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Hedge hogging

The most productive accomplishment of the day was in trimming the hedges. This is no small thing, as our house is surrounded on three sides by shrubbery. I’m not sure why the southernmost side is bare.

Everything along the front, save the door, the sidewalk and the garage, are bordered with green, growing things. All but one segment was trimmed. The lucky ones — and isn’t that just like a bunch of bushes, bragging to their neighbors? “You got chopped up, but I’m still here. Look at me grow! — I left alone because they’ll probably be dug out of the ground in a few weeks. Others along the front got lowered, including one that borders the garage. We’ve developed a little contour into it for the car’s side mirror.

There are also two at the end of the drive. These must be maintained to preserve the proper turning ratio as one backs out of the drive. This requires the acquisition of surveying tools, and chalk lines. I am the only person in America going through such precise measurements.

The unintended benefit, or consequence, is that one of them is growing around the mailbox post. I’d let it grow over the thing, but that would probably violate some nuance of the neighborhood and only make the mail carrier mad.

I do all of this, by the way, with the 24-inch Black & Decker Hedge Hog, which is like mounting an M-60 onto Excalibur and plugging an extension cord into the hilt. You hit the trigger, feel that dual blade action, wave it above your head and know: your kingdom is only limited by your vision.

And municipally recognized property lines.

Trimming up the northern side of the estate required the ladder, because there are some bushes on steroids on that side of the house. Two of them would have been easier to reach from the roof.

So I’m standing on the top of a multi-use ladder. We have a transformer of aluminum that makes shapes that are only limited by your imagination, and not its contortion. I dutifully set the ladder into a standard A configuration, straddling the center hinge point with a foot on either side. I realized I couldn’t reach the very back of the bush. OK then. So I find myself standing on the top of the A, in the hinge-point, waving about a whirring 24-bladed saw with shark teeth moving at 2,900 strokes per minute.

My kingdom is suddenly a lot less interesting from this vantage point. I climbed down quickly.

The curious thing about the greenery here is that there is a lot of variety. Once the offending shrubs are out of the front there will only be one place surrounding the entire structure where you see two of the same species next to one another. I haven’t yet decided if that’s a feature or a bug. If you had to dig them all up, every annoying root, what would you replace them with? Uniformity or everything that could grow in this climate?

And that’s the sort of thing you think about as you rake away the leaves leavings. That’s some way to start your Friday evening.

YouTube Cover Theatre, where we see the talent that people have, until the advent of webcams and the Internet, people were hiding in their homes. Since Irecently watched the George Harrison documentary, we may as well check out covers of some of his work.

The Beatles weren’t my band. I like them fine, they just don’t belong to me. Wrong generation. But, if I had been in the right group, I think Harrison would have been my favorite of the bunch. And since you can’t have Harrison without the band, we’ll start with a cover of All Those Years Ago:

That looks like an impossibly difficult tune and he did a nice job. Then he leaned back against his den’s wood paneled walls and enjoyed the rest of his evening.

This cover of My Sweet Lord has received 26,000 views, which may be the largest count that we’ve ever seen in YouTube Cover Theater. Aside, is it just me, or has this song always sounded like it should be appropriated as commercial bed music?

One of the cool things about the Beatles, I would think, would be introducing what has essentially become timeless music to kids. I mean the clean cut, less drugs portion of the catalog. And while this is essentially a Paul McCartney tune, Harrison wrote the main riff, which is enough of an excuse to show a cute cover by a father serenading his daughter for her second birthday.

When she’s older she’s going to be humming Beatles tunes and won’t remember why. Then she’s going to stumble through her dad’s YouTube uploads and it will all click. It will be adorable.

Hard to believe it has been 10 years since George Harrison died. I was doing a network newscast at the time, the last segment of which was a 30 second spot and outro. That day I just played this song for 30 seconds and signed off:

Just for fun, here’s a recreation of Harrison’s Bangladesh Concert with members of Wonderous Stories, Alan Parsons Live Project and more, covering Wah Wah:

Other things happened today, too, emails and organizational things. We’ll have wrapped up the latest big project at work by the first part of the week, it seems my part has largely been completed, except for showing up at the various events next week. Homecoming at Samford means advisory council meetings and wall of fame induction ceremonies and all of the attendant activities.

With those things now completed I can return to other work. Like digging up shrubs.

friends / history / journalism / links / memories / Monday / music / Samford / site / video — 1 Comment
17
Oct 11

… Any road will take you there

” … wants to be friends with you on Facebook” was sitting in my inbox this morning.

But they should send these with a greater nod to suspense. I’m already friends with everyone that a.) I know today who b.) wants to be my friend and c.) is on Facebook.

A new invitation is either spam, which isn’t exciting, a mistake, which may as well be spam or some new person I’ve recently met. I haven’t made any new acquaintances in the last few days.

This leaves one possibility: some old person.

Of course you know that in the first two words of the email. There’s the name, and the higher part of the brain speaks with the lower part of the brain, and they conference in the memory section and the assessment nodule for a big decision. Is this a person? The person? Shall we be friends? That is to say, make it digitally official, because permission has been sought.

Go up to the next person you meet that you like and say “I want to be your friend,” while holding up a “Confirm” button. It can’t me any more awkward an interaction, but I digress.

In the first tow words, the name of this person, you know. And I knew this name, even as it was a slightly shortened version for the man of the boy I once knew. After I pushed the little blue button and spent a few seconds looking through his profile and the first two or three pictures I was sure. Same guy. By then you know what the person is doing with their life.

Now. If you’d approached me any time within the last 10 years and told me what his job would be I would have thought “Yeah, well, that figures.”

Which makes you wonder. How often do career paths and life choices surprise you when you discover lost people online?

Most everyone I’ve stumbled upon, or sought out, seem to be doing well for themselves. There are lots of young families, successes and just a few difficult-sounding jobs. Most of them just seem to be in the places you would expect. That’s not uninteresting, for some that’s just knowing which path takes us where you need to be.

I suspect the online platforms have reshaped reunions. No one has to be surprised, anymore, about what became of anyone else, how they look and if they’re still with that dolt they wasted their time on when they were young and foolish and —

I just discovered a Facebook page about my high school. The theme is “You know you went here if.” Most of it is banal or beyond prosaic. One comment says “If you assumed school was closed on the first day of hunting season.”

Before that you can find a post for people who still live in that community alerting parent/alumni to watch out for a green truck that seems to be lurking near a truck stop. There’s also a death list. A few people have developed a master list of people that have died. A grim and valuable service, no doubt.

Ha. I love this. That community was basically two parallel roads, and in between was the school and a set of railroad tracks. Probably half of the student body had to cross the tracks to make it to school every day. There was an old gentleman who lived right next to the tracks. Just found a note about him. Once my mother insisted we take him a little fruit basket, and now I’m very glad she thought of that:

He was my grandfather. Everyone just doesn’t know what it meant to him for all of the kids to go by and wave to him. He passed away in 92.

He’d sit on his porch every morning and afternoon in his co-op cap and overalls and wave. If it rained, or he did not feel well, he would wave from one of his windows. He’s been gone 20 years. His house has been gone for almost as long, but judging by those comments generations of people think of him every time they have to slow down for those railroad tracks.

That’s enough Facebook for this month.

Class prep today. I wrote a terrific lecture on photojournalism. As an experiment I’m blending pictures I’ve taken with pictures working photojournalists have shot. We’ll see how many times I’m found out. I’m guessing: each time.

Think I’ll mention this, too:

Justin Elliott writes that The Washington Post “chose an image of a bearded protester seeming to assault a cop to illustrate a movement that has been overwhelmingly — almost without exception — nonviolent.” The image shows an Occupy Wall Street protester with his arm around a police officer’s neck. Andrew Burton, the freelance photographer who captured the image, tells Elliott that he doesn’t know what sparked the confrontation and that due to the melee he didn’t even know he had captured that image until later. The ”vast majority of the protests have been incredibly peaceful,” Burton says.

And people think confrontation is news, mostly because it is. But is it representative? The debate continues.

There’s also a current events quiz, featuring exactly no questions about Occupy Wall Street. I would pass it, says the guy who wrote the thing, but it won’t be an easy one to take if you hadn’t been reading or watching the news.

A new section of the site:

These are some of my grandfather’s books. I inherited them a few years ago, and have been scanning a few of the images inside his old texts. Figured they’d make an interesting section, so here we begin. Just a few pages a week, starting with the English literature textbook. Some are intended to be funny, others insightful. Hopefully you’ll find them all interesting, especially if you have a taste in 60 year old books.

There’s a small tidbit in this book that will come up in a few weeks that show my grandfather’s road from a young age, too.

This post was written while listening to the George Harrison documentary. There’s a moment with an archival Harrison interview were he talks about the “inward journey” of meditation and “far out” in the same sentence. There is, of course, an overwhelming discussion on the drugs, and a dire need for a razor and sharp scissors, but that’s just the period. (Hah, here’s a history of the band in hairstyles. They were so in tune with the universe back then, you know.) I recommend the documentary …

… even if Phil Spector is in it.

iPhone / journalism / memories / overwriting / photo / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
13
Oct 11

Math and rain, and also traffic

I drove through that this morning. As it was later described, by several people, as “Suddenly here” and “hurricane-like.”

That last description came from a writer, so we’ll excuse the hyperbole. Even still, it was an imposing wall of active weather.

And I drove through two of them. The second was less impressive, but no less guilty of fraying the nerves of other drivers. Apparently it has been a while since it rained here — checking the drought monitor, why, yes, severe and extreme drought — because no one remembers how to drive in this stuff.

“I seem to recall something about hazard lights and … what was that other thing? Oh, BRAKES!”

Usually, applying a little less pressure to the accelerator and coasting to a speed slightly more comfortable allows one to press on, but not these good drivers. No sir. Today was a 45-mile-per-hour rain, which is to say that’s the speed I could safely maintain on the interstate in the heart of the storm.

Old timers remember a time of a 10-mile-per-hour rain, but their grandchildren, at Thanksgiving, just sigh and roll their eyes. “Not the monsoon story again, grandpa … ”

I recall stopping more with my grandparents in the rain than I’ve done myself, and my grandfather was a truck driver. He’d know from road weather. I have stopped for rain exactly twice in my driving career. Once it was raining so hard I mildly feared for my life. The other time it was merely difficult to see. And I believe it was late in the day and all the crazies were on the road.

No problems in the storms today, though, happily. The pine tree frontier was uneventful. Made it back to civilization just as the roads dried and the traffic thinned. I was able to stop by an engraving shop and ordered gifts for this year’s inductees to the Samford JMC Wall of Fame. Two gentlemen, alumni, success stories, are going on the great wall. They also need plaques.

Visited one of my banks, where I filled out paperwork. I will not be surprised at all to receive a phone call in three weeks informing me that the paperwork was incorrectly done and will need further attention. The helpful young teller was new and she knew as much about this particular procedure as I did. And I’m sure this will cost me $6. Processing fees, you understand.

On campus I received marching orders. I marched to and fro, doing things that were asked of me. I discovered, just before class, that I’d almost duplicated a colleague’s plan, almost to the letter. This required a last minute change of plans for my afternoon lecture.

I discussed math for journalists. Everyone wins.

Here I wrote some other things, my browser crashed and the WordPress draft sequence didn’t kick in. This is frustrating, but you’re not missing much. There was a story about bumper-to-bumper traffic and how, for the first time in the history of overcrowded interstates and freeway construction, it was beneficial. There was also a whimsical anecdote about the moon, which was lovely tonight.

I made this, though, so enjoy. I’ve put a few of these up here in the past, but not for some time. Thought I’d do this one, since I shot it from the hip today and remembered how much I like raindrops on glass. Something about the focus of the droplets and the blurring of the world beyond. I want to write about rain, there’s some great meaning behind it all, but precipitation isn’t my strongest subject matter, it seems. Best leave it to the experts:

Rain more. We need it.

adventures / football / iPhone / memories / Monday / video — Comments Off
10
Oct 11

The video that wraps the weekend

It is Monday — I am on fall break. There is a chill in the air. It is raining. I am still sick. (At times I think I am getting better; other times my sinuses and respiratory system are in full revolt.)

So, naturally today is a lot of fun.

Here’s a quick video from Saturday in South Bend, though. Aviation buffs will love the clips around the :45 second mark. Enjoy the whole thing:

All of this was shot on the iPhone and edited on my Macbook, during which I had the sniffles, the hacking coughs or the shivers.

An Apple a day keeps the doctor away, eh?

history / journalism / memories / photo / weekend — Comments Off
11
Sep 11

September 11, 2001-2011

Condensed and reprinted, for the final time I think, from notes I wrote in 2003.

It was my first week working in a new newsroom Little Rock. The top local story of the day was the Little Rock Zoo regaining its accreditation. The anchors there could not pronounce “accreditation” correctly, but that was the big story for the day.

A phone call from our traffic reporter, just landed from his morning flight, started like this “You might want to tell the (people on air) to turn on a TV, a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center and they are talking about the zoo.”

I made my way into the studio to announce that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

As they got up to speed the second plane hit the opposite tower. Bryant Gumbel was interviewing an eye witness. A camera was pointed up into the sky. The eye witness broadcast the second plane crashing. It could no longer be an accident.

My producer later told me that I was so surprised, watching it happen in real time, that I just announced it out loud. He could hear me two rooms away.

I called for New York on one phone, dialing the NYC area codes and pushing random numbers hoping for a connection. Because so much communications equipment was tied into the Towers, seemingly the whole borough was down. I wanted to say “Stick your head outside and tell me what you see.”

In my other ear I was on a phone call with the Pentagon. They aren’t confirming it was a terrorist attack, but they are looking into it, a spokesman says. Moments later I tried to reach my Pentagon source again, but there was no answer. We find out a moment later that a plane has crashed there.

I learned about a year later that the office of the guy I was talking to was located not very far from the impact site at the Pentagon.

We started calling local officials to try and make a local angle on the story, it’s what you do on a huge story far removed from your location. There was a bomb threat called in to a prominent Little Rock building. An announcement was made that planes nationwide are being pulled out of the sky. They all land at the first airport that has an appropriate runway. This is unprecedented in the nation’s history of flight. (And a remarkable feat of logistics, looking back.)

I dashed across town to the airport. I’m to talk to people getting off planes. I get to ask these people “What have you heard? What did they tell you on the plane? How does it feel to know that, but for the grace of God, ‘there go I’?”

As I arrive at the airport, the first building collapsed on itself. ABC’s Peter Jennings, now being simulcast on radio, very somberly says, “Oh my God.”

The airport was packed. I’ve lived here for less than a week and have already been in the airport five times. Now there’s confusion. Tears. Cell phones and scrambling for rental cars and hotels. I talked to dozens of people. They all had stories.

Some were travelling across country, heading to the northeast. One flight was told they were having mechanical difficulties and had to land. It wasn’t until they could called their loved ones that they knew. One man wasn’t sure he could find Arkansas on a map. A Sikh was there alone. In his eyes, he knew. He seemed to already understand what had happened on a level the rest of us would come to grasp in the coming days. He was afraid. I still wonder about him.

We did great work for the next 10 hours, about 15 in total for the day. I was proud to be a part of that product. I finally made it home in time to watch the Congressional leadership and the still-stirring end to their press conference.