In the midst of catching up with friends, I did speak on a policomm panel at SSCA today. The topic was the 2024 presidential election. I spoke a bit about about the campaign last fall.
Do you know that feeling where everyone at the table is a considerable expert, and most everyone else in the room is an expert, too, and someone looks at you and expects you to say something insightful? It was that feeling, for 75 minutes.
My main point was about how no one, pollsters, campaigns, media, really understand how things are evolving around us in terms of the modern election cycle and that’s going to eventually spawn some sort of reckoning. Also, I touched on how the Democrats changed their tone midway through their shortened run-up, and that might not have been a good thing for them, because they did not get the result they’d hoped for. This, by the way, is how analysis is done. Everyone else said much more thoughtful things than I did, I assure you.
We also got to remember Dr. Larry Powell, a friend and mentor to many of the people there, who passed away last summer. Powell was on my grad school committee, and my lovely bride’s, too. We met in that program, bonded over the lesser experiences there, but also over the genius of one of the giants of political communication. His was my favorite class in the curriculum. He was helpful, kind, patient and giving. He solved problems for me he probably didn’t have to, and he was able to do that with ease.
In 2013, he was the respondent in a session at a conference where she and I presented a co-authored paper. Powell offered everyone that presented “a gift” to signify their works. He worked his way through the presenters a Reagan reference for this presenter, an obscure thing for the next one, and so on. Finally, he came to us.
He pointed out that she and I met and cemented our friendship in his class. He noted that he served as advisor on both of our comps committees and now we are married.
“I think I’ve done enough,” he said.
Just a delightful man.
He’s the fourth of my grad school professors who has died.
Between the conference and our hotel is the berthing slip that is the home for the former USS Wisconsin, an Iowa-class battleship, which is now a museum ship. She put to sea in 1944, sailed the Pacific, in the Philippines and at the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. During the Korean War, the Wisconsin was on duty again, then decomissioned. But a modernization project in the 1980s brought her back into active service, and took part in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which was the end of a 14 year active duty life. The sailors of the Wisconsin helped their battle ship earn six battle stars for service in World War II and Korea, as well as a Navy Unit Commendation for service during the Gulf War. She’s been a museum ship now since then.
You can, in the middle of the night, walk pretty close to it. But you can approach most museums with relative ease. There are some active duty vessels, or soon-to-be ships, in the waters around Norfolk. The security around those would, I’m certain, be more stringent.
We had Korean friend chicken for lunch today. Everything we tried tasted great, and I’d go back for that again. For dinner we went to a place we visited on our first trip to Norfolk in 2009, the Freemason Abbey. Some places are worth visiting over the years.
Tomorrow, I’ll sit on a panel about mediated fandom, and see a lot of other great work, as well. Conferences are fun!
We have plenty to catch up on, and we must do it before I forget all about it. It’s easy to do that when there’s constantly so much to add. Constantly so much. You can’t even imagine how many things have accumulated since I began typing this.
From time-to-time I have to remind myself to read things for fun. And there’s just … so much. The work material, which is interesting. Daily news, when it isn’t doomscrolling. And some of that turns into work stuff, in a variety of ways. Every day, it seems, there’s a new thing that will be an example in one class or another. And then there are the, no kidding, 200+ books sitting here waiting for me. (I just counted. I should be reading.)
So, let us make the smallest of dents. A few days ago, as we traveled to and from Chicago, I read The Great Rescue. It’s about the USS Leviathan, seized from its German master when the U.S. joined World War I, the liner turned into a transport shipping, moving doughboys back and forth from New York to the U.K. The book was released to coincide with the American centennial anniversary of the war. I bought a digital copy of it in 2020, and finally opened the thing.
This vessel was a luxury liner sailing under the Germany flag, christened as SS Vaterland. She was opulent, massive and fast. She first sailed in 1914, a three-funnel beauty built as the largest passenger ship in the world, meant to move 4,050 passengers, and some of them in the grandest style. The Vaterland had only made a few trips before her fate was forever changed. It was docked on the Hudson when the United States declared war. After a time, it was taken over and repurposed. As the Leviathan, the vessel made 10 round trips, carrying over 119,000 people over there, before the armistice in 1918. Nine westward crossings in the year after the war ended brought the survivors home.
Is there video of this legendary boat? Of course! It’s only 100 years old.
It was also crowded as a troop ship. And the passengers needed to eat.
As for the book itself, it’s a popular history read, and it moves well. Reading about World War I from this distance is interesting distance because, on one hand, we have things like those videos, but not a lot of the popular histories always want to go too deep on the human subjects. The Great War was so broad in scope that the best histories are observed at the division level. This one, despite the distance and the large sample size, we get a little bit of time with the captains, men named Joseph W. Oman, Henry F. Bryan, who commanded seven of the voyages, and William W. Phelps, who was in command when the armistice was signed. (She was in Liverpool at the time.) But not Edward H. Durrell. He was the last military captain of the Leviathan. He shows up in the index, but not in the text. John Pershing and his staff went over on an early voyage.
You can’t tell the American story of World War I without mentioning him, so the book veers away from the vessel now and again to talk about him, his war, and meeting the woman who would eventually become his wife. Douglas MacArthur came home on the Leviathan after the war ended, American readers know that name, so some of his combat exploits are included.
We meet Royal Johnson, who was a young congressman and briefly a soldier before he was wounded and knocked out of the war. You meet Freddie Stowers. He gets a nice treatment, but there’s apparently a fair amount we don’t know about his early life. Only in the epilogue do you learn that he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. You meet the writer Irvin Cobb, who covered the war and probably had his exploits downplayed. And you also met Elizabeth Weaver, a nurse that went over to Europe and returned on the Leviathan. She plays a minimal role in the book, but it’s a second woman, one supposes.
Reading about World War I from this distance is also interesting distance because, on the other hand, it is so often short on those individual tales. And this is the case here, too. The book moves swiftly, and it probably does well to have the cutaways from the voyages to the short vignettes of these people’s stories. What’s the alternative? Writing about yet another day at sea? More smelly, cramped holds? A possible periscope sighting, again?
The other big character in the book was the influenza outbreak, and it comes up, but it feels like maybe it was tacked on as an afterthought, or cut down for some reason or another.
“The curtain was coming down on the wartime career of the Leviathan. It happened quietly, with none of the fanfare and news flashes that had accompanied the seizure of the ship in April 1917. The last entries in the log were made on October 29 as the vessel was tied to her moorings at Pier 4. Totally ignoring or missing the quiet end to her naval career, the New York papers devoted their front pages that day to the ongoing Senate fight over the peace treaty, a looming national coal strike, and how the prohibition amendment would be enforced when it went into effect in January. There was no mention of the Leviathan.”
The ship was decommissioned that day, a day the ship’s final log noted was “clear, slightly hazy, light SW airs.” It sat in New Jersey for a few years. By then, there were more ships than anyone needed. It was overhauled and refurbished and in 1923 United States Lines landed a deal to take five trans-Atlantic voyages a year, but it was expensive and it was Prohibition. In a decade as a post-war cruise liner it never turned a profit. And then came the Depression. The Leviathan was retired in 1936, sold, and scrapped in the 1940s.
Since we’re catching up, let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I’m probably 17 albums behind. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, I figured that since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” and I’ve only come to regret that it has taken forever, because I have a lot of music, and I don’t do this regularly. The idea was that I could pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.
So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998, because I got the CD books out of order. And, today, we’re in a bit of a greatest hits phase. First up, “Words & Music: John Mellencamp’s Greatest Hits,” a two-disc retrospective featuring at least one song from each of his studio albums released between 1978 and 2003, some 17 records.
These aren’t music reviews. They certainly aren’t music reviews of 21-year-old greatest hits, so this will be brief because I don’t have any good recollections attached to this. Besides, everyone has the same John Mellencamp memories, anyway, and that’s not a bad thing.
So, quickly. This is the first track on the first disc. It was an unreleased song, and it immediately tells you your favorite pop artist has entered a comfortable phase. It’s the strings, and the rhythm.
There was another new song on the second disc. And it reinforces the notion you got from the first one.
That’s probably a little cynical. I’m sympathetic to a problem had later in the 1980s Mellencamp. Everyone wanted him to make Jack and Diane over and over. No one wanted to see the guy grow or change as an artist or musician. I’m neither of those things, but I understood his complaint.
So let me share my favorite song from Johnny Cougar, from 1987.
Mellencamp had a bit of a reputation in Bloomington. And I almost met him once, just before we left. He was donating his papers to the university, and they had a big ceremony in our building. It was all very locked down for someone selling a man-of-the-people gimmick. Hilariously, while all the old university people were thrilled, none of the students even knew who he was.
Entertainment is a tough business like that.
Anyway, here’s your new favorite John Mellencamp song. Someone there played it for me, probably one of the family members or handlers was within earshot at the time.
He doesn’t have any tour dates on his site for this year, just now, but Mellencamp did more than two dozen shows last year. He still paints. He does VO work. Not bad for a guy in his early 70s.
If you like Mellencamp, and you can find it, there’s a good documentary-concert that was released about 15 years ago titled “John Mellencamp: Plain Spoken Live from The Chicago Theatre.” It’s worth checking out.
The next disc up was another greatest hits effort, and it’s not even their first compilation, but it was a good one for me. Def Leppard’s “Vault” covers the 1980-1995 range, and somewhere there in the 1980s was when I started finding my own music. MTV, don’t you know. They were there, I was there, it was bound to happen.
“Vault” was eventually certified five-times platinum in the U.S. It went platinum in four other countries and gold in four more. And that’s why you release greatest hits. Sometimes you make easy money on music already produced.
Which is not exactly fair. There was one new track.
It was a post-grunge era power ballad. There was a lot of that in 1995.
To promote the record, the band did shows on three continents in one day in Morocco, London and Vancouver. This put them in the Guinness Book of World Records, under the larger category of Things That Don’t Need To Be Records.
The rest of the tracks are off “Pyromania,” “Hysteria,” or “Adrenalize.” They all figure into the Re-Listening project, and this is already very long.
I’ve never seen Def Leppard live, and I’m surprisingly OK with that. They’re still touring, some 48 years into the band’s life now. I guess they’re the Stones, but with more intricate instrumentation. They’re playing all over North America this year.
Tomorrow, another book (I know!) and probably some more music.
Helped clean the garage. We have a too-small garage. But, then I think that every garage should have about 20 more square feet. And laundry room. Almost every laundry room needs to be larger, but I digress.
We have a little punch out in our garage, allowing basement access. And in that area we also have two 7-foot-tall shelving units. But it was all in the way, according to my lovely bride. I’m not the best with conceptualizing spatial arrangements, but I didn’t think it would provide the space she thought. But it is spring break and it was her idea so that’s what she started and I joined her for that and, wouldn’t you know it she might be right.
We’ll find out in a few days of using the new configuration, I guess, but the first impression looks promising.
I gave it the first test today. The bikes are now parked where the shelves were. And I went on a little ride this evening, just to spin my legs. It was down the chipseal road past the winery, onto the little cut through that has some of the newest asphalt around, a downhill stretch of two-tenths of a mile of pure ribbon, and then back up by the local park and into town, where I let the traffic decide my route. I was going to turn around once, but had to take a right because of what was behind me. And I was going to turn left later, but had to go straight because of what was ahead of me.
The last five miles were about getting out of town and through two neighborhoods and back home.
There is a nearby Strava segment, and I have the second fastest time on it. I should have the fastest time on it. This year, I’m breaking the record, which was set in 2020.
In my first try of the year I was one second off my PR and 11 seconds off the record.
I left maybe three seconds out there from a wobble, not taking the left-hander perfectly and sitting up a little too soon.
Felt good, until the end.
Even if that’s close to right, I need to improve by a lot. But there will be plenty of opportunities to improve. There always are.
Yes, we are in Chicago. Spring has arrived here with us. (It will snow here this weekend.) But today is beautiful, and if there’s one thing I learned in the Midwest, it is that you live for the day, because tomorrow could be an entirely different kind of problem.
But this trip is great, because we are with friends and colleagues, most of whom we haven’t seen in a year. Sadly, some aren’t here for international travel reasons, but maybe in a few years more reunions will be had.
We had lunch with friends from South Florida and UNC-Chapel Hill today. Lovely, lovely people. The sort you should see more than once a year. Two, maybe three times would be much better — and still keep me at low risk of being found out. We walked down to an Irish pub, where everyone working there was Irish, or at least had worked out a good accent. I had the shepherd’s pie, because I’m a sucker for the stuff. In the back of the joint, near the restroom, was this sign.
I glanced at that, thought, They oughta know and took a good picture.
Down the street was a bike shop. My lovely bride had a meeting and I had nothing to do, so I walked down there. Look! Bikes!
The application of that bike lane warning was hasty, and there’s probably an end-of-the-work-week story that isn’t that good, but I had a two block walk, which gave me plenty of time to invent a better story.
I went to the bike shop to look for helmets. I’m due a new helmet this year. Past due, in fact. And they have one I like. And since it’s not at my local store, and I had a few minutes I figured, why not? Except while this store had it on their website, they didn’t have it in the shop. Now, it’s a small enough place that everyone sees you come and go, and so I felt a bit silly about being in there and walking out without buying anything. I need new fingerless gloves, so I bought some. They made a sale, I didn’t leave empty handed, everyone was happy.
And I saw Didi the Devil! He’s a German superfan. A car mechanic by trade, holder of 17 world records for bike inventions and he’s been on the side of the road for all the big races in Europe for 30-some years now. The story goes that in German broadcasts, the old 1 km to go flag, a red triangle hanging above the race, was called “The devil’s flag,” and that inspired the costume. The riders say it’s good luck to see him in the race.
I’ll never see him in a race, of course, but I do see him when I watch the races. And since I’m talking about bikes tomorrow, maybe he’ll bring me some good luck.
The photo was taped to the customer-facing side of the receipt dispenser, so if I had not gotten new gloves I wouldn’t have seen him today. The guy that made the sale flipped that photo up and showed me another one taped beneath it. Double good luck to all their customers who know what they’re looking at.
After the day’s pre-conference work, we went out for dinner with a friend from St. Bonaventure. We headed to another pizza place, but it was a two hour wait for some mysterious reason. Looked dead, sounded quiet. No one wanted a wait like that, so we went to Billy Goat’s Tavern.
It was legendary before it became a bit on SNL.
The place is steeped in Chicago history. This is beneath the old newspapers, and so all of the reporters and the people that wanted to be seen came here. The walls are covered in the city’s history. The picture frames jammed next to one another like a wood and glass wallpaper.
We first visited in 2008, when we were there for another conference. We stopped by at lunch time, when the line wraps around the restaurant and the old man was doing his cheezborger shtick for his guests. That guy is, or was, the life of the party, and he knew it and reveled in it. He could also take one look at you and guess what you were eating. It doesn’t hurt that it was a relatively small menu, but he could just tell. It was great. Also, the borgers are pretty good burgers.
At the time of night we visited, it was quieter, the night crew didn’t need to do the gimmick. And there was plenty of room to sit and have a quiet meal. Also, the borgers are still pretty good burgers.
Now I’m going to go finish my presentation. I have to deliver a concise 12 minutes on this research tomorrow. It’d be better if they would allow me 14.
Today was the day I was to put my contracting packet behind me. I’ve worked on varying versions of this for weeks, and I reached the finish line, both in what I could do and what I could tolerate, last night. It’s a helpful process in several respects, but it is also time intensive and there are other things I need to be doing.
So I went to campus today because a colleague who is on this particular committee wanted to see what the new CMS the university is using looks like. He’s been frustrated by the rollout of the new process, which is function of where you are standing. Most of my confusion with the process has been of my own doing. There are a few things that they’ll improve on for future versions of this process — you have to go through this every few years — but that will surely improve. My colleague’s perspective shows him some other things. The guy is a rock star, and he’s been incredibly helpful through this whole process. It might not be that every department has a guy like him to help the new people, which would be a shame. He’s definitely been a huge and helpful part of this for me. So I brought him an afternoon coffee and we sat down to look at the new upload system.
I stopped at Dunkin. And then I couldn’t get into the parking deck at work, so I had to drive around while his coffee cooled and looked for a parking space. I wound up parking some ways away, and walked in, while the coffee kept cooling. I assume that’s what it does. I don’t know anything about coffee. And, really I just wanted to get to the office on time and get my packet uploaded and move on to anything else.
The new uploading system we were testing has been perhaps the easiest part of the process. Even still, there were a few unexpected things. Nothing that can’t be overcome. Also, they had my title and department wrong.
So I couldn’t complete the process. Perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day I will put my contracting packet behind me. It better be tomorrow; the thing is due tomorrow night. It’s complete, and the only thing left to do is upload the files. Most anyone can do that and I am what they call tech savvy.
1785, slang, “practical sense, intelligence, knowledge of the world;” also a verb, “to know, to understand;” a West Indies pidgin borrowing of French savez(-vous)? “do you know?” or Spanish sabe (usted) “you know,” the verb in both from Vulgar Latin *sapere, from Latin sapere “be wise, be knowing” (see sapient). The adjective, of persons, is attested by 1905, from the noun. Related: Savvily; savviness.
I guess that’s why.
Anyway, got home, took care of about three weeks worth of email, and then celebrated by doing … not much else today, and enjoying the reflective glow of having this behind me.
And then I went downstairs and basked in the glow of the Zwift screen. I decided to try a race. I think I’ve done three races, now. The first one I don’t even remember. I did one a few weeks ago in a group I had no business being in. The field split up right away and I managed to come in at the front of the second group, with two other people who were pushing me on the last climb.
Today, I chose a flat course, and I followed Zwift’s suggestion. The game will tell you where you should be racing based on your recent performance. And based on my performance I should be in the category that’s one step above physical therapy.
When the time came to begin the group all spun into action together and I found myself right at the front of the ground. I took a photo for proof, because who would believe it?
Second place! I stayed right up front for about seven miles, about 70 percent over my threshold and wondering how long I could stay there. The answer is: about seven miles.
The front of the field left me behind, I faded in the last mile and the next group came up to race me to the line.
And then I rode on for another 10 miles, at a much slower pace because it turns out I was also under-fueled, just to see how long it would take to lower my heart rate. Not too long, it turns out. That’s cardiovascular quality for you. Where it went in the last few minutes of that race we’ll never know.
And the long-range forecast suggests that next week I might be riding outside!
