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Samford

friends / Samford / Thursday — Comments Off
9
Dec 10

Caledonia soul music tell me what it is

Newspaper nominations were due today. The Crimson sent off eight candidates for awards today. Some of them will do very well, I suspect. We’ll find out in a few months.

So that was part of the day. And my fingers are covered in newsprint. If a police officer stopped me today he would suspect I escaped during booking. And he could fingerprint me with ease.

Had a few meetings today. Handed off my grades. Investigated a camera repair issue. And now I’m down to the Big Database Project at the end of the semester.

It is a great feeling. At the end of the night I just sat and enjoyed it for a few minutes. I have an official end of semester song, which I picked up a year or so back. When it is all done, I turn to Van Morrison.

It must work, the nerves can step down from DefCon 3. The shoulders relax just a bit. I almost nodded off listening to that.

Also, it is still ridiculously cold.

Brian and Elizabeth joined me for lunch at Moe’s Barbecue. I’m beginning to like that place. And I discovered last weekend we’ll soon be getting one close to home. They can’t open soon enough.

They don’t have pie, but many will be pleased to learn that they offer banana pudding.

More tomorrow, of something.

journalism / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
8
Dec 10

Snow!?

There was snow (flurries, anyway) in south Alabama today. Way down in the deep south. I dated a girl from that town once upon a time. When we went out for nice food we had to go to Florida. That’s how south we’re talking about. And it snowed there today. Also, it is still technically autumn.

But it is cold everywhere.

I wrote six paragraphs on the cold, just to keep my fingers warm. They weren’t worth reading, but the writing was exquisite. For just a few more moments there was circulation beneath my fingernails.

Watched a rocket launch this morning. Falcon 9 seemed to be perfect in everywhere. That’s the commercial future of space, happening right before our eyes. Didn’t seem to carry the same amount of attention as rocket launches of the past. The day we reduce rocket launches and astronauts to airliners and bus drivers we’ll have made the space business perfectly safe. And then we’re all going to the moon.

I wrote a column with an embarrassingly transparent call to action today. The editor for the publication is going to cut the word count in half. The poetry and the lame jokes will be excised, but the call to action at the end will no doubt still be there, annoying me until my final days. But the cause is a nice one, and we’re doing our part. “So let’s go out and blah blah blah.”

Taught a class on broadcast writing, my last one of the semester. Students turned in stories on youth sports and the need for more exercise. We all agreed we should leave the lab and go run laps. So I walked back to the office to critique the newspaper for the last time of the semester.

Now I’m grading television scripts. And when the grading is done the semester will be almost over. There’s another meeting or two, a gigantic project to work through and then, of course, preparing for comps. (Have I mentioned that lately?) By this weekend that should take over.

Things I write here during all of that are going to be stellar work, let me tell you. Or is it too late to backhandedly apologize for that?

journalism / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
7
Dec 10

“In it, something is.”

With the semester winding down, I indulged myself for three minutes of deleting the garbage from my spam filters. In my Email account the subject lines always amuse. One urged me to think of myself in the crystal clear waters of some exotically named please.

Every day, Mr. Spammer, every day.

I’m getting some nice spam on the block. Some of it appeals to vanity, “Bravo, your phrase it is brilliant.”

I haven’t written anything brilliant here in some time, I’m afraid. Others are just, well, a little overzealous.

Comfortably, the article is in reality the greatest on this noteworthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the extraordinary lucidity in your writing. I will immediately grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Genuine work and much success in your business efforts!

Generally my blog spam is polite. Much of it is complimenting a post or gently disagreeing with something I’ve written. I’m starting to get a lot of comments from the spammers who say they are too busy to comment, but … and that makes us all happy.

And then there’s Yoda, who’s turned to the dark side. “In it, something is.”

Taught the next-to-last class of the semester today. Students are working on broadcast scripts. I went from that to a sales meeting. And from that to sitting in my office working as the paper staff put together tomorrow’s issue. It’s a nice life.

I’m now pulling readings for my comps exam. Want to help? Want to take the thing for me? It’ll only take four days of your time. Don’t worry about the weeks of studying beforehand. You won’t notice them.

I’m probably going to talk about this a lot in the next month. I’m sorry in advance.

As a break I’m reading about the treaties that came about after World War I. Hindsight is a powerful thing, but George, Wilson and Clemenceau, weren’t really doing the rest of the world — or the people from then to here — many favors. These were impossible problems to wrestle with, and fascinating to consider forensically, but everything just leads grimly to Czechoslovakia and Poland. Some of the French knew it, Wilson knew it, but no one could stop it.

It is best if you don’t look for parallels or conspiracy theories. This is, after all, light reading.

adventures / friends / iPhone / movies / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Dec 10

December?

This doesn’t seem right at all, to be in December. But the mind makes perception funny that way. If it isn’t December, smart guy, what is it? July?

Well, no. But I wouldn’t mind a few weeks worth of May. It has just recently turned to a bitter chill (for here) which at least makes it feel like winter is creeping in. Doesn’t mean we have to like it. If I can’t have May I’ll take mid-March, please.

So the monthly video, designed to encapsulate the theme of the next four weeks in 35 seconds, is up. This one was both obvious and hasty. Busy day today. Work, meetings, study. Had a great teaching moment with the newspaper today. We will have to run a correction next week.

Lunch with Brian, he suggested Moe’s, a local barbecue chain that now stretches from North Carolina to Colorado. This particular one is close to Brian’s office, in an old oyster house. The place feels run down, maybe even transient for a restaurant. Yuppies can go there to feel authentic about their barbecue.

And it is good, if a little pricey. This is my compliment: It is like Bob Sykes‘ barbecue, but without having to go to Bessemer.

I love barbecue.

In finding links for this entry I found this BBQ blog. Why didn’t we think of that? They wisely break their entries down by state. Not that they can be everywhere at once, they’re leaving out a lot of Alabama. (They’re looking for contributions, if you’d like to help them out.)

I got to have Thai for dinner with The Yankee. We visited Surin West, where we haven’t been since sometime before our move. We sat at the same table. Had the same disinterested waiter. I may have had the same meal, who knows. The coconut soup was delicious, as always. And actually warmed us up a bit. Have I mentioned it is cold?

Sent her home, shot the movie above, bought some things and ran other errands.

And then Up. It is a touching film about which much has been written. I’ll simply say that it seems to me to be about how the spirit of love changes. First the child, the dream, then the wife who becomes wrapped up in the home, which gives way to the boy and the bird and the dog.

The animation, of course, is brilliant. The montage was full of life and yearning and loss, even before it was about that. And it might be one of the best montages ever recorded. That’s art.

And now a little studying. More tomorrow, happy December!

iPhone / journalism / movies / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
30
Nov 10

Watch this video, but not the movie that follows

Bitterly cold and falling just now. Winter has arrived. Or it has signaled it’s imminent arrival. Honestly I can’t tell anymore. It is easy to personify the whimsy of nature to a point. But when you get to the days of 40 degree temperature swings — as some parts of the state enjoyed today — you go beyond a singular personality. You have to accept the possibility that the weather personification you’ve been building might have a friend in there.

And that doesn’t even get to addressing those delightful outlier days where winter is officially here, but everything stays in the low 60s. Maybe your personification has an ADD consideration. The pharmaceutical companies are working wonders on this sort of thing these days, just ask them. Maybe they have a drug big enough for all outdoors.

I’m sure that day is coming. And that will be the day that Neo reveals Skynet was just a ruse to distract us from the Matrix. And you just thought you had identity issues before that.

So it was cold. Actually, it started warm. I put on a sweater this morning to walk into 72 degrees with a dewpoint of 68. Around here the meteorologists call that disconcerting. After driving through rain storms, one of them so angry that people were tempted to pull off the road, I made it to work in a chill drizzle. And things have been deteriorating, weather-wise, since then.

Photojournalism in class today. Our faculty member that teachers photojournalism offered to come in and give the lecture. It is always nice to see how others do it, especially those who’ve been doing this for quite some time. This particular professor now travels a lot professionally — some gig, eh? — and he brings back these majestic shots from all over the world. He shows a lot of his pictures, and then showed the great Eugene Smith.

It is enough to make you want to grab your camera, shake your fist at the rain and demand a low angled light so you can take tight closeups. People are the thing. I forget that a lot in my casual shutterbugging. You must always remember it if you’re working.

And also, reporting. Even Eugene Smith’s almost-groundbreaking work is lacking if you don’t have the information to go with. Pictures, words, light, pens, all of the above. Photographers are journalists too. I try to make this point a lot.

Two quick links, and then back to it: I cause trouble. The sports guy at al.com sends me these questions and I try to answer them in the most un-antagonistic way possible. Still I get almost 100 comments in 90 minutes.

Don’t read the comments. They’ll hurt your head.

So of course that’s about Auburn and Alabama football. For just a little more, read about this piece my friend Jeremy is putting together on Bo Jackson. Very interesting little letter, there. It might not be your time or your place or the pinnacle athlete of your generation, but put yourself in Jeremy’s shoes. You can interview the Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali or the Bo Jackson of your childhood. What a possibility.

Do read the comments on that one. They are very good.

Later: I don’t expect you to watch this, but I slogged through Under Heavy Fire tonight. Or, as IMDb calls it, Going Back. Sure, lots of films have working titles and international titles, this one just had two different names. I think it was trying to get into the witness protection program. Anyway, I half acknowledged it playing on Netflix and only link to it here because someone went to the trouble of getting the entire thing on YouTube.

I did not embed it, however, because it might be the worst Casper Van Dien movie that has ever starred Casper Van Dien. It is a shame, since it is Casper Van Dien, and his square jaw of truth here just demands respect. But nothing else does. Shame, because the primary story — OK, there is no secondary arc — could actually be an interesting tale. Every place, that might display conventional thought, or logic, or other key things like dialog, this movie is lacking. There is a lot of screaming, and a little acting.

Casper Van Dien is really hoping Starship Troopers 4 gets the green light about midway through this project. He pulls aside one of the other characters for a sidebar and you almost expect him to break the fourth wall and start talking about this movie.

This being a Vietnam-period piece it must be told in the tone of the self-loathing post-modern Americanism. So much so that this may have been geared for an international release. The guy that directed it was also behind three of the four Iron Eagle movies (Did you know there were four? I’ve seen the first two and was contemplating the final films as a joke, but now that I’ve put all of this together I just don’t have the stomach for it. This might be the worst military film to roll out in 25 years, and this guy didn’t direct Iron Eagle III. How bad must that film be?) and Superman IV. So there you go.

Just as a means of comparison: how did these movies fare on IMDb’s notoriously generous star rating system?

Iron Eagle 4.9 stars
Iron Eagle II 3.3 stars
Iron Eagle III 3.2 stars
Iron Eagle IV 2.9 stars
Superman IV 3.4 stars
Going Back 5.1 stars

So I won’t be watching the last two Iron Eagle movies tomorrow.

I will be shooting you one, though, as we make our way into December it is time for the first-of-the-month thematic video. December, hmmm. I hope I can think of something.