Auburn « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Auburn

Students were doing what with email?

There is this giant filing cabinet drawer sitting in one corner of my office. I rescued it some time back from a nearby room. That office space was once the home of Entre Nous, the Samford yearbook. When they moved elsewhere it seemed to become a storage space, mostly forgotten. Finally someone came along and made plans to use it for another department and we were kindly asked to move all of our old stuff out of that room.

So I moved all of our old journalism department things and all of our old newspaper things out of there. It was a multi-day process and helped proved where my time goes.

Anyway, one of the things I discovered in there was this giant drawer of newspaper clippings. Instead of moving it to another storage space I just put it in my space because the clips would be fun and because this joker was heavy.

And now I am going through some of the clips. This was in a folder titled “Computers.” I’ll just leave this here for you to note the dates yourself.

From November of 1979:

From September of 1987:

From December of 1987:

Also from December 1987:

And you could apparently check your email in March of 1988:

I love two tidbits in that last story:

“Students often find creative ways to send messages to friends. Charles Dunlap, a pharmacy major from Tullahoma, Tenn., sometimes sends graphics and computer art through the system.

[…]

Although most students feel positive about the use of E-mail, some have expressed complaints that communicating electronically causes some people to avoid one-on-one communication.

So some things are the same, no matter your connection speeds, eh?

The people writing those stories, or pictured in the photographs, are ministers, educators and work in the software industry. Our alumni turn up in all manner of interesting places.

Things to read … because reading takes you to interesting places.

There is this football game this weekend, perhaps you’ve heard of it? Here are three stories looking back on last year’s game. Each has their own merit. One of them is mine. I present them to you in order of importance:

Jon Solomon’s Remembering “Kick Six”

My piece, The Iron Bowl

Thomas Lake’s Looking back at historic Iron Bowl a year later

Solomon’s piece is the one I’d excerpt, but it defies excerpting. If you read one sports piece today, that should be it. It is simply one of the best non-sports-masquerading-as-sports stories you’re likely to read this year. Superb copy. High marks, Jon Solomon, high marks.

Here are a few quick journalism and PR links:

Will be sharing this in class next week, 7 ways to ensure your press release won’t get covered

I wish I had more places to share this, Visual journalism: Virtual reality graphics technology

A one-page photo essay from 2013, still worth seeing, if only for shots 23 and 36, On the Border

One to make you mad, Social worker charged with smoking crack while driving on I-65 with child in car

And three really nice stories to end on. The first one has an aww, an oops and a neighbors-helping-neighbors theme. The second one is a superbly touching kindness of strangers tale and the last one is part of the great Gabby Giffords comeback.

Sheriff’s dive team recovers engagement ring dropped in Noccalula Falls

Former newspaper vendor Charles Graham receives the birthday surprise of a lifetime

Gabby Giffords completes 11-mile bike ride

That sounds like a great ride to me.

Have a nice one today and come back for more tomorrow.

Auburn / football / Samford / weekend — Comments Off
22
Nov 14

Samford at Auburn

Slept in. Rode my bike around campus, which was very quiet. I watched the Minnesota at Nebraska game, which was the only early game that sounded promising. It was a good one, too.

If only I’d known about that Wake Forest-Virginia Tech game, though, right?

Got out to the tailgate in time for a late lunch. Visited with friends and then we all made our way in to see the game. It got off to a slow start, but briefly gave us an amazing stat:

As the second half began I realized that one of our Samford students was sitting behind me:

I’ve had him in class and he worked for me for two years and now there is right behind me in a stadium. What are the odds? 1:87,450.

Auburn won, of course, but Samford looked good and fought hard throughout. This is the second time I’ve been fortunate enough to see them play one another in football. It doesn’t happen all of the time, of course, but it is a special treat to see.

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21
Nov 14

Before you head into your weekend

Today I looked through a 1976 edition of the Crimson. This newspaper was produced before I was born, and the ads inside it were great. Here’s one:

That IHOP is now a pizza joint. That pizza joint is now closed.

You can see the front page and several of the ads on my Tumblr, here, here, here and here.

Isn’t this a lovely photo that I snapped from the car?

That plane was pulling up as I was driving under its flight path. I dug out my phone and pointed it in that general direction — eyes on the road — and pressed the shutter button one time at what felt like the last moment.

And maybe it was the last moment. Another second or two of fumbling and the plane is out of the frame. But never mind that, look at all of that beautiful empty space.

Things to read … because the cat has currently strapped herself to me and is not interested in this typing business at all. (Seriously, she is being ridiculous.)

The fall of 2012 I don’t remember all that well, but I remember we sat near Kiehl Frazier at Barbecue House and took the “Oh look who is over my shoulder picture.” I also remember, prior to that, that he once felt the need to apologize on social media for the outcome of a football game. When you get beyond how unnecessary that is, you remember he was a freshman at the time. You can’t help but cheer for a guy like that, no matter where he plays, Auburn to Arkadoo:

Marquez knows sooner or later Kiehl Frazier will be one of those calling. When Auburn’s former quarterback-turned-defensive back-turned receiver is asked about the whereabouts of his 2013 SEC championship ring, he’s like all the rest who use Marquez as a lost-and-found.

“I haven’t picked it up yet,” Frazier admitted, 10 months and 550 miles removed his former school, an SEC title, and the ring that went with it. “I bet Dana still has it. I haven’t seen it at all. Right after the national championship game I came down here.”

Here is Arkadelphia (Arkadoo, they sometimes call it), a slow, sleepy Arkansas town 30 miles from Hot Springs, an hour and change from Little Rock, and light years from big-time football. Here is Ouachita Baptist University, a tiny private school that has to share space in a town of 10,000 with fellow Division II football power Henderson State.

Alabama’s unemployment rate dropped in October

Here’s a way we might have actually had it better than kids these days. Teens Are Sharing Gross Pictures Of Their School Lunches With The Hashtag #ThanksMichelleObamaNanny statism neither looks nor tastes delicious.

That’s all I have. Enjoy your weekend.

Auburn / iPhone / journalism / links / Monday / music / things to read / video — Comments Off
10
Nov 14

The delta comes to campus

I have a very musical sense about things. I know this: One day, many decades hence, before they put me in the cold ground, there’s going to be a ragtime band playing a few tunes. Some of it might sound like this:

The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and the great Allen Toussaint are touring together — they’ve never done that before, somehow — and they played Samford tonight. It was a terrific show. Toussaint has 20 records, two Grammy nominations and the National Medal of Arts award. The band goes back 50 years with a rotating cast of members. Some of the current iteration have been onboard for decades. Seeing them all on one stage feels like you’re reaching elbow deep into the hopes, history, irreverence and dreams of Americana. To see great talent like those men playing together is to, perhaps, get a small inkling of jazz as the American art form. Within it all there are discordant notes and spaces and wandering musicians and multiple instruments and it all comes back together again. Americana. They all count their time in music and New Orleans in generations.

Charlie Gabriel, for example, is 81 and has been playing music for at least 67 years. He has four generations of New Orleans musicians behind him and three generations playing below him.

Also, if someone can book a singer that sounds like Charlie Gabriel for that day many decades hence, that’d be splendid.

They did play St. James Infirmary, two versions in fact. One of them was perhaps the happiest tune about death you could imagine. The other was very angry, as it should be. Part of that is in the clip above.

Things to read … because there are clips below, too.

Supremely well said, Open Letter to the Auburn Family.

Also, if you were there, you got to see a Medal of Honor winner:

Student assaulted, accused of recording Ferguson protest meeting:

A University of Missouri-St. Louis student who uses an online platform to live-stream protests in Ferguson was hospitalized last week after five or six people threw him out of a church, where protesters had gathered to strategize, and beat him.

The student, Chris Schaefer, began live streaming Ferguson protests and interviews on Oct. 23. But during the protest strategy meeting at St. Mark’s Family Church on Nov. 6, he was not recording, he said in a video from a hospital bed.

[…]

Schaefer told police five or six people assaulted him at the meeting because they believed he was recording the meeting, said Sgt. Brian Schellman, a St. Louis County Police Department spokesman. Schaefer ran out of the church to a Walgreens about a half mile from the church, where police responded to a 911 call, Schellman said. Police are looking for the suspects.

Russia is changing their media laws, and so … CNN To End Russian Broadcast By Year’s End

Here’s another demonstration of the need for multiple platform idea Millennials Spend 18 Hours a Day Consuming Media — And It’s Mostly Content Created By Peers:

New research by social-influence marketing platform Crowdtap indicates that individuals ages 18 to 36 spend an average of 17.8 hours a day with different types of media.

Those hours represent a total across multiple media sources, some of which are consumed simultaneously.

We all need to develop effective (meaning, sometimes, different) messages across platforms within our unifying themes. It is starting to sound like jazz, no?

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8
Nov 14

Texas A&M at Auburn

The slideshow experiment continues. Plenty of things not to like, plenty of things to enjoy.

And look at that sunset!