Wednesday

collarbone / journalism / links / Samford / Storify / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on A lot about today’s news
11
Sep 13

A lot about today’s news

Not the way they’d anticipated this playing, I’d bet. On 9/11 the newspapers of the Alabama Media Group ran their cloned front pages to celebrate the 100th birthday of Paul Bryant. He died in 1983. Ignored was the 12th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. The reaction on Twitter was awkward. I’ve collected them on Storify. (Blogging continues below.)

That isn’t cherry picking. I searched Bryant’s name and the names of the papers and AMG. I didn’t add one which was linkbait. I chose not to include one which was tangential at best. I avoided anything that was purely directed at the University of Alabama. (They had their own unfortunate public response after today asking people to honor the former coach by changing their Facebook photos, but that’s not relevant here.)

Furthermore, of the 13 dailies from the state I surveyed today (via newseum.org) two localized 9/11. Two offered skybox teases to 9/11 content elsewhere in the paper. Four ran some elements of a wire story about New York’s current mayor Michael Bloomberg. There was not as much Syria on the collected front pages as you might imagine, either.

Meanwhile, talk radio host Matt Murphy had his way with the newspaper. You can hear that segment here.

As for the Crimson the paper looks impressive considering this is the new staff’s first paper. I’ve challenged them to start strong and become great quickly, and they’re answering. Here are the first two pages. They have plenty they can concentrate on, but I do believe this is the best first issue paper I’ve seen in my six years at Samford. And we’ve seen some fine starts, too.

They worked on it until almost daylight.

You can see the rest of the stories at samfordcrimson.com.

The department’s Twitter account liked it:

The day marched by quickly. Lunch at my desk. People talking about the paper. Phone calls, emails and so on.

There were meetings. Meetings where one ended so another could begin. Talking with students, an advertising meeting, the paper’s critique meeting.

Left work to go on step two of the tuxedo rental odyssey. Stopped by a place last week to try to match a rental with someone (whom I’ve yet to meet) who owns a tux with a fair description and one photograph. The guy last week said it couldn’t be done. The guy this week, in step two, told me to go back to step one.

Good thing everyone will be busy staring at the bride and not me. Maybe they won’t notice if I go with the blue ruffles.

Got home and everything seized up on me again. Went immediately to the foam roller and abandoned that for the flat floor. That helped a bit, but I ended up in such a state I didn’t know how to get up.

But, more therapy tomorrow, so there’s that.

collarbone / photo / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Wanna see my bones?
4
Sep 13

Wanna see my bones?

Well, do ya?

Returned to see the new orthopedic surgeon today after our first meeting two weeks ago and the bone scan last week. The first good news remains that I did not grow wings or a third eye or gain a mutant power from the radiology. Not that I expected I would. The radiologist said that rarely happens. One assumes that we’re in the clear there, especially since it didn’t come up when the doctor today discussed the results of the scan.

So he’s looking at the collarbone area, the purpose of the scan being to rule out any bone problems. He said there are none. He probably said some other things, but I stopped listening. It is one thing to see your own bones. It is another to see your own skull.

bones

At the end of the day we can say the bone is fine. And your own skull is creepy.

Now we’ve ruled out nerves, rotator cuff and the bones. We’re down to the hardware and muscular problems. The hardware is an issue, but as I told the doctor, if your magic wand only works once I’d say let’s use it on the shoulder.

So he’s sending me to more physical therapy, a different set of therapists. The phrase I get to use now is scapular stabilization dysfunction. The doctor keeps saying that an accident such as mine involved a great deal of physical trauma.

Because, 14 months later, you want more therapy and a three-word title attached to your problem. (I don’t mean to complain, but … ) We agreed that my shoulder and its recovery have not reached their optimal condition. The good news is that, being muscular, there is improvement to be had. So we’re pleased with that.

Conveniently the new therapy center is close by the doctor’s office, so we set that up. I get to start next week.

How unusual has this summer been?

Alabama’s 2013 summer went into the books as one of the coolest summers in the 131-year record, with an average high temperature that was almost 2° cooler than seasonal norms.

How cool was it?

For the three months of “meteorological” summer no station in Alabama hit 100 degrees. If that holds up (we won’t have all of the temperature data for a few days and the folks at the Southeastern Regional Climate Center are keeping an eye out), this summer will be only the fourth time that has happened since 1883. The others were 1965, 1994 and 2001.

Three times in the last 20 years. Most unusual.

And now, all you need to know about foreign policy as it relates to Syria in four videos:

He didn’t …

Except when he did …

The guy that works for him says so …

And this, the most egregious of it all:

Someone approached our top diplomat and said “We’ll pay for it.” And he said, “OK.”

As opposed to kicking them out of the room or hanging up on them or pointing out that this would make us mercenaries.

Shameful.

Oh, and it sounds less and less like that piece of adventurism would simply be cruise missiles from the sea:

Securing Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles and the facilities that produced them would likely require the U.S. to send more than 75,000 ground troops into the Middle Eastern country, MailOnline learned Wednesday.

That estimate comes from a secret memorandum the U.S. Department of Defense prepared for President Obama in early 2012.

U.S. Central Command arrived at the figure of 75,000 ground troops as part of a written series of military options for dealing with Bashar al-Assad more than 18 months ago, long before the U.S. confirmed internally that the Syrian dictator was using the weapons against rebel factions within his borders.

Tim Siedell has the final word:

Auburn / football / journalism / links / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Links to things
28
Aug 13

Links to things

We’ve been watching the last quarter of the 2010 football season on DVD as a way of preparing for the college football season, which opens tomorrow night. Last night we saw the SEC championship game, which I think I only saw the one time, live. It was an emotional thing, that day. Still fairly stirring.

Tonight we watch the national championship against Oregon. It has its drama, but it isn’t terribly exciting in some respects. Knowing the outcome is, of course, anticlimactic in a small way. The win was the thing, but that SEC championship game was the most complete effort of that amazing season. And knowing what it meant, and knowing it came at Darth Spurrier’s expense made it all the better.

All of which is to say nothing new, except this. It was this video that really made me look forward to this season.

Ronnie Brown is a bad man. (Hard to believe it has been nine years since some of that footage was shot.) The New York Restoration Choir sounds great. Bring on the football.

Would you like a bit of history? NPR has a great piece on what was one of the rhetorical inspirations for Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. You can hear it! I knew the provenance of the imagery, but I’d never heard the original speech before. It is fascinating in every way, though that’s not really the voice I imagined Pastor Archibald Carey Jr. having. Give it a listen.

Here’s a longer read on the future of NASA:

NASA is looking for a rock. It’s got to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can’t be too big or too small. Something 20 to 30 feet in diameter would work. It can’t be spinning too rapidly, or tumbling knees over elbows. It can’t be a speed demon. And it shouldn’t be a heap of loose material, like a rubble pile.

The rock, if it can be found, would be the target for what NASA calls the Asteroid Redirect Mission. Almost out of nowhere it has emerged as a central element of NASA’s human spaceflight strategy for the next decade. Rarely has the agency proposed an idea so controversial among lawmakers, so fraught with technical and scientific uncertainties, and so hard to explain to ordinary people.

It just doesn’t sound like the same agency in some ways, but there is some boldness in the plan, if you read on.

Here’s a conversation that delves into the origins of online scholastic journalism. Before WordPress, before a lot of tools, you had to hand-code everything. Now, not so much:

Yet there persists an odd notion that a newspaper staff is more deserving of awards for its online journalism and that its online work is more authentic if they built their website or even their WordPress theme themselves. There’s a confusion in this logic –– a failure to distinguish the tool from the content; we only tend to see this confusion when working with newer tools. No one would question the value of using a word processing tool and writing on a computer over using a typewriter. No one would question the value of using desktop publishing software and new printing technology over hand-set type. No one would question the value of a photo taken with a digital camera over one taken with a film camera and printed in a darkroom. That’s because we’ve recognized that Microsoft Word, GoogleDocs, InDesign, PhotoShop, and digital SLR cameras are tools that allow our students to do better work.

We now need to make that same recognition with our understanding of WordPress and its templates. Buying a good WordPress template is the same as buying Adobe CS7 or buying a new digital SLR camera. CS7 won’t create your design for you, a camera won’t take its own pictures, and a WordPress template won’t write and publish stories, photos, and videos in a timely and relevant manner. New tools create new efficiencies and new opportunities –– they allow us to report better, write better, design better, and connect with our audiences better, and our national contest and critique standards need to evolve to reflect the new realities of the tools used for web publishing.

I bolded my favorite part. This debate isn’t restricted to online tools designed for efficiency versus the most laborious method possible. Value the journalism over the tool, or the medium for that matter.

One more PBS thing, a series of serious and concerted thoughts on a digital curriculum from Dr. Cindy Royal:

what I am proposing is curriculum in which digital is the foundation, and the basic skills of writing, reporting and editing are injected into digitally focused courses, as opposed to inserting a digital lesson or two into traditional classes.

Most programs have courses at their core that introduce basic skills, things like Media Writing, Media Law and Introduction to Mass Communication. Other programs also require courses in Media History or Mass Media and Society. I propose we flip and reconfigure these courses with a digital emphasis.

That’s worth a read if you’re interested in journalism or pedagogy.

Did I mention I renamed my work blog? I renamed my work blog. Made it a little more inclusive, avoids any university branding concerns and just sounds more vaguely fun. So check out the creatively titled Multimedia Links. Several new posts this week as we’ve gotten back to the classroom:

Must have apps

The FOIA Machine

Sleuthing public records

Crowdsourcing history

Things that, perhaps, should be reconsidered

Still not sold on mobile

Evernote tips

I try to get as many students as possible to read that site, so there will be more to write this year.

More, more, more!

We want more.

Auburn / baseball / collarbone / football / friends / music / Samford / Twitter / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Six to eight weeks you say?
21
Aug 13

Six to eight weeks you say?

Had a morning appointment. Showed up right on time, owing to the slow car in front of me, the other car that couldn’t figure out turning lanes and a search for a parking space that could be described as too-warm porridge.

Visited with the nice lady sitting in the desk inside the fish bowl. She took my insurance card — because this is my third orthopedic guy to check out my shoulder and collar bone. In return she gave me the clipboard of paperwork. What are you allergic to? Have you had an of these diseases? Did your paternal great-great-uncle have any skin sensitivities to latex?

So you do all that, you know the drill. And then you wait for your name to be called. Other names are called. You start playing the same game you do at a restaurant. “They came in after we did and they’re already eating!”

I decided that, at 75 minutes, I would go ask when my 10:30 appointment was going to take place. At 74 minutes they finally called me back.

And that’s just the waiting room wait, of course. Wouldn’t it be great if the doctor was already in the examination room and he was waiting on you?

Another X-ray. And then a spirited round of playing with the display knee joint sitting in the exam room.

The doctor finally comes in.

“Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”

So we talked about the last year. He tested for nerve damage and said there was none. He tested for rotator cuff problems and said there were none. He touched my hardware and I decided I’m going to pinch, hard, the next person that does that.

He looked at my X-ray and said things look good there.

The problems, he said, are muscular, hardware or skeletal. He said he just took a plate out of someone’s collarbone that was so severe the poor guy couldn’t wear a jacket. Said the guy felt better the night of that removal. I don’t think that’s my problem. I’m guessing 90 percent of my issues are muscular.

But first we’re going to test for the skeletal. Sometime next week I have to have a bone scan. No idea what that’s about.

Oh. Radiation. Patience. One thing you don’t want and one thing I need more of.

Also, this doctor, who is apparently nationally renowned for shoulder surgeries, says I should have been in a sling for six to eight weeks. Had him repeat that.

My surgeon had me out of my immobilizer in a week. (I had to ask. I couldn’t remember. I don’t remember a lot.)

I take it I shouldn’t be happy with that.

Indian for lunch. School stuff for the rest of the day. Speaking of school:

Here’s the official release. Pat Sullivan almost beat his alma mater on the last trip. He put a huge scare into Auburn for 45 minutes. It was a great performance.

The Auburn baseball schedule was released today.

More sports: Google wants to buy the rights to put the NFL on YouTube. Remember where you were when this happens.

We had dinner with a friend — who will remain nameless because of this transgression — and standing in the parking lot, under the stars and lightning, we learned he’d never heard this song.

I did not realize you could be in your 30s and say that.

cycling / family / iPhone / overwriting / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Not the best day ever
14
Aug 13

Not the best day ever

I slept in, because I stayed up late, because I had a cup of tea and was wide awake for the next seven hours last night and early this morning.

So when I woke up the story was fully developed. A UPS plane had crashed on final approach into Birmingham. The pictures are horrific. The two pilots were dead. And, thankfully, for a change, I knew precisely where my step-dad was.

He flies out of the same hub as those two pilots. The co-pilot has been named, someone he doesn’t know. We’re still waiting to hear the identify of the pilot. The reporters at al.com have done an incredible job on the story if you’re interested in the latest.

I’m ready to turn away from it. I’ve covered stories about neighbors, became friends with people I covered over time. I’ve reported and written and read about some horrible things people to do to one another and have a healthy detachment.

But I’m invested a bit here, enough to set the whole day off. There were emails and Facebook and a few “That’s not him, is it?” questions.

It was not, but what could have been. I couldn’t tamp down the anxious feelings until the late evening.

sun

So I went out for a little bike ride in the rain, down through the neighborhood, around the roundabout and out the back. I planned to turn left, but as so often happens in the saddle I changed my mind almost mid-turn and went right.

The rain picked up and I smelled the river. The stagnant water at the boat launch. The still and mild decay of a fish. The synthetic carpet of a boat. The funky tinge of artificial bait that has been too long in the tackle box and couldn’t catch anything but weeds. There is no water there, but those were the smells. It made me think of my grandfather, and so I pedaled on.

I started having a tough time seeing through my sunglasses on the rainy, graying road. I enjoy a rainy ride, but this wasn’t quite the same. I hit a sprint stretch, wheeled to the right and realized I was cheating on all the turns. I blamed the new front tire. We don’t know each other yet. It doesn’t trust me to dive into turns yet. If I listen close the hum is saying what could have been?

I was dying on everything. But my socks were getting wet, so my feet were getting heavier and, thus, faster. That’s my theory, anyway. Doesn’t always work. I found myself shifting toward my easiest gears and climbing up the biggest hill of the day, which is no big hill. It is already a forgotten blur. So was most of the rest of the ride. Raindrops and panting. Chickening out in curves, full of unease about them, feeling my bike get lighter the few times I put in some speed.

Somewhere I picked up the smell of an old grandmother’s hairspray, baked in by decades of cigarettes. I don’t know why I smelled these things today, since I usually can’t smell anything. But I love being on my bike because it gives me time to think about things like that, the sensations, analogies and forgetting the whompwhompwhomp of my legs.

I took that picture above just before getting home, dawdling in the sprinkling rain and the purple and orange sky. I lingered to get the right fuzzy shot because a crisp one didn’t fit the mood. I took my time because getting home means going inside means cleaning my bike — the no-fun part of riding in the rain.

And there was still UPS plane talk. What could have been is such a bizarrely odd sensation. I got so distracted I almost gnarled two knuckles of my left hand in the spokes of my bike’s back wheel.

Here’s the last story I’m reading about it tonight:

More than 13,000 bags made by Freeset USA, a local nonprofit that provides jobs to women in Calcutta, India, were among the cargo lost when a UPS cargo plane crashed Wednesday morning near Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.

The company, which lost what amounted to its entire fall inventory of bags, has decided to begin selling a T-shirt to raise money for the families of the two pilots killed in the crash, according to a news release from the company.

[…]

The company is also worried about its 200 employees, mostly women freed from Calcutta’s sex trade.

People are donating via Twitter. Freeset’s Facebook page says they are working on the design. I know this company through Samford connections. They do incredible work and I’m glad they are involved here. Can’t wait to brag on them. That will be the best thing for a perfectly sad and strange day.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →