Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
11
Mar 25

First outdoor ride of the year

Yesterday, at the end of class, I gave my students my other bully pulpit lecture. I tell them at the beginning of the term that being at the front of the room allows me to give one or two brief speeches that have little or nothing to do with the class. And yesterday was the day, because today was the day.

That speech is the one about how to pass other road users safely when you’re driving. There are relatively new state laws. People don’t know them very well. I am updating people one room at a time. I have a whole patter about this, because I’ve been doing it for years. I used to do it much more intently.

The whole thing was about being careful to allow cyclists room to safely operate when you pass them. And I won’t tell you what I wear or what color my helmet or my bike is because I want you to be safe and attentive and considerate when you pass all of them them. Because one of them might be me. “And remember,” I used to say in the driest tone of humor I can muster, which is pretty considerable, “I have your grade, right here, in my hand.”

That’s what I used to do, and one semester a student said to me at the end of the term that I’d psyched her out and tensed her up whenever she saw a cyclist. That’s not the point. Nor is it the point to threatened anyone’s grade, of course. It’s a laugh line. After that, it seemed important to point out, “This is a laugh line. But, also, be careful.”

All of this was made much more relevant after my lovely bride’s pickup truck-caused accident in 2022. And it’s relevant since we’ve been doing research in this area the last few months. And it’s relevant because, today, the weather was beautiful and I took my bike off the trainer and put it on the road. (Twenty-two days earlier than last year!) Oh, happy day.

Also it was a momentous day, of sorts. I’ve been sneaking up on this little achievement for a while, and I certainly didn’t want to capture it indoors. So I have slacked off on the trainer, with that in mind. I didn’t really want to do it on a road I know very well, but that’s the risk you run when you are on your normal training roads. Not that it matters, nothing about this matters, but, somewhere, right in here, I reached a mileage equivalent to the earth’s equatorial circumference.

That’s 24,901 miles to you and me. I celebrated by dropping a gel, turning around, and picking it up.

The bullfrogs were cheering me, and summer, on.

In addition to being the first outdoor ride of the year, and the equatorial ride, it was also new bike computer day. New is a relative term. I bought this, used, at the end of last September and mounted it in the cockpit today. The computer I just retired, a Garmin 705 Edge, I bought used in 2020. It was a 2008 release. My new computer is the Garmin 520, which made its way into the wild in 2013, so I’m happily still behind the curve, but it is a half-decade leap forward for me.

And that’s an important five years because the new computer communications with this new light, the Garmin Varia. I got one for The Yankee for her birthday last year, she loves it, and so she got one for me for Christmas. This is no mere light. There’s a radar system here, and it detects approaching vehicles, and then signals the computer, which beeps, turns red on the edges, and displays dots meant to represent the traffic behind you.

It’s a cool little feature. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, you don’t always hear the oncoming vehicles, so it is a nice help. Though you mustn’t think of it as 100 percent accurate. It’s not too bad on false positives, but there seems to be one time of day, if you’re riding in front of a low-in-the-sun sky, that it isn’t perfect. It didn’t pick up the first two cars that passed me on this initial ride today, but I think it caught the rest of them. One extra layer of safety.

What’s nice is that sometimes the headset will beep, because the Varia picks up a vehicle before I hear it. I have developed a three-look technique that seems to help. I glance over my shoulder when the oncoming motorist is well back, when they’ve closed about half the distance and then just before they get to me. And this seems to help them realize that I’ve seen them too. Since I’ve started doing this late last summer, most of my passes have been much better.

But perhaps the best part of the Varia is this. It has different light settings, and I’ve watched this with great amusement while riding behind The Yankee. She leaves her light on a solid setting, but when a car or truck gets to a certain distance away from them, the light starts blinking. Every time, every time, you see the car decelerate and move over.

So if you wandered to this page thinking about bike radar, we’re still in the early days, but big fans of them so far.

Also, because why not, it was new jersey day.

I got a good sale at NeoPro. Full zip, three pockets, they do the job you ask a bike jersey to do, except make me faster and skinnier. They’re bike jerseys.

Now I need to find good sales on bib shorts.

And to go pack. So, if you’ll excuse me.

Monday / photo / Rowan / video — Comments Off
10
Mar 25

Giving you no mis, and certainly no dis

In class today we discussed disinformation and misinformation. There is a difference. Did you know the difference? I recently had a nice conversation with a colleague at Cambridge about this, and I showed one of his videos in class.

It gets down to motive, we decided, but motive isn’t always clearly perceived. And the conveyance of bad information is bad, either way. Happily, my students have a pretty decent handle on the social engineering often at play with disinformation. But there’s always something new to learn. The next time the class meets we’ll discuss some techniques on savvy consumption.

And then we get into the fun stuff!

About time the class sighed.

Just kidding, it’s all fun. It’s an international media class. Coming up after spring break we’ll talk about the Armed Forces Network and sports on the international stage, and advertising and social media. It has all been a great deal of fun.

Almost as fun as after office hours, when I went to a nearby JoAnn’s. They’re all closing, of course, and that’s unfortunate for the people that work for the company and it’s stores, but there’s something about store closings that is interesting to me.

And what was interesting today was how unusually crowded this JoAnn’s was, and how the shelves were already getting bare. But I walked around, saw all of the things that weren’t fabric, and then I bought some fabric. It seemed worth it for an early evening’s worth of entertainment. I’ll make some new pocket squares from them this summer.

It was probably the largest JoAnn’s I’ve ever seen, which is to say, bigger than two or three others I’ve ever noticed. Smaller than a late 20th century major retailer, much bigger than necessary for fabric. I wonder if the kitchen section was somehow part of their problem. Maybe it was the wood craft section. Or the enormous floral quadrant. It seems they’ve strayed, in their pursuit to pursue Hobby Lobby.

I also saw some of the reasons why JoAnn’s has struggled these last many years, the all too familiar considerations that have hit brick and mortar stores of all stripes. The apps on my phone were happy to tell me how much cheaper every comparable brand and product were elsewhere.

It’s a sad feeling, in a bad-laminate-floor-under-worse-neon-lighting way. But, still there were employees straightening things up, moving things around, offering good cheer, great theatrical performers that people are when working in retail. Retail was never easy, but the challenges they face today … it all felt typified by the last dying gasp of advertising that was plastered around the store. “New shipments arriving from our warehouses daily!”

The rapidly thinning shelves would suggest otherwise. Crafty customers of crafts had been busy picking the place clean; there aren’t many reasons to go back.

I know the reasons you come back here. The proof is in the analytics, and the analytics say the most popular feature on the site is our regular check-in with the kitties, which starts right now.

Poseidon has to follow you everywhere, especially when that place is behind a closed door. So when his honed feline senses tell him you’re heading to a door, he’s there. And in this case, he had to get into the bathroom so he could jump on this rickety MDF cabinet top and be taller than everyone.

He is very pleased with himself in that photo. Sometimes you try to keep a cat out of things, but other times, you’re just too tired, distracted, slow, or you remember that look they get when they’ve conquered the unconquerable.

For Phoebe, it is different. Her race is to find the coziest spot possible.

I respect her dedicate to her craft.

So, you can see, the cats are doing just fine. And so begins another week, one like any other, but different in every way.

What does that even mean? I’ve no idea, but we’ll find out together, in this space, this week.

Friday / memories / music / video — Comments Off
07
Mar 25

Re-Listening: One of these has a notorious Star Trek reference

Apropos of nothing, I just sneezed. Some sneezes you can feel coming from a long way away. Sometimes you can sense that a sneeze will be arrive tomorrow, at about 1:30. The lining of your nose gets that first tinge. “There’s something in here!” signals are sent to the brain. The brain fires off memos in triplicate to the body. “We’re going to do it!” Your eyes shut, the tongue moves to the roof of the mouth, and the muscles brace. Sometimes it happens in just a few seconds, or 25 minutes.

That’s not the sneeze I just experienced. This sneeze was a bit closer to the seeing-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes tinged with a bit of “What am I going to do after this, if my nose stays on my face and my organs stay in place?”

There’s no metaphor here. Just the one sneeze, come and gone. Sometimes the nose needs a reboot. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a low-brain reaction to a sternutation.

I’m about 14 CDs behind in the Re-Listening project, so let’s make a small dent in that deficit. If anyone can remember back that far, the Re-Listening project is something I’m doing in the car. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.

I decided, since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” I thought, back when I did that sort of thing. “I can pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.” And I did that, until I kept forgetting to do it, at least, which is how I’m so far behind right now.

So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998. This was a record that wasn’t meant to be a success, but a 1996 single got a lot of airplay and a Grammy nomination. And then the record was certified gold the next summer. And that happened to Duncan Sheik who was used to playing small venues, and suddenly he was on much bigger stages, which was a surprise for everyone, especially the singer, who saw that one song stay on the charts for a year, after peaking at #16. It spent 55 weeks as a radio hit, which was one of the longer stays on the chart at the time.

But there was more to the debut record than just the one single. There were two other singles! And a lot of deep cuts. Probably I picked this up after the second single, “She Runs Away,” but I don’t recall for sure. It was almost 30 years ago … a sentence I find I am now saying a little too often.

Anyway, when I popped this into player, I was hooked by the second track. (It sounded great on big wooden speakers.)

Why did we ever move away from those large speakers, anyway? Everything sounded better. And nothing was re-compressed by an additional layer of digitization.

And, look, that first Sheik record was pure singer-songwriter pop. Except for the parts that weren’t. But he did like to incorporate his vocal range all over the place.

At various times, when I had to do such things, Sheik’s music was a good vocal warmup. Sing along on the way to the studio and all that.

There are 11 tracks on the record, I liked 10 of them, and eight of them still hold up. Sheik has released eight other studio albums and a live record, but none more commercially successful than his debut, which did hit number 80 on the Billboard 200. He’s probably OK with that. I got the impression from interviews that the unexpected success was a little overwhelming.

These days, he’s performing as a writer and composer on Broadway, where he’s won two Tony awards.

I’m sitting here looking at the next disc trying to decide how I have this false memory. The record was released in 1998, just another power pop, post-grunge alt record. And the overriding memory doesn’t fit that timeline. I went to high school, and once worked with a guy who was in a local band. I saw them play, just another group of kids who were inspired and he’d sing the big hit, but he did a cool vocal trick in one spot where he’d sing on top of the note in a key spot. It was just enough different that now, when I think of or hear the song, I hear it his way.

Only, I didn’t work at that place when the single was a single. I hadn’t worked there in probably two years. So how does that memory even work?

Beware of memories, I guess.

A few years later I got an out-of-the-blue email from a mutual friend and it turns out that that guy was going to go to jail for a while. He’d gotten drunk and climbed into his house through his bedroom window, only it wasn’t his window and it wasn’t his house. Extremely common name. No idea what became of him.

Anyway the band was Semisonic — and I mean that made the record, not the band of the guy I knew. “Closing Time” was the single everyone knew, of course, and it was a big hit, climbing to 11 on the US Radio Songs chart, four on the Pop chart, topped the Alternative Airplay chart, 13 on the Mainstream Airplay chart and so on.

But, and I realize I used this above, there was a lot more to “Feeling Strangely Fine” than the one single. The second single, from August of 1998, is a terrific little pop number which found its way into two top 40 charts. I always liked that it was a song about listening to a cassette. It was charming even to me, a slow music format adopter.

Then, as now, there was no way this piano — a keyboard, really — should pair up with that bass sound.

Whenever I picked this up, I don’t recall that either, I listened to it for a good long while. It got heavy rotation during the year of driving back and forth from Little Rock to Birmingham. This was a good late night, empty highway song.

I don’t know your feelings about this, obviously, but I think we all need a New Year’s Eve song. Here’s one now.

There’s one song another song on here that I’ve always liked, but I can’t listen to it, because the weird way the singer treats the chorus is too catchy. It’s just days and days of this, when you play it. You’ve been warned.

That was Semisonic’s second album. They produced two more studio records and a live album. And they’re still at it, touring the U.S. this summer with Toad the Wet Sprocket.

That’s enough for now. The weekend is here!

cycling / Rowan / Thursday — Comments Off
06
Mar 25

I lost a (slow) race!

Today was the day I was to put my contracting packet behind me. I’ve worked on varying versions of this for weeks, and I reached the finish line, both in what I could do and what I could tolerate, last night. It’s a helpful process in several respects, but it is also time intensive and there are other things I need to be doing.

So I went to campus today because a colleague who is on this particular committee wanted to see what the new CMS the university is using looks like. He’s been frustrated by the rollout of the new process, which is function of where you are standing. Most of my confusion with the process has been of my own doing. There are a few things that they’ll improve on for future versions of this process — you have to go through this every few years — but that will surely improve. My colleague’s perspective shows him some other things. The guy is a rock star, and he’s been incredibly helpful through this whole process. It might not be that every department has a guy like him to help the new people, which would be a shame. He’s definitely been a huge and helpful part of this for me. So I brought him an afternoon coffee and we sat down to look at the new upload system.

I stopped at Dunkin. And then I couldn’t get into the parking deck at work, so I had to drive around while his coffee cooled and looked for a parking space. I wound up parking some ways away, and walked in, while the coffee kept cooling. I assume that’s what it does. I don’t know anything about coffee. And, really I just wanted to get to the office on time and get my packet uploaded and move on to anything else.

The new uploading system we were testing has been perhaps the easiest part of the process. Even still, there were a few unexpected things. Nothing that can’t be overcome. Also, they had my title and department wrong.

So I couldn’t complete the process. Perhaps tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day I will put my contracting packet behind me. It better be tomorrow; the thing is due tomorrow night. It’s complete, and the only thing left to do is upload the files. Most anyone can do that and I am what they call tech savvy.

Not sure why we call people such a thing.

1785, slang, “practical sense, intelligence, knowledge of the world;” also a verb, “to know, to understand;” a West Indies pidgin borrowing of French savez(-vous)? “do you know?” or Spanish sabe (usted) “you know,” the verb in both from Vulgar Latin *sapere, from Latin sapere “be wise, be knowing” (see sapient). The adjective, of persons, is attested by 1905, from the noun. Related: Savvily; savviness.

I guess that’s why.

Anyway, got home, took care of about three weeks worth of email, and then celebrated by doing … not much else today, and enjoying the reflective glow of having this behind me.

And then I went downstairs and basked in the glow of the Zwift screen. I decided to try a race. I think I’ve done three races, now. The first one I don’t even remember. I did one a few weeks ago in a group I had no business being in. The field split up right away and I managed to come in at the front of the second group, with two other people who were pushing me on the last climb.

Today, I chose a flat course, and I followed Zwift’s suggestion. The game will tell you where you should be racing based on your recent performance. And based on my performance I should be in the category that’s one step above physical therapy.

When the time came to begin the group all spun into action together and I found myself right at the front of the ground. I took a photo for proof, because who would believe it?

Second place! I stayed right up front for about seven miles, about 70 percent over my threshold and wondering how long I could stay there. The answer is: about seven miles.

The front of the field left me behind, I faded in the last mile and the next group came up to race me to the line.

And then I rode on for another 10 miles, at a much slower pace because it turns out I was also under-fueled, just to see how long it would take to lower my heart rate. Not too long, it turns out. That’s cardiovascular quality for you. Where it went in the last few minutes of that race we’ll never know.

And the long-range forecast suggests that next week I might be riding outside!

photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
05
Mar 25

Just work

Last night, and again earlier today, I finished putting together the last of my notes for the day’s lecture. We talked about journalism in places like Europe, Kazakhstan, China, and Russia. You might think that’s too much to do in 75 minutes, and you’d be right! But we touched on some things. They asked some questions. Shared some thoughts.

The sun was out. The sky is getting warmer. Spring Break is beginning in 10 days. Touching on some things, asking questions and sharing thoughts is a great goal. So mission accomplished, I guess.

Immediately after class was over I sat down in a committee meeting, which ended soon after it began. So I went to a group function and met some new students and had a pretzel.

My primary mission this evening was in finishing this packet I’ve been working on, off-and-on, for weeks and weeks. It’s done. I have written about this stuff all I care to, which is how I know I’m finished with it. All I have to do now is agonize over it some more. And convert the whole thing to PDFs.

Tomorrow I’ll go to campus and submit the thing. I’ll spend the next several days wondering how this managed to take up so much time. It was mostly my fault, which is why I’m glad to have finished the thing, and with a full two days to spare.