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Hedge hogging

The most productive accomplishment of the day was in trimming the hedges. This is no small thing, as our house is surrounded on three sides by shrubbery. I’m not sure why the southernmost side is bare.

Everything along the front, save the door, the sidewalk and the garage, are bordered with green, growing things. All but one segment was trimmed. The lucky ones — and isn’t that just like a bunch of bushes, bragging to their neighbors? “You got chopped up, but I’m still here. Look at me grow! — I left alone because they’ll probably be dug out of the ground in a few weeks. Others along the front got lowered, including one that borders the garage. We’ve developed a little contour into it for the car’s side mirror.

There are also two at the end of the drive. These must be maintained to preserve the proper turning ratio as one backs out of the drive. This requires the acquisition of surveying tools, and chalk lines. I am the only person in America going through such precise measurements.

The unintended benefit, or consequence, is that one of them is growing around the mailbox post. I’d let it grow over the thing, but that would probably violate some nuance of the neighborhood and only make the mail carrier mad.

I do all of this, by the way, with the 24-inch Black & Decker Hedge Hog, which is like mounting an M-60 onto Excalibur and plugging an extension cord into the hilt. You hit the trigger, feel that dual blade action, wave it above your head and know: your kingdom is only limited by your vision.

And municipally recognized property lines.

Trimming up the northern side of the estate required the ladder, because there are some bushes on steroids on that side of the house. Two of them would have been easier to reach from the roof.

So I’m standing on the top of a multi-use ladder. We have a transformer of aluminum that makes shapes that are only limited by your imagination, and not its contortion. I dutifully set the ladder into a standard A configuration, straddling the center hinge point with a foot on either side. I realized I couldn’t reach the very back of the bush. OK then. So I find myself standing on the top of the A, in the hinge-point, waving about a whirring 24-bladed saw with shark teeth moving at 2,900 strokes per minute.

My kingdom is suddenly a lot less interesting from this vantage point. I climbed down quickly.

The curious thing about the greenery here is that there is a lot of variety. Once the offending shrubs are out of the front there will only be one place surrounding the entire structure where you see two of the same species next to one another. I haven’t yet decided if that’s a feature or a bug. If you had to dig them all up, every annoying root, what would you replace them with? Uniformity or everything that could grow in this climate?

And that’s the sort of thing you think about as you rake away the leaves leavings. That’s some way to start your Friday evening.

YouTube Cover Theatre, where we see the talent that people have, until the advent of webcams and the Internet, people were hiding in their homes. Since Irecently watched the George Harrison documentary, we may as well check out covers of some of his work.

The Beatles weren’t my band. I like them fine, they just don’t belong to me. Wrong generation. But, if I had been in the right group, I think Harrison would have been my favorite of the bunch. And since you can’t have Harrison without the band, we’ll start with a cover of All Those Years Ago:

That looks like an impossibly difficult tune and he did a nice job. Then he leaned back against his den’s wood paneled walls and enjoyed the rest of his evening.

This cover of My Sweet Lord has received 26,000 views, which may be the largest count that we’ve ever seen in YouTube Cover Theater. Aside, is it just me, or has this song always sounded like it should be appropriated as commercial bed music?

One of the cool things about the Beatles, I would think, would be introducing what has essentially become timeless music to kids. I mean the clean cut, less drugs portion of the catalog. And while this is essentially a Paul McCartney tune, Harrison wrote the main riff, which is enough of an excuse to show a cute cover by a father serenading his daughter for her second birthday.

When she’s older she’s going to be humming Beatles tunes and won’t remember why. Then she’s going to stumble through her dad’s YouTube uploads and it will all click. It will be adorable.

Hard to believe it has been 10 years since George Harrison died. I was doing a network newscast at the time, the last segment of which was a 30 second spot and outro. That day I just played this song for 30 seconds and signed off:

Just for fun, here’s a recreation of Harrison’s Bangladesh Concert with members of Wonderous Stories, Alan Parsons Live Project and more, covering Wah Wah:

Other things happened today, too, emails and organizational things. We’ll have wrapped up the latest big project at work by the first part of the week, it seems my part has largely been completed, except for showing up at the various events next week. Homecoming at Samford means advisory council meetings and wall of fame induction ceremonies and all of the attendant activities.

With those things now completed I can return to other work. Like digging up shrubs.

friends / history / journalism / links / memories / Monday / music / Samford / site / video — 1 Comment
17
Oct 11

… Any road will take you there

” … wants to be friends with you on Facebook” was sitting in my inbox this morning.

But they should send these with a greater nod to suspense. I’m already friends with everyone that a.) I know today who b.) wants to be my friend and c.) is on Facebook.

A new invitation is either spam, which isn’t exciting, a mistake, which may as well be spam or some new person I’ve recently met. I haven’t made any new acquaintances in the last few days.

This leaves one possibility: some old person.

Of course you know that in the first two words of the email. There’s the name, and the higher part of the brain speaks with the lower part of the brain, and they conference in the memory section and the assessment nodule for a big decision. Is this a person? The person? Shall we be friends? That is to say, make it digitally official, because permission has been sought.

Go up to the next person you meet that you like and say “I want to be your friend,” while holding up a “Confirm” button. It can’t me any more awkward an interaction, but I digress.

In the first tow words, the name of this person, you know. And I knew this name, even as it was a slightly shortened version for the man of the boy I once knew. After I pushed the little blue button and spent a few seconds looking through his profile and the first two or three pictures I was sure. Same guy. By then you know what the person is doing with their life.

Now. If you’d approached me any time within the last 10 years and told me what his job would be I would have thought “Yeah, well, that figures.”

Which makes you wonder. How often do career paths and life choices surprise you when you discover lost people online?

Most everyone I’ve stumbled upon, or sought out, seem to be doing well for themselves. There are lots of young families, successes and just a few difficult-sounding jobs. Most of them just seem to be in the places you would expect. That’s not uninteresting, for some that’s just knowing which path takes us where you need to be.

I suspect the online platforms have reshaped reunions. No one has to be surprised, anymore, about what became of anyone else, how they look and if they’re still with that dolt they wasted their time on when they were young and foolish and —

I just discovered a Facebook page about my high school. The theme is “You know you went here if.” Most of it is banal or beyond prosaic. One comment says “If you assumed school was closed on the first day of hunting season.”

Before that you can find a post for people who still live in that community alerting parent/alumni to watch out for a green truck that seems to be lurking near a truck stop. There’s also a death list. A few people have developed a master list of people that have died. A grim and valuable service, no doubt.

Ha. I love this. That community was basically two parallel roads, and in between was the school and a set of railroad tracks. Probably half of the student body had to cross the tracks to make it to school every day. There was an old gentleman who lived right next to the tracks. Just found a note about him. Once my mother insisted we take him a little fruit basket, and now I’m very glad she thought of that:

He was my grandfather. Everyone just doesn’t know what it meant to him for all of the kids to go by and wave to him. He passed away in 92.

He’d sit on his porch every morning and afternoon in his co-op cap and overalls and wave. If it rained, or he did not feel well, he would wave from one of his windows. He’s been gone 20 years. His house has been gone for almost as long, but judging by those comments generations of people think of him every time they have to slow down for those railroad tracks.

That’s enough Facebook for this month.

Class prep today. I wrote a terrific lecture on photojournalism. As an experiment I’m blending pictures I’ve taken with pictures working photojournalists have shot. We’ll see how many times I’m found out. I’m guessing: each time.

Think I’ll mention this, too:

Justin Elliott writes that The Washington Post “chose an image of a bearded protester seeming to assault a cop to illustrate a movement that has been overwhelmingly — almost without exception — nonviolent.” The image shows an Occupy Wall Street protester with his arm around a police officer’s neck. Andrew Burton, the freelance photographer who captured the image, tells Elliott that he doesn’t know what sparked the confrontation and that due to the melee he didn’t even know he had captured that image until later. The ”vast majority of the protests have been incredibly peaceful,” Burton says.

And people think confrontation is news, mostly because it is. But is it representative? The debate continues.

There’s also a current events quiz, featuring exactly no questions about Occupy Wall Street. I would pass it, says the guy who wrote the thing, but it won’t be an easy one to take if you hadn’t been reading or watching the news.

A new section of the site:

These are some of my grandfather’s books. I inherited them a few years ago, and have been scanning a few of the images inside his old texts. Figured they’d make an interesting section, so here we begin. Just a few pages a week, starting with the English literature textbook. Some are intended to be funny, others insightful. Hopefully you’ll find them all interesting, especially if you have a taste in 60 year old books.

There’s a small tidbit in this book that will come up in a few weeks that show my grandfather’s road from a young age, too.

This post was written while listening to the George Harrison documentary. There’s a moment with an archival Harrison interview were he talks about the “inward journey” of meditation and “far out” in the same sentence. There is, of course, an overwhelming discussion on the drugs, and a dire need for a razor and sharp scissors, but that’s just the period. (Hah, here’s a history of the band in hairstyles. They were so in tune with the universe back then, you know.) I recommend the documentary …

… even if Phil Spector is in it.

journalism / links / music / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
27
Sep 11

Four more minutes of the riff, please

My office is next door to the campus radio station. My desk is oriented in such a way that there is only the one wall between their primary studio and my computer. They play smooth jazz and broadcast Samford’s sports and news programming. Occasionally, when my office is quiet and they are inspired, I can hear their broadcast, or even the people inside laughing.

This evening, I heard:

In class today we discussed more language and grammar. You haven’t embraced your day without a hearty conversation about the precise and proper placement of commas.

That’s the circle of life, though I’m sure the students would disagree.

It is, in part, a class on copy editing, and so I think often of John E. McIntyre’s speech:

This is not a gut course. Writing is difficult enough to do. It does not come to us as naturally as speech, and we have to spend years learning it. Editing is even harder. We can write intuitively, by ear, but we have to edit analytically.

Before we even get to the analytical aspect, we will have to do some work on grammar and usage, because if you are like most of the five hundred students who have preceded you here, you will be shaky on some of the fundamentals. You will have to learn some things that you ought to have been taught, and you will have to unlearn some things that you ought not to have been taught.

I should also caution you from the outset that this course is appallingly dull. A student from last term complained in the course evaluation that “he just did the same thing over and over day after day.” So will you. Editing must be done word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and we will go over texts in class, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. No one will hear you if you scream.

I’m going to turn my back for a minute so that anyone who wants to bolt can.

Now, if you are willing to stay—and work—I can show you how it is done.

Want a heat-seeking ground-to-air missile? Libya is the place for you, apparently. Thousands have gone missing from unguarded ammo dumps and now the chase is on to try to recover, or buy them back.

If this sounds familiar, it is. The Americans had to buy back missiles from the mujahideen after the Soviet Union’s adventures in Afghanistan. After having spent between $3 to $20 billion in outfitting the Afghanis, they had to go back and try to buy back the armaments, reportedly for as much to $100,000 a piece. But that’s just the monetary perspective. The security concerns are astounding.

Sen. Barbara Boxer calls it a nightmare. Have a nice day with these little factoids, just one more note that causes one to wonder why we got involved in Libya and, more to the point, if we had to, why didn’t we do it right?

Democracy? Not that necessary:

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover … I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. You want people who don’t worry about the next election.”

Says the governor of North Carolina.

One of Gov. Bev Perdue’s staffers would later say she was speaking in hyperbole, which is code for “I wish my boss would shut up.”

Oh, look, newsobserver.com have posted an mp3 of the governor’s speech, so you can figure out her tone.

If you play it backward she’s clearly singing along with the Temptations.

Friday / music / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
16
Sep 11

Deadline day

Turned in the last paper after having a Microsoft Word crash at 24 pages and 5,400 words. Good thing I’d just saved the document. Shame the autosave feature doesn’t function correctly.

I pasted my references into the paper and then watched the pinwheel of doom appear. I re-opened Word, confident that I’d just pressed the Command-S, and found an old version of the paper. Well then. This is the auto restore function, which picks a version of the from about three hours ago. So I closed that, opened the file in the traditional way and found my updated paper. For the most part. I had to re-make a few changes, despite the save. This is a level of aggravation you don’t need after six consecutive hours focusing on one project.

I’ve been told I expect to much, but Microsoft, which has been in the word processing game for some time now, shouldn’t have problems of this nature.

Yes, I expect it to work.

Got everything fixed, though, properly formatted and sent away. With time to spare!

So dinner was late, but the paper was on time. And that’s been my day: a 15-mile bike ride, reading, thinking, writing, editing and dealing with technology.

And now for this week’s YouTube Cover Theater, where we sample the talent playing in their homes for the adoring crowds of their webcam and random people on the Internet.

This week’s feature artist is Sam Cooke. Why? Because I couldn’t find enough Gene Vincent covers. (The world has enough Be Bop A lula. Let’s try some variety, Internet!)

Kiersten Holine is actually an independent artist — she’s selling a demo and an EP on her site — which is a bit at odds with the YouTube Cover Theater premise. But who cares, this sounds great:

Sayaka Alessandra is a Japanese-Sicilian Italian (I love those combinations and always wonder: how did your parents get together?) who’s bio starts “Sayaka Alessandra started her singing career on YouTube recording cover songs of many various artists … Since being discovered on YouTube Sayaka has gone on to sing in Café’s, Lounges and outdoor venues.” So that’s in keeping with the premise …

And now, two guys sitting in an apartment:

And for the second night in a row, I’m going to bed at a respectable hour. No need to check my temperature. I’m fine.

music / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
3
May 11

A random assortment of observation-like observations

This cropped up on the this day in history feature. That wreck is almost as terrifying as the production values. Bobby would walk away and outlived his sons, Davey and Clifford, and his friend Neil Bonnett, who all lived and died in racing. The rest of the Alabama Gang are still around. Bobby is doing commercials, his brother Donnie is retired, Jimmy Means is a race car owner and Red Farmer was racing in the 21st century, into his 70s, a product of an era where he even he didn’t know how old he was.

But back to what’s important. Here’s the early race from Talladega this year. That’s television in 24 years.

You never really think of the late 1980s as being ancient for an art and technology like television, but there it is.

Cold today. It was 54 degrees this afternoon, this is odd being Alabama in May. It was warmer, by 15 degrees, at my in laws in New England than in the deep South.

Sitting in my office and shivering I discovered that a bit of a Jerry Lee Lewis song I recently taught myself is actually a Rabon Tarrant (or older) riff. Listen to this.

Hear that piano? Speed up Blues With A Feeling and you’ve got the Killer. A few weeks ago I pulled up a tutorial from YouTube and learned how to peck that out on the piano. Tarrant played in brass bands all over the country during Prohibition and switched to the blues and left orchestras somewhere around World War II and started playing the blues. He recorded a lot with Jack McVea and now, 64 years after Tarrant laid down Blues With A Feeling here we are.

Artists back then might not have given much thought to the longevity of their music. It was here, it was recorded, you played it in dank, smelly clubs and then the little checks came in. You had to write more tunes to keep the money rolling, to keep the car filled with gas so you could play more of those clubs. No one probably had any time to consider that the great-grandchildren of the people they were playing in front of might also discover their music.

Three-and-a-half hours in class (and extra time) with Dreamweaver this afternoon. This was the next to last day of the class, where most are rounding the corner from being perplexed or dismayed by the program to having something almost ready to show off. Most of their portfolio sites I’ve watched them build from the ground up, helping out a bit here or there with the tricky parts. There are a few that have big strides to make, but by this time next week everyone will have managed to shuffle themselves into pretty good shape.

Amazing how a deadline will do that for you.