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This was a window from the flight back home from the holidays.
If you’ll allow me the indulgence of creating a silly metaphor on a poor cell phone photo, this is the way the day has felt: a bit dreary and streaky and indistinct.
But I got some things done. And shivered a lot. The high was 37. The low is 18. Think I stayed inside all day. I’m fine with that.
Overcast this morning. Clear in the afternoon. The high was in the mid 40s. It was the kind of day that suggested a feeling that implied what flirting with spring might, one day, be like.
The forecasts call for another cold snap in a few days, making it our second of the year, meaning we’ll have an extra one that no one ordered. We’ll convince ourselves that, somehow, this means we’re going to have an incredibly nice spring.
Hit the pool, swam a mile. That makes three times in a week. Suddenly, I feel like I can breath in the pool again. That’s always a nice comfort-level skill to have. I’m a very bad lap swimmer, but I only kicked the lane lines twice today, so there’s that, too.
Appropos of nothing I came home the other night from somewhere and The Yankee was watching City of Angels. I remember seeing this in the theater, it was probably the perfect late-90s date movie, after all.
So we ended up watching the whole thing, because she likes the movie, and I can make Nick Cage jokes. And then, toward the end, at the climactic scene:
She yells at the television screen, “Wear a helmet!”
It has just become a reflexive thing, at this point.
Things to read … no helmet required.
The New New Newsweek.com: “it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new Newsweek.com.”
I remember when I first subscribed to Newsweek. It was the 7th grade. It was a class assignment. I was never that big of a nerd. We had the same English teacher four times in junior and high school and she gave us writing assignments out of the old magazines. Those were my first, real, writing assignments, summarizing news copy each week, every week, for four years. It was a decent start on learning the craft of writing. I remember when I finally dropped Newsweek, when they were running wildly divergent covers for different parts of the world. What you saw from one to the next was so different as to be insulting. And if that wasn’t insulting the American copy got the job done. I doubt I’ll be subscribing again anytime soon, despite new editors and a third round of new owners and so on, but having more publications out there is never a bad thing.
Survey: Obamacare worries Hill aides:
A vast majority of top congressional aides say in a new survey that they are concerned about the effects of Obamacare on their staff, ticking off worries about changes to their benefits, higher costs and whether they’ll have access to local health care providers.
Ninety percent of staffers surveyed for a report released Monday by the Congressional Management Foundation said they are concerned about benefit changes under the health care law, while 86 percent are anxious about the financial hit and 79 percent cited worries to access.
[…]
“The elimination of staff’s traditional health care has been a complete disaster,” one aide said in the survey. “If you wanted a legislative branch run by K Street lobbyists and 25-year-old staffers, mission accomplished.”
Guess you should have had your bosses read the bill before they passed it, huh?
What Secrets Your Phone Is Sharing About You:
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
Businesses are tracking their customers and building profiles of their daily habits using a network of startups that have placed sensors in restaurants, yoga studios and other sites. Chris Gilpin, founder of one such site, Turnstyle, joins the News Hub.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones.
Whenever I talk in class about how we’re going to be leveraging technology in the near future — which is here, now — this is the one that always makes the students squirmy. You can see why.
This is the best story of the day. I have a feeling no one will mess with Jeanna Harris anymore, except maybe reporters, to whom she gives great quotes. Woman with shotgun chases away burglar:
Jeanna Harris, of Decatur, said the man she woke up early Tuesday to find rifling through her bedroom belongings is welcome to come back and try to steal from her again.
“He better be glad I had my nightgown on. The Lord’s hand was on him,” said Harris, 43, who armed herself with a 20-gauge shotgun and chased the intruder from her home. “I’m waiting on him, and I will not have on my Victoria Secret nightgown. I will have on my running shoes. It didn’t scare me; it made me mad.”
[…]
Harris said she’s glad she didn’t fire, partly because “it could have been a very dirty mess to clean up.
A suspect was arrested. And, Decatur, where this happened, puts mugshots on Facebook. People comment. “They” would do that without booking information being published online, but fewer people would hear about it. In some circumstances that could be a good thing.
The freezing weather has broken. You may call it a polar vortex, the now popular, misused term found so often in the media. I just call it cold. We’re due two or three seriously cold days a year here, and, before today, we’ve endured about 36 hours of them.
It came in Monday night, when just before midnight the wind chill was -1.8. Early Tuesday morning it was -5.5 and the low was 9 degrees.
Have I mentioned we live in the Deep South?
Today the high was 45 degrees, so we’re on our way out of this. We may as well have a picnic.
During the cold snap we also had a fire warning. Things were dry. It was windy. Also cold. And fires sounded great. So we burned everything. It was terribly romantic, and now everything is covered in soot.
OK, we didn’t. But it was tempting.
Returned to the pool today. This was the first time there since October and that’s embarrassing. Did 1,000 yards.
This is a warmup for swimmers. But we’re talking about me here and 1,000 yards is a cause for celebration. I fought my goggles and complained almost the entire way.
And now I have tiny bruises on my maxilla bone, because I can never get the straps on my goggles right. They’re constantly squeezing and still letting in water and fogging up. All of which is silly. I can control that in a mask. I can fix all of that on a mask at 80 feet underwater.
Goggles? Total mystery, apparently.
Parks and Recreation, the quiet little show that could, is celebrating 100 episodes. That’s the magic syndication number, which is why you’ll soon see this show in the most inexplicable places. Here’s a 100 episode special, which starts with Perd Hapley, who would easily be my favorite character on the show if Ron Swanson wasn’t my spirit animal.
Things to read … I find ’em, I share ’em.
The Dominance of Loooooong in the Age of Short and, essentially, the opposite view, in The blog is dead, long live the blog.
We seemingly have an incessant need to call things dead in the media. Formats and a medium may change or even contract, but that doesn’t mean they are dead. (Newspapers aren’t dead, but they surely are different.) Tumblr and WordPress alone boast more than 164 million blogs. Even if half of those are stagnant, well, that’s hardly dead, or even on life support. Hyperbole, happily, is alive and well.
Two things going on in this story. One is the headline, the other is this nugget, “While it sits in the heart of San Francisco’s startup community in the SOMA district, the Chronicle has lagged in its coverage of technology and social media. Its circulation plummeted by 50% between 2009 and 2012. ” Newspaper to Put All Reporters Through Social Media Boot Camp
Still want a drone. Still window shopping and daydreaming. This doesn’t change that: FAA on drone recordings by journalists: ‘There is no gray area’. Mostly because it is 100 percent incorrect. Happily, the comments set this entire story upside down, which means it is right side up.
Finally, the much-anticipated rollout of the New York Times new site is upon us. Here’s a review. Also, here’s a TouchCast discussion about the redesign.
Love TouchCast. There is a lot of amazing stuff there, for your iPad and browser viewing. Make interactive, realtime video products with the swipe of your finger. What a world. I’ll be using it soon, too, I hope.
Ran this morning, and then spent the rest of the day running. We did two miles around the track that surrounds the football and lacrosse field. Two girls outran me on every lap, and a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind looked better than me too. It was too cold, and my leg hurt and felt too inclined to come up with excuses.
It was about 24 degrees at the time.
After that we spent the afternoon packing. We were due to leave on Friday, but there’s a storm coming with even more cold and, most importantly, snow and ice. Neither planes nor I like to travel in snow and ice.
So we flew home this evening. The trip was great. Christmas was fine and lovely. It was a lot of travel and it was cold from time to time, but hour journey that began almost two weeks ago is over.
We stopped to see one more set of friends before catching a lull in the traffic on the way to Laguardia. We met a helpful Delta ticket agent and a pleasant TSA agent. We managed to get everything on the plane in short order. I read. A beautiful young Indian woman sat next to me and laughed a lot at whatever she was reading.
Hobbled off the plane, rode the terminal train, found our bags, caught the shuttle to the car. Packed the car, got rained on. Missed the interstate. Found the interstate. Found that the only thing still open for food was McDonald’s. Made it home in between rain clouds. Unloaded the car, got stamped on by the cat, unpacked …
That’s one way to start a new year.
How’s yours going so far?
One of those things people say that has always stuck with me is that, when you are older, you see Christmas through a child’s eyes, and so you see it anew.
This is one of the kids in my family. Santa called him. This is the moment that Santa told him that he’d been good this year.
The little boy did have some bad news. His mom had recently hit a deer … “But not one of yours!!!”
