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Before it was a commercial …
It was a movie …
And before it was a movie it was graffiti …
And also, apparently, a rather famous poem.
This has been troubling me for a while. Mostly, I just wanted to let you know about the high quality of scrawls on the restroom walls on campus.
We drove from Birmingham to Lafayette, La. Google Maps says you can do that in just over six-and-a-half hours. I missed the turn onto I-12, so that meant we went through New Orleans. This unfortunate turn of events means I caught rush hour in New Orleans and in Baton Rouge. And also rain from Baton Rouge on. And I had to get there by 7 p.m.
So we drove fast, me and three students. All through Mississippi and most of Louisiana we read Wikipedia facts of the various small towns aloud. It was a lot more fun than it should have been.
We saw this mural just outside of Pachuta, Miss.
Some 245 people live in Pachuta. Here is the town hall, library AND fire department.
Anyway, we were all very ready to be out of the car. Very ready. We were in the car for more than eight hours and ade it in time, but only just. I dropped the students off, took our sports writer to the University of Louisiana-Lafayette Cajundome where he was covering a Troy-ULL basketball game for a sportswriting contest.
We had dinner, gumbo and amazing red beans and rice. We checked in to the Hilton. Here’s my view from the 14th floor of the Hilton, Lafayette:
I did run tonight. I got six miles in, a nice little 10K at almost midnight. I do not know what is happening. I feel like my new shoes are officially broken in:
Aren’t they unattractive?
Tomorrow the Southeast Journalism Conference begins in earnest. I have to be awake again in a few hours.
Well. We certainly showed that snow what for. It was all gone by the end of the day, a product of temperatures leaping back into the 50s or low 60s, as winter here was intended to be.
Last night, as it snowed, I heard a woman say a friend “You’re wearing Chacos!” The Chacos wearing friend said, and I’m not making this up, “I didn’t know the snow would be this cold!” So, for that dear child, bring on spring.
I have a long window that stretches almost the entire length of one wall in my office. If you peer through the giant blinds you can see a dorm up the hill. Below that is a grass lawn that has been converted into a parking lot. (When I started here, six years ago, it was a construction equipment parking lot. Now it is overflow parking as they begin work on a new business building.) If I had the ability to open this window and step outside I’d walk onto the second-floor roof of this same building. Beneath me are various administrative offices. Over their heads was a great deal of snow. And I stared at it today, watching how it melted in stages while the sun moved from one horizon to the other, all of it disappearing, slowly from the ledge, and then rapidly from the pebbles. It all went away, except for the zealous stuff holding off the inevitable in the shade, thinking, Now bring on spring.
He said, like he’s been in Canada or some place with a real winter for the last four weeks.
There’s nothing like going from snow to short sleeves and no socks in the span of afternoon. And after you’ve done it a few times you start thinking that this time, really, it will last.
I noticed that the earliest blooming bush in our front yard was starting to give off its bright yellow signal. Let us call it now: another winter is behind us. This is, of course, an entirely mental exercise. There is barely a winter where I live and work and play. We get a few days of cold and trees pointing their sticks into the air for too long, but that’s not a winter. Even still, you’re always ready to see it off.
Saw this ad tonight:
Cadillac is hitting on something here, a nod to a bygone era, with an actor who, really, belongs in another era. Neal McDonough just asking, “Why?” For this? Stuff?
McDonough’s biggest early break came 11 years after his first TV appearance. He was in eight episodes of Band of Brothers, which, for most people promoted him from “That Guy” to, “Hey, Neal McDonough.” He was playing Buck Compton who earned a Silver Star on D-Day. After the war he turned down baseball to go to law school. He became a police officer and an assistant district attorney. Compton put away Sirhan Sirhan, became a judge and retired. Just for grins he taught himself the real estate game, got licensed and was a realtor on weekends.
McDonough has said a lot of nice things about Compton. He wrote the epilogue to Compton’s autobiography and it starts “I would do anything in the world for Buck Compton.” So I’m thinking about the old judge, who died just two years ago, when McDonough says “Why aren’t you like that?”
This commercial is so strange from there. The question outside, the answer inside. The “crazy-driven hardworking believers, that’s why.” He points to his daughter, or the double helix. And then the other kid gets the high-five exclamation point. And now I will name-drop. Wright Brothers. Bill Gates. Les Paul. Ali.
Muhammad Ali had his run-ins with the federal government. The U.S. called Microsoft a monopoly. They almost shut down Gibson, who made Les Paul’s guitars. Where is this spot going?
“Where we nuts when we pointed to the moon?” That isn’t McDonough’s wife, but there is a resemblance. But we’re nuts about the moon. Where we got … bored. And littered. We put a car on blocks on the moon because we’re going back up there.
Said the guy in a polo and yellow shorts.
But now we’re getting serious, because the suit is on and the digression is over — a digression for a kinder, post-Dennis Leary world, I might ad — and now we finally come to it.
Cadillac.
An electric Cadillac.
“You work hard. Create your own luck and you gotta believe anything is possible.”
Unless, of course, you mean seeing a return on all of that taxpayer money sunk into GM.
Which brings us back to “stuff.” That we’ve paid for, so you can sell it to us. You didn’t build that. Period.
I’d have put the ad here anyway, because I like McDonough, and in 60 seconds it gets about four or five slices of what the guy can do. That you don’t know what the ad is, indeed, that you realize it is a paean to a generally bygone ideal before you even know what the ad is for, makes it that much more incredible.
But here’s the truly amazing thing about this ad. It prompted cogent comments on YouTube. Here are a few:
Wonder how many bailouts it took to design this car?
In regards to taking August off, keep in mind that the GM UAW contact gives UAW workers up to 5 weeks off per year, plus 15 holidays per year (5 more than the standard number of holidays), for a total of 8 weeks of time off per year.
If GM and the UAW actually believed the message in this ad (which is true by the way), then why do they take so much time off? They are most assuredly NOT crazy, hard-working, driven believers, as the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars they swallowed up shows and the tax payers lost because what the UAW and GM management actually believe in is buying politicians.
I hope GM fails miserably and every single UAW member loses their jobs. They deserve it for their laziness, sense of entitlement and sloth. Because of their sense of entitlement they actually think they deserved taxpayers’ hard earned money because AMERICA! The problem is that America doesn’t stand for “taking from others to give to me using the state”. America stands for the actual crazy, hard working, driven believers that the UAW hate because the UAW is made to look bad always when compared to real working Americans.
A lot of commenters have all ready pointed out the rank hypocrisy of GM’s laziness, sense of entitlement, and sloth from having their hand in the government till for decades, then making the above ad. The message in the ad is still true, even though the messenger is an excellent representative of exactly the type of laziness, sense of entitlement, and sloth welfare yields.
Bummer for Caddy. This ad would have KILLED in 2000-2008. Happily, we’ve all grown up. ‘MERICA! Seriously, I thought it was satire until it wasn’t. So sad.
We’re going back to the moon??? With what budget? Oh and the same government that killed the shuttle program bailed out GM so they could keep making average cars and keep the UAW happy
Anybody want to take a run at explaining that?
Meanwhile, in Europe: Exclusive: EU executive sees personal savings used to plug long-term financing gap:
The savings of the European Union’s 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says.
The EU is looking for ways to wean the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment.
And, meanwhile, here at home: Vulnerable Dems want IRS to step up:
Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races.
In the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, the Democrats are publicly prodding the agency instead of lobbying them directly.
That’s a fairly even-handed story The Hill has, but it doesn’t take much to imagine the entire approach there spinning in some perverse direction.
I just cut three paragraphs that sounded too preachy about another story. I was casting allusions to the early 19th century and the Hoover administration. And that’s always how you know when to stop.
So, moving on …
The Rising Cost of Not Going to College:
(T)he Pew Research survey asked college graduates whether, while still in school, they could have better prepared for the type of job they wanted by gaining more work experience, studying harder or beginning their job search earlier.
About three-quarters of all college graduates say taking at least one of those four steps would have enhanced their chances to land their ideal job. Leading the should-have-done list: getting more work experience while still in
school. Half say taking this step would have put them in a better position to get the kind of job they wanted. About four-in-ten (38%) regret not studying harder, while three-in-ten say they should have started looking for a job sooner (30%) or picked a different major (29%)
I’m using that in class next week.
Finally, Step Sing Step Sing Step Sing! (It takes over our campus, but it’ll be a pleasant memory by the end of the weekend.
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The big cultural event of the spring at Samford is Step Sing, the choreographed, team-based, song and dance revue put on by the Greeks, independent groups and who knows whom else. I learned today that there was once a professors’ group. I suspect there’s probably enough interest in creating a local alumni group. I say local because this is a seriously orchestrated event. They put in about 40 hours of rehearsals for the three days of shows. It eats into everything.
One of the ancillary aspects of Step Sing is the banner drop. There are 14 groups performing this year. I know this because there are 14 banners now on display in the Caf. Everything is supposed to be kept strictly confidential until the banners are unveiled, and then the real anticipation for the shows begins. Here are two of the banners:
More later this week.
I say Step Sing eats into everything. The only thing big enough to eat Step Sing is winter weather. And so it was, that on the sixth day of February, and for the fifth time in just the second week of the term, we’ve had campus closed.
So I went home. Which was good, because we had to be in Atlanta tonight. There was a play:
Here is the curtain call:
That show isn’t for everyone, but if you like your satire acerbic and irreverent, well you might find a place in that show.
Things to read … because reading is for everyone.
This story should really be titled “Russia: Our shower surveillance says the hotel rooms are fine.” Russian Officials Fire Back at Olympic Critics
If you were wondering about J.C. Penney’s Super Bowl adventures, here’s an explanation. How JC Penney Accidentally Won the Super Bowl:
But here’s the kicker: It never even occurred to the company or its agencies that people would accuse them of staging a hack — or, for that matter, being drunk. In reality, the tweets were part of JCPenney’s ongoing campaign for the Olympics, which involves promoting its special Go Team USA mittens. The original plan for the Super Bowl was to tweet a stream of these misspelled, clumsy tweets through the big game and then reveal the #tweetingwithmittens hashtag at the end.
If you believe this telling — which has some depth to it — then you have to acknowledge that what really happened here was J.C. Penney was more or less very lucky with an incredible unsound strategy.
You’re going to run a series of bad tweets for a few hours and then tell the joke? There were 25 million tweets during the game, which is to say the firehose was turned on full bore. And you’re going to run a joke for three hours in an environment that is guaranteed to have an audience with an attention span of Dory the Pacific regal blue tang? At best you get ignored and forgotten. At worst people assume, well, what they assumed.
J.C. Penney will take all of the publicity they can get, but the point is this was a deeply flawed plan.
Quick ones:
More of … something … tomorrow.
It wasn’t a big freeze, so the thaw couldn’t be that big either. You don’t need a big freeze to cause big problems, though. So, as I assured my grandmother, I was staying put. I had no need to be anywhere until things got warm and dry. Everything dried up yesterday. We crossed back over above freezing today.
At lunch, the outside world was starting to look like this again:
There were four squirrels wrestling and playing and fighting in that tree. You can see a few of them in that shot if you look long enough.
I stuck around the office until just after 4 p.m. The roads were dry. The first intersection on my way to the interstate, a crossing of two four lane roads that had apparently looked like a war zone, was fine.
When I got to the interstate I found all of the local media setting up on the overpass. Tonight’s story: traffic.
From the entrance of the interstate, to the next interchange, which is about seven miles, I counted 43 abandoned cars.
The thing of that is that most of that seven mile stretch includes a high wall at the median. You have no way of knowing how many cars are sitting over there, waiting for their owners, people desperate enough to walk in snow and ice two days earlier.
What a week.
