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Rowan

Monday / music / photo / Rowan / video — Comments Off
27
Jan 25

Luke is Joe, until he finally gets to play himself

I’m not going to upload the whole Guster concert we saw Friday night, but there are maybe two or three other little bits I want to highlight. This was the beginning of their second version of the “We Also Have Eras Tour.” We saw them on the first leg of this tour, last march in Baltimore. We also saw them last May in a live radio concert. Obviously we were going to see them again. We’ve now seen the boys from Tufts three times in the last 10 months. I can’t wait to see them again.

This one takes a little context. Which I guess is perfect and confusing since the silly conceit of this tour is they are acting (to critical acclaim) their life story. So, context. Guster started, in 1991, as a three piece, guitarists Ryan Miller and Adam Gardner and percussionist Brian Rosenworcel, the Thunder God. In 2003 Joe Pisapia, a multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and producer joined the band. He stayed in the group, and added a lot, until he left to play in k.d. lang’s band in 2010. So, at this point in the concert, they’re in that period. But Pisapia isn’t there. The part of Joe Pisapia is played by Luke Reynolds, who joined the band when Pisapia departed. When he first comes on stage in this show, he’s holding a giant picture of Pisapia over his face. He wears a name tag that says “Joe” on it during that part of the show. It’s dorky and tongue-in-cheek and great. Everyone is in on the joke.

So this is Reynolds, with the banjo, playing as Pisapia. He and Miller are pretending to re-enact the creation of one of their most popular numbers and, because of the magic of show business, it comes together for us here fully formed. This is “Jesus on the Radio,” which is always referenced on March 16th, since March 16th figures into the song.

Only, there’s a lot going on here in this particular performance. Reynolds is obviously losing his voice. It’s January. Miller knows it. The sound person knows it. Most people in the crowd probably didn’t catch this, but I heard it: Miller picks up some of the slack and the booth made some quick adjustments to their mic levels. And then when Gardner joins in, they change the layering in the chorus. This is all done on the fly.

Let’s check in on the cats, who have entered another noir era for this week’s installment of the site’s most popular feature.

Phoebe was catching a nice little nap in the 1 o’clock hour.

Same spot, a few days later, and almost down to the minute, I found Poseidon doing the same thing.

So, clearly, I’m the one with the routine.

(Bonus point for you if you see Phoebe in the background.)

In class today I demonstrated that the students don’t want me lecturing all semester. I did this by … lecturing for a full class session. Today we talked about globalization, and the history of cities, and a little about how each helps the other. And this will get us started down our path for the semester. A path that, I hope, they’ll lead the way on, conversationally.

The class was great today. A third or more of them were chipper and chiming right in. A few others sprinkled in some ideas, as well. Next week, we start talking about media and culture. And then we’re off to the races, examining various kinds of media from different places around the world.

I hope it all works out half as well as I’ve imagined it. In the the imagined version, a few students who took the class as a pure elective tell me they’ve been so inspired that they’ve changed their major. Others say they’ve had a vote and decided I am the Cool Professor. They’ll tell me this class was gas. That I left no crumbs. I will accept the gesture, but politely decline the gift they’ve all chipped in for. And, besides, being the Cool Professor is a great honor. It’ll go on my vita, I tell them. Right at the top, in fact. Instead, of a gift, just tell all of your friends about the class. And they do. And, eventually, it becomes so popular that they have to move it into one of those giant auditorium settings. Each semester it grows, becomes more intriguing, and more innovative. And then one day, a former student from this class comes back, now a cross-cultural pioneer in some as yet unrealized medium, and they guest lecture in the course. They say it started for them, right here. And they feel so indebted that they still want to give me that gift. By then, my career is winding down and I’ve become so popular that accepting a gift doesn’t seem problematic anymore. I figure maybe they’re going to give me a new prototype of their newest technological innovation. Or make a sizable donation to the university in my name, and my name goes on a building somewhere. But, then, my former student and now friend and global media pioneer says, No, the alumnus says. In 2025 we bought you a granola bar. And I’ve held onto it since then. Here it is, your 20-year-old thank you.

So, yeah, if it works out half as well as that, I’d be pleased.

After class I completed the impossible and Herculean task of putting office hours on the office door.

And then I went to the UPS store. Now there’s a tale …

I walked in because I had to return some poster frames I bought. I had to return the poster frames because I bought the wrong size poster frames. I need 24 x 32 and I bought 18 x 24. Not an original story.

I walked into the UPS store bracing myself for a line, because some part of my brain just thought it’d be like the USPS. But let me tell you, there was no one in the UPS store. When I opened the door the bell rang or the ding donged or whatever, and one of the guys came out of the back.

What can I do for you, boss?

This is now the second person that’s called me boss in the last 72 hours.

“I need to return this box and I’m sure you can tell me what to do from there.”

He has by then picked up his scanner, punched three buttons he hits dozens of times a day and scans the code I have shown him on my phone. His printer spits out a label faster than the sound from the scanner dies in the room. Seriously, you could still hear an “ep” and he had the thing in his hand.

OK, he said.

“It still has the label on the — ”

I’ll cover it with this one. Have a great day, boss.

And that was that.

So then I went to a gas station. Now there’s a tale! I’m going to save that one for another day.

journalism / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Jan 25

First day of class

The first installment of the new class, International Media, went … OK. It’s syllabus day, which is an easy day, but also tedious. You just talk about the class in a meta way, and little is conveyed in terms of knowledge or thoughts challenged. But don’t you know they know where the various policies are in this 10 page document. They know what they’re getting into, at least.

And what they are getting into is a newly designed course. And my first class that will be taught in 75 minute sessions. The last two years I’ve been online, or leading three-hour classes. I have to figure out what 75 minutes feels like. I apologized preemptively for these sorts of rough spots.

At least there’s a clock in the back of the room. Except I realized, that’s not a clock. It’s a timer. (For public speaking classes, I guess.) I noticed that at the last moment, and managed to get everyone out with a moment or two to spare. So it’s a new class for me. A brand new course design. It’s being held in a time block with which I must get reacquainted. And it takes place in a room I’d never even seen until I walked into the room after the previous class filed out.

We made it out together.

Now we’ll see how many of them come back on Monday!

I stuck around the office for a few hours to do some work, and then set out for the drug store on the way home. I shopped for, not drugs, but vitamins. And I saw this sunset on the last chilly leg of the drive.

My suit got a compliment today, so at least I did that part right. Now I just have to iron for the twice-weekly meetings between now and May.

So as not to dive too deeply into the minutiae, The Washington Post is dying of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. They begged off running endorsements before the election. Some of their stellar newsroom members have left in protest of that, and some other things. The tenor is really changing in that venerable old newsroom. And no less than a 40-year veteran of the place, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was publicly critical of a recent editorial they published. These are all the by products of choices they’ve made, either at the hand of the new boss or the insistence of the owner, one of the oligarchs presently prostrating himself before the president.

Funnily, Jeff Bezos came up in passing after class today. It was one of those questions a student asked on the way out the door. It was a simple answer, one the student didn’t know, and that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone knows the things you know. But in that class they’ll learn a few of them. And we’ll probably wind up talking about Bezos and the Post. I’ll try to pretend not to be disappointed in the venerable old rag when we do.

But, then, I saw this ad as an interstitial ad on one of their stories. And, friends, I can tell you a whole table full of their sales and marketing people sat down together and wrote this nonsense.

Right after that I saw the first mentions of the indefinite pauses to the NIH process. This is important, important stuff. It’s difficult to state how vital the NIH grants become to local economies, to the fields they fund, and to the scholarship they help create. And we just … stopped them today. Even if you wanted to start the panels back up next week, even if you did it without change — and you know that won’t be the case — we’ll have done some real damage to the whole system. A system which is, in fact, one of those things we run better than just about anyone else in the world.

This isn’t just some small nonsense we’re talking about. Some colleague(s) at my current employer are working with some NIH grants on various small business grants. I don’t know the details, but it’s likely some scientific entrepreneurial enterprises. I looked up the grants at one of my alma maters. These are the departments that benefited from NIH money in fiscal year 2025 at UAB.

For FY 2024 UAB received $334,417,936 from 612 awards. This is critical money as states continue to cut back on university funding and administrators and scholars are forced to find their financial support elsewhere, as in these previous reliable grants. You wonder, now, how rickety the whole higher educational system is.

Not that that medical research is a worthwhile reason to maintain a sense of urgency or continuity. Not that there are patients around the country desperately trying newly developed techniques or therapies or medicines that might stem from those grants. Not that people around the world benefit from them daily. If you’d like to approach this from a strict dollars and cents perspective, by all means. NIH reports that for each dollar they dole out, it turns into almost $2.50 in terms of economic activity support. That chart also represents a few hundred jobs from highly skilled experts. Who knows if it is too early to worry about a brain drain, but hamstringing specialists and experts is certainly a dangerous strategy.

The largest beneficiary of NIH grants in FY 2024 was the famed Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which earned 1,512 grants that totaled $857,947,550. Most of that, $821 million or so, goes into all of the amazing research they do there. You know, cutting edge Johns Hopkins.

What could possibly go wrong?

Monday / photo / Rowan — Comments Off
13
Jan 25

Syllabus complete

I spent a full day happily typing away at the keyboard today. A full day at the home office. A full day and then some. It was productive. My new class is now prepared!

Except!

I still have to make the Canvas version of the class. But that’s just a lot of copy-paste, date setting, triple-checking the details, typing some fine print and so on. That’ll be all day Wednesday, I’m sure. The readings and videos are set. The grading schema is established. The first five or so classes are essentially prepared. I’m feeling pretty good about it.

Best of all, I got the thumbs up from my lovely bride, who said it looked like a class plan.

So, good. I turned to the other class. I’m teaching what I taught in the fall, and only one thing has changed in that class, so it’s a straightforward prep.

And I also copy edited two things for her. Funny. I asked her to look at a syllabus, which was about nine pages, without all of the boilerplate. She wrote a few notes on it. She sent me two documents, 12 pages, and I sent back a lot of track notes. I’m note sure that was an equal exchange on her part.

It got up to 44 whole degrees today, the warmest it’s been in a month or so. The long range forecasts suggest we might get a few more days like that this month. But before that, a bunch of more days at or below freezing.

So I went outside to bust up some ice from a great big puddle. It bested me yesterday, but not today! Showed that ice who’s boss, is what I did. Then I looked up to this beautiful view.

That’s a random moment in the middle of January, and it still looks like that. We’ve got it pretty good, I must say.

It’s time for the site’s most popular weekly feature, it’s time to check in with the kiddies! They’re happy to be back in their regular Monday spot, let me tell you.

I caught Phoebe getting ready to be wacky. The crouch-down pose is a big favorite in our house.

And Poseidon, we ran into him on one of his regular inspections of the guest bathroom.

You never know what’s going on with shower curtains. You’ve got to jump on cabinets and sniff them and look over them some times. You never know what’s going on with shower curtains.

Nothing was found.

But the kitties, as you can see, are doing well. Hope you are, too!

Friday / photo / Rowan / site — Comments Off
10
Jan 25

Getting things done

I think I spent all day in either a productive and good committee meeting, or working on a syllabus and an outline for my new class. The latter is a bit of a slog. The good news is that, after however long I’ve been working on it, and for the last four months or so that I’ve been thinking about it, I finally got it into a shape I like, this new class.

There’s still work to do. a lot of it, but six weeks of layout are now in the can. I can do the next two with my eyes closed, if I have to. There will be some great guests after that, and then a series of group presentations after that. And, by then, we’ll be in the home stretch for the term.

Tonight I even figured out the midterm paper and two options for the final.

It was a productive day, then. It should all be mapped out on paper this weekend. Hopefully the rest of the details will click into place in a satisfying way.

Then I have to build the Canvas site for it.

And then I have to prepare lectures and presentations and deliver them, of course. But, here, in January, I found the path to May.

If I can sell the students on following along this could be an interesting journey.

That’s pretty exciting for me, even if a day spent pecking away at keyboards and looking for good resources to use in the class isn’t the most exciting thing to talk about.

Perhaps, then, the most exciting thing today was this. I set my cup on the countertop in the kitchen and went into another room to do … whatever it was, I forget now … and I heard the sound of something falling. Because we have two cats, you have to put things in just the right spot, or chaos gets created, and almost right away. You come, too, to know all the sounds. So I knew what it was, from two rooms away.

One of the cats was playing flip cup.

And someone won.

I wonder who it was.

There’s new art on the front page of the site. It’s a nice eight-image presentation, this is the general premise.

So go to the front page and check it out. I’ll wait for you.

It’ll probably stay up until the end of February, unless something really blows me away between now and then. By then we’ll be past due for something that makes us feel warm.

Also, I started making new buttons for the front page. There are plenty of updates coming. But I’m just doing a bit here and there, because there’s a lot of regular work to be done. And, as ever, the Want To Do list, is crammed full of items. Maybe I’ll have some of those done by May, too!

cycling / family / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
9
Jan 25

Progress is being made

Terrible night of sleep. But the morning’s sleep was better. Usually, I go to bed when I’m dead tired, but I went earlier and just … laid there for about six hours. Also, both cats decided it was my turn to be their personal space heaters. One cat is fine. Both cats are a furnace.

I looked at the weather, and then I looked at the forecasts for family. So, today, after doing a bunch of work, I called my grandfather to see if he was prepared for snow and ice. It seems he’ll have a harder winter weekend than we will. He assured me he is prepared to stay indoors. The porch has already been treated. He has the traditional French toast provisions. He gets the joke, but not being adventurous with cuisine, I doubt he’s ever eaten French toast. Nevertheless, he’s ready to watch the weather come and go. I asked him when it was supposed to warm up for him.

“Springtime!”

Nowhere near soon enough.

Though we’re now forecast to hit 41 degrees this weekend. I might set up a sprinkler and go run around in it.

I spent today working on class stuff for the spring semester. It’s just that for the next 12 days until class begins. Honestly, 12 days probably isn’t enough time. But I have the outlines for the first three weeks of class prepared. Another two or three hours will make me properly prepared to navigate through them. And tomorrow, and part of the weekend, I’ll continue building outlines.

It’s terribly exciting stuff, I know. It is, if you like the subject matter. Lucky for me, I do. We’re going to talk about globalization and media and culture in the first three weeks and, looking through what is in store, I want to talk about them right now, but all those days will be here soon enough, leaving me plenty of time to prepare.

Except there’s never enough time to prepare. The class I’m working on right now meets twice a week, for 75 minutes. I haven’t taught a class of that length in several years. Three, maybe four key points per day. It is a mental shift, and a lot to prepare for.

Tomorrow, I’ll figure out how to boil down the entire history of recorded communication into a class session or two. And then figure out what I can omit for a unit on global cinema, and then another for an entire planet’s worth of television. These are challenging choices.

So, I’m left with the idea that it’s a good thing that I don’t have months and months to prepare; I’d agonize over it. I know that, for certain, because that’s what I’ve done every time I’ve sat down with it over the past several months.

I’ve been working my way through a sprint series of Zwift this week. I’ll do a workout, and then round out the day with some free riding to get about 30 miles in. Yesterday, I did a workout inspired by the outrageous style of Mathieu van der Poel. He’s a six-time world champion in cyclocross, and a world champion in gravel bike. Two titles he currently holds, in fact. He’s been the European champion in mountain bike. He also wins stages in grand tours and in the European monuments and classics. Also, he’s been world champion on the road, too. The exercise was meant to name drop him and try, with a straight face, to convince you that you’re emulating the attacking style of one of the best riders of his or any generation. (There are maybe three generational talents on the road right now, including perhaps the best ever; it is absurd.) Surge and recover and surge and recover. Then go over your threshold some more.

Do that eight times, and you’re just like Mathieu!

The training session has little messages on it, and I was having a good ride, and I was sure it was going to say something laughable like that. “You’re ready to race MvdP!” I was ready to mock it endlessly. But they held off.

From his Tour of Flanders win in 2023 …

In great news for wattage fans globally, MVDP has even uploaded his power data. You might want to take a seat before reading this next section. Van der Poel averaged a stunning 285 watts for the 6.5 hours with a peak power of 1,406 W. That’s 1,406 watts in the final seconds of a six-hour-and-thirty-four-minute-long race. Most of us could barely say “1,406 watts” at the end of a 280 km ride, let alone hit such a figure. MVDP’s heart rate monitor also had a tough day at the office. With an average heart rate of 141 bpm and a max of 189 bpm, the Dutch superstar’s heart rate was the only thing faster than his speedo(meter).

If you don’t know what that means, it means a lot. It means something nearly incomprehensible to mortal human beings.

I don’t care about watts — I have a shirt that says “More Pulse Less Watts” — but that’s the central metric of the workout. I was doing but a fraction of that yesterday. And I did it for about 90 minutes, rather than all day.

But I set five new Strava PRs yesterday. Four of them on climbs. (Take that, Mathieu!)

Today’s workout was a long segment with eight sprints in it. I hated most every second of it. But I kept getting these great canned messages from the app. Usually they are of the “You’re getting stronger,” standard rah-rah. But in today’s workout …

Read the room, Zwift.

After 24 miles going from sprint to sprint to sprint — some of them a bit uphill, mind you — and a few more miles just passing the time, I found I’d set Strava PRs on five of those eight sprint segments.

When they don’t feel especially fast it just means you are especially slow!