My in-person class wrapped up yesterday, but they still have a final to submit, and there will be plenty to read there. Meanwhile, my online class is going strong. While mindlessly washing dishes last night, I thoughtlessly made the mistake of counting up the number of things I have to read and score between now and the middle of the month. And, because it is mindless, I went ahead and tried to determine how many pages that will work out to.
About 650, but perhaps a few more.
So there is a lot of work to be done. Plus meetings and who knows what else that pops up.
Anyway, while I wait for things to get submitted, we got in a nice little bike ride this evening. Here’s me, and my shadow!
And here are some Angus we ran across.
And a red Angus for good measure.
Of course, I could be wrong. My cattle identification is a bit rusty. That was a 20th century skill of mine, and it was shaky even then.
In my freshman year of college I had an animal and dairy science class and breed ID was a part of the class. The professor had a carousel of slides that he showed us, let us study, and quizzed us on. I found that, for some species of different sorts it was easier to learn what was in the background of photos. Great for a quiz, absolutely useless in the field, of course. Then again, I’ve not been asked to identify a breed of farm animal professionally since my internship ended … several presidential administrations ago.
Anyway, these are the things I had time to think about and remember on a windy out-and-back ride. I got dropped on the way out, fighting a bitterly persistent wind. My lovely bride is better in the wind, because she gets lower on her aero bars and I’m just a parachute. But then we turned around, enjoyed the tailwind and I pulled my wheels off the road.
I had a 38-mph sprint on one timed segment, days which I thought were behind me. And they are! But so was the wind!
There she is, in the final miles, after she caught back up, and riding into the sun. My ride back was 13 minutes faster than my ride out. She was faster, still.
cycling / Thursday — Comments Off on There’s always more, and never enough 24 Apr 25
I spent the full day grading outlines. This is a four-week assignment, and students are two weeks in. The first stage is picking some sort of social media platform. The second stage, which they finished Monday, involves observing and coding the platform. The third stage, which is due in a few weeks, is a rough draft of the audit they are tasked to do. The final is due three weeks form now. It’s a good project. My job is to provide feedback that helps them along the way.
Also, I have something like 67 of these to work through.
It is time intensive, however. The need to offer specific, stylized, feedback means this took Tuesday, today, and also part of tomorrow.
Also, it is the project that launches a thousand emails. Month-long projects can do that.
I did call it a day just in time for an early evening bike ride. I went out a road named after neighborhoods which are named after plantations. I descended down a big hill named after a local 18th century farmer. The hill drops into town, which I pedaled out of after a quick mile, past the park, and the farms.
I went through the pastureland and wineries. And I soft-pedaled through two neighborhoods, just to get to 16 miles, to mostly make a complete ride before dinner. There will be more this weekend.
More rides this weekend. But also dinners. And probably more grading and feedback
photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Our backyard is becoming a colorful place 10 Apr 25
It seems I am forever grading things. Or in a meeting or performing the email ritual. Maybe those are the places this week is going. Who knows?
No, really. Who knows? I have no idea.
Anyway, things are shaping up nicely in the backyard. These were all photos from earlier this week.
Yes, it takes the first full week of April for things to turn neon green around here. It’s lovely, but much delayed.
I think this tree should flower all summer long. That’d be a delightful thing to see.
The camellias will. These guys are pretty amazing. They just sit alongside the house and do their thing. Asking for nothing, other than your attention.
And that bush deserves it. Maybe I’ll replace the email ritual with a shrubbery habit.
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.
