Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

cycling / photo / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Feb 21

This one confuses the dot org space-time continuum, sorry

There’s a new look to the front page. And now I know what that’s supposed to look like. Click on the image below to check it out.

I’m really looking forward to the next update of the front page — probably in the next week or so. It’ll really hit the theme’s design.

Last night I did an amazing thing. I was riding up a hill on the bike trainer, turning out more watts than the session demanded, because the session didn’t seem especially demanding, and I had a flat. I developed a little pinhole on an indoor ride. So I stopped my ride because you can’t ride on a flat. It was almost dinnertime, anyway. So I’ll just have to re-do that workout later this week.

I looked it up. You can get a flat on a trainer in the traditional ways. But there’s no debris in my tire or in the wheel rim. So this must have been a trainer flat, which means I was super-heating the thing.

Yeah, there probably was something in the wheel that put the little hole in the tube, but it’s more fun to imagine I friction-burned the thing into submission.

(I wrote this part Wednesday, but it pertains to Tuesday and Wednesday.) I almost fell asleep, three or four times, watching a car chase tonight. Because I was tired, and it was late, and the chase lasted all night, and four hours into the morning.

This is what happened. At 10:19 p.m. we got the notification that NBC LA was in the air following a car. The driver was wanted as a possible suspect in a shooting. The gang division had been following him and he wasn’t going to go easy into that good night. He raced across surface streets, living the charmed life of someone who is ignoring every light, a charmed life until, suddenly it isn’t.

But he managed to work his way through two parts of greater L.A. and onto the interstate system. He raced along the freeways. And then he started going slower. And then slower. And much, much slower. After a time, he would crawl to a stop, the police cars would line up in their traffic stop configuration and he would drive away again.

It was amusing at first, until it became boring. And he did it so much it became amusing again. And then just frustrating. But you’re invested in the thing by then. And that’s the problem, because you figure “I’m invested in this thing now. What’s a satisfactory outcome?” You don’t watch chases for bad things to happen. I don’t want to see any innocent people also on the road getting hurt. I don’t want to see this guy get shot. I also don’t want him to get away. So I, secretly, cheer for a foot chase and then a good solid linebacker-style tackle of the suspect who is, in this case, considered armed and dangerous.

At about 4 a.m., seriously, and after about two hours of slow crawling on three flats, he finally drove the rim off the driver front side of the car. This, as we know, brings the car portion of any chase to its conclusion. Police were content to let this play out on it’s own time because the driver had turned this into a slow-speed chase hours ago. They didn’t want to PIT him, because you don’t want to go nose-to-nose with a guy who is carrying a weapon.

Within five seconds of that rim falling off, and the car going down to its drive axle, the local NBC lost its feed. For about 60-75 seconds NBCLA was offering me one of those video autoplays that play every story other than the one you want.

When I got the feed back the driver was out of the car and standing on the closed highway. He’s got his hands up. He’s facing away from the officers while the cops are doing whatever cops do there. It takes forever. The dude puts his arms down. They command him to raise his arms again, he turns and yells to them back over his shoulder, and raises his arms. Until he lowers them again. More yelling. He raises them. He lowers them. On and on this goes.

Until the helicopter had to leave again for fuel consumption. (This was their third helo of the chase, mind you.) So after a six hour chase, about 5:40 of THAT being on camera, NBCLA couldn’t even get the apprehension.

Their story this morning notes he had two outstanding wants for felony burglary. No weapon was found.

Guess who’s dragging around tired eyes today?

IU / podcast / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
26
Jan 21

Light day around here

Web work today, and if only I meant Spider-Man work. But I updated a lot of pages I update around the web for work things, leaving only many of these pages un-updated. There are two glaring areas on this site to deal with, and I’m going to get into one of those this evening.

I did add one thing to this site, on the front page. Careful observers will note one of the old photos has been replaced by a new photo. Check it out. Maybe you’ll see it. You’ll definitely see it. There are only so many photographs to look at in that display. Maybe you’ll notice it.

So there’s a new student loan grace period in place thanks to an executive order President Biden signed last week. So I talked with Phil Schuman, who is the executive director of Financial Wellness and Education at Indiana University, to see what this means for alumni, students and potential borrowers.

Dozens of people will listen to this, and you should, too.

On Topic with IU · On Topic with IU — Student loans with IU's Financial Wellness and Education office

Nationally, student loan debt reached $1.6 trillion dollars last year. Average monthly payments are between $200 and $300 and the U.S. Department of Education says about 20 percent of borrowers are in default. Tough economic times, to be sure.

And I spent part of the afternoon looking for the next podcast idea. And that’s the day. Some days are more fruitful than others, what can you say?

cycling / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
19
Jan 21

Snow video and cats, what the web was made for

I said it would snow, because the meteorologists said it would snow. And so it snowed, light flurries pretty much all weekend. We got maybe two inches out of the deal. Here’s some video proof:

And here’s some slow-mo snow, ponderous precipitation, facile flurries:

It was melting away in the early afternoon, yesterday, but more flakes fell, amounting to little of nothing and that will be the last of it for a while. Sun and clouds for the next few days. And Thursday we might hit 46 degrees! A delightfully mild week seems like just the thing, doesn’t it?

Let’s check in with the cats, who are a handful and just fine, thanks.

Phoebe is checking out something on that first sunny day we enjoyed after a long stretch of bleh.

Fortunately she was able to work in a bit of sunbathing into her busy schedule.

Poseidon spends a lot of his mornings contemplating the deeper things in life, like ‘What is spotted ball?’

He, too, enjoys the sun. Sitting on the cat tree lets him be taller than you, and he can really fill the frame.

Sometimes I think he understands the idea behind camera sense. Sometimes I think he’s a philosopher cat. Usually, he’s just … we call him high spirited.

Had a great bike ride, going up the Alpe du Zwift. I am so very slow, and it takes me forever. But I did hold off a couple of people the whole way up the mountain. They were the other slow climbers, like me.

Scroll around and look at this climb:

The map looks reminiscent of my Alpe D’Huez shirt, which I am wearing this evening in honor of my massive video game accomplishment. I found the photo function on Zwift, because on a long slow climb, you can discover new things. This is right after the summit:

This was on the descent:

That’s my second hors categorie, or beyond categorization, climb. I am so slow. It actually snowed on the climb. The app showed little drifts of snow scurrying across the road as I huffed and puffed. It has a lot of detail to it.

Twelve mile climb, 3,753 feet of elevation, and an average gradient of 8.5 percent yesterday, and a punchy little workout today, means I will feel them both tomorrow, too.

books / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
12
Jan 21

The sun, in all its muted glory

The photosphere is about 10,000 degrees, Fahrenheit, but it’s cooling at that level. In the chromosphere, scientists figure, it is about 7,800 degrees. The light and heat has to travel the 93 million miles here. It takes a little more than eight minutes. And, sure, we’re pointed the wrong direction, but we’re turning back the right way. But, still, despite all of that, the nuclear fusion can’t burn away the clouds for days, days, on end.

Finally, today, as promised, the sun:

Saw that for a few minutes. It was chilly, but bright. If you can only one weather condition in January, you take sunny, because it’s always going to be cold.

There was a meeting! And it was filled with things both new and old! Decisive and not! And nothing will be reframed in such a way that requires any of the substantive articles of the meeting to change! I took notes and everything! A few of them will make sense to me in a month or so.

So … like every 90-minute meeting you’ve ever enjoyed. And then also a lot of email, and some demo reels to review, and a few other light chores to address. So a normal day. Except the sun was out, and so everything was great.

Tomorrow morning starts with another meeting, so we’re back in the swing of things, is what I’m saying.

In the spring of 2019 Wright Thompson came to campus and, at the end of his visit, he talked about his collection of sports stories, The Cost of These Dreams, which had just been released the week before. Someone gave me a copy of his book and I finally got around to pulling it from the To Read bookcase. Yes, I have an entire bookcase of books waiting to be read. Doesn’t everyone?

I keep those books well away from the Have Read bookcases. We can’t have intermingling of texts. It would get too confusing. Why, just this weekend I had to go through all of the books to see if I already had a book I was considering online. (I did.) It was in the To Read bookcase, so I picked that one out for my next read, along with a few others. They’re now sitting on my nightstand, part of a multi-stage on deck system to ease the complaints of the To Read bookcase which is groaning under the weight of paper. It’s a beautiful sound.

I digress. It’s a shame I waited all this while to get to Thompson’s book. He is easily one of the best contemporary sports writers. Take, for example, this little tidbit in a longform story about the New Orleans Saints, which is really about Katrina, which is really about New Orleans, which is really about inequity.

This is part of an 11-graph sidebar arc you could use in a master class. I read it over and over the other night, just to dissect it, to imagine, as you often do, how the story part of it came to be. It would be inappropriate to share the whole sidebar, but here’s the return, where Thompson is describing Charity Hospital. It was a teaching hospital and was, you might recall, utterly neglected after Katrina.

He gets all the details, like any great feature writer. He gets the best quotes and writes about all of the moments in a contemporaneous way, so it’s difficult to determine if he was in the room, or heard about it later through the course of his reporting — which is terrific. The next time I see him I’m going to ask him this: You get people to tell you things, for publication, that you say they have never told to anyone. How?

Sometimes it’s simply because you ask. A lot of it is about the relationship, which is about time. How much time do you have to spend with someone to get them to talk to you like their oldest friend? How long until it no longer seems strange to them that you’ve asked? How much listening does it take to become a professional confidant? This is a particular kind of reporting. Thompson is great at it.

If you like stories and people and storytelling and A-plus writing, buy this book. It’s incredible at every turn. (Except the Urban Meyer story. Some characters are just beyond the redemption of soulful prose.)

Just don’t read it all at once. Read a story, put the book down and come back several weeks later. This isn’t a criticism. Indeed, the writing is easy and the subject matter draws you in. You want to keep reading. Problem is, Thompson, like all great writers, has recurring themes. Being a great writer, they are some of the big ones. So space it out. Think of it as a textual indulgence.

cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
5
Jan 21

A-ha!

This is a lightbulb. I saw it in a bulk mail advertisement and thought I would give them a try. So we got a few for stocking stuffers this year. They are called fireworks lights. They don’t move or make big sounds or change shape or color or anything. They do throw a nice, colorful, half light around the small space of a half bath. So I got a few more and put them in the stairwell. You can still see the stairs, it’s better than a standard yellow light. Now it feels like you are in a movie theater, and so far this week I haven’t stumped a toe. Yet.

Lightbulbs are symbols of brilliant ideas. And so today, having photographed a lightbulb, it seemed important to have an idea.

This evening I did the first stage of something called the Tour de Zwift. I think it’s simply a come-see-the-place kind of gimmick. Ride in many of our venues! Try different styles and distances! That sort of thing. Mostly it’s just a good way to see how slow I am compared to everyone else.

Anyway, the first round of stages are the shorter parts of the Zwift environment. Makes sense. But that’s not long enough for a day’s ride. So after seven quick miles, I figured that was a warmup, and why not do something else.

So I went up.

Which, if you’ll see on the road markings, is the only way. I’ve only had a smart trainer and a Zwift setup for a couple of weeks. And this weekend I went a third of the way up the biggest climb on Zwift, a faithful recreation of Mont Ventoux’s Bedoin ascent, which is universally regarded as one of the more challenging mountain climbs in road cycling.

Which is where I should say a few things. I’m no climber. Also, as noted, I’m slow. And especially so when going uphill. Furthermore, Zwift is fun and probably helpful to the overall cause, but in a few important ways it’s not exactly the same as riding on a road. For the purposes of this discussion, I never feel like I’m about to fall over when slowly trying to go uphill.

So riding up Mount Ventoux wasn’t easy, but most assuredly easier than most assuredly easier than doing it in real life.

Finally, after a long time, because I’m slow, I saw the weather station at the famed summit up close.

It’s just 13 miles up, a little over 22 kilometers, but it’s a long and steady up, up and farther up. These are the average inclines.

KM	Avg gradient	KM	Avg gradient
1	1.9%	12	10.1%
2	2.8%	13	9.2%
3	3.8%	14	9.4%
4	5.8%	15	8.8%
5	5.6%	16	6.9%
6	3.1%	17	6.6%
7	8.6%	18	6.8%
8	9.4%	19	7.4%
9	10.5%	20	8.3%
10	10.1%	21	9.1%
11	9.3%	22	10.0%

It’s not a leg breaking kind of climb, hills shaped like that aren’t especially hard to find. The difference is the distance. And this is definitely cumulative. The distance, the unrelenting nature of the thing, that’s what taxes your muscles. There aren’t many places on the way up where you aren’t asking your legs to pull you up something that isn’t a strain. I spent most of the time in my lowest gears.

Two other things about a trainer ride aren’t quite right. I, of course, stayed at 760 feet above sea level the whole time I was climbing. If I’d gone all the way up to a real-life altitude of 6,263 feet, I would have felt it. Though, to be honest, late in the ride it seemed like the room was thinning out.

What you also don’t experience on Zwift is the wind. Ventoux is a variant of venteux, which means windy in French. They’ve recorded wind speeds as high as 200 miles per hour near the summit. It blows in the upper 50s for two-thirds of the year. And if you get a headwind, good luck. Me, I was dealing with an underpowered ceiling fan.

But I did this. I climbed a digital representation of a legitimate mountain.

On the descent I came back down the giant fast, again feeling nothing like the real world. I’m old enough now to feather the brakes. At about 60 miles per hour Zwift was having trouble rendering some of the graphics during the descent. I just couldn’t wait for those trees to appear, I was ready to be off the bike, cleaned up, have dinner, do the dishes and enjoy some time quality time with the compression boots.

So I can go do it again.