A bright and warm and sunny spring day. The sort of day you should have. The sort of spring day you definitely want. The kind of day that, darn it, you deserve after a long hard winter. The things growing outside know it. They know it best of all. I just stood in the window and looked at the snow, this thing was under it for weeks.

So my only problem here is that I feel this blooming beauty deserves a lot more admiration, and a lot more time, than I can afford to give it at the moment. Blooming things should capture our imagination and attention. They certainly shouldn’t be a mere backdrop, a brief bit of mother nature’s colorful palette ignored for the moment, dismissed for the day, unappreciated because we’re busy.

There’s a lot to do during the blooming period, a clumsy scheduling error that occurs every year, and that’s a first world problem.

Which sounds like I want to do a lot of horticulture; I just want to look at the flowers.

If you start at the URL logo in the bottom corner and let your eyes move up the image you’ll see an airliner flying over. Hear it, fetch the phone, open the camera app, find it in the sky, talk about it here. A lovely way to spend a moment outdoors …

… when you’re not admiring the flowers.

In Rits and Trads we talked about youth sports today. Sportsing: what’s the point? Students are always interested in talking about youth sports, because most of them played something, and because travel ball is ludicrous, but kids are great.

Youth sports, we say, helps teach interpersonal skills, helps us learn how to follow rules, participate with others, respect teammates and opponents, and so on. I like to talk about my favorite coach, who wasn’t the best coach, but was determined to teach us more about those things than the game. Since most of us have a very finite window as athletes, that just seems like a good idea. Teach me how to be a better me.

And that let me talk about social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and constructivism learning theory (Piaget, 1964) (and others) and social learning theory, (Bandura, 1977).

Sometimes we are what we see, and social learning theory talks about that.

Of course I put in a cycling video. Paris-Roubaix was just Sunday, it was an all-timer, and someone is out there reproducing the race with their kids. This is remarkably faithful to the actual race.

And we talked a bit about representation. It seemed pertinent since we get that conversation most around the Olympics and thisw was an Olympic year. This video, then, was a cute no brainer.

I showed other videos, too. A friend of mine coaches youth soccer and he has the parents of the two teams form a tunnel and the two teams run through it at the end of the game. He says that by the end of that the kids can’t even remember the score of the game. They’re just having a good time. I showed several things like that. And then we talked about the rituals and traditions in youth sports. The one that no one thought of was senior night.

In Criticism we talked about this story, LeBron James, Cooper Flagg Make History as Fans React to Near Triple-Doubles in Lakers’ Loss to Mavs, which allowed us to talk about curating and context.

Former umps watch their brethren deal with ABS and feel sympathy, pain:

What is a strike?

The answer to that question has traditionally been easy for MLB umpires: A strike is whatever I say it is.

However, amid the introduction of the automated ball-strike challenge system, highly experienced former MLB umps are critical of baseball’s newest technology.

Citing their own observations and conversations with those currently still in the job, the consistent criticism has been simple: What’s a ball and what’s a strike has changed, and they don’t know how, exactly, to call it.

That allowed us to talk, among other things, about who is included in a story, who is not, and why those things might happen.

After class I beat it back home, and to the bike shop. We’d checked our bikes in for an annual tune-up. Mine was about three years overdue. Tune-ups aren’t expensive, but add-ons are. My lovely bride needed new tires and instead of just ordering them and replacing them myself, our friend the bike guy mechanic did it for us. He slapped on the most expensive tires on the market. These things are interwoven with cash money, they have to be.

I told him I’m probably going to go on the market for a new bike this summer. He told me where to shop. A lot of the smaller shops, like his, have been cut out of the roadie market. It’s a square-footage vs. manufacturer demands vs. ROI issue. He has a small shop. The big four bike manufacturers want you to buy a certain number of machines from them (basically on spec) and then sell them. But bikes don’t constantly fly off the shelves, so the store might have to buy 15 or 20 bikes and hope they can sell them. And that’s all a huge risk, or maybe untenable. Here is a sport built on local culture and the source of the equipment is flirting with driving the locals entirely out of business. My guy said I should go over to this other bike shop and get in some test rides, because I want to try different things out. The guy told me to go to his competitor. I suppose, considering how the industry is changing under his feet, that other store isn’t his competition anymore. And this is how manufacturers are marginalizing and creating vulnerabilities in the best ambassadors their industry has.

So I suppose, this June, I’ll be doing that. Maybe, if I do it right, I can be gripped by paralysis by analysis and not buy a new bike at all.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy this close encounter with the roadside sheep with me, won’t you?

Ya know, we have some neighbors that have two small sheep herds. They don’t let them roam around, and we’re all the lesser for it.