If you’re here for the Catober bonus pics, this is the day for them. I have six photos here, the ones recently captured, too late to include, too delightful to ignore. These photos are our thanks — mine and Phoebe and Poseidon’s — for taking part in Catober all of last month. And if you didn’t — the very nerve! — you can click that link and see them in reverse chronological order.
These bonus photos are in no particular order, but the last one is from my lovely bride, it’s just about the cutest thing you’ve ever seen and is my all-time favorite Phoebe pose. (And she has a lot of great poses.) Please enjoy these, and thank you again for being a part of Catober. (More words are below.)
We had a governor’s race, and plenty of other things lower down the ballot. So, for the last several weeks I’ve been giving all sorts of info to my classes. Registration tips and deadlines. And then early voting links and, finally, the Election Day and the last big push. Make your voice heard! You are a part of one of our largest voting blocks! Politics, friends, is definitely interested in you! And, finally, if you’re in line when the polls close, stay in line and vote.
And then, like me, you can wonder how the local TV stations and YouTube will get by for ad revenue after today.
I, a person who studied political campaigns in grad school and covered (in some way or another) every campaign between 1996 and 2020, have never wanted a campaign cycle as badly as I wanted this one to end. On teevee, there’s a guy who looks like he can barely complete a sentence. And he’s running ads of his opponent doing the same. Her ads are all about a helicopter. Apparently she is a rotary aircraft enthusiast. On YouTube, it’s my local state lawmaker and there really should be a button that allows me to say “I know you. We’ve met. I like you. I’m going to vote for you. Please, please spend your advertising budget courting other people, because you’re wearing me out, to the point where I’m questioning my preferences.”
That’d be a big button, sure, but it would be worth it.
We drove over to the polling place, where I thought about that button while I pushed other buttons. We have electronic voting booths here. (I do prefer the old fill-in-a-bubble style, myself.) It took us a while to get there because there was some significant car accident that required two detours to get around. The voting was done in a municipal garage. It had the smell of grease, industry, and democracy — long may we have all three.
There were four folding folding tables set up. Two for each district, and then divided by names. Lacking any real originality, I went into the line that held the S names. I told the lady my name, and tried to sound convincing doing it. She asked for one other bit of information, as a verbal challenge to cross-reference the legitimacy of my being there, and I concentrated really hard to not stumble through it. She took a blood sample, a bit of hair and a retinal scan to complete the interview. Meanwhile, her colleague, a gentleman even older than she, pushed forward a paper pad. I had to sign here and print there. I’d just signed the digital screen, poorly as it turned out. Before she could take it back I was able to see my official signature under the new one. I’m surprised they let me vote at all, given the discrepancy. I worked really hard on the paper version, because someone will flip through that in a library or archive one day, and you’d like to be legible for that. (No one is ever going to scroll through digital signatures, let’s be serious about this. When all of this was done, and I explained to them the first 16-layers of my family tree, I was given a little key card. Put it in the slot arrow first, and leave it there until you see the green check mark.
Wave it in front of the screen and don’t leave until you see purple stars, got it.
We make these systems as simple as can be, and for good reason. People don’t see all the details, get in a hurry, get forgetful, they’ve never used a device like this before or, at best, once every few years. And some of these ballot selections require two votes. And what if your finger shakes?
Anyway, I voted. I took my little key card back. I thanked them both again, just as I had when I signed in. The enthusiasm of polling place volunteers is absolutely unmatched — Long may they come back and do this important work.
Now, we’ll just wait to see who wins these things.
(Update:Just an hour-and-a-half after the polls closed, a gubernatorial winner was declared. And the loser is now a three-time loser. After this drubbing, and it was a drubbing, it is safe to say the state has rejected the notion of him as a political leader.)
In my criticism class we discussed this story, NHL player Brad Marchand misses practice to fill in for junior hockey team after coach’s family tragedy:
Florida Panthers left winger Brad Marchand is missing time on the ice with his teammates to help out a friend.
Marchand, 37, offered his hockey expertise to the March & Mill Co. Hunters team on Wednesday, Oct. 29, by filling in as the team’s coach. The team’s usual coach, JP MacCallum, took time off after his 10-year-old daughter, Selah, died of cancer, per Marchand’s Instagram post.
Marchand missed the Panthers’ 3-2 Tuesday, Oct. 28, loss to the Anaheim Ducks after taking a leave of absence from team to attend Saleh’s funeral, according to NHL.com.
It was a simple curated piece, as you can already tell. I don’t think the class picked up on that as a whole, but we should notice these things, particularly as we undertake media criticism. What are the strengths of that style of writing? What are the weaknesses? Why isn’t this guy’s whole outlandish career (because he was that guy in his early days) also not included here. Was it a rehab piece? No. Was it a profile? Nope. Nowhere near complete enough for that. But it was something worth seeing and talking about for a few minutes.
This piece is a bit older, but the guy in it just retired, and it was a nice contrast to the hockey item, so why not? Malcolm Brogdon knows his impact can extend well beyond the hardwood:
After the 2014 season, during which Brogdon averaged a team-leading 12.7 points, 5.4 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 1.2 steals in 31.4 minutes a game, he and his brothers joined their mother on a trip to Brazil. Adams had been working on an international science training program there and decided to bring the boys along for a family trip where they could all experience another country together as adults.
There’s a joke among the Brogdon boys that Malcolm has no personality. Mostly, it’s a result of John’s and Gino’s strong personalities swelling over Malcolm’s, but it’s also a result of Malcolm’s intense focus on his goals.
“Sometimes I sound like Allen Iverson when I’m trying to get him to go out with us at nights,” Gino says. “I’m like, you’re talking about not going out because of practice. Not a game, but practice. But we did manage to get him to go out with us a couple times in Brazil.”
When Brogdon saw the poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro right next to hotels that he knew would make hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the Olympics and World Cup in the following years, it solidified in his mind what he wanted to do after basketball—start a non-profit or NGO (non-governmental organization). “After basketball is over, I want all my energy to go to that,” Brogdon says. “That’s my true passion. I want to transform people’s lives in third-world countries—give them clean water and food.”
This piece was more in the mold of a traditional profile. We also have the added benefit here of looking back, 10 years on. He seems as impressive a guy now as he did then, already devoting his post-basketball life to clean water initiatives had when he was running up and down the court.
In org comm we had a casual sort of day. The best part of it was an elaborate teamwork exercise. I broke the class into three groups and put them all on a deserted island. They were able to salvage a few things from their vessel before it sank. There was a huge list to choose from, and I gave them a very small amount of time to figure out what they would take. They encountered a deranged person, driven mad by solitude on the island, who was going to escape, and they had to bribe him with one of their salvaged items so that he would tell others where they were. They had to figure out how to feed themselves, how to treat their wounded, and so on. And then a big storm came along and they lost more of their items. Finally, weak and hungry and everything else, they had to use their remaining items to signal a passing plane for rescue.
They all made it off their respective islands. And this was my entrance into the next several days of class, which are about conflict and negotiation. For purposes of the story I’d told them that the crazed person they met was a prominent campus figure, putting the publicity shot on the screen. I said the fate of that deranged individual remained unresolved, and he was never seen again, that got an odd reaction. Tough room, I guess.
Think I’ll stay off boats and islands for a while, just in case.
