I wrote, on Monday, about my lunch book, Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, the last installment of his trilogy on the European Theater of World War II. I discussed Atkinson’s descriptions as “filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.” This passage is in his prologue which, again, is 41 delicious pages long:
One concise paragraph touches on a millennia of history and technological firsts. It offers a description, a quip and a
discarded plan on how to address the English Channel problem. The guy is good.
Who else is good? The staff at the Crimson. We held our weekly critique meeting today. We’re almost a third of the way through their production run and we’re down things like punctuation in quotes and synonyms. They are working hard and showing their talent. I’m quite proud for them.
This video showed up somehow today, in that delightful way that modern life gives you things from so many directions you’re never sure from which they came. It is, as the kids say, completely insane.
Turns out this guy only finished second in this ridiculous display of gravity, speed and a complete disregard for survival instinct.
This is an entirely different kind of ride than I’d ever want to do. The first time I ever heard people talking about mountain bikes they were celebrating the ways they got hurt, like that was the competition. That’s not for me. One of our friends is a big time, travel across the country, day-long race mountain bike types. I sent him this video and he carefully noted “We can’t all do that!”
Not sure that would have been my first response.
But what a great testimonial for the GoPro camera, no? Ours will not be pressed into such a service.
We fired up the grill at home this evening. The Yankee made a London broil. We kissed it with just enough flame and it was delicious enough for seconds. Adam came over to enjoy the flank steak and catch up on a bit of Game of Thrones.
We’ve been watching them all again. They actually get better on the second viewing. There’s a lot you didn’t catch the first time.
For example:
Things to read …
You wonder how Netflix will stay on top of their entertainment niche as others build their own platforms to compete with in-house productions. They have some plans. Five things Netflix is going to disrupt next
The company has big plans for next year, and its executives previewed some of them during Netflix’s Q3 earnings call earlier this week.
A modern journalist needs to know how the web works, needs to be exposed to and respect all journalistic crafts (including code), and needs to know their role in working with others. And that role is an active role, not a passive one. They need to use these digital tools to produce relevant, quality journalism.
A digital journalist (or web journalist) focuses on producing journalism of the web, not just on the web. That can manifest itself in a diverse set of roles — being the homepage editor, becoming a multimedia storyteller, or developing a news app, alone or with a team. They can use the tools, but they can also build tools when needed.
If you’re a student, I’m not going to debate which path you should take. I’m not even going to debate what level of instruction in digital journalism or code you need to take. (It’s 2013 — are you really arguing against learning technology?)
But what I will say is that, like those other required parts of your education, you are better off for being exposed to it, whether in a journalism career or in life.
Birmingham and state economic development experts said plenty of new projects and expansions are looking to invest money and add jobs, but recent history has proven there is a big difference between getting looks and breaking ground.
A panel of economic development experts spoke to members of the Society for Marketing Professional Services Alabama at a luncheon in Vestavia Hills today.
Just another fine day, where most people struggle with Mondays I can look at this one as one that just came my way, sailing through like a leaf on a calm, moving stream. The weather was delightful. Sunny and warm, a nice change after I had climbed off my bike last night, panting a little more than I should for the regular ride, walk out from under a dark sky into the chill borne of damp clothes and a tiny breeze. That was the first signal of the changing seasons. Today was the rebuttal.
And a fine one it was today, too. Sunny, with high skies. I don’t think that means anything, but I use it on days like today, when the sun is always out of the way of the direction you’re looking, you have just enough clouds to give some perspective and set off the cobalt blue sky.
I was enjoying myself well enough that I drove right past the exit where I occasionally pick up a Whataburger. No matter, there was another one a few stops down. The one I usually hit has great fries and the buns are perfect. And something on the burger there always falls onto my shirt, which I hate, but I can set my clock by it.
The one I visited today, the backup spot, has perfectly reasonable bread, which is to say like most places, but you don’t really talk about it. Now the first one has bread so good you say “Get a load of this bread! Taste the flour signature! Can you smell that baking!?” or whatever you say to your friends. And no one ever says those things, but they would there.
The one I visited today, the backup spot, did not have perfect french fries. And at my regular stop I have had near-perfection in a fried length of salted tuber. They were fine, today, but trending to old. The tea, however, was perfect. The preferred Whataburger has lousy tea.
So, would it be odd to order just the sandwich and fries at the one place and then stop again, later, to get a drink?
They are both owned by the same guy, I read today in that restaurant standard, the food review mounted on the wall. The reporter asked him what he’d have as his last meal. He said he’d have the number two. I prefer the single, myself.
In class today we worked on polishing and editing stories. And so students wrote and rewrote and we came up with new ways for them to see old things. Writing, I tell them constantly, is a process. And you have to love the process. If you become infatuated with what you think is your finished product you’re going to have a hard time in many respects.
I was talking with a glass blower a few years ago, and he said that about his craft. It takes about 10 years, he said, to master the art, and you have to love the work, because you will break your heart breaking glass for 10 years. When he said that I knew precisely what he meant. Though that gentleman, I’m sure, is a better writer than I am a glass blower. But we could relate. And he had huge furnaces.
Never mentioned that I finished reading Hello, Everybody a few days ago. I probably never mentioned I was reading it, either. It is a history of the rise of radio in the United States and the author has plenty of terrific personalities to illustrate his tale, which chronologically starts with KDKA, the famous and historic AM station in Pittsburgh and goes through the end of the Hoover administration. Like so many aspects of society, we find ourselves looking at FDR as a new chapter. In the story of radio, however, the story was prior to and during the Hoover years. He was, as secretary of commerce, the man instrumental in the early years. He played, as president, an active role during the maturation process. All of that is in Anthony Rudel’s book, which starts with the legendary tale of John Brinkley.
All Brinkley wanted to do was to put goat glands into men suffering from impotency and other maladies. And sell people miracle elixirs. And tell everyone about it on his huge transmitter. And get filthy rich doing it. His is a great tale, one of those that is probably slipping away into history, but is worth reading about. And when you read about him, the image you picture looks almost exactly like the man himself. It is uncanny.
That’s just one story. You’ll learn about evangelists, crime and entertainers, including Roxy Rothafel, who was perhaps the nation’s most famous performer during his run. Ever heard of him? Funny how that happens. Turns out, though, that Rothafel was the type that launched a thousand ships. He gave a lot of mid-20th century performers their start. He was an enduring influence on even more. So everyone that was old when I was young, they were young on his show once upon a time.
Also, and most interesting, you can take significant passages of this book detailing the growth of radio. Take out that word and put the words “world wide web” in those places and you’d see incredible parallels.
So I put that book down, which is great because I’ve been reading it forever. Today I picked up Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light. He’s finally finished his trilogy of the European Theater of World War II. They are heady books, filled with detail and insight and passages from three generations ago that feel like they are fresh today.
The books are fairly dense, but they are hardly complete. (Which is not a criticism.) The first thing I did when I picked this up today was to flip through the index. No one I’m related to is there. I looked up the regiment my great-grandfather was in. It is listed exactly twice, almost in passing. I’ve recently condensed that unit history into a chapter-sized file for family reading, and those troopers did stuff. (France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, was given to 67 members of my great-grandfather’s division. His regiment alone earned 24 of those. The division scored 651 Silver Stars, 35 Distinguished Service Crosses and one Medal of Honor.) But they don’t even make it into Atkinson’s book. It is a telling example of how big the war was. Hard to wrap your mind around if you weren’t there. Probably impossible when you were in it.
And you’ll pardon me if I get nerdy here: Atkinson’s prologue is 41 pages. It starts, after a bit of scene-setting in Britain (and oh, how Atkinson can set a scene) with the famous meeting at St. Paul’s. It looked something like this:
Though I never bought Selleck as Ike.
Anyway, I made it 10 or so pages in to the Atkinson book over dinner tonight. Good book.
Things to read, which I found interesting today … This was written by the president of the state press association. It is an important, if technical and legal, piece. State Supreme Court demolishes Alabama Open Meetings Act:
“Justiciability.”
“Redressability.”
These two tortuous legal terms were used by the Alabama Supreme Court last month to deliver a devastating one-two punch to Alabama’s Open Meetings Act.
First the court proclaimed that our state legislators do not need to hold any of their meetings in public and do not even need to follow their own rules. Then the court placed severe limits on the qualifications of persons who can sue under the open meetings law, although the law plainly states that “any Alabama citizen” can bring such a suit.
Speaking of media and the law, Samford just announced a six-year journalism and mass communication-slash-law degree track. You can read about it here.
The Associated Press is planning to introduce sponsored articles into the stream of news stories on its mobile apps and hosted websites. The rollout is expected in early 2014, with potential sponsorship deals centered around major events the AP is planning to cover, such as the Super Bowl, the Winter Olympics and the Academy Awards.
[…]
The move to sponsored content is part of a broader effort to open a new line of revenue at the AP, where just 2% of total revenue comes from advertising, including mobile banner ads and units across a handful of websites populated with AP content. Another 13% of comes from services the AP offers media outlets. And 85% comes from licensing content to subscribers such as TV stations, newspapers and websites, where the AP is not hopeful about expanding income.
I fear they will all be even more 45- or 60-second spots in the style of television commercials that get in the way of some important story. The best video ads online are at YouTube, the ones that you can skip. Make a great ad and keep the audience, maybe even for your mini-opera. Can’t hold us after six seconds? Well, you tried. Sorta. Now we’re going to see what Lady Gaga is up to.
This is unfair, as AP’s video is usually quite good, but one of their lead pieces as I wrote this was “Sleeping Driver Wakes Up, Causes Atlanta Crash,” which is almost one of those “We have video, and so this is news stories.” I’d share it with you, but AP doesn’t allow for their videos to be embedded. Maybe they can work on that next.
Oh here’s the actual raw footage, sans the carefully re-enacted emergency phone call that they put into the AP package:
Something the video is strange. It feels incomplete, somehow. Particularly when you read WSB’s accompanying story. Weird scene, bad wreck. But you would have never heard about it if not for the videographer who was already there.
I managed to get on the bike just in time for a quick 20-mile evening ride. When I got home there was about 15 minutes of daylight left, so that was well-timed.
I rode my bike to the bank. (I’m doing errands! On a bicycle! So ecologically sound!) I did the local time trial route and then climbed up one side of the town’s biggest hill. (Big is relative. It is actually fairly small.) At the top of that hill I changed my plan and turned left instead of right. And, before long, I saw this:
What is that? And where is that? You can almost make it out in the pond’s reflection. The building behind the art is the local art museum. It is now 10 years old. It is a fine museum. It has this weird, rusted, house.
And the house seems to have thrusters attached. Which explains the satellite dish on the side.
But not the spare tire or the cinder block on the front porch of the rusted house space ship.
Or the chicken wire and large (for scale) water valve:
The medium is, in part, called Found Objects. Which means the artist, professor Robbie Barber had this stuff in his or his neighbors’ yard or an abandoned lot, repurposed it, or recycled, or re-used it to earn an honorable mention in this juried art contest. And we’ll get to see it for a year.
Influenced by science fiction, toy design, both folk and outsider art, and found objects in general, Barber fuses these influences to create hybrid objects of fantasy, the results of which are often humorous, ironic or visually poetic in nature. Dreams of Flying depicts a shotgun shack that is transformed into a spacecraft of dubious reliability. While reminding us of the inherent dangers of space travel, this sculpture also depicts the ultimate escapist dream of flying.
What did you get out of it? I perceived the inherent dangers of going into space in a poorly conceived home. (This was Prince Lonestar’s other spaceship, I guess.) I liked the curved display stand best of all.
I was going to say something broad and silly like “every type of modern art has failed, except architecture,” but that sounds simplistic. Except it’s true. Atonal music? No one cares. Abstract painting? It had its vogue, reduced everything down to a canvas consisting of one color (Red #3 – a title of a Great Work, or an FDA additive designation?) Modern literature flirted with styles that required no particular aptitude – automatic writing, cutting up bits of newsprint and rearranging them – but words require structure, or it’s phoneme salad. Modern sculpture masked its irrelevance by substituting size for detail, so you’d be overwhelmed into thinking this enormous hunk of metal that looked like the Hulk broke out of a boxcar had significance, but eventually it turned into “installations” and “assemblages” that relied on the artist’s ability to recombine instead of create.
And you nod in understanding, even if you don’t agree. But most of us do. And the rest of us are just too good to acknowledge it, maybe, or smarter than others. You may not know what art is, but you know that an assemblage of pipes, siding and shingles and rust. You know that stuff when you see it. And now you know it can remind you of the perils of interstellar travel
Other works are on display outside the museum. I’m going to show them off on Sunday.
We ran into the owner of our local bike shop out and about tonight. It was every bit one of those situations where your mind recognizes some facial aspect in an encoded memory file. But the file is locked away because you are actually in the next town over. It is night. He’s in a nice shirt. This is a Chinese restaurant (I wanted soup) and he belongs in a polo behind a counter tapping keys and turning wrenches and talking about races.
Context means so much, but you’re relieved because you can see the neurons in his head scrambling to make the exact same connections.
We’re all constructs to one another, in some ways. We were at a dinner party last week and talking about this very thing. When was the first time you saw a school teacher of yours in some place that didn’t have “School” at the end of the name? Mine was at a movie theater. Changed my relationship with that lady forever. She was suddenly more than the person with a classroom at the end of the hall. Now she had interests, great passionate pursuits and a crystalline sense of humor.
I was young. It took a lot to overcome that teachers-exist-only-at-school construct, but only a little to prove the point.
Then earlier today we saw one of the other guests at that dinner party walking down the street. “She looks familiar … Oh that’s … ”
I wonder if she knows Danny, who runs the bike shop.
I wonder if either of them have seen the art at the museum. Probably the woman has. She was an art professor.
Three tremendous paragraphs, in Life Magazine, written about one of the most contemporaneously important photographs published in the middle of the 20th century. Still important, too.
Why print this picture, anyway, of three American boys dead upon an alien shore? Is it to hurt people? To be morbid?
Those are not the reasons.
The reason is that words are never enough. The eye sees. The mind knows. The heart feels. But the words do not exist to make us see, or know, or feel what it is like, what actually happens. The words are never right. . . .
Thursdays, for which I have a lot of respect, are the days that really hold the week together. They maintain the decorum of the week. They give you permission to look forward to Friday afternoon. They are sometimes the days when government workers go back to work.
You wonder what those first conversations back in the office would be like after those long breaks from the routine. How much paperwork has accumulated, how much more efficiently things will move under the wheels of power. Or how much of the afternoon will be spent in nonessential chatter.
Nonessential was the best work of the entire foolhardy exercise, wasn’t it? Who in which office was nonessential? Who was judged nonessential and then someone in the national security apparatus decided, “You know, now that we think about it, security might be essential. You should come back to the office.” And of course someone had to apply this to everyone under their charge, which must have made for some miserable lunches and awkward office parties in the future.
I’m still stuck with my initial thought. Everyone somehow went about all of that shutdown business in the wrong way. And, ultimately, just lays the groundwork to be in the same spot again in a few months.
As people slip back into their routines now, I’m not sure that it impacted me directly. Probably much of America share that non-experience. All of it was essential, of course.
$3.1 million for the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. The board addresses privacy concerns over laws and regulations related to fighting terrorist threats.
An increase in authorization for spending on construction on the lower Ohio River, something people are calling the “Kentucky Kickback” because of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Kty.) involvement
Back pay for federal workers furloughed because of the shutdown
Compensation for states that paid for federal programs to continue to run when the government shutdown
Here’s this week’s example of how student media matters. Ohio high school journalists push for records, break a story:In September, two Ohio high school journalists broke the story that an alleged assault at Shaker Heights High School was actually an alleged rape, and they did it with public records.
[…]
The Shakerite reported last year that the school has had three sexual assaults in the last five years. Following the September story, SPLC reports, the school began examining strengthening their security.
When Massachusetts high school senior Erin Cox went to pick up an intoxicated classmate from a party, she thought she was doing the right thing. However, administrators at North Andover High School are punishing her for the deed, citing the school’s zero tolerance policy on drugs on alcohol.
Cox, an honor student and volleyball star, received a cell phone message from an intoxicated friend asking for a ride home from a party earlier this month, according to the Boston Herald. However, Cox arrived at the party at the same time as the police, who were arresting a slew of students for underage drinking.
While Cox was cleared by police who recognized her sobriety, her school has given her a harsh punishment. The 17-year-old was stripped of her title as captain of the volleyball team, and she was suspended from five games.
She’s apparently a volleyball star, and who knows how this has hampered her collegiate hopes. But some right-thinking people in her community have established a scholarship even as her “educators” have failed. “Educators” have impacted a student for doing something off school property, during off-school hours, not at a school function and socially and civically upright. “Educators” have left a 17-year-old feeling “defeated.”
This is from some recent ride. Certainly not the one I had this evening. I know where the side roads on tonight’s ride go. I did not know where this road went.
I’m going to post that photo again as a test of a new tool I’ve just discovered, an immersive, interactive photo sharing tool called ThingLink.
There’s something of an unwritten rule (and we have many rules) about the unknown road. You don’t look on a map. You don’t ask a fellow rider. If you want to know where that road goes, you travel that road. And before you do that you stand at the head of it, take a photo and then run it through a filter. Then you ride down the road.
It was a dead end.
If you please, put your mouse over that photo. See those little circles? They are all interactive. Most are just notes. There’s one link and one video. And so it is apparent to me right away, this is a useful tool.
Anyway, I rode 20 miles today, I discovered a new tool there and did some other things, all less interesting than those.
I’ve been wondering lately, if you were building from the ground up, what would your marketing/newsroom/studio/entity’s goal be? Or, what era are you building to? Online TV/video market to be worth $35BN by 2018
I had a terrific conversation this weekend, one of those where the other person really crystalizes your thinking in a spare sentence or two. That conversation, with an Army major of strong personal convictions, had to do with standing up for the smaller, weaker, more vulnerable person, and it applies to this terrible story, a sad tale where that did not happen. Felony Counts for 2 in Suicide of Bullied 12-Year-Old:
Brimming with outrage and incredulity, the sheriff said in a news conference on Tuesday that he was stunned by the older girl’s Saturday Facebook posting. But he reserved his harshest words for the girl’s parents for failing to monitor her behavior, after she had been questioned by the police, and for allowing her to keep her cellphone.
“I’m aggravated that the parents are not doing what parents should do: after she is questioned and involved in this, why does she even have a device?” Sheriff Judd said. “Parents, who instead of taking that device and smashing it into a thousand pieces in front of that child, say her account was hacked.”
[…]
“Watch what your children do online,” Sheriff Judd said. “Pay attention. Quit being their best friend and be their best parent. That’s important.”
We had deer burgers on the grill tonight. First time I’ve had deer that way. Adam came and prepared the patties, an animal he’d taken himself. The Yankee made fries and sauteed onions. I started the fire, easily the weakest part of the meal. But the burgers were incredible.
We watched Game of Thrones. He is now through the end of the second season. Don’t spoil it for him.
