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history / journalism / links / Monday / video — Comments Off
31
Jan 11

Link filler

Mondays, apparently, have become my least interesting day. You’re naturally riveted six days ago. OK, maybe five. (Four? Two? Any?) That being the case, we can all forgive a Monday that is spent buried in a computer screen or a book. So I’m just falling back on Twitter, here, which is something I haven’t in a long while.

And since it is Monday, and since Monday is history day around here, the On This Day section rides again!

In 1990 McDonald’s opened their first restaurant in Moscow. That means most of the college students have been able to eat a Big Mac in Russia their entire life, had they visited Pushkin Square. Here’s the scene. They serve an estimated 30,000 people a day.

In 1971 Apollo 14 launched.

They were the third mission on the moon. They almost had to try the landing without radar because of a software glitch, but an in the nick of time fix put them down closer to their original target than any of their fellow astronauts.

This was also the trip with the famous moon trees. Five of them are planted in Alabama. I’ve been near four and didn’t even realize it. Need to fix that.

Fifty-three years ago Explorer 1, the first satellite from the United States made orbit. Sure, Sputnik got there first by three months, but the value was largely propaganda. Otherwise the thing was not quite useless. It helped with some atmosphere detection and then tumbled out of the sky in three months. Explorer, on the other hand, transmitted data for almost four months and stayed in orbit for 12 years. It achieved more than 58,000 orbits, says Wikipedia, and began a series of 90 Explorer satellites.

Sputnik moment? Let’s try another Explorer moment.

And way back when, in 1930, 3M starting marketing scotch tape. Did you know? The Scotch Tape Test measures the adhesion strength of conducting polymers adhered to indium tin oxide glass slides? Neither did anyone else. Also, it can make X-rays.

Other links: Sometimes I like to find the outrage of the day and consider it’s relative merits to the big scheme of things. When you do that, you realize modern life could be a lot worse.

Dan Cathy Statement from Chick-fil-A on Vimeo.

Who else wants waffle fries?

This is a bad idea.

Pay walls! More pay walls! Also, and still, a bad idea. The problem for the industry being that there aren’t a lot of other prominent and viable ideas at the moment.

Finally I watched American Pickers tonight. (They aren’t letting you embed the episode for some strange reason.) Love that show. Love the premise, love the show, love the thing the guys do. Everything about it is fun. \

They subtitled a Kentucky man, suggesting he was unintelligible. I found this to be unnecessary. But, before I became my own outrage of the day, I called my Connecticut bride into the room and played clips of the man for her. “Don’t look, just listen.” She couldn’t make him out. So what do I know?

adventures / Auburn / Friday / history / links / memories / photo — Comments Off
14
Jan 11

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.