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Samford

journalism / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
2
Feb 11

You did not see your shadow

Also, it was National Signing Day. I (re-)wrote this piece for The War Eagle Reader and received a few nice comments.

I must be doing something right, even the spam comments that come into this site are complimentary. I guess the plan of attack has changed: kill ’em with kindness. Better than ads for pills and bank notices. Not as good as the fake Rolex ones, though.

Lots of meetings today. Had a long sit-down about our website. I wrote a two page memo on all of the changes we’re about to make. And then there was a newspaper meeting, where we marked up pages of newsprint. This is the first paper of the new semester, which is always a difficult thing. How does one write about things that happened days or even weeks ago with a new angle?

The next two weeks of the paper will surround Step Sing, the song and dance revue that features about 20 percent of the student population. At least they know what they’ll be writing about.

Met with the boss, did a little reading and a little writing. A lot of grading.

The students in the class I’m teaching refine their resume over the course of the semester and I’ve been compiling notes to help with the task. Resumes are both tedious and important, of course. I talk about clarity, brevity, accuracy, consistency.

Many of the resumes I looked through tonight were quite good. Now the drum beat will grow louder. “Get involved. Work at the campus paper, the campus television station, or the magazines or radio.”

This is an introductory class in our curriculum, of course, but it is fun watching students realize the importance of that idea. Journalism and public relations and broadcasting are careers built on examples of quality, so we encourage students to get involved early and keep working on campus until they graduate and move into the professional realm.

Which is why I graded resumes until almost midnight.

The groundhog says there are 13 more weeks of that.

iPhone / journalism / Samford / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off
27
Jan 11

Not that Kenny Smith

Busy day in class. We set up blogs, talked about news critiques — I started in with the obvious, showing them Antoine Dodson.

So we talked about news critiques, and we started talking about resumes. We’ll talk a lot about those this semester.

So I prepped for that, read, talked much, stayed long and so on.

Lunch was jambalaya. Dinner was enchilada. I feel very cosmopolitan.

I was a trending topic on Twitter this evening.

A former student noticed it and pointed it out to me. Of course it wasn’t me. There are three semi-famous to extremely famous people with whom I share the name. There’s the talented bluegrass musician, Kenny Smith, the former football player Kenny Smith and The Jet, the NBA basketball star turned TNT analyst.

Turns out that Kenny Smith and his colleagues Ernie Johnson and Charles Barkley had Tracy Morgan on their show tonight. You can find the clip on YouTube yourself, but suffice it to say that we learned that Morgan makes Barkley look soothing and responsible in comparison.

And some days you wish the random person on Twitter could distinguish between a man with two NBA titles and a guy 11-years younger who is a bit slower and could only barely touch the rim of a basketball goal on his very best of days.

I’m also three or four inches shorter, but let’s not quibble over obvious differences.

movies / Samford / Tumblr / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
26
Jan 11

“An expression and sentiment that has aged very well”

Spent the full day in the office staring at the computer. There’s this to work on, that to read, the other to write and so on.

I did make this and uploaded it to Tumblr at some point in a small break this afternoon. Spencer Hall ran across it and offered up the warmest bit of pop analysis that a blog can offer on a 40-year-old freelance postcard design.

The problem was that things have changed since 1969. So I made the additions in that family portrait gimmick. Now all of those stares seem to make a lot more sense. Interlopers.

I’m steaming ahead through Robin Hood, the BBC version, as it plays along in the background while I do other things. This series is perfect for that. You watch the first six minutes, get the gist and tune it out until the resolution. There’s the problem, the fighting, something is stolen from the rich and the capture of someone. Then comes a moralistic dilemma, the rescue, the “curses, you evildoers!” moment and then the laugh at the end. Add in a little more fighting when necessary, move a few of the elements around to keep it fresh and have a nice day.

You know it is serious when he’s aiming his bow at someone. The guards here are more predictable than red shirts. They get almost as much dialog and they seem to fight just enough to allow the good guys to get away or are far enough away to take the occasional arrow.

I’ll finish the series up this weekend. It ran for three seasons, which is not unusual in the UK, where television programs are built shorter. Many of your favorite shows here would have benefited from that decision, too.

I’m watching this on Netflix, which is another of man’s greatest recent inventions. No longer does one need to get emotionally invested in a television show. Just wait until it comes out and watch it all in a rush. Chew it up as pastiche, especially in Netflix’s streaming format, and move on. The biggest thing is the HBO problem. They’ll license their programming for discs, but not for streaming.

HBO Co-President Eric Kessler went on the record as saying “there is a value in exclusivity,” and that people would “pay a premium” for it.

Co-president? Is that why they’re seeking to make their customers pay for their programming twice? HBO has their own service, still trying to gain market penetration. It seems they’re having the same fight they had in the 70s and 80s.

I grew up with HBO. I mean HBO and I grew up together. When we first picked up the channel on our cable system the churn rate was still high and they were celebrating becoming a 24-hour channel. The movies were still awfully repetitive, though, but hey, it wasn’t the Big Three. There were no commercials. It was novel. They had the coolest pre-roll maybe ever.

That still makes me want to watch a movie right now.

At the end of my days in undergraduate, though, money got tight and I just dropped my cable altogether. When I could afford television again I just went the basic route. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed HBO. And, happily, those have been supplemented by the inevitable DVD releases of their (usually quite good) original programming.

Netflix, meanwhile, has 20 million subscribers, as of today. It is an experimental way to watch movies. For the small monthly fee we can see everything, which really removes the risk. I’ve watched some dreadful things on Netflix, at least the first few minutes of dreadful things. I’ve also watched guilty pleasures as background sound. The Philadelphia Experiment did not age well, friends.

So now I’m watching Robin Hood on a computer. I can also watch it on my television. Next week I’m going to sit on a spin bike and watch a movie on my phone. We live in the future.

journalism / Samford / Tuesday / video — 1 Comment
25
Jan 11

First day of classes

Busy day. The kind where I finally got around to lunch at almost 2 p.m.

Handful of meetings before that. Catching up with people, wrapping up old things, setting course for new projects and all of that.

And then there was class. Fourteen bright young minds sitting in a too-warm room hearing about what they’ve gotten themselves into for the next 13 weeks. It was fun. They’ll take field trips and write a lot and give some presentations. They’ll have to put up with me. But aside from that last part it is a good course. I’ll talk a lot about journalism, but it is an intro class, so there’s a great deal of public relations and advertising, too.

Otherwise, I’m just trying to get back into the swing of things. I love my holiday break, could use some more of it and yet am terribly, wonderfully spoiled by it. This week has not eased back into the routine, but just puts you squarely in it. Not violently. There’s been nothing brutish or shocking about it. Just work. Here it is. And here’s another thing or two. Do enjoy. And don’t forget those Emails and phone calls.

I broke my office phone today, somehow. I have an old touchtone job, one of those that immediately replaced the rotary phones. Suddenly the numbers don’t do anything. Very odd.

I began watching the BBC’s Robin Hood this evening. It has been well received and it is on Netflix, so why not. I watched one episode and realized “This is like Kevin Sorbo as Hercules, but only a third as cartoonish.”

Which was good, because it instantly became background sound, not requiring any real attention. Ascertain the plot, ignore the fight sequences. No one ever really gets hurt. Everyone always escapes captivity. Robin Hood is a terrific shot. We get it.

Here’s the opening sequence:

First of all, how did those guards and horses sneak up on the hunter? Second, the guards never have such an opportunity to share as much character or dialog as they do here. The guards turn into red shirts, willing to spar, easy to knock off. Now the Sheriff, the villian, is delightfully funny.

His heavy is the most cardboard character you’ve seen in a while, though.

The biggest things are the modern sensibilities, put I’m a fantasy character purist. Fiction should be just so. The 20th and 21st Century were deliberately shoehorned into a tale set in the 12th. Of course there is modern foreign policy symbolism for the BBC viewing audience. They are not very subtle about it, but you’ve trained yourself to excuse much of that, anyway. One character, who only appears for one episode (so far) was wearing modern camouflage. The clip you just saw shows one of the evil character demonstrating a remarkable alacrity for wigs and latex disguises. These sorts of things take me right out of it, but then Robin Hood shoots his bow and the music blares and we’re off on another easy adventure!

When they inevitably make the American version they need Paul Giamatti as Much.

black and whites / photo / Samford — Comments Off
25
Jan 11

Black and whites

We’re in the stretch run of the black and white series. There are six additions to the sometimes-active-sometimes-dormant section today. These are all pictures from Samford. An office down the hall from mine flooded in the fall and I rescued these photographs from a filing cabinet.

There are some pretty remarkable stories in this bunch, including this lovely lady, who worked until she was almost 90.

Go here to see the latest. If you’re new to all this, you can start right here.