Rain, which we need — we are in an extreme drought, meaning crop and pasture losses and widespread water shortages or restrictions. Or at least in the literature. According to the Southeast Regional Climate Center‘s 2011 State of the Climate (PDF) two metrics, the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) and the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) suggest the dryness in the region throughout much of last year hasn’t been experienced since the early 1980s. They note this period is “comparable to the dryness experienced during the drought years of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s.”
Not that you’d know it by media coverage or water consumption. That probably sounds preachy, but it is meant as an observation. There are slides in that climate report that compare today to the 2006-2008 drought, when cities put out traffic signs urging you to conserve and then the 1998 to 2002 drought. Where I worked toward the end of that period one town created a water use hotline. If you saw people wasting water they asked you to call and report it. People could not wait to tell the police about their neighbor’s luscious lawns. It got so chaotic the police closed the hotline.
You don’t even hear people talk about it this time.
Me? I’m just ready for the neighborhood pool to open.
So it rained a lot today. We live in an area that with a sandy loam soil. We’re right on the geographical border of the Appalachian plateau and the upper coastal plain, so it is dark in places and sandy in other places. And today the water stood on it. When you can make water stand on sand for more than a few minutes you’ve poured a great deal of water on it, .84 inches today.
So that kept us inside. The baseball game was canceled hours before they played it. There’s a doubleheader tomorrow.
Today, just hours and hours of spreadsheets. I think I did three or four hours, which is really six weeks in spreadsheet years.
At the end of it all I had a wonderful example of the truism that this is an age of being able to find information. Once, a few centuries ago, some people knew everything. Not many people, but a few folks had the essence of the sum of human knowledge. Enter Gutenberg, more academies, schools, science, the Enlightenment and the benefit of Flintstone vitamins (brain food!) then things became really expansive. Before long a single issue of a good newspaper, supposedly, had the equivalent amount of information of our ancient polymaths. Once it was what you know. As we learned in school it is: what you know, what you can cram and what you can find in the card catalog.
Of course, these days it is what you can find on Google. Or, as my friend Ike Pigott says, you find it in your network. (And, thus, it is who you know, it will forever be who you know. That’s really the network he likes to talk about in his presentations.) Pigott is coming to speak to my students Monday, so I’m riffing here on some of what he presents. But the important part, these days, is that you know how to find information.
My example of this, was in trying to find a solution to an Excel problem. I was combining four different spreadsheets, removing the superfluous cells and making everything line up nicely. The bigger chore was removing the redundancies. Some of these lines had the same names and contact information. I searched on Google for something like “removing duplicates from Excel.” My Googlefu is strong because I’ve built enough pages and sites to write them both as a designer and a reader. In a game where finding the right word combination is the key I’m usually a big winner.
Only this search was giving me the typical Microsoft tutorial written by a committee of technical writers. The phrase you need is “conditional format unique values,” an expression of bland words grouped together, whose mere existence can wring the life out of any joy you had on a rainy Saturday, and that is before you skim the tutorial. I’m not interested.
I asked my lovely bride if she knew how to “conditional format unique values.” Being a very smart person, she does not know because she has no use for such phrases, I’m sure. But, being a very smart person, she said “Why don’t you just sort alphabetically and delete the duplicate rows?”
(See? That was all about who I know, who happened to be sitting in the same room. I networked well on the homefront.)
I was coming to that idea, actually. I’d had the idea and got sidetracked by this paragraph:
Filtering for unique values and removing duplicate values are two closely related tasks because the displayed results are the same — a list of unique values. The difference, however, is important: When you filter for unique values, you temporarily hide duplicate values, but when you remove duplicate values, you permanently delete duplicate values.
Sometimes asking Google is not the easiest answer. Sometimes you need your own personal expert. That’s the power of your network. From now on I’ll just ask an Excel question aloud. The look I receive from someone who thinks it a stupid question can’t be worse than reading stuff like that.
video / weekend — Comments Off on Joe Greene, still taking gifts from strangers 11 Feb 12
Cold. So cold. Made all the worse because all of winter has been so delightfully mild. It isn’t even terribly cold, he said as the wind chill hit 14 degrees in the late hour, the skin just isn’t prepared for it. The last time I went out, to fetch Chinese take out, the wind chill was a balmy 19.7 degrees.
The first sound I heard today was the neighbor’s daughter’s basketball goal falling over in the driveway. There was a breeze this morning. So let’s do yardwork!
The Yankee is spreading soil and removing old debris from one of the flower beds. We’re tilling. We’re digging. We’re removing rocks. It’ll be in the 60s by midweek. This is a hard time of year to figure.
We are simultaneously under a hard freeze warning and a fire weather warning.
And now, a comparison of two Joe Greene commercials.
“Mr. Greene … you played a great game. As a demonstration of my appreciation I’d like to offer to help or, failing that, insist that you enjoy this Coke in the hopes that its restorative powers help you find your A-game in time for next week’s matchup, at which time I will see you again.”
“Hey kid!” Toss jersey, jingle out.
“Mr. Greene? Mr. Greene?”
You’re a bit older and harder of hearing.
“Want my Downy Unstoppables?”
I make awkward faces while I try to stretch this container into people’s laundry rooms or, failing that, into people’s subconscious.
“Really. You can have it. (That’s what the cue card says, Joe!)”
Joe takes it, sniffs, so amazed by the smells that the angels begin to drown out the stadium crowd.
She turns, “See ya around.” Clearly bummed because a few generations ago Joe Greene just gave his jerseys away. And this would be a terrific e-bay opportunity. But no. He has to smell the darn Unstoppables some more. It is like they are … unstoppable.
Clearly, she’s pouting twice as hard as the kid in the original. (The football legend says, in a making of the commercial interview, that the kid was disappointed because he only intended to share the Coke, but Mean Joe Green drank it all.)
Realizing he is typecast, Greene tosses the jersey once more. But the scent is too strong — her olfactory nerves having intercepted the odious game time exertions — and she throws it back.
He waits half a beat and looks into the camera. “Last time I’m doing this.”
Read: “I’m in the Hall of Fame, and I have six Super Bowl rings. But I wanted to buy a nice gift for someone and this came with a hefty check. Stop trying to recreate this spot in jetways.”
Instead of pictures as we usually have in this space on Sunday I’m embedding my favorite commercials from the game. Tonight’s winner: ad agencies. Tonight’s loser: other ad agencies.
In reverse order of my personal favorites, and because I needed a sixth:
I’ve mentioned here before my love of nostalgic commercials — and if you didn’t read that specifically you might have guessed it by other context clues — and there were a few nostalgia spots. This one was the best, because it was produced by people that understand their product and know the place where it belongs. (Budweiser missed on their nostalgia pieces. Toyota’s was fine, but it was more of a personal nostalgia than a historic one.) So this one wins:
I do enjoy the irony that the last thing you see before “making the next century safer” is the attempted horse collar tackle, which is one of your more dangerous and banned parts of the game.
The local ad, supposedly shot with Hyundai’s employees in Montgomery, with Mary stealing the show:
And since we now need to cleanse our mind of Gonna Fly Now, I give you the best song in, perhaps, the worst commercial of the night. They lost all of America with “It’s got a pen? This is awesome.” They redeemed themselves mightily when the bizarrely unforgettable Justin Hawkins is found standing on a San Francisco street corner, being his over-the-top self and somehow warping the continent to be in four cities at once:
That song made it to nine on the Billboard, the album climbed to 33. It was top of the charts in the UK. They may never do anything that gets popular attention — a new albums is forthcoming, Wikipedia says — but The Darkness will always have one of the great pop tunes to their credit.
After the game Chevrolet teased this video. I surfed over, found the page down — the television audience visited en mass, perhaps. When the servers found their footing again there was the newest OK Go video which is, naturally, incredible. Stick with it through the end:
That’s one of the most involved musical performance art acts of all time, a foley artist in desperate need for an award or possibly both.
My favorite ad actually aired just before the game. And it was apparently released last fall. But it is real and emotional and does not feel the need to be outlandish to be outstanding:
What were your favorite ads? What did I miss? (I missed most of the second quarter.) Tell me in the comments.
About 30 employees of the former New York Times Regional Media Group were notified Friday that their new employer, Halifax Media Group, has decided to lay them off and offer severance packages. The other 20 were offered positions, but only if they relocated to Daytona Beach, Fla., where Halifax is headquartered.
A letter accompanying documents distributed Friday said Halifax “has reviewed the company’s Tampa operations to see where additional efficiencies can be achieved by eliminating or consolidating certain job functions and operations.”
Employees “who were offered a package were told that they wouldn’t be given severance if they speak to the media or publicly discuss the situation,” said one source. A second source confirmed the confidentiality clause …
There are more cuts on the way:
Those local news organizations also have their own journalism and sales staffs, who can expect to hear more lay off news over the next month or so.
By the terms of the sale, Halifax could only lay off a maximum 10 percent of the 2,000-person staff, but that requirement applied only to layoffs that occurred at the time of closing.
Selling those properties to Halifax only did so much good for the New York Times. While their paywall has been somewhat successful GigaOM says it doesn’t come close to closing the gap. “Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.”
And now that I’ve found three stories to slow down your Saturday, here’s this reason I love the Internet: Jedi Betty White.
I watch Golden Girls from time to time, I’ll admit it. I can’t stand the theme song, but if I can jump into an episode after that I’ll be hooked for the duration. White’s character is really the only one I never especially liked, but watching the actress is a different thing. Estelle Getty’s character has always been my favorite. Rue McClanahan was always on the periphery to me, Betty White played the comic relief. Bea Arthur held it all together, and sometimes tore up the room. Here’s the end of a great speech at the end of the fifth season premiere. She’d been blown off by her doctor and then saw him out at a fancy restaurant where she confronted him:
It is the sort of thing you think about when someone you care about talks about their doctor and whether they like him or her. The camera pulls and Dorothy goes back to her table and there’s Dorothy setting up the comic relief, and Sophia stealing the show, as she often did.
I’m certain that clip has made its way around to restaurant managers, however. You might need to find your own solution when you get stuck in that spot.
Visited the local bike shop today, which I do believe is about two steps down from going to a coffee house. A few less chairs, a few more expensive products, but everything else is the same.
The Yankee is two-thirds of the way through a bike fitting — centimeters matter, particularly when you’re talking about long rides and various stresses and strains on the body. This is a multi-step gets the process, a by-feel mixture of what the bike expert thinks looks right, and then several rides where you go back and tell him what this infernal device is doing to your back or your shoulders or what have you. Once you get things well fit you can feel like a rocket. Until then you’re just tinkering and trying to find something that doesn’t make you miserable.
I did mine myself last summer. She said my knees were spread out all over the place so I moved the seat post about eight microns over the course of a weekend until I found just the right height. When I found a place that didn’t strain my knees or over-burden my upper body I wanted to launch fireworks and mark that spot in a paint that the world’s worst CSI agent couldn’t miss: Place Seat Here. Mine probably isn’t perfect — my bike is a little small for my build, after all — but nothing especially hurts.
And, as I told the owner of the bike shop today, lately it feels like I’m not riding my bike so much as going along for the ride. I’m holding on more than propelling the thing. It is a nice feeling, silly as the explanation sounds. Bill Strickland calls it the flow:
a discussion of the merits of such a route will ensue, incorporating concepts such as traffic, slope, wind, sun, gravel and the ever-ethereal and thus impregnable defense of “flow.”
I’m the “flow” guy, by the way.
This is inane behavior, I know. But it is important in the way that things that are absolutely without importance are important.
I think Strickland and I are on the same page, at least. If you find Strickland’s flow — which sounds like a submariner’s geographic map notation — maybe you can get to what Jean Bobet called la volupte:
The divine surprise comes when you discover that beyond enjoyment lies the thrill of la volupte. The voluptuous pleasure you get from cycling is something else. It does exist, because I have experienced it. Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity. It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions. At the risk of raising eyebrows, I would maintain that the delight of cycling is not to be found in the arena of competition. In racing the threat of failure or the excitement of success generates euphoria at best, which seems vulgar in comparison with la volupte.
The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.
I wonder if the guys in the local bike shop have read all the great French philosophy on cycling and — oh, he’s going to answer my question now.
I had two, actually. One about chain maintenance, to which he whipped out a tool from the sky above and told me how to build a clock that runs on bike chains. You can’t help but like this guy. He’s just so passionate and giving with everything he knows, and he knows plenty. My other question was also about the chain and how mine seems to have a “Shift, Dummy” signal. He pulls that tool out again, a silver boomerang shaped thing that is not unlike a dipstick and shows me another function. He tells me what I’m describing could be one of three things, or just me being in the wrong gear.
I’m not a very good cyclist, I keep telling you this.
The Yankee, meanwhile, has her bike attached to a trainer. The back wheel is slightly elevated so that she can pedal and work the gears and the front wheel is in a giant plastic contraption designed to keep her in one place rather than crashing through a handsome wall of ultimately vital, expensive brand name accessories.
They adjust, tinker, reset, and we’re all just chatting away about geometry and ergonomics and you’d not believe how many different terms they bring into cycling just to mystify the casual listener, or how many ways I will analogize the things he is saying just to make sure I have it all right in my head.
We talk about warm ups and routes and races. He races. He has more than one pair of cycling shoes. I do too, they are called the tennis shoes I ride in and the the tennis shoes I learned very early hurt my feet when I try to ride in them. (Those are now simply my gym shoes.) The Yankee builds a good pace and pronounces the fit worth trying. She picks up a few accessories. Her bike is now once again fancier than mine.
Back at home, as the day is beginning the long slow sigh into evening, we decide to go for a short ride. We have about an hour of daylight and she wants to try her new clipless pedals. We do a few laps on the empty street in our neighborhood. We pass the little boy who lives next to us, intently focused under his Incredible Hulk helmet and pounding away on his training wheels. I cruise by him quickly, hoping he likes speed, and chuckling that it might concern his mother.
The Yankee and I decide we will ride our bikes through the neighborhood and back up one of the more popular routes in town to the local grocery store. We need charcoal. If we both go one person can stay outside and watch the bikes. I pull out one of those ridiculous drawstring backpacks that we picked up as a promotional gift at a swim meet figuring it might hold the charcoal on the way home. One day those backpacks might hold extra water if I find myself making a really long ride in the summer. A quick visit to the store will be a good test.
We head through the neighborhood, down the hill, through the stop sign and out through the entire subdivision, two people on bicycles laughing like crazed people on bicycles. We can’t do this ride leisurely, because The Yankee has new equipment and wants to test it. Also, we are competitive.
Around the part where all of the old ladies live, the ones you can unfortunately startle if you pass by their house when they’re out to get the mail, we’re streaking along at what is, for us, a good pace. Sprints are relative, dear reader. She has an extra gear in her bike, and perhaps an extra something else when it comes to short distances. I do well to stay on her wheel. But when the hills come — we have moderately sloping hills, nothing massive at all — I can create some distance between us.
I settle in at a nice pace and beat her to the grocery store, but I know I won’t for long. Her new equipment, the bike shop guy said, is going to give her another mile per hour on her average. The gear is a great equalizer. (I, suddenly, need new gear.)
She stays with the bikes. I go inside and find a seven-pound bag of charcoal. I think the 12-pounder might fight this drawstring backpack, but let’s work up to that. I pay. I’m in my full cycling kit and no one at the store even blinks.
“Can I bag this for you?” one of the employees asks.
“Can you put it in this one?” I pull off the blaze orange backpack and he doesn’t hesitate. What do you have to do to give these people pause?
We head back home. In this direction that popular road is more like a drag strip, which is why it is so popular in that part of town. I put my mass forward, which is now even greater with seven pounds of briquettes strapped on my shoulders and cruise down the road. This is a straight path, the first feature being the turn back into the intersection, a 90-degree right-hander that is never a problem.
Unless you’ve changed your weight distribution. What I can normally do from my bike lane into the right-hand car lane now takes up every inch of asphalt. There was no diving into that corner. It was more like watching a big glop of something sliding down the back of a spoon. Not especially viscous, not in any way pretty. Then more sprinting, the last of it really, for soon the remaining route turns into an uphill push back home, which sits up higher than everything else in the ZIP code, apparently. At least it feels that way on my bike.
Just before the bottom of that last sprint is a roundabout, which offers the most technical aspect of this particular ride. You have to swing to the right to get into it, even from the bike lane, but then swing back to the left to avoid someone’s well manicured lawn. But you can’t do that too early, because there are potholes and bent bike wheels waiting for you if you do. Also, I have charcoal on my back. It doesn’t interfere with my riding — I didn’t even notice it on inclines — but it is certainly impacting my swooping.
And I like swooping.
I make it home with no more difficulties and feeling confident I can carry a small amount of dead weight on my back while riding. The Yankee rides up soon after. I note the times on our computers, just in case it is the last time I get back before she does. I’ll want to remember this moment, because it was a great day.
How great? I didn’t even mention the morning yard work, which could not diminish it, with all of its attendant scratches and scrapes and cuts from the flower bed. That’s how great.
This is the weekly opportunity to post a lot of pictures that haven’t yet landed elsewhere on the site. Here’s a handful, there are even more in the January photo gallery.
One day one of the gymnasts will leap into the air and forget to land:
Look at the expressions on her teammates’ faces in the background:
Nobody has more fun on the floor than Bri Guy:
In the Hunt Seat arena. Horses jump things there, and this is currently the extent of my ability to comment on the sport intelligently. I’ll have to fix that:
I’ve never seen Nosa Eguae anywhere around town where he didn’t have a handful of people come talk to him. He likes equestrian events, too, apparently:
Oklahoma State’s team is called the Cowgirls. The name is bejeweled on the back of their outfits. It was in juxtaposition of all of their serious, championship-caliber riders. You can just see her championship belt buckle in this shot:
Stop! This is part of the routine:
On today’s big bike ride, mile 20, middle of nowhere and feeling fine:
At 26.4 miles in I’ve already gotten lost, figured out where I missed a turn and thought to myself “You’ve always wanted to see what is happening in Crawford. Press on …”
Here’s Crawford in a nutshell, an unincorporated community of perhaps less than 1,000 people, it was settled in 1832, as Crocketsville. A few decades later the state legislature changed the name. It boasts one of the oldest Masonic lodges in the state. A prominent church was built in 1910 using bricks from the original county courthouse. You can apparently see some of the workers’ (slaves mostly) handprints in those old courthouse bricks now making up the church.
Didn’t see that church, I was going in the wrong direction. Not sure about the history of this building though:
Nothing happening at the local co-op, about 34 miles into the ride:
I don’t know if the church planners put this place up with an idea of how the sunsets would play, but it worked out for them:
This next picture is 41 miles into my ride. I’ve been here before — behind where I’m standing as the photographer there is a gas station full of nice people that sold me Gatorade one hot summer day last year — but I didn’t notice this advertisement:
It is safe to say this mural is pre-1980, when Texaco drilled on Louisiana’s Lake Pelgneur and accidentally pierced the roof of the Diamond Crystal salt dome beneath the lake:
Within seven hours the entire 1,100-acre lake was empty and two drilling rigs, a tugboat, eleven barges, a barge loading-dock, seventy acres of Jefferson Island and its botanical gardens, parts of greenhouses, a house trailer, trucks, tractors, a parking lot, tons of mud and trees and three dogs had disappeared into the sinkhole at the bottom of the lake. The whole scene was described by witnesses as resembling a draining bathtub with boats bobbing around like toys before being sucked under. About 30 shrimp boats that were in the canal were beached as the canal emptied into the sinkhole, and were refloated later when the lake and canal refilled with water. Nine of the eleven barges would eventually pop back to the surface. Amazingly, no human life was lost in this spectacular accident.
What does that say? I haven’t been able to afford exterior paint in 30 years? No one has come along and offered to make it say “See Rock City”? I really like salt and my sodium levels are unfortunately high?
I wanted to do 60 miles today. This is with about 14 miles to go, and it was the last I would see of the sun:
I managed to get 52 miles. It was dark and cold. When you can’t see the bumps in the road you call it an evening. And then you put on several layers to warm up.
