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30
Nov 11

Christmas arrives, Beeker sings

He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good
so shop the endcap for goodness sake.

Those are foam stickers, Santas, presents, stockings and trees. They have the thin white peel-back paper and will stick pleasingly onto some clean surface for exactly four days, three if there is any curvature of the stuck upon surface, 36 hours if you do it more than a week before Christmas.

There’s something about that Santa Claus’ face that is unnerving. How can he see me? How can he knows? His eyes are closed. And yet he still has that wan smile. Maybe it is the economy. The strain of it all is probably getting to him too. Like in this story:

The result is a Christmas season in which Santas — including the 115 of them in this year’s graduating class of the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School — must learn to swiftly size up families’ financial circumstances, gently scale back children’s Christmas gift requests and even how to answer the wish some say they have been hearing with more frequency — “Can you bring my parent a job?”

Santas here tell of children who appear on their laps with lists that include the latest, most expensive toys and their parents, standing off to the side, stealthily but imploringly shaking their heads no. On the flip side, some, like Fred Honerkamp, have been visited by children whose expectations seem to have sunk to match the gloom; not long ago, a boy asked him for only one item — a pair of sneakers that actually fit.

“In the end, Santas have to be sure to never promise anything,” said Mr. Honerkamp, an alumnus of the school who also lectures here. He has devised his own tale about a wayward elf and slowed toy production at the North Pole for children who are requesting a gift clearly beyond their family’s price range. “It’s hard to watch sometimes because the children are like little barometers, mirrors on what the country has been through.”

And if that story doesn’t tug on your heartstrings, I present to you the Press-Register’s Neediest Families, like the Colemans:

The 33-year-old Prichard native says that it takes a lot to keep them smiling. And even as she battles sickle cell anemia and struggles to support Ashley, 7, and Michael, 14, she believes that with a few key breaks, her household will come out OK.

Cooking, for example, is an issue since Coleman has only a microwave and hot plate, but no regular stove.

Or the Hodges …

In June, 51-year-old Norman Hodges saw a doctor for what he thought was a pulled muscle. Testing revealed lung cancer.

The five months that followed were filled with chemotherapy and radiation treatments, sudden paralysis, long hospital stays and severe complications from infection. The father of two passed away at home on Nov. 2.

It’s not even December yet, and those stories just grow more and more heart-rending. I read them all when I worked at al.com. I’ve read them all every year since.

The building in which I work, the best I know, is now 54 years old.

Not much has changed over the years. This shot was from last fall:

There’s probably no way of knowing how many roofs have been on the building in those decades, but there’s no getting around the need to fix at least portions of it now.

The layout is a bit unusual. As the building stretches back out of the frame there are second-floor wings on both sides. Those roofs are flat, which does not promote drainage. And water freezes nicely on it too, as you might have noticed if you were on the site last February:

My office, on the third floor, commands a view of the second-floor wing roof on one side. Walking to the stairs on the front end of the building shows the other side, where the leaks are.

Today they’ve been destroying the old roof coating, which appeared to be a tar-based material. There’s been precisely rhythmic hammering — you could gesture, like a conductor, and keep perfect time with the worker — and some sort of mechanized tool. If anyone on that side of the building got any work done this morning you should be impressed.

But we worked anyway.

Later. The promotional sticker on the CD case calls it the “greatest Muppets soundtrack ever.” Track 11 is “We Built This City,” so I doubt that claim.

To your everlasting amusement, however, the Muppets Barbershop Quartet covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

You should be singing that for a day or two. You’re welcome.

Alabama / Auburn / football / history / memories / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Nov 11

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!

photo / Storify / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off
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.

Auburn / football / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / Samford / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
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.

Auburn / movies / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
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.