Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

IU / site / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
27
Oct 20

Tuesday, huh?

Have you ever had part of a day just vanish from memory? You know you did things, but you can’t really recall, precisely or vaguely, what those things were, even on the same day?

Welcome to my Tuesday!

I know I got up and puttered around the house and caught up on all the things I read in the news cycle and then at some point went to the office and did office things. I even held an office hour! Virtually! No one showed up.

I watched some videos and pounded out the emails and … anything else I could type about it would just be guessing at the routine. But it was there. Maybe that’s what it was fluorescent light-guided routine.

It’s a studio night for me, which reminds me to update you on some of the recent productions. And here they are now:

The spooky late night comedy show:

By the way, we learned this weekend that Not Too Late, which is the show above, earned an Honorable Mention in the national College Media Association’s Pinnacle Awards. A fine recognition, indeed. It’s a fun little program they’re building over there in Studio 5.

Meanwhile, and elsewhere … notably in Studio 7 …

Big Ten football is back and the subject of this longform talk show.

More sports! Now it feels like fall on campus:

And if you’re more of a morning person than a scary late night person, well I’m sorry we aren’t compatible in this respect, but, nevertheless, there’s a show for you as well:

And that has us all caught up on the last few days of television. I think. They also produce remote programs and social media and something like five different podcasts this semester. There’s a lot going on, is the point, even in this semester where there is, necessarily, less going on.

Forgot to mention: I updated the front page recently. Go check it out. It looks like this:

I have a several new photos I’m going to work through there. I’d like to have some random script do it, like the banners on this page. Around here, we are big fans of visual variety, as you might have noted. And the more you can automate that, the better.

Why not just use the same code?

Aren’t you a clever reader, you clever reader.

I’m tinkering with that. Maybe it’ll work. I might have to try something else to avoid breaking too many other rules on the site.

Why don’t you use javascript?

No thanks.

But —

Look, we’re trying to get away from that around here.

It’s something of an industry standard and —

Oh, believe me, construct I created just to have this conversation with myself, I know. But there’s some bloat and loading and security and some mobile-user issues and I’d just rather have a CSS and a PHP style solution, if you please.

Well, when you put it that way … why not just use the same code as this page?!?

Capital idea! Let me look into that.

Covid-19 / family / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
Oct 20

A note from there, to here

The family and holiday questions will be tricky.

Here, we’re simply decisive about Thanksgiving. Others’ plans are starting to enter the national dialogue: Anthony Fauci is telling people to not do Thanksgiving now. His kids are at all four corners and the travel would make it a bad idea. The CDC, it seems, is gearing up to push these unpleasant messages.

We’re about to hit a third Covid case peak any minute now. Maybe a travel holiday makes a fourth? No thanks. My worry, and may it go unrealized, is that we see bad numbers by the third week of December based on Thanksgiving. Christmas is already going to be maudlin in that not-normal way, but it’s potentially going to be like that under the specter of “We were that dangerously impulsive over dry turkey?”

There are two primary problems. Say I get a cootie in my day-to-day professional life. Say I took it to people who didn’t have the cooties. People who are older, who have worked hard to stay healthy. I would, of course, never forgive myself for endangering people I care about. That’s the personal problem. The other is travel. For some, who’s family is just across town, getting there probably doesn’t expose yourself or endanger an entire community. Simple car ride, done. To see my mom, that’s somewhat more risky. I’m gassing up at least once, making a bathroom stop or two, and picking up take out along the way. If you were getting on a plane, doing rest stops, making big travel plans, running travel errands, having to hit restaurants along the way? Wholly different model.

Recently, TSA cleared a million travelers for the first time since the spring. Eventually we get to a critical point of mass. People bring their behaviors, their errors, their accidental transference, and it adds up. That airplane the sick guy is on, the people on his flight potentially take the cootie home to others. From the airport bar where he waits for his connection, someone catching a red eye pick it up, and takes it home to their aunties. Same for the guy making the drinks at the airport bar.

It’s not just my trip, but every joker out there doing the same thing, its compounding interest.

If big events — like Sturgis and political rallies and Rose Garden announcements — are super spreaders, then the next level is the travel spreaders set, the micro-event set. I might be coming from a hotspot to a cooler place. Or vice versa, pending my return. Consider whatever your bunch normally does, 25 people in a house the family outgrew two generations ago? No thanks. I’ll give my thanks from afar.

It boils down to degrees of selfishness. I could do Thanksgiving. Or I could try my darnedest to not risk myself, or others, getting sick.

The more vigilant I am now, the slightly more confident I can be that I’m not gambling with the health of my family if I properly isolate myself before Christmas: I have been cautious.

Which is what the holidays should also be right now, cautious. I can continue to be cautious for myself, and others.

Not everyone can stay in as much as I’m able. I appreciate that. Not everyone is built for it. Introverts will inherit the earth. But I can make the considerable, deliberate choice to not travel, to limit my time in public, for a greater good.

My employer has taken great steps to create a proactive safety culture (and an astoundingly successful one, so far) and is spooling up massive amounts of testing to that end. My job isn’t especially forward-facing after we’ve scaled down on-campus operations and I am diligent about limiting my time outside of the house. It’s worth honoring those efforts and my good fortune.

I am fortunate. I can limit time out to help avoid making a lot of stupid, human mistakes. (Just two so far!) It doesn’t guarantee my health, but it reduces my risk. I have been afforded, and undertaken a great many steps to help create, a fair degree of safety. None of that means I feel especially comfortable risking someone’s health at Thanksgiving.

Like all spring and summer, this remains an easy and small and helpful thing we can do right now: avoiding the unnecessary. Sadly, the usual holiday routine falls in there too. It’ll be harder and bigger and families will feel fractured, but nevertheless, it’s the helpful thing we can do.

The considerate thing.

bespoke / hobby / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
13
Oct 20

Colors of the season

On Monday I sanded two pieces of wood. They are very long pieces of wood. And I worked out all of the splinters with 60- and 100-grit paper. Which means I only have to take eight pieces of wood, large pieces of wood, through grist 150, 220 and 400, so I can finally stop sanding wood.

But! Progress! That funny feeling of progress! Vibrating through the entirety of the upper body! There’s just no bettering that. Or is it just the remnants from the orbital sander? Probably it’s that.

But progress!

Also, I’m experimenting with making pocket squares. Measure twice, cut and trim your way with bad scissors into something resembling a square shape for all of eternity! You could sew these, but I don’t have a sewing machine. I found some nice hem tape, though, and you iron it into place to save the day. Also, I had to learn the hard way that hem tape is double-sided and you have to remove the covering first. If you don’t learn something, you don’t leave any room to laugh at yourself. Anyway, I’m now a costume designer, or something:

You’ll notice I’m not wearing any of those today. Today’s pocket square is a nice orange, autumnal number:

I took this picture right after a student called me by someone else’s name. There was a question mark on the end of it. He thought I was his professor. I am not. Imagine there’s another guy around here that has to look like this.

Anyway, autumn! It was a beautiful day and I indulged in taking seven whole minutes outside in it.

I am a party animal. A wild man, in my mask and pocket square, which clashes with my lapel pin. But the leaves are impressive.

This is just one lively maple, don’t you think?

A version of this shot might wind up elsewhere on the website.

This little guy is sitting in the window sill above the kitchen sink.

That’ll give you something to contemplate when you’re washing dishes.

IU / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
6
Oct 20

Have some leaves, make your down payment today

To mark the changing seasons I’ve updated the front page of the site. Go check it out. Or just imagine it, based on this hint.

Those maple leaves are from our yard. And the grass is ours, too.

One day I’ll get around to digging under it to see if we happened on anything profitable with the mineral rights. Probably not. They don’t build houses over valuable resource reservers very often, I’d guess. Surely there were surveys once upon a time. And since no one ever found a gold nugget or enriched their britches with oil or natural gas or found some other valuable thing around here, they decided “Houses it is! Put out some nice sod and sidewalks and run some utilities out there and we’ll make money off it that way!”

Anyway, the leaves look grand, wouldn’t you agree?

This maple tree is turning in stages. It’s the arboreal version of a combover, maybe. The tree that’s kidding itself, and not fooling anyone else. How could that tree fool anyone with that bright bit of vibrance. There is, as they say on the ‘gram, no filter here.

Now if everything looked and felt like this for the next five months.

Oh, I forgot to add this show yesterday. The morning troupe doing morning things.

It was a studio night tonight, where the news team worked on news shows. They’re due out tomorrow.

Tonight, we’re upgrading the sofa! We bought memory foam to support the cushions. You trace outlines of each section, cut the three-inch foam, and then jam the foam inside the upholstery underneath the old stuff. That last part was a bit of a workout, but now the seats look full and new again. It’s an easy refurb of a 15-year-old set of furniture which is, otherwise, perfectly great.

It felt a little strange to sit on them for the first time, but better. For the first time in who knows how long, hips and knees are at the proper positions relative to one another when you’re relaxing. The important question: Is it good for naps?

So I have a weekend chore, then: taking a nap.

baseball / history / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
29
Sep 20

Two campus notes, just before the full moon

Checked my mailbox on campus today and there was a little poster tube there. It was from the Office of the Bicentennial. The university, early this year, celebrated its 200th anniversary and, while it was a bit abbreviated because of the coronavirus shutdown, we’d been marking the event for a few years.

From time to time I had the good fortune to help them with this or that, and someone there was kind enough to send me a little thank you. I got a nice poster and some cool lapel pins:

So my question is, can I wear those in 2021?

Meanwhile, there’s baseball going on. And today I used my awesome powers to put three simultaneous playoff games on the big screen:

No one was there to watch them, because few people come into the building these days under the university’s wise safety precautions. But just as it is weird to consider 16 teams in baseball’s post season, it seemed normal to put sports on the big screen.

I wonder what they showed on that screen 200 years ago.

Ha! That’s a trick question! That building is only 103 years old! Back in 1917 you would have watched the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants in the World Series. The Sox, who won the series, were managed by a man named Pants Rowland. The Giants were managed by John McGraw, he of the bony old fingers.

Did you know there was a real Moonlight Graham? Burt Lancaster put poetry to the thing, but his is a beautiful and common tale, even without the book or the film. (The one inning the real Graham played in was a bit earlier than the film, in 1905. He passed away in 1965.)

There’s a book about him. Let me know if he ever made it down this way.