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In 2006 I had the privilege of celebrating Memorial Day at the place where it all started, Gettysburg, Pa.
I put together a flash video of that day — a slideshow with audio — and would like to share it with you now. It was a great day, and a touching ceremony with the opportunity to see some of the most important places in our nation’s history.
Since it autoplays I’ll just link to it here. Please turn on the speakers and share 2:20 of your time with me.
I want to tell you that my family is full of good cooks. My mother, when we were young could invent dishes out of random extra things that would make your mouth water. When she has the proper ingredients she’s quite incredible. She may not have a green thumb, but if you grow something and put it in her kitchen she well make you one of the better meals you’ve had in a good long while.
One of my grandmothers is also a good cook. My grandparents raised a large garden that was essentially subsistence farming. Only, when I was young, I got tired of all those vegetables of course. Now I’d love to see that farm back in action for some creamed corn and various other things we pulled out of the ground.
My other grandmother is not a bad cook, either. People disagree on this, but I think she’s a fine cook. But that could be the grandmother, oldest-grandchild thing. (I’m her favorite. Just ask.)
All of this leads me to one of those curious things in life that we never think about until it is forced upon us. What if something you’ve always eaten is not so very good? For instance, God bless the fine cooks in my family, but they will bake a turkey dry as a dusty road at Thanksgiving.
I never knew what turkey was supposed to taste like until The Yankee cooked one the first fall we dated. Sometime after that her father was telling the story of how, as a boy, he didn’t know what a hamburger was supposed to be like. His mother burned them and then cooked them some more. It took eating at a friend’s to learn what he’d been missing.
It is a good tale, and the full version of that story is great, but that seemed silly to me until I considered the turkey example of my own culinary experiences.
Similar to my family’s apparent hatred of delicate turkey meat, there’s also a big bias against pork chops. I’m not sure what it is, maybe my grandmothers thought you needed to cook them at lunch and again at dinner, just to be sure any germs were dead. Perhaps we distracted them too much in the kitchen. Could have been anything, but even as a kid I knew that my lovely, saintly, giving and patient grandmothers respective pork chops didn’t taste good. I think I was in my mid-20s before I had a good one.
All of the above to say, if you’re not grilling your pork chops, friend, your missing out.
Had a too-hot ride yesterday. Last weekend we reversed a route we occasionally take and I found it grueling in the sense that I wanted to do it again. I thought I could easily improve my time on the trip. Only it was much, much warmer and I found myself questioning the wisdom of all of this within about 10 miles.
I struggled through it though, happy to see a gas station about four miles from home. I stopped for a drink, and this must be regular enough now that they don’t even think twice about bikes being walked into the store.
They have a picnic area to one side of the story and a porch swing on the other side. I sat in the swing for a few minutes to have a drink and top off my bottles. I was only four miles from home, but this was the first truly hot riding of the year.
A man walked out of the store and playfully chastised me for stopping. He had the easy, friendly face that makes you think you’ve seen him before. Maybe you’re supposed to know that guy.
“You aren’t supposed to be taking a break,” he said.
“No” I smiled, “but it is warm out here.”
“Yes it is. You’ll fall out!”
The heat index was about 95 at the time. It was not a strain to believe it, either.
So I came home, dropped the last few miles I had in mind because, as I came up the big hill I realized there were no cars behind me. I could move to the center and then duck into the neighborhood without a problem. And that thought made me so happy I leaned on my handlebars and took the 90 degree turn.
It was only 18 miles, but it was hot. But still, I thought, 18 miles.
And then I read this:
Tamae Watanabe, 73, beat her own age record for an Everest climb by a woman set 10 years ago. She also recovered from an accident in 2005 in which she broke her back and feared she would never climb again.
“It was much more difficult for me this time,” Watanabe told reporters Friday after returning to Nepal’s capital, Katmandu, from the mountain. “I felt I was weaker and had less power. This time it was certainly different. I felt that I had gotten old.”
She reached Everest’s summit from the Tibetan side on May 19, at the age of 73 years and 180 days.
That was properly deflating.
Things here are just fine. We’ve finally had to shut the windows and turn the air conditioning on. We’re to the point of the season where you have to start thinking strategically about when you want to do things like, work in the yard, heavy exertion or breathing.
Grilled tonight, watched the second game of the 2010 Auburn football season on DVD. I received the complete championship season as a Christmas gift and they’re becoming regular summer weekend viewing. I hope the Tigers win.
I thought I should take notes to see if and how and when the announcers started trying to talk differently about Cam Newton. So far, after two games against lesser opponents (sorry, State fans) they’ve been properly deferential. The in-game tone may not change, but if you’ll think back the commentary overall got very nasty.
It is great to see this team play though, and as I said tonight, to do so without having to worry about the outcome. There were a few points that season where they were almost defeated. There were moments when you just thought it was all going to come undone because that’s just the way of it. But, knowing they kept it together and defeated everyone, knowing they survived the biggest smear job this side of the classic 1960s Bryant-Butts piece, the feel of it is altogether different.
Watching Cam Newton play in retrospect, I wrote on Twitter, is like knowing the end to the world’s best sonnet.
What I’m saying is that the guy was like poetry. He was pure, violent, graceful poetry. Pure, violent, graceful, championship poetry.
One of the things I have to do this weekend is eat an entire watermelon. We’ll be out of space in the fridge, otherwise. It is ridiculously good, the first of the season and seedless — despite the presence of seeds. I ate a big portion of it last night and the middle of it today.
Still plenty left, if anyone is interested.
For those who have never been to Price’s Barbecue House — I’m sorry and you should fix that as soon as possible — they are set up to take your order at the counter, hand the ticket to their right while you get settled at a table. After an appropriate amount of time spent thinking about the delicious food you are about to receive one of the nice guys running the short order grill calls your name. You go collect your food and eat this delicious meal they have prepared for you.
Mr. Price sometimes takes the order. More often than not, of late, one of the ladies working there is running the front counter. Mr. Price, as I’ve mentioned here before, remembers me. I visited the place so much during undergrad that last fall he asked if I was back or just visiting. That was more than a decade and thousands of customers ago.
(I’ve eaten a lot of food here. And, while it is still sensibly priced, I just had a flash of memory: is it possible that my breakfast here once cost $2.17? Surely not. That seems shockingly low, even for a century ago, especially for the golden age of the 1990s. Another number pops in my head: $5.45? My memory can’t be trusted. That was in the last century, mind you.)
Anyway, Mr. Price remembers me. The ladies, one of them at least, doesn’t recall my name, but she remembers the usual breakfast we order. This new lady, though … Last week she wrote my name as she did above. I thought that perhaps she spelled it phonetically. Perhaps, I reasoned, a little of my north Alabama accent had slipped into my name as I told her the order. Maybe I’d done as much of my family does and made it sound like an I. Today I was very deliberate with the pronunciation, just out of curiosity.
“Kenny.”
And, again, she wrote: Kinny.
And that might have been the worst thing that happened today.
I’ve got it made, I tell ya.
Also, I have a big stack of papers to grade. So, if you’ll pardon me …
I taught about false light in two media law classes today.
The three criteria required for a false light case:
1. Publication of material must put an individual in a false light.
2. The false light would be offensive to a reasonable person.
3. The publisher was at fault.
Two anecdotes from the lecture:
The Sun ran a picture of Nellie Mitchell, a 96-year-old Arkansas woman, in a fabricated story about a 101-year-old female news carrier who had to give up her job because she was pregnant. The Sun’s editors needed a photo for their false story. They assumed Nellie was dead and pulled her picture from a previous true story. She was alive and, by then, feeling litigious. She sued. She won $1.5 million in 1991. (That’s $2.5 million today)
In the 1980s WJLA in Washington, D.C., did a story on genital herpes. The reporter shot b roll on a busy D.C. street. The videographer zoomed in on a woman who was easily recognized. In the 11 p.m. broadcast the anchor read the script “For the 20 million Americans who have herpes, it’s not a cure” as tape rolled with the woman’s image. She won her case and was awarded $750.
I like media law, but I think you have to have an anticipation of enjoyment of it before you take it as a class. I imagine that students who don’t have some inkling of that beforehand find themselves miserable. But it is a vitally important topic.
I think I enjoyed it, in part, was because the first media law case I ever read about was Carol Burnett v. National Enquirer, Inc. I loved Carol Burnett as a comedienne, even if her sketch comedy show (which I caught it in syndication) was for an older audience. It always felt like I was getting away with something to be able to watch it late at night, but I remember thinking that Burnett’s case, while important, probably felt ancient to most of my peers. It had happened almost 15 years before we studied it, an eternity to undergrads. (I did not talk about it in class today.)
And so I vowed to give contemporary examples in a media law context. Need to brush up on the dockets a bit.
To know the more than a name makes a case history more interesting. To see this makes it all stick in your head:
I actually remember that bit, which is remarkable with my memory. I suppose it speaks to the impression those talents could leave upon you. To this day my favorite stylings are physical comedy and the famous loss of composure. I blame Harvey Korman for that:
Had a guest in my Mass Media Practices class today. My old friend Napo Monasterio came over from The Birmingham News to talk about that happy, curious, more-flexible-than-ever place where journalist, coder and designer meet. Napo is from Auburn, though he was a year or two behind me. Now I see his work all the time.
Here are some of his page layouts and the online package that went with it. Now he’s developing apps.
He was formally trained as a print journalist and designer, but his desire to learn new things keeps opening doors for him. I hope students pick up on that.
“Just like a firecracker going off in the air — kabuuuuum.”
We are so very fortunate those words did not define our generation. You’ll see why at the bottom of the post.
Riding through the neighborhood the other evening I found I’d picked the neighborhood time for bicycles. Usually I see the ladies walking, or a mixture of people taking their dogs for a stroll. I often find kids out in their yards, but never anyone riding a bike.
But on this particular weekend evening I found four of them. I caught up with two at the stop sign that leads to the creek. At least one of them was even greener than I am. He was struggling with something at the intersection and his friend had turned and was waiting for him up ahead, his thigh across his crossbar.
The second pair I met soon after. The first I passed easily enough, he was just out for a ride. His partner wanted a race. And so surged up the hill after the creek. He was pedaling furiously, constantly looking over his shoulder. I pedaled furiously, clicking down through the gears and tapping out a rhythm I’ve never tried on that little hill. At the top he turned right and I turned left, but I had him. I was no good for the next few miles after that, but I would have had him.
It would be better if I didn’t get competitive about this sort of thing, as I am a bad cyclist.
But today, when I sat in my office doing office things, I thought about that hill. I thought about that little attempt at rushing up it. I thought about how my legs weren’t burning. That was a nice thought, for sitting in the office.
In class one group of students did a presentation and part of that was asking the question “Is print dead?” What followed was the best conversation of the entire semester. There were many different stances. Some said yes, some no. Others took the middle ground and wondered why we don’t simply say that print is changing. There were strong opinions. It was so great we’re turning it into an assignment.
Maybe I should have started the semester asking that question.
Things to read from my journalism blog: The interactive infographic uses a fancy ProPublica design as an example.
The increasingly useful Internet radio where I realize how many streaming apps I have on my phone, and we are teased with next month’s announcement of even more surprising smartphone penetration.
Two prisms, two news brands pulls together two stories, one on Al Jazeera English and the other on the growing Patch network. Both good reads of successfully growing (in different directions) projects.
From my evening drive:
