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A good deed, an ending, a beginning

I caught an escaping dog this morning while out pounding the pavement. There was a collar on the pooch, so we called, wonder who was named Colby. Turned out that was the dog. A big white pekapoo, or some such, out free and intent on telling the other dogs within sniffing range about it.

When Colby’s owner caught up to us she said the dog was more trouble than her kids. He’d figured out a way to get through the bushes in the yard. Maybe the children haven’t mastered that technique yet, but the dog is escaping every time if the deterrent is shrubbery.

Anyway. That was the beginning of the day. Good deed done. The day’s going to end with a bite of frozen yogurt, so it has rounded itself out nicely.

In between there was reading and a little more reading. There was also a delicious steak dinner, my balloon post from yesterday got picked up by The War Eagle Reader. Also I had a little chat with a member of the governor’s office that is leaving Montgomery today.

Bob Riley returns home — or to his lake house, his home is getting water damage repairs, apparently — after eight years in the governor’s mansion. I was a cub reporter when he was first elected to Congress. Interviewed him on election night. He was a very nice man, who could have been self-important, but was willing to entertain questions from a kid who didn’t really yet know what he was doing.

He’s not without his critics, of course, but there’s no denying the mark he’s had on the state in two terms. And, if half of the things for which executives get credit or blame are really directly related to his efforts, it has been a good administration.

The economy has slowed everywhere, of course, but there are several vital aspects of the state now leading the way in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a decade or two ago. There are car manufacturers everywhere. Mobile is poised to become a boomtown with new naval contracts and airline deals and shipping growth. Birmingham has completed the transition from being a steel town to being a medical center and a biomedical hotbed. Huntsville will grow as more military comes that way. Education, which has never been a strong area for bragging in Alabama, got some good news just today:

The report, dubbed by Education Week as the most comprehensive ongoing assessment of the state of American education, ranked Alabama 25th among all states and the District of Columbia for overall grades and scores on the report card. This is the first time Alabama has ever ranked ahead of the national average in the overall education quality.

[…]

(T)oday Alabama students are outpacing the rest of the nation in improvements in Reading, Math and Science scores and Alabama ranked 4th nationally in gains in the graduation rate between 2002 and 2008.

Not a bad bit of news to hear on your way out the door. Also, a few huge and ancient lawsuits against the state were resolved during Riley’s eight years. He also pushed some useful ethics reform bills late in his second term.

There are criticisms, to be sure, but if inauguration day is about hope and promise, the day you leave office should be something of a victory lap. Riley — and every member of his cabinet whom I had occasion to interview, come to think of it — was always considerate to me professionally. I tried to follow along on his re-election campaign for my master’s thesis, but that didn’t work out. Even so, his people were cordial.

This evening we went out to the gymnastics meet. This was the first home meet of the year for Auburn, and the first meet in the new Auburn Arena. Pictures and blurbs below:

The answer to a trivia question no one will ever ask: Who had the first routine for the gymnastics team in Auburn Arena? Allyson Sandusky. She also won the beam routine in the Arena opener.

Kendall Swartz scored a 9.750 on bars, putting her at fourth in the meet.

Lauren Brzostowski’s 9.800 was good for second on the beam, behind her teammate Allyson Sandusky.

Laura Lane’s 9.750 was good for third overall on the floor, an event the Tigers swept.

Rachel Inniss scored 9.900 to win the floor routine. Something about this pose seems familiar. Feels like I’ve seen that three times before, around here.

The Auburn gymnastics team got their first win of the season against No. 25 LSU, 194.775-194.475. The gymnasts performed for a crowd of 4,190 on hand to see the Tigers’ first meet at the Auburn Arena and the first victory for new head coach Jeff Graba. Auburn and LSU were tied after one event, but the Bengal Tigers took a lead halfway through the meet. Auburn, which began the season ranked 15th, pulled away in their final two rotations on the beam and floor. Petria Yokay won the all-around with 38.750.

It is really nice to be at a gymnastics meet and hear “War Eagle” after events.

Auburn / football / journalism / links / Tuesday — 1 Comment
11
Jan 11

The front pages — WDE edition

Celebrating Auburn’s undefeated, national championship season on some of the state’s newspapers. Clicking on the paper will send you to their web site for complete local coverage.

[UPDATE: This post was picked up for syndication by The War Eagle Reader.]

links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
5
Jan 11

Random things to distract you

It seems that Ted Williams got a job, and a house.

That should just make your day. And it looks more and more legitimate, which is, of course, even better.

The cable company came out this afternoon. Each of the last three days we’ve lost our connection to the Internet. We were forced to watch regular television and interact with one another. Well. We called Charter, told the man we’d gone through the resets and we were thinking about the new cable company that is coming to town. He promised to send a guy out today, and so the man came out today.

He’s been here before. We’ve had, I think four visits from Charter — add that to the list. He’s a nice guy, very personable, quick to laugh and tell stories. He remembered being here before, which is something. Told him the problem, tried the car metaphor. Of course it works now. But when it doesn’t work it slows down. And then stops. And then it fights for forever to turnover and connect us again to the ones and zeros.

He runs two tests on his television prop tricorder and pronounces the numbers to be good. So, tomorrow, he’ll call another technician out to investigate the lines coming from the central matrix node. Apparently that’s a different pay grade. He will let us know what he learns.

It occurs to me that this must be a great job. “How are ya? Where’s the modem? What is it doing? Let me run a test. All pluses! Let me make a call. OK, someone else is going to come out tomorrow. Take care, now.”

Funniest thing I’ve seen today? We came in from dinner at Cheeburger and I was, for some reason, singing Single Ladies. So I played it on YouTube. And then I found this:

Jeff Tweedy may just be a little too smart for all of this.

Back to the studying.

history / iPhone / links / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
Dec 10

Roadside hypothesis and a bridge to history

This was my yesterday evening. Made it back home by around 9 p.m. thinking “There’s no place like home from the holidays.”

Though I wish I could have stayed longer, there is work to be done. And, also, the vain hope that moving 170 miles to the south will improve the temperature. It is cold in north Alabama, where the snow still looks abnormal, but the bitter chill is setting into the bones.

So that’s looking west. I headed east, and then south, and then east again. And in all of that driving I began to tinker with an hypothesis about what you can learn about a reason by the tall things you see during your travels. Here’s a partial list of last night’s sites:

Neon catfish. They like their fried fish around here.

A giant cross. It is the Bible belt.

Vulcan, the god of the forge belongs in a steel city.

The big peach, in the fruit tree region.

Then, of course, that regrettable Confederate flag.

And on the last leg of the trip the dog track’s giant triple sevens.

You could write books from just those starting blocks.

Anyway, back to the above picture. If you look east, you’d see this:

I took that particular picture four years ago after it closed. Yesterday, when I drove by it was still covered in snow.

The bridge was built in 1924 and opened in 1925. My grandmother, at Thanksgiving, showed me a newspaper clipping of the first car that went over the bridge. There was an addition made in 1959, making it one of the last truss bridges built in the state.

When they closed the narrow little bridge it was supporting something like 15,000 cars a day. Now there’s a nice, wide six-lane expanse sitting nearby.

And we’re going to call that History Monday, because the rest of the day was indoors, trying to stay warm and reading. I did make it to the mailbox. We got a card from family in New England. The theme was “Let it snow.” I bet they’d like to take that back just now.

Very cold here in Auburn still. There was a wintry mix late on Christmas day. Snowmen were made. I saw photographs.

Later this week it’ll be in the 60s.

friends / history / iPhone / links / memories / photo / video — Comments Off
2
Dec 10

Your pets’ past lives

This year’s family ornaments have been made. Took longer than it should, but life is full of little tasks that you think you can complete in 45 minutes that take upwards of three hours of your evening.

First there was going through 11 months of photographs for the ones worth of putting on our tree. And then that list must be cut in half. Agonizing is then done to get it down to the requisite number. I do three a year.

The tree has grown nicely at that rate, there are ornaments from Belize, San Francisco and Louisville. Our graduations from the master’s program we shared together are there, football is there and our engagement and wedding. But there are also regular pictures, days in the park or picnics by a pond.

Anyway. I get these through Cafepress, where I have made money in the past. Remember “Don’t get stuck on stupid?” Made several bucks off that slogan on a bumper sticker a few years back. Occasionally something else sells, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. Except for today.

I had to open the shop, blow out the cobwebs, sweep, put the chairs down and upload the chosen pictures to the slowest servers not involving Julian Assange. Fortunately I didn’t have to re-edit any pictures, making the banal turn boring and flirting with tedious. The assembly process — choosing the product I wish to make, putting the image on the product, ordering and repeating — is somewhat more pleasant than sausage making, gives way to a very nice product, however. I love those ornaments.

And for maybe the first year I’ve smartly ordered the ornaments early enough that they might actually make it on the tree this year. Usually it works like this “Merry Christmas. You can put these on the tree next year!”

Next year we might have to get a small tree for this. I think we’re outgrowing the plastic apartment tree The Yankee bought some years back. One day, I hope, they’ll take over the main tree. Of course we have all of the other ornaments. At some point we’re going to have a tree in every room, I’m afraid.

Links: Just two today, because putting these two together amuses me.

Journalists, says Alan Mutter aren’t objective. Never have been, he says. And we should do away with the pretense.

In other news, ALIEN LIFE!

NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.

NASA is saying that this is “life as we do not know it”. The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

[…]

The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

Once again, that’s (alien-ish) life imitating art:

Back to Mutter on approaching news with a nod to appreciating our objectivity:

For journalists to be able to report effectively on the news and its significance, we have to replace the intellectually indefensible pretense of objectivity with a more authentic standard that journalists actually can live up to.

The way to do that is to treat the public like adults by providing the clearest possible understanding of who is delivering news and commentary – and where they are coming from. Hence, the following proposal:

Let’s take advantage of the openness and inexhaustible space of the Internet to have every journalist publish a detailed statement of political, personal and financial interests at her home website and perhaps even in a well publicized national registry. Full disclosure would enable consumers to make their own informed judgments about the potential biases and believability of any journalist.

No one would read the individual disclosures, but they could be consulted when Spidey-senses started tingling. Blogs and their endless archives, searchable and permanent, would be a good place for this. But who reports on the disclosures? And would my biases inform my disclosure? Or would they stifle it? Perhaps I leave something out, is it a sin of omission, or just a harmless mistake? Or what if a particular detail of my life and my beat didn’t previously intersect, but now do.

Suddenly it sounds like a wiki.

In domestic news, I was instructed to put a lasagna in the oven this evening. Our friends Shane and Brian were here for dinner and they stayed late telling stories. The bigger picture is that I’ll get to have lasagna leftovers for the next three days. This is an excellent development.

As I tried to put the dining room table back in order Allie was jumping on every chair as I tried to move it. In a previous life, she might have been a snow skiing cat. She’s longing for the lifts.