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Last class of the semester. There were cookies and hugs and television scripts and newspaper copy.
Also the last late Tuesday of the semester.
There were bleary eyes and late copy and other assignments begging for attention.
Now to the grading.
And that is finally done, there will be the traditional playing of Van Morrison:
The mind and body are amazing things, really. I complained yesterday, a day when I felt as bad as have since, I dunno, let’s call it the end of August. There have been a few other unfortunate days as I recovered from the crash and the helmet and the medication and the surgery and more medication. Yesterday was high up on the list of lowlights. My mood was off; I hurt. It was generally lousy.
I woke up today a new guy, which is to say, like myself again.
This is important because it remins me how I should feel. For the first time since July I felt like myself again. There I was tapping out miles in Orange Beach and now here I am, finally, me again. In between I’ve just been a fraction of myself, perhaps.
The amazing thing, the mind-and-body-are-amazing-things part, is that it took feeling so much more like myself today to realize how far off I’ve been since July. You have an accident and get acclimated to your new condition so quickly, subtly, that you just accept that this is how you are and forget how you are supposed to, in fact, actually feel.
I still hurt some, mind you. That’s improving on its own slow schedule. I finally learned how to not overdo it. I still have painkillers, but they stay in the medicine cabinet and I don’t have that foggy miserable feeling that I’ve come to associate with modern chemistry.
All of this sounds pitiful, but I mean it to say I feel like me again. And while I can’t move furniture or anything just yet — maybe next year — my discomfort doesn’t dictate every thing I do now. Just some of the things. Most important, I feel like myself again.
Samford is getting ready for the Hanging of the Green and the Lighting of the Way. This marks the beginning of the Christmas season here. The tree in Reid Chapel will be decorated. Garlands will be displayed. There will be hymns and prayers and carols. It is beautiful, really.
And then everyone will go out into the crisp night air for a message from the university’s president, more carols, a concert, Silent Night and then then, in the dark, the Christmas lights will come alive, the Lighting of the Way.
Prior to that, just lots of luminaries:
When you go into Reid Chapel there are just the little white bags. During the Hanging of the Green every one of these on the long quad will be lit. Whoever does that knows how to hustle. There are hundreds of them:
And then everyone goes back to studying, or home, or into Harry’s for hot chocolate. Finals are coming up fast.
I worked with students. I had a critique meeting with the newspaper staff. We discussed how we managed to leave an entire question, ‘Why?’ out of a story.
But at least we managed to reference something from 1939 in that piece which didn’t really matter much at all to the story today. Z has now happened, which was a logical conclusion of X, which brought about Y. And now here’s a tale of B, C and D.
That’s the way of it sometimes.
I told one funny story. I worked on this for much of the afternoon:
I had a headache and various other aches. This hurt and that hurt and my shoulder was bothering me for no reason at all and my collar bone was weird and on and on. Pretty rough for most of the day. By the evening I was in a foul mood of my own creation and for no good or real reason.
So I watched Memorial Day, which was what a movie that’s not trying to be a movie might look like.
This is interesting. Here is the trailer from the movie’s distributor:
And here is the trailer, YouTube says, “From the actual filmmakers. Not the distributors.”
I wonder what brought that on. Which of these movies would you rather see?
If you like the Cromwells, this movie is worth seeing. Everyone else is just holding serve, but that’s OK. When your film is about a flashback within a flashback the leads are running the show anyway.
I watched the Jackson Browne DVD, Going Home, but it didn’t fit my mood.
So I soothed myself with Meat Loaf:
Tomorrow will be better. Has to be more delightful than this one.
Have to love a deadline journalist. One of my jobs is to coordinate the coordination that is involved in coordinating nominations for student journalism awards. It leans a bit toward tedium sometimes, but our department likes to brag on award-winning students. We have quite a few worth such young men and women and so we do the contests because we want our share. Journalists like awards.
One of the better contests we enter has an odd holiday deadline this year. The nominations were due today. This could have somewhat put a crimp in the implementation phase considering how everyone had several days off last week and that goes against the very last minute nature of every journalist you’ve ever met.
So for weeks I’ve been sending my colleagues emails. Remember the rules, here’s what we have to do. Please have these things to me by this time. The deadline is 5 p.m. Monday.
I spent much of the day finalizing my portion of the contest. It is all online now, a big improvement. Once upon a time this took folders, a stenographer, two notary publics a series of semaphore motions, stamps, labels and ink obtained from the inner lining of an ostrich egg. That was a two day process.
I mean just curing the ink from the ostrich eggs.
This was of course all done after the bird had hatched.
So yes, selecting nominees still takes a bit of time, but I have a marvelous committee that makes that happen. And now, this year, it is simply a matter of finding, selecting, renaming and uploading the correct PDFs in the many categories. This only takes a few hours. (There are many categories.)
I received a phone call around noon or so from one of my colleagues with his nominees. I received an email from another at 3 p.m. with his nominees. At 4:46 I sent off the final document.
At 5:03 I received another email from the last colleague. He had no nominees this year. Well then.
We nominated student-journalists in 18 of 30 categories. We should have at least a few wins in there, hopefully.
You can see all of their work at the Crimson and SNN and various other corners of the Samford net.
Something new on Tumblr, there’s always something on Twitter and maybe on Google+ if we’re lucky.
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.
