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Fam week

And we’re back! Quite literally. I am in my little chair, which I bought four years ago with birthday money. My feet are up on a stool I made in junior high. My arms resting on my desk, which I made eight years ago.

That seems impossible somehow. And explains why occasionally I wonder what a new desk, a real desk, would be like. I made this out of pallet wood and, in a go-big-or-go-home way, it was the second thing I’d made since … well, almost junior high. And, in some ways, it shows!

But it holds my things, so it is good enough for now.

Anyway, we’ve been out of town the last week. Did you miss me? Did you notice?

We flew out Monday evening to Nashville. We got a rental car from Hertz, a hybrid Kia. Would not recommend it. The car had a Florida tag, so I was Florida man for a week, and drove like it. Would not recommend either of those two things, either.

We drove down to north Alabama, where we visited with my mother for the week. Highlights include, hanging out with her and helping around the house, seeing my grandfather, and rebuilding a closet shelf for him. I also helped him clean out a closet and bureau. I ate more food than necessary — including, in one meal, more fried food than should be approved for anyone. We had Mexican twice, catfish once. We watched football. And so the week flew by.

We also saw a cousin, and his new baby. I looked this up, she is my first cousin twice removed. She’s six months old and adorable. Right after lunch they went to this place that exists just to exist, apparently. It’s there because there are parking lots, and a bunch of little stores surrounding all of this. Inside this building, though, was a little Santa display. Small little setup, great looking Santa. And so we watched the kid take her first Santa pictures, and watched her mother absolutely humiliate herself to make her baby giggle for the camera, which she did. It was beautiful. They gave us a photo.

The place we were at, of course, was a mall. Or used to be. It has some out-of-town owners, and they’ve put up a lot of local propaganda. It is obvious they are trying to learn about the place, and convince the locals that they know about the place. And, I suppose if you’re in need of a visit to Sunglass Hut, Claire’s, American Eagle, Bath & Bodyworks, or Spencer’s, you would see those messages.

This is a small town, but that was a once-proud mall. Now they’ve framed up the stores to hide the empty windows. As for all out-of-time spaces, I try to imagine what this could be. Apartments, pickleball courts, a series of specialty medical clinics, a real and vibrant community activity center. It could host a couple of amazing worker spaces, or museums, or both. Or maybe a business incubator or an adult learning facility. Or maybe it could even be a place where you can buy things. But, instead, it just, is. And stuff like this is hanging from the walls everywhere.

C.S. Lewis isn’t going to help you much with this, mall.

Anyway, the father of the new Santa’s village child model is my cousin’s son. And everyone always thinks he’s like me. Poor guy. Now he’s in his mid-20s and knows everything. Poor guy. And occasionally, I try to impart wisdom. Poor guy. We also exchange music, so I gave him two records — an Avett Brothers and a Ryan Adams record. He played it cool. He better enjoy them.

Also last week, I did a lot of grading. My last two finals came due while I was traveling, or down there. And I wrapped up the assessments for two classes, and submitted the final scores. I still must wrap up my online grading, and get those in. Guess what I’m doing tomorrow.

adventures / Monday / movies / photo — Comments Off
15
Dec 25

No fingers were (seriously) hurt in the production of this post

I was overdue for a trip to the inconvenience center. We take our recycling there. Cardboard in these bins, mixed recyclables in those bins, and so on. I also had to drop off four deck chairs. We inherited with the place, who knows how long they’ve been here, but at the end of a third summer with us, they were showing their age. The fabric was tearing from the aluminum frames, and we upgraded with nature’s IKEA, wicker chairs.

I’d asked the man that runs the place if he would take them, and he, a man of few words, pointed me to this other bin. I said they were aluminum. He pointed to that bin. I said they also had a fabric covering. He pointed to that bin. So, unless he was telling me to jump in the thing, I took that as permission. That was my last visit, some weeks ago. And today was the day. Only, the chairs filled up the vehicle. And we still had the two large containers of recyclables and a small factory’s worth of cardboard we’ve accumulated in the last couple of months, plus some that had been hiding from me in the basement. After some time, we managed to get everything inside, as I despaired over taking multiple trips. It is only an inconvenience center because it is across town. But, eventually everything was ready to travel, and I wished away every police officer between here and there. Surely I was breaking some ordinances about safe transit. Some of the windows could not be used for defensive driving.

As soon as I got to the place, I realized I did not have the community hang tag. There’s a big blinking sign, everyone must present their tag. Mine was in the other car, hanging, helpfully, from the rear view mirror. So I got into the place, backed in as you’re supposed to, and then hustled. Cardboard, cardboard, cardboard, all thankfully broken down already. One tub of mixed recyclables in, a second one turned over and dumped into the giant bin. We are really saving the earth today. By this time, a few other cars and trucks have come in to do their bit for the planet, and now I have to weave around them.

I manhandled these four deck chairs at one time. Not heavy, but ungainly as a one-person job. Plus there’s the bobbing and weaving around Old Man Coveralls who is doing his work. As I got to the bins for the chairs, the one the man pointed at weeks ago, I realized that I needed to readjust my grip so that I could heave and/or ho. This was the point where I pinched two fingers on my right hand. Earlier in this choir I’d pinched the ring finger. It hurt. Here I pinched the middle and index finger. It was one of those slow motion things. I had time to silently say goodbye to the tips of my fingers, thank them for their help over the years, and wish them well.

Before I had time to contemplate life without the top part of two fingers, though, I was able to readjust the chairs, sit them down, and relieve the unforgiving grip of metal on skin on metal.

Chairs deposited. Fingers OK. Hang tag never requested.

That was Saturday morning. Saturday evening we went to the cinema to watch a movie about propaganda, power, and epistemology.

Here’s my review: not as good as the first one, but the story needed to be completed. In fact, in a less cynical and more artistic world they’d just combined the two and call it a terrific movie. I love that these two movies were so devoted to practical effects. Everyone involved was obviously having a great time with their work. I love the way we portray what we think the 1930s thought the future would look like.

I’m still not certain how a hallucination has prequels.

Saturday night, into Sunday morning, we had snow. This is the view from the wee hours, as I was going to bed, thinking about getting up early to go outside. Unless it melted!

It did not melt. It was a fat, heavy snow. We had six inches and change when we went outside. It was still snowing. A few passes with the shovel proved that this job called for the snow blower. So, glad that I retrieved it from the shed yesterday, I filled it with oil, filled it with gas, and we cleaned the drive, so my lovely bride could get out of the house.

She was back before I finished the job, because the roads beyond were still impassable at the time.

All of the roads looked much better by the afternoon. And the sky cleared up beautifully. It was the perfect way to see the snow, from indoors.

The problem becomes the next few days of harsh temperatures. But, hey, I’m inside and warm and the driveway is clear. I’m not sure what else I can worry about right now.

Oh yes, the packing. And winter travel. I’m taking the rest of the week off from the site. Family time begins, though the work continues. I will see you here dashing, and dancing, on Dec. 22nd.

adventures / bluesky / Friday / photo — Comments Off
12
Dec 25

When you have an artist in your home

The way our kitchen was designed, there’s a countertop to the left of the stove. It is a fine food-prep area which is surrounded by a little wall, about a foot higher than the countertop, which acts as a backsplash of sorts. The top of that is also designed as a countertop, and it occasionally holds a cup, or random junk I’ve put on it, or a cat. Beneath these countertops are seven drawers. Three of the large sizes (the random utensils drawer, tupperware and a place to store extra paper towels and ephemera which we’ll wonder about in 2029) and four of the smaller sized drawers, which hold things like Ziploc bags and kitchen towels and so on. This counter top does not end in a wall. Rather, it just sits there, across from the refrigerator. This is the main walk through of the kitchen. And on the exterior wall of those cabinets, facing the fridge, is a chalkboard.

It’s great for positive affirmations, silly messages, a creative place when someone brings a child over and, of course, our very own art.

My lovely bride made that. I suggested, after counting the reindeer, Rudolph’s nose. She went subtle there. I would have played it far too big.

Taking a cue from that, I filled in one tiny little spot later, just to complete the illusion, but also to say that it was a joint masterpiece.

But, really, there’s only one chalk expert in this house.

Grading the livelong day. I finished, last night, the work for my social media strategies class. I wrote them a nice note yesterday, as well. Nice, for them, meaning shorter than usual. I started in last night on grading the final in my Criticism in Sport Media class. A few last night, quite a few more today. I’ll finish tonight or tomorrow.

The exam involved them watching a particular episode of a sports show and answering a bunch of questions about it. Everyone is doing well so far. I am resisting the temptation to think I need to make it more difficult just because. (I could, but I never said stumping people was an objective for that class.) I do know how I’ll do about a quarter of it differently next term. It came to me in a flash today.

So, really, the last two weeks of that class have been hugely productive in figuring out what I need to evolve out of that course.

Also, earlier this week for that class, I compiled a list of accidental answers I received on their last reflection paper. I say accidental because we’d talked, ever so briefly, about how people who aren’t taking a class like this could benefit. How do you help them? So I posed a little question about that and got these sorts of answers. After I read the first few, I went back and started collecting them. If I had to code and characterize it, I would say students are really craving this. Those answers, across the whole of the class, ran five pages. I look at that document of gathered answers and think: we might be on to something here.

In my criticism in sport media course, I asked students to write about the class' value, what they would tell others about classes like this, and media criticism and news literacy.

I collected FIVE PAGES of excerpts. Students are very much interested in this. A sample …

#medialit #medialiteracy

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

"(I)t makes you a stronger, smarter media consumer. It helps you understand the stories you love and it gives you skills that make your own writing clearer and more thoughtful. This course doesn’t just teach you about the media, it also teaches you how to think.”

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

"(I)t honestly makes you smarter about the media you consume every single day…It gives you skills that go beyond sports like critical thinking, analysis, and awareness, which are all useful no matter what field you’re in. It’s one of those classes that actually changes the way you see the world.”

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

"I discovered that media should not be viewed as neutral, but rather as a developed creation. This change made it easier for me to understand that media critique is a way of thinking that allows us to deal with an informative environment much more thoughtfully and responsibly."

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

"I would recommend this class as one of the more important courses I have taken. While this course is centered around sports media, the content discussed in this course is relevant to anyone who consumes any form of media … This has been one of the most practical courses I have taken."

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

"My appreciation for the craft and practice of media criticism has definitely evolved over the course. Learning different ways to break down readings and to think more critically while reading media has evolved my learning and understanding of media criticism."

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

"You should take a class like this because it doesn’t just change the way you look at sports media, it changes the way you look at society … Sports may be fun, but they also reflect big issues—power, race, gender, politics—and this class makes you recognize how important that really is."

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) December 12, 2025 at 3:06 PM

This, and the improvements I have planned for next term, make me excited to get back to this class again. Now, to convince people it should be a regular and permanent offering …

adventures / football / Philadelphia / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
6
Nov 25

It’s a high pitched honking sound, which trills up at the end

A breezy, chilly day. And, later, downright coolish. That’s the season, and that’s a point we must concede. This comes with this season.

In today’s Criticism in Sport Media, we watched “It’s Time.” Here’s a little clip where Billy Brewer talks about how Chucky Mullins got to Ole Miss.

The problem was that I was able to find nine minutes of the doc to skip, but we just couldn’t cut out anything else out and keep the story together. So it ran the whole class. But this will be an interesting experiment. What will the class say when we talk about it on Tuesday?

In my org comm class we talked about different types of conflict, the way behaviorists used to see it, the way we view it today, the structural and contextual factors that create it, and why it is sometimes good.

And then we played a bit of the prisoner’s dilemma. I broke the class into two groups and sent one of them outside. This group played as the Las Vegas Raiders. The other group played as the Los Angeles Chargers. I told them each the circumstance. Last game of the season, if you win, you make it to the NFL playoffs and the other team goes home. If the two teams tie you both make it to the playoffs. What do you do?

I made the groups argue this out separately amongst themselves. I brought them back together to reveal the choices they’d made. This scenario actually happened a few years ago, and some of them actually remembered it, which made the internal conflict a little more interesting. Ultimately, though, both sides decided to play for the win.

This is how it played out in real life.

So one group won, basically. One student rightly noticed that if both groups had been left in the room they could have figured this out. But that’s the prisoner’s dilemma for you.

It’s an applied approach to understanding people and groups, this class, you see.

I took a grad school class with a guy who literally wrote the book on game theory. (There are about 6,000 books on game theory, to be sure.) He talked about it for an entire semester. And so, today, I was laughing to myself about his many ridiculous stories.

After class we went over the river. Had dinner at McGillins the oldest Irish pub in the city. The food was not the best I’ve had at an Irish pub, but the experience was fine. It was just up the street from the venue where we saw.

He does laugh funny.

It’s all one-liners and bawdy dark comedy. He does a lot of good crowd work. And he laughs funny.

Then every now and again he’ll do something very thoughtful, almost philosophical, which gives away the other nonsense. The problem with one-liners, though, is that they’re almost immediately forgotten. But the laughs remain! Even the funny ones.

adventures / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
4
Nov 25

Election Day

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.