A few weeks ago I wrote about one of the signs in my grandparents’ part of the world. The old Coke sign had been there all my life, and finally it faded beyond recognition. And then the city elders, or the Chamber, or the Coke people, someone, repainted it.
This is a few years into the new version of that sign, and it still looks obnoxiously bright. For some reason all of the Coke signs of the world should be distressed or full-on ghost signs.
Except for this one, in Cartersville, Georgia, which Coke has authenticated as the original outdoor Coke sign and restored.
I took that picture in 2006. I wonder what it looks like today. Here it is in 2012.
Just down the street from the new-old Coke sign is one of the best signs ever:
I don’t know what a deer-turkey is, but I’ve always been curious to find out.
If you notice the last line it says “Drive a little to save a $” and then there’s a picture of a deer head. So they do either taxidermy or emoji. Who can say?
Anyway, said all of my sad goodbyes and sad and extra hugs and then hit the road. Stopped at campus, where we got new computers installed in the newsroom and in my office. Signed paperwork, delivered paperwork and hit the road again, for home.
Dinner with friends, and then a quiet night with the cat.
It was the second in a series of posts about photos I found in my 1898 Glomerata, which is Auburn’s yearbook, of which I have a humble collection. The first post was here. (I have three more from that book that I scanned to share here, but I’d forgotten about them until just now.)
I say all of this to mention an email I received today. A nice lady from Wisconsin is doing genealogical research on some of her in-laws and one of the guys in this picture is her man, Franklin Waters Van Ness, and did I know which one he might be.
He’s the guy who is sitting. He was the captain of the API track team. At an inter-mural field day against six other schools he won the half mile, running it in two minutes and five seconds. But, I said, that was all the yearbook had on him. This was both a surprise and not surprising. They never really seem perfectly complete, but, also, the school was so small back then, and so many names pop up more than once, that you imagine he’d been in there somewhere, but I can’t find him.
So I asked what she knew about F.W. Van Ness. My previous post had some information that I’d read from research that she’d posted on findagrave.com. She wrote back right away:
He and his brother moved to Chicago where they were engineers. Franklin was also an efficiency expert. Franklin met Jennie Sullivan there. She was a teacher. They married in Chicago and the three children were born there. The family then moved to Milwaukee where Jennie was instrumental in developing playgrounds at the schools. They then moved to East Orange, New Jersey. Franklin is on the 1920 census twice. I think he was also in Cincinnati, as well as East Orange, but he traveled for his work.
Being a southerner, he loved the south, and bought that cotton mill (in North Carolina), which went bust during the Depression. They had lived very wealthy lives until that point.
[…]
(H)e ended up in Richmond, Virginia, and I don’t know why or what he did until his death.
[…]
He was certainly a smart guy and very motivated until the Depression took the steam out of him.
One of his daughters became a success in the hospitality industry, writing a book and giving college lectures on hotel work. Another daughter married an admiral and an ambassador. Franklin’s wife, Jenny, a suffragist and prohibitionist, was one of the first two female legislators in New Jersey. This is an interesting family.
Where Franklin Waters Van Ness is buried is a mystery, so I started Googling the man once more. Where I once again came up empty.
But I did find out something about Franklin’s brother, Graham Van Ness, that she didn’t know. She knew he’d served in the 2nd Missouri during the Spanish American War, but her trail went cold. Here’s the actual muster roster with his name on it. His unit only made it as far as Georgia, where another guy in the 2nd Missouri was famous for being Jesse James’ son. The story goes that people would often visit his unit to take pictures of him. This gives us a small world moment. I’m apparently related to Jesse James, so my relative would have known my new email friend’s relative. Except not. Apparently, the essay notes, this was a trick played by one of the jokers in that unit. But small world!
I found all that because I found a mention of Franklin as F.W. Van Ness in the story covering the suicide or murder of Graham. They were brothers and, the Burlington Daily News explains, Graham had witnessed the murder of Jack Lingle. This was a huge story in Chicago and Graham was apparently on the run from hitmen. Lingle was a well-to-do reporter … and a friend of Al Capone.
She said another of Franklin’s brothers was murdered in Texas. And another part of the family features a man who made his money in oil and natural gas before branching out into shipping, real estate and S&Ls and buying the Dallas Cowboys. Some family tree.
All of that, and more, I learned today because of a 115 year-old-photo I published last year.
My run is slow. So slow, in fact, that I can tell when it is even slower. So slow, in fact, that it is impossible for me to go out too fast. Would that I could.
But, hey, my next run is over a flat downtown course. So, today, I decided to run on the flattest terrain I could find, at the old Wilbur Hutsell Track. In school I watched Olympians and record holders there, putting their athletic potential on display. It has never made me any faster. But, I noticed today, if I run on a flat course I can drop a few seconds off of my neighborhood pace.
Just to insure I am that guy I rode my bike to the track.
So I rode about eight miles. I would have ridden more — but there were dinner plans — and ran three miles. Maybe I’ll get in one more run and ride before the race this weekend.
I was listening to music as I ran. Here is the obligatory “Where were you when ‘Party in the USA’ came on?” shot, the east side of the track:
I have to add miles back into my legs. I need to run more miles, too. I recently read the relationship should be about 80/20 cycling to running. And I need to swim, a lot. The art, science, skill, talent and philosophy of triathlons, I’ve decided, is balancing the training and maximizing your minimums.
If you figure out what all that means, please let me know.
Things to read … because reading shows us what we need to know.
(W)hile my personal capacity to tell technology stories in the past year has diversified, I’ve noticed something: my beat is rapidly disappearing.
We don’t need someone “watching the internet” during elections anymore, that’s clear. But we’re also now approaching a point where the most pressing — and let’s face it, interesting — technology stories shouldn’t be thought of as technology stories at all.
That is an essay, really, about the ubiquity of the web and the blurring of specialization. That the author is still thinking in terms of “beats” is the first step to fixing the problem. Atomize the thing is important. Developing a contextual curation is important, and that will come from those with a background and depth of understanding, or as Steven Rosenbaum calls it, the Second Law of the Curation Economy. So if you are on a tech beat and feeling marginalized, figure out how you can flex your muscle in a new light.
(I)t is a completely pointless exercise. Those who ask for these articles to be removed simply invite more publicity on themselves.
This was an extremely serious court case, which merited a front page when we ran it back in 2010.
To have this disappear from Google searches is frankly ridiculous, which is why I feel it’s so important to highlight this issue.
Won’t it be interesting when the EU’s media outlets start pointing out content from which Google (Bing, Yahoo! et al) is removing their links? The story still exists online. The removal becomes a story — hence the Streisand Effect — and ultimately it becomes a badge of honor. There comes a day when the Bolton News proudly shows off all of those stories, they linked to this original one twice in one story, because they stand behind their news judgment. Some other site will then come along and become a clearinghouse for stories that Google (Bing, Yahoo! et al) can’t link anymore.
My alarm went off. I hit the snooze button. Music started playing again. I snoozed. It sounded off once more, I rolled over and started having weird snippets of strange dreams. There were happy dogs to pet, and I was happy to do it, but there was a sense of foreboding, the kind you have when you know something bad is about to happen to the character on TV. Only I am not a television character and have no reason or real sense of why anything bad would happen. So I try not to acknowledge it or let on, for the happy dogs.
I hit the snooze button again.
It is part of my charm.
I watched the Tour de France stage, which everyone hyped beyond belief yesterday. And, with the announcers, lost track of the number of crashes, which took us to the sublimely ridiculous moment of asking the cyclists, before they’d had the chance to wipe the mud from their faces, if this stage which they had hyped so much, so not be included in the future. Television is a curious thing. When it steps unselfconsciously out of its element that is when it is most in its element, though the players never seem aware.
There’s only so many times you need to see guys lose control of their under-inflated tires in a roundabout and smack the asphalt. The cobblestones and rain together, it seems, were not worth it today. I should just go back to watching the mountain stages. I only watch the bike races for the mountains and the scenery anyway. But I watched that today.
In one of the biggest developments in the history of the Tour de France, women will take their place in the iconic race this year…but now it’s up to you to help them.
Following a massive worldwide push for women to have their own Tour de France the UCI and ASO have responded with a one day race on the final stage.
[…]
This may just be one day, but it’s not a token gesture. It’s a trial. A test to see how popular, supported and lucrative women’s cycling is. It won’t remain a one day race forever, moving forward it will grow and develop in the sporting landscape and in people’s consciousness.
And a trailer for a related documentary:
I finished the laundry. I moved things around.
I had Whataburger for a late lunch and, there in the parking lot, got to watch two teenagers have a marginally dramatic disagreement. She was mad at him about something. And he loved her, you know. She worked at the Whataburger and her coworkers thought enough of all of it to come outside. He, in trying to demonstrate his love despite whatever had made her mad, parked behind her car and mine.
So I saved the day. Move the car, bub. I have fries to eat and many miles to go, etc.
Judging by his reaction, this guy had never read Robert Frost. But he had the sullen look down. And while he did that, she went inside to work and he left.
I wonder what he did wrong.
I did a full inventory of things at work. I wrote emails. I repaired tripods. You don’t know fun until you’ve fixed tripods with nothing more than a pair of pliers.
I listened to the Argentina-Netherlands game. Glad I didn’t watch that woof-fest.
All of that kept me longer than I’d hoped, but it did give me these views:
So, you know, a perfectly wonderful and stunning day.
Things to read … because reading always makes your day.
A report published by the Royal College of Surgeons and Age UK shows that rationing is being extended to cover life-saving operations on elderly patients. A study found that in large parts of the country, hardly anyone above the age of 75 was receiving surgery for conditions such as breast cancer and gall bladder removal. This is wrong. There should be no automatic cut-off age for treatment, not least because the elderly have contributed sufficiently in taxes throughout their working lives to expect to be afforded decent and proper care.
Is it just me, or should that last sentence have a full stop at the comma?
“I like the program because I got the nicest teachers and I like what we do in our decoding and fluency and we get into small groups and we work together and we try to figure the problem out,” Hicks said.
The college part goes two ways. It teaches younger students to dream of a future and furthering their education and it gives students in Samford’s School of Education valuable experience.
Service learning is such a great tool. I wish there were more ways to implement it in every field — and it is in place in a lot of areas to begin with.
They gathered in the stadium of the 2,000 student school in the town of 56,000, which is a suburb of Atlanta. His coaches talked and his college coaches talked and his father talked and the sun set a remarkable shade of orange and blue and people thought, “Oh, Phil is a painter.”
And they lit candles and laughed and hugged and shared tears for what they’ve lost, what we’ve lost, and tried to imagine what his family has lost. And none of it was enough, but a lot of it was just right. There are eulogies and then there are eulogies. And this video played:
I rode one of the regular routes today. I did it in new cycling shoes. I couldn’t decide if trying new shoes less than two weeks before a triathlon was a good idea, and I still can’t decide, but here we are. It will take me a while to figure them out and how to avoid mishaps with them, but they are lighter.
Why all of that matters, in as much as it does. You’re familiar with the fairy tale of the princess and the pea? I’m a lot like that on the bike, which is to say I’m an elite athlete in tune with myself and the machinery I’m using. Of course that’s not the case, but I notice things that make The Yankee roll her eyes.
When I swapped from Continental tires to kevlar trainers, I noticed a big drop off in performance. When I swapped from the kevlar tires to Gatorskins, I noticed an improvement. When I changed water bottles, I could tell the new ones were heavier. I didn’t notice that in my hand, mind you, but I filled them up, put them in their cages and pedaled away and felt it within just a few strokes.
So these shoes are lighter. And, in cycling, lighter is better. I feel like they pull up better, too. These are clipless shoes, of course, which bolt you onto the pedals. They have two advantages, allowing you to pull up on your pedal stroke as well as push down. This exercises some different leg muscles. Also, the pros use them and you want to look like them despite the different sensations and the possibility of disaster that comes with them.
Falling in clipless shoes is something of a rite of passage. I’ve done it a few times. Once in front of a police officer and once in front of fire fighters. Both were embarrassing and only slightly painful. It takes a bit of time to train your foot to come out of the pedals and to do it in time. Hence the falling and the rite of passage and the skinned elbows and things.
With these new shoes, they feel like I’m starting over with the whole thing. That’s odd since the cleats are exactly the same. The pedals are exactly the same. The shoe feels different, and the sole is different, and I am the prince with the pea.
So I rode 18 miles and ran a 5K today. It was very warm out, both times. Also, I’ve been dragging the last few days and am in one of the inexplicable phases of not eating very much. It felt pretty good, though.
I do not know what is happening.
Nice picture and all .. You don’t often expect great lines from Instagram, but this one has it.
