Happy New Year! And in order to look ahead we must look back. Previously I’ve written posts detailing of all of the interesting, important and neat thing that happened in the previous year. I’m not going to do that this year. The archives are in the column to the right if you are interested, but the short version is this:
A.B.D.
Conferences in Troy, Little Rock, Boston, Portland, and St. Louis
Visited Bermuda, Notre Dame, Gulf Shores, D.C., and others
Took a much needed summer break
I rode my bike about 1,000 miles, but not nearly enough
I worked a lot, but not nearly enough
We generally had a terrific, lovely year
So with done, let’s empty the last few photographs from late in the year that I’ve been holding for just this post.
This is a second cousin of mine. Apparently he had an appendectomy in the summer and later in the year the hospital turned him into a newspaper advertisement. His great-grandmother, my grandmother, showed me this ad at Christmas:
Feel free to enjoy this delicious blueberry muffin recipe:
Toys R Us, on Christmas Eve. Spooky place:
The Yankee, as a child at the beach. She still flashes me this smile:
Santa’s gothic stand is still in place, but no one has any more use for it.
It is as if we’ve said: The season has passed you by, old man. We’re here to return things, not ask for more from you. And why did you bring me this awful thing anyway?
We were not returning things, however. We’d ventured into the cold and damp for a visit to the Apple Store. No longer do people wish to see Saint Nick. Now they are looking for Saint Steve.
We were there to look at iPads for my father-in-law. He wanted something a bit more new than his hulking desktop. He’d told us what he wanted to do and we decided that this might be the way to go. We just had to put one into his hands.
This being his first Apple Store experience, it was a bit eye-opening. We showed him the basics in the crowded store, he didn’t seem especially into it at first, but ended up buying one. We snagged a salesman pretty quickly. He went through the data-mining procedure. Told my father-in-law to sign his device. He looked around in vain for a pen, a stylus, anything. The kid was concerned with his lunch break.
“What? Am I supposed to use my finger?” he asked, if a bit sarcastically.
“Oh yeah. Just use your finger. I see it every day and have gotten used to it. Sorry,” he said.
This was the first thing my father-in-law had ever signed for with his fingertips. We live in an age of wonders.
Got him home and opened the box. The Yankee signed him up for iTunes. I threw way too much information at him at once. He logged in, found his home network, registered and started playing with it. One little hiccup later and he was suddenly a professional.
My mother-in-law came in and said “Is this how it is going to be from now on?”
“Huh?”
She said, “Finally I can have control of the remote. For the first time since we’ve had a remote!”
They’re on a cable system that has an app which acts as a remote control.
Had dinner with The Yankee’s collegiate diving coach. They were comparing dives they threw a decade ago. They seemed to recall teammates technique with alarming clarity. Let that be a lesson for all of us.
We had dinner at a place called The Black Duck. It is an old ship that is tied to the bank under an interstate. It looks like it is falling into the river. It was featured on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. Guy Fieri pointed out on the show that it looked like the place was falling into the river.
It could be that the place is falling into the river.
I wondered if it was happening on a trip to the restroom, where the floor is at a severe tilt. Turns out you’re OK as long as you notice the tilt. It is when you don’t feel the angle, I was told, that you should call a cab.
The steamed clams were a big feature on the show, but the burgers were the quintessential calling card. I had the stuffed bleu cheese burger. It was pretty good. You would think places featured on a show like that would blow you away, but this was perfectly acceptable. It was a bit pricey, but that could be the regional thing, too. As with the few other places featured on that show, this one gets some bad reviews online, but that could be two trolls with an axe to grind against the Food Network for all anyone knows.
The stuffed procedure involves tearing apart 12 ounces, putting the cheese in the middle and then putting one part of the patty on top of the other, closing up the seams so there’s no leakage. I was surprised to learn from the segment that these were 12-ounce patties. I do believe they cooked them down. Judge for yourself:
By the time we got back the in-laws were asleep. The iPad was nowhere to be found.
We had this conversation last night, in fact. This morning she said “I want to go here and there, hill and dale and so on.”
She did not, but you don’t care about the street names. What you do care about is when she said ” … and then come back here to fuel up.”
Which, I’ve decided today, is the meanest thing she’s ever said.
See, I’d figured I’d do my 30 miles — because I am at a place where doing less than 15 is a joke, doing 20 barely seems an effort, but 30 is time well spent AND I can still function like a human being for the rest of the day. I’d do my 30 and then come home, rest, hydrate, shower, you know, that stuff. And then later this evening I could mow the lawn.
I am aided in this because, being from the north, the Deep South summer wipes her out. She decided earlier this week she can ride in humidity — it was odd hearing her admit that — but it is the sun that truly hurts. And, if you think about country roads, or even urban areas, rare is the spot where you can be in a lot of shade. July. Deep South. And so on.
So she starts out, and then I play catch up. I pass her. I get home and have a refreshing beverage and think “I’m done. She’ll get home and by then it will be serious July and no longer the early morning and that’ll be the day’s ride.”
But no.
She decides to go back out. And I’m stubborn, so I decide to go back out. She gets a head start. I catch her, and so on. She has a flat tire. I help with that. Turning right at the top of this hill — which I’ve climbed twice, because I had to go back for the tire — means going home. Turning left means we continue our pre-existing route. She turns left, figuring that, having done 45 miles, she’s pressing on.
There’s an expression we’ve learned in long duration exertion called bonking. It is defined as “a condition caused by the depletion of glycogen stores in the liver and muscles, which manifests itself by sudden fatigue and loss of energy.”
I think I had several bonks today.
But we rode 60 miles. SIXTY.
And finally we made it home. Now we’re not doing anything else for the rest of the day that requires coordinated muscle effort, because, really.
She made a delicious dinner. We had a late, large lunch. (Because we’d burned something like 4,000 calories pedaling around town.) And then we dove into Morgan Murphy’s Off the Eaten Path, which is a ringing endorsement for dives and out of the way places across the South (and, for some reason, Delaware and Maryland).
The Yankee’s mother gave us this book. We’ve been looking forward to trying most everything in it. Over the weekend we put sticky notes on each page marking a recipe we’d like to try. Basically we now have a book with sticky notes on most every page. That was a useful exercise.
Tonight we had chicken tortilla soup from Henry’s Puffy Tacos, in San Antonio, Texas. Delicious. Want the recipe?
She’s wearing my aviators, but she’s not flying the plane.
The Yankee flew the car, though. And that was a problem. Just as we got on the freeway and up to a NASCAR speed the whole thing began wobbling. It felt as if a tire was going out of round. We did not, she said, have time to go back home and swap cars. We were, ahem, riding it out.
After a while we ran over something and the wobbling improved. Later it returned. We stopped to check the tires, but everything seemed OK. And then we ran over something else. We stopped again to discover we hadn’t been hitting things, but rather were slinging rubber from the back passenger tire.
On the side of the freeway, having left home late and running to the airport, we found a tire exposing the steel-belted bits. We’d lost a chunk of tire about the size of your hand. This required a tire change. That required pulling all of the luggage out of the trunk and then the fastest tire change ever. Also, we had to add a bit of air to the tire. Our personal air pumps are a bit slow when you’re watching the clock.
We made it to the park-n-ride shuttle. We hustled through airport security, feeling safe with the oh-so-cursory attempt of security theater taking place — better than too much, I say — and then to the plane. Which was delayed. A flight attendant was late.
Oh, they’d leave you, but for one of their own, they’ll board half the flight, count their crew and then take the passengers off the plane. The flight attendant was late because her flight had not shown up. This happens so frequently they have back-up flight attendants waiting to spring forward and offer you a bag of peanuts.
Now, this trip is one-part conference and we’d done something we’ve never done before, which is to fly into the town on the day of our first role in the festivities. The Yankee had to chair a panel in this afternoon’s sessions, which made the plane and the shuttle to the hotel fun. Our room wasn’t ready. We were hours beyond the checkout time, but people weren’t leaving. The Westin in Boston is just that awesome, apparently.
The Yankee, then, changed into a power suit in the locker room. She broke a locker. And that was just how the day went. But, we made it here. She got to her panel on time. We had dinner with friends — her dissertation chair, who is also on my dissertation committee and a guy I went to Auburn with who’s now working toward his PhD at North Carolina — at a place called Dry Dock Cafe. It feels like a restaurant in a mall, but the soup and salad and crabcakes are great. Everything else was fried. The appetizer, nothing more than kidney beans, relish, garlic and mayo (all to taste) was wonderful.
And that was the day. We’ll be in Boston over the weekend through the ICA conference and then on to the next part of our long journey. All down hill from here.
I have a new gimmick for this space on Mondays. Since the day is spent pinned beneath the computer — picture it, the machine has fallen on top of me, on the monitor is a vaguely human expression of determination, I am feebly trying to crawl out from under it — I’m just going to make this the day of a great dumping of links.
Oh there’s still Monday history, for the 1.4 people who come here to find out what I find interesting. That’s been transmorgified (Now there’s a wonderful word. It means something, but as yet has not been defined. We just know it is something about a mutation, but that G sound in there just makes it sound … unpleasant.) into a little elaboration on what I put on Twitter in the morning.
And I do that every morning on Twitter. There the habit seems to be recent history, mostly American or culturally impactful things that I find in a daily history app. I’d do more meaningful tidbits, but it is hard to explain 16th Century context in such a small forum. So I limit it to the baby boomer set when I can. From there and the two following generations people just know stuff. Right? That’s why President Obama talked about Sputnik, because it has seeped into the public consciousness, even if it was someone else’s actual event. Everyone knows what “we” did with Sputnik. And certainly the recitation of that storied tale was accurately told in the brief news packages the next day. Sputnik, when Russia launched us into space! It was Sputnik that put us on the moon!
This isn’t a new phenomenon, actually. There’s a great quote by John Adams after Benjamin Franklin died, where in his most bitter, paranoid way imagined the way the story of the American Revolution would be:
The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin’s electrical rod smote the earth and out sprung General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod and thence forward these two conducted all the policy, negotiation, legislation, and war.
The word insecure, in the psychological sense, only dates back to the early 20th Century (make your jokes here). But if they’d had that concept at Philadelphia, New York and Washington, they might have used it to describe Adams.
Stories change, is the point. Maybe it is enough that people remember Sputnik with fear and wonder, or bemusement, and tell their kids. And then one of those children grows up to inject it into a speech that his boss, the president, gives before a joint session of Congress and the nation. Anything is possible when that kid grew up with a father who used Old Spice.
Did you know there’s a new Old Spice commercial?
I wildly digress, but that’s OK because Monday, in the original Latin, means Stream of Consciousness.
If you’re really suddenly very curious about what recently historical things I’m trying to condense into 140 characters, then by all means, follow me.
From that storied feed of valuable historical information we remembered that today:
In 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed. This is oversimplified, of course. It took about two years, but on this particular day the Central Committee let loose of it’s power. They’d finally gotten around to watching Rocky IV and saw the writing on the wall.
I remember watching television when the Berlin Wall fell, but not this day in particular. So let’s make it up. This day in 1990 was a Wednesday. I was in class. I was in the seventh grade. So let’s say I was in … Coach Tucker’s social studies class. Why not?
This was before my time, but I remember reading about it on the 40th anniversary. In 1967, at a rooftop fine dining restaurant in Montgomery, Ala. a fire broke out in a cloakroom. The flames quickly spread, blocking access to the elevator and stairs. When they finally put out the flames they pulled out 25 bodies, including a prominent former state official, the wife of a newspaper editor and one of Jimmy Hoffa’s chief lobbyists. Here are two contemporary accounts, including one from a reporter who had dined there the night before, and considered returning that night.
Here are the recollections of survivors and firefighters:
In 1964 the Beatles invaded. In 1962 the United States stopped trade with Cuba. If I could have lived in the sixties I would have stopped just after the British invasion began. After that it was a long time to sit around for something fun. Sure, there was Apollo and the moon in ’69, but that would mean wading through five more years of that decade.
My mother asked me once, I’m sure I’ve written of this here, if the moon landing meant us much to my generation as it did her’s. From the exploration and science standpoint, sure, it is incredible. But, on the other hand to my age bracket we’ve always been on the moon. The previous generation got the experience of seeing it happen.
Of course, they didn’t have Google Moon. Come to think of it, they might have won this round.
Other links of varied merit: AOL is paying $315 million for Huffington Post, approximately 10 times HuffPo’s reported last year. From a financial point of view they overpaid. From an intangible point of view, it is anyone’s guess. I’m siding with Alan Mutter:
If HuffPo’s revenues triple this year to $90 million, then Armstrong can tell his shareholders he paid “only” 3.5x more for HuffPo than its sales are worth. If HuffPo sales triple again to $270 million in 2012, then the value of the deal is likely to be about 1x HuffPo’s revenues at that point and Armstrong, assuming he remains on the job, can tell the skeptics he was right.
The question to ask yourself in evaluating the long-term financial benefit of the acquisition to AOL is whether you think HuffPo is capable of bringing in a $270 million in annual sales within a couple of years.
Poynter’s Damon Kiesow finds some problems with Rupert Murdoch’s newest venture, The Daily:
I have been reading The Daily regularly since it launched on Wednesday, and almost every time I open the app, I’ve been confused to see a message telling me that “a new issue” is being delivered.
The Daily is published every morning, but Editor Jesse Angelo also said that it wouldn’t be “static” and would be updated as events warranted.
He’s quite forgiving of the experience, which is a better reception than The Daily has received in many corners. Of course there will be problems to overcome, this is a new enterprise, after all. These things must be done in full view of your audience, which is tough, but familiar to news types.
If only they’d announced it as a beta, everyone would be more willing to accept the learning curve.
Finished up a social media presentation for tomorrow. Three dozen slides should just about do it, right?
Try to make sense of that if you like, but it is mostly images and not too much text. The places with text will be, I suspect, where notes get taken. More to the point, though, I’m hoping to demonstrate the virtue of a PowerPoint presentation where every word isn’t read from the screen. This is an entry-level class and this is meant as something of a not-quite-vague overview.
Sadly I won’t be talking about cool stuff like this, where Coke is looking to move into SMS as a mobile priority:
“If you want to reach every consumer on the planet, texting is the way to do that,” said Daly, speaking Friday at MediaPost’s Mobile Summit conference in Miami. To underscore his point, he noted that 2.3 trillion text messages were sent worldwide last year. And as one of the world’s most pervasive consumer brands, Coca-Cola is always interested in reaching as wide an audience as possible.
Texting has even helped the beverage giant sell more Cokes through vending machines equipped to handle mobile short codes and cashless payments. The unlikely combination of traditional and newer technologies has given vending sales a 14% lift where the specialized machines have been rolled out, said Daly.
That’s just fascinating. You don’t often see Coke making bad marketing moves, so if Coke says they’re concentrating on SMS, you should be the next group.
Did you know our accents are changing in the South? Seems that way. Language is a fluid thing and it is always changing, everywhere. There’s a lot of neat stuff in this story as researchers ponder how and why this happens. I’m surprised no one is thinking of mediated influence. Naturally that wouldn’t be the only cause, but certainly it could be a significant contributor in modern times. Television and radio shape and influence patters, too.
But then I’m a media effects scholar. Here’s my hammer, there’s a nail.
This week Dr. Oz is unveiling his choice of Unhealthiest Cook in America. And Paula Deen’s boys are somehow involved in the promotional aspect of this, but it isn’t Paula. That’s odd. There are less healthy cooks than Paula Deen and her sons — it’s good, food, sure, but your doc would be displeased. Would you eat this:
Place burger patties on English muffins or buns, and if desired, on glazed donuts, as the buns. Top each burger with 2 pieces of bacon and a fried egg.
I made fun of this on Twitter, just as The Yankee uploaded a picture of the cupcakes we bought this evening for dessert. The secret to comedy is timing.
