Wednesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Wednesday

Stuff and things for Wednesday

A few people actually asked for this on Twitter — can you believe it? — and so I’ve compiled this list in Storify. It is found elsewhere on the site, but that just isn’t good enough. Your requested material should be everywhere. It started on Twitter, of course, but the biggest problem is that Twitter has a very temporary nature. Storify will, presumably, be more permanent. And I can edit it for later. So, then, here is the famous Twilight Twitter commentaries:

The Yankee tells me the next movie is set to underwhelm everyone 17-years-and-older this fall. I’m sure she’ll go. If so, I’ll go along to make fun of the thing on Twitter (I do it for you, Internet) and then put it there.

I’m beginning to like Storify. It makes sense, though I wish it would do a few more things, which would also make sense given what it is trying to be. But that’s the nature of things. I’ll take my mile now, you charming little free service.

Follow ups to things mentioned recently: The New York Times has have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars. Did I mention that in it’s present form the paywall is hardly daunting? I get my Times from Twitter, so it is free to me under this odd scheme. Meanwhile, USA Today is revamping. There’s promise and trouble there, I’d think. Their online presence will be the best part of their recently unveiled strategies.

About Libya. Scrambling, stumbling and fumbling. Oy.

The story here is that a guy stills a laptop from a young computer whiz. The guy then apparently recorded this video of himself and the victim tracked it all down through the power of ~~cheese~~ technology.

And finally, a guy I worked with in Little Rock years ago put this on Twitter today. Apparently that’s his great-uncle cutting Elvis’ hair. He says his grandfather swept it up. No word, yet, on whether anyone stashed it for the eventual creation of e-bay.

So, there, I have three degrees of separation from Elvis and my friend Grant Merrill has a really cool family story he’s probably heard all of his life. And Elvis hair, lots of Elvis hair. He’s just waiting until his daughter goes off to college, and then he’ll sell it off for tuition money. Grant’s a multimedia mogul now. Very impressive.

One day, when I need a loan, I’ll remind him of that time he crashed on my sofa.

This got me looking for an aircheck from the late, great Ray Lincoln who was simply one of the best people any of us ever worked with in radio. I only knew him at the end of his career when his health was failing, but his mind was razor sharp. In his prime he did a show where he performed two people, Ray and Ram, at once. And he did it well, I’ve heard snippets and the thing was amazing. Later I wrote a little copy for him and pitched to him as he did horse track picks. Lincoln was one of those guys who could do a lot of things well, and he was regarded as one of the best handicappers in the country. As was typical, he did that as a character, too. Sport Jackson was a no-nonsense personality and it was just inside the man. He was a method actor without a stage.

KTHV, when Lincoln died a few years back, did the best obit piece you’ve ever read, mostly because the man was one of those people you could imagine has existed anyway:

In January of 2000, deteriorating health forced Lincoln to quit full-time radio. His condition would worsen until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. “They cut me open and did six bypasses. They were gonna do five and I found out if they do six, you get the cell phone and the Internet and the dish.” His condition would deteriorate until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. He suffered six strokes which left him incapacitated and he was in dire need of a heart transplant. Lincoln was kept alive by a machine called an l-Vad. Eventually though, his family was faced with a decision. Lincoln explained in 2005, “It was not looking good. So, we had decided on Thursday, come Sunday, we’ll just turn this machine off.” Suddenly, there was a donor heart available that was a match for Lincoln. “This kid, his name was Dwayne Compton, 26 years old. He was killed in an automobile accident December 11th and the next day, I got his heart,” Lincoln says. “And his heart is in my chest right now.”

And they included quotes that probably are more in keeping with the character Ray Lincoln conveyed on air:

“The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long, plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

“Do I get credit for using those words? Look at my contract. I get a 50 cent bonus for large polysyllabic words that are obscure and seldom used except for people who are erudite and urbane.”

I didn’t know him especially well, but he was always a decent guy and a great talent. Sadly, there isn’t any audio of his to be found on the Internet. This is an oversight.

We’re going to Little Rock this weekend for a conference. I must resist the urge to try and remember stories to tell. I was only there for a year, after all. But I certainly met some characters.

Auburn / baseball / iPhone / journalism / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
19
Mar 11

I can’t believe it is already Saturday

If you left it to some media outlets you’d think the South was still living in the 1960s.

But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.

His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.

With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.

Mr. Crawford’s work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one.

That’s a neat piece, don’t misunderstand. But let’s also be clear: the latest development in that particular story is Crawford’s death, last July. Everything else dates back two generations.

The reporter certainly has her share of accolades, but she’s from California and Alaska, so maybe that’s the problem. Every time you send another person South they have to gain some sort of institutional history and the Civil Rights Era is one place to start. Certainly this is a worthy era, but it discounts more than a little about what has happened in this region, you know, in more recent decades.

Just off the top of my head there’s biomedical research, medicine in general, automotive growth, the transition from heavy industry to service industry (which would be a nice follow up after the typical Civil Rights, five decades-old reporting), more corruption and governmental unscrupulousness than you can cram in a newshole and so on.

None of these things will ever be covered by that particular newsroom. Doesn’t fit the narrative.

One more journalism note. I foudn these three headlines grouped together. Google calls it an algorithm. Really, this is irony:

Arianna And AOL CEO Tim Armstrong Teach Journalism Class At Brooklyn Middle School.
AOL to De-emphasize Journalism, Focus On Brand.
Huffpo Claims Its Bloggers Aren’t Writers. Is That True?

So I guess my one recent visit to HuffPo might be my last. We’ve seen AOL brand things before, and this is just going to get unfortunate, I’m afraid. Shame, too, they have been massing together a lot of resources and talent, but if the point is just to get the logo on my browser, I’m going to be less and less interested.

Meanwhile, from the Middle East, comes a fascinating insight into life in Syria:

Syria recently gained the unpalatable title of being the most restrictive Middle Eastern country for internet censorship, formally held by Tunisia. Syria blocked (and still blocks) a number of sites ranging from pornography to Kurdish websites. These restrictions however are not uniform and inconsistencies such as blocking Hotmail but not YahooMail are not uncommon.

More or less every internet cafe I visited (albeit these were in the more touristy areas) already had the settings changed so that a proxy computer, usually in Saudi Arabia, was used so the public were free to browse banned sites at their leisure. There were even computer programmes that people would pass around to find a new proxy number should one stop working. Sometimes I had to ask for the proxy to be put in which the staff would do without a bat of the eye.

[…]

Speaking to my friend recently he told me people are still frightened because although these sites are now allowed, the internet is still heavily monitored and the rules may change at any time. As there has been no official announcement of the ban being lifted, predicting the mood of the regime is difficult.

The full piece is definitely worth a quick read.

More baseball today as the Tigers looked for revenge against the visiting Arkansas Razorbacks. The bases were loaded, Kevin Patterson had been in a mini-slump, but he’d been hacking away like someone kicked his puppy. And then the pitcher grooved one which wound up behind him, about 385 feet in his bullpen. That grand slam helped the Tigers win 9-5.

Also, they had fireworks.

(That’s from last night, but they go better with a grand slam story than an extra-innings loss.) If you’ll watch the video there’s something a little different in the second half.

books / family / friends / iPhone / links / photo / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
16
Mar 11

Sadly they did not have strawberries

I made a video of our visit to the farmers market this morning. Enjoy.

The most important thing about this video is not that I shot it on my phone, but I edited it in the car on the ride home. After that the iMovie app offered an update. The description sounds promising. Can’t wait to see it in action.

I promised you two stories yesterday.

Here’s the first: My longtime friend and radio mentor, Chadd Scott, lost his job at an Atlanta sports talker this week. He was stuck in St. Louis, stranded by Delta and weather. He tweeted about it, Delta took offense and, being sponsors of his station, put a lot of pressure on his employer. So they fired him.

This is regrettable, but everyone in the business pretty much understands the tough spot the station was in. Less excusable was Delta’s overreaction. Here’s why. He tweeted about it on Tuesday and the power of the Internet took over.

He started that day with about 800 followers, and now has almost 1,200 as of this writing, but that’s not what is important. I collected his original tweets, minus one, which he deleted for his former employer, and the next nine hours of original tweets and posted them on Storify.

If you don’t read the entire thing, I ended with the important part. The last 50 tweets mentioning @chaddscott and thus, Delta, had (at that point) reached 19,113 potential airline customers, creating 22,711 impressions.

So this is unfortunate for Chadd, but he’s the kind of guy that lands on his feet. You don’t build the fastest growing syndicated show in the country as he did a few years ago or work at ESPN for two of their top shows as he has done without being the kind of talented person capable of landing on your feet. While no time is good to be out of a job, now especially so, Chadd’s going to move on to bigger things.

But poor thin-skinned, corporate Delta. The guy had a few jokes, sound observations, really, and a few people online saw it. Now he’s going on television, thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw this and, apparently, are making travel decisions around it. (And as soon as my already-booked next Delta trip is up, I’ll be sure to figure this into my personal calculus.) If they can’t figure out when to have deicer at which airport they might not be worth my money, either. Also, they did my friend wrong.

Here’s the second story: I went to a local bookstore last night, a Hastings. We don’t seem to have another one around (that isn’t attached to the university). I remember when this Hastings arrived, when I was in college. it was a novel thing, then, because they had books and music and movies. But only mildly novel. They had some of all of those things, but other places had more of any one given thing.

The writing was almost upon the wall then, but there’s no mistaking what it says now. These stores are dying, at least the ones that aren’t dead. It was like strolling through a video store — Can you still do that in your town? — the only thing you need is the preservative fluids.

Finally found the biography section. Two entire sets of shelves. Amazon has a few more selections.

Not much of a story, but Hastings, I learned, has used books. Then again, so does Amazon. I hope the place makes it. Towns need bookstores. College towns should have more than one. Several people work there and they have at least three chairs for sitting and reading. Also, they have free coffee, so if you need a fix, that might be a good place to try.

I don’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t say.

Worked on what will become a new section of the site. I’ll give you a hint:

Give up? That’s from an old 4th grade science book. It was published in 1940. It belonged to my grandfather. I have a few of his old books and I’m scanning the fun pictures for a small extra section of the site. Not in this book so much, but in one of his high school literature books, there are notes in the margins. I get the impression that he was a funny kid.

I’ll try and trot out part of that section next week.

books / iPhone / LOMO / photo / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
9
Mar 11

Rainy and busy

Rain, lots of rain. Even the radar doesn’t know what to make of it. I tried to time my dinner in between storms and managed to get caught outside in the rain twice. Only one line had shown up on the radar. So that was just lovely. If you’d been standing outside for the last two or three days you’d find somewhere between five and eight inches of rain on your head, depending on your neighborhood.

Beware of falling exclamation points. They may strike you on the head, whereby you may then slip on a pile of bacon.

They think of everything on our campus, really they do.

Samford named a new athletic director today. He’s a Samford grad who’s coming home from Kentucky. The paper came out with a story on his appointment just as they held the official press conference. On the same front page you could see the women’s basketball team. They’d just won their conference tournament and secured their first berth in the NCAA tournament. Meanwhile, the debate team has won a top seed in the national debate tournament. Also, the mock trial team qualified for their national tournament. And the Brock School of Business named a new dean.

Been a nice week on campus.

Meetings with the boss, the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, the web editor today. Also phone calls with a person carrying the impressive title of operations manager. Another with a camera repair expert. And another chat with my dissertation advisor.

At lunch I read through Remini’s The House through World War II. At dinner I made my way through Korea and into the Eisenhower administration. He had an interesting one-paragraph final analysis of FDR through the prism of the 22nd amendment. I think he misreads Eisenhower a bit. (Or maybe my understanding does not comport with the esteemed historian. This is more probably the case.) It is a fine book, if you find yourself thinking about history or about the House of Representatives. And I know you do.

Curiously, though, I find I was more intrigued by earlier eras than what it has to offer for the second half of the 20th century. I’m sure it is a case of the untouchable mythology of some previous period when compared to the high water marks of Newt Gingrich and Tip O’Neill.

(O’Neill, by the way, served for the second longest period as House speaker, behind only Texas’ Sam Rayburn. The pictures of Mr. Sam, as they called him, don’t look right. To me he’ll always be James Gammon (at 34:08) or, in a pinch, James Gammon. That’s what you get watching made-for-television movies before you read about the real people. But reading about them is always more interesting than the screen version.)

Maybe I’m ready to move on to the next book, which was a gift so promising I moved it right to the top of the list. Maybe next week.

Which is Spring Break. Which is already booked solid. And that’s lovely, too.

That’s all for now. Check out the LOMO blog, which features a new update that dates back to the 1950s. I’ll have something else there tomorrow. Look for at least one thing on Tumblr tomorrow, too. And, of course, I’ll see you on Twitter as always.

Hope you have a great, productive, busy and dry Thursday!

errands / journalism / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
2
Mar 11

About being out

Churned through the remainder of my stack of papers to grade today. I’m now all caught up, which seems a small miracle when I considered the pile of things to work through.

Also had a sit-down with the boss today.

Had a meeting with the editor-in-chief of the paper this afternoon where we critiqued this week’s edition of the Crimson and started thinking about the last six issues of the year. They go by so fast, but I’m always proud of how far the staff progresses in that short amount of time.

Had a meeting with the sales manager, too. She’s selling things that need to be sold. That makes everyone happy. As a salesman friend of mine says, though, you can always sell more. Sales: not for the faint of heart.

All of these things seem safer than my errands of late.

Know what else isn’t? Walmart. I went there late last evening and, I can’t recommend it. I like to compile a short list of things to seek out, lest I feel I’m braving that parking lot for only one item. Two things — a garage door switch and a particular type of bottle — I could not purchase there last evening. A third I decided against. That worked me down to cards and candy. This is why I sat at that weird light and made an almost-unprotected left turn.

Also it means I’ll have to visit a home improvement mega center later in the week. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, because it might be worth a full-length essay all of its own. Come back Thursday or Friday for that.

Just as fun, though, was taking my life into my own hands tonight. I’m walking from a parking spot across a lane of parking lot traffic to get from car to the door at Jason’s Deli. A car is coming through the parking lot lane and accelerates toward me. This was shocking to me as I am not in a drama/action film, but merely a mild-mannered professor carrying a book about the history of the House of Representatives. (Really, this is the person you’re aiming at, dude?)

Fortunately his aggression was all for naught. He was driving a Volkswagen. If he had more than four cylinders that could have become messy.

Which makes you think, high speed accidents will decrease when we all inevitably buy those magic unicorn cars. Incidences of road rage will skyrocket because it’ll take you four minutes to clear an intersection, but there are always trade offs in life.

Like this. I’m going to end this now so I may begin watching The Tudors. I’ve just finished the first two discs of Rome, Season Two (see how I deftly avoided the Roman numerals there?) and am in a television period piece frame of mind. I’m so comfortable with the notion of period pieces I won’t even mind when they obviously veer from history to try and tell a tale.

(But I’ll surely tell you about the egregious oversights. For example: Henry isn’t this young when these things happen. But look at those clothes! It must be legit!)