memories


15
Feb 17

A little something for a lot of people

Here’s your mid-week upside down motivation, brought to you by Allie The Black Cat:

She’s always concerned about morale, now if only she could read, so she’d know the words were upside down.

She spends enough time staring at screens and books and paper. Maybe she thinks she can read. Maybe she just looked at that upside down. Maybe I’m the one that is wrong. Maybe she actually can read. Anything is possible, it says.

We went for a run late this evening, before it was time to head back into the studio. I thought we would be running indoors, so I just had shorts and a t-shirt. But we ran outside, where the windchill was 34 degrees. I am smart. So I got in five miles before I had to cut it short to go back to work. I didn’t get my full eight, but I did get this view after I showered and set out to walk back to my building:

That’s going to be a banner on the site one day soon, I think.

These two pictures are from last night. The news show I oversee now has a weather segment. This was from last night, when we finally broke in the green screen. Pretty cool opportunity for the folks studying the weather:

I spent some time in the control room last night, too. Mostly because there are a lot of lights and cool buttons in there:

Things to readHere by the owl:

CADIZ, Ohio — Don Jones supports students as an FFA adviser, represented by the owl during FFA meetings.

In FFA tradition, the owl is a time-honored emblem of knowledge and wisdom, and Jones has served in the adviser’s role for 22 years. Some of his students jokingly refer to him as the “wise old owl.”

In his classroom at Harrison Central Junior and Senior High School, he provides real lessons for real life as the agricultural education teacher. He sees 140 students a day, in grades 7-12.

Being the only educator in the program, with just one classroom, he has to turn away students from his program, which is an elective for the nearly 650 youth at Harrison Central.

That headline is no accident. That’s actually part of the opening ceremony the FFA uses at levels ranging from school meetings to the national convention. The teacher, or the adviser, is represented by the owl.

Last year I wrote about my advisors:

I had many valuable experiences, and this could go on and on, but the most important thing the FFA gave to me was the leadership of two good men. Mr. Swaffield and Mr. Caddell were battle-tested teachers. They are two solid, stand up, good, decent, morally upright father figures I benefitted from as a teenager, when a boy needs them most.

Scott Pelley, Lester Holt, David Muir: The Unprecedented Joint Interview:

And, finally: Lost songs of Holocaust found in University of Akron archives:

In the summer of 1946, the psychologist interviewed at least 130 Jewish survivors in nine languages in refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. With a wire recorder — then considered state-of-the-art equipment — and 200 spools of steel wire, Boder preserved some of the first oral histories of concentration camp survivors. He also recorded song sessions and religious services.

A portion of Boder’s work has been archived at The University of Akron’s Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology since 1967. But it wasn’t until a recent project to digitize the recordings got under way that a spool containing the “Henonville Songs,” performed in Yiddish and German and long thought lost, was discovered in a mislabeled canister.

As I’ve said before: A significant portion of the 21st century is going to go toward the preservation of the works of the 20th.


14
Feb 17

My sun-eating Valentine

Some pictures are worth remembering. Some pictures you just know perfectly. I have about 13-plus years worth of snapshots on my website. And after Lauren, earlier today, posted a picture of the two of us from our 2013 trip to Ireland I wondered if I could recall the first one of her I uploaded.

The sun-eating one, I figured, had to be high up the list. And so I went back through our early months of knowing one another. I scrolled through the people we knew, most all of whom have kept us around, since then, until there I was, 12 years ago. February 2005. I remember the night I took this picture going down the highway, and that one is probably from a library, because I have always liked repetition in my pictures. These next two are at a Super Bowl party in Five Points we were invited to.

The Patriots beat the Eagles in that game. Paul McCartney was the halftime show. (I had to look this up.)

And, oh look, here are a few sunsets and clouds. And there she was. The 10th photo I uploaded in February 2005, the first one of her.

We were in her car. I know precisely where that was, two cities, two jobs (for each of us) and one car ago. She was probably taking me home after work one day. We were carpooling at the time. We’re traveling north, to soon turn west.

That next weekend we got invited to a dinner party — (thanks again, Laura!) and sometime after that we realized we were getting invited to places. That people in our little world thought of us as a package deal. I skimmed through the rest of the 2005 series of photographs. Jamie​ shows up, and so does Greg​ and Brian​. Look, there’s Justin​ and RaDonna​ and Wendy​, too! There are family shots in there, also. There are pictures of colorful people that you pass by in life. There are blurry, low-res, sometimes underexposed pictures in the collection. There are trips and sports and bands and Lauren figures into most of all of those pictures, somehow, even though she’s not in a lot of them. That’s how you remember, though, the circumstances and the stories and the time you went to the place and saw the thing and tried the unusual item on the menu. “Who” is how you remember those. Some are worth remembering. Some you just know perfectly.


13
Feb 17

A thing from a few weeks ago is still really funny

The new video on the front page of the site looks something like this:

I just happened to be walking by the “river” outside of our building and saw that bright green glow of the moss. That caught my eye. Not Spring!, as a season, but the season of Almost Spring!. It gets your attention. I stood there admiring it for a moment and I realized I was in the right spot, and the sun was at the proper angle, to carry out a little light show.

Standard Monday. A lot of email, and then wondering around and the doing of a few things to be useful in some other capacity.

I finished a book at lunch today, The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins, the former U.S. attorney who would go on to write some 30 books. It is a crime novel, and probably some 70 percent or more of the text are quotes and it zips along. I think I read it over three or four lunches. Everyone says it has the best dialog around. In it, you get an idea of what people think, even a U.S. attorney, who had the job of prosecuting bad guys, thinks it sounds like to live in that world.

It was Higgins’ first novel and Dennis Lehane, another wildly successful novelist of the genre, says in the foreword that everyone is just trying to be Higgins now, even Higgins, was, he says, in his much-too-short career.

I probably won’t go read more of him, because I don’t read a lot of fiction in general. (Today I checked out a memoir, a biography and two history books.) I picked Eddie Coyle up sometime back at the library because the author Elmore Leonard said it was his favorite book, and I like Leonard’s work. I would watch the movie, however.

The best part was it didn’t really have a natural beginning. You were just thrust into things as the reader. And the end, well, the end had its own circular swirl that suggests, perhaps, why Higgins had decided to leave the law and go to the typewriter.

Good book, though. I’m going to read a war story, next, I suppose.

This evening in honor of 12 years of being together, The Yankee and I went out for dinner. We went to the local ichiban steakhouse, which is the preferred style of meal for select ritual occasions. I think this is the fifth or sixth different actual restaurant we’ve enjoyed over the years. And this one is the least crowded of them all.

We had our own private table. No, by the time the chef arrived the neighboring table was standing up to leave. We had our own private room. I do this romantic dinner setting stuff right.

And the chef said maybe three sentences the entire meal. Oh, sure, he warmed up by doing all of the latest spins and twists and twirls, but it reminded me of the clown character that is playing happy, but really is sad. Since there were no other children for him to show off for, I paid close attention. Soon after expressing his sorrow through the twirling of his spatula, though, he just cooked. Which was fine. I’ve seen most of the tricks and the jokes aren’t really all of that great.

I did find myself missing the choo-choo onion volcano, though.

Boy, that’s not a sentence you heard and thought I have to steal that!

Anyway, 12 years. It was a dinner party and we played a board game and then the next day we were hanging out again and we later decided that was the proper date to observe, for observational purposes. And on the night in which we observed 12 years of being together I got another version of one of the truly great moments in our relationship. I told a story, recounting my side of a text conversation we’d had a while back, taking on this pretend frustration for theatrical effect, and she laughed for approximately six straight minutes. The seriously involved kind of laugh, the face scrunched up, doubled over hands on knees, you don’t let up sort of laugh.

I’d trade a lot for those moments. It’d be foolish not to.


8
Feb 17

Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow

To break up my 11-hour day I went for a run. And just after we started jogging, The Yankee and I, we went by a window and saw snow flakes. And so being indoors was a good idea. Because I could look like this:

But we ran in this gym instead:

That’s Wildermuth, an intramural facility, where I ran eight miles tonight. From 1928 until 1960 it was the home of the basketball team. And, on this day in 1946, it looked like this:

I’m glad I never had to stand in line to register for a college class. I think my freshman year my alma mater was on their second year of phone registration. At an orientation session they plopped in a VHS tape and made us watch a corny — even by the standards of the day — video about how to sign up for classes. But that system only lasted a few more years. Before I graduated they were doing it all online.

Not in line, online. And that probably changed things, too.

Anyway, a few more views on my snowy walk back from Wildermuth to Franklin Hall, where a sports show was recorded tonight:

You reach a certain point with these sort of pictures where you think “Hey, more snow. Yeah, yeah.” And that is almost always just behind “I can’t feel my hands.”

And as an aside about nothing, we had gumbo for dinner tonight. So I washed the dishes while listening

A Louisiana boy singing Delta and soul blues while snow was on the ground outside.

It makes perfect sense while you’re standing at the kitchen sink.


3
Feb 17

I remembered to forget to remember

Some kind of busy day. It started last night.

I got in at about 10 p.m. last night, just in time for frozen pizza and then bed. Woke up a half hour earlier than usual this morning. I grabbed a bit of breakfast on the way into the office and, when I got there, I loaded up a cart worth of stuff to send to the surplus store.

If you need a handful of old standard definition television cameras or other outdated gear, I know where you can get it.

After that, the morning show:

The two ladies on the right are national champion cheerleaders. They told me it gets harder every year. They’d know. One has two championships, the other has three. Their team has won five of the last six titles. Harder every year. But, for one, her cheer career is almost over. She wants to work in that business, perhaps as a coach. The other is planning to go to medical school.

So this was the second episode of the new morning show. It looks promising and you’ll see it here when they upload it.

I pretty much lived in the studio today. After the morning show there was anchor training and then some other folks came in and used the room for some interviews. We did critiques of the news shows and then I went back to the studio for more of those interviews and a series of pesky emails and so on.

When the day was over I headed to the grocery store. On the way I found a local country station, a 3,800 watt shop with a liner that says “Fox News is coming up next, after this country classic!”

And then Elvis played. “Devil in Disguise.” Even in 1963, with his powers not yet fading, saw that song go top ten on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B charts. That was no country song. Neither was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” but it showed up a few songs later. There was also Linda Ronstadt and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and there was nothing wrong with any of that. But Elvis? Or, that Elvis?

He had 54 hits on the country charts, including 11 number ones. Altogether, he stayed on the country chart for almost 12 years. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of contradiction on the individual song data online, but this was Elvis’ most successful country song:

Thirty-nine weeks on the country charts. It was written by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers wrote it, two more Mississippi boys. It was covered by everyone so it is basically a standard. Should have heard that on the radio.

Oh, which reminds me, I met Elvis once:

Barbecue restaurant, out in the pine tree woods of Georgia, like you do.