Thursday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Thursday

You can park here

The parking wars.

We’re having a lot of fun with emails around campus about the current parking crisis. None of this is new, of course. You go back to the first cars on a college campus and the first campus that installed parking lots and you find these same problems. (Seriously, I’ve seen it in archives.) This year we have a record enrollment — so more students and cars — and some ongoing construction eating into preexisting parking.

To the credit of the Samford administration, they are doing great work in solving the problem. We have shuttles and golf carts driving people back and forth. The university president and various vice presidents have been driving the carts around. And they’ve wasted no time in building a new parking lot which is already starting to accept cars. Meanwhile the construction equipment is starting to move out and go on to some other project, destined to ruin someone else’s parking.

So things are finally starting to return to normal a bit. And then the emails today. A campus-wide note told us of new cones for reserving spots. And then the reply-all emails, noting those times when cones are put in place to reserve a spot for some guest, only to never be used.

Like the ones above, which sat there, untouched, all day. And apparently that happens in a lot of the parking lots, according to the other emails. It made for an entertaining read. But, again, nothing of this is new. I have been pleased to share with colleagues that my president is out in the driving rain driving commuters and the vice president of student of affairs is doing this and that and the vice president of business and financial affairs is outside driving a shuttle. Truly, it is a unique place with an extraordinary response to a predictable problem. We’re pretty fortunate.

Today’s podcast features Jeremy Henderson following up on a story he wrote about a guy who wrote somethings on Facebook that have landed him in more than a little trouble:

This evening I had a 2,000 yard swim and a sloppy five-mile run. That follows yesterday’s 10K run. Now if all of my run could be on a flat track.

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20
Aug 15

Hey look down here

No, farther down.

Down here! This is a new pet peeve:

If every media outlet uses an interrogative as a social media tease, every time, they stop working. Be clever, avoid question mark fatigue.

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) August 20, 2015

The striking thing, to me, about the sport of football is that we can easily forget the human element of the game. Every so often you get a very sharp reminder of that. This is one of those examples:

I had my first meeting with the newsroom staff tonight. As we all got settled in I realized that I know more of this bunch at the beginning of the year than I ever have. And they are talented young journalists. We expect a big year.

Here’s something you never expect, a shopping cart road block:

Like they’re saying, “You didn’t buy enough stuff! Go back inside!”

I didn’t buy anything because, for four days in a row I’ve been there for a specific thing and they have managed to not have it in stock.

Ran a nice 10K today. That was all in one continuous motion, even. According to those classic gym charts I was at 70 percent of my max heart rate. My last mile was under nine minutes.

It was a nice workout, begging the question “Why didn’t I feel like this on Sunday when I was falling apart in the Chattahoochee Olympic?”

Finally, I’ve been watching the third season of Newsradio on Crackle recently. I haven’t watched the show in some time, long enough to have forgotten how smart the writing routinely was. In the third season it gets difficult to watch Phil Hartman, though, because there’s something in his eyes that makes you wonder what difficulties he and his wife were already dealing with at home. But that could just be because you know what would happen a short time later. But this is an exception to that, and perhaps one of the best three or four studio scenes from the entire series:

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13
Aug 15

Folded re-discovery

I was looking for my other microphone, my Sennheiser classic, which meant I had to go through this box in that closet and then another box and so on.

What? You don’t have more than microphone at home? The Sennheiser records a better sound than my newer, cheaper microphones.

Anyway, just before I found it I ran across my origami collection in a box of desk supplies. Kelly made these for me years ago. (There’s no medium she can’t conquer, it seems.)

I had always intended to use them here, actually, but as an under construction place holder. I just never really built a site so intense as to make use of them in that way. So I put them in my homemade diffuser box that I’ve been tinkering with recently. It isn’t perfect, but it does help make a neat picture. These are with my phone, even:

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22
Jul 15

What are the odds?

It isn’t like I was driving to or from a Chrysler Cruiser convention. So how random is this?

They made that car for about 10 years, but that is still a little creepy.

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16
Jul 15

The tank banks

I saw this piggy bank at Stonehenge. At the time I had no idea about the history behind it, which is, like most history, rather interesting.

It comes from a World War 1 British fund raising campaign. Six tanks toured the countryside promoting war bonds. You have to remember this is in the fall of 1917 and tanks were still the high end of war marvels. The public was fascinated to see in person what they were just starting to read about.

The tank rolled in with soldiers and artillery alongside. Airplanes dropped pamphlets, speeches were made. The tank was put through its paces before spending several days in the town with a table inside where people were giving money. They raised millions of pounds, nationally. Soon a competition emerged to see which place could raise the most money and “win” a tank. West Hartlepool would win and Egbert — they do know how to name things, don’t they? — stayed in the town until it was scrapped in 1937.

After the war was over, the government gave 264 tanks to towns and cities in 1919. Most just rusted out over time and sold for scrap. All but one was gone before the end of World War II. The town of Ashford still has their tank, the only one left. It is now a registered war memorial, though without its engine or gearbox and with replica armaments. You can see the tank here:

That tank, one of 1,200 Mark IVs the British built for that particular war, is thought to have never seen combat. Only eight remain. The Mark IV carried a crew of eight and traveled at seven miles per hour.