Tonight we had the last newscasts of the year, which means we’re really sneaking up on the last IUSTV programs of the year, and we’re saying goodbye to a few more talented seniors.
That’s Anna Black, on the right. She’s been doing more job interviews than I can count. She’s interned at CNN and at WRDB in Louisville. On campus, she’s produced shows, directed, reported and, at IUSTV, has hosted What’s Up Weekly for the last two years.
She’s a member of two or three different honors programs on campus. I wasn’t previously aware you could find that much time in a day, or that anyone could even be eligible for more than one. She has the most kind and generous disposition, and makes friends quickly and everywhere. Whatever station ultimately is lucky enough to hire her will be getting a great asset.
Which leads me to Ella Rhoades. Ella has been passionate about the news and broadcasting from the beginning. She’s been at IUSTV for four years and she was news director for her junior and senior year. She helped produced some impressive collaborative journalism with the other student media outlets here, streaming an all-night election results newscast. She also held down an incredible day of breaking news on campus, reporting live with some of her reporters in the warm sun when we were on lockdown.
Whenever she’s doing these things, no matter what role she is playing, her eagerness to to do great work is palpable. She leans into the news with a great gusto.
Ella is a team player and all of those positive personal attributes are right there on her sleeve, for everyone to see. This year, in addition to her quality news work, she’s done a masterful job working with younger students, helping us get the freshmen started on the right foot, and pushed the sophomores and juniors to up their respective games. Their individual and collective successes show in the finished product, and how they’re talking about next year.
My friend Ella is taking her energy — and her enthusiasm to learn, to share and to report the news — to WFTX FOX 4 in Fort Myers, Florida. That Scripps shop is getting a great, talented, young reporter. She’s going to grow and grow and do some great things in Florida. I’m incredibly excited — almost as excited as she is! — to see what she does next.
The other woman, in both of those photos, is a rising senior. Carly Rasmussen has served as assistant news director, and she will take over a growing news division next year. She’ll run a young unit, there are a lot of rising sophomores who have been developing some great experience this year, and they’ll have great momentum. In a year, there will be a huge applause essay for her, I’ve no doubt.
After we left the studio, when I made it back to my office, this was the view.
Seemed fitting. Three more productions to go for the year.
We’re counting down, because it seems a fun thing to do this week really, and I noticed an unusual thing today.
Everything went green. Bright, wavy green in a big, big way all of a sudden. This is a blurry view of the trees from my campus office. Blurry because, I don’t know why, but I like it.
And this is the same tree, just a few moments later, in focus, and from beneath it’s now bountiful limbs.
But that’s different. This is the same tree, roughly from the same angle as the blurry one, though the linear distance is different.
So that’s three photos of the same tree. Forgive me. It’s all so bright and new still, here in the third week of April, and it will take a few more days for the foliage to feel familiar. It’s like the shock of the seasons. There is that indistinct time where you stand at the door and mentally prepare yourself for one condition outside — hot, mild or cold — but then get something different. It is, in fact, the shock of the season.
Three days until the local, officially recognized beginning of spring. Since 2017 it has always arrived the weekend of the Little 500, the two big bike races.
Ha! I just looked at the weather. Friday, the day of the women’s race, the forecast calls for rain, with a high of 58 and a low of 44. The men’s race on Saturday will be under partly cloudy skies. The high is projected at 54, with a low of 34 degrees. Tomorrow, which has no bearing on this whole spring-arrives-with-the-bike-race phenomenon, the high is 82. Weird year.
Anyway, here’s another photo. A different tree. It just looked cool.
Cool, I say.
I was in the studio this evening with the news team, the penultimate news show of the year. It’s a wonderful feeling when a semester winds down, more so when it’s the end of an academic year, but bittersweetly so. For the news crew in particular, we’ll see a few key people graduate, but there’s a whole platoon of freshmen who have this year gained incredible experience for next year. The news side, I am happy to see, will continue to make good strides, having built a nice pipeline, evenly balanced between older and younger students. Now, they’re always growing and growing, helping each other grow, and I pitch in on the little things.
Tomorrow will be another night in the studio, with the sports gang, and that may be their last taping of the year. Bittersweetly so.
It seems we’re always playing catchup on the Re-Listening project, and that’s what we’re doing today. We’re doing that with Alanis Morissette’s “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.” The album was released in November of 1998, but I picked it up in early 1999. It was another freebie, and, through the Re-Listening project I have discerned a pattern. I didn’t always fall in love with the freebies I picked up way back when.
From this remove, my time with Alanis Morissette feels like a stream of consciousness ple goes like this: Jagged Little Pill has been everywhere for two years, no need to buy that. Also my roommate has a copy, so … Dave Coulier!? The next one, I’ll get the next one. Oh, there it is on the giveaway table (probably) so put that in the pile.
The album debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 and set a record for the highest first-week sales by a female artist, a record she held for two years. It stayed on the Billboard 200 for a solid six months, and has moved millions of units … but, because it is the music industry, being triple platinum after “Jagged Little Pill” was 16-times platinum in the US, this was underwhelming. (The music industry is weird.) And I’m going to gloss over all of it.
I’ve listened to it. I tried to dive into it. I paid attention to every track this time through. There are 17 tracks here, the runtime is almost 72 minutes. It’s a long record, one which has never resonated with me. I find that odd, since we all watched her grow up. Grew up at the same time, whatever. The woman has lived her entire life in front of the public eye, all of the stages and phases a person goes through, we’ve seen them. For 1998, this was fine, but watching an artist’s march through life leaves a different sort of longitudinal vulnerability. Some of this feels dated now, though, that I finally figured out what always troubled me here. It’s the background tracks. There’s just too much nasally, head voice harmony on here.
Anyway, the stream of consciousness takes us far beyond this 1998 record, end with the best song, the best performance, I’ve ever heard Morissette do. This was July of 2020, just the right mood during that first Covid summer. Sadly, NBC has taken the original video down. Here’s a taste of it.
It was a perfect performance: a poignant song, a new record, eight years since the last and a full family in her orbit. This is the Alanis Morissette my stream of consciousness is most interested in now, not the 24-year-old from “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie” but the confident, multitasking woman at a new kind of peak of her powers. That’s the one worth re-listening to.
I’m hungry. Quite hungry, really. I was just thinking, yesterday, that I am due a don’t-eat-much phase, but it seems I’m going the other way. This is a deep, can’t-ignore-it hunger. Lunch didn’t touch it. All the snacks stored away in my office? Not a dent. It is a considered-second-lunch-at-4 p.m. hunger. (Pizza sounded sooooo good.) I dared not to stand too close to anyone wearing a microphone in the studio this evening, lest my tummy start chiming in. After dinner, still hungry. I didn’t even have a big workout today. Makes me wonder how I’ll feel after a bike ride tomorrow morning.
I met a guy from Hearst Television today. The broadcasting giant sent two recruiters to campus to meet students. They did one-on-ones with interested students, I told him I could tell him to hire some of the young men and women he met, right away. They also did an under-attended info session, too.
Turns out the guy was from Savannah. I told him my wife and I got engaged there, and that we got married there. He knows the place. Everyone there knows the place. He lives just up the road, he said. He told me about the owner of the place where we got married. I told him we were just there in December, did the bridge run. Told him we go every year, that we don’t even do the tourist stuff anymore, but just walk around and enjoy the pace of things. I asked him if he had a job for me there. He asked me if I wanted to be a news director. The guy that was the news director in their Savannah shop just moved. I say, who doesn’t want to be a news director?
I wonder how many people he meets every year. How relentlessly positive he is, because he was profoundly optimistic, and energetic. Good traits, I’m sure, for this type of recruiting.
He left with my card. But, most importantly, he left having met a lot of talented students. A few of them might wind up within their company. They’ve got almost three dozen stations to fill, after all.
Let’s dive into the Tuesday feature, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. I have so many open tabs this has become a regular thing. I’m not sure if we’re calling it that, or if we should. But it’s my site, so I can decide I guess … Anyway, here we are, the Tuesday Close Your Tabs feature. Yeah, we’re not going to call it that. Anyway, I have a lot of open tabs, and not everything should be closed, lost and forgotten forever. Better to memorialize a few of those pages here.
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
Same website, same general concept for me: of someone is writing about them, lichens and moss deserve at least a skim.Lichens and the meaning of life:
Lichens come alive as an enchanting miniature of the miraculous interconnectedness of nature in biologist David George Haskell’s altogether fascinating book The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (public library).
Having previously written beautifully about the interleaving of life, Haskell details the ecological and evolutionary splendor of lichens as living symbiotes:
The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union. The fungus body spreads out, turning itself into a structure similar to a tree leaf: a protective upper crust, a layer for the light-capturing algae, and tiny pores for breathing. The algal partner loses its cell wall, surrenders protection to the fungus, and gives up sexual activities in favor of faster but less genetically exciting self-cloning. Lichenous fungi can be grown in the lab without their partners, but these widows are malformed and sickly. Similarly, algae and bacteria from lichens can generally survive without their fungal partners, but only in a restricted range of habitats. By stripping off the bonds of individuality the lichens have produced a world-conquering union. They cover nearly ten percent of the land’s surface, especially in the treeless far north, where winter reigns for most of the year.
Having so mastered the art of unselfing, lichens emerge as living testaments to the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s insistence that “we abide in a symbiotic world.”
Now that we’ve thunk deep thoughts, let us enjoy the idea of a delicious pie.No-bake Lemon Icebox Pie:
My Southern sweet tooth can never resist an icebox pie — a class of pie that earns its namesake from simply chilling the pie layers, so there’s no baking involved. They’re wildly simple to assemble, and lightly sweet with a crisp graham cracker crust and the most stately pile of whipped cream on top. With fillings, the flavors are endless, from strawberry to coconut to chocolate. Lemon ranks at the very top for me — fresh lemon zest and juice in this pie contribute to its natural lemony flavor, with no artificial colors or extracts required.
And now I’m hungry again. I’ve been hungry all day.
The team discovered the leak after spotting plumes of methane bubbles nearly a mile below the surface of the ocean. After sending an underwater drone to investigate, they discovered that water with a different chemical composition from the surrounding seawater was seeping into the ocean from a hole in the ground “like a firehose,” Evan Soloman, a fellow UW oceanographer and a co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “That’s something that I’ve never seen and to my knowledge has not been observed before.”
Further analysis found that the water was 16 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the seawater around it. The authors suspect that the fluid’s source is roughly 2 miles below the ocean floor at the CSZ fault line where temperatures sit around 300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Why is that a big deal? The researchers say that the fluid might be acting as a kind of pressure regulator between the continental plate and the ocean plate. The more fluid that is in the cracks of the faults, the less pressure there is between the two plates as they smash into each other.
So less fluid means there’s more pressure building between the two plates. This can create a lot of stress on the region and a whole lot more potential energy that could unleash itself as a devastating earthquake.
I wonder if this is happening, in actuality, in other places and we just don’t know it yet.
Something we do know: how many tabs, 28, I still have open on my phone’s browser. That’s pretty decent progress. Still hungry, though.
With a quick dash of a video or two here, we’ll be caught up on the Re-Listening project. For just a moment. That’s the way it works. I’m listening to all of my old CDs, in the order that I got them, in the car and writing something about them here. I live just 4.5 miles from work, but it is a 20-some-minute commute, somehow. These CDs, then, come and go pretty quickly.
We’re in late 1998 here, with a by-design one-hit wonder. New Radicals released this one record, fronted by the high-toned Gregg Alexander, but Alexander and his writing partner, Danielle Brisebois, ended the project before the second single was released. The album ” Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too” was topical, critical, and pulled from all sorts of influences to make a modern pop record. The record made it to 41 in the US, and landed in the top 20 on charts in Austria, Canada, and the UK. You might remember the top 40 hit single.
In the liner notes to her 2004 compilation Artist’s Choice, the Canadian songwriter Joni Mitchell praised “You Get What You Give” for “rising from the swamp of ‘McMusic’ like a flower of hope”. In 2006, Ice-T was asked on Late Night with Conan O’Brien about what he has heard, besides rap music, in the last few years that really grabbed him and his only reply was “You Get What You Give”. In a Time interview, U2 lead guitarist the Edge is quoted saying “You Get What You Give” is the song he is “most jealous of. I really would love to have written that.”
I always liked the album, but it’s starting to show it’s age.
The first track has, has always had, a terrific energy. And when it came on — even though I am playing all of these discs in order I’m not always sure which one is going to appear next — I was quite excited for the rest.
A bit later, this one isn’t bad. The bit about obscure bands is hale, hilarious, hipster:
The rest … today it just feels like it’s trying to find it’s voice, while trying to be a meta-album, while trying to channel Prince and, among others, Hall & Oates. The 1970s came back in 1997, basically.
New Radicals signed in 1997 and called it in the spring of 1999. Alexander went back to producing. Seems the touring was part of the problem. They went platinum along the way, though.
I attacked the morning with zeal. Zeal, I say. That was what the morning was attacked with, zeal. And urgency, and enthusiasm. The first alarm went off and I got up and put on the bike riding clothes and I went downstairs and rode on Zwift for 96 minutes, putting 36 more miles under my shoes.
One of the routes I did today included Neokyo All-Nighter, the fever dream of some poor game designer. What even is that thing floating in front of me?
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 95 routes down, 34 to go.
Later in the morning, I found myself reading copy aloud so a student could master the teleprompter. My voice was still thin in that way that’s difficult to control after a big workout. The was just coming from the back of my throat. There was no projection, no commanding news voice, no soothing tones, just a bleating, busted reed of a sound. Didn’t sound like me at all, especially to me. Even though I know it happens with a big workout, and in an hour or two I’ll sound more like myself, it’s always a tiny bit unnerving. What if it takes too long? What if this is the way I sound now?
But it was only a practice, for someone else. For some reason it got a polite bit of applause.
“Huzzah! He’s literate!”
That happened to me in a newsroom once, too. New job, second day there. The news director was the anchor, he pitched to me for my first story and I glanced over at him just in time to see a wide-eyed, stunned look on his face. “He can do that?”
And I thought, If you’re surprised, why did you hire me?
I googled this tonight, why my voice does that, not the former news director. (He’s in sales now.) It apparently has something to do with exertion and the way the muscles get used. But people seem to have different responses to this. Some people’s voices get deeper after a big workout, for example. This was a medium workout for me, though, and when I found that different people have different reactions, I knew it was time to close the tab.
Speaking of which …
While I closed that one to avoid diagnosing myself via Dr. Duck Duck Go, I am closing these tabs because … I don’t need this many open browsers in my life. The information could be useful, so I’m keeping the notes here for me, and sharing them with you, just in case.
Recently upgrade to a newer iPhone? We bet you have your old one stuffed in a drawer left to gather dust because you can’t figure out what to do with your old iPhone. But, lucky for you, we’ve got some fantastic ideas to reuse your old iPhone.
It is sitting on my desk, waiting.
I wanted a light and bright pasta one night the last time I had a bachelor weekend. I started pulling things out of the cabinet and then though, No, I’m hungry, not feeling experimental … and found this recipe, which was almost exactly what I was imagining. Light & easy garlic lemon pasta for two:
Ingredients
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
enough cooked angel hair pasta for 2
salt & pepper, to taste
The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.
Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected — and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.
Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.
And, after closing these three, I am down to just 34 tabs on my phone.
I am still catching up on the Re-Listening project — playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car. These aren’t reviews, but mostly just an excuse to share good music and write about whatever comes to mind about it, the time, or whatnot. And right now we are somewhere in early 1998, I think, when I was adding a bit of jazz to the collection. Most assuredly I was trying to bring some class to my collection.
So today we’re listening to Charles Fambrough’s 1992 The Charmer. This is the second album from the late, great bassist and composer. This still plays as a great easy jazz listen.
I don’t have the education or jazz vocabulary to appreciate the composition — or the talented interplay between the musicians — as I should, but reading comments online I have come to understand it was apparently under-appreciated in it’s time.
To me, this is perfect for ambience — say you’re making a nice lemon pasta — or as something quiet in the office, or simple and unobstrusive for the car. Which sells Fambrough short. He appears as a contributor on 17 other records, plus releasing nine records of his own between 1991 and 2003. He died, at just 60, in 2011. One of his obituaries called this record the high point of the CTI label’s 1990s output. It also used two exclamation points and the word “splendiferously” in the same paragraph. This was, one presumes, written by someone with a much better sense of musical appreciation than I have.
And so, for your musical appreciation, here is the complete Charles Fambrough album, The Charmer.
I attacked the deal with zeal; I will end the evening with the jazz.
I have been twice informed that we are way overdue for a check in on the kitties. This is, of course, the most popular weekly feature on the site, woefully neglected these last few weeks, and how dare I? “Oh. big cats, oooooh. Not the point, friend.”
Twice I have been thusly informed.
Mainly by Phoebe, sitting on the stairs, as if to say “What gives?”
And also by Poseidon, who can’t even cast his gaze upon me in disbelief.
The cats are doing great, even if they have been thusly neglected. Oh, so tragically neglected, just ask them.
I am sadly nearing the end of North Toward Home. I want to continue, but I want it to continue, you see. It’s an odd sensation, even as I have a small stack of other Willie Morris books in the To Read collection. I don’t pretend to understand the phenomenon, not wanting to finish things I enjoy. Is this a vein of anti-completism? An unwillingness to part beloved things? There are TV shows I’ve never finished for the same reason. If I don’t watch the finale or read the last chapters, it is all still out there and we never have to part.
I haven’t read this memoir before, but it isn’t my first time around with Willie Morris. I know the broadest strokes of his life and have a comfortable understanding of the style he’s using in this book. In the last 40 pages of so, which I read tonight, he’s written about the changes coming to the upstate community in New York where he’s bought a farm to escape the harsh realities of the city. He wanted to give his son and family a life, while he took the train 70 miles into town. He detailed seeing accidents on the train, the shifting attitudes of people as they got closer to the city, or closer to their homes. He wrote about how he learned about the sniper shooting at his alma mater, the University of Texas, while on the train. He wrote painfully, rawly, about how aghast he was, while his fellow passengers noted the news, and moved on. Suburbia is creeping in on that farm, which is too close to the big city, and too far away from the idyllic small town world he grew up in. He wrote about that too, watching the developers drive out, point this way, look at maps, buy that plot, cut those trees.
“It was impossible,” he wrote, “not to become deeply attached to this old country of the Indians and the Dutch and the Yankees, to the quiet hills and farms of western Connecticut, to the great sweep and flow of the Hudson Valley.”
He quotes the passage from Sleepy Hollow, about “A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.” Morris tells us that reading Washington Irving to his son on a windy November night, writing that he was glad, for the sake of the child, that a real writer had lived in the neighborhood years before.
By then, before then, it had grown obvious where he was going, but it was breathtaking all the same.
The thunderclap of rightness, which he says came upon “not apocalyptically but slow as can be, slow as good sourmash gets its mellowing or as a young man matures and finds balance” is, somehow, why I don’t want to finish the last pages of the book.
I had a fast little ride this morning, getting in a quick 19 miles before work. I set PRs on four Strava segments, including on two climbs.
It felt like I could have done a lot more, but for time.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 87 routes down, 42 to go.
Finally, we continue to catch up on the Re-Listening project. Each CD, in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a thing to do in the car, and to write about here. Mostly it’s music and memories and a bit of whimsy, which is what music should be about.
The memory I have with this CD is that I picked it up off a giveaway table because the cover art was great. Otherwise, I have discovered, over and over, try as I might, that Michael Hedges just isn’t for me.
But if you like technically proficient guitar work, new age lyrics and a classically trained flute, the posthumously released “Torched” might be for you.
