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Wednesday

Games on the plain

Holiday travels this week, so we’re padding this out with videos and memories. But there’s a theme! This is Iron Bowl week after all. So let’s talk about football all week. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thought I’d throw in a few clips from memorable games during my years as an undergraduate. This space is nothing if it isn’t good for self-indulgent memories. So let’s take a stroll down that particular lane.

The first game I attended as a student was against Ole Miss. A fight broke out in the student body, probably over too many drinks or girls. Order was quickly restored by the people around them and Auburn won 46-13.

The biggest games of my freshman season were unavailable to me. Student tickets were sold on a seniority basis, which meant no Florida and no Alabama. I had to watch them both from my place just off campus.

Strange to now think that the 1995 Iron Bowl was just the third one on campus. I’d only missed history, the first time Alabama finally played a true road game in the series, by a few years. (This may sound silly to readers that aren’t involved. To you I recommend this column, this article, and also this piece and the CBS pre-game video below.)

That was all just before my time in undergrad. My freshman year was a mediocre one for football in the state. Both Alabama and Auburn came into the Iron Bowl with seven wins. Auburn would win 31-27 and Tide fans still complain about a referee’s call late in that game.

Later, in bowl season, a struggling Auburn played a solid Penn State.

Moving on, then.

In 1996 we watched The Barn burn down. That was one of the athletic buildings on campus. They used to play basketball in the facility, but in 1996 it housed the gymnastics team and was one of three wooden buildings on campus. A tailgater put their grill too near the structure and during the game the flames leapt higher than the football stadium directly across the street.

I asked Carl Stephens, the former public address announcer, about his most memorable games, and this one was in his top three. No one who was there will ever forget it, or Stephens’ deep voice announcing “Attention Auburn fans if you parked near the barn please exit the stadium and move your vehicle.”

A moment later he followed that up with “Attention fans. It is too late to move your vehicle.”

From most views in the stadium it looked like we were on fire. There’s no way you’re moving 85,000 people, so we were resigned: Well, if you have to go, go with friends.

The bigger problem at the moment, however, was why Auburn could not kick a field goal. Priorities: We have them.

Ironically, it was a building donated by LSU — my roommate said “Pistol Pete played in there!” — and it was destroyed during the LSU game. That there is no footage of this online is a glaring blind spot in mid 1990s video uploading. My friend Joe McAdory wrote about it, however.

That year there was also the famous four overtime game with Georgia. I was in Kansas City, but I could have flown home, driven from Montgomery to Auburn and caught the end. Georgia won, unfortunately, so I was glad to watch from my hotel room. Mostly, this is remember as the day Uga tried to bite Robert Baker:

The next week Auburn lost a narrow game to Alabama, 24-23 in Birmingham. But the days of going to Legion Field for that game were coming to an end.

Now to the story you will not believe. In 1997, I called this turnover. It wasn’t a wish or a hope. I was not being an irrational, desperate fan late in the game. I turned to the friend standing next to me and said “They are about to give the ball back to Auburn, just as if I’d looked into the sky and said “It is night.”

Ed Scissum, who fumbled the ball at the crucial moment, works at Evangeline Booth College, a theological school in Atlanta. Martavious Houston, who forced the fumble, had a nice career in the Canadian Football League and then had a moment in the NFL. Jaret Holmes, the placekicker who scored the winning points for Auburn, had three years in the NFL and is now back home in Mississippi.

Auburn earned their way into the SEC Championship that year, but we don’t speak of it much.

So 1998, then, featured the last ever Iron Bowl in Birmingham. I was there, and on a chill night watched the Tide close that chapter in a storied history with a 31-17 win over my Tigers.

Shaun Alexander was a good back.

To make matters worse, the next year Alabama came back to Auburn and for the first time won the Iron Bowl there. Not a pleasant experience:

On the other hand, it would be 2008 until Alabama won the Iron Bowl at their own stadium. Just took them three centuries to accomplish the feat.

Now. The purpose of this little entry was to talk about the Iron Bowls and a few other games from my time as a student. I was very fortunate, working as a journalist and in a few other capacities, to see some of these games and work with the people — like Pat Dye, Jim Fyffe, Rod Bramblett and others — that helped create these moments over the years. My experiences are a bit atypical.

For example, one of the best games I’ve ever watched at Auburn — and we’ll discuss the best game tomorrow — was the 2005 Iron Bowl. I was in grad school at UAB at the time, so it doesn’t fit the tidy theme here, but it bears mentioning. My future bride managed to land sideline passes, she worked at Fox at the time, and we shot the game. This was Carl Stephens last game behind the microphone. This was the last Iron Bowl flight for Tiger VI. They named the field in Pat Dye’s honor.

And this happened all night long:

We were on the sideline for that. It couldn’t get much better, I figured, on the way home. And until this last year’s championship run, I was right.

Tomorrow I’ll write about the best contest I’ve ever seen at Jordan-Hare Stadium in a special holiday use of bytes and bits.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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16
Nov 11

The tornado

Had something of a panic today. I am not prone to such things, thankfully. And, furthermore, this was a bit of anxiety after the fact. But it was warranted. I just threw everything into Storify (which wasn’t behaving properly when I built this one, so it might not be the normal perfect presentation), because it needs to be remembered for a while. First there was the storm. I got an alert on my phone via Twitter. I texted my wife, telling her to hide as there was a tornado warning and the radar did not look good.

And that was when the sirens over her, the location of the storm, were finally activated. This is problematic. A few minutes later the tornado touches down. She was safe, her office is in the basement of a building built in 1940, so that’s a pretty safe bet. I’d called around the neighborhood and found where it was good and bad. And some places were fine, in the way that often marks a tornado’s appearance. Other places had plenty of damage. In the end, all of the places were familiar. Some were close to home. Some, very close.

The damage was just a half-mile away. Fortunately property damage and minor injuries were the extent of it. The biggest loss seems to be a horse that I wrote about at the end of the evening. There was a collective sigh of relief. A supposed EF1 or EF2 just appeared overhead, whipped up some trees and pulled apart some signage and then moved on. But what might have been.

Elsewhere: I’ve been saying this for years: if cities cared about the environment and their community, they would synch intersections better. One of the Birmingham suburbs is listening:

Drivers along a stretch of Allison-Bonnett Memorial Drive in Hueytown may notice improved traffic flow following a project to synchronize the traffic lights at 10 intersections.

[…]

Baumann said the upgrades to the traffic signals will have an impact on driver’s wallets and the environment. Better traffic flow will lead to lower fuel emissions and a reduction in air pollution, he said. The mayor said synchronizing the lights will save an estimated $45,000 a month in gas as drivers cut down the time their cars are stopped at the traffic lights.

As the second comment notes, the rest of the metro is on the opposite, anti-synchronized, plan. Because, well, because they are.

Looking for something to read? Here’s a list for future journalists.

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9
Nov 11

Big day

Spent the day covered in newsprint:

Now comes the time of year when stories must be submitted for contests and other notable honors. This is a multiple-day process that will stretch into next week, includes solving Byzantine riddles and parsing out the meaning of a rough online translation of a fortune cookie’s first draft.

There are very precise rules for news contests. It requires a great deal of precise effort, because imprecision means disqualification. It is a mess, really. But then you think of the person who must deal with the many submissions.

He is a kind man, and he welcomes dealing with these submissions and finding judges and sending out the clips and getting them returned and sorting out winners and he does it in a contest that can have about 30 categories for dozens of schools. He’s also a patient, hardworking man. And he needs these rules in place, just to make sense of it all.

So you can’t complain, really. Almost every one of the rules makes sense when you see it from his point of view. And if you heard the reasoning behind the other two or three rules you’d probably think, “Yeah, well, that figures too.”

Which doesn’t exactly make the entire process fun, but it is an important one. And, as I said, will stretch into next week.

Busy day otherwise. Jefferson County voted to file for bankruptcy, the largest municipal failure in the history of the United States. Here’s a fine timeline on the issue from August. It saddens me to read that. This story has been going on my entire adult life.

Indeed, it was one of the first stories I ever reported on the radio. And even back then it seemed like this would go on forever. More than a decade later, they’ve avoided the bankruptcy for as long as possible.

And so here’s the next story, the numb and numbly titled Now What?

Speaking of the radio, I returned to the old format for about five minutes this evening. Ingram Smith, sitting in for Chuck Oliver, asked all the right questions about a football game coming up this weekend. I surely gave all the wrong answers. The final conclusion: if the ball bounces the right way the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry will have a close finish.

Speaking of football and old and tradition and finishing … Here’s the historic Penn State press conference from this evening. I especially like when the students in the room started asking questions.

That will be around water coolers for a good long while.

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2
Nov 11

The toils of history

Late in the summer I was asked to read, and review, the new memoir of Dr. Wayne Flynt. He is a retired history scholar who was educated at Samford, where he would first teach. He’d go on to earn his greatest acclaim during his almost three decades of scholarship and activism while on the faculty at Auburn. Here’s the review, and a brief segment:

For his ground-level view from the center of many critical turning points in the state in the last 30 years Wayne Flynt’s memoir is worth reading.

But you’ve probably read this far to see what Flynt says the power struggles at Auburn. That starts in Chapter 12, which he’s titled In the Eye of the Storm.

Here again Flynt delves deep into Auburn’s long history to establish the setting. A lot of talk over the years, dating back to President Isaac T. Tichenor (1872-1881) has centered on the mission of Auburn University. Flynt — noting that Auburn has a unique history as a Methodist school that taught the classics before the Morrill Act created the land grant institution — almost distills decades of dispute to the mutual identities as an institution with an agricultural and mechanical mission and as an institution of the classics and other liberal arts. Flynt, the history professor in the College of Liberal Arts, acknowledges in his memoir the role and need for both, while portraying board of trustee member Bobby Lowder as a nearly exclusive supporter of the former.

From such divides Flynt recalls the pesky matters with the the SACS investigation and subsequent probation, the NCAA and, of course, coaching changes. Lowder, who wanted Auburn to aspire to be like Clemson, is of course the central figure.

If you’re interested in history, education, religion, the rural post-war South, the modern day political landscape of Alabama or, in particular, Auburn University, this might be a book worth your time.

Elsewhere, class prep, grading things, trying to figure out a new assignment and reading.

I also started The Kennedys. Sometimes Greg Kinnear is John Kennedy. Other times he’s just Greg Kinnear. You can totally buy Barry Pepper as Bobby Kennedy, however.

You can see why Kennedy fans didn’t want this show to get picked up. Early scripts got panned. The final script is apparently different and, still not well liked. The mini-series, which won four Emmy awards and was nominated for three more, was finally aired on something called ReelzChannel. The History Channel passed because, “this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.”

As I write this The History Channel is in an Ancient Aliens marathon.

This is the best quote on the subject, in the New York Times of all places:

There is something wonderfully Kennedyesque about a backroom campaign to discredit a series that claims the Kennedy White House had more than its share of backroom shenanigans.

Also, methamphetamines? You learn something new from television everyday.

Google Reader. I got the update last night and was immediately dismayed. Not the least of all because it removed the thing I was reading at the time. And then I looked at it, and oh, the thing is just dreadful. Best part, you have to actually seek out how many unread items there are. And in Chrome, Google’s own, you can’t see that number across the top of the browser because there is no top to the browser. The design aesthetic is now working against them. A lot of people are complaining of wasted space — I have big screens, so I can only imagine their pain — but I do agree with everyone’s sentiment about the lack of color and the inherent un-usability that comes with this roll out.

There’s a word you don’t see with Google a lot. But, as they say, you get what you pay for.

If you decide to stay, then please do send us your feedback on today’s set of improvements. Google+ is still in its early days, after all, and we’re constantly working on improvements. If, however, you decide that the product is no longer for you, then please do take advantage of Reader’s subscription export feature. Regardless where you go, we want to make sure you can take your data with you.

So you take a product that works and people like. You turn it into something people hate — and apparently near universally judging by Google’s own un-answered message boards — to try and bring it in line with Google+, which is fighting for its own life. You strip the communal Share feature from Reader so you’ll have to do that in Google+, without considering that the user might have or desire different audiences and communities at different places.

Look, I like simplicity — Have you seen the rest of this site? This iteration was designed as an ode to basic code — but Reader has abandoned simplicity for starkness. Two horizontal rows over three columns, and now nothing to differentiate any of it. Stylistically it looks like a step back to 1997 (can the subscription button blink?) built for baud modems in old East Germany and devoid of color, graphics or anything of any kind that might be useful to the eye.

White space because the #FFFFFF pixels are cheaper. (They are not.) Air, as a design element in the print format is a beautiful thing. Air in an ultra-data format, an RSS reader, betrays the point of concisely packing a lot of information on a page. And when you have data, you’re going to need a color or two and a rule here and there to separate the basic elements. Now, it is all gone.

It is a polar bear, walking across an empty ice floe looking for food. Finding none, it has moved on. Also, the javascript is slower. There is no Classic Version reset button. No option. (Though the former lead designer has offered to help fix the thing.) Take it or RSS elsewhere.

So, yeah. Find me an reader that gives me a browser and a phone version that are both tolerable. Allow them to communicate with one another — “He’s read this feed on the computer, the unread items should disappear on the phone.” — and I’ll export and move on.

My only regret is that I would not be giving ad opportunities to Google. Not that their using that trick in the Reader just now.

Oh, and GMail is due a change too. I’m sure that’ll push more stuff to Google+ and allow even more spam through.

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26
Oct 11

Grounded to my chair

The bulk of my day today was invested in conference planning. I was elected sometime back as a vice-chair of a division of a conference that we attend each year.

This means that in the summer I send out a call for papers. In the fall the papers role into my inbox. The scholarly work is then submitted to academics who read the papers under blind review, which is to say that the author never knows who the reviewer is and vice versa. The system generally works well, so long as you have enough reviewers. In this case I was fortunate.

So the reviews have come back and now I must determine the order of things for the subsequent conference. These papers go here, these go there and that sort of thing.

All of this being done under Outlook Web App, our new campus email platform, of which I am not a big fan. I’m sure others appreciate it more, but it has bugs — little tiny ants are crawling across my email — and the organization of it isn’t as intuitive to me as other email systems.

The archiving seems solid, and this is an important thing, though finding things at a glance is challenging. But, hey, at least I can use a cupcake theme! There is also a robot theme, cats, varying colors and other things. Microsoft Outlook could work on making the thing work in browsers — it tends to not be responsive to any clicks should it log out and force me to sign in again. That being too much to ask, they’ve offered me a nice leaf theme to run across the top of the page for autumn.

It is the little things.

Anyway, the conference paper scoring is done based on an intricate four point scoring technique. First authors are asked to evaluate the overall paper. Then seven separate criteria are pulled for individual scoring on a seven-point scale. After that comes a comparative evaluation of this paper next to other papers the reviewer has been asked to read. Also, the reviewer is asked for if and how the paper should be accepted into the program.

Doing this several times over for each paper, takes some time. And then each score must be evaluated. Then the numbers and results are triple-checked. After that the surviving submissions must be placed in some cogent order in the program. And then the format of the program must meet specific guidelines. The programmer must also get halfway clever with titles and then ensure that the various specific details are accommodated.

All of these little details take a while, and I was intent on making sure the numbers worked and everything lined up just so, no matter which way you considered the material. This is my first time to do one of these. Now I know why everyone wishes the new guy luck, and inches away if he starts asking too many questions.

That’s not true. People at conferences are generally very helpful. This is a neat little volunteer job because you meet even more people. It is good for me professionally and I read maybe a dozen more papers being submitted to this conference than I would have without the role. So I’ve enjoyed it. Now I can send the finish product off and move on to other projects. If I counted up the time I’ve invested in this particular task it would be close to a week, so far. Time well spent.

So I didn’t even leave my office for much of anything else today. Did see this story though, where we learn BP oil spill money is being spent on correcting a problem not in any way caused by the BP oil spill:

For the first time in a generation, Sand Island Lighthouse lives up to its name.

As of Monday afternoon, the lighthouse once again has an island of sand surrounding its base.

On Tuesday, a trio of bulldozers pushed sand pumping out of a big metal dredge pipe into a hill that rose about 8 feet above the surrounding sea. A team of surveyors staked out the contours of the still growing island, which will continue to increase in size for the next several weeks.

For decades, the lighthouse was a small island unto itself, a forlorn brick pinnacle perched atop a heap of rocks and concrete. Dredging of the Mobile Ship Channel had sliced through the natural sand delivery system that runs along the Alabama coast and prevented new sand from washing onto Sand Island.

Over time, the island — once large enough for the lighthouse keeper to graze a herd of cows — shrank beneath the waves. But now, thanks to $6 million in federal funding awarded in the early days of the BP oil spill, the island is back where it belongs.

This is an erosion issue, and new knowledge of hydrodynamics is supposedly being utilized to help keep the sand from being moved around by the nature currents in that area. But, still, if this manmade island disappears in the next few years — this sort of thing happens on the coast — it would be wasted money.

And, also, this on the ongoing saga of the new Alabama immigration law:

The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told Congress Wednesday that her agency is not helping to implement Alabama’s immigration law.

In response to a question from U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., Secretary Janet Napolitano said the agency is instead working with the Justice Department in its legal challenge to the law.

As always on a divisive issue, the comments are especially insightful.

This evening I watched Captain America at the dollar theater. I was hoping for, as Claudia Puig wrote “A jaunty, retro style and stirring World War II story.” What I got was a polite mixture of Chris Barsanti’s “Little more than a dutiful origin story for a superhero” and a slight dash of Owen Gleiberman “Stolidly corny, old-fashioned pulp fun.”

But, then, I’m more interested here in the contemporary imagining of the 1940s — not enough took place in “New York” but rather in the woods of Austria, which doesn’t really say a lot more than “Trees!” I could care less about Hydra or the Red Skull character. The former has been done better in every incarnation and the latter should have been left in the comic books.

Let’s not even get into the “Look kids, steroids are OK if you’re heart is in the right place” subtext. I don’t care to read that deeply into this, though I’m sure some offended critic has. It doesn’t bother me, I’ve never been that impressionable, but it is in there.

So I’m left with those two bits at the end, the false finish and the post-credits tease. The best things these movies do is promote the next one — which is ingenious, mind you — meaning you’re paying to sit through the movie and wait for the next commercial. Why do we do that?

Also, I’m coming to the conclusion that Nick Fury is Han Solo. I don’t even know that character, as my comic book readings were limited, but I can see that the story without Fury is just OK. Everything seems to mean a little more when he’s in the shot.

Makes me worry about the Thor DVD waiting at home.