Monday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday

This covered more ground than anticipated

It was oppressively muggy — central Arkansas muggy — last night. Also it rained. Rained all night. Rained into the morning. Thunder was my alarm clock. The storm front blew away mid-morning. We’ve been in triple digits with the heat index into the early evening. I’ve sat here to sweat.

I spent several hours doing work stuff today. Don’t you want to know about it? I had to find the notebook that held the fall 2025 notes for a class I’m teaching again. I figured it was in one of three places, and I found it in the third place: a bookcase. Also, there were two notes books. So many notes I made for myself! I’d forgotten that.

When last this class met it was a twice-a-week class. This fall it will meet once a week. So the bulk of my day was in starting the reorganization process. Moving things around, renaming modules. Oh, and I updated this document I maintain with pages and pages of university resources. And I updated the syllabus for the course. It’s funny: some parts of working through all of those details can be easy, and some parts seem like a huge effort.

Apply that nonsensical observation for most of my days for the next five or six weeks.

Tomorrow I’m going to restructure the outline of that class. Hopefully that will be done by Wednesday. The rest of the week will be spent in making sure the work works right for both the style, and schedule, of this new version of the class. And I need to figure out how I’ll update the old slides in an efficient way.

That, I think, will be solved by some inspired bit of epiphany. Or I’ll just do it the long way 15 times in the next few months. Copying and pasting is such a bother, innit?

Also, I have to work on two other classes. I suspect I’ll begin one of those next week. The good news is that they aren’t starting from scratch. I’ll just agonize over them as if they are.

There’s a new look to the site, and if you go to the front page you can see it now. It starts like this, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Go ahead and look. That link will go to a new tab. Give it 60 seconds of zen. This page will be here when you’re ready.

The new idea for the front page is to update those images each month. If I don’t mess that up I have front page updates prepped to take us into next June. If I don’t mess it up.

I also updated the mobile version of the site. Just some easy text corrections and changing a few buttons that needed changing. Still not sure why it looks as intended on a phone, but broken in a computer browser. That’s an issue for another day. I wonder how many times I’ve said that about this issue.

And, of course, because the first of the month was this weekend I also did all of my regular monthly computer updates, changing various files, updating spreadsheets, cleaning up files, and so on. It’s not the most fun thing to write about, but this is is an old machine now, and it’s necessary. Fortunately these are easy chores.

Do you know that feeling when you learn something new and you just have to tell someone about it? I learned this yesterday and I have to tell people about it. Admittedly, I like this tale more than anyone else will, but I have that feeling, and so now you get to learn about this too. And for that we must return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy.

When the Augusta’s ammunition and gunpowder burned off the explosion was heard more than 50 miles away. The vessel’s remains sat in the water for about 90 years, a sometimes navigational hazard. I found a great 2015 lecture that talks about the ship, recovering the vessel’s remains, a tourist attraction, scavengers, and then …

That appeals to me in more ways than one. I’d just like to make things and then point to them later and say “That came from …” and the rest of that sentence not be “the lumber yard.” You can see some better photos of the HMS Augusta furniture and paneling from the DAR themselves.

Here’s one other, unrelated, Revolutionary War note for the day. Just 250 years and one day ago, John Adams wrote to Richard Cranch, the colonial watchmaker, clockmaker, and repairman of Boston. He talks about the inoculations against smallpox and a few other events of the day. But also this.

You mention the Exultation at a Declaration of Independence. Is not the Change We have seen astonishing? Would any Man, two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments, and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own it? Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.

I’ve rambled on a bit, as it turns out, a few times recently about the public moods of those heady, dangerous, uncertain days. It’s not as if they had a bunch of surveys in the field to gauge things on the home front, or beyond their own social circles. They just knew what they knew, heard, read, and felt as they did. But there’s the great John Adams, certain of a sea change all the same.

It’s a remarkable kind of public politics, really. A revolution of its own, perhaps. Gauging the public interest like that wouldn’t have mattered quite the same way to a monarch. And it matters, of course, more and more now. Also, we still find the pros guessing at it often as not.

Cranch and Adams had been friends for decades. It was the watchmaker that introduced Adams to his future wife, Abigail.

I guess you could say, at both points, Adams knew what time it was.

Cranch married Abigail’s sister, so they were all related. And while the couples remained close, John kept his friend at arm’s length over money-making schemes. Cranch was not lucky in business. But, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, and was a trial court judge for almost 30 years. He and his wife died within a day of one another. He was apparently a forgotten man until modern historians wrote about him in just the last few years. His son became a federal judge in D.C. Two of his grandchildren became a painter and a minister. One of Cranch’s great-grandchildren was a man named Henry Ware Eliot, who became president of a brick making operation in St. Louis. And this is how history never ceases to astonish me. This man, the great-grandson of a Revolutionary War era man, died in 1919. Henry Ware Eliot, by the way, was also the father of T.S. Eliot.

I didn’t see that coming, either.

I had a nice ride Saturday evening. My lovely bride was off having a girls’ day and by the time I set out I had most of the roads all to myself. It’s quite lovely to be out when most everyone is already where they need to be. I did the river ride, which is the second route we designed for ourselves when we moved here in 2023. We haven’t done it in a good long while because a bridge has been closed since July of last year and there’s a sad and spooky part after that, but the road is opened once again.

Just behind me in that photo is where that new asphalt begins. If they’d just paved down another 100 feet or so (and, again, this road was closed for a year, they had time) they could have repaired the biggest mess of potholes you can find in the county.

When you get to the bridge it has that new overpass smell.

New overpasses have smells. Turns out it is not a pleasant smell, but surely it will descend upon the highway below it.

On the other side of the overpass we regained a pleasant little downhill, and a stretch of land that gives you three or four houses on one side, and a cornfield on the other. There is an intersection soon after that, so it was only ever a closure effecting about 1.5 miles, but still, it’s nice to have that road back. This corn is a definite change of pace.

From there you go up a little hill, through more fields, past the famous local artist, respectfully cruise by a memorial, and sprint through a tree canopy so you can get to an access road that’s a half-mile, tree covered stretch of brand new asphalt. A car followed me down that road, but the driver stayed respectfully behind me while I tapped out something in the 20 mph range. After that, back off the access road, another overpass, more trees, watch out for deer, go as fast as you can by the house where the people always yell, and then into the wind.

If I go the way of our designed route I would eventually get to a four-way stop and go straight, but last year the county made a shambles of that stretch of road. If I turn to the right I can stretch this ride. The weather was nice, I was not pressed for time, and so I went that longer way, making my road selection as it suited my whim and wind direction.I stunk it up on the one real hill on the route, as usual. Twice, though, I broke 34 mph on a flat stretch. Haven’t done that recently.

Maybe I’ll do it again!

adventures / books / family / history / Monday / music / video — Comments Off
27
Jul 26

All I can hear now is Aerle Taree: ‘a game of horseshoes’

We went to a pool party, Saturday. Perfect day to spend in someone’s backyard. Just a lovely day. Very nice people. Let me count … about two dozen people. Kids in the pool, burgers on the grill, enough tables to circulate through to drop in on different conversations. Perfect weather. Someone there will have a big birthday next week, so it was one part that and one part getting all of these different people together.

Played a little cornhole, downplaying the skills, lest anyone become awed by my grasp of geometry and physics. At one point, for phone, I was just knocking other bags out of the air with my bags. And then a score was announced and, well, I can’t lose the game. So I started dropping them directly down the hole, which wasn’t as impressive as it could be, but was held in higher regard than it should be.

I resisted the urge to throw up my hands and yell, “I grew up playing HORSESHOES!”

Because I did, and that game gives you life lessons.

Also Jarts, which gives you other lessons, important lessons about parabolic arcs, escape vectors, eye protection, how to pop your hips and turn from a backpedal into a sprint if it really goes bad, and so on.

One of the kids was working on swimming lengths of the pool entirely underwater. We’ve all done that. I still do that. I might do that the next time I get in the pool. The swim was powerful, fast, ferocious. Three widths of the pool were completed by natural athleticism, fitness and youth. I explained lactic acid buildup, fluidity, efficiency, and wall propulsion. Suddenly, five widths became the standard. I think I felt more accomplished for explaining it than the swimmer did for swimming it. This is what it means to coach others: to see the success of others, to manifest an excitement of achievement that belongs solely to them because, if you did not, it’d just look weird when the thing was done to a level you knew possible.

Another, younger, kid I taught how to use a snorkel. I’m not sure if we progressed well into using it as a submerged breathing tool, but he did delight in blowing water out of the top of the thing. This is always what it means to coach others: to enjoy seeing the delights of others as your success.

Ask someone who played any sort of youth sport about something a coach and a team and their sport taught them that wasn’t about the game itself. That’s what it really means to coach others. I’ve never coached a sport, but I had those coaches. It’s invaluable. I coached college students on student media for 15 years — they won a bunch of awards and a lot of them have gone on to satisfying and important work in the media and someone of them just enjoyed their time their for their own reasons. And I think about that aspect of what a mentor or a coach can be when I think about that work. In this case, what is the confidence that grows in seeing yourself improving a skill by 67 percent based on just one conversation? What joy can you provide yourself by seeing how far you can discharge water out of a silly looking bent plastic tube?

Which is to say it was a nice pool party for me, and, also, I won at Cornhole.

We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show last night. Matt Nathanson was the opener. Still doing his breathy-graveling, coffee shop singer-songwriter thing. He was a 15-year-overnight success in 2008. He’s done now something like a dozen studio albums, two live albums, a bunch of EPs. He’s got a great stage presence. Its not every opener that you’re determined to get there on time for, or that everyone around you will shut up for, but we should, and Nathanson is one of them.

It was a night of three acts. More featuring Matt Nathanson later in the week. I’ll have another, different clip tomorrow.

Back to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. (This is not a book club, but if you pick this up and read along we can pretend. Either way, you should consider the book, it is a great, terrific, and informative read.) One of the things that I always appreciate about Atkinson’s work is how he uses these lists as a sort of a daily street-level census of things. The more texture like this you give a story, the more I’m inclined to lean into it. Atkinson always seems to do that in these descriptive ways that never seem too onerous, never lose the thread of where his story is going, and yet gives you real flashes of this moment that we can’t physically inhabit.

Obviously I’m not prepared to fact-check him on this. Possum meat? Few of us are. But he’s a well regarded popular historian and I’m sure this has all been carefully examined to the extent possible. I have no reason to think otherwise, but I often think: how long does it take him, or the people that wind up in the acknowledgments of the book, to pull enough color together so that it can go into this one paragraph? Just the assemblage of information, let alone whatever time it took to write it, re-write it, edit it, re-work it again. And it’s merely a part of his style.

And one more reason I’m enjoying the book and suggesting it to others.

bluesky / books / history / Monday — Comments Off
20
Jul 26

Evidence of our natural environments

Guess what I did this weekend …

I sat next to that leaf, and read. But more on that below.

Today was even more fun. The kitties received some mail from my mother. She bought a cheap little cat tunnel years ago, and I mentioned that it was showing some wear and she immediately leapt into action, seeing to it that the cats will want for nothing. (I had to talk her down off other presents because, truly, these cats want for nothing. But this came with the mail.

And though they were quick to inspect it, I had to help open the packaging. Thumbs and all that.

They were, of course, intrigued by this new addition to their environment. But I guess you don’t recognize a tunnel until it is in its tunnel form.

This will mostly be a Poseidon thing. Phoebe will sit in the tunnel some, but he uses it a lot. It is a hiding place, a napping place, a play place, a place where he can, somehow, approach the speed of sound as he runs through it. And he usually takes over spaces.

But now we have two tunnels, so maybe that dynamic will change. Tunnels for every cat! But, first, I wanted to see what he thought about a giant tunnel. He was pleased with my innovation, as if I had, finally, achieved my purpose in his life.

Both tunnels are sitting in the living room, but I think I’ll move them around, for variety’s sake. It could be a long-term experiment, studying where they like them the most. I promise to not report every little tunnel move and finding here, only the interesting ones.

I’ve finished Diane McWhorter’s incredible Carry Me Home. My last notes on Bluesky:

I have a great respect for Diane McWhorter’s work, but this is a reach. Standards of good and right and wrong and evil of the 20th century weren’t so different that we should see them as a kind. We, they, have the same problems: a willingness to confront actions and what is supported or opposed.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 17, 2026 at 3:40 PM

She proves the point with 2010’s HB 56, paranoid and nasty immigration legislation — most of which was overturned in court.

People were either ignoring him or telling tales out of school about the former AG, who was upfront about what he was.

That second highlight? Classic B’ham finger pointing.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 17, 2026 at 3:57 PM

One footnote:

Thousands of Birmingham News photos from the era were rediscovered in 2004. They’d been marked "Do Not Sell.” The editor, Vincent Townsend, it is said, didn’t want them to sully the city’s good name. Later, a selection was published to @al.com. Today, however, …

(Note the URL.)

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 19, 2026 at 11:58 AM

I’m sure that’s just general content migration and site rot, rather than something nefarious, but it is both sad and illuminating.

Finally, Diane McWhorter, who lived the moment, though as a child and over the mountain (which is to say, for out-of-towners, at some remove), spent two decades working on this book (which is incredible) and won a Pulitzer for it, deserves the last word.

I’ll just say, read “Carry Me Home.”

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 19, 2026 at 12:02 PM

And now I’ve started reading Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. A few years ago my mother-in-law gifted me the first, The British Are Coming, which was everything I’ve come to expect from an Atkinson book. Last year I asked her for this second book, which is one of four presents I can recall having ever requested in my adult life. It’s just been sitting here, on a bookshelf, staring at me staring at it. It is astoundingly good already.

A hallmark of Atkinson’s work is how he synthesizes so, so much source material, while maintaining his journalism sensibilities, letting the original language speak for itself. This is about the American general, Arthur St. Clair, mulling over certain fate in staying at Fort Ticonderoga or ignominy in retreat. St. Clair’s quartermaster wrote “He faced an agonizing decision, as his deputy quartermaster later recounted: ‘If he remained there he would save his character and lose the army. If he went off, he would save the army and lose his character.’

St. Clair ultimately decided to retreat from Fort Ticonderoga, where his supplies were running low and he was outmanned something like 3:1 by the British Canadian army. He would be later be court-martialed and vindicated. He was retained by George Washington for staff work, served as the president of the Continental Congress, presided over the Northwest Ordinance, later led a lot of people to their doom in Ohio, and then served as a governor … St. Clair is a complete character in American history that all too often gets overlooked.

The scale and the scope of Atkinson’s work in this trilogy is such that a lot of these people that are introduced to provide the rich texture of the moment only come and go — indeed, what we know of some of them may be well limited to the letters from them or about them — but I want to look into a lot of these people. Atkinson can’t answer every one of those questions, in this format, but I like to look up people and see what became of them. Did they survive the revolution? What became of them?

Sir Francis Carr Clerke wrote a friend back home in England that, “The British bayonet will ever make its way.” Clerke was a secretary to the Canadian Army’s general, John Burgoyne. You give a quote like that, I’m going to look you up. Clerke would die at Saratoga just a few weeks after that letter.

On the very same page you meet Seth Warner, an American officer in the Green Mountain Boy. He’d been at Bunker Hill, invaded Canada and fought pretty much everywhere up north, it seems. He was highly regarded by his contemporaries, but got edged out of Vermont politics. Also, he had some financial issues and died at 41 in 1784.

I wonder which new-to-me noteworthy person will be introduced next.

You’ll have to read the book, and this space, to find out.

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13
Jul 26

Tessera mihi est, ergo sum

Without hesitation I can say that the highlight of today was updating my university password. Passphrase, actually. This must be done every six months — if the system remembers it. (It doesn’t always seem to remember it.) But, without fail, in those times I must update it, I always find myself in a struggle. You log in to things several times a day and your fingers get into habits. And then, of course, it is time to update the password. Passphrase. Except I’ve noticed the last two times that the requirements have continued to grow expansive.

I use a sentence, and my now expired passphrase included a special character and a number. Now I have to make sure the new passphrase checks all of those boxes.

Hilariously, the form field where you input this does not show the characters you are typing, just the little privacy dots, as if my books or my cats are going to steal the new password. Passphrase. So you better get it right. Of course, it must be confirmed. And you better write this down. So I have it written down in a place where only I will find it. Because security.

We all remember the Instructure debacle of 2026, after all.

And now I will have to retrain my fingers to type this new phrase. Hopefully I’ll be in shape before I have to do this in front of students. Nothing builds confidence in the classroom like messing that up three times in a row.

Also, when you have completed the not-at-all challenging task of designing a new passphrase and making sure you’ve met all of the criteria now involved you are encouraged to update this in the places where it needs to be updated.

Because no one remembers the Instructure debacle of 2026, after all.

It’d be nice if every place where you had to login to something had committed to the same series of special character challenges, but that’s a lot to coordinate and keep straight, of course. And all of this is just another step toward my computer having a fingerprint pad on it, at which point I will retreat to Walden.

We saw another show Saturday night. I’ll give you four hints.

The second hint is that this act was at a different venue, a much larger venue. (Don’t worry, we won’t go through the naming origins this time. OK, fine, it is named after an 18th century British lawyer.)

The third hint is that this band is marking the 30th anniversary of their first Grammy, which is to say they’ve been around for a while. And, in that time, they’ve cultivated and maintained quite the following.

OK, final hint, if a bit in profile.

It was Dave Matthews Band, which we have seen a few years in a row now, attending with friends. All told, I think this marks the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen them over the course of their touring career. If you like them, they put on a good show. If you like jam bands, they put on a good show. If you’re just determined not to like them, you probably won’t like the show. I feel like I always come away from the show thinking the appreciation outpaced the expectation just a bit, whatever that means.

I think what it means is that I’ve seen several bands and singers more than a few times and I’ve decided there are only so many you need to see more than a few times. And, if I had to make a list, I wouldn’t put DMB on that list, but when I leave the show I find myself thinking, That was a good time. Because it is!

It isn’t that it is a surprise, but what is surprising is that they’ve built up this huge legion of concert followers over the many decades and they continue to put up shows with enough energy and fun that people keep coming back, dozens and dozens of times.

I wonder if Dave and his buddies thought about that way back when. I wonder if anyone does.

Take Guster, for example. We saw them Friday. Next year they’ll mark the 30th anniversary of the record that turned them into a regular airplay band. I know they’ll celebrate that because Friday night they mentioned that this is the 20th anniversary of a subsequent record. The threesome met in school, at Tufts. No way they sat around on campus in 1991 and said, “Man, I hope one day we’re filling stage banter with an ad lib about the region we’re touring in when we are 53 years old!”

Maybe that’s the dream. Do something you love with people you like and get to do it so long and so well that you can also pursue other things you are interested in, too. I’m certain that’s the dream, actually. But no one says that at 18. No 18-year-old has the foresight. (Shoot, I was 26 when I figured it out, and I’ve spent the years since wondering if I actually did.)

Existentialism is definitely going to be incorporated into my next password. Passphrase.

memories / Monday / photo / safari / South Africa — Comments Off
6
Jul 26

How’s the weather up there?

There is no going outside. There is no doing of things. There is only making sure that the air keeps moving, and finding the sweet spot to sit in for optimal ceiling fan coverage.

The truly great thing is that this heatwave hasn’t even concluded yet — that temperature was on Saturday — and meteorologists are already confidently forecasting the next one. That’ll be the third of the season.

Also, this was the only cloud in the sky.

Poison ivy update: I have learned going outside is really uncomfortable now. All the places stressed by the blistery itchy irritated skin. It feels like the skin is being stretched apart and pulled together at the same time, somehow. Also, it just exacerbates the itching. This weekend I also graduated to oatmeal baths. They sounded silly, they still do, but also they seem helpful. Nice long soaks of the arms seem to give the Cortisone and Calamine a fighting chance at providing a little relief.

We are now approaching week two of poison ivy. Most people deal with this for two or three weeks. I bet I’ll be dealing with it for two weeks. Maybe three.

I have a complex relationship with giraffes. They are awesome. It is an unrequited appreciation. Few animals give off the same air of indifference, but that’s part of what makes them awesome. Here is a short clip of two we saw at Kruger National Park when we were on safari there last month.

The safari won me over on the first day. The views were lovely, the animals we encountered were outstanding and each one felt unique, and our guide was top notch. The entire experience was stress free, aside from early morning wake ups. If we ever find ourselves in South Africa again, and going on a safari again, it’ll be with Wild Wings. And if you’re considering doing such a thing, do it. And book it with Wild Wings. They were terrific.