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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.

links / Monday — Comments Off
29
Nov 10

The scarcity of things

It is Monday, and I have a case of blahs, with a chaser of nothings. I’m feeling better, but not quite my spry self. Tomorrow I’ll be just fine.

So today is slow. Tomorrow’s class has been prepared. I’m considering this paper I must finish in the next week. Things are coming along smartly. Or so I’m telling myself. If I turn around counter-clockwise I get the opposite effect. It is that time of the semester.

I have this: President Obama, you might have heard, wants to freeze the salaries of federal employees for two years. This proposal has pleased Republicans, since it is one of their thinner ideas. The following is a list of the people who are upset by the president’s suggestion: People who are serious about budget problems.

The Economic Policy Institute calls it “chump change.”

Ed Morrissey estimates the total is around five billion dollars in savings over two years, or roughly 0.3% of the $1.3 trillion deficit from a single year in Obama’s budget. This symbolic piece of symbolism is the thinnest of tokens.

Of course the plan has also upset the federal workers who have so skillfully listened to their own rhetoric that they think they get paid less than their private sector counterparts.

Now imagine if they’d been asked to make a real sacrifice.

On this day in 1942 rationing of coffee began. (Odd coincidence of absolutely no significance, no?)

Rationing was announced a month early. Panic began. Hoarding took place. Prices soared. A lucrative black market grew around the beloved bean. Sugar and milk were also rationed.

After eight months the agony was over. The coffee ration ended in July of 1943. Sugar was still carefully measured until 1947.

Now imagine if Obama had walked out to say “We’re cutting back federal employee’s coffee intake by 35 percent because of health care costs, manpower hours and because Yes We Can!”

How do you think that would go over?

(Told you I had nothing.)

history / journalism / links / movies / photo / Samford / video / Wednesday — 1 Comment
17
Nov 10

Danger: Below are TWO Wikipedia links

My office window faces the north, so I have to go outside for views like this. There’s a nice green lot below my windows and I can see when the sun hits that perfect golden angle. It just so happened I had to make a trip today from my building to another part of campus and I just managed to catch the sun exploding through that tree through the lomo filter.

Students were throwing a frisbee on the quad, the hammocks were empty, young ladies were teaching one another an exciting new cheer that involved a lot of screaming. The sun was peeking between the chapel and the theater. I was carrying a handful of books and binders and things and it was just a marvelous scene. I took more pictures for later.

We had baked apples at lunch, which I only mention because I’ve never noticed them in the cafeteria before. Naturally I tried them. Baked apples are very subjective, of course. No two recipes are the same and no one’s are as good as those made by the person that you’re now thinking of.

My grandmother makes the best apples. She would cut up fruit from the Granny Smith tree in her yard — I never called her Granny, but given that her name was Smith it was a long time before I realized that the variety wasn’t named after her. I don’t know all of her secrets, but I know that my cousin and I would beg her to make them. She’d fill up one of those square casserole dishes, the apples, the sauce and a bunch of mini-marshmallows. We could eat them all in one sitting.

These apples weren’t my grandmother’s apples. They weren’t bad. They had a nice cinnamon taste with a mild bleach finish. My grandmother has never had to make apples for hundreds of people, so there’s that. And it got me into the
spirit of fall, so I’ve no complaints.

Journalism links: It still boggles the mind that publishers, who were slow to accept the changes brought about by the world wide web because they were fundamentally losing control of their ability to be one of a few unique voices, have made their bed with Apple where they have willingly handed over control. Poynter reports:

(T)he November issue of Esquire, its second to be made available as an iPad app, has been held up by Apple’s app review process since mid-October.

The November cover story features actress Minka Kelly, who the magazine named the “sexiest woman alive,” and that apparently is the sticking point in the app being approved.

The Gazette Extra, like everyone else, is trying to find the proper way to deal with comment trolls. Because, as the editor says, “some people can’t behave” his paper won’t allow comments on stories about crimes, courts, accidents, race or sex. That particular paper, it seems, has exceeded that point of critical mass where comments are no longer constructive or dialogical. Even in that thread, on a note from the editor about curtailing vicious comments, the conversation veers wildly out of control. Most every big site has this problem.

Cooks Source — the New England cooking magazine that became suddenly infamous for infringing upon the works of online writers, and then snottily claiming that everything online was public domain — has another petulant letter from the editor on their website. Both Facebook pages they’ve set up have been overwhelmed by critics. And now, at their most popular, the little magazine that copies and pastes is closing shop.

And I wish I could give you a link, but the Samford Crimson is unfortunately not putting it online. The sports section has been running a football pick chart this fall. The university president, the starting quarterback, sports writers and other student leaders have been participating. A math professor has led all season.

Videos: Last Saturday when Georgia visited Auburn for their beat down in the South’s Oldest Rivalry freshman running back Mike Dyer broke the great Bo Jackson’s freshman rushing record. Jackson was there, celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Heisman, and had a nice moment on the sideline with Dyer.

This is the video that aired on AUHD, so imagine seeing this on the big screen at the game, and the audio is the crew’s behind-the-scenes chatter. It makes a nice moment even more entertaining:

I love that last line: Memories. That was just perfect, in so many respects. The guy who produces the the big screen programming, Bo Cordle, is leaving. In fact that was his last game. what a way to go out.

This wasn’t quite as entertaining, but I watched The Red Baron tonight. It is a modern adaptation on the career of Manfred Von Richthofen. Like all movies of legendary war heroes, it is told as a love story. Only this particular love story didn’t actually happen. Because the story of perhaps the greatest ace of World War I needed to be glossed over and fictionalized. I hate when that happens.

Meanwhile, here’s actual funeral footage:

Everyone in that footage is also in the ground now. World War I was a long time ago, said obvious guy, obviously. I just started reading this week R.A.C. Parker‘s history of Europe between the wars. The first handful of chapters are about the treaties that ended World War I. This book was published in the 1960s, so everyone knew where this story was headed. Even still, in the first few pages, it is already heartbreaking because of what even then, just months after that funeral, was something of an inevitability.

As is this stack of things I must grade. So, to my red pen I must now go.

journalism / links / photo / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
16
Nov 10

The wisdom of pancakes

Clouds

There were a great many low, dramatic looking clouds today. You’ll see some more here and here. In ancient times this would mean the gods were angry, and that the late crops had to come in, pronto. You knew that to be true whenever the gods brought those orange barrels overnight.

(Most think those are about traffic, but actually that’s just a cultural nod, the departments of transportation have a think for old mythologies.)

This cloud formation means nothing today, except that a storm system is blowing out and a higher pressure system is moving in.

Taught today, spent the evening with the newspaper bunch. Took some time working over a survey and playing with QR codes.

Very cool stuff, turning any flat surface into a link. I suspect there’s a better QR reader than the free one I found tonight. (Any tips? Mine isn’t as fancy as the one in that CSI clip.) They’re just begging to become more of a multimedia tool. (But maybe no one will get around to doing that for a while and I can.) If they were a bit more aesthetically pleasing they’d grow bigger, faster, but sometimes the look of things is a slow growth.

Links, upon which journalism was practiced: Staff Sgt. Salvatora Giunta was formally presented with his Medal of Honor:

Obama said Giunta “charged headlong into the wall of bullets.” The sergeant at first pulled a soldier who had been struck in the helmet to safety, then sprinted ahead to find two Taliban fighters dragging away the stricken Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan.

“Sal never broke stride,” Obama said. “He leapt forward. He took aim. He killed one of the insurgents and wounded the other, who ran off.”

As bullets rained, Giunta dragged Brennan by his vest to cover and worked feverishly to stop the bleeding until the wounded Americans were flown from the ridge.

Giunta’s is the first Medal of Honor that hasn’t been a posthumous award since Vietnam. That most surely is a terrible oversight.

I let NPR’s Most Popular box dig up the rest of my reading. These two were interesting to see right next to one another. One suggesting this conversation about sexuality is a good conversation to have, the other suggesting that talking about it can be a bit precarious. These are conflicting times.

Dave Barry has been felt up at the airport: “Well, I would say whoever wrote that it’s not punitive was not having his or her groin fondled at the time.”

So I’m adding this to my list of unorthodox public policies. First, there’s the Nixon rule: If a president’s approval number ever falls to Nixonian levels you should retire from office, extending arms in a large motion with fingers stabbing the sky in a V, escaping the public eye for a decade or two before trying to rehabilitate your image. (Neither Bush made it there, but Truman did, predating Nixon of course.)

Now, the second of my unorthodox public policies goes like this: If Dave Barry can’t make a joke about what you’re doing, you’ve gone woefully astray and things need to change.

Read this. It will only take a moment. And then flip through the slideshow, enlarging the pictures. What a terrific project. I’m being vague because you should read it.

And now, to IHOP, for a late dinner. I have a craving for pancakes. It was there that I learned the all-important lesson “It isn’t whether you win or lose, but where you eat afterward.”

One night, during a particularly bad semi-pro volleyball game where nothing went right the coach called a time out. We gathered together and tried our best not to bicker. The jokester of the team picked his spot perfectly. In between the “What are you doings?” and the “Pass the ball better!” he said “Where are we going to eat later?”

And then we all went out for chocolate chip pancakes.

Alabama / links / memories / photo / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Nov 10

The no continuity update

Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and today marks the 235th anniversary of the creation of a fine force of warriors. There’s a long line of Marines in my family and I’m thinking of theme today. One of them lost a leg in Vietnam, others served in more peaceful times.

A few years ago we watched a battalion graduation at Parris Island. I spent two years there is a child and watched countless graduations. I don’t remember any of them, but I think of the men I saw four years ago. I think of these young Marines today, and I hope they are safe and still serving proudly.

Semper Fidelis, Marines.

That’s this evening at Samford. Evenings being relative. Three weeks ago that same time was the afternoon. At any rate I was walking from one errand to a meeting and had the best view. By the time I made it back to the office it was completely dark. And that shouldn’t happen.

Spent the better part of my night working on a paper for my media effects class. I wrote, revised, edited, re-wrote and moved things up and down until it didn’t make sense any more. That’s when I quit, having achieved a level of perfection that is not easily reached. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and realize two or three things that I should have added, but you should live by this motto: Print early, never second guess.

That’s a great motto, but hardly a practical one. I’ll continue on with this paper until the bitter end — trying to massage every possible detail into a very finite, five-page space — and hope my professor makes sense of it as well.

Random fun: In 1995 Dr. Clifford Stoll could see no future to this Internet thing. Newsweek, a fine brand today weakened by both content and their very name and now being absorbed by The Daily Beast, published his scribblings:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Remember, this is 1995.

(T)he Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.

Sound like any curators (or journalists or producers) you know?

Then there’s cyberbusiness (sic). We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete (sic). So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

He decries the lack of human interaction, the virtual communities and some sense of isolation.

Dr. Stoll’s Wikipedia page says he’s now mostly a stay-at-home dad and sells custom-made blown glass on the Internet. Good for him.

OK, back to that paper, lest it become an all-nighter.

World’s Fair update will be along in a bit.