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Samford

Do not eat the black olives

Quick! What is this?

You’ll find the answer over on my Tumblr. Having posted the photograph in one place, however, it seems silly to put part of the same picture elsewhere. So I probably won’t do this a lot, but I needed some sort of art for the day, and this seemed a cheap and easy way to do it.

More easy content: I accidentally landed on someone’s mailing list as they wrote to their family back home about their trip to the American southwest. Seems someone has noticed the error, or the emails have stopped for some other reason, but let’s live vicariously, shall we?

Call her Barbara, though that’s not her name.

Day One:

I’ve arrived in Phoenix. There is no phone here, but in an emergency my cell phone might work (yet to be determined, but I’ll confirm later).

Hope you are well. We have wi-fi here and I’d love to hear from you by email.

Have a good week.
Love,

Barbara

Day Two:

Hi,

Great to hear from you. We had a jam-packed day today. We went shopping, out for lunch, to the Phoenix Art Museum, and to the Heard Museum. The restaurant had typical south western fare. The native artifacts were really interesting. I have some pictures but don’t know how to get them on the IPad.

Tomorrow we’re going to golf in the morning, check out some food trucks in Phoenix, and go to the Botanical Gardens in the afternoon. This holiday is fun but exhausting!

Miss you all.

Love,

Barbara

Sounds like a great trip so far. At the art museum Barbara might have seen exhibitions by Matthew Moore, W. Eugene Smith, Gustave Baumann and others. The Heard Museum is hosting great exhibitions on the art of ceremony and the history of bolo ties, among other things. You laugh, but I bet that one cinches on tight and doesn’t let go. (Actually that sounds like a great museum. When in Phoenix … )

If they made it out to the botanical garden they no doubt enjoyed the spring butterfly exhibit.

On Day Three of her adventure she sent me a picture — out of respect for her privacy I shall not post it. Imagine a nice lady standing by several cacti all much taller than her.

“Too big to trip over! I sure wouldn’t want to fall on one though!” she wrote.

Which is where I am a bit sad. She’s trying to write her grandson. I hope he gets to see this picture eventually.

On Day Five I received another email:

Good morning,

It was over 100 degrees here yesterday. It doesn’t feel too bad as long as we’re not walking around in the sun in the afternoon for too long.

The Swap Mart was OK. It was like a huge flea market, but with only new things for sale. The olive grove was interesting. There are only two places in North America where they grow olives, here and in California. The climate here is perfect for olives. They don’t get any of the pests or mold that they do in Europe, so can grow here with no pesticides or herbicides. They would be certified organic if the corn field that is within 15 miles of their grove was also organic. They also don’t have to worry about birds eating them off the tree as olives are very bitter until they have been soaked for quite a while. We had lunch outside under an umbrella. The food was excellent and the tour afterwards was very informative. I learned that olive oil should say ‘extra virgin’, ‘fresh pressed’ or ‘cold pressed’ and that we should not eat ‘black olives’.

We went shopping again after that and to a great food market where we got wood-oven pizza, salad, and other treats. We’re eating like queens. I’ll have to take up running when I get back.

We’re off to Sedona this morning, and will be there overnight.

Hope you are all well and happy.

Love,

Barbara

Someone wrote to the group asking why you aren’t supposed to eat the black olives. A fair question as I’m sure we’re all a bit more olive smart after that email, but it doesn’t elaborate on that point. Maybe she was talking about canned black olives, which sometimes use ferrous sulfate as a coloring additive. After that I’m out of guesses and I won’t look it up — because if you’ve ever done that before you understand the wisdom of not asking the Internet a question about health and safety.

And that’s where the email thread ends. Sounded like a nice front half of a fine vacation though. Hope she made it home safely with lots of pictures and adventures to share. Check out, by the way, the banner art on the Sedona link. That must be a beautiful place.

Had the new editor meeting tonight. We bring in the outgoing and now grizzled veteran and the shiny-eyed new person and talk about the job. This is what I do and don’t do. These are the positions you should be hiring for. This is what you can expect.

These are the obstacles. This is the workflow. These are the late nights. These are the things you must do. These are the few things you can’t do. Here is the production bible and notes from former staffers.

Now go out there and, as some wordsmiths awkwardly say, “commit journalism.”

The new editor works hard. She’ll grow into the position nicely.

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30
Apr 12

An indoor picnic

Last field trip of the semester today. I took my class to meet the nice people at Hoffman Media, who runs an always-growing office not too far from campus. They just bought a new magazine last week, Louisiana Cooking. I believe that’s nine special interest magazines under their banner these days.

The students learned about layout, scheduling, food photography, menu prep, circulation strategies AND got a tour of some of their six test kitchens.

No wonder the students always think that’s one of the better trips of the year. You should see the food stored in those pantries. They test every recipe, and re-test it, before it goes in the magazines. They say the only downside is when their cooking fish, or Mexican first thing in the morning.

The journalism and mass communication department’s awards picnic was this evening. Some two dozen awards and honors were given to people I’ve had in class or worked with in the student media.

Some of them I had in their freshman classes, and now they’re getting set to graduate. They grow so fast …

Last night I watched a bit of Apollo 13 for the 478th time. Love that movie, even the parts where it diverges from history, it does so a bit apologetically. I can take that. It is one of the better film adaptations of a book — in this case the book — that I can recall seeing.

Up the dial a bit Forrest Gump was also on. It allowed me to tell the movie theater story, where a woman in an Apollo 13 screening was frightened for the crew’s safety. Her son said something like “Don’t worry mom, Forrest Gump will get them home.”

I mention all of this because that little tale is cute, but mostly because I wanted to post this video, which is one of the most deliberately underplayed, intense lines ever.

Turns out that’s Ron Howard’s mother playing the part. Jean Speegle Howard was still working until shortly before she died in 2000.

That quote isn’t from the Jim Lovell/Jeffrey Kluger book, but the real Blanch Lovell is in there, scroll down just a bit:

I bet she would have delivered that line with even greater elan.

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25
Apr 12

Your most unusual ice cream

One of my annual projects took me snooping around campus today. Our printer brings us some of the plates from the newspaper as keepsakes. This is the day when they are delivered, and I spend a while searching for them.

My investigation led me to this door and the sign above it:

After what happened to your other hand, you’d think you’d learn, right?

Something I wrote on my student blog, The classes we wish we’d taken.

A professor friend in Texas wrote “The class I most wish I had taken is probably ‘How to Find Buried Treasure and Pick Winning Lottery Numbers.'”

They didn’t offer that in my undergrad curriculum.

The Yankee, Brian and I visited Bloodhound for dinner tonight. It is the hot new place in town, described to us as having specialties of bourbon and bacon. Looking at the menu, there’s nothing healthy at the place. We had to visit. Here’s their description:

Bloodhound is a family owned restaurant, bar and live music venue featuring over-the-top American classics, top shelf bourbon, 28 craft beers on tap, and a music line up sure to knock your socks off. Our atmosphere was designed to be warm and welcoming- think hunting lodge, antler-pronged barn setting with the hustle and bustle of old time Alabama. Our music venue is separate from the restaurant and dining area with it’s own bar, stage, and local art displays.

I had the bacon, turkey and avocado sandwich, which was great. The dijon really made the dish. They also offered free popcorn, popped in bacon grease. Tasted like popcorn.

It is a fine-food place in a casual atmosphere, keeping the slightly upscale prices. The meatloaf will set you back $16. Brian said it was delicious. I don’t doubt his evaluation, but have a hard time ordering a $16 meatloaf.

A big component of the place is the everything-local motif. They even offer honeysuckle ice cream. Seems they go out and collect the stuff in the spring. It takes bags of the flowers to make a gallon of ice cream, but it smells and tastes exactly like honeysuckle.

A little bit of the ice cream goes a long way, though.

Begs a question, though: what’s the most unusual flavor of ice cream you’ve ever tried?

Bunch of stuff on Twitter, and new things on Tumblr.

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24
Apr 12

The long day

Last week we had the board members from the Alabama Press Association on campus. Today, it is Gene Policinski, the vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center in Washington D.C.

Things are hoping around here.

Policinski met with student-journalists at the Crimson this morning. I treated him to a mid-morning snack after that and he told me how he got in the business, where he’s been and his upcoming projects. Very interesting — and nice — guy.

The department took him and a few students to lunch at The Rotunda Club, the exclusive dining arrangement on campus. We ate in a beautiful wood-paneled room with monogramed plates and personal attention.

I hope whatever organization that normally dines there was able to make do with vending machines.

We had a student media committee meeting, electing next year’s editors for the literary arts magazine, Sojourn, the yearbook, Entre Nous, and The Samford Crimson.

This evening Policinski was the featured guest at the Timothy Sumner Robinson Forum. This is a Samford program named for a 1965 alumnus. The Robinson family hosts the event each year in honor of Timothy, who was a veteran of The Washington Post and the National Law Journal.

At the Post Robinson had more Watergate front page stories than anyone. He’d go on to work at NYU, and then head west to pioneer much of the first online media work.

Here’s Policinski speaking in Bolding Studio about the constitutionally “unique role” of journalists in the political and legal system:

He notes “We have turned to an era where we talk to people directly.”

He applaud bloggers and citizen journalists, but notes a difference between what they might do and what a committed court reporter could offer as coverage. He’s right, and it isn’t about the journalism, but about the legal system. There’s a need, he says, for more legal training, which is part of a big project he has coming up soon with his many professional affiliations.

The state of legal reporting is in decline, but not because of the people covering it, but by volume. Meanwhile, he says, the journalism profession is “if not walking away from it is turning away because of other pressing issues.”

Great to have him on campus, though it made for a long day (and after that there was still the newspaper). It was worth it. You can follow him on Twitter @genefac.

Don’t forget: Tumblr and Twitter.

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23
Apr 12

Just pictures

Breakfast here, in honor of the weekly tradition:

And then it was on to campus, where I wondered what kind of shrubbery this might be:

And then it was class, resumes and so on. It was a full, full day.

That’s why this is what you have this.

But you also have this: the return of the Tumblr. The thing has been dormant for quite some time, but I’ve recently stumbled across a few nice, inspiring ones. So I’ve changed the look, twice, adopting a free theme in the cheapest traditions of this website and then tweaked the code.

It will never be much, the Tumblr blog, but random things from my phone can easily be uploaded through the app and that will be enough to let us point and giggle.

More tomorrow.