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overwriting

Downright magical

Here’s an almost-interesting piece about the future of how you watch sports. You work through the need for cable for your sports fix, baseball’s success with streaming, how other leagues follow what MLB does and the need for cable. Cable is always important:

ESPN might be the pied piper for a different kind of strategy, though. Rather than cutting cable and paying only for what you want (the “a la carte” model), you’d pay one price and get everything, everywhere. Yes, you need cable to get WatchESPN, but once you’ve logged in you’re effectively untethered from your TV. Your cable bill buys you access to all the things you want to watch, wherever you want to watch them, on whatever device you choose. And because it’s the company setting the restrictions for the leagues, ESPN’s platform doesn’t have weird local blackouts, or odd weekend restrictions — you just watch ESPN as you always have.

The Verge is also running a War for your TV series. Stock Gumshoe is using Television 2.0 and the new golden age, and really the The $2.2 trillion war for your living room. There are also the game consoles and emerging gadgets.

And it all sort of leads to this piece, which is worth reading in full and defies excerpting, really. But:

Because the percentage of households with a cable or satellite subscription is now declining for the first time in the history of television.

3 million Americans have already cut the cord, including 425,000 in the past 3 months alone.

And according to Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, those “cord-cutters” are joined by a new group: the “cord-nevers.” A full 83.1% of new households are choosing to live without pay-TV.

[…]

Robert Johnson said about the shaky state of the cable industry last month at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“In the next two or three years, something’s got to give. At some point, the consumer is going to say enough is enough.”

He’s one of the most powerful men in the pay-TV business, warning his fellow fat cats that their bloated, inefficient industry may collapse by 2014…

TV isn’t just the next great transformation of the Internet Age… it’s the BIGGEST one of all.

Since no one likes their cable service, let us say bring it on.

And, of course, it will change things for us in the classroom. Not everything, but quite a bit.

Newspaper critiques. Budget meetings. Award nominations. Well that’s different for a Wednesday. We submit news clippings from the Crimson to a couple of different contests every year.

The deadline for one of those contests is coming up. We’ve gotten about two dozen awards from this organization in the last three years, so we sat around late into the evening finding the best examples today. Next week I’ll have to send them to the judges.

OK, we sat around for part of the afternoon. The rest of it I think I just rambled on for a while, too. It happens.

If I ever ran for office I might be a micromanager. I visit rest stops in my travels — I have to take breaks to stretch my shoulder and back — and the photography is … dated. Not the best image to share with people visiting our fine state. It is probably 14 pages down on the list of priorities, but still, this could be easily fixed.

The one nearest our home has photographs of the football stadium without upper decks. That’s a 32 year old photograph, at least.

Here’s a photo from a rest area in almost the perfect center of the state. It is encouraging you to visit Orange Beach, a lovely place to be most any day, but on this day in 1981 … well, downright magical:

People see that picture and think “Now there’s a group of somebodies. What a great life.” But they don’t realize they haven’t talked in a lifetime.

She’s a new grandmother. He’s now a guy who is coming to question all these years in sales, but he’s been pretty good at it. They gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. They sent cards to each other on all the big days for the first few years after, she always loved the memories of that trip to the coast, he’s silently been kicking himself for drinking too much and remembering too little … but they somehow lost track in that way people do.

Sad, really. She stopped at that rest stop one day, her kids had to go potty. She walked right by that photo.

“I need to go to the beach,” she thought. But she didn’t make the connection.

Or they could be happily married. The new grandkid could be theirs. He might have been a terrible salesman, but really found his stride in retail.

We’ll never know what became of them. But that photograph might live on forever.

Visit me on Twitter. And a new picture on the Tumblr today, too.

Auburn / football / overwriting / photo / weekend — Comments Off
10
Nov 12

Georgia at Auburn

Beautiful day for football. Breezy this morning. Calm and sunny all afternoon.

We watched the morning games at home and then went out for a day of tailgating. We spent much of the afternoon sitting under a tent, because sitting down with back support seems a good idea when your shoulders feel ready to pop off your torso. We made Alabama jokes with friends as we watched the first half of the Texas A&M game.

Had a great time as the sun slide down behind a tree and behind the stadium and the air turned a nice shade of cool. We walked around the stadium to get to the right gate. We walked through the inside of the stadium looking to upgrade our seats, but no such luck tonight.

Not to worry, our seats are low and not the best, but that’s pretty much what this game will be like. The Auburn Olympians are welcomed out on the field. The marketing slogan around here this year is “Welcome home.” The PA script still says, “Welcome back.” They’ll figure it out eventually.

Nova, the golden eagle, flew from the flagpole, soaring over the eastern stands and then looping into his target at midfield. He was feisty this evening. The band marched on, the teams came out. We all watched the scoreboard as the Auburn game got underway and the A&M-Alabama game wrapped up. The Aggies beat the Tide and that was the biggest cheer in Jordan-Hare this year, perhaps.

It was a fine evening. There’s nothing quite like a game under the lights. It just makes for a great atmosphere. Under those lights we saw Onterio McCalebb take the opening kickoff from his four up to the 21 :

The kickoff is a lovely moment. All of the team’s frustration of the year, all of the fans’ gripes, despair or whatever the individuals do in a bad year is wiped out with a simple promise of what might be. The analysis and prognostication and reality is momentarily replaced by the eternal ‘what if’ optimism of the fan. This might be the night.

And that gives way to the first offensive series. The struggles of a young offensive line, a true freshman quarterback, the third starter of the year making only his second start are all remembered. These things and all of the effort and successes and not-quites of all of those young men who’ve played and practiced hard are laid bare.

But still, anything is possible. Until even the most irrational possibilities are re-ordered by reality, whatever the reality is to be. No one yet knows, given the vagaries and the variances. This game could go anywhere. That’s the feeling of any game, or at least the feeling of the desperate in a desperate game.

The first drive went like this: Jonathan Wallace looked to his fullback, crowd favorite Jay Prosch, for a screen pass, gain of one. On second down Tre Mason ran off the left tackle for a gain of one. On third and eight Mason skirted through the offensive line and gained seven yards. On fourth and inches Auburn — a 2-7 team with absolutely nothing to lose except, perhaps, their jobs — punted.

Six plays later Georgia had chewed up 76 yards and scored the game’s first points.

Auburn got the ball back at their own 12 after the next kickoff. After eight plays they’d marched 49 yards to the Georgia 39. On 4th and 14 Auburn couldn’t bear to attempt a 56-yard field goal. They took a delay of game penalty and punted. After nine more plays and 80 more yards Georgia was patting themselves on the back for taking an early 14-0 lead.

Grown men and women barking at each other. This is as erudite as it sounds.

Georgia won easily, as if they were holding a mid-season scrimmage, really. They scored 28 by the half, shut it down to celebrate an SEC East championship, and rode home with a 38-0 win, the most lopsided score in the 116-game history of the series.

That’s two in a row for Georgia in the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry. Feels like 14 in dog years.

The championship in 2010 seems like a long time ago.

Auburn, we discussed during and after the game, has been competitive in exactly three games against the top half of the SEC in the last two years.

Maybe it would be better if you could point to one thing. If, before that opening kickoff, you could say “If only we can minimize this, or avoid that we’ll have a fighting chance today” and mean it. Instead this is a near total collapse.

The turmoil is just beginning. It will quickly outpace the marketing.

Monday / overwriting — Comments Off
10
Sep 12

The onomatopoeia of our appliances

Mondays are nothing terrible. Or overly much original or fun. They are inside days. There are no great pictures, or inspiring visuals with tinkling bits of bed music.

I should make more videos. I have a note, I wrote somewhere in a note to myself in one of my notebooks, that says “Shoot more video.”

Many of my notes wind up in my notebooks. Fancy that. The problem with that statement is the plurality. Many books mean less review, which means less remembering, meaning, in this instance, fewer videos.

I did laundry this evening, can you tell? There’s something about the repetitive sounds — next time don’t tune it out, really listen to what your Kenmore is trying to tell you. There’s some sort of story in that kerchunk kerchunck kerchunk, gurgle and blurble. There’s meaning in the chaos of the woosh of the drain.

There’s not, really, a meaning there. I’ve been spending a lot of time with words and commas today, and it can make you a bit silly.

And so I will leave you with this, a profound thing I read somewhere. The sentiment is more important than the original location, I think:

I do tend to repeat myself a bit, but only for the sake of emphasis.

I’m going to put this is in the signature file of my emails. This is only here, again, because it was important the first time. If I felt I’d explained it earlier, you wouldn’t be reading this. My apologies for not having enough time to make the original telling more clear.

Kerchung, kerchung, kerchung, whirrr —

I’ve noticed that the dryer, which turns itself off, can also turn itself back on for a few extra revolutions. I wonder what that means.

cycling / iPhone / overwriting / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
29
Mar 12

Ride right

The road was quiet. Everyone had gotten to where they needed to be.

It was empty enough that when the occasional car came by it seemed to do so apologetically. They knew they were intruding on the empty asphalt and how lonely it should be.

When the hum of the road is your own noise, and yours alone, that’s worth chasing. That’s the moment you ride for.

Alabama / Auburn / cycling / memories / overwriting / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 12

Bo Bikes Bama

Bo Jackson, that Bo Jackson, will ride across Alabama in April, east to west, as a fund raiser for tornado relief.

The man is intense even in promotional videos. I want to ride along. At least for a little bit, if not an entire leg. (I’d prefer the Bessemer to Tuscaloosa day obviously, since we both grew up there.)

You can ride with him.

If I were able to ride with him the only problem would be figuring out to get ahead of him several times so he can pass me and I can describe the sound. So I can write things like this:

Bo riding a bike is an angry mashing of steel gears. Gritting carbon fiber against melting alumnium. He flings acidic drops of sweat behind him, furious that he has to stop and replace his pedals every 45 minutes or so. He’s riding a Trek because it is built like a tank, but he still grinds them into dust. I bet he could ride the 300 miles in the better part of an afternoon if he catches the red lights right. But since he has to wait so often for wheel rebuilds it stretches this thing out over a week. I bet the turbulence behind him helps clean up the tornado debris on some of those central Alabama roadsides.

And not one man will sneer at him when he coasts into Tuscaloosa, because they know.

I told a friend that I was trying to explain Bo to my lovely bride, who was busy being a little girl in another part of the country during Bo’s prime while we were busy agog at what the man could do. A few years later and superlatives can ring hollow. He suggested the uninitiated watch this:

If I rode with Bo I would not act like a fanboy, but I would ask him about coming home to raise money. And I would ask him about his VOX2 Max. And I’d playfully suggest we sprint to the next road sign, just so I could say I’ve been beaten by the best.