Freshman Keegan Thompson threw his second consecutive complete game, striking out 10 and scattering four hits while allowing two runs. (So it was a disastrous 5th inning by his standards.) He threw 121 pitches. His 111th pitch was clocked at 91 mph. The kid is unbelievable. I hope they don’t break him.
Auburn won the first game 5-2 to take the series from the visiting Aggies. Thompson came out in the second game and played first base for a while. Auburn was put away easily in the last game of the series, falling 9-0.
So let’s talk fans! This group includes two of the four new Aggie friends we made today. Scroll beyond the photographs. There are things to read below the pretty pictures.
Things to read … because today hasn’t been all about baseball.
International news: Venezuela is likely more important to us than Crimea, though whatever Putin is doing in the home office is interesting. Meanwhile, just common sense suggests that of all the places you could cut the military here, slicing off parts of the navy is an inherently risky strategy.
Journalism items of interest: The lengths people will go to try to prevent reporters from doing their jobs often borders on the absurd. Here are two examples, and correspondence from Great Britain, which has been milling about on the wrong, lost, broken path for a while now, it seems.
Just stories: The first one is just strange, the kind where you know you don’t know the whole story, where maybe the whole story doesn’t matter so much, so long as the person is OK.
This little bush in our side yard always seems to have the first blooms. They showed up last week, finally. I thought it’d be nice to show them off, finally.
Two trees on campus, that I drive and walk past every day, have turned into lovely lavender explosions. Everything is about to surge forward. Spring, finally.
My swim was much better this evening, thanks for asking. I swam 2,000 yards. That’s 1.14 miles to you and me. I’m pretty sure I’ve consciously gotten into my car and deliberately driven it a shorter distance. It isn’t fast, or especially pretty, but there’s distance, and I don’t feel bad during it. Except for being constantly winded.
I’m told this is because I don’t know how to breathe. I’m beginning to believe that.
Things to read … because we want to believe everything we read.
The body found last Wednesday in Pontiac is that of Pia Farrenkopf — according to her sister, Paula Logan. Authorities investigating the case haven’t released her name, but they have said that the woman apparently died in 2008 at the age of 49.
According to a report in the Detroit Free Press, records show Farrenkopf as voting in the November 2010 gubernatorial election. Officials say, however, that it may represent an administrative error. Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard says the information must be checked out.
Officers found the 33-year-old male suspect in the living room with blood dripping from his head.
The 82-year-old victim, George Bradford, who was inside the home, struck the suspect with the hammer in an effort to protect his family. George says his mother was in an upstairs unit and that he’s owned the duplex on Whitfield since 1968.
I don’t know about you, but I always enjoy when the aggressor is the one who gets hurt and the victim is the person with the hammer.
The piece features stories of three rape victims. Their names have been changed in the story.
On Monday Fond du Lac High School Principal Jon Wiltzius told journalism classes new school guidelines require that all stories meet his approval before publication and are subject to rejection.
“This is a reasonable expectation,” Wiltzius said. “My job is to oversee the global impact of everything that occurs within our school and I have to ensure I am representing everyone and there was some questionable content.”
Here’s a rule of thumb: If someone can fairly say you have a rape culture on your campus and you’re talking about how everyone is represented and you are questioning content, it is possibly possible that you are asking the wrong questions.
Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s initial proposal for what would become the World Wide Web. Think about how different media and technology were in 1989 from today. Now imagine how different things might look at a year that sounded like science fiction not that long ago: 2025.
And, now, Kevin Bacon:
You can’t just swipe away the hurt. Also, the Soviets had nukes for a lot longer than 20 years. Or maybe they ran out after nuking Bacon’s friends.
I don’t recall Daylight Saving Time having this much of an impact on me. Maybe I’m just not sleeping well. Maybe my diet is off. For one of these, or some other, reason, I have been battling a terrific laggard feeling today. I’m blaming Daylight Saving Time. That’s what I said getting out of the pool after a lousy swim this evening.
That’s also why I’m saying I’ve staggered through the entire day. The clear parts, the hazy parts. The warm parts and the mild parts. It has all felt like syrup.
So I swam 1,350 yards tonight. It was unremarkable except that I have discovered if I go slower each lap I actually go faster in the long run. And now I have to develop a routine that makes it all work — for when I am not in molasses.
Things to read … because other parts of the world are moving at normal speeds.
When I first saw this 1919 picture of nebulae in the Pleiades, I was surprised to see such an old photograph of distant stars. To think that an image like this was published just a year shy of the end of the first World War and over 40 years before the first man stepped foot in outer space seems almost beyond comprehension.
There are so many models out there. We’re at Bloomberg now, where a core terminal business is funding journalism, and it’s something that is of use to the users, giving them real-time information that’s going to be efficacious and useful. That’s one way to go. You have Huffington Post at the other end, where it’s not a narrow user base; it’s the broadest user base possible. You have BuzzFeed, which is taking viral content and then overlaying it with a skin of serious news. You have a lot of mainstream journalists like Ezra Klein, formerly of the Washington Post, Kara Swisher, and Walt Mossberg leaving Dow Jones and striking out on their own or in alliances with nonlegacy companies. There are all these bets all over the table and nobody knows what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.
Here’s the full video, which has some nice, thoughtful conversation throughout:
“The legislature hereby finds that a free society is maintained when government is responsive and responsible to the public, and when the public is aware of governmental actions. … The legislature therefore declares that government is the public’s business and that the public, individually and collectively and represented by a free press, should have access to the records of government …”
We’re quoting from the preamble of New York state’s Freedom of Information Law. It requires governments to release records of their activities, with some exceptions, so that taxpayers know where their money is being spent and how their government is performing. FOIL is a powerful tool for demanding accountability.
Alas, saying “government is the public’s business,” and acting like it is, are two different things. Government agencies and officials routinely resist public disclosure.
The press-freedom portion of the First Amendment is a compact between the Founders and future generations. A strong democracy depends on journalism to keep government honest. This applies from the top all the way to the bottom — from details about the federal government’s expansive domestic-spying program all the way down to the goings and comings of a county’s criminal justice system.
“Democracies die behind closed doors,” wrote a federal judge in 2002. A journalist’s job is to pry those doors open. Someone should keep an eye on the courts, the city council and the streets department, to cite a few local examples.
Human nature tends to cut corners if no one is looking. And the kind of corners we’re talking about — public safety, criminal charges, proper bid processing involving taxpayer dollars — can come with a steep price, in terms of money and, occasionally, human life.
And, lastly, from the Department of The Children Are Our Future, comes another fine tale of the generous spirit of young people:
Trinity Classical was up over 20 points against Desert Chapel with time winding down in the California section championship. Trinity Classical brought in Beau Howell, a player on the team with autism who had never scored a point.
Take your eye off the ball. Watch number four. And then, at the very end, the winning championship team is giving Beau the ball.
The bird seed was left on the back porch, one of those “Let me put this down and deal with something pressing and I’ll get back to it” decisions. After a short time it was forgotten. At some point after that the squirrels and the chipmunks found it. The squirrels bit nice holes into the bag.
We noticed because Allie noticed:
We’ve learned, over the years, that the little meeping noise cats make is because they are frustrated. “I want IT.” Allie makes that noise when she sees wildlife in her yard. She also twitches up a bit. She’d really love to go outside and catch the thing, whatever it is she sees. But this cat is not a hunter. And even if she had enough speed to keep up with the other creature — bird, squirrel or chipmunk — she’d have no idea what to do about it.
A mouse, in a story so embarrassing a cat would beg you not to tell it, once scared her away.
She is fierce, this cat. Which is why, I suppose, I have a long scratch on the back of my hand right now. One of the few times she’s ever really done that. I choose not to interpret it as “You didn’t let me catch the thing, so you’ll do as a substitute.”
In baseball today Keegan Thompson pitched seven innings for Auburn. He allowed no runs and only two hits in collecting the win 4-1 over Mercer.
She is wrong. This wasn’t Thompson’s second win of the year. It was his third:
Actually I have no idea what she was talking about. But she held that position for a long time, so it must have been important.
A cutie at the park:
With one out in the ninth, Mercer had three runners on and the tying run at the plate. A ground ball to first sent center fielder Sasha Lagarde to the plate. The umpire said Lagarde slid in under this tag to score.
Auburn’s manager, Sunny Golloway, disagreed. He had a discussion about the best pizza toppings with the umpire. The plate ump decided he’d learned all he needed to know about the local fare. Golloway still had some things on his mind, so he circled back and brought up the best places around to get wings:
The umpire, not being a wing man, threw Golloway out of the game. Not everyone dips in ranch, Sunny. But the big emotional outburst — “How can you not like celery and carrots!?” gave struggling closer Terrance Dedrick the opportunity to regain his composure and he shut the Bears down from there.
Things to read … because some things are more important than a beautiful afternoon at the park. (Or so we’re told.)
I met Lance Cpl. Kyle Carpenter three years ago. It was a unique and humbling experience. Now, it seems, he’s getting the Medal of Honor. When you read his story, the instantaneous decision of a Marine of 21, which I thumbnailed in the first link, you’ll understand the common experience people get when they meet him, and why he’s up for the nation’s highest military distinction.
At Clay County Christian Academy, they call their favorite player “Codyman.” They have blue T-shirts with “Down syndrome awareness” surrounding a Superman logo on front. The logo has “C” instead of an “S,” and the back of the shirts says what Codyman fans feel about No. 12, Cody Morris: “Codyman, sort of like Superman (only cooler).”
Morris had his time to play in most every game this season, called “Cody Time.” It was that final minute when the sophomore took the court in the same uniform with his friends and teammates, and they made sure he got chances to shoot the ball.
And make no mistake. Morris can shoot.
I do enjoy those stories.
Finally: Chris Hemsworth. Liam Hemsworth. Meryl Streep. And Tom Hanks in The Bitman Begins:
In a way, this is actually a small culmination of the post-modern, highly social, remix era. The thing is somewhat funny on its face, but to maximize the video you have to understand several layers of nuance and references. Everyone probably has some basis for reference tough. The “Charlie bit my finger” clip now has more than 675 million YouTube views, so maybe you don’t need subtext.
I got caught in the rain a few times today, so there’s that.
I dried out sitting on a waiting room sofa, talking with a colleague about Texas and grandchildren and holidays. That was nice, since yesterday I’d sat in someone else’s office and talked about communication plans and how you’d restructure your entire workflow if you were given the opportunity. These are little insights into other worlds that I don’t normally see, in my office or with my students or in my car or wheezing through a workout. We talked about internships in one of those meetings yesterday and externships today. Sometimes the circles complete themselves.
Sometimes the umbrella leaves drip marks as you walk up two flights of stairs.
I don’t know what that means. I only know you can never shake enough drips out of the things, and then I feel responsible to patrol halls warning people of the wet floor I made.
Things to read … because nothing of great interest is coming to mind.
What if front pages were selected by newspapers’ readers instead of their editors? At NewsWhip, we’re always interested in the news stories people are choosing to share – and how those stories differ from the normal news stories editors put on the front pages of big newspapers. So we ran a little experiment.
On Wednesday morning, we gathered the front pages of leading newspapers in several countries. Then we used Spike to check the most shared stories from each one.
A little work at our end, and we used those most shared stories to make new “people powered” front pages for each newspaper – giving the most shared story the most prominence, the second most shared the second most prominence, etc.
I was going through the most read and most commented on stories at al.com to do a mock up of the local outlets. But I decided against it when, even in March, most of the lead stories would be about Alabama football.
This move requires uptake, but the right kind of uptake. Ideally, it would generate new value among the web scofflaws while not harming Getty’s business with pro publishers. I’m not sure these embeds hit that balance. The workflows are too ungainly for the people who currently have contracts with Getty, true, but they’re also not quite easy enough to be a good substitute for people who don’t mind stealing. My wager is that, as transformational as this announcement might seem to be, Getty’s embeds won’t be pockmarking the web.
But no matter how it turns out, give Getty a lot of credit for being willing to take a highly unorthodox stance. It’s an effort very much worth watching.
So more illustrations for blog posts everywhere, I guess.
Newsweek returns to newsstands Friday with a small press run (70,000), but it’s hoping to make a big impact with its cover story, which claims to have actually tracked down the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, the man credited with inventing Bitcoin.
As the story goes, Nakamoto doesn’t open up much except to say that he’s not involved in Bitcoin anymore, but senior staff writer Leah McGrath Goodman manages to wring out a nearly 3,400-word profile of the California man, who’s described as rumpled and unkept and living in a modest home, despite having a fortune estimated at $400 million.
Doctors announced that they may have possibly cured a second baby born with AIDS by administering antiretroviral treatment within hours after birth.
Doctors revealed on Wednesday that the baby was in remission from the virus at an AIDS conference in Boston. The girl was born in suburban Los Angeles last April, a month after researchers announced the first case of a possible cure, a baby from Mississippi. The Mississippi case was a medical first that led doctors worldwide to rethink how fast and hard to treat infants born with HIV, and the California doctors followed that example.
Two of the 10 best barbecue chains in America are right here in Alabama, according to the food website The Daily Meal.
Birmingham-based Jim ‘Nick’s Bar-B-Q, which was founded by father and son Jim and Nick Pihakis in 1985, is No. 1 on The Daily Meal’s 10 best list.
That is a list of chains, mind you. And while I enjoy both of those chains, if you were talking singular barbecue experience there are about five other places you might choose first. In a related story: There is such a thing as eating too much delicious barbecue, but no one has found that amount yet.
That post is a bit self-serving, particularly given the gravity of the situation. Also, it seems that another, equally important question is: “Why is this taking so long to address?” This story is from a year ago:
There are other television examples from 2012. The systemic problem in the state’s prisons didn’t just creep up on anyone. And while there’s no finger-snap fix, it reads as if change is slow to come. But AMG is on the case now. Every little bit of attention helps in a progression story.
Rutgers University is not backing down in the face of a faculty eruption over the New Jersey state school’s invitation of Condoleezza Rice to deliver this year’s commencement address.
The Faculty Council at Rutgers’ New Brunswick campus is trying to oust Rice, a former secretary of state, national security advisor, and provost of Stanford University, as the university’s commencement speaker because she does not “embody moral authority and exemplary citizenship.”
Taking issue with Rice’s politics and career, professors passed a resolution Friday imploring the university’s Board of Governors “to rescind its misguided decision” to invite Rice and give her an honorary degree. Faculty councils on Rutgers’ Camden and Newark campuses are expected to do the same in the coming weeks.
If only the secretary was of a serious caliber of whom the Rutgers community deserves:
Apparently no one has uploaded a video of that 2011 Snooki speech. You do see a lot of “Rutgers angered by” links, though.
I bet they all went up and down the halls at dear ol’ Rutgers, warning of the drip that was coming.
