The first day of the semester. Samford has a Jan-term, an accelerated short term in between the holidays and the spring term. My department didn’t have classes, so I got to work on things like recruitment, a new lesson plan, reading and so on. Today, though, is our first day back.
And so, of course, today was the day my printer decided to miscount the number of things I asked it to print. It also decided to jam about 90 percent of the way through.
“So it is going to be a Monday, eh, HP?”
My printer had nothing to see. Its gears were full of mutilated pulp.
Dig the paper out, successfully pulling out only microfibers at a time. I have some special chemical blend of paper that shears at the subatomic level. You can pull on this stuff for hours and not get it out from the reticent printer’s teeth.
With every passing year this becomes more entertaining to me. My youngest step-sibling is working her way through undergrad, but she’ll be done soon. When that happens I won’t be able to try to convince the new students that I understand their plight. “We’re practically the same generation,” is the implication, despite my silvering hair.
This has turned itself into a running cinematic joke in my classes based on a conversation I had with students a couple of years ago. For whatever reason the gag hinges on Spaceballs as the denouement of movie humor. I don’t have a real theory that we crossed some boundary in 1987; Spaceballs was simply the high water mark of post-modern film parodies, he said, hoping it made him sound sophisticated.
Anyway, almost everyone in the class said they’ve seen the movie.
“One day” I told them, “I will start a semester by saying if you haven’t seen the film don’t come back until you do. I will give bonus points for the first person that catches a Spaceballs reference.”
Twitter is set to censor content to their service in some countries when necessary:
The company announced Thursday that it could start censoring certain content in certain countries, a sort of micro-censorship widget that would pop up up in a grey box on the Twitter feed.
“Tweet withheld,” it would read “This tweet from @username has been withheld in: Country.”
Twitter explained the change in a blog post on Thursday: “We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.”
Twitter is growing up. There’s some censorship angst among the commentariat, but people have to remember: Twitter is a business. They’re not in the business of changing laws that we’d find unpalatable here at home.
When you look into the details there is a degree of transparency to the process Twitter is putting in place.
Information wants to be free. People need to speak with other people. This move by Twitter might limit this particular tool in times of domestic turmoil in hotspots, something else will always emerge. Or work arounds will be found. (Indeed, it seems that took just a few hours.)
In short, Twitter could have done far more here, which would have been far less.
Hawaii’s legislature is weighing an unprecedented proposal to curb the privacy of Aloha State residents: requiring Internet providers to keep track of every Web site their customers visit.
The bill was introduced last week and a legislative committee met this morning to discuss the bill, which is even more far-reaching than the federal analog.
Rep. Kymberly Pine, an Oahu Republican and the House minority floor leader, told CNET this evening that her intention was to protect “victims of crime,” not compile virtual dossiers on every resident of–or visitor to–the Aloha State who uses the Internet.
“We do not want to know where everyone goes on the Internet,” Pine said. “That’s not our interest. We just want the ability for law enforcement to be able to capture the activities of crime.”
Pine acknowledged that civil libertarians and industry representatives have leveled severe criticism of the unprecedented legislation, which even the U.S. Justice Department did not propose when calling for new data retention laws last year. A Hawaii House of Representatives committee met this morning to consider the bill, which was tabled.
What will they think of next? Brain erasing? Oh yeah …
For decades scientists believed that long-term memories were immutable—unstable for a few hours and then etched into the brain for good. Research now suggests that recalling a memory causes it to revert temporarily to an insecure state, in which the recollection can be added to, modified, even erased. “Memory is more dynamic, more fluid and malleable than we thought,” says neuroscientist Daniela Schiller of Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
That idea, brought to the fore about a decade ago, has opened up a new controversial research area exploring the possibility of deleting, or at least muting, parts of human memory with drugs or targeted therapies. Some experts have found that a drug used to treat high blood pressure works to unseat recollections; others are testing novel biochemical means or behavioral interventions to interfere with unwanted remembrances
The application is still limited in trials, but the implications are fascinating.
Unemployment numbers: This came from Todd Stacy, an aide to Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard. The speaker presented numbers showing Alabama’s unemployment percentage diving below regional and national averages. One hopes the good news continues.
(Disclosure: Years ago Hubbard was my employer. Nice gentleman, too.)
I did not ride today. The Yankee pronounced it yucky, and I had no desire to ride in such a condition. (She did though.) Truthfully, the conditions didn’t bother me much, but I noticed my legs were sore before I even put my feet on the floor this morning.
Better to take the day off, I figured. Clearly I have a lot of work to do towards realizing my larger cycling goals. Tomorrow, though, I’ll have a big day in the saddle.
So I worked instead. Emails, syllabi, networking, reading. I do so much reading that someone should write a book about it. No one would read the thing, though. Except me.
The fun reading is fun, at least. Last night I finished Mark Beaumont’s The Man Who Cycled the World. Eyeing a plan of about 100 miles a day, Beaumont started in Paris, rode through Europe, the Middle East, across India and part of Asia. He suffered through the barren portions of Australia, raced through New Zealand and then crossed the U.S. (He got mugged in the States, perhaps making Louisiana as memorable as his experience in Pakistan.) Finally he made it to Portugal, Spain and back to Paris. He shaved two months off the world record.
It is an interesting premise, and a Herculean feat of speed and endurance. The read becomes a bit repetitive. That’s hardly a fault, though. The guy is writing about the most repetitive thing one can conceive: “I pushed my feet around in circles for six months. And, also, saddle sores!” So the intriguing part is the mental grind, and that’s probably one of the hardest things to write about. By the time he reaches the southeastern U.S. his point is made.
There are a few inaccuracies in his recounting, and it feels like he was still writing the thing while trying to overcome the bicycle burnout. The thing that amazes me is how much of his trip he managed to not research, because you think you would devote a great deal of time to that.
I was hoping for more people and vivid descriptions, but he’s an adventurer who wrote a book rather than an author who developed great calves and cardio. If you aren’t intrigued by cycling or ultra-endurance sport this book probably isn’t for you.
Had dinner with Shane and Brian tonight. We visited Logan’s, where they have a new menu. You can gorge on peanuts and rolls and get the marrow of a steak bone along side a sodium supplemented potato, all for $7.99.
I told a joke.
Shane: “Country people don’t say ‘extension’ they say ‘stension’.”
Me: They don’t need ‘straneous letters.
The waitress thought the joke killed. Of course, she was new. Maybe she didn’t know any better.
As you might have heard, there were deadly tornadoes across the South on Sunday. At least two people in Alabama were killed. As always, the tragedy could have been much more costly, despite the devastation of property. There were, experts now say, at least six twisters in Alabama. The fatalities were low because of the excellent and hard work of the National Weather Service and the local meteorologists.
Only ABC did not get that memo:
ABC 33/40 meteorologist James Spann — the best in the business and there’s no discussion on this — took his national network to task. He suggested Diane Sawyer “get a clue” and challenged her to a debate on the issue. His audience were also indignant, writing first on the local site and then at the ABC homesite, where the chastising grew even louder. Those comments are worth a read.
We live in a dangerous area when it comes to spring weather. December and January are dangerous here too. Storms fall out of the sky. Tornadoes flare up and destroy property and sometimes take lives, but the technology and science now allow meteorologists to give days worth of advance warning. Forecasting that was not available a generation ago saves untold numbers of lives every year.
And so Spann took umbrage. His colleagues at KATV in Arkansas, where other tornadoes touched down, did too.
After today’s social media uproar ABC News decided to interview Spann today. It was scheduled and then canceled and rescheduled. Somewhere in there ABC had to stoop to spinning their own newscast:
“The report that aired Monday was referring to the fact that many families were surprised because they were asleep when the tornado hit in the middle of the night,” an ABC spokesperson says. “‘World News’ will cover the latest on the aftermath of the tornadoes tonight and will clarify the warning and advance forecasts given.”
Not even especially good spin, but there it was all the same.
Their newscast this evening?
Spann wrote on his site that he was grateful for the interview and that the important message about the outdoor sirens was shared, but …
There was no apology, or mention of the botched story yesterday when Diane Sawyer said the pre-dawn tornadoes Monday were a “surprise” with “no warning”. A little odd how you just go from that one day, to a story on how good the warning process was the next day. But, I am not a journalist and maybe that is just the way you do it. Seems strange. I would imagine Diane actually didn’t write that copy, but she will probably think twice about fact checking on lead story intros.
[…]
My frustration with the situation yesterday is shared by ALL of those hard working people involved in the warning process. The National Weather Service, the EM community (emergency managers), and broadcast meteorologists. I felt that these people were devalued and insulted yesterday.
It has been an interesting day in local-national media.
The storms missed us entirely, all going far north. We had some much needed rain and that’s all. We’ll get some more later this week, hopefully without the storms. I’m sure ABC hopes that’s the case.
Beautiful day today. I got in a 26 mile ride at a nice, even 15 mile per hour pace. Now let’s see if I can do that again tomorrow.
Got a lot of work done otherwise, and made a handful of phone calls. More work tomorrow, more emails and reading and some time on the bike. We’re expecting 72-degrees tomorrow for the first time this year. Of course I’ll be riding …
This looks like a great classroom exercise. I’ve been compiling the chronology of events worth pointing out to young scribes.
There are no winners there, no successes or celebrations. Just a few giant errors and important lessons.
I have a note out for Devon Edwards, the profoundly upset former managing editor of OnwardState, a student-run news outlet. (Read his Twitter account and you can’t help but feel for the guy. I’ve also written Adam Jacobi, the CBS writer who passed along what OnwardState reported. Hopefully they’ll reply to add a bit more perspective and give some insight into what went wrong and what can be learned from the experience.
An email conversation spent me on a late evening genealogy search. My known family tree only goes back so far, it seems. Some people aren’t interested in doing the research. We have common names. We are from a typically inconspicuous rural lifestyle, so there aren’t a lot of newspaper mentions.
I haven’t done any real genealogy research, the extent of my primary searches have come from old digitized newspaper copy, but I do enjoy digging through the hard, good work of others.
So in this conversation today I realized there were names I’d forgotten and names I couldn’t recall ever knowing. I started searching. I got back an extra generation and found two new surnames. I also found the obituary of my great-great grandfather. He was a World War I draftee, and died in his home. He was survived by his wife and four children, including my great-grandmother.
(Update, from several years later … In digging this up to search out one key point, I now think I was wrong about the people in the family tree. I can’t find the original thread anymore, and later clicking and surfing has given me other names. So I’ve put a strike through the parts below that now seem erroneous. Still, one side of my family was Dutch, though.)
These were the ads on the obituary page of The Alabama Courier (Athens, Ala.) on Thursday, February 28, 1946. (The Courier was established in 1892 and merged with the Limestone Democrat in 1969. They’ve been publishing as the News Courier since.)
Miss your loved ones? Bury yourself in work! The nuts and bolts of the Army Air Corps will see you through! The coveralls are free, but you’ll earn the stripes.
This is from the Ads You Don’t See Anymore department of the newspaper:
I couldn’t find any mention of the Clem Brothers Gin, but I’ll ask around. The closest thing I can find is a lumber concern over in Georgia.
Ahhh, a glamorous night out on the town. You’ve put on your best coat, your wife is wearing that beautiful dress. And the maitre’ de can set you up at the best table! “We’ll take the milk. Christopher’s.”
“Garçon! This is from a different dairy. Please take it back.”
I can’t figure out if this was the local logo or something that died out before the muscle car era, but here’s the Dodge ad:
A man named Robert Mills had worked at Draper Motor Company for about a year when this ad came out. After a decade on the lot he bought the dealership in 1955. It stayed open at least until he retired, in 1979. Can’t find anything about the place after that.
The Plaza Theater was on the square in neighboring Athens:
The movie, West of Pinto Basin, was released six years before, in 1940. My how the world changed in between. The IMDB blurb for the movie: “Three cowboys fight a saloon owner who is trying to grab up all the local land by engineering stagecoach robberies so an irrigation dam can’t be built.”
Can’t miss, right? It is a durable plot. Shows up in a lot of westerns.
Here’s the Zorro serial, in full:
Three people are killed and a stagecoach crashes off a cliff into a creek in the story’s first two minutes, before the first word is spoken. They do a great cliffhanger at the end of the episode, too. (You can watch the entire story at the Internet Archive.
And, yes, the title says Zorro, but the character is Black Whip. Released in 1944, the serial was meant to capitalize off of a 20th Century Fox remake of The Mark of Zorro. Republic couldn’t get Zorro, and so this was how they solved the problem. (See? Hollywood has been out of ideas before.) The serial is set in Idaho and the main theme is a fight to prevent and ensure statehood by the villains and heroes respectively. You wonder if other territories had other Zorro spinoff franchisees. A different color, a different weapon and some hero could pay a few royalties to the Big Z and save the day, and probably a few Hollywood production companies, too.
One last thing on the Zorro serial: James Lileks has a theory that projects from this period always have a Star Trek tie. So I ran the entire cast and crew through the Star Trek filter — it zooms along at warp speed don’t ya know … — and found exactly one match. Tom Steele was a stuntman on Black Whip. He started in 1932 and worked until the mid-1980s. He appeared in Bread and Circuses as Slave #2. He has the best stuntman bio ever:
Stuntmen are often selected because of their resemblance to the star they are doubling for. In contrast to this, many of Republic Pictures’ western stars in the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Allan Lane, Bill Elliot, Rex Allen and Monte Hale, were selected in part due to their resemblance to Steele, who would do their stunts.
The Added Joy? It was a cartoon short from 1937, back when Mel Blanc was uncredited.
But I digress. The Plaza opened in 1939 and sat 340 people. (The city itself had about 4,300 at the time.) In 1954 a newspaper ad said the theatre would be closed temporarily starting in June, but it never reopened.
Here’s where the theater stood:
Last year, the Courier reported that a non-profit community organization that prettifies the downtown area asked the current owner of the building, a pharmacist, to improve the façade of the old theater. The dilapidated stucco came down, the brick underneath was still in good condition.
BABY CHICKS – The KIND THAT LIVE. As opposed to the chicks that, you know, die.
It verily screams out at you on the obits page.
Anyway. In my paternal grandfather’s family I gained an extra generation — Smith’s are tough to trace at a casual glance — dating back to my great-great-grandfather.
Now, my paternal grandfather’s mother? She told me when I was very young about some uncles who fought in the Civil War. I was young enough to be enthralled by this, but not smart enough yet to ask if she knew any details. If she were still here I might be able to tell her a few things after this bit of reading.
It was her father’s obituary we started discussing here. I picked up a thread on rootsweb that allows me to go back 13 more generations. Assuming these various people’s hard work is correct (I see a few logic errors in chronology in some peripheral details, but let’s assume the big stuff is accurate) we can go back to a man named Eltekens, in 16th century Midwolda, Groningen, Netherlands.
The Hendricks family, again I didn’t even know this name until today, came over to the New World in 1662. (In my mother’s family a young man came over on the Mayflower, so my roots are fairly deep, it seems.) Albertus Hendrickssen became Albert Hendricks. He was a house carpenter, owned land in Pennsylvania and was a constable and a juror.
This would have been his land around the turn of the 18th century:
Albert’s particular son that matters to this story, Johannes (or John), was a shipbuilder. His second wife extends the chain a bit closer to my family. He had two children in Philadelphia before dying in 1709. It was John’s son, James, that moved the family south. He found himself in North Carolina in the early 1740s. He had nine sons and “several unknown daughters as he left no will.”
James Jr. changed Hendricks to Hendrix. He is believed to have fought in the Revolutionary War. James Jr.’s son, Larkin, moved the family to Alabama in 1830 or earlier.
Larkin’s son, William, and grandson, Joseph, lived through the Civil War — though I don’t know if they fought. Joseph also read about World War I and the Great Depression in the local paper. He was a farmer, and he died in 1933 at the age of 88. His son was James, the World War I draftee, my great-great-grandfather at the beginning of this post.
At least one branch of my family tree has been in that county for nine generations and 180 years. It’s only been a county for 196 years. (They should really own more property don’t you think?)
All of this is more than you wanted, of course. But when you do this sort of thing it is good to write it down and make good sense of it all. That way you can bore your friends endlessly at parties.
