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Friday / journalism / links / music / site / video — Comments Off
4
May 12

Music and demographics and embarrassment

Sometimes I wish I knew something about music, just on the off chance that I’d get to be a part of something musically moving. Like this, for example. At the end of their U.S. tour, Bruce Springsteen took a request from the crowd and the E Street Band played one for Levon:

I posted some Levon Helm videos the day before he died. You can see them all here.

In more sobering news, Birmingham Business Journal reports that Alabama lost 36,100 private sector jobs in the last decade. There are less than 1.5 million private sector jobs in the state these days.

There are 4.8 million people in the state. How can there be that few private sector jobs?

The Census says 37.5 percent of the state is younger than 18 and 7.6 percent are older than 65. So that’s 45 percent young and old. And if you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which is increasingly becoming a funny thing to say these days — there is 7.6 percent unemployment in the state, so that gets us up to 52 percent of the state.

And here’s a list of government populations by city, which is eye-opening. According to that list 135 of the state’s 512 cities are above the U.S. median for percent of government employees. Not sure how that list accounts for residents in unincorporated areas, which are prominent in rural states.

If you aren’t doing mobile media you’re behind:

(G)rowth of mobile video usage is increasing dramatically. 108 billion videos were watched on mobile phones in 2011, almost trebling to 280 billion in 2012. However, unlike apps, this isn’t translating into symbiotic revenue levels. Despite a 23.8% revenue growth, Video is likely to account for a mere 2.4% ($3.6 billion) of total mobile media revenues in 2012.

Food as art, history and sociology. I don’t think about these things this way on my own, but this is a wonderful read:

Q. Shouldn’t we all be more in touch with our food heritage? How can we go about doing that?

A. When you follow a family recipe, you have an opportunity to bring life to your family story. What sustained your ancestors and your parents? It becomes exciting because you can say, “This is what my so-and-so ate to celebrate the end of World War II.”

Michael Twitty, the A above, is taking a tour of the South — he’s calling it the “Southern Discomfort Tour” — a journey to follow his ancestral path across the region, covering almost 4,500 miles.

How not to do television news.

And how to embarrass yourself on air in one easy step. I’d embed the video, but that television station hasn’t discovered that autoplay is evil. So I’ll link to it.

I’ll be showing that in class. If you can watch it more than once, I applaud you. But go watch some more Bruce instead.

Friday / iPhone / photo / site — Comments Off
27
Apr 12

The acceptable uses for chalk

When you think about it, beyond the classroom setting, there’s just not that much call for chalk.

Sure, there’s that rousing game of hopscotch. And kids occasionally scribble on sidewalks to amuse themselves. On college campuses that remains a moderately effective message delivery system. But that’s about it.

Oh, and the produce aisle.

This is at a cafe, which is also a produce store, attached to the back of a nursery. The nursery is well located, but who knows how many times I’ve passed the cafe without it registering. There’s limited parking. You have to walk through or around the nursery to get to the Crape Myrtle Cafe.

More chalk:

The food there is very good, so I’ve heard. We order a fresh veggie basket every week. They are locally grown, organic, and all the rest of those happy little buzzwords. We make huge salads and are forced to find recipes for things like kale and radishes.

While the nice lady that works there puts my basket together I look around, enjoying a warm day, noisy birds and the smell of strawberries and tomatoes. I take pictures of local honey jars and labels that read “Certified Organic Sprouted Bagels — with grains as referenced in Ezekiel 4:9.”

That verse, by the way, says “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side.”

My neck and shoulders are about 15 percent better. I’m trying to lie on my side, but I’m not doing this for 390 days. Two weeks in and I’m beyond that point of “This hurts, and that, in turn, magnified every other little thing.” I’m now to “I’m really, really tired of feeling like this.

But it is heartening that there’s progress. Tonight something popped in my neck and it helped a great deal. Moving slow, but now more by design than anything else.

I’ll take some more of that progress, if you don’t mind.

On the site: The March and April photo galleries are now updated. You can see those and much, much more on the photo page.

One version of the chalkboards above has worked into the rotation of the banners at the bottom of the page. You can see it here. You can see all of them simultaneously, with cutline info, right over here.

I’m going to go rest now. And by rest I mean make a bunch of phone calls.

site / Thursday — 1 Comment
26
Apr 12

Pain in the neck

Much as I like to complain about this sort of thing, I haven’t done so. Until now, of course.

Three weeks ago I narrowly avoided broadsiding an SUV on my bike. I’d been in the saddle for three or four hours. I was back in the neighborhood, but was dragging. My head was down. A lady turned right in front of me. I looked up just in time to yank my bike over hard.

I missed her handsome SUV, but strained my neck. It stretched out just fine that afternoon, so I figured I was dehydrated.

Two weeks ago, in San Antonio, I slept on a poor bed in a shabby room. On Saturday I stood up from breakfast and everything in my neck suddenly felt weird. I took a few extra hot showers that day and everything stretched out, improving so much that I’d all but forgotten about it by dinner time.

And that’s when I played with our friends’ four-year-old. We were doing that thing where you swing the kid’s feet over his head by his arms. He loved it. Four or five times his father and I pitched him in the between us.

Suddenly there was a blinding, white light. Put the kid down, deal with this strangely powerful pain in the neck.

I’ve been fighting this, and losing, ever since. The odd thing is that it moves around. One day it is on the right side of my neck. The next day it could be on the left side. I look like a zombie in the mornings. There’s no turning of the head, and I’m trying to do everything from my waist. It loosens up as the day progresses, but there’s always some point I can’t move beyond. Looking down is pretty much impossible. Tilting my head back is about the worst thing imaginable.

It has moved to my back. Everything from my shoulder blades up is suspect. My trapezius muscles don’t know what is going on.
Tuesday I complained about a spasm in my right shoulder that almost turned me into a one-handed individual. So The Yankee booked me a bit of soigneur-style therapy.

Which was great. Nice lady. She was from Pennsylvania, studied in South Carolina. Found her way to Birmingham … “There was a boy.”

A familiar tale. But I didn’t press for details. As I sat on the table and as we talked my left shoulder spasmed up. Interesting sensation.

So I must, somehow, change the way I sleep. Do this, do that; come back if you aren’t better in a week or two.

I’m tired of this. I’m not interested in giving it two weeks. Sleeping is tough, waking up is worse. Can’t ride my bike. Turning around in the car is a bit painful, making some intersections uncomfortable.

This is approaching miserable, but it could be worse. Then again I could also not hurt.

Monday / music / Samford / site / video — Comments Off
26
Mar 12

I’ve got nothing.

Roy Orbison, Iggy Pop, The Bangles and Darius Rucker each have a song with that title. I don’t especially relate to anything of them just now. Even so:

There’s a busy schedule and a weary feeling, same as everyone else.

I taught a class. So that was fun. We talked about the best spring break experiences. Someone went to Disney. Someone went to Disney. Someone got snowed on in the grand canyon. I spoke with someone who dislocated a shoulder. And someone else who had shoulder surgery.

The best spring break stories are usually a degree or two better than the surgical ones, if you ask me.

Caught up on a bunch of reading. So now my stack is merely overwhelming, I suppose.

That’s a big enough word for me, thanks.

Just so it’d be done I spent a few minutes cleaning up the photo galleries. February and March were hastily dashed off and will now pass for up-to-date.

And now on to more pressing things. More when I got something.

family / journalism / links / memories / photo / site / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
22
Mar 12

Much better now, thanks

I woke up hungry this morning, which is how I knew things were looking up. Let’s call whatever moved in on Tuesday night and dominated Wednesday a minor, temporary inconvenience and move on.

There is this, though:

When I was in the third grade I came down with chicken pox during my spring break. I was at my grandparents. They were out in the country enough that a trip into town to see the pharmacist was good enough to verify the pox unto me. The druggist suggested I not travel. I was staying with my grandparents for a few days longer.

This would ordinarily not be a problem, but I’d had perfect attendance in the second grade and made it all the way to spring break in the third grade without missing any school. This was upsetting.

And then the itching really began.

After a while it all became miserable, one of the more painful being a spot right on a biceps tendon, irritated each time I walked. But I was fairly well covered in the horrible little blotches.

The only thing that made me feel better was the custom-ordered and custom-heated chicken noodle soup with crumbled up crackers and tea in the red plastic cup.

My grandmother has always been amused by me, and she’s spoiled me with all of her precious heart. (I was her first grandchild.) And so this silly, pathetic little request was honored for almost every meal for the week or so I fought off the chicken pox. My grandmother has a very giving spirit.

That picture is probably a few years before they realized they’d have to buy me that nasty, soothing lotion.

Some years later, probably when I was in undergrad, I asked my grandmother if she could spare one of those cups. Because I’ve always amused her, and because I am her favorite (and only!) grandson, and because she is very giving, she offered me two of her red plastic cups, which secret a cure-all elixir from their pores when you are feeling bad. They’ve always held a place of honor in my cabinets.

What, your cabinets don’t have places of honor?

They’ve been in use around here the last few days. I still can’t make chicken soup like she can, even though she just pours it out of a can as I do. Also, she is a better cracker crumbler than I. That’s even more absurd sounding, I know, but it is a truth of life: your grandmother is way better than you are at a lot of things. It’s science.

These days a similar cup is called a Koziol Rio Tumbler. I doubt that’s what these cups are. That name suggests a carefully calibrated focus group that was meant to impart sophistication. My grandparents were hardworking country people. My grandfather was a truck driver, my grandmother worked in the textiles. Their red plastic cups have no name or logo on them. Who knows how long they’ve had them, but it is an easy 30 years at least. They probably bought them because they needed cups, and red brings out her eyes. Or maybe they were a gift from an aunt or someone. What matters is that the magic curative powers within these cups are still working.

(And now, some several decades later, during another spring break, this bit of unpleasantness caught up with me. Parallels!)

Elsewhere: I did a few small things around the house to feel productive. I read a bit and wrote about nine pages worth of things. There’s also the new marker entry.

I’ve recently added some posts to the work blog:

The age of mobile has been here awhile, actually

Lots of links — visual edition

The 1940 Census infographic

Changes in advertising trends

Publishing with WordPress?

That last one, even if you aren’t interested in anything to do with the general journalism theme on the other blog, could be useful.

Finally, I’ve tweaked the front page to the section on my grandfather’s textbooks. That portion of the site is complete, but it was missing something. And then I found that something — a photograph, the one I have of him as a school boy, even if it is a transfer and his bright young face is in a bit of shadow — tonight while working through a box of things in the office closet.

Yes. As midnight approached I was cleaning off a desktop and working through a box of photographs. I am feeling better, thanks. The red plastic cups do the trick.