the first time in the history of overcrowded interstates and freeway construction, it was beneficial. There was also a whimsical anecdote about the moon, which was lovely tonight.

I made this, though, so enjoy. I’ve put a few of these up here in the past, but not for some time. Thought I’d do this one, since I shot it from the hip today and remembered how much I like raindrops on glass. Something about the focus of the droplets and the blurring of the world beyond. I want to write about rain, there’s some great meaning behind it all, but precipitation isn’t my strongest subject matter, it seems. Best leave it to the experts:

Rain more. We need it.

Auburn / Glomerata / journalism / Samford / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
Oct 11

Two plus too equals …

Health status: Still here. Still sickly, but there are moments of improvement. Then I make the mistake of thinking I can stop taking pills.

Twenty-two minutes later I can’t breathe again. So back to the pills. Four minutes later the chest-quaking, throat-burning, head-aching coughs return. And so there’s the Nyquil. To keep the bugs guessing, I sometimes change it up for Robitussin.

I’ve taken enough of this stuff that I’m beginning to acquire the taste. This should be a gustational impossibility, so you do what anyone would after drinking the stuff for several days: check the expiration date. Still valid, so it must be me.

I can’t taste much else just now, but the Robitussin, well, that’s just got a hint of a cherry and an undertone of oak.

Breakfast with The Yankee this morning at the local breakfast place. This is a rare treat that we’ve come to enjoy. Fresh biscuits, tasty bacon and a leisurely time to sit and chat about nothing of consequence. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially if there is a BLT involved.

Spent about five hours working on a math for journalists lecture. That’s always one the students love. “Math? I’m in a writing major!”

I can sympathize. Felt the same way, but then you find yourself writing a story, or a press release and there’s percent changes and per capita and then you have to mix that with things like strong verbs and now you’ve found yourself writing with numbers. It has happened before.

So that was a lot of today. The numbers have to be just so.

Returning to an old feature that hasn’t yet been completed. Here’s the resurrection of the Glomerata covers:

These are annual volumes of the Auburn University yearbook, which I collect. Here are three new additions to the Glomerata section as we begin the sometimes tumultuous 1960s.

Since this hasn’t been here in a long time, you might need a refresher. Start at the beginning, here. For a more detailed look at some select Gloms try here.

The plan is to return this to a regular weekly feature until we work our way through the full list of covers. This will take some time.

Also, the September photo gallery has been completed. And, for good measure, the October photo gallery is up and running.

And now to write a math exercise …

journalism / links / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
6
Oct 11

The descent into sickliness

In retrospect I should have known last night this was going to happen. I was ready for sleep by 10 p.m. And then this morning the scratchy throat begin. A workout was unsatisfying. The day slipped into, well let’s just call it existential decline.

Hey, it sounds good.

So there was work. Messing up a spreadsheet and recovering it by chance. Finishing slides for a lecture. Lecturing. Doing research. Tabbing through more spreadsheets. Making phone calls and so on.

As the afternoon slipped into evening the scratchiness in the back of my throat turned to a full-on sore throat. There was coughing. At the end of the day there was little breathing. Sinuses, then. My mortal enemy it seems. There will be little breathing or rest or happiness until this passes.

Links, then: Steve Yelvington has 10 things we (should) have learned about mobile and tablet news. Robert Rosenthal, meanwhile, offers lessons learned on reinventing journalism. About seven of these can apply to any industry, however.

And now the fun of new immigration law, writ large in Alabama’s fields. There is so much wrong here that deserves correction:

The farmers said the some of their workers may have been in the country illegally, but they were the only ones willing to do the work.

“This law will be in effect this entire growing season,” Beason told the farmers. He said he would talk to his congressman about the need for a federal temporary worker program that would help the farmers next season.

“There won’t be no next growing season,” farmer Wayne Smith said.

“Does America know how much this is going to affect them? They’ll find out when they go to the grocery store. Prices on produce will double,” he said.

Lana Boatwright said she and her husband had used the same crews for more than a decade, but only eight of the 48 workers they needed showed up after the law took effect.

“My husband and I take them to the grocery store at night and shop for them because they are afraid they will be arrested,” she said.

Tough situation with no obvious answers. It is already impacting Alabama’s agricultural industry, small farmers, the construction industry, schools, the DMV, large groups of people who are willing to endure thankless jobs at low or average pay to try and make a better life and who knows what else.

You can’t envy anyone in this circumstance, but we’re all about to learn the rule of unintended consequences. This is, however, a federal issue that has failed and the states — Arizona, Georgia and Alabama the first among them — to try to address the issue. There seems to be an overreach.

And now, for something more fun:

Come back tomorrow for ragged coughing and sneezing. And some other things too.

journalism / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
4
Oct 11

Venus Mars household habits

The Yankee is a great wife. She’s fun and silly. She appreciates my silliness. She is very smart. We exist together well and shuffle along in a reasonably efficient manner when such frivolous things as “work” or “other plans” interfere.

We had a pretend disagreement on Twitter last night about silverware in the dishwasher. Somehow this became a discussion about brownies — she threatened that I would not get a snack, I took a picture of them in defiance, she accused me of licking them. And then two other families became involved in the Twitter conversation. One took a very clinical and precise approach of efficiency and ergonomics. (They’re architects.) Other friends contributed, and their part of the conversation became about the proper use of the toothpaste tube. We all have our pet peeves. And for those particular friends, the debate rages on at the beginning, middle and end of the day.

Personally, I’m a wherever-the-thumb-falls-on-the-tube kind of guy. I assume most people, and particularly, most guys are. That his lovely wife, a photographer, disagrees with him, an editor, only speaks to the nature of the gender difference, organizational tendencies and the way they get along. Probably it also has something to do with their professional roles.

And this is my theory that will go precisely nowhere. Your formal training inspires what you do in the most minute way, which is really probably what started you down your professional or avocational path to begin with. I submit that the chicken came first, but in a calcium carbonate format. Take this, for example. About the only thing I’ve ever naturally done well is string a bunch of words together in a way as to seem almost credible.

But I digress.

My wife is a lovely lady. And about the only thing we disagree about is the preferred method of waking up. Her alarm goes off. She hits it and wakes up. She is one of those.

I maintain that the best treatment for an alarm, if you must have one, is to pound the plastic casing in a highly ritualistic manner in precisely timed increments. Sociologists, I believe, call this hitting the snooze button.

And I wore it out this morning.

Normally this is where I would delete all of that, write “I just wrote eight paragraphs on oversleeping” and move on with my day. But I’m rather proud of those eight paragraphs, so they’re staying in.

And this was a day of a one quick meeting and signing a bunch of things. It was a day of computer disorganization, class preparation and a teaching demonstration. There was another quick meeting, this time with bubble wrap and styrofoam peanuts.

Now, I am wrapping up the evening with the newspaper. There is apparently something in tomorrow’s edition that will stir conversation, and also many faces in the photographs. Every week is a little better than the issue before, so I’m eager to see what they’ll have tomorrow. No snooze button for me.

Lots more tomorrow.

Auburn / journalism / links / Samford / site / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Sep 11

“I’m not that interesting”

And if you go outside in the right time of the evening, you’ll see a scene like that. Life is good.

Did a lot of writing today, finishing a project that needed finishing. A lot of rewriting had gone into it, none of it especially inspiring, so it just dragged on and on. The next time that project comes up, though, it will be much better.

Alan Mutter has a read on an important new Pew report on a disconnect between younger and older consumers in perceived newspaper value.

When asked by researchers to identify their preferred source for crime news, 44% of those in the 40-plus category named newspapers, as compared with just 23% for the younger cohort.

[…]

In what may be a sign of the desperation of the population in this time of high unemployment, the only area where young and old alike turned with equal frequency to newspapers is hunting for information about jobs. Even there, only 17% of each age group considered newspapers the first place to look.

Pew also found this sobering statistic: Fully 69% of respondents said it would not “have a major impact” on their ability to keep up with news about their community if their local paper no longer existed.

That last one is more of a perception than anything and, I suspect, a misplaced one. Yes, more news now stems from personal networks, word of mouth and social media than every before, but there is still a significant amount of that information that originates in traditional newsrooms. That indirect impact, I believe, often goes undetected.

A federal judge upholds most of Alabama’s controversial immigration law:

Section 11 (a), which makes it unlawful for a person who is an unauthorized alien to knowingly apply for work, solicit work in a public or private place, or perform work as an employee or independent contractor in this state.

Section 13, which prohibits concealing, harboring, transporting, etc., of unlawfully-present aliens.

Section 16, which concerns the taking of a state tax deduction for wages paid to an unauthorized alien employee.

Section 17, which creates a state “discrimination” cause of action based on the retention or hiring of an unauthorized alien.

I posted a little something about both of these stories on the journalism tip blog I write. I invite you to read it if you find these sorts of things mildly interesting.

Still here? Good. I also changed the URL of that blog, and fixed the links on this site. Speaking of the site: I haven’t mentioned it, but I added a rotating piece of code to the top and bottom images on the blog. Hit reload a bunch. Fancy, huh?

Speaking of journalism, check out the Crimson’s site for the latest news from campus. Included is this cute little profile of the famous Ms. Dot.

I saw her at lunch today, just another face in her long line of a day.

I read about you in the paper!

“You did?”

Yes. It was very good! I think you should be in the paper every week!

“I don’t. I’m not that interesting.”

I think there should be a little According to Ms. Dot section in each issue of the paper. Just a little box with some wise saying.

Need a scarf? The original Toomer’s Corner tradition is now a fine accessory. It only costs $17.16 for the neckwear which is made of “scarf like” material. Not sure what that is. As for the price:

I guess they thought $28.27 was over the natural scarf price point.

Ahh, football season jokes.