Visited with two of my grandmothers today. My great-grandmother recently fell, and had to have rods put in her hip. Modern medicine is so impressive. That’s just three tiny incisions. She’s a nonagenarian and no surgery is a small thing, though. (She’s a tough lady. She had open-heart surgery three or four years ago and bounced right back.)
Today she was sitting in a chair, for hours she said. She walked 15 feet in therapy yesterday. Told you she’s tough.
We had a long talk about the Bible, her example to the family and how much getting rods in the hip hurt. But she’s made of stern stuff.
Spent the evening with another grandmother, who recently had a different kind of leg surgery. Now as tough as my great-grandmother is, this grandmother is perhaps the strongest lady I know. She’s moving around great and in good spirits. And that’s the key.
Me, I groan getting out of the car.
We had dinner from my aunt’s five-star restaurant. It doesn’t hurt that there’s only 350 people and one other restaurant in that town, but it is true. I looked them up on all of the online review spots. You can’t go wrong at Fish Creel if you want catfish or shrimp.
As we were leaving we saw one of those third cousins twice removed who I’ve apparently once or twice before. Also, while playfully discussing the hereditary stubborn gene, I learned a family name I’ve never heard before. I’ll have to look that branch up one day.
Even when you know where you come from, you still find new places that you’ve been.
My office window faces the north, so I have to go outside for views like this. There’s a nice green lot below my windows and I can see when the sun hits that perfect golden angle. It just so happened I had to make a trip today from my building to another part of campus and I just managed to catch the sun exploding through that tree through the lomo filter.
Students were throwing a frisbee on the quad, the hammocks were empty, young ladies were teaching one another an exciting new cheer that involved a lot of screaming. The sun was peeking between the chapel and the theater. I was carrying a handful of books and binders and things and it was just a marvelous scene. I took more pictures for later.
We had baked apples at lunch, which I only mention because I’ve never noticed them in the cafeteria before. Naturally I tried them. Baked apples are very subjective, of course. No two recipes are the same and no one’s are as good as those made by the person that you’re now thinking of.
My grandmother makes the best apples. She would cut up fruit from the Granny Smith tree in her yard — I never called her Granny, but given that her name was Smith it was a long time before I realized that the variety wasn’t named after her. I don’t know all of her secrets, but I know that my cousin and I would beg her to make them. She’d fill up one of those square casserole dishes, the apples, the sauce and a bunch of mini-marshmallows. We could eat them all in one sitting.
These apples weren’t my grandmother’s apples. They weren’t bad. They had a nice cinnamon taste with a mild bleach finish. My grandmother has never had to make apples for hundreds of people, so there’s that. And it got me into the
spirit of fall, so I’ve no complaints.
Journalism links: It still boggles the mind that publishers, who were slow to accept the changes brought about by the world wide web because they were fundamentally losing control of their ability to be one of a few unique voices, have made their bed with Apple where they have willingly handed over control. Poynter reports:
(T)he November issue of Esquire, its second to be made available as an iPad app, has been held up by Apple’s app review process since mid-October.
The November cover story features actress Minka Kelly, who the magazine named the “sexiest woman alive,” and that apparently is the sticking point in the app being approved.
The Gazette Extra, like everyone else, is trying to find the proper way to deal with comment trolls. Because, as the editor says, “some people can’t behave” his paper won’t allow comments on stories about crimes, courts, accidents, race or sex. That particular paper, it seems, has exceeded that point of critical mass where comments are no longer constructive or dialogical. Even in that thread, on a note from the editor about curtailing vicious comments, the conversation veers wildly out of control. Most every big site has this problem.
Cooks Source — the New England cooking magazine that became suddenly infamous for infringing upon the works of online writers, and then snottily claiming that everything online was public domain — has another petulant letter from the editor on their website. Both Facebook pages they’ve set up have been overwhelmed by critics. And now, at their most popular, the little magazine that copies and pastes is closing shop.
And I wish I could give you a link, but the Samford Crimson is unfortunately not putting it online. The sports section has been running a football pick chart this fall. The university president, the starting quarterback, sports writers and other student leaders have been participating. A math professor has led all season.
Videos: Last Saturday when Georgia visited Auburn for their beat down in the South’s Oldest Rivalry freshman running back Mike Dyer broke the great Bo Jackson’s freshman rushing record. Jackson was there, celebrating the 25th anniversary of his Heisman, and had a nice moment on the sideline with Dyer.
This is the video that aired on AUHD, so imagine seeing this on the big screen at the game, and the audio is the crew’s behind-the-scenes chatter. It makes a nice moment even more entertaining:
I love that last line: Memories. That was just perfect, in so many respects. The guy who produces the the big screen programming, Bo Cordle, is leaving. In fact that was his last game. what a way to go out.
This wasn’t quite as entertaining, but I watched The Red Baron tonight. It is a modern adaptation on the career of Manfred Von Richthofen. Like all movies of legendary war heroes, it is told as a love story. Only this particular love story didn’t actually happen. Because the story of perhaps the greatest ace of World War I needed to be glossed over and fictionalized. I hate when that happens.
Meanwhile, here’s actual funeral footage:
Everyone in that footage is also in the ground now. World War I was a long time ago, said obvious guy, obviously. I just started reading this week R.A.C. Parker‘s history of Europe between the wars. The first handful of chapters are about the treaties that ended World War I. This book was published in the 1960s, so everyone knew where this story was headed. Even still, in the first few pages, it is already heartbreaking because of what even then, just months after that funeral, was something of an inevitability.
As is this stack of things I must grade. So, to my red pen I must now go.
Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and today marks the 235th anniversary of the creation of a fine force of warriors. There’s a long line of Marines in my family and I’m thinking of theme today. One of them lost a leg in Vietnam, others served in more peaceful times.
A few years ago we watched a battalion graduation at Parris Island. I spent two years there is a child and watched countless graduations. I don’t remember any of them, but I think of the men I saw four years ago. I think of these young Marines today, and I hope they are safe and still serving proudly.
Semper Fidelis, Marines.
That’s this evening at Samford. Evenings being relative. Three weeks ago that same time was the afternoon. At any rate I was walking from one errand to a meeting and had the best view. By the time I made it back to the office it was completely dark. And that shouldn’t happen.
Spent the better part of my night working on a paper for my media effects class. I wrote, revised, edited, re-wrote and moved things up and down until it didn’t make sense any more. That’s when I quit, having achieved a level of perfection that is not easily reached. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and realize two or three things that I should have added, but you should live by this motto: Print early, never second guess.
That’s a great motto, but hardly a practical one. I’ll continue on with this paper until the bitter end — trying to massage every possible detail into a very finite, five-page space — and hope my professor makes sense of it as well.
Random fun: In 1995 Dr. Clifford Stoll could see no future to this Internet thing. Newsweek, a fine brand today weakened by both content and their very name and now being absorbed by The Daily Beast, published his scribblings:
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Remember, this is 1995.
(T)he Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
Sound like any curators (or journalists or producers) you know?
Then there’s cyberbusiness (sic). We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete (sic). So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
He decries the lack of human interaction, the virtual communities and some sense of isolation.
Dr. Stoll’s Wikipedia page says he’s now mostly a stay-at-home dad and sells custom-made blown glass on the Internet. Good for him.
OK, back to that paper, lest it become an all-nighter.
Cold and rainy, but at least the spiders at Samford can enjoy a drink. Winter is pushing its way in behind this little tantrum of a storm front. We need the rain, but not necessarily the chill. But this isn’t winter. The cold weather isn’t shouldering through, but rather sneaking through with a little nudge of the toe.
The cold air will be brushed aside again in a few days. It’ll be weeks before winter really arrives, but we don’t especially care for the reminders.
While working out this morning I missed a collect call pretending to be from the city jail. No one I know is there. Or no one would own up to it online. Of course, if you were in jail you couldn’t check Facebook. So if you were in jail, I apologize for not being able to answer the phone to bail you out.
If you’re still in jail there’s no need to apologize; you’re probably still not reading this.
Homecoming week at Samford. There’s an extra little bounce of happy in your step on campus. It can’t be helped. There’s an inflatable bull ride in the student center. There’s football and tailgating and plenty of free food for the students this weekend and more. And an inflatable bull ride.
I watched two people ride the bull. The horns were falling off, but so were the riders. Everyone was happy, watching their friends flung into the lawsuit minimizing safety of the airy cushioned walls.
I rode one of those bulls a few years ago at a mall with family. It was Christmas time and we spent the evening doing things like riding inflatable bulls. I figured I would be very good at this. I’ve seen rodeos on television, or snippets of them. I’ve heard tips on how to use your knees.
I lasted about as long as it took you to read that sentence. Other people did better. My grandmother rode the thing. She did very well. It was fun, and humbling. The bull we rode was in one of those empty mall stores, one of those places that looks fire-bombed without any shelves or commerce. The inflatable people were as temporary a tenant as you could have — they sold time on air, of all things — and may have rolled up shop as soon as we walked away as far as I know.
Inflatable operators are the modern carnival operators. You worry less about the bolts and bits and pieces of metal that couldn’t pass a yard rake’s stress test and more about whether that air blower will keep whirring for the 45 seconds you are involved. No one likes to talk about this, but it is always in the back of your mind. Is there a worse holiday tragedy — because inflatables only appear around holidays, birthdays and other celebrations — than drowning in a collapsing sea of rubber?
The inflatable bull on campus, though, was without incident. The horns wouldn’t stay in the fake animal’s fake head. One girl fell off, picked up one and put it back in place. She reached that point where she realized she’d been standing there too long and moved away. The next guy up rode a bull with one punk rock horn.
Somehow that improved the situation. None of this would be memorable if there was cranial symmetry. That the bull spun to his right and you could see a plastic horn, and then spin to his left and you’d see a big gaping hole made the whole thing silly and odd and perfect for a homecoming festivity.
I’m writing a mini-paper for a class, so I must get back to that. The 1939 World’s Fair will be along in a bit.
That’s part of a spam comment I received yesterday. They snare you with the first part of the phrase, a nice little comment meant to appeal to the author’s ego, and then snap you back with the hard realize that this is all just a lie and you are really just a tool for The Man, and we need to get our people out of Vietnam, man! Johnson is ruining everything.
And then the HUAC is re-formed and things get nasty from there.
I was going to really dissect the spam for fun, but something made me Google it. The 2,740 results suggested that this particular Russian server gets around a bit, but it problem isn’t the most prolific one.
Plus, Dr. Jim Pangborn, a English-lit, poetics, cultural and media history scholar has already done the heavy lifting stretches the idea beyond English. Pangborn takes the idea back to Socrates. You could take the thing all the way back to plumage and scales and cilia.
“Mine are better, softer, sturdier more colorful, more bountiful. Whatever you need, babe. Clearly life with me is going to be better than life with that guy. How droll.”
Then the female, having been impressed with the dance and the spontaneous sense of the male’s dance interpretation, takes a chance. And now the male is at the bowling alley four nights a week, coming home late reeking of booze and cigars. And she thinks Maybe, just maybe, the male with less scales or feathers wouldn’t have been so bad after all. She goes to look him up on Protozoabook and thinks Still less plumage/scales/cilia but he is a senior developer at Endoderm, so there’s that.
You never really think of Darwinism with that particular brand of cynicism.
Back to the Lomophotography. I took two pictures today on my iPhone for comparison’s sake, one using the Lomo app, and the other with the conventional technique.
I like the effect, but it is always going to be a novelty to me. I blame the years of rational empiricism training.
Critiqued the Crimson this afternoon. This year’s staff has grown into putting together strong papers pretty rapidly. Very proud. There was one or two minor problems, but I figure if the editors discover them before I point them out they are on the right track.
I showed them the new template for the website re-launch, as designed by the online editor. The mock-up has turned into a working page that will go live sooner than later. Now we begin the talks of more photography, more video, more social media, more, more, more. Dream big, I say, because the answer is frequently yes.
Picked up the Wall of Fame plaques today. They’ll be given out at Homecoming in two weeks. Another good class of inductees, and now I have to write blurbs for their displays. It is no easy challenge to distill a career of success into 30 words. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?
Studied. Read. For class tomorrow I am critiquing Lang et al. (2005) “Wait! Don’t turn that dial! More excitement to come! The effects of story length and production pacing in local television news on channel changing behavior and information processing in a free-choice environment.” This is not the longest journal title I’ve ever encountered.
My professor, an internationally respected scholar and a talented and kind man, studied under the author. (Lang is mentioned mid-way through this spiel from one of my former professors. I recorded that in the spring of 2009, which seems a long time ago now. Indeed, I’d almost forgotten I had it.) I know one of the co-authors. It is a good paper and I can only find three or four things to mention in class tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a worthwhile critique.
For this class I’ve now almost filled two large three-ring binders with papers on cognition, method and effects. My three-hole punch is getting dull under the strain. I didn’t realize you could do that.
More from the 1939 World’s Fair will come along shortly.
