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24
Mar 11

“Yee-haw Arkansas”*

Field trip day today. My students visited Hoffman Media, who publish 11 magazines from a cozy little office space here in town. During our visit the students met Phyllis Hoffman DePiano, the founder and her sons who help her run the place. We heard from advertising people, designers and an editor.

We also learned that the next big food thing is going to be chocolate-covered bacon. You’re welcome.

The students enjoyed their visit and learned a great deal about cover design and magazine publishing and when that was done we hit the road. The Yankee and I have a conference in Little Rock this weekend, and so we made the drive, tucked ourselves into a hotel just across the river.

Tomorrow we’ll attend sessions. She’ll chair one and I’ll be the respondent in a session. My job is to provide some unity among the papers and offer some constructive criticism on where the papers are. I’ve never done this before, should be fun.

Tonight I had my first banana pudding milkshake in Tupelo, which sounds a lot better than saying “We stopped off the interstate and had a sandwich at Chick-fil-A.”

We stopped off the interstate and had a sandwich at Chick-fil-A.

The ubiquity of fast food places is a blessing when you’re hungry, and a curse when you’re trying to say something about the South, or your travels or your general condition. But, on the other, other hand everyone can relate to Chick-fil-A, I guess.

So the milkshake was terrific. So good, in fact, that I didn’t even mind that I spilled a bit of it on myself.

OK, that’s a lie. Of course I minded. Spills are the worst part of gravity, but at least I was covered in something delicious.

* The first time I ever visited Arkansas, as a senior in high school we were driving across the Mississippi River, the state line when we heard Alan Jackson, who sounded like he was about three days into a two-day all-nighter say that in the most disconnected tone you could imagine. One of the only other things I remember about that particular drive was seeing the “Welcome to Arkansas — Home of President William Jefferson Clinton” full of birdshot. I’d make that drive a few dozen times in my year working in Little Rock. Tonight I remembered: central Arkansas is flat. I’m sure I’ll recall more in the daylight.

adventures / Alabama / Auburn / baseball / Friday / links / site / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
18
Mar 11

Remember what the train conductor said

My four tokens to the general usefulness of things today:

I graded a lot of things.
I prepared a bit for my comps defense.
I read a lot about Libya, the slow-motion thing that can’t be stopped, with fascination.
And I built a mobile version of my website.

The world really needed that last one. Someone poked fun that I didn’t have a mobile version to the blog yet. But late this evening I added a plugin for that too. So you can easily see this drivel anytime.

I tinkered with this one for a while, but couldn’t make it go. So I found another one to build from. I’m on the fence about it, but what do you think? The mobile site is here. The mobile version of the blog is … well, found on your phone.

It is a curious thing, but I like that particular mobile theme on a friend’s site, but I’m not sure it works here. When these are the problems in your life you’re doing OK, though, so I won’t be too upset about it.

My comps defense is rumored to be next week. So I’ve been consolidating a few ideas I’d like to incorporate into that conversation.

On Libya, these types of stories are always good reading, and the reporting here is fine:

“This is the greatest opportunity to realign our interests and our values,” a senior administration official said at the meeting, telling the experts this sentence came from Obama himself. The president was referring to the broader change going on in the Middle East and the need to rebalance U.S. foreign policy toward a greater focus on democracy and human rights.

It will be interesting to see how long this shiny spin on things remains in place.

“In the case of Libya, they just threw out their playbook,” said Steve Clemons, the foreign policy chief at the New America Foundation. “The fact that Obama pivoted on a dime shows that the White House is flying without a strategy and that we have a reactive presidency right now and not a strategic one.”

So the next few weeks should be interesting.

Baseball this evening, Auburn hosts Arkansas this weekend, but dropped the opener 6-5 in 11 innnings. The bullpen is still working itself out and Auburn stranded eight runners on base and seven of those were in scoring position.

We had pizza after the game at Mellow Mushroom. We noticed that Moe’s Original Barbecue is now open downtown. Finally, our style of ‘cue. Now we just have to become regulars.

YouTube Cover Theater is a little feature intending to point out the art of people making music in their homes to their video camera. There’s a lot of talent out there, some of it is more than worth sharing. I hurriedly picked REM as this week’s featured cover act. It didn’t seem the best pick at the time, but now I’m glad of it. Their music seems to have a lot of room in it for others to play. Unfortunately none of these particular three covers have been seen by more than 2,000 people.

Doug McKenna is an independent artist, but unfortunately his site has been neglected. Nevertheless, Sweetness Follows is a good tune and he does a nice job here:

My favorite REM song, and it is a shame this has only 59 views. Unfortunately there’s not much biographical information about the guy here, but his treatment of Driver 8 is good fun:

In a different career on those rare times when I had to play music at radio stations I’d always end my shift with this song, so we’ll end this post the same way.

adventures / Alabama / iPhone / photo / weekend — Comments Off
13
Feb 11

Catching up

Where we pad Sunday with pictures that never made it to the site. Poor, sad pictures. Don’t want their feelings to get hurt.

“Come to the blog on Sunday! Everyone looks pictures on Sunday!”

Yes, that one is small, but click the image to embiggen. This one has been sitting in my iPhone for a while. This is a parking lot in Homewood, Ala. Can you guess what I was doing there? Shot, and automatically stitched together by the free Panorama app. Not perfect, but, again, it is a panaroma shot from my phone. What an age.

Sunset over Auburn, Ala.

This will not be an inexpensive repair. Lesson: always counterweight your tripod.

Sometimes the sun catches you just right.

I love peanut butter as much as the next guy, but who needs six pounds of it at a time?

Church, read, studied, wrote, raked leaves. I have one of my four comps questions now sufficiently researched. (At least I hope.) Three more (all in various stages of progress) to go!

Come back tomorrow as I fret about two of those remaining questions.

But now, The Yankee and I are going out for early-Valentine’s Day/dating anniversary dinner.

(Six wonderful years!)

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14
Jan 11

A good deed, an ending, a beginning

I caught an escaping dog this morning while out pounding the pavement. There was a collar on the pooch, so we called, wonder who was named Colby. Turned out that was the dog. A big white pekapoo, or some such, out free and intent on telling the other dogs within sniffing range about it.

When Colby’s owner caught up to us she said the dog was more trouble than her kids. He’d figured out a way to get through the bushes in the yard. Maybe the children haven’t mastered that technique yet, but the dog is escaping every time if the deterrent is shrubbery.

Anyway. That was the beginning of the day. Good deed done. The day’s going to end with a bite of frozen yogurt, so it has rounded itself out nicely.

In between there was reading and a little more reading. There was also a delicious steak dinner, my balloon post from yesterday got picked up by The War Eagle Reader. Also I had a little chat with a member of the governor’s office that is leaving Montgomery today.

Bob Riley returns home — or to his lake house, his home is getting water damage repairs, apparently — after eight years in the governor’s mansion. I was a cub reporter when he was first elected to Congress. Interviewed him on election night. He was a very nice man, who could have been self-important, but was willing to entertain questions from a kid who didn’t really yet know what he was doing.

He’s not without his critics, of course, but there’s no denying the mark he’s had on the state in two terms. And, if half of the things for which executives get credit or blame are really directly related to his efforts, it has been a good administration.

The economy has slowed everywhere, of course, but there are several vital aspects of the state now leading the way in a way that wouldn’t have been possible a decade or two ago. There are car manufacturers everywhere. Mobile is poised to become a boomtown with new naval contracts and airline deals and shipping growth. Birmingham has completed the transition from being a steel town to being a medical center and a biomedical hotbed. Huntsville will grow as more military comes that way. Education, which has never been a strong area for bragging in Alabama, got some good news just today:

The report, dubbed by Education Week as the most comprehensive ongoing assessment of the state of American education, ranked Alabama 25th among all states and the District of Columbia for overall grades and scores on the report card. This is the first time Alabama has ever ranked ahead of the national average in the overall education quality.

[…]

(T)oday Alabama students are outpacing the rest of the nation in improvements in Reading, Math and Science scores and Alabama ranked 4th nationally in gains in the graduation rate between 2002 and 2008.

Not a bad bit of news to hear on your way out the door. Also, a few huge and ancient lawsuits against the state were resolved during Riley’s eight years. He also pushed some useful ethics reform bills late in his second term.

There are criticisms, to be sure, but if inauguration day is about hope and promise, the day you leave office should be something of a victory lap. Riley — and every member of his cabinet whom I had occasion to interview, come to think of it — was always considerate to me professionally. I tried to follow along on his re-election campaign for my master’s thesis, but that didn’t work out. Even so, his people were cordial.

This evening we went out to the gymnastics meet. This was the first home meet of the year for Auburn, and the first meet in the new Auburn Arena. Pictures and blurbs below:

The answer to a trivia question no one will ever ask: Who had the first routine for the gymnastics team in Auburn Arena? Allyson Sandusky. She also won the beam routine in the Arena opener.

Kendall Swartz scored a 9.750 on bars, putting her at fourth in the meet.

Lauren Brzostowski’s 9.800 was good for second on the beam, behind her teammate Allyson Sandusky.

Laura Lane’s 9.750 was good for third overall on the floor, an event the Tigers swept.

Rachel Inniss scored 9.900 to win the floor routine. Something about this pose seems familiar. Feels like I’ve seen that three times before, around here.

The Auburn gymnastics team got their first win of the season against No. 25 LSU, 194.775-194.475. The gymnasts performed for a crowd of 4,190 on hand to see the Tigers’ first meet at the Auburn Arena and the first victory for new head coach Jeff Graba. Auburn and LSU were tied after one event, but the Bengal Tigers took a lead halfway through the meet. Auburn, which began the season ranked 15th, pulled away in their final two rotations on the beam and floor. Petria Yokay won the all-around with 38.750.

It is really nice to be at a gymnastics meet and hear “War Eagle” after events.

adventures / Auburn / football / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
10
Jan 11

I believe in Auburn

War Eagle

Win for Auburn

Power of Dixieland.