I’m pretty sure I developed my prowling and curiosity at my grandparents’ place. So many things you didn’t see all of the time, so many things that were different than what little you knew about anything. So many things that spanned ages of time — to a child at least. A lot of stuff got kept by my grandparents — and yet my grandmother also had a clean house.
But the storage building out back … well, I spent all afternoon in there today. We spent time in there as children, probably hide-and-seek and trying to figure out the boxes and stacks of things. I’m sure some of this stuff hasn’t been touched in years, or more. And today I glanced around a few rooms, but concentrated on the books.
I found a few other things too, but this was the first thing I found:
This was a pre-kindergarten gift I’d received. I could place that based on the sudden memories that returned. I hadn’t thought about this helmet in decades, and suddenly there it was in my hands. We were in the apartments at the time, so before I was in school. It explained why I liked guys like Art Monk and Gary Clark and why I’ve always found the Washington Redskins’ color scheme to be one of my favorite. Turns out I was programmed early. I believe this helmet, and some toy shoulder pads and a jersey and so on, were a gift from an aunt.
I’d literally walked into the outbuilding, turned right, stepped up into the first of two side rooms, walked through there and into the back room. You could walk a few short steps in before your path is blocked by boxes and such. I looked down in the first one and found that helmet.
“This was mine,” I said to my grandfather, “and I’m taking it with me … If you don’t mind.”
Of course he did not. I’d cleaned part of the storage area for him and took a few other things off his hands that he wouldn’t have to deal with, books and other things. I found some things he’d want and a few things my mother would like to have.
Later, she pulled out an old photo album, most of the contents inside being older than her. Inside were pictures of her grandparents:
I have a few memories of him, but not her.
Here’s another photograph that was inside that albums, my mother, my uncle, their parents and my mother’s father’s parents.
I found two letters from my great-grandfather, W.K., to his son, my grandfather, standing behind him in that photo. Aubra was away at college. In one note his dad was reminding him to write his mother. In the other letter he explained that he could not afford to give him a car and put him through school — the more things change, right? — and gently explained why he had said this or that about some choice the younger man was considering.
I found a book my mother and uncle gave to their mother when they were very young. They’d inscribed it for Mother’s Day. And Mom told me about the last birthday card she got from her mom, a little girl on a beach and the note she’d written in it, which fits pretty much everything.
And so on this Thanksgiving, difficult or joyous or perfectly routine, I suppose it isn’t enough to be thankful for what you have, but what you had and what you remember.
Winter is coming, and months early. But we were warned. Our friendly neighborhood meteorologists and our bombastic national media chicken littles have been trying to get our attention about it for days. I haven’t doubted the forecasts, but it would be hard to believe based simply on your observation.
It was beautiful today. Chamber of commerce weather doesn’t do it justice. Someone struck a Faustian deal for the conditions we enjoyed today and at least one end of that ill-considered deal was upheld. This might be the end of our peak fall.
(It usually lasts about three days to a week.)
Knowing that it would be the last pleasant day for a while — there are models that suggest we won’t be warm again the rest of the month — I went out for a run this evening. I’ve never been on the trail across the street from campus, but I figured out a way to do a little extra and make it a 10K.
I finished up in darkness, on a part of the path where I couldn’t see my feet. Fortunately no ankles were twisted. But I did run through sections where it was remarkably cooler here than it was there. This wasn’t just my perception, I had to run through it twice. It was like being in a canyon where the temperature drops 10 degrees simply based on the terrain. Only I wasn’t in a canyon. More like a tunnel. An office building sealed off the big road artery, woods were on the opposite side and there was a strong tree canopy overhead.
But it was a fine run. I even did some intervals.
Intervals at the end of a six-mile jog. I do not know what is happening.
Things to read … so you’ll know what is happening.
Happy Veterans Day, indeed, and thank you to my many family members and friends who have served or continue to do so. All four of my grandmother’s brothers served. That whole family is full of camo, olive drab and a sprinkling of Air Force blue. I have had the good fortune to be friends with Marine reservists, Army veterans and active duty personnel and I read a lot. All of that tells me only this, the sacrifice others make through hardship, deprivation and loss are things that the rest of us will have difficulty ever knowing. And we’re definitely blessed in what we don’t know; but perhaps we shortchange all of those between us and that by not having a better understanding.
I had the great privilege of seeing these Marines graduate a few years ago:
A friend shared this link today and it is a reminder that it isn’t just the serviceman or servicewoman who is given a sacrifice: A Marine’s Parents’ Story
And, as I said on Twitter this evening, every war is different, indeed every person’s war is different. But if you read nothing else after the story above, I encourage you to read Ernie Pyle’s A long thin line of personal anguish:
Here in a jumbled row for mile on mile are soldiers’ packs. Here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out – one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked.
Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes. Here are broken-handled shovels, and portable radios smashed almost beyond recognition, and mine detectors twisted and ruined.
Here are torn pistol belts and canvas water buckets, first-aid kits and jumbled heaps of lifebelts. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why I picked it up, or why I put it back down.
That line, for a reason I have never been able to explain, punches me, hard, every time. That entire column, like so much of Pyle’s war work, gets right to the heart of what it is to be in a hard time.
David Turnley had so much to say on the matter of street shooting and his experiences of so many decades of work, and I was so overloaded with joy and the relevant information he brought to the table based on real experience from a career as a humanitarian and war photographer, that it was hard to capture everything he was saying, but some important things he shared with us did manage to stick with me.
The task force says radio is “perpetually declared to be a dying medium” but nevertheless attracts dedicated listeners and commercial and public support. The organizers believe radio’s history is a chronicle of our country’s culture and a potential trove for historical researchers, but that much of it is “untapped” because of radio’s live nature and problems of accessibility to content.
Almost every day there’s something in the bygone ether that I wish I could find online. We’ve become great archivists as amateurs, but if you think about the decades of important work that might have disappeared …
TV stations will one day get a large percentage of their breaking news video from viewers, predicted Rebecca Campbell, president and CEO of the Disney ABC Television Station group.
Speaking Friday in a keynote interview at LiveTV:LA, Campbell said producing local TV news is an increasingly interactive affair, with producers using social media to alert followers to breaking news, and viewers shooting video and sending it to newsrooms.
ABC stations are promoting the trend, Campbell added. “Many of our stations brand themselves as ‘Eyewitness News’ and they’ve begun encouraging viewers to become an eyewitness and send in video when they see news,” she said.
The seminars offered police officers some useful tips on seizing property from suspected criminals. Don’t bother with jewelry (too hard to dispose of) and computers (“everybody’s got one already”), the experts counseled. Do go after flat screen TVs, cash and cars. Especially nice cars.
In one seminar, captured on video in September, Harry S. Connelly Jr., the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., called them “little goodies.” And then Mr. Connelly described how officers in his jurisdiction could not wait to seize one man’s “exotic vehicle” outside a local bar.
“A guy drives up in a 2008 Mercedes, brand new,” he explained. “Just so beautiful, I mean, the cops were undercover and they were just like ‘Ahhhh.’ And he gets out and he’s just reeking of alcohol. And it’s like, ‘Oh, my goodness, we can hardly wait.’ ”
Carole Hinders at her modest, cash-only Mexican restaurant in Arnolds Park, Iowa. Last year tax agents seized her funds.Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime RequiredOCT. 25, 2014
Mr. Connelly was talking about a practice known as civil asset forfeiture, which allows the government, without ever securing a conviction or even filing a criminal charge, to seize property suspected of having ties to crime.
Now that a crucial section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge has been replaced by a new $6.4 billion span, nobody needs it anymore — nobody except about 800 birds who call the decrepit, 78-year-old segment home.
The double-crested cormorants – protected, though not endangered – have nested along the bridge for decades, and have so far shown no interest in relocating to the shiny new section that replaced the eastern section of the famed bridge. Officials have tried pricey decoys, bird recordings and even specially-made nests installed underneath the new span to lure them roughly 100 feet next door. The effort to demolish the old section, damaged 25 years ago in the massive Loma Prieta earthquake, is being held up by the birds’ unwillingness to move, and critics, who say the delays could cost taxpayers $33 million, are crying fowl.
The first two comments I see on that story?:
Gee I wonder how some moonshiners from Alabama would handle this technical problem? LOL
I guarantee you that Alabama moonshiners would handle it with a lot more logic and common sense than the Californians are handling the problem. By the way, I am not from Alabama so here is no bias on my part.
A few scare shells would probably do the job. Just like the ultimate removal of their preferred structure.
Hey, they’ve already built the birds a replacement home.
This entire day has felt like that moment just before you release the sigh, he said, not fully knowing what that means.
Or … I could try that again.
This entire day has felt like that moment just before you release the sigh, he sighed, knowing exactly what that meant.
Each time I went outside the sky was this light, slate gray. Even the grays couldn’t be bothered to bring a full palette. Like the sky said “Ya know … forget about it.”
So it was that I found myself bending over to study the leaves on the ground, where there was some actual color. I picked up a few to bring inside for a picture, but I’m not sure why.
All of this probably sounds like I am in a mood, but I am not. Well, I am in a mood, but it can safely be categorized as “good.” I’ve just not been especially impressed by the day.
There was a class though, and there was a newspaper meeting and then some time signing things and copying things and marking up papers. Last night I solved a networking problem. One computer wouldn’t reach anything, a student said. The ethernet cable had been removed. Broken clips sink ships. Today I’m dealing with a scanner problem. Bad software helps the enemy everywhere. Technical support is not my job, but I suppose it is really all of our jobs these days, not unlike wartime security and the old propaganda posters.
I love those old posters. At the Churchill Museum in London I was confronted with an entire room of them I could purchase. My wife and her mother, who were also in the museum, knew I was a lost cause and left me there to go do something else. A friend and former boss owns the poster printing company linked above, with tons of great old art. I’ve spent a lot of time pouring through those as well. In both cases I’ve never managed to buy anything. The next one is always better. There’s that moment before the sigh again, I guess.
Anyway, I can’t make the scanner work with the new computer. I’ve downloaded the things and read all of the forums and installed, changed, rebooted and all of that. I know how to have a good time, boy. Ultimately, though, I’ll need the actual tech folks — the real heroes in any business — come and get this situated.
So I may as well go back to looking through ancient posters — here’s one with a guy in an arm cast and sling in the background with text that says “Don’t get hurt.” In the foreground there’s a GI sprawled out, dead. “It may cost his life.” What a crazy poster to have hanging in the factory —
Suddenly, there’s a big squealing sound. Not the speakers, not the phone, but the scanner, which is in between them. Unplug the scanner, the squeal goes away. Try to scan again, it still will not initialize. There will be no beaming of data this day. We’ll have to send the shuttlecraft, keptin.
This can only mean that later, or some time tomorrow, that random squeal will start again.
Things to read … because reading is never random. (You’ll see. One day.)
If Democrats were going to hold off a Republican tsunami, they needed their base voters to come out to the polls and pull the lever for the president’s party. That didn’t happen where Democrats needed it to. Especially with young voters. Nationally, Democratic base groups — young voters, single women, African-Americans and Latinos — posted numbers that looked more like the Democrats’ 2010 midterm “shellacking” than Obama’s 2012 re-election victory. Most strikingly, voters 18-29 nationwide were only 13% of the electorate in 2014 (compared with 22% for GOP-leaning seniors.) In the 2010 midterms, young voters made up 12% of the voting public. In contrast, during Obama’s re-election victory in 2012, 19% of the electorate was under 30.
Nearly complete election results indicate that about 41 percent of Alabama’s nearly 2.9 million active registered voters participated. A gubernatorial election traditionally attracts more than half of Alabama’s voters.
Maybe if the Democrats would put someone on the statewide ballots …
A West Virginia University freshman who did most of her campaigning out of her dorm room became the youngest state lawmaker in the nation Tuesday.
Republican Saira Blair, a fiscally conservative 18-year-old, will represent a small district in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, about 1½ hours outside Washington, D.C., after defeating her Democratic opponent 63% to 30%, according to the Associated Press. A third candidate got 7% of the vote.
In a statement, Ms. Blair thanked her supporters and family, as well as her opponents for running a positive campaign. “History has been made tonight in West Virginia, and while I am proud of all that we have accomplished together, it is the future of this state that is now my singular focus,” she said.
Ms. Blair campaigned on a pledge to work to reduce certain taxes on businesses, and she also holds antiabortion and pro-gun positions. She defeated Democrat Layne Diehl, a 44-year-old Martinsburg attorney, whose top priorities included improving secondary education and solving the state’s drug epidemic.
Maybe I share that story with students. No pressure, folks.
CBS plans to launch its new digital news channel tomorrow, an effort to get the broadcast network into 24-hour news. CBS Interactive head Jim Lanzone confirmed the company’s plans for the news video site during an onstage interview with me at the Web Summit in Dublin, Ireland
If they do something different with that, they could find some success. If the plan is simply to be a 24-hour news channel online … CNN or MSNBC awaits.
The panel stressed that not all of the old values have been swept away. “It’s really old-fashioned: can I find it out, is it true, can I stand by it? That level of trust is really important,” said Sutcliffe. “I’ve got a story, but does it stand up, is it true, what are my sources?”
“There will be two types of parallel journalism going on – the facts on the ground from people who are there, foreign correspondents, and people like us who filter,” said Little.
Some of the filters will be the same media organisations who employ on-the-ground correspondents, though. Time, for example, has a division focused on breaking news, which is deliberately kept separate from its foreign correspondents.
“We’ve hired a bunch of very young people in New York and Hong Kong and they’re essentially aggregating as a breaking news service: when anything appears from a reliable news organisation, quickly write two or three paragraphs and get it out there,“ he said.
Every quote in that piece is worth reading. I hope the students will give it a glance. You should too.
And then let go of that sigh. Tomorrow is Thursday, and yours is going to be great.
Five years ago we were in Ottawa at a conference. It was a low key trip in a busy time. The conference only allowed for one paper each, so The Yankee and I got to be tourists. We took a walking tour of Ottawa one day, and it was lovely. The sky was overcast and chilly. We got snow flurries and red poppies for Veteran’s Day. We met exceedingly nice people at every turn. We walked through incredibly moving memorials and beautiful gothic revival architecture. It was, I said on Twitter today, a wonderful place to visit as an American. Some things I wrote that day:
We toured Parliament. I gave security fits. It seems the metal detectors there are set to the highest sensitivity. Wrists make them beep. Not watches, but the bones in your body. The security officers were very patient and polite, almost apologetic. But, then, everyone we’ve met in Ottawa has been unfailingly nice.
When we finally made it in we sat through a few minutes of the House of Commons, including their regular question period. We made our way up to the Peace Tower and Memorial Chamber. The Memorial Chamber is a very solemn, quiet place. So much so that I didn’t even take any photographs there. Everywhere else, yes, and they’ll eventually make it into the November gallery when I get that section of the site back up to speed.
The picture above is from the gift shop in the parliament building. The kids working the cash register were not prepared for my line of questions about the Speaker’s Selection syrup. Peter Milliken has been the speaker for forever, they said (since 2001) and so this has likely been the syrup since he took office.
How did he decide on this particular syrup?
“I think it was a blind taste test,” one young lady offered.
But surely not. Milliken is from Ontario, but imagine if he’d chosen a syrup from British Columbia in a blind test. That’d be a bit embarrassing. No, he probably brought his favorite from home. Surely this producer is among his constituency.
Unfortunately I couldn’t bring some home with us. The humorless TSA would not allow it. Perhaps I can order some online.
We visited a fancy mall while looking for hats. Turns out this was the coldest day of the season so far. It was 30 degrees with the occasional flurry and we were out taking pictures all day. The guy working the desk at our hotel directed us to the mall, telling us “You can’t get more Canadian than Roots.” He told us to look for a toque.
This was the sort of mall that made you feel poor just by walking inside. “Authentic Canadian” must mean fooling the Americans. Before we found Roots we found Old Navy. Figuring they would be cheaper we steered that way. Right next to Old Navy was a store called Buck or Two.
Why not? We walked in, found hats right up front and bought two of them. Four bucks.
We found Roots, found the toques. Twenty-six dollars, each.
On our way out of the mall I noted my hat couldn’t get any more American: Made in China.
Take that, desk clerk! You will not be getting any kickbacks tonight!
Sure, we’re staying at the downtown Radisson, but we booked through an online discount site. We = Cheap.
We met some striking museum curators — a noun and modifier that could lend itself to a great band name or a magazine layout. These nice, freezing folks were trying to get better wages and less contract labor in their field. Museum curators are important; these are being replaced, the woman said, by non-experts at a lower wage.
Not Canadian, but what can we do? They urged us to drop this note of protest in the mail to our representatives. My guy wasn’t on the mailing list, what with him living in a different country, but I picked a good sturdy English name from a place I’d like to visit and dropped him a note in the local postal system.
We also saw the Notre Dame Basilica. It is across the street from the art museum — we didn’t go — with the giant spider on the corner. If they make a Night at the Museum III they should start with that. Creepy.We saw black squirrels, the famous canal from which all of Ottawa sprang, Quebec on the other side of the river and some very nice, funky shops.
And, sadly, today all of that was locked down after a shooting at Parliament. It seems the Sergeant-at-Arms put a stop to the chaos. More details will emerge, but at this point one victim, a reservist, and the shooter are dead. The soldier was killed at the national war memorial. The shooter somewhere inside Parliament itself.
A writer wrote that this wasn’t supposed to happen in Canada. We can all sympathize; this sort of thing shouldn’t happen anywhere. Parliament member John Williamson wrote “Parliament Hill is never going to be the same.”
Sad to think of that.
Things to read … because there’s always something to think of.
Steve Herrmann says verification is the main challenge when dealing with user-generated content.
“The biggest challenge of all is establishing something is true and retaining peoples’ trust at a time when information is moving so fast it can be very, very hard to check.”
He says that although the speed of the news cycle makes verification difficult, newsrooms need to make sure it’s correct before publishing or broadcasting.
“Or at least if you’re not quite sure, you need to be very clear [about that]”
However, Claire Wardle says the phrase ‘we cannot independently verify this’ is doing a disservice to the audience.
“Until we sort that out, we’ll have content being run too quickly with these caveats, and this isn’t transparent,” she says, indicating that there needs to be more transparency when dealing with UGC.
Bloomberg.com’s desktop site racked up over 5.3 million unique video viewers in September, more than triple the amount it ran a year earlier, according to comScore. Making that more impressive, overall unique visitors to Bloomberg.com declined slightly during that period, from 8.7 million to 8.2 million. That’s important, considering Bloomberg fetches $75 CPMs for its video ads, according to Marcum.
“The world leaders in business are tremendously appealing to advertisers, and we have them,” he said.
Information research company Gartner expects consumer spending on SVOD services to grow 28.1% in 2014 and 18.2% in 2015. Gartner says spending on SVOD services in North America is on pace to improve 28.5% in 2014 and 18.6% in Western Europe. Emerging territories will see a 53% growth rate in 2014.
Looking forward to tomorrow. Our student journalists have a big story coming out. It is complex and sensitive and it is well done, a compliment to the people who’ve worked on it. I read it tonight — which is unusual, as an adviser I do not interfere with their editorial decisions, meaning I generally see everything as a regular consumer — and I’m proud of the work they’re doing.
This is a fun, loud, sharp, sarcastic group. They do their work throughout the week and they put their newspaper to bed early on Tuesday nights. But not this week. Tonight was a late night with lots of copy and good quotes and ink on hands. There was plenty of layout experiments and squibble marks and bleary-eyed readings of federal definitions.
The work is good. It is honest and fair and thorough. Our editor-in-chief has spent a lot of time writing it. She’s proven why the job is hers and is proving why she can handle the investigative work. I think she’s going to be proud of it all, after she has put the story to bed and steps away from it for a minute or two.
In the copy room … I’m making copies. I had to re-load the machine with paper. No one ever considers the humble wrapping paper that holds the copy paper together. Maybe we should:
In a random musical moment I wondered: Whatever happened to Live?
Turns out they have a new album, their first in something like eight years, coming out next week. Here’s one of the new tracks:
But that’s not Ed Kowalczyk. He’s not been with the band in years. (Apparently it was not an amicable breakup.) He has a solo album out. And, in this just-released video, he smiles. This seems unnerving, somehow:
That’s what happens when you wonder about things from 15 years ago.
Here’s a thought exercise: Isn’t it interesting how things are so different for you than they were 15 years ago? Isn’t it even more interesting how things are so similar? Discuss.
