Time for The Yankee’s big race. Today marked her second aquabike and the first of the season. We were up before sunrise and out at the race site hours before the sun finally appeared. It was gray and cloudy and the water was cold, but she was swimming. Better her than me.
This is the starting line. All the different color swim caps mean different race groups:
This is the first guy out of the water. He was moving very fast:
Here’s The Yankee’s heat. She’s somewhere up front:
A few minutes later came out of the lake after her 600-meter swim. It was a short run up to the transition area:
She’s off on her bike for a quick 13.8 mile ride. She’d pass these other ladies right away:
Meanwhile, here is the amateur group starting their race. This group also includes the handicapped competitors. Imagine swimming around a lake hauling a floating raft and then biking and running around the town. Those guys were awesome and their teammates were all smiles:
Remember that first guy out of the water? Here he is back from the cycling leg and getting ready to run. He isn’t even in the park yet, let alone the transition area. Look at his feet:
He’s already out of his shoes. He’ll hit the transition area and then sprint off for his 5K, which he’ll finish in about 18 minutes. It is a sprint triathlon, after all. Here’s the first woman back in from her bike leg:
Not too much later The Yankee came back in after a great ride around John Tanner Park:
And all of that earned her some bling. Here’s her silver:
After the awards we packed up, hit Chick-fil-A on our way out of town and got home in time for a nap.
Her medal is hanging over the sink which means, I think, that I’m doing the dishes for the next several days.
The Yankee is racing on that tomorrow and I was doing the scouting work. The opening rollers can get you. Your eyes will deceive you. Watch out for that pothole. When you get here shift up. You’ll ride along the top of the hills, so pedal hard.
Gear up when you hit that stop sign. Crush it here. Be careful of that intersection, it feels crazy on the bicycle. Get over your gears on that roller. When you come back in toward the park sprint the last leg. I was breaking 30 through there.
Tomorrow she’ll do her second aquabike, a swim-ride race. Last year, in her first one, she took third place. And now she has another 600-meter swim and a 14-mile ride at John Tanner State Park in Carrollton, Ga. It boasts 28 acres of lakes, the largest sand beach of any Georgia state park and the nicest state park restroom I’ve ever seen. And also really, really cold water in the swimming area.
Things are still unseasonably cool, which feels great in general. But if you have to swim in it at 8 a.m. probably is a different story.
John Tanner was a local business owner who opened and ran the park from 1954 through 1971, when he sold it to the state. Actually it is now a county park. Even better. The state was going to close the park in 2012, but it went back to the locals instead.
The ride felt slow to me, I started cold, I hadn’t eaten enough and I’d gotten right out of the car and on to the bike. But my computer disagreed. It said I had a fairly nice pace for my first time on that route. Nice for me, put still slow, we agreed.
That’s OK, because pasta for dinner! We found our way to a Carrabba’s after noting the local Mellow Mushroom was closed and avoiding the many Captain D’s that seem to populate that part of the world.
They are presently offering a menu that includes seconds. They know their audience, namely, me. Only they brought out both plates at the same time, which didn’t make me look very good I’m sure. Joke’s on them. I still had bike grease and tire dust on my face, apparently.
Badges of honor, I say.
George Jones was nothing less than the greatest country music singer that ever lived.
Not much else to say after that. This week’s YouTube Cover Theater features covers of the timeless, brilliant George Jones.
Charlie W. uploaded this video from Belgium today:
Sitting on a porch with crickets buzzing in the background, playing a pretty Gibson Hummingbird and singing about drinking. That’s a George Jones tribute if ever there was one:
Jim Arkus here says he heard the news and sat down on his porch and put this cover of The Door on video:
There are a lot of Jones covers popping up today, and so their traffic is necessarily low. This one has been up for more than a year and I do not understand how it has less than 200 views.
The Opry dedicated their show tonight to Jones, who became a member in 1956:
George Jones had number one singles in four different decades. He marked 26 albums that charted in the top 10 and 72 singles reach such lofty places.
George Jones gets the final word, of course. This was a title track in 1985 and still a fan favorite a decade later, when he performed it in this 1993 concert. It reached number three on the charts as a lament and a criticism and it is even sadder today:
OK, Merle gets the last word, because it is likely the truth:
It took almost three years, but ol’ Harvey Updyke proved the only thing he’s ever been capable of proving, that spirit goes beyond a football game, that a place is more than a jersey, and heart is more than a scoreboard.
Saturday was the big day, the last roll of the old Toomer’s Corner oaks. It was orchestrated and planned and monumentally huge. (The Auburn equestrian team, which just won a national championship of their own, will get the final honor.)
Thousands upon thousands of people were there. They stood chest to back and shoulder to shoulder and that crowd jammed the corner and the four roads. Everyone had a great time, coming away with that old familiar feeling: this is a family reunion.
For some people it was a refutation of a malignancy of misguided fandom. For others it was an excuse to have a party. For all, it was an opportunity to hear what comes next. Now that the old oaks are coming out of that spot, ending a run of about 75 years, there is plenty to look ahead to.
But Toomer’s Corner always taught me to look back. You didn’t get too many rolls dropped on the back of your head as a freshman before you learn to always be on the lookout. In a way, this too was an opportunity to look back at the fine spirit of something we’ve long enjoyed.
I’ve written about this for The War Eagle Reader and for the Smithsonian and a few other places. I’m always trying to capture this feeling, share the sense so that those who aren’t lucky enough to be there can find their place in it too.
The problem is that whenever you do this, it always comes off as hokey and cheesy. How do you explain this small town thing? This silly little thing that amuses us, that we look forward to, that we’ve lately lamented and, Saturday, celebrated beyond comparison?
The best way to understand a culture is to figure out why the important things are important and why the small things are important. To ask yourself why these things are so is to find all of the silly answers. In this case, it is the celebration of a victory, which started either to emulate the old telegram system that used to send home news of games from far away, or a spontaneous celebration of the joy of having too much toilet paper. There are several theories and apocryphal stories about how and why this began, but let’s be honest, it is just fun. The tradition started out as rolling the trees after big road wins. Today this is a way to continue the game, the event, the championship and the celebration of a moment after the moment is gone.
It is the place where we say “Meet me at Toomer’s Corner,” which means a whole lot more than ‘See you there.’ Town and campus come together here, the corner where everything meets, where we make the 400 yard march from the stadium to the place where we celebrate some more. You see old friends, make new ones and take pictures in one of the happier, more laid back places you can be. This is where the chants and cheers don’t stop, where the players come to join their classmates, alumni and fans.
Toomer’s Corner also taught me to look down. My favorite thing about rolling Toomer’s has always been watching the tiniest Tigers. College students often yield to children in this place where parents let their little ones actually play in the street. They have the run of the place. They’re flinging rolls, they’re turning themselves into Charmin mummies. They’re climbing on the gates, up the surrounding trees and receiving the gift of extra rolls from the big kids.
The picture above was from the 2010 national championship. That was the last time I rolled the corner; that was a memory, a fine one to end on. We make our memories, but we make them for others too, that’s what is happening when Toomer’s gets rolled. These days I catch rolls to give to children, the younger the better. It is more important to me to build their memories.
I like to take visitors, because if you can’t write about Toomer’s Corner and make sense of it, you surely can’t tell someone about it. You simply need the experience. I taught my wife how to throw a roll of toilet paper. She figured it out just in time for the 2010 SEC championship.
I’ve had the good fortune to take my mother a few times. She gets in to it despite herself. A few years ago we treated my step-father to his first football game and his first trip to the corner.
My in-laws came down for their first game in 2010, a quiet non-conference game which was unlike anything they’d ever seen up north. Rolling Toomer’s is unlike anything you see most anywhere, too.
Family, friends, everyone comes away impressed, and that’s after those cream puff games. “You have to remember,” I solemnly tell them “that the degree of rolling Toomer’s Corner is directly proportional to the importance of the win.” They imagine and wish they were here on those nights when covering great distancesyou can find the toilet paper covering great distances
One night I popped a flash on my camera as people rolled the corner and I could see the tiny cotton particulates of celebration floating in the air around me, two blocks away from the trees. That’s a fervor.
Toomer’s taught us to look forward, too. This is just the tip of the experience, but all of Auburn has a way of growing into you. The farther away you get, the more deeply it ties itself to you. The longer you’ve been away the closer you hold it. You’re just starting something here, but you’ll carry the place forever.
Below are the gates. The men that put them in place were staring down a world war, and some of them would go off and find themselves fighting it in the next year. But first they had to finish things up here, and the class of 1917 had to build that entryway. (The eagles came later.)
Saturday we learned that, in the new plan for Toomer’s Corner, the gates will stay in place. And that’s maybe the best news of all. For all that Auburn can be it is important that we always remember who she was before us.
Here’s why: what she was defines who she’ll be. What we become is dictated in some way by what we were. I think of Auburn as an instrument of potential, but as Toomer’s Corner regularly demonstrates, it is also about spirit and heart.
I wrote, two years ago, the day we learned this day was coming, “Auburn and her family are stronger than oak and more sturdy than history. We’re going to say “Meet me at Toomer’s” for generations yet. The power of dixieland is going to be just fine.”
Saturday went a long way toward proving that right, but it is no prophecy. The clues are all around.
We’re all little dots in the immediately famous helicopter shot. We are all the central players in the more narrow perspectives we hold on from the ground. We’re all in those moments from years ago, frozen in other people’s photographs. I always study those pictures with wonder. Where is that woman now? What does that guy do these days? We’re all in the photographs yet to come, too.
There will be more trees. There will be more times when police officers playfully stand there and let the kids roll them, more times where people watch and dance from the windows across the street. Someone is always going to be willing to shimmy up the poles that hold the traffic lights in place. There will be more parents and college students and guests all delighting in the fun silliness of the thing.
At the biggest moment any of us could imagine, I was fortunate to stand under the old trees with my beautiful, talented wife — who I turned into an Auburn woman in the course of a single tailgate, who later joined the faculty — and celebrated a national championship with thousands of friends:
That’s a great memory, but not hardly the best. And Saturday, we were reminded once again, that this has never been about the trees, but about all of those people, our people.
I presented a paper this morning titled “Hail to the Chief: Comparative Presidential Face-ism on Online News Sites.” The abstract reads:
Past research demonstrated that visual displays demonstrated varying facial prominence, known as face-ism, among varying subjects with respect to race, gender and prominence. This paper compares the face-ism score of President Barack Obama on prominent news web sites in the early days of both of his terms. The analysis is timely and relevant as the nation’s first African-American president comes to power and constitutes one of the few studies on face-ism online. Results indicated that facial prominence of the president yielded a moderately low score on the face-ism scale which suggests that the editorial choices are reflective of stereotypical scores with respect to race rather than his powerful and prominent position.
Or words to that effect, anyway.
There are numbers in that paper, which is a great way to start a Saturday morning.
In the very next session The Yankee and I presented a paper we creatively titled “Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Virtual Watercooler? An Analysis of Election Night Conversations on Twitter.” We looked at hashtags and what was going on under #Election. She discussed the theory, I talked about more numbers and then read some of the interesting examples from our case study.
These things happened over the course of the evening’s election coverage. In more than 11,000 tweets with #election in that period between the polls closing and the end of the immediate coverage we found:
52 #GOP
47 #Republican
80 #Democrats
45 #Dems
512 #Romney
1,095 #Obama
30 #Mitt
32 #Barack
147 #CNN
47 #NBC
47 #Fox
30 #ABC
2 #CBS
2,992 @ symbols (Conversations.)
205 RTs (Sharing others’ tweets.)
2,487 links (Sharing media.)
21,447 any # (Indexing attempt or punchline.)
120 #Florida or traditional abbreviations
157 #Ohio, or OH
67 #Pennsylvania or traditional abbreviations
All of which is to say that, with the framework of social identity theory — your self-conception realized through your perceived membership in a relevant social group — we can see how formerly passive television viewers and newspaper readers are now not only taking active roles in conversation, but they are using primary identifiers to organize themes, which suggests a fair amount of implications for audience fragmentation, political activation and raises questions about “unofficial” hashtags, harnessing those results and forced versus voluntary interactivity.
Mostly, I enjoyed reading the tweets that we captured for the study. Here are a few I shared with the audience. These are direct quotes:
Dear Todd Akin, I do believe you suffered a legitimate defeat #inyoface #Election #legitimaterape
I feel like you should have to be 21 to vote. Some people just vote for the coolest name #YouDontKnowAnything #Election
The tone of PBS’s election coverage is basically Suck it Romney — Big Bird wins! Hilarious! #Election
Who at #NBC decided to put an #Election results map on the ice rink? Was Jack Donaghy involved in this?
This whole #Election tracker business turned our civil governance process into the highest stakes Fantasy Football game ever played.
I don’t tweet much.. But I hope @JohnKingCNN shuts up… You are so annoying.
Damn this girl on ABC is too fine! #Election
i used to have faith in my countrymen. now that i know my countrymen can be bought w/ phones and biRTh control, not so sure…#Election
Interesting dichotomy: Obama strong in swing states, Romney strong in states that snap their fingers out of time. #Election #Dems #GOP
Romney of Massachusetts might have won this. Romney of Tea Party, 47%, Ayn Rand, Benghazi blather, false Jeep ads… Not so much. #Election
Tuned into Fox News and was surprised to see that they harnessed the power of time travel and brought in Ben Franklin to cover the #Election
But #Romney holds firm in Cayman Islands and Switzerland. #Election
Obama 2012 campaign just announced it will unleash drones over Pakistan to celebrate re-election. #Election
i want to create a burlesque number called “the exit pole.” #Election
Another panelist talked about the making of this ad for Dale Peterson, former candidate for agriculture commissioner of Alabama.
That’s a real commercial. It was produced for the web because Peterson didn’t have TV money, but it was an instant hit online and the money started rolling in. Before long he went from five percent in the polls to pushing 30 percent. But he did not win in the Republican primary, despite his huge online following. The entire case study is an interesting exercise in aggressive, low budget politics.
So we go through all of the presentations and then the respondent, our old friend Dr. Larry Powell stands to discuss each of the presentations. He talks about how each of these studies are important and offered his suggestions for where the research should go.
For each paper he also offered his fake gift. One rhetorician received a copy of Ronald Reagan’s RNC acceptance speech, so that he might give it to Mitt Romney, for example. The author of the Dale Peterson work received a can of cashews.
Everyone in the room from Alabama is now all but rolling on the floor for, you see, Peterson has recently been arrested for shoplifting, twice. The second time he was dining on cashews.
For our paper Dr. Powell pointed out that The Yankee and I met in his class. That he served as advisor on both of our comps committees and now we are married.
“I think I’ve done enough.”
In the afternoon The Yankee was a member of a panel titled “Political Entertainment Television and the Framing of Choices and Consequences in the 2012 Presidential Campaign.”
Here she is now:
She talked about The Daily Show’s Indecision 2012 which was, I feel, the presentation that really brought the panel together.
So after that it was time for another very late lunch. We learned that three of the four sandwich shops within walking distance were closed. You’re in the middle of the downtown entertainment district on a Saturday and all the small places lock up at 3 p.m. Some business model. Back to Potbelly Sandwiches, then, and then back to the conference so that I might run the political communication division meeting. It is my penultimate responsibility as the division chair.
All went according to plan. Things moved along, I printed too many agendas, made a joke no one thought was funny and we conducted the business of the division. The Yankee was elected as the vice chair-elect of the division. That means she’ll program two divisions of presentations in a row, mass comm next year and political communication the year after that. That’s service to academia, for you.
Dinner was just about the strangest, most surrealistic, hysterical thing possible. Also we sang along to Carly Rae Jepsen. And I played the drums. There were drums at dinner and that was the part that made the most sense of all.
On a break from the conference we bumped into Colonel Sanders:
And that was just about the only break of the bitterly cold day.
The morning started with a “Roundtable Discussion of the 2012 Presidential Election” where the program promised “Panelists will discuss campaign tactics, strategies and outcomes in the general election process of the 2012 U.S. presidential election season.”
Here I was fortunate enough to be invited to sit at a table with immensely talented scholars and talk about the presidential campaign. Even better was that Dr. Larry Powell, my adviser in my master’s program, and a highly influential political pollster, was on the panel. At one point I was looking for a spot to wade in with what I felt was a particularly important point. He said it first, almost word-for-word. That alone would have made my day. But, somewhere around 3 p.m. I entered “What a great day” territory.
I presented awards for the top papers in the political communication division. The Yankee (who was the respondent on this panel) and I won this award last year.
Then I listened in another panel as The Yankee presented our paper “Identity in Twitter’s Hashtag Culture: A Sports Media Consumption Case Study.” Since it got accepted to this conference it was accepted and quickly published in the International Journal of Sport Communication, 5(4). The abstract reads:
This case study, using social identity theory as a framework, examines how sport consumers and producers used different identifiers to engage in conversation during the final games of the 2012 College World Series of baseball. Five major hashtags were noted for each baseball team as primary identifiers; users fit in three main groups and sub-groups. The analysis of tweets revealed five major themes around which the conversations primarily revolved. The study has implications for social identity theory, team identification, as well as broader implications for audience fragmentation and notions of the community of sport.
In the afternoon I was the respondent on a panel full of papers about message framing. The panelists had four interesting papers, one about salience in the New York Times and the Apple Daily in Taiwan in coverage of the Tohoku tsunami, another was about college newspapers framing the H1N1 scare a few years back, another discussed the use of Twitter in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death and the last one compared how CNN and Al-Jazeera English covered Occupy Oakland.
Respondents wait until the scholar has finished their 12- or 15-minute distillation of their work and then discuss the matters at hand. Different people take different approaches to this. Some try to find a common thread in the collective works and riff on that. Others just ask a question or make a point here or there. I’ve watched people just lecture on about whatever crossed their mind. But when I am presenting a paper I want the respondent to be useful. So I find hard things to critique. I try to ask interesting questions that will help them think of new things they can expand their research. I try to be obnoxiously detailed about it. Be useful.
An interesting thing happened after this panel. All of the researchers lined up to thank me and shake my hand ask me more questions. That’s never happened before. Maybe I did something right.
After that I had a very late lunch, which came all too close to dinner, really. Ordered a burrito at Chipotle, realized how hungry I was and then returned to the conference for the mass communication division’s business meeting, where business was conducted. The Yankee is the secretary of that division and I’m a mostly quiet member. I did second a motion, however.
We had dinner at this place:
Spinelli’s is in a basement. It is long and stone and drywall and linoleum. There are columns keeping the ceiling off your head, and loud speakers keeping the music in your ears. The guy working the counter was an archetype of counterculture straight out of central casting, he said knowing how bizarre that sounds.
This is a pizza place, and so we order Stromboli, which is like a calzone. The menu offered a regular and a large size. I asked about the size and he did the hand gesture: regular, large. The regular looked about like what you’d expect out of a slightly ambitious calzone. When it arrived it looked like a large pizza rolled over onto itself. Just massive. But the brocoli and the spinach and all of the other things inside were delicious. And we sat there for forever laughing about, oh, most everything. About half of the jokes were directed at me, which makes them funnier somehow.
You’d have to be there, I guess. You’d need video and we’ve made a pact that all of that will stay in the private collection.
And since there was no possible way we could still be hungry, but we were all having such a nice time, we found more ice cream.
Here’s one more shot with the Colonel:
Tomorrow: We have three more presentations to take part in. Told you it was a busy conference.
