It’s time, once again, for our weekly check in with the kitties. They’ve been quite helpful these past few days. Poseidon, for instance, was instrumental in the grading. He read final papers with great interest.
The final exam question for my online class was a yes or no sort of thing. You have to take a stance. Then you have to use some of our class readings to back up your position. It is one last opportunity to demonstrate you can take the conceptual and make it operational. There’s no wrong answer, really … well … there is. Poe couldn’t believe it that a few people decided to argue the wrong side of the thing.
Just covered his face and sighed a lot.
I think he thinks I grade too many things. I know Phoebe thinks that. She would come in for a while to visit and help, and then she’d leave.
Sometimes she just waits, patiently, by that door for me to get it for her. There is sun, after all, to soak up elsewhere. All things considered, I think she’d rather be in her box than in my gradebook.
It’s a good box, and probably the right choice.
So the kitties, as you can see, are doing just fine, and they thank you for asking. They would also appreciate some pets, and every ounce of attention you can muster.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation and sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. Enjoy. I still am!
This is the last week of this feature. (For now, anyway.) We are going to spend it all looking at the majesty of Malin Head, the northernmost part of Ireland.
My last finals and projects are rolling in now. They’re all due by 11:59 tonight. The original deadline was that same time last night, but after the Canvas outage last week I pushed it a day. It seemed the polite thing to do, and doesn’t crimp my schedule. All of my final grades must be submitted by the 18th. I started the day with 96 more things to assess and the final grades to tally and submit. The last part goes quickly. And I began chipping away at the final projects today.
And they go fairly quickly. This is work my online class does. They’ve been studying social media platforms all semester and in last six weeks or so we’ve been on a four-part journey of examining a particular platform of their choice. (Most these days are choosing TikTok and Instagram. It’s all about personal trends.) The first stage is simple, pick your platform, write an introduction and rationale, which get modified as the project moves along. The second stage is that they have to start coding the platform’s tools according to one of the key readings of the semester. They begin analyzing their data and putting that into the outline form of this project. By the third stage, having finished their coding, they are essentially the rough draft of a platform audit. All of these get a lot of feedback from me, which I am happy to provide and hope they find useful. It does take time. But for this, the fourth assignment in the project, they are submitting their final, finished audit. No feedback necessary. I just get to read the thing (some of which I’ve now read two or three times) and make sure everything is present and where it needs to be.
And also their final, which is an essay. So 48 of both of those, 96 things. But I spent much of today working through the audits that came in before the deadline. I’ll spend tomorrow and Thursday and maybe Friday, finishing this off.
To celebrate, as I often do, I went for a bike ride. This was the ride where I got a couple of three-minute miles, which I don’t do that often anymore. This was the ride where I decided to start adding on a few extra miles. I was going to do 25, but I was riding well. The weather was lovely …
… and I told myself that this was the ride where I would start building up some real mileage. This is what I tell myself every year. For 16 years now I’ve told myself this. And almost every time something — a trip, responsibilities, illness, motivation, extreme heat, life — gets in the way of that. I just want to be fit enough to go out and ride to some place for five or six hours, see the sun like this on the way back in …
… and have enough energy to want to do it again the next day.
The other thing I want to do is to find a nice shade-filled park a couple, ride there, carry a book, sit under a tree and read a while, and then come back home. There are a few parks around town here, but that’s more like a thing you’d do to break up an afternoon — if you were the break-up-an-afternoon sort (I am not) — not take on as a challenge.
One of these would be easier than the others. I just need to figure out how to not sweat through a book while I ride.
A third thing I’d like to do — and I don’t want to become a bikepacker, because I’m too old to ride long distances, sleep on the ground, and ride long distances the next day — is to get a hammock and ride long distances, string up my hammock …
Actually, no, that seems like a lot of work.
Just long distances, and then other rides to faraway parks. And daily 30-milers like today’s ride, which was a lot of fun.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
Or later. When it warms up and everything is working as it should.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
This is Sliabh Liag, one of those places you’d go back to again and again.
I wanted to add to my small lapel pin collection. I have 15 of them, most of which I’ve just collected over the years. About half of them were given to me. I have little case to display them in, and lapels on which to wear them. And so it seemed a good time to add a few to the rotation. This is tricky, I figured, because they should have some sort of meaning to the wearer. How many meaningful lapel pins can you be autobiographical about?
It turns out you can get custom made lapel pins for pretty cheap. So I made and purchased two of them. They arrived late last week, and I’m slapping one on today.
I like the old logos. And the quality of these is pretty good. So it is probably a good thing that lapel pins ought to mean something, otherwise I might be adding more to a medium-sized and growing collection.
But no one needs that. Least of all me.
Today in Rituals and Traditions I wrapped up the last of our lectures. I shared this video, which is all kinds of great. It has just the right amount of spiteful, prideful, “Make me.” What’s more, FIFA deserves attitude, at the very, very least. It’s a shame they won’t get more.
We also talked about the future of stadium design. No one in my class is in architecture or engineering, so they’ll never do that themselves, but you never know where you’ll wind up working, or what the facility circumstances will be. So today we discussed a recent trend of removing the cheap seats from venues, in favor of more lounges and escalators and clubs and restrooms. The cheap seats are important. They are typically thought of as a gateway into the sport. And we have discussed how fans spend more money inside the stadium — food, souvenirs, etc. — than they do to get in the place. So I asked them to think about how all of these changes might effect the fan experience and stadium choreographies and everything downstream of such changes.
I had a colleague come in to proctor the student evaluation process. I summed up the semester, gave my last little lecture and handed over the room. We’ll get together one last time, Thursday, for their presentations.
Marie-Louise Eta received a typical German welcome at Union Berlin’s Stadion An der Altern Försterei on Saturday.
“Fußballgöttin!” (“football goddess”) they bellowed in deafening unison.
Eta, 34, was named interim manager of the Bundesliga club last week after the sacking of the under-performing Steffan Baumgart. As a result, her unexpected appointment became a historic milestone as the club smashed through a glass ceiling in men’s professional soccer.
In the April 18 match against Wolfsburg, Eta became the first woman to take charge of a men’s soccer team in any of Europe’s top-five leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain).
Here, we talked, obviously, about representation. This example also let us consider a great deal about the notion and value of context, for the CNN copy omits a lot.
(Update:She was successful. Union Berlin finished 11th of 18th after going 2-2-1 under Eta’s tenure. She will coach the Union’s women side next year, as planned. Tapping Mauro Lustrinelli to run the men’s team returns the club to the old European boy’s club. Pretty much everyone expected that.)
We also talked again about watching out for fake stories. There’s a set of skills involved in that, and we were due a refresher. So we discussed psychological literacy, basically understanding our own psychological biases so that we might be, hopefully, less at risk of manipulation. We also talked lateral reading (check up on the source you’re reading and read others besides, basically).
It sounds better in the lecture. Maybe it sticks with people.
And for me, two more classes to go for the semester.
I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?
In Rituals and Traditions today we talked about the role of myths in sport. I started with talking about the two greatest Jacksons in sport, Andrew and Bo.
I told them I know two of the men in that intro, and would believe them. I have heard one of the stories mentioned there from multiple sources, told just differently enough to seem credible. But the truth of stories sometimes isn’t the most important thing, even for people looking for ontological truth. Maybe especially for them. Sometimes, the telling is the truth, and that’s why myths are important.
So I told them about a bunch of the myths around my alma mater. There’s the train thing and the pajama parade. A number of students, the story goes, snuck out in their pajamas and greased the railroad tracks so the train bringing their opponents couldn’t stop. The train had to pull in at the next station, the players had to lug their equipment five or six miles back to town, were exhausted, and got shut out 45-0. The story goes that the visitors were so offended they refused to play the next year. The story dates to the 1890s, but you can’t find anything at all about it in the historical record until the 1930s. Good story, though.
I told the two or three stories about rolling the corner. I gave them all three versions of the origin story of the phrase, “War Eagle.” I asked them which one they thought was correct. Everyone guessed that it was the most romantic story. That one was made up by Jim Phillips, a college newspaper editor. I showed them his copy. (He later urged various university people to work to make sure that his story didn’t get accepted as the truth. They still highlight his story. Well, part of his story. The version I learned when I was a senior in high school and getting ready to enroll goes a step further. Someone improved on his myth!)
I talked about myths from other universities, too, and some of the great stories that major league baseball gives us as myth. Some of them evolve much like the old gossip games. Some of them are quite deliberate. Both are, to me, fascinating in their implications. A friend just told me about the origin story of a new mascot, Noigel. No one will believe that one, of course, because it’s about a mascot, but it demonstrates to us the power of our stories. I hope the class was picking up on that today.
I drove it home with The Gipper, which works because, true or not, it’s accurate enough to at least blend with what we know. And we want to believe.
(Rudy, by the way, is largely cinematic and not perfectly truthful. Sorry.)
Did Rudy read that plaque and do his little impersonation? Probably not. Did Knute Rockne have that moment with George Gipp? Historians disagree. We’re pretty sure (much of) it is inspired by the movie.
Is that plaque even there in the Irish locker room? Yes it is.
Does Notre Dame know where they got the nickname, The Fighting Irish? It comes from one of several places, maybe. I reeled off a few of those, and asked for their thoughts on which one it might be. I don’t know. I know which one I want it to be. But all of that, I said, gets back to identity, doesn’t it?
One of my students said I should do a class just on myth. I’d love to; I doubt I’d be allowed to.
A study by AI risk management platform Alethea into the surge in artificial intelligence-generated fake content, dubbed “AI slop,” has warned sports teams, leagues and fans of the risks posed by increasingly sophisticated digital misinformation.
Retired NFL player Jason Kelce never said 2026 Super Bowl halftime singer Bad Bunny’s critics were “a bad fit for America’s future”.
The Reuters Inside Track newsletter is your essential guide to the biggest events in global sport. Sign up here.
San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle never ranted about slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk and politics in football.
However, thousands of people believed they did and that is the problem.
Well, sure it is. The students recognize that. They’re worried about it. They should be. That let me work in this little explainer focusing on Jaden Ivey.
Sometimes when the different pieces click together it is quite satisfying.
You can probably tell, but I’m one of those annoying campus spirit guys. I’ve always held that you learn a lot from class, but the rest of the college experience is the most educational and the most influential and the most memorable. That’s what makes the drive in worth it, where you make the friends, build the lasting memories, the stuff that can fill your heart with cheer later in life, the sort of thing that encourages alumni to be donors.
Or, put another way, I know of one alumni who wanted to make donations because of my pedagogy. But a lot more people are thinking of other things when they get ready to donate. And so we were out an event this evening and the marching band rushed the stage.
If the marching band “crashed” events from time to time, that’d be fun. I want every part of a student’s time on campus be about their studies or about memorable events full of good cheer.
Maybe I’m not alone in that. Maybe one day I’ll be allowed to bend more of my work that direction. It’d be better than rowing aimlessly.
Tonight’s event was a special one. It was one of those nights when some of the superior networkers made a bit of magic happened and a folk hero turned up.
Started late, ran long. The food in the VIP room was still great. My current hypothesis is that all events should use the guest of honor’s menu.
