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things to read

More on the depot and on smoky smoke

I took extra pictures of the old train station, so I may as well use them. It is a neat old building:

Click the image to embiggen it in a new tab. The old Auburn Railroad Depot is one of those Places in Peril lists. In the old days, this was the center of everything, but the last person got off and on the train in Auburn in 1970 and things have just crumbled and suffered lately.

There was a real estate company operating out of there for two decades, but the depot has sat vacant for 10 years now. Here’s a look through the windows:

And the overly fancy door handle:

In addition to the official marker, found here, there is an older plaque mounted on a large stone just outside the depot.

The building is described as “A typical example of Victorian railroad architecture, the one-story Richardson Romanesque-styled station boasts long hip roofs, deep eaves, dormers, finials, rounded arches over the windows and flat lintels.”

It is owned by a Montgomery lawyer, who is asking a steep price on a building that needs a lot of work, in a historic district — which would make a new building on the property problematic. So there is a sad stasis to the whole place.

But I love this. This would have been the sign you saw getting off the train:

A little bit more of that font in life would never be a bad thing.

This is the third building, built after a 1904 fire. Eight trains a day once stopped there.

The Jolley principle: Where there is smoke there is smoke.

If you are still trying to figure out what a Roopstigo is, and you want to hear some poor arguments for journalism, and from an Auburn journalism grad of all things, you can listen to the interview the guys at 790 The Zone conducted with Selena Roberts. She’s been doing things like this for years, though, and nothing here is that surprising. It is amusing to hear the host’s exasperation with the entire thing. This a direct link to their mp3.

Oh, and now ESPN is stepping in it. They’re calling it a six-month investigation into Auburn, which is great. It took Jay Jacobs, Auburn’s long-suffering athletics director, about four hours to dismantle the entire thing:

The facts clearly demonstrate that the Auburn Athletics Department and the Committee on Intercollegiate Athletics acted appropriately and aggressively in response to the growing threat of synthetic marijuana during the 2010-2011 academic year.

Auburn Athletics began testing its student-athletes for synthetic marijuana three days after a test became available. Since our drug testing policy was amended to include synthetic marijuana as a banned substance, there have been three positive tests for the drug out of more than 2,500 drug tests administered.

It becomes an item-by-item, blow-by-blow mitigation of everything ESPN thinks they have. It is thorough. It is just this side of terse. And it is just about the most thorough media pimp slap you’ll ever see from a group of people who’d prefer to take the high road.

Also, if you’re still wondering about the Roopstigo thing — who? — she named it after her dog. So, previously, we wondered why Selena couldn’t sell her creative writing to another outlet. (Then you read the creative writing which was, in a matter of hours, refuted by almost every source she pretends to quote.) Now we’re wondering “What did you name your dog after?”

Meanwhile, The War Eagle Reader found the first thing she wrote in college. It was … strange.

All you really need to know:

If you’re keeping score at home: Chizik called someone “short on logic,” & Jay Jacobs outplayed an ESPN senior writer. I’ll be in my bunker.

— Aubielicious (@Aubielicious) April 5, 2013

BREAKING: Selena Roberts just released her interview footage… twitter.com/Aubielicious/s…

— Aubielicious (@Aubielicious) April 4, 2013

Alabama / Auburn / baseball / journalism / links / photo / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
28
Mar 13

The baseball Iron Bowl

Alabama visited Auburn for a three game series, starting tonight. Things did not go well for the Tigers.

Ryan Tella was 1-of-5 with three strike outs:

Tella

Garrett Cooper had one hit in four at bats and struck out once:

Cooper

Between the two they stranded five of Auburn’s eight base runners as Alabama won 6-2.

In the major sports – football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and baseball – Auburn is now 9-43 against the SEC since the 2012 SEC baseball tournament. I’m keeping count because someone has to.

Other things: Nineteen percent of Alabama are on food stamps.

Then there’s this most depressing lead:

In Hale County, Alabama, 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.

[…]

As far as the federal government is concerned, you’re disabled if you have a medical condition that makes it impossible to work. In practice, it’s a judgment call made in doctors’ offices and courtrooms around the country. The health problems where there is most latitude for judgment — back pain, mental illness — are among the fastest growing causes of disability.

[…]

In Hale County, there was one guy whose name was mentioned in almost every story about becoming disabled: Dr. Perry Timberlake. I began to wonder if he was the reason so many people in Hale County are on disability. Maybe he was running some sort of disability scam, referring tons of people into the program.

After sitting in the waiting room of his clinic several mornings in a row, I met Dr. Timberlake. It turns out, there is nothing shifty about him. He is a doctor in a very poor place where pretty much every person who comes into his office tells him they are in pain.

“We talk about the pain and what it’s like,” he says. “I always ask them, ‘What grade did you finish?'”

What grade did you finish, of course, is not really a medical question. But Dr. Timberlake believes he needs this information in disability cases because people who have only a high school education aren’t going to be able to get a sit-down job.

It is an enlightening piece, and worth your read.

adventures / Friday / iPhone / links / photo / things to read / Tumblr / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
22
Mar 13

This is spring, right?

“It is tough,” she said, “to be that enthusiastic at that this time of day.”

She meant the morning, trying to wake up for breakfast, which is something to be excited about. And it was delicious:

And then it was cloudy and cold. Well, there was that part of the afternoon were it rained. That really changed things up. All week long. That’s pretty much been the way of it this week.

Today we learned that Harvey Updyke could be back on the street by May. I’m over the guy. He has so many probation conditions I’m sure he’ll get picked up again before too long.

More importantly something collapsed at the newly renovated terminal at the Birmingham airport. A family was hurt. Turned out they were standing under one of those large flight info screens when it fell off the wall. I was listening to the fire department scanner chatter. Three rescue units were there. And then a fourth and fifth were dispatched.

Meanwhile they were answering calls to an elderly person with trouble breathing, a teen who couldn’t see and a car crashing into a power pole. Listening to a scanner is addictive.

Late in the evening we learned a 10-year-old died in the airport accident. The people that picked up the info screen off the family said it weighed between 300 and 400 pounds. The mother had some serious leg injuries. Her younger children were also taken to the hospital. They were on vacation, returning home, and just passing through the Birmingham airport.

In a happier story, the US played Costa Rica in a World Cup qualifier and someone thought booking this in a Colorado venue in March would be a good idea. Craziest non-soccer game I’ve ever watched at the international level:

Two new things on Tumblr this week. Here’s one and here’s another.

Posts from the campus blog this week:

Building a media room

WaPo to go behind paywall

Improving the interview

Conde Nast’s video project

What to worry over in the publishing game

Welcome back YouTube Cover Theater, where we celebrate the talent of regular people who are playing on their sofas, at their bars and on their decks, in front of a camera and, now, the world. We do this by choosing a feature act and showing off covers of their original work. This week’s inspiration is Old Crow Medicine Show:

James River Blues:

There have been some 5,200 views of that one. I can’t believe this one of Caroline has less than 2,000:

This one just looks older because of the sepia:

Every other Old Crow Medicine Show cover is of Wagon Wheel. So we’ll just go to Mumford and Sons:

Hope you have a great weekend, and that it is a little warmer and a little drier where you are.

We’re getting more rain all weekend.

Auburn / baseball / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
20
Mar 13

The variability of weather, devised to furnish unfailing conversation*

At the baseball stadium last night, before it turned cold again, Auburn hosted Alabama State. The hecklers were giving ASU’s third baseman a good-natured hard time. He had the misfortune to execute a poor slide in the early innings and then the good humor to laugh about it with the crowd later.

Late in the game, with ASU in the field, their short stop shifted far to his right. Someone pointed out how close the guy at short was to the third baseman. And then there was a weak ball up the line to third and the two guys ran into one another. Here is a dramatic reenactment:

Thereafter the Alabama State short stop was everyone’s hero, and he could do everything. Those guys were such great sports. The ASU third base coach offered free tickets to the Auburn students for their series this weekend. Auburn won 10-2.

We had dinner at Mellow Mushroom, which meant leftovers for lunch today.

It turned cold about that time. I debated turning on the electric blanket. No, I thought, spring is here. The windows were open earlier.

And then this morning it felt even colder somehow, which is to say the low 50s. We’ve been in the upper 70s, so there is a bit of chill again when you hit 54 at the high point of the day. Particularly when the sun is playing shy behind three or four layers of cloud cover.

Never could get warm today. I stayed curled up under a blanket with the space heater on. Spring is here, after all.

Sometime in the late afternoon, though, the sun finally came out. It was nice and bright and warmer, though the space heater stayed on all day, into the evening and night.

But we did get sunlight at the right time, my favorite time of day in our house, which I’m sure I’ve mentioned here before:

Those 25 minutes or so just feel magical. Anything is possible. The most ludicrous movie plots could become reality for those few moments. You revel in them, you wonder how they manage to escape so suddenly. And you reaffirm an incontrovertible truth; every house should have clear sight lines and plenty of windows facing west.

Tonight The Yankee made chicken tikka masala and naan, which is a new dish at home. It was good. Now, we’ve decided, we just want authentic Indian food.

Things to read: Usually videos like this are news simply because there is video. And usually it is some bad news, or something that barely qualifies as news. This, however, is awesome:

In an amazing rescue in Perth, Australia, a man administered CPR on a young girl who stopped breathing as her panicked and thankful father looked on.

Voyager is leaving the heliosphere, or may be leaving the heliosphere. It might be coming back, because it thinks it left the stove eye on. Or it could already be Vger. Whichever. Humanity is now interstellar:

What’s not in dispute among any of the scientists is that the spacecraft is now, undeniably, in a new and unexplored region—pushing the reach of humanity farther than it’s ever gone before. What we call that place is, in many respects, less important than the fact that we’re there at all.

According to new scientific findings set for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Voyager I has pushed into the great unknown.

NASA, however, remains skeptical about these new conclusions. “Consensus of the mission team is that NASA’s Voyager spacecraft has not left the solar system,” a NASA social media specialist told TIME via e-mail. “Statement soon from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.”

For years, scientists have speculated as to when Voyager would finally leave all traces of our sun behind — officially exiting the heliosphere, and entering the great undiscovered country beyond.

Here’s, perhaps, the dumbest story of the day:

Every suspect is entitled to his day in court, but for accused Auburn shooting suspect Desmonte Leonard, Wednesday’s hearing had to be postponed because no one thought to bring him.

[…]

(H)e was never transported the 50 or so miles from Montgomery to the Lee County Detention Facility.

Don’t make any attic jokes.

The best writing of the day is at Rapha:

Your brain can’t remember pain. Of that I am glad. I don’t miss the pain. I’ll tell you what I miss though, I miss the weather.

Did I ever tell you about when I used to train in Italy in the winter? In the mountains the snow would fall for days, and the hillsides would be covered in thick blankets of white, their peaks looking like the hunched shoulders of giant beasts, faces bowed in shame. Those giant mounds of rock were too scared to face me and too cold to move, and so I rode up them, and made heat of my own. I would catch fire; burning in my layers of clothes, cutting through the cold like an electric heater. Sweat would drip from my nose onto the white road, snow tingling as it melted on my exposed skin. The world was frozen, but I was roaring in flames, as if I was driving an open-top-car with the heater on full blast. I was my own nature. I was defiance.

That piece, about bicycle racing, just gets better and better. Penance for complaining about the cold this morning.

(*The title? Emily Post.)

journalism / links / things to read / Tuesday / Twitter — 2 Comments
19
Mar 13

1,032 words on a slice of the Steubenville story

There was a high profile rape trial in Ohio you might have noticed. You might have watched some media coverage that was sympathetic to the attackers. Perhaps you saw some of the news media shared the victim’s name — likely an honest error which nevertheless breaks an unwritten rule of this type of coverage.

I doubt you read this:

It’s a misplaced anger that will do nothing but further confuse the public about issues of rape and sexual assault, particularly as the crime affects children and teenagers, who make up 44 percent of rape victims.

[…]

Here’s the problem: Rape and other forms of sexual assault are incredibly common. (For more information and statistics go here or here.) Researchers estimate that one in four girls and one in six boys will be sexually assaulted before age 18.

That means there are a lot of rapists out there. Sure, some rapists are responsible for multiple attacks and some are dangerous predators. But that many victims suggests profound confusion about rape on the part of both men and women, boys and girls.

Portraying all rapists as monsters and refusing them any sympathy creates a dynamic in which it’s impossible to acknowledge how many ordinary and common rapists live among us. (According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, “approximately 2/3 of assaults are committed by someone known to the victim,” and “38 percent of rapists are a friend or acquaintance.)

To media ethicist and Poynter Institute faculty member Kelly McBride, it seems we can’t characterize the familiar types as monsters. Just the strangers, one supposes.

When your premise starts out as “Railing against CNN’s Steubenville coverage is a waste of time” and moves to shakier ground from there you should reconsider your point. Otherwise you’ll conclude there are plenty of ordinary rapists right there in your hometown. Maybe on your city council! Or church or street! You know, just folks.

Maybe we should treat that as an extraordinary thing.

McBride sees this as “an opportunity to have an honest conversation about the sexual assault of children and teenagers, and about misguided perceptions of healthy sexuality and the role of sports culture.”

So sports turned the young men into rapists. Or maybe it was just that good old fashioned healthy American sexuality.

Poynter, which is a school “dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders” does fine work. This might be one of the most highly trafficked pieces they’ve published for some time, and you should read the comments. There McBride attempts to answer some of the criticisms:

I wish that some of the news orgs that are spending so much space on the CNN controversy would find some survivors to tell their stories.

This is a huge huge international problem. Yet, I think we will be more successful convincing the men who hold these views to see women as fully embodied humans and endowed with clear rights that should not be violated by approaching them as humans, not monsters. Tell someone he’s a monster and he’s not likely to hear you out.

I don’t believe having sympathy for an offender precludes me from being shocked at their sentences, especially when I compare them to the sentences that some teens receive for drug offenders.

(W)hat I would love to see is more news orgs taking the opportunity to explore how confused people are about consent.

Alternately, “You’re doing the wrong story, media” or “You aren’t seeing the right forest because of the wrong trees, society” or “They shouldn’t go to jail for too long because they aren’t monsters and many former victims are able to lead fruitful lives. Also, look at drug sentences.” or “People don’t understand.”

Gotcha.

If I may: Life is choices and consequences, with each meaning something. One choice can make you a gentleman or a braggart or a person who preys on other human beings.

It is troubling that there are so many in that latter group. Being critical of our media doesn’t diminish that. Praising our media for good coverage doesn’t either. Finding shades of gray within that group — as McBride seems to do — is problematic.

Meanwhile, there is plenty of opportunity to discuss both culture and media because, so often, media effects culture. McBride is missing that.

Her last graph:

Railing against missteps or an imbalance in coverage makes us less likely to take up powerful stories that will change the way we as a society understand the extent of the rape problem and the power we have to change it.

Do not share your indignation about “missteps or an imbalance in coverage.” That will … do something or other and you won’t like it.

It has to mean something when the media talks about cultural issues, preferably the right things, in the modern cultural context — yes, your mileage will occasionally vary. When the media strays they deserve a public course correction.

McBride is a media ethicist, a field where right and wrong would, occasionally, be a good thing. But this isn’t about the media for her, rather about some poor put upon teenagers. Did they get the proper messages? Did they know right from wrong? Who taught them that? Could the jocks with the promising grades and a modicum of athletic potential know any better? Or were they mired in some larger, dumber, ignorant problem? Just how backwards is your typical Steubenville teen scene anyway? Maybe it was their coaches? Teammates? Anything, anything but created, complimented or exacerbated by media, except that the larger problem was nurtured by media, which doesn’t deserve criticism, but should, in fact, change “the way we as a society understand the extent of the rape problem and the power we have to change it.”

The circular distraction is maddening.

Kelly McBride on Twitter:

@michaelsmith thank you.As a parent of teenagers, both boys and girls, I see the mixed messages they get on this topic. And I worry.

— Kelly McBride (@kellymcb) March 19, 2013

But it isn’t the parents’ problem, apparently:

@michaelsmithNow is when it counts. By the time they get to be teenagers, you can no longer influence them.

— Kelly McBride (@kellymcb) March 19, 2013

One wonders who she’s willing to blame. Maybe that’s the problem.