Samford

I do not know what is happening. / photo / running / Samford / swimming / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on All of these things are worth remembering
31
Mar 15

All of these things are worth remembering

I follow exactly one comedy writer on Twitter. And tonight he linked to this essay written, he said, by a friend of his. That guy worked on the Letterman show, and he’s dishing the anecdotes. There’s a lot of fun in these stories:

Bill Clinton was hanging out near my wife, which is something no husband wants. My wife also worked at the show, and the former president was backstage watching the Top 10 List while awaiting his guest segment. I had a joke in the Top 10 that mentioned Chewbacca. The joke got a pretty big laugh backstage, but Clinton seemed confused. He turned and with a quizzical look asked, “Who’s Chewbacca?”

First off, I have to admit that having written something that prompted Bill Clinton to say the word Chewbacca stands as the proudest achievement of my life. (I’m the father of two.) My next goal is getting Pope Francis to say “Wu-Tang Clan.” But the more I thought about it, the madder I got. Yes, Bill Clinton’s a world leader with lots of important things on his mind. We get it. But when Star Wars came out in 1977, Clinton wasn’t the president. He was a regular guy. Heck, his nickname was “Bubba.” A guy named “Bubba” can’t pretend he’s too important to know who Chewbacca is. And also, isn’t Clinton always claiming to be a New York Times crossword-puzzle expert? Chewbacca is exactly the kind of random reference any decent crossword-puzzler would be aware of.

I really hoped there would be a YouTube video of Clinton and Chewie together. Get on that, Internet.

Here at home, Tom Cosby is busy finding a silver lining in the things that are going on at UAB with the athletic department. I haven’t said a whole lot about the UAB story, but I like Cosby’s point of view:

But despite these disappointing aspects, here’s the good thing, no the GREAT thing, that’s come out of all this. This brouhaha has accelerated a rekindling of Birmingham’s civic pride along with a fierce embrace of UAB. Our civic pride was already surging before this debacle but its now quadrupled since December 2 and you see it growing every day.

When has this city ever united like this behind UAB? For that matter, when have you ever seen this level of civic passion in anything? And unlike earlier generations of Birminghamians who years ago let out of state corporations call the shots here, these citizens are letting the UA Trustees know their outrage. And they are making it clear that they believe killing football has the real potential to damage both UAB and our city’s future.

Take all the victories you can.

Time for the weekly update of the work in the cafeteria. They are expanding the center of the space, which has clogged the flow around the main food-substitute procurement area and jammed up the dining area. They say they have the same amount of tables, but they are all in less space because this first phase of the renovation required the building of a dust wall. One must keep the dust out of the food.

They’ve put fiberglass windows in the dust walls, so you can check out the work. This is what I saw at lunch today:

The larger portion of the work has been up in the ceiling and, thus, out of view from this position. I look in every day and the equipment is moving around. The guys working there seem to spend more time doing stuff than standing around watching one guy do stuff. They say they’ll be done with their work by the first part of the summer. I suppose it all depends what they find as they poke around in the ceiling.

Ancient chicken wings from lunches gone by, no doubt.

I had contemporary chicken for dinner tonight, visiting the Chick-fil-A that I visit too much. Even the guys in the back know my name now.

Also swam and ran today. Got in about 2,200 yards in the pool and then two miles of running. It always feels weird to say after the fact, but I got to the end of that second mile and my body and my energy levels agreed: we’ve done enough.

It was that feeling you can’t really describe, or maybe even remember clearly later. The one beyond rubbery fatigue, but down around emptiness. The one where another step was foolish because you were no longer running along on the ground, but rather about 18 inches below it.

Now, having had dinner and sitting in a chair, the inability to run another mile or so doesn’t seem so bad. It is a kindness that the mind sometimes gives us, being able to forget about some of the painful things.

I wonder, if they find something curious in the ceiling, if it is remembered by whoever put it there years ago.

food / I do not know what is happening. / photo / running / Samford / swimming / Tuesday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on This isn’t Ham-let, and I bacon your pardon
24
Mar 15

This isn’t Ham-let, and I bacon your pardon

I swam 2,700 yards today. That may be more than I’ve ever swam before. It didn’t even seem hard. It felt like everything slowed down, my breathing was better. My arms were better, maybe my technique was a tiny bit better. Also, I think I better understand the purpose of a pull buoy. Funny how that works, using something to find out it works. In the last two hundred yards I got weary, but I’d swam almost a mile-and-a-half by then.

So then I went for a three-mile run.

I do not know what is happening.

The company running the dining on campus is undertaking some renovation. This was a significant part of their successful bid to take on the food service, which has met with some criticism and hardware in food. There has been under-cleaned silverware:

A lack of silverware:

Some packaging issues:

Plenty of oil:

Undercooked chicken (I’ve also enjoyed this):

And underplucked chicken:

So they’re fighting an uphill battle. But the renovations — which took a lot of criticism for delays in the fall — now feature a walled off area. The purpose is to create a dirty room for the renovation that won’t contaminate the undercooked food and dirty dishes. Now, though, the students are railing against The Wall.

Behind that wall:

construction

There was a great walls of Jericho reference online already this week and this room was only erected two weeks ago.

I’ve spent some time with the food service people and I can sympathize with their lot. They are, of course, central to campus life. And when there is a difficulty, or a series of them, the impact is widely felt and difficult to overcome. But maybe the new renovations, slated to be done by June, maybe that’ll help. Of course clean dishes and better-prepared food would too.

The weird thing is that a lot of the faces on the front side of the cafeteria are familiar, holdovers to the previous company. So the problem is somewhere else.

They’ll get it there. There are too many good people involved.

But, if you’ve ever wondered what undercooked green beans taste like, they aren’t good.

It was a big workout. I’m thinking a lot about food. It seems I’m back pretty quickly to that place where my body is begging for more calories. It is a two-way street, this sort of exercise.

Dinner was better. I stared at this sign and made puns.

signage

“I never sausage a thing!”

“This cowboy is bacon me crazy!”

What’s for second dinner?

journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off on The flexibility of now
11
Mar 15

The flexibility of now

I walked into a classroom today with one idea about a later thing and when I walked out of the room an hour later I knew other things. A meeting had changed. One student had a story and another had a joke. A third had big news. A lot can happen in a calm hour. Some days the idea of now is an obviously thin construct and some days now is a solid and statuesque thing.

There are at least four full statues and a bust on campus, and this fact amuses and bewilders me.

One of them is an abstraction, three of them are representations of real people, including an ancient president of the institution, a statue which once stood at the U.S. Capitol. Another is a football coach, which, OK. And then there’s Ralph Beeson, who was a big donor and has the family name on quite a few nice things around campus. His statue is centrally located and figures into a lot of pictures and general merriment around the place. Also, it has the great honor of being the voice behind one of the best Twitter accounts on campus, even if some of it is school-specific.

Anyway, I recently stumbled upon this 1988 clip which explains a bit about the man and the then-new statue. The Twitter account asked us to republish it. Great idea, alas, it was from The Birmingham News, and not ours.

BhamNews

We were discussing our publication tonight when someone poked their head into the newsroom and offered us free food. There was a focus group down the hall and journalists are always hungry for leftovers. I grabbed a few things:

underneath

I’m going swimming tomorrow, and I won’t eat them all at one time, so it works out, right?

Things to read … because reading always works out right.

There’s one truly incredible story worth reading, it is a bit long, but absolutely worth it. And I mention it here so you’ll keep looking below. First, though, a few journalism links:

24 takeaways from the ONA London conference on mobile
Los Angeles Times reorients for digital
CNN Pushes More Original Web Video
How to capture fly-by digital visitors
Boston Herald, Franklin Pierce combine for exclusive coverage

And now the story worth spending a few minutes to read. It defies excerpting, really, so here are just a few of the first paragraphs. A Bulldog’s battle:

It was morning in Lithuania and Andrew Smith was getting dressed. As he put a shirt on, he caught an oddity in the mirror, a weird bump at the base of his neck just above the collarbone. The former Butler center was a newly married man playing foreign hoops in a faraway land, just three months into his first professional contract and living with his wife, Sam, and dog, Charlie.

Thinking little of it then — Smith had battled mono and enlarged lymph nodes during his freshman year at Butler — he brushed aside any serious concerns. Over the next two weeks, the bump got bigger and more uncomfortable. The scare increased when pressure crept on his insides, near his chest, and soon enough breathing became a conscious task. Lithuanian health care is not optimal, and the team physician spoke broken English, which did not translate at all to nuanced medical terminology.

[…]

In a foreign country with doctors they did not trust, the Smiths weren’t getting clear answers. Tests were not immediately coming back with conclusive results. An initial biopsy came back negative for cancer, but still, Andrew reluctantly agreed to minor surgery because his neck’s discomfort was preventing him from being able to play.

Smith was — get this — awake for the procedure and could faintly feel doctors tugging with metal tools at his numbed neck as they attempted to remove the blockage in his throat. What at first blatantly felt like the wrong decision turned into a mistake he was lucky to make. Without successful surgery, more evaluation was needed. Andrew’s neck was coral-red as he and Sam spent their first Christmas together as man and wife. They Skyped home, telling their parents Andrew was cancer-free. But a few days later, Smith’s growth got grotesque. He was living with a rock attached to his throat and a perma-red neck. He underwent a full body scan, and as they awaited the results, Andrew rung in 2014 feeling like his chest was shrinking by the day. He was unable to sleep.

Maybe it was his heart? No. For now, Andrew’s heart was fine.

That part, that “for now” part, that becomes important. But “for now” is always important.

baseball / I do not know what is happening. / memories / music / running / Samford / swimming / Tuesday / video / Vine — Comments Off on You’re here for the music, I don’t blame you
10
Mar 15

You’re here for the music, I don’t blame you

This evening I did a 1,800 yard swim, toweled off and then had a 5K run. Finished at 75 percent target heart rate. The swim was about at my normal slow and sloppy pace and style. The run was probably at the lower end of my pace. But that’s a brick to start the season of exercise, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m feeling pretty good after, too.

You know, there’s a time when you don’t think about doing those sorts of things. And it doesn’t take all that long to look at those numbers and think to yourself, “That’s all you did?”

The mind is a weird place, is what I’m saying. I do not know what is happening.

So I swam in the indoor pool, naturally. I had the far left lane all to myself, hitting neither the wall or the room any at all. I did these in 50 yard increments, because I’m still trying to find some form of breathing that works. And having completed the mile I staggered out of the pool, into my flip flops, up the stairs, into the locker room, into some dry clothes and my running shoes and then out and over to one of the old gyms on campus. The gym was closed for a boy’s lacrosse practice, but the track above it was open, and I jogged and sprinted along on that, listening to the sounds of my footfalls and wondering just how long that track has been in place. This is what it looks like from underneath it.

underneath

And so to the parents that were there, sitting on the bench, watching their sons play lacrosse and listening to me trample 15 feet above you and wondering “Is this going to be the lap? Will this be the time? Are all of my affairs really in order?” I apologize. But you should have seen me in the pool.

I have this mental image that my swim looks really good for about 1,000 yards. Really it probably only looks really good for 15 yards, which is most of the push off the wall and that first stroke. But I can really make a nice streamline shape, boy, and I’m proud of that.

I got through some portion of the run by wondering what I would have for dinner. I can just look at a body of water and my appetite gets out of control, so, to have actually burned some calories, this could be a real meal. But I didn’t want this, and that would never seem filling and … for some reason there were two big burritos wrapped up and sitting on the floor of the track. So I somehow talked myself into Moe’s, because I guess I was getting hungry by then. Moe’s, I said aloud tonight, making it real, seems like a better idea in theory than in execution.

Please remind me of that as necessary. But, at Moe’s, there was this:

So now it is back to the newsroom, where the award-winning staff of The Samford Crimson is working on what will surely be another fine edition of their august publication. They’re celebrating their 100th anniversary this spring, ya know. We should have a party.

Things to read … because reading is always a party.

This one doesn’t surprise anyone, but it is nice to see: Huntsville ranked among top cities for STEM jobs

Turns out there is going to be a lot of stuff going in this summer: Redevelopment of Toomer’s Corner set to start after A-Day.

This is written in a sports talk context, but you get the sense that the anecdote might carry over to other programming: Is Sports Radio Ready For Its Future?:

Two discussions in particular stuck with me and have had my mind racing for the past few days. First, I was in Dallas for the Radio Ink Sports Conference and during my time there I had the chance to moderate a panel which focused on the mind of millennial listeners. I was on stage with three college students. Two were 21-years old and the other was 26.

Over the course of 45 minutes, I hit all three students with a barrage of questions on their perceptions and interest in sports radio and I along with the rest of the room learned that they live in a different world where content is only king if it can be consumed quickly. If it requires sifting through your podcast to find it, waiting through a commercial break or needing to wait for a host to finish rambling off-topic, they’re gone. Even the big name guest means little if it doesn’t include a hook worth sticking around for.

And that whole essay is a pretty nice read.

They got that right. Rickwood Field ranked among best baseball destinations

RIckwood

Really, I just mention that to dust off this Rickwood piece I did some years back. The oldest continually operational baseball park in America, in 20 minutes:

The place is 105 this year. This is a painstakingly recreated manual scoreboard you’ll see in the outfield:

RIckwood

And, over on Facebook, I’ve started The Best Single of the Last 45 Years game. So far there are eight great choices, including mine, which I heard tonight, and whose intro inspired the entire thing:

If you can’t get in a good mood with those horns the very reverend Al Green is right behind them, ready to work everything out.

He’s still doing it, too.

Yep, that’s all you want.

Friday / history / journalism / links / Samford / things to read / Twitter — Comments Off on The Friday blanks
6
Mar 15

The Friday blanks

A few weather things, from yesterday.

As always, it is dangerous when you amuse yourself. (Usually that means you aren’t being funny to anyone else just at that moment.)

Just two Selma things today, because while the activities are getting underway over there, we know there will be plenty more tomorrow.

So I had to narrow down about four interesting Selma stories I found today to share just this one. It is a fine read. ‘No matter what it takes’: Selma remembers:

They paid for black Americans’ right to vote with their blood and bruises. Now they remember.

As President Barack Obama said on the eve of his visit to Selma, Alabama: the battle for civil rights is not ancient history.

“The people who were there are still around, you can talk to them,” America’s first black president said Friday.

He meant people like 70-year-old retired firefighter Henry Allen, who five decades ago took part in history.

“It was was the final stage. We had been beaten. We had been pushed to the limits,” Allen told AFP.

“No matter what it took, we wanted to get the right to vote.”

I mentioned this in class today and, later, I was thinking about what I said and the reaction it got and I realized that, next time, I’m going to make a big hinge point in the conversation about that day’s historical topic. The 50th anniversary marches are this weekend. This isn’t even ancient history by collegiate standards, as the above story points out.

This is our story, I said. American society, the South, Alabama, Selma, people we know. Please, I said, take a few minutes this weekend to read or watch some of the goings on at Selma.

I got back blank stares. Maybe it was because it was Friday afternoon. Maybe they somehow don’t know what this is about. (I’m not teaching history here, but perhaps I should?) Maybe they don’t care. Perhaps they knew all about it and had heard all about it from other classes and they’d already decided they were going to spend every waking weekend moment absorbing stuff from Selma. The reasons could any of those or anywhere in between, of course. I’m just curious about. I’d understand that reaction if I somehow brought up that Magna Carta found in Sandwich recently.

Magnum Carter? When’s his new track drop?

(I don’t think it is that bad, for what it is worth.)

But Selma, for a lot of us, the people there were grandparents or people down the street or who have been in our stores or churches or or schools or lives in some way or another for all the time since. Seems like half my professors covered the Civil Rights movement. It came up a lot. I hope we didn’t stare back blankly. Anyway, this is another big moment, perhaps one of the last contemporary ones as the original participants age. Festivities will continue there, of course, but they’ll eventually become memorials, history, not living reminiscences.

A decade ago the Crimson had the opportunity to localize the story:

Crimson05

Professor Davis is no longer on campus, or we could do that story again. I haven’t heard of anyone else still here that was there. But I’d like to. The author of that story, by the way, now works for International Rescue Committee, a refugee relief organization operating in 40 countries and 22 U.S. cities.

Things to read … which span cities near and far.

These are all journalism/storytelling bits today and they will be bullets, because the weekend is upon us. On we go:

The next stage in the battle for our attention: Our wrists

How a 40-year-old radio DJ from Florida became a Snapchat star

Who should see what when? Three principles for personalized news

9 ways the most innovative media organizations are growing

19 free social media analytics tools

An open letter to the community

That last one needs some setup, but it is from a high school publication, so that’s OK. It is worth reading, though, because the editors, two high school seniors, goes point-by-point through the various concerns that emerged after they wrote about teen sex. The letter is thoughtful, detailed, clear and leaves little room for debate about why they did or their stories’ value to their community. (The one that comes to mind is the age range. Their school is a 9th-12th grade institution. Not all topics are the same across that spread, I’d suppose.) Anyway, it is a wonderful argument, a fine letter. The kids are alright.

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