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A sign teaches us the history of veganism

Enjoying Catember? A photo of the cat every day, what a great gimmick, eh? Today’s features a recent night where she judged me worthy of a lap visit. I reached for my phone to try to take a picture and she leaned right in. She has never been phased by my DSLR. Point the phone at her, though, and she protests, moves or leaves. Or bonks the phone, ruining the shot. She’s uncanny that way.

And she’s as feisty as ever, too.

I did not realize we had such a think in the 1940s.

You would think our old family members, in the peak of life, would have thought “The war is over and I am alive. I am eating a steak. Later, I’ll have a pork chop, and possibly a meat soup. Tomorrow we’ll try that new Milo’s place.”

Actually, a 2008 Time article says the word was coined in 1944. Wikipedia says Englishman Donald Watson came up with it in Leicester. They were bombed in the Blitz in 1940 and more than 100 were killed, hundreds more injured and more than 250 homes destroyed, but they weren’t in the front lines otherwise and was considered something of a sanctuary for around 30,000 people. The area was important for air training and uniform production and, later holding Axis POWs. And, less famous for the man that was inspired by his time on the farm to become an animal rights activist.

Did you know there is a World Vegan Day? November first. Steak? Pork chop? Or meat soup?

I kid, I kid. I eat less meat than I used to, most of the time. But, occasionally you just need to use your canines.

Things to read … because reading puts meat on your bones.

Zach Brown is a former student of mine. He was the editor of The Samford Crimson. Now he’s a Fulbright scholar traveling in far-flung regions of the world bring English and pop culture coolness to people in different, dusty places. This is part of his journey: Mountain passes to Gharm, Khujand, and Panjakent.

Elsewhere in the wide world … The ongoing Damage to the Venezuelan Economy:

Venezuela’s annual inflation rate has risen to 63.4%, the highest in Latin America, according to official figures published on Tuesday.

The figures are the first released by the central bank since May, which has led critics to accuse the government of withholding data for political reasons.

This is going to be important, and I don’t want you to be caught unawares.

Also important … Ebola is ‘devouring everything in its path.’ Could it lead to Liberia’s collapse?

Here is a collection of Sept. 12, 2001 newspaper front pages. The thing I find interesting is how they are all different. With so many hub-and-spoke operations in place today that wouldn’t be the case with a huge national story today. There would be a great deal more homogeny.

Closer to home … Professional football returning to Birmingham:

The new North American Football League says the Birmingham Freedom will begin play next spring, along with franchises in Columbus (Flight), Hartford (Merchantmen), Kentucky (Thoroughbreds), Memphis (Kings), North Carolina (Redwolves), Orlando (Sentinels) and Virginia (Crusaders).

We’re number five! We’re number five! Alabama ranks as one of the most tax-friendly states in the U.S.

And now for some quick links on various media subjects of the day:

Is Virtual Reality The Future Of Journalism?
5 charts: The shifting landscape of digital video consumption
Seeking to bolster websites, TV stations hire newspaper journalists
Looking for new photo, video, audio, multimedia or FTP apps?
How to Setup the NPR App Template for You and Your News Org

Finally, there is this piece, which is pretty great … ESPN3 grows its offerings with student productions:

On Saturday, the Mercer Bears from Macon, Georgia, will play their first Southern Conference football game against Furman. Fans can watch it on the ESPN3 Web stream, even though the Bears football program is only one year old. Mercer decided to take advantage of an ESPN3 initiative that allows schools to join the network.

“We’re one of the first in football to pick that up and run with it and self-produce an event for ESPN,” said Mercer Athletic director Jim Cole.

It took an investment of $150,000 to upgrade the university’s TV production studio, get some high-grade cameras and pull fiber cable throughout campus. But, Cole says, joining the ESPN network is money well spent — even if it’s only their Web stream.

“I’m looking for name ID for Mercer,” Cole said, to showcase Mercer to potential students around the country. “Kids understand what ESPN means, so we view this as a recruiting advantage as well,” he said.

ESPN gets inexpensive programming, students get experience and exposure, teams get airtime, schools can use it to recruit. There’s a lot of win-win in that setup. I wonder about the details behind the line, “ESPN3 has different deals with each school,” but if that works out for a Mercer or whomever, more the better.

I do not know what is happening. / journalism / links / memories / photo / Samford / swimming / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
10
Sep 14

I have an idea about noodles

One of my favorite memories of journalism classes as an undergrad was watching the story ideas form. I wasn’t a natural. I think some people are, and others can be taught. Some people have the ideas spring forth, but others have to work on it. Until I learned to come up with a reliable story idea process, I was enthralled by listening to others just riff off ideas.

That’s not right. I’m still impressed listening to really talented, curious, passionate people spit out story ideas.

So this is, perhaps, my favorite part of the semester. We’ve been discussing this in class. Today I broke them all up into groups and requested, nay, demanded story ideas. And once we got just around the corner from the traditional campus issues of parking and tuition, they had some good ones.

Next I’m going to make them put them into practice.

One of the ideas was the new cafeteria vendors. Things have changed. Some people find the food tastier. Others have pointed out there is an awful lot more pasta. To me, the food varies from decent to bland, with fewer options — once you remove the bushels of pasta. And there seems to be more chaos in the food serving area.

Also, this:

Surely we can do better than that.

I swam again today, about three-quarters of a mile, or 1,300 yards. My flip turns, new yesterday, looked basically the same today. Off-kilter, untargeted and more power than grace. But, hey, it seems to get me back down the lane a bit faster.

Also they are slow. And I forget to look for my knees, which probably explains a lot of the above. But, on those flip turns when I go down more than out I must also come up, which, I think, has the look a whale breach. That amuses me.

I hope no one else is looking.

This evening there were Crimson meetings, where we discussed the story they had on the changes in the cafeteria. It is a popular topic. Today’s was the first issue of the year, and in their critiques I got to brag on them a great deal. The paper looks pretty great for a first effort. There are some things they’ll work on, but there are always things to work on. I’m very pleased, I told them, about where they are starting. They have great potential for the year ahead — and so now I will challenge them.

Anyway, we did not discuss the sign above, but the pasta did come up.

The vendor, Sodexo, says they surveyed students on the campus where they have contracts and found that students wanted more of the stuff, so we have tons of carbs. There’s a lot of pasta in the cafeteria.

Things to read … which is as easy to boil up as spaghetti.

Man, I need a good drone. This was shot by my friend and a Samford grad, soaring high above campus. (He appears several times as the drone does flybys.) It is pretty awesome:

This was a terrific story last winter. Now it is heartbreaking, and touching … Patient saved by doctor who walked six miles in snow to perform brain surgery on him has died:

The couple have seen the doctor several times since the incident, and he always told the doctor how much he appreciated what he did, Andrea said.

“God and Dr. Hyrnkiw gave us an extra six months,” said Andrea Robinson. “And I can see why God gave me those extra six months.”

Did you watch anything from the Apple event? Interested in the mobile payments that were discussed. It is a game changer, as Alan Mutter explained years ago … Get ready for mobile payments

It was fun while it lasted … Twitter CFO says a Facebook-style filtered feed is coming, whether you like it or not:

At a financial conference on Wednesday in New York, the CFO provided some hints about the feature roadmap that new head of product Daniel Graf — who came to Twitter from Google in April — has in mind for the service, a list that includes better search and a move into group chat. But he also suggested that the traditional reverse-chronological user stream could become a thing of the past, as the company tries to improve its relevance.

[…]

The most recent example of how stark the differences can be between a filtered feed and an unfiltered one was the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. and how that showed up so dramatically on Twitter but was barely present for most users of Facebook. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci noted, that kind of filtering has social consequences — and journalism professor Emily Bell pointed out that doing this makes Facebook and Twitter into information gatekeepers in much the same way newspapers used to be.

The impetus for Twitter to filter is obvious: the service needs to show growth in both number of users and engagement in order to satisfy investors, and finding relevant content as a new user can be a challenge, which is why the company recently updated its so-called “on-boarding” process.

I’d hope there would be a classic version. I count myself in the group of users who have spent a fair amount of time developing a well-curated Twitter stream, and now they’ll turn it into Facebook. And, you’ll see in other stories, let you buy stuff directly from your feed. The ultimate impulse purchase!

The only thing I’d want would be to purchase the original Twitter format, chronological and curated by humans, me.

But that’s a complaint for a different day. Today I can only complain about my flip turns. And the pasta.

I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / swimming / things to read / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Sep 14

Wherein I reference Carl Sagan

I showed off a neon sign in transition last week, without making too many philosophical references to the illuminating gases within us all that shine brightly into the evening sky. I stared at the distressed sign, full of rust and faded paint without wistfully wandering through paragraphs about age and history — OK, I talked history — and the way the elements shape the decay that shapes us.

I went back to check on the sign this evening. They’ve changed it:

We talked about generating story ideas in class yesterday, and will continue to do so tomorrow. Tonight the journalists produced their first issue of The Samford Crimson for the year.

Also, this evening, I taught myself how to do flip turns in the pool. They are bad, awkward, crooked, slow and hilariously off target. I can hit the lane line. I can push myself deep into the pool. (Good thing I was trying to figure all of this out in a deep pool.) My flip turns are also incredibly violent. I was here and then I pushed and now I’m waaaay over there, and it was fast.

It felt like this:

Watch a person who knows what they are doing and they are elegant. Watch me do a flip turn and it is like something out of the ACME catalog.

But I’m learning, and I swam 2,000 yards. I do not know what is happening.

Things to read … so you will know what is happening.

(When various of your gimmicks come together in an unplanned moment like that, it is kind of neat. And, perhaps, a signal to kill the gimmick.)

(Nahhh … )

Samford Is #3 in 2015 U.S. News Annual Rankings:

Samford University continues to be ranked 3rd in the South in the 2015 annual college rankings released Sept. 9 by U.S. News & World Report. Samford also was ranked third in last year’s U.S. News list.

Samford is the highest ranked university in Alabama in any peer group and continues a three-decade tradition of being ranked in the top tier of its peer group. Samford also recently was ranked the top university in Alabama by Forbes, Inc.

One of our students wrote this, and it is a neat read … Alabama’s first Miss America reflects on title more than 60 years later

Another lovely story … Finding a groove, giving a gift:

Darlene Werner suffered a stroke in 1994 and had not been out of the home where she lives with her husband, David, since Christmas.

Even with David’s support, she could no longer negotiate the four steps from the front porch to the patio or the three steps from the kitchen to the carport.

The couple tried, first with Darlene, 74, using a walker. For the past year, she has mostly been confined to a wheelchair. Returning some of her freedom was the goal of the eight men representing family-owned Contractors Service and Fabrication Inc., of Decatur, during United Way of Morgan County’s Day of Caring on Tuesday.

The crew, only two of whom had ever worked together on a ramp, created a way out down the house’s 29-inch high front porch with a ramp of three sections totaling 30 feet.

And this is quite interesting … 11 Bird’s-Eye Views That Show How NYC Has Grown Over 350 Years:

Exactly 350 years ago today, New York City became New York City. The city itself already existed, of course: As the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. But on September 8th, 1664, the British gave it its permanent moniker, which makes today its name-day.

We’ve seen all manner of maps illustrating how NYC has grown over the centuries, but one of the coolest—and least appreciated—is the bird’s eye view. These are images that are, loosely speaking, maps; but thanks to a little artful perspective, they give us much more of a sense of what the city was like in each case.

Tomorrow, there will be more interesting things to be found here. Do come back, won’t you? And have a lovely time until then.

cycling / football / journalism / links / Monday / things to read / video — Comments Off
8
Sep 14

A day full of things to read

I have been accumulating a wealth of links these last few days. They are all wonderful in one way or another. I will share them here now.

But before all of that, here is a video featuring the parents of a fine cyclist and, wouldn’t you know it, Davis and Connie Phinney were world class cyclists themselves. They have an incredible story of success and heartache and recovery and peace and satisfaction. It is worth 15 minutes for the archival footage alone:

And now for some interesting news from near and far:

Al Qaeda Wasn’t ‘on the Run’:

In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden documents were primary source material, providing unmediated access to the thinking of al Qaeda leaders expressed in their own words.

A comprehensive and systematic examination of those documents could give U.S. intelligence officials—and eventually the American public—a better understanding of al Qaeda’s leadership, its affiliates, its recruitment efforts, its methods of communication; a better understanding, that is, of the enemy America has fought for over a decade now, at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

Incredibly, such a comprehensive study—a thorough “document exploitation,” in the parlance of the intelligence community—never took place. The Weekly Standard has spoken to more than two dozen individuals with knowledge of the U.S. government’s handling of the bin Laden documents. And on that, there is widespread agreement.

From the Office of There’s a Special Circle for This Guy … Woman beheaded ‘with machete’ in north London garden:

One line of inquiry for detectives is understood to be that the man was inspired by recent footage of terrorists beheading two American journalists in Syria.

Some residents claimed last night that the suspect was a local man who had converted to Islam last year, but those claims could not be verified. Detectives said they had ruled out terrorism.

For a different kind of frustration … We Could Have Stopped This:

(T)he world largely ignored the unfolding epidemic, even as the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym, MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action.

Even as the leading physicians in charge of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s Ebola responses succumbed to the virus, global action remained elusive. The neglectful status of the WHO was, horribly, by design.

Meanwhile, closer to home … Stop and seize:

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.

Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

More than 100 teens swarm Memphis plaza, ‘knocking out’ shoppers

Seldom do most people wish to be a teenager again, but there are some people who would like the chance after reading this … Teen with autism victimized in disgusting ALS ice challenge prank:

Although their son is doing well and bravely returned to school, the parents have a message for the teens that humiliated him:

“I hope you will be punished to the full extent of the law, which still to me would not be enough, but that’s what I wish,” said Mensen.

School officials say no disciplinary action will be taken until after police have completed their investigation.

We watched this documentary this weekend:

You should watch it. There will be sobbing. I’m not sure you can say enough about It’s Time. Not every story is as great, or terrible, as the one that brought Chucky Mullins and Brad Gaines together, but it is a tremendous look at what football, the region and story telling can be. You’d be hard pressed to make a much better sports documentary.

You can tell a lot about the world around you by the business news:

Alabama’s economy in slow recovery

August Jobs Report Disappoints

Fed: Under Obama, only the richest 10 percent saw incomes rise

The 3% Surcharge Catches On: The Lucques Group Introduces Healthcare For Employees

On the other hand, there is apparently a market for this … Pampered Babies Kick Back and Relax at the Floating Baby Spa

And, finally, some good economic news, locally speaking …

Reliance Worldwide Corp. plans $50M expansion in Cullman

YP affiliate to add 165 jobs in Shelby County

If you can end a post with good economic news, and on a Monday, no less, you’ve really done something, I think, so we’ll call it a day. Hope yours was a great one!

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4
Sep 14

There are two videos, and people move fast

Let us go ahead and get this out of the way right at the beginning. This is the best video of the day. It is almost two years old and, until you watch it you won’t have any idea why a father refusing to walk his daughter down the aisle is the theme behind the best video of the day:

“What else after that?” Indeed. I could watch that over and over. I’ve watched it about four times. Isn’t she a beautiful little thing? Now all we need is a followup video in about 20 years or so.

I ran today, but it was an abbreviated run. Just a couple of miles and then I had the general feeling of nausea and sickness. So I called it a morning. I was right; it was a morning.

Things to read … because that’s useful, no matter what time of day it is.

There is both a static and an interactive version to this map. I wonder why. Map: The counties that have received the most undocumented immigrant children

Naturally. H&R Block CEO says Obamacare to add ‘significant complexity’ to tax season

I remain unsurprised. Inspector general: Homeland Security spent millions on underused vehicles

Sure, this is about the largest animal ever discovered, but they buried the lead: we can play with the bones! Newly discovered dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus, takes title of largest terrestrial animal

I wonder if it is an algorithm that Twitter uses to send me the dated emails I get every so often. Algorithms Are Invading Your Twitter Stream, And Resistance Is Futile … Don’t get me wrong, algorithms are good things on the whole, but I’ve carefully curated my Twitter stream to serve my needs and interests. It is very human and practical and effective. I don’t want your continual move toward Twitter in Facebook. Just allow me to keep the regular version, and thank you. I am afraid, however, that if this gets out of hand this becomes a goodbye for a lot of users.

This, this is awesome. Researchers send brain-to-brain message from India to France:

“We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways.”

The information sent were the words “hola” and “ciao” in binary. Four people participated in the study: one person in India sent the information, and the other three people in France received it.

Age is just one more number for U.Va. stat trackers:

At 104, Risher does not take a backseat to many in matters of seniority. He saw his first Virginia game in 1920 and played for the Cavaliers during the 1931 season, making him the school’s oldest football alumnus.

With “only” 51 seasons under his belt, however, he’s not the senior man on the crew.

“Paul’s the workhorse,” Risher said. “He puts all the data together.”

Wisman began keeping stats at VMI games in 1950 while teaching economics at the school. He came to Virginia for graduate school and hooked on with the stats crew in ’56.

He’s missed one home game since: the 2011 season opener.

And, finally, I produced this Hyperlapse video today of the organization fair Samford had. No one has seen it — thanks to absolutely no retweets or other social media shares, thanks all! — so you can be the first:

Should be a fun tool.