I mis-dated my last post and only just now caught it. No one else seemed to notice, but the knowing is the thing. There is one strip of paint that needs attention in our kitchen. No one else has noticed it yet, but I can’t walk by it without noticing. I’m fairly certain there’s a picture frame that I’ve put on the wall that isn’t level with the one next to it or another across the room.
And on Friday I re-alphabetized the DVDs. They sit in a closet and no one would ever know except The Yankee — and she makes fun of me — but I see the need to know precisely where My Blue Heaven is, but not have to scan through Sixteen Candles and Bulworth to find it.
Could be worse. Could be autobiographical.
“If I want to find the movie Labyrinth I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1986 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”
“That sounds — “
“Comforting.”
Pounded a little pavement this morning. Ran into a friend this afternoon. Everything else was class preparation. Or preparing for class. The new semester starts tomorrow.
I haven’t taught this class before and I’ve been laboring to get the handouts down to something that doesn’t seem too intimidating. Right now, on the first day, the students are getting nine pages. These are younger students and I’d like them to come back for the second meeting.
The text for this class, which is a mass media introduction, is Media / Impact by Shirley Biagi. The front cover features the facade of the David Letterman studio, a cellist, advertising, newspapers, magazine collages, books, satellite trucks, storm troopers and an iPhone.
The first page of real text quotes Dr. Edward Hallowell. “What we’re seeing, we’ve never seen in human history before. It’s just the extraordinary availability and magnetism of electronic communication devices, whether it’s cell phones or Blackberries or the Internet. People tend to — without knowing it or meaning to — spend a lot of time doing what I call screen sucking.”
Try to get that image out of your head.
Hallowell is a psychiatrist who formerly sat on the faculty of Harvard Medical — I love that usage, imagine this man sitting on top of a bunch of professors — and wrote the book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!. The quote, as it is included in a later essay reprinted from The Boston Globe, relates to the idea that too much screen time is working to the detriment of interpersonal time at home.
The second page, and this is genius, manages to work 5,500 years of communication history onto one page.
My how far we’ve come, just in a century. Where do you think things will stand in another half-century, when this class’ students are retiring? (Happy coincidence: It doesn’t appear on that list, for reasons of simplicity, but it just happens that on this day in 1984 Apple’s Macintosh first went on sale.)
I learned today a photograph of mine is being published in a book. Perhaps more than one. The Email reads “We are happy to inform you that one (or more) of your photos has been selected for publication … ”
They could be more specific, but, then, it is a coffee table book. Perhaps they can’t. Maybe the coffee table book industry is in flux about the size of their margins and page counts and that’s left everything up to a last-minute design by some machine tech who’s going to be doing the actual heavy lifting. Maybe there’s some question about whether a book should have odd or even pages and an extra photograph or two hangs in the balance. Maybe they just like to keep their options open. This is for a book on Auburn football. You can find out more about it here.
Spend some time on campus this afternoon. We had a meeting about a class which is set to begin next week. We’re teaching three sections of the same class and are trying to standardize things a bit. One of my colleagues has done a very nice job pulling all of this together, and so this was a great meeting.
This is a survey class where we take new students and give them the opportunity to learn about various types of media and public relations and advertising. In the overview we take field trips. Now I just have to line up a television station, a magazine publisher and a PR firm. That’s for the rest of the week.
We had a late lunch at Moe’s Original BBQ with Brian. I think we might have been the only people in the place. For a while I wasn’t sure that the one employee was there. But the barbecue was good.
We stopped at the mall for The Yankee to exchange something at Sephora. She exchanged her product there and the lady running the counter complained of gas prices. I told her to try a horse. Government regulations have improved their oats mileage, you might have heard.
We drove home in the darkness. As we got off the interstate I learned that my wife has, improbably, never heard Biz Markie’s classic hit. So, for her, and for you:
That spent 22 weeks on the Billboard chart in 1990, earning heavy rotation from January to June, peaking at ninth that March. Only Phil Collins, Michel’le, Billy Joel, Bad English, Taylor Dane, The B-52s and Janet Jackson topped Biz at his height of popularity, and three of their songs were number ones.
In college the running joke is that if someone called you told them you were at the library. Better than a parent hearing you were on a date or taking some road trip when you should have been pulling an all-night. When I was in undergrad I told my roommate to never tell my mother that if she called. She’d see right through it. I don’t care for libraries.
Books. I love books. I love to read. I’m writing this in our personal library at home. It needs a name, and we’re working our way toward one, but I feel the name of your private library should be carefully considered and evolved naturally. Unless you have a benefactor. And if someone gives you money for more shelves and books, then you name your library in their honor, send them cards every Thanksgiving and Christmas and let them borrow books whenever they want.
Anyway. I dislike libraries. Mostly because you go there with the idea of getting something done. A student goes to study. A reader goes to pick up a new book. I never checked out a great deal of books, but I’ve had to study once or twice in my academic career. And the library, I’ve found, is built for opposite purposes. There are so many books there! So much to read! So many things to learn! And, also, there’s this stuff I have to learn. I’ve come to accept this as one of the complex contradictions that make me the inscrutable individual I am.
But I had to visit the library today. There was a book or two I wished to pick up for my studies. I found them in the online catalog, made note of their numbers in the Library of Congress system and then set out for a visit.
I walked in, pulled out my spouse card and said “My wife is on the faculty here. Can I check out books with this?” The young lady deferred to her colleague. Again, then. The new person asks about fees. We’ve discussed them. I think I’ve paid something. The card works for other scanners on the campus. She makes a phone call to the department from whence the card was assigned. They’ve decided I should pay for the pleasure of checking out books.
Fine.
“How about this card?” I produce my faculty card at Samford. No.
“How about this card?” I produce my student card from Alabama. No.
This is a friendly chat, but frustrating. I’m an alum. My wife is on the faculty. I have two cards from other research institutions. But yet it will still require $20 to check out books. “That’s $20, annually, not $20 each time.” And thanks for that.
The supreme irony being that were I at Samford or Alabama today I could check out these same books from this library via the Interlibrary Loan agreements. They’d ship them across the better part of the state. Someone would even bring them to my department. This would all be done for free.
I have a better idea. The Yankee can come help. But the very nice lady quickly sends me an Email. Turns out I can check out books, as a graduate student from Alabama. So I grab a stack of books and visit one desk, the very nice lady, upon hearing all of this agrees, “Oh that’s bad.” She sends me to the first desk, who brings out the second woman. So, after five pleasant conversations and two phone calls, I have a stack of books.
And they are good, helpful books, so it all worked out.
I include this picture because there’s nothing else to tell you about but reading and writing and breaking a plate in the kitchen and starting a very small fire on the stove. I dropped a cup on the cracked plate and the little bits of paper met a warm stove eye. So there you go. So this picture, then. (Click to embiggen.)
The picture is from our New Year’s Eve Pie Day and I’ve been saving it for a slow day such as this. We were at Jim ‘N’ Nicks, where the light is a little low. In the shot with The Yankee she’s moving from menu to glance at the waiter as I took the picture. That’s why her shoulder somehow disappears. Despite all of that, this is fairly promising.
I’ve been searching for a good (and by good I mean usable and free) panoramic app for the iPhone. This one is that. The picture above was my first experiment.
For some reason it didn’t include the last photograph on the right. The app handles the stitching by itself. It isn’t perfect — but this is on a phone. If I were doing panoramas as I did on our honeymoon I would use my SLR and stitch them together the old fashioned way, by hand at 1400 percent magnification.
The big problem is that the shutter button isn’t exactly sensitive. On the upside, it makes the composite for you and saves it directly to the photo album. And it is free.
Also, I’ve picked up two other photo apps. I’ll let you know.
What do these jelly beans have to be joyous about? Have they been misled? Did someone at the factory tell them of the vacation home to which they would be sent?
Oh yes, there’s a beach. Lovely place. Clear, blue water. And some green. And it alternates with all the other colors. Kind of like you guys!
If you were a jelly bean this would be great news. “Home! Maybe there would be more like you, and fewer of these guys, the bums you’re having to share the box with. Tell me more about that ocean. I’d like to know the exact moment it goes from blue to aquamarine. It just sets my coloring a-glow.”
These were a Christmas gift, these jelly beans. A stocking stuffer. I’m sitting in the library trying to study and the beans are calling to me. “We’re joyous! If only you’d open this box you could hear the sound! And, also, where’s that ocean?”
They are of a Christmas theme. Sorry. Holiday theme.
I don’t take offense at the difference between Christmas and holiday as far as the marketing word choice goes. It is your product, you want to appeal to a great many customers without alienating them. That’s a sound strategy. Lately, though, there’s a bit of intellectual laziness — and a wink to the perceived intelligence of the customer base. Have a great … holiday, and enjoy the Christmas imagery.
Christmas and the celebrants thereof don’t hold the adjective jolly to themselves, but I bet you can guess who they’re hinting at here. Red and green are more of a Christmas theme. Hanukkah Harry, you’ll recall, wore blue. And the jelly beans aren’t alone. This ad campaign is still running:
The really nice thing about the jelly beans though, aside from that little bit of joy escaping in the opened box of the second picture, is that they are both delicious and kosher. The certifying rabbi’s name is on the label. It is this gentleman. I am eating kosher Irish jelly beans, approved of by a man in Liverpool, England, distributed from a company in California, purchased for me by my mother-in-law in Connecticut, hauled back to Alabama on a Delta flight. The fumaric acid — the most ominous sounding thing listed in the ingredients, and intended to add a hint of sourness, according to Wikipedia — is exhausted just thinking about it.
Sadly, they’ve yet to find the beach.
I ordered a hotel room today. This will be for a future trip, of course. Ordering a room has never been easier, except when there are ways to save money. Scope out the place I want, do one last check to make sure no one else is sneaking in with a better price under the gun. Nope, this place is still $15 a night better than the rest. It has Internet and the pictures look clean. Also there is a mini-fridge. Done and done.
So I book the room. But I find that the Best Available Rate option in the drop down box is the Fisher-Price button. It looks nice, and makes sense in that particular spot, but doesn’t do anything. The AAA rate is, in fact, six bucks cheaper a night, still. My AAA membership has lapsed.
A search ensues for the paperwork. The price looks manageable. And, since they just saved my bacon a few days ago in a cold, lonely parking deck it seems a reasonable investment. For the two of us that’s $71. The calculus kicks in for everyone here. You start subtracting from that total and vow to use AAA discounts where you can. I’ve already saved $14 bucks from that membership fee. And just wait until I actually use the AAA app on my phone!
Now I have a room. But there is no pool. This is doubly sad because it is January and suddenly I want to swim. The neighborhood association website says our pools reopen April 15th. Today is January 3rd. That’s a long way off to nurture the need to float.
All of the above is done electronically, of course. The paperless society has just led to stacks of paper categorized in more arbitrary ways, but at least the random check stub isn’t falling out of the collection. That’s one aspect of the modern economy that has perks and disadvantages. I only write approximately six checks a year now. I will still be writing 2010 in the upper right corner next October.
Seen another way, the changing of months and years hampers me on the website. I have a very complicated system for archiving the pictures like you see above. The directories are uploaded and organized on a monthly basis and each individual file is numbered sequentially. This. I believe, will mystify anyone that would like to grab an authorized jelly bean snapshot. If that technical difficulty doesn’t dissuade the unscrupulous, I can always call into action Plan B: sending in the local toughs who want to make sure no one gets wise with my pictures. They’re pricey — why do you think I’m saving AAA cash on a hotel room? — but worth it.
Anyway. I was just wondering, with the jelly bean pictures, what number they would be for December when I realized … oh yes. The flipping of the calendar.
Earlier today The Yankee said she didn’t even know what day it was. I’m not even convinced of the month. All I know is it isn’t April 15th. The pool is closed.
Lots of studying today. A lot more to come. My boss called to check on my progress. Swell guy, really.
“How is it coming? Anything I can do?”
Overwhelmed. Feeling behind. Help me shake this head cold?
I’d only recently woken up and sounded and felt miserable and didn’t mind if anyone knew it. The last several days I’ve been battling sinus troubles. There’s nothing to speak of here, this is as routine as it gets. It is frustrating and then it passes.
The last two days I’ve been feeling better. I can breathe and everything, and that puts you right back at 95 percent efficiency. That’s under the influence of Sudafed, however. You can’t take them during the overnight hours, though, so the first few steps from the bed to the pills to the steamy shower are rough.
I’m now tired of coughing, so I’m mentally prepared to feel better. And I’m tired of taking pills, so my improvement is all but assured. The Sudafed, I believe, are getting larger. They are now the size of jelly beans. They aren’t very joyous.
Busy month ahead. I’ve lately been saying that about everything. This time it will be even more true. Reading, studying, comprehensive exams and preparing for the class I’m teaching … and then on to the dissertation. January is accounted for.
