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honeymoon / photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
22
May 10

Saturday at the Vatican

Sistine Chapel ceiling

At the Vatican we saw what must be the world’s most comprehensive statuary collection. There’s ancient Egyptian works, Greek works, Roman impressions of Greek works (those are the newcomers) and more. You can see 5,000-year-old writing in this museum.

Finally you work your way into the Sistine Chapel. No words you have read, no pictures or video you see can prepare you for the pinnacle of Rennaissance art, so I won’t try to start.

It is a fresco, painted while wet over several years, depicting all of Biblical history of the world, from creation to Judgment Day, which is found on the front wall. The sides are painted as curtains. Overwhelming is a word you use a lot in Rome, no more deservedly than here.

The floor, incidentally, was terrible.

We had lunch at La’Isola della Pizza, of which Rick Steves says “wood-fired pizzas, sidewalk seating and home-cooking at its truest. Adele, Vito or their son Renzo serve up generous plates of their mixed antipasti and Vito himself hunts the wild boar for the cinghiale pasta.”

They offer a four-way pizza, un quattro stagioni. We chose the quattro formagi (four cheese), Gorgonzola e salsiccia (mozzarella, sausages, Gorgonzola), Capricciosa (tomato, mozarella, ham and egg (it worked, well)) and bascaiola funghi e salsiccia (mozarella, mushrooms, sausages). We were serenaded by a violinist.

We hiked the 320 steps (we paid two Euros to avoid another 180 steps) to the cupola above St. Peter’s Square. This is another tremendous view. You can see all the way to the Tiber and beyond. On the way up to the top you can see a bird’s eye view of the basilica.

We took in a mass. St. Peter is buried there, in this most ornate, overdone place on earth. Seated next to us were the Sisters of the Arrive Late, Leave Early Convent. Watching a nun check her watch during mass is great. Watching another answer her cell phone is even better.

We decided on gelato for dinner. It is our honeymoon, why not? We found some in a mid-block mall near our hotel. You walk in from the street, but it feels like an underground. Everything was closed, except the restaurant. We’re doing lots of things like that, dancing our way through Rome, hardly believing we are here. And we are only getting started.

Site stuff: Because it will otherwise get overwhelming I’m breaking up the photo galleries. I’ve posted almost 140 photos for the first two full days. Here’s yesterday’s. Click here for today’s. You’ll soon have video to stare at as well.

Friday / honeymoon / photo / site — Comments Off
21
May 10

Rome, Day One

The Roman Colosseum

Incredibly full and busy day. We say the Colosseum — understated in size in person, but only a third of it remains for modern eyes. We walked up to Palatine Hill, the central hill of Rome, and the forum. We visited a little museum, stopped by the Piazza del Campidoglio and the Victor Emmanuel monument.

We took in an incredible view from the rooftop. I made a hasty panorama. (Magnify and scroll left.)

We took in the Pantheon, which is the oldest imposing structure around (and still boasts the world’s largest unsupported concrete dome). It was built in the 1st Century and became a Catholic church in the 13th. The first two kings of Italy. Renaissance artist Raphael and others are buried here. It is the most alive place we’ve been today.

We had dinner at Trattoria der Pallaro, which Rick Steves says is “a well-worn eatery that has no menu, has a slogan: ‘Here you’ll eat what we want to feed you.’ Paolo Fazi — with a towel wrapped around her head turban-style — and her family serve up a five-course meal of typically Roman food, including wine, coffee and a tasty mandarin juice finale. As many locals return day after day, each evening features a different menu.”

They brought us olives, cured beef, the best salami ever, lentils, an unidentified vegetable, rigatoni and roasted pork loin.

Steves knows his business. This place was delicious.

More pictures (almost 70 of them) can be found in the new, and rapidly growing, honeymoon gallery. There could be a brief video forthcoming too.

Tomorrow: The Vatican.

errands / memories / Monday / photo / site — Comments Off
17
May 10

Of Kens and trees

Had lunch with Ken, my former boss. I met him more than six years ago — where did all of that time go? — in an almost two-hour interview. That was the day when I began stepping away from radio and into a future that focused more online.

Ken had been the online editor of a major newspaper and was the editor-in-chief of the state’s most trafficked newsite, al.com. He’d hold that job for more than a decade. I remember we talked about the job, of course, how the site worked, what sort of web work I’d done and so on.

I remember asking about the possibilities of doing new things. And in my four-and-a-half years working for Ken the site went from merely hosting the daily news for The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times and the Press-Register to becoming a full-fledged modern site. We ran blogs. I developed a regular podcast program. I added the first news videos to the site. We covered hurricanes, lots of them, developed political ad strategies and had big plans for the future.

My time there let me read some great thinkers about the evolving possibilities for news online. Many of them help influence my thought, teaching and research today.

So it was great to have a nice long lunch with Ken to talk about his latest projects. He’s a sharp, thoughtful man who puts ideas into practice, and you learn a lot by brainstorming and daydreaming with him.

Stopped by the bank, the friendly people. Now we’re up to introducing ourselves and shaking hands when customers walk in and when they leave. The security officer is holding the door with a smile. Ultimately what I needed can be taken care of over the phone. It will most likely be an automated process. I expect the recording to be painstakingly polite.

Made a few shopping errands in the late afternoon, most notably to the local bookstore. Books-A-Million is based here in Birmingham. It is the third largest bookstore in the country. Not bad for a company that started as a corner newsstand in sleepy little Florence in 1917. I wrote a few days ago about Trowbridge’s, which started in that same city just a year later.

Where that first corner newsstand — built from discarded piano crates and catering to out-of-towners constructing Wilson Dam (which, I’ve just learned, has the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains) — resided I don’t know. The store that came from it closed a few years ago. It is now Billy Reid, an overpriced clothing store. You can buy a t-shirt that you can order for $51 dollars. That’s on sale.

The sales in the bookstore weren’t much more impressive. And, Books-A-Million, the third largest book retailer in the country, seems a bit dead on a random Monday afternoon. I found a bird watching book I want. I copied the ISBN number and found it later online for half the price.

I’m not a bird watcher, but I know people who are. They take great joy in sharing their latest finds with others. I’m also reading about Theodore Roosevelt’s birding passions and I have this notion that dedicating a little time to bird watching could be restive and relaxing.

The problem is that I know only the most basic birds. Trees, fish, most livestock, dogs, sure I can break all of those down into different species and breeds. Birds? I’m pretty clueless. This book details the ones we see in this state. It has a map for winter and summer months. It organizes the birds by their physical characteristics in a simple and clever way. It has a CD which, I assume, is a study on the bird calls.

So it looks like I could be planting bird feeders in the fall.

Grilling

We grilled steak tonight. It was a big meal for a big night. This is the next-t0-last episode, ever, of 24. It starts with the entrails of the guy Jack killed last hour. It ends with a preview of the finale where Jack promises to finish what he started. And then he smiles.

In between he kidnapped the former president. Again. He squealed quicker than a former president who’s just been trapped, shot at, gassed and choked should. From there we learned that Russian diplomats and fireplace pokers don’t mix.

I’m really wondering about that smile. I’ve been offering predictions about the outcome of the show for the last several weeks, revising the plot as the show dictates. I think he’s smiling while taking aim at the guy at Fox that canceled the show.

Did you see the new picture across the top of the blog? That’s the field behind my great-grandparents place. It sits fallow after his passing, but that’s the place where my great-grandfather tilled the land and let me “play in the dirt.”

The last photograph of my great-grandfather.

I was in college and he’d still ask me when I was going to come play in the dirt. I told stories about that field in most every speech I ever gave in high school. The picture on the front page is the oak tree in their front yard. If there are no cars rounding the curve, or coming down the hill from the opposite way, you can hear every thought you’ve ever uttered all at once.

That’s the peace of the place. No matter where you are in your day — or your year or what have you — you can always use a reminder of what soothes you. Today you can share one of mine.

If you keep reading this site this place might snooze you, too!

Have a great Tuesday!

Samford / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
11
May 10

One final down …

One day to go.

Students gave their website presentations in one class at Samford this evening. We made them dress up and talk us through their site, describing their layout, thought process and explanation of why they added some features and omitted others.

The sites look good.

Dr. C., who’s been teaching for my entire lifetime, was impressed by their efforts. The students have only been working in Dreamweaver for three weeks, but many of them have created nice portfolio sites.

Now we just have to upload them.

At the end of the class I thanked them for the patience, bragged on them for struggling through the new software and encouraged them to keep at it.

They didn’t want to see mine. Something about getting home to see Lost.

Full day otherwise. Grading here, printing there, Emailing everyone. It was the this and that of putting the semester to bed. Somehow it ate up the day.

I did manage to scan a handful of things for Tumblr and the blog. These are all just ads from ancient editions of the campus newspaper. There are folders in a file cabinet by my desk and I’m leafing through them all. A lot of interesting things happened in the 1970s.

The Yankee and I spent the late night sitting on the sofa. No studying, no deadlines. It was a nice change of pace.

Tomorrow is the last final. The summer starts around 4 p.m.

Monday / photo / site — Comments Off
10
May 10

My grandmother could beat up Jack Bauer

I spent lunch with my mother and grandparents. Visited my great-grandmother before church and spent last night with my other grandmother.

Not too long after I arrived, though, my cousin brought her three boys over for a visit. They have three children, four and under. The youngest is only eight-months old, content to take it all in. The oldest are big fans of drag racing and toy cars were required to move at high speeds, and volume, across my grandmother’s coffee table.

She didn’t mind. She was holding the baby, and was content to ignore the chaos.

The deeper into the drag racing we went the louder the cars became. You’d think they’d get hoarse, but no.

Old cars I played with as a child are seeing use again.

I remembered details about a lot of the cars — there is a full case of them. The one on the left was the General Lee before I scrapped all the paint off of it. (The guy in Hazzard didn’t do a decent paint job, apparently. In one of my demolition derbies it began to flake away.) The jeep didn’t roll well. I liked that plastic Thunderbird because it always soared off ramps well. Also my grandfather had two sitting outside. The Mercedes was always handled with care for some reason. Even then the value of a brand was apparent, I suppose. The truck, there are two or three just like it, doesn’t haul very well. They were, however, quite successful in the demolition derby.

So that was last afternoon and into the evening. My grandmother and I visited for a while and then I found my way into one of her extra bedrooms. It has been one of those days where I could never get ahead of being tired, so it was an early night.

She made pancakes this morning. And then her sister-in-law came over to go to town with her. That woman is a whirlwind of chaos and compliments and walked in the door ready to fuss over this and that and do this and that. It is nice to see, and I understand the sentiment, but I also agree with my grandmother.

“It’s a wonder I ever got along before these people came to take care of me.”

My grandmother is one of the most completely giving, unassuming people I know. She’s fiercely independent and more than capable of doing her own dishes or getting her own umbrella or any of the other things we all try to do. We know it, too. We’re just trying to be helpful, of course. She just laughs at us.

So I drove back across the county for lunch with my mother and other grandparents. We went to Trowbridge’s.

Trowbridge's in downtown Florence, Ala., since 1918.

It seems that in 1917 Paul Trowbridge of Texas passed through on his way to a dairy farmer’s convention in North Carolina. The next year, after purchasing property, he started a creamery and ice cream shop. Somewhere along the way they started selling food. During World War II they added their famous chili. Breakfast was added to the menu some time later. There’s a painting on the back wall of Trowbridge’s a generation ago. It looks almost identical to what you see today.

The chilidog isn’t what it used to be, but the straws still float in the Coke bottles and the ice cream is still delicious. I haven’t been in years, but I snapped a few pictures. You can see them, along with a few shots from Mother’s Day, in the May photo gallery.

After lunch I pointed the car back toward home. There was some library time to be had, then a delicious spaghetti dinner with The Yankee. We watched 24, which might have given us the most crazy hour of television in that show’s history. We knew enough to eat early. Something about that upcoming interrogation just made us think torches applied to skin wouldn’t go over well alongside a nice meat sauce.

That was a good choice.

And that was a guy Jack Bauer didn’t even care about. This show may go and redeem itself altogether in the final few hours. I expect the write in revival campaign will begin accordingly.

Anyway. Check out the photo gallery. Speaking of pictures you might have noticed the new banner across the top of this page, neatly wrapping up the neon from Las Vegas. There’s a new picture on the main page, showing off a handsome view from my grandmother’s home. Tomorrow the Tumblr will return, alongside various random things on Twitter. One of my classes has their final tomorrow. I’ll wind down this and that as the semester comes to a close. We’re really in the home stretch now.

Oh. That headline? Entirely true.