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22
Oct 26

Many more just like this, please

Just another Chamber of Commerce sort of day, the sort you selfishly want every day, even if you know that it doesn’t work that way, shouldn’t work that way, that it can’t work that way. Doesn’t matter. It should work that way because you want it to. The sun is bright and yellow and high and soft and the temperature is best described as: room.

It bled over into the rest of the day, too. Got everywhere on time. There were no problems. Everything felt unhurried. Everything felt pleasant. Hopeful. The weekend was also just around the corner.

In class we wrapped up the week’s discussion on Jose Van Dijck’s Culture of Connectivity. We are now getting to the real meat of the semester, which I have been teasing, hinting at, flirting with, and making casually aloof references for eight weeks. I think that the class might be ready, mostly because they are ready.

We also discussed a recent essay by Anil Dash. I read this a few weeks ago in one of my reading chairs — yes, I have reading chairs, three of them in fact, but I need two more — and thought, immediately, I have to find a way to get this into class.Then, just a few days later, someone made a reference very similar to Dash’s appeal. I said, “I have something we’ll read on that very subject next week, and I want you think about how this might very important in the broadest sense. Today was that day. Anyway, Dash says …

Our creativity can be constrained by the language we use — our imaginations are limited by what we can think to say. If we’re trained to limit the words we speak just by habit, and those limits are put in place by people whose social, political, cultural and moral goals are the opposite of what we value, then our work is unalive before it is even born.

[…]

The best artists around you are invisible to you, and the most important statements by activists that you care about are being silenced. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a system working as designed. And the proof is as obvious as the fact that the angriest activists you know can’t even talk about systemic abuses or state violence without having to put it in algorithmically approved speech or censoring their captions like they’re going to be read by 5-year-olds.

It should make you furious. It is time to kill “unalive.”

[…]

If we keep accepting the words that are forced upon us by TikTok and Meta and Google and all the rest, while platforms like Twitter/X allow the most hateful and harmful content in the world to be distributed completely unfettered, we’ll only see authoritarianism rise, and the harms against the vulnerable accelerate. But what breaks my heart almost as much is that we’ll see so many brilliant artists and activists and thinkers whose genius will be muted or silenced by mindless, heartless algorithms that capriciously decide who gets to say exactly what words, in what ways.

After class, we lingered for a moment on campus and then set out for further fields.

We had tickets to see a rock ‘n’ roll show. Toad the Wet Sprocket are doing an acoustic tour. Tonight they played this little theater in a cute little downtown of a bedroom community.

We walked the two blocks a few times, visited an odds and ends store, where we picked up two cat toys. We stuck our heads in a record store — where I was primed to purchase vinyl, but left empty handed. Everything was ancient and obscure and I want merely the old and familiar-to-me.

We tried to have dinner in one of the four recommend spots, but they required a reservation. So we went to the second place, which was a soul food theme, with blues blaring from hidden speakers. Blue South opened earlier this year, but it feels comfortable, competent. Like they knows who they are. I tried the short ribs. They were adequate, but I doubt I’d have them again. The sides were terrific. People were hyperbolic about the sides on the review sites, but it was not hyperbole. My lovely bride tried the chicken. She liked it. I had a bite. It was good, but not my favorite sorts. (There are different batter approaches and this is very important.)

We left the restaurant with plenty of time to make the short walk back to the venue. Walked right in. Missed the crowds entirely. Got to our seats without causing a scene. Had plenty of time to settle in before the show. Then Willy Porter came out. He may be one of the most underrated guitarists you’ve never seen live. The man can just play. Here’s an old clip.

Then the guys from Toad the Wet Sprocket came out to the requisite clip from Monty Python.

It’s funny, in a way. We’ve listened to these guys for half our lives now. We saw them twice, a few years ago, supporting a Barenaked Ladies tour, but have never had the chance to see the full show. And now, finally, one of the recurring elements of the soundtrack of my life is about four rows away.

Tonight, they sounded like this.

And, look, this is a me statement, not a theme statement, but I am not prepared to see my almost-contemporaries looking like this.

They’re only six or seven years older than me. Dean Dinning sat down a few times during the set. (He did it very cool, though, so it could have been a part of the act, or that he needed a break. I, a person who sits down, am not judging.)

They also covered Neil Young. They played all the hits, the favorites, and a few deep cuts.

We’d parked just across the street, and before we got out of the lot, which happened fast, we were already trying to slot this show into its proper place. It was a great concert. I’m glad we had the chance to do that. We made it home easily, beating the initial GPS estimate by two minutes. It was the end of a great day, the sort you selfishly want every day.

music / photo / Rowan / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
Sep 26

We got the shirts

Spent the day working on today’s class, and tomorrow’s class, and also beginning to grade things that were turned in at midnight, Tuesday. And also all of the things that come with the job that are sorta related to the job. The biggest part of it is logging in to some system, service or platform over and over and over. The rest of it moves pretty quickly, happily enough, and I can get back to class things. This, I thought to myself today, is where I wrestle this week into control. And also tomorrow. Possibly Friday.

If I don’t have it by then, well, it’s the weekend and that’ll be great.

It’ll be Friday before we know it.

Before I knew it, today, it was time to head to campus for Org Comm.

The door knob fell off the door. I broke a pen. These two things happened within about four minutes of one another. (At least the elevator, electricity, and plumbing worked!) I kept everyone a safe distance from me after that, just in case I was developing super strength or telekinesis. I did not develop super strength or telekinesis. Well, I don’t know that I didn’t. I might have a superpower now, and just haven’t realized it yet. Super power origin stories are all just a tiny bit different, aren’t they? I do know I’m not invisible, but I don’t know if I can fly. Hang on, let me just open this window …

We talked about what makes sports organizations unique. We talked about the politics involved with sports. We talked about whether this competition or that competition is a sport. That one is silly, but students are always invested in this debate. Now I just have to keep that up. Next week we start talking about branding.

After class we hopped in the car and drove across town, well a few towns I guess.

We went to a public garden which, until this experience I am embarrassed to say I didn’t even know existed. They have more than 1,100 acres of gardens, woodlands, and meadows and over the years have created one of the premier horticultural display gardens in the country. It was dusk when we arrived, and we were there for a little concert, which happens there a lot. They also have seasonal attractions, educational lectures, courses, and workshops, and it is too bad, really, that it is an hour from our house.

The show was outdoors. A little square of land had been cut out of the trees. A path ran through it. The crew had hauled out several hundred old bamboo-style bar chairs. There was a stage that looked like it emerged straight from the trees. Behind it, we learned, was a fountain, which was synched up to a few songs. And soon after we arrived Guster came on stage.

This was their first show back after a six-week break. And everything about the place created a very chill environment for a band that normally sees a little more hype and energy from the crowd. Try as they might, only this one section worked themselves up. Of course they were right in front of us.

I think this is the song where The Yankee, way back when, really figured out she liked the band. Also, I’ve created a monster. This is only the second time we’ve seen them this year, she’s keeping count and saying we must step up our game.

Anyway, we got the shirts. I think they wound up giving them away.

We were on row E. My lovely bride and I met her god-sisters (just go with it) at the concert. We all had a nice time. Much rock was had, also some roll.

I was trying to count … I’ve seen Guster maybe 12 or 14 times over the years now, also in six states, but never in the same venue twice.

It was a nice set, with 23 or 24 songs. It was quite chill, I think that unnerved the band a bit. But we had fun, and I guess everyone else was thinking about tomorrow. I hope tomorrow is like today.

Nah nah nah. Nah nah nah nah. Like today.

I try to put one more song up, maybe next week, and then figure out when we can see them live again.

adventures / books / Friday / history / music / photo / video — Comments Off
31
Jul 26

Fastest July ever

Happy weekend! I’m making it a long one. There was work, a little, but then my lovely bride and I decided to sit down and read books. First we read inside. Later, we read in the backyard. We know how to party.

The electricians came back to finish the install of the generator. Took them part of a third day to get it done, but at least this time it wasn’t 108 degrees outside. They’ve completed their tasks. Nice guys, unfortunately their shop is a long way away, or I’d call them our local electricians. Maybe they still will be.

And so we have a generator. The local inspector has to come out and inspect all of the gas and the electrical work, and hopefully that will be painless. Our electricians seemed to know what they were doing. The various gas people who’d come out seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure it’ll all look good.

This is how it works. If the power goes out, the system realizes it, and the generator fires up 10 seconds later. When the power comes back on, the generator set up realizes that, and turns itself off. Our job is to keep the air vents cleared, schedule annual maintenance, and, if the generator has to run for long stretches of time, check the oil.

Since we’ve been in the house the power has gone out three times. Once for about three hours, once for slightly longer. The first time we weren’t home, so I don’t know those details. Always in the back of my mind, though, this is the first time in my life that I’ve not lived on a priority grid — near a hospital or nursing home — and it could take a while to have the power restored if there’s a widespread outage. The neighbors talk about a big storm that came through and famously left them without power for a week. And that’s why we, and the neighbors, both have generators now.

Also, we got a shutter fixed today. Somehow some wind got in behind one, bent it over from the top down, and pulled the two top screws out of the siding. It just dangled there for a few days. It’s too far to reach via ladder alone. Also that roof is steep. Also, once in a while I get the impression that I am not as young and as bulletproof as I used to be. Also, that angle.

Anyway, a guy shimmied up the ladder, pulled out the old one, put up our new one (both are plastic, and look roughly identical) and held up a pleasant conversation the whole time — like he’d done this all before.

I promised to catch him if he fell. He promised to not mess up the gutter. He held up my end of the bargain and decided it wasn’t worth testing whether I meant it. (I meant it.)

Thing is, those shutters, pretty standard aesthetic pieces, come in packages of two. So now we have one extra shutter. Hopefully we won’t need it anytime soon. I put it in the store-it-and-forget-it section.

At the concert last weekend, Train did a curious little medley, the theme of which, if any, escaped me. But the crowd enjoyed themselves an awful lot with it.

It’s a party band vibe. A lot of crowd pleasing things, and tons of those local references that make the crowd scream. A lot of energy throughout.

The demographics here make no sense, and that’s probably the best part about it. For every person my age we saw at the show there was one person much older, and three people in their 20s. Age is just a number at a rock ‘n’ roll show. Maybe the demographics never should have mattered.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Sometimes, even writers who have won two Pulitzer Prizers, and/or the editors who edit them, can get punchy.

This is, so far, the only Looney Tunes reference I’ve read.

Col. Donlop was killed at the Battle of Red Bank. It was a poorly conceived assault by the German officer and his British commanders. The Hessians were trying to avenge a previous slight. They thought they had the element of surprise. They did not have the proper tools for a fort siege. They never had the initiative and, ultimately, the battle becomes a big morale win for the Americans.

Some of our colleagues are working at that site even now. Just a few years ago archeologists found the remains of 15 Hessian soldiers there, and the project has become a public and educational dig. Dr. Janofsky is the real sort of archeologist you’d want to meet. The kind that can bring history to life for people who thought they were uninterested. I had the chance to see her speak earlier this year. She’s incredibly passionate about the work and of course steeped in the time she’s studying, but a part of a program that’s using the most modern techniques (isotopic testing of remains!) to further the research. Between the discovery in 2022 and 2024 the researchers have held a few “public dig days” and almost 400 community members have taken part.

Read Atkinson’s book. (If you know how to party like I know how to party, this will be a great start to August for you.

books / cycling / history / music / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
30
Jul 26

This is no time to ask for more time

I spent the day reading and playing with cats. These were excellent choices. If this day came around again, I would do much the same thing. I’d just also do other things. There are always a lot of things I could do, a lot of things I want to do. You just can’t fit them all into every day. I’m never sure how to remedy that, but I’d like to figure it out. I’d like to figure out how to do all of the things I want to do, to the degree and extent I’d like to do them, so that each day has all of those things, nothing was overlooked, and there’s nothing to regret.

Or, how do you put 10 pounds of your interests in just two hands?

Also, how have I not figured out the solution to this dilemma by this point?

At the show last weekend, they brought Ed Robertson back on the stage to do a medley. Train played their shockingly ancient breakthrough hit “Meet Virginia,” and Robertson has been coming out for a little “Country Roads” ad lib. I expect he’s been doing the Canadian bit throughout. But Pat Monahan has a topical lyric in here.

I can’t not hear Country Roads anymore without thinking that we need some profound exploration and explanation about why it has such a growing, lasting resonance.

That’s a weird thing to think about at a rock ‘n’ roll show.

My lovely bride went out for a run. I went for a ride. I did a part of what we call the marsh ride, turning left before you get to the marshes. So it’s the non-marsh ride. It was one of those rides where I set out just to move my legs a little bit, having gotten started too late in the day. When it came down to it, I was riding well on the flat portions. Every time I looked down at my bike computer I was impressed by the speedometer. I was riding fairly poorly on the little hills. No need to look down to realize that. Some things you sense in more ways than one, and you do not need an LCD screen to convince you.

Anyway, cut over from one road to the other on some quite side roads, which was my plan, and then spent the next four miles wondering if I had enough daylight to add on a few more miles. I did not. One must be near home before dark if one did not bring along headlights. And one must never be late for dinner. This was what I saw over my shoulder at 7:55 p.m.

It was a nice little 17 mile ride, just enough to make me feel like I’d had a nice little bike ride.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. This is one of those little supposed anecdotes that hits on all of the themes I’ve been thinking about the last few days.

The question is whether you believe that. The anecdote here feels as much like wartime propaganda as something that really happened. But let’s assume that Moses Dunbar’s dad made that offer. He was the second of 16 children. His dad, John III, had fought for the British in the French and Indian war, but was supplying rebel forces during the revolution. They disagreed on politics, but also religion. As a young adult, and freshly married, Moses joined the Church of England. This was a problem for John, a strict Congregationalist. And of course that little passage omits other details. Moses had been arrested once before, and released. He’d thought about fleeing. He enlisted. He was captured, escaped, and was re-captured. The emotions of those times were running high. Connecticut’s Nathan Hale, a 21-year-old Continental officer was hanged just six months prior in New York, and people in Connecticut were surely thinking of that.

Moses Dunbar was eventually hanged in front of a large crowd of onlookers. He was apparently the only person to be convicted as a traitor and executed in Connecticut. Rumors were that his remains were later moved by his family, and there is another marker in another cemetery, but apparently this is still something of a mystery. He was buried, initially at least, at the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, where the founder of the Nutmeg State, one congressman and four governors are also interred. You can read a bit more about Moses, including his last letter to his children, here.

You should also read Atkinson’s book. It offers some great insights into the times.

books / history / memories / music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Jul 26

I had to log into Canvas today, and more fun things

Today I started doing some back end coursework. Building Canvas shells and preparing the reorganization of things. I started some light reading. The usual, and terribly exciting stuff. But, ya know, it has to get done. And done it gets. So much so that I may do less tomorrow. Is day three too early to take a break? It’s probably too early to take a break.

I’m taking a break.

I shot this photograph, which is nothing special, while doing the weekly garbage can chore, and promptly forgot about it. I remembered it. I edited, uploaded it, and promptly forgot about it again. So here it is, a nothing special snapshot from the wee hours of Monday morning.

The clouds had more patience than me and waited me out. Then nothing happened and I went inside, which is why it is nothing special, and probably why I forgot it, twice. But it’s here, I’m here, the site is here, you’re here, and so on.

The headliner at the weekend concert was Train, which is doing one of those “celebrating 25 years of a hit” tours. So many people are doing these now it no longer seems novel. It seems impractical. It seems a problem. The problem is that so many acts I like are doing them.

Anyway, at one point they launched into a planned bit of spontaneity and played Jack and Diane. Matt Nathanson came out for the back half of the song.

And, now, allow me to point you to something that will change your opinion about that song, and give you, finally, the correct opinion about Mellencamp. It was funny, when this happened, listening to the people who knew him, his father, his sons, and their opinions of him from first-hand experience, and watching all the right people fawn and fan over the whole event, and watching the students saying, “Who?”

I have two more concert clips to round out the week. Tomorrow’s video is something you’ve never heard before, guaranteed. Friday’s video is something I’ve, somehow, never seen live before.

I had a nice little ride this evening. I set out for my time trial 25-mile loop, but it was slow. I didn’t really know that when I passed the sheep, but that’s only because I see them in the first five miles or so.

Soon after, though, the numbers looked low, so I decided to do a bit extra. On the long straight road that usually gives me a good tailwind before the final segment I had a crosswind, and instead of turning for the last seven miles home I went down to the next turn, 1.5 miles down the road, hooked a right at the little white house on the corner and then pushed on through some woods, a few warehouses, over some railroad tracks, a few more warehouses, and then finally took another right, to pass by some other warehouses, and finally the bridge over the water at a place where you sit five feet below sea level, and then into a four-stop sign town that dates back to the 17th century.

Turning left at one of those stop signs sends me through one final neighborhood and then four miles of pastureland, and then home. It was a lovely evening for a ride, a lovely ride, felt good and, yet it was somehow slower than I expected. Who knows why these things are the way they are.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Terrific book and today I am again marveling at his source material.

This was just prior to the Battle of Brandywine. Lt. William Hale survived Brandywine, participated in the occupation of Philadelphia and beyond. By August 1778 he knew he was going home, his regiment in tatters. Less than 100 officers and men from the 45 Foot survived their battles and the subsequent trip home. A 1914 unit history by a Captain W. H. Wilkin of the same regiment, writes that Hale “was not a man of note,” and that his letters home “describe the war from the point of view of a British subaltern.” Wilkin, nevertheless, gives Hale’s correspondence a full chapter rich in context and granular observations of some of the battles in which he participated. Hale was 22 and fighting in America. He retired from the service a captain in 1781, married in 1783, and died in Devonshire in 1789.

Hale’s line about his esprit de corps has, of course, been used in still other books as well. How could it not? While I’ve not read those others, I can say that Atkinson is delivering another great work. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Catch up and read along!