I was looking for a book, a new Associated Press Stylebook, but one place didn’t have it. A second store was closed.
Going to a third place I had your standard “Don’t see that every day” moment. A bicycle-mounted police officer pulled over a car. The officer turned on a little blue light and the car pulled over.
You can almost imagine the mental calculus going on in the car. But that was a good move, stopping. Oh you’ll get away from the guy on the mountain bike with the fat tires. But he has friends just down the street. And those people aren’t riding bikes.
I believe that’s the first traffic stop I’ve seen by a cycling officer. Now I want to see the officers on the ruggedized Segway-trike get someone making an improper turn.
I rode 22 miles on my bike this afternoon and I didn’t see anyone that would stop for me. But I don’t have a badge or a blue light. I just have the lycra.
Anyway, the third bookstore didn’t have the book. I can try another place tomorrow. I hit Walmart. I was looking for two things, but I only found one. I got a watch battery for an old watch. (Still works! Now I have three watches that might, from time-to-time, help me out. I’ll be late somewhere tomorrow.) So I only found the one thing at the retailer, that let me make a withdrawal at the cash register. These are the details of my day.
I needed the cash because as I was going from one place to the next I got a message from an e-bay seller. We’ve been negotiating the sale of two Gloms. A deal had been reached. He’s in town and so we set up a meet.
So I find myself watching the sun go down from the Kroger parking lot, waiting on this guy to show up. He brought two books. I paid cash. He felt like he got a good deal. I felt like I got a good deal. We were both happy.
Turns out the guy’s a picker. He’s telling me stories about how he used to go dumpster diving, how it is different now. Once, he said, people would come up to him and strike up a conversation. Now he’s afraid they’ll just call the police.
But is it the times or his age? You can probably get away with more in your 20s than 40s, I’d guess.
He feels like he covered the entire area, going through old abandoned buildings, salvaging and scavenging. I wonder how many of those roads I know because of my bike and how many I have no idea about.
The newest condos being built are going up on a large tract that previously had several old, decrepit houses. He says he got the call to go into those houses, that he was the only guy, and that he got to pick them clean for leftover property, repurposed fixtures and, of course, the copper.
The stories of all of the local stuff he finds sounds like a lot of fun.
We probably talked for an hour, mostly with me just trying to get him to show me his collection. Never know what else he might be willing to sell.
Probably should have asked him if he had a Stylebook.
I’m taking a bike ride today. I had grease on me before I’d even filled a water bottle. I took this as a sign of a good day in the saddle.
I rode the bike leg of a super sprint tri course today. The event is coming up in two weeks and a friend is going to ride it. I figured if I turned on the tracking software and forwarded the data to her that she could, after laughing at my outputs, perhaps get something useful from the experience.
I am so very out of shape. So out of shape that it only takes a 16-mile ride and a few small hills to prove it.
She’s an out-of-towner, the person I’m riding for today, but she knows the roads. It could be, I’d figured, that she only knows them in a car though, so I wrote notes like “Watch out for this drainage grate there” and “Even in good form this pretend little hill always kills me there and I don’t know why.”
She pronounced my email the best ever. I think she was just chuckling at my speeds, though.
I caught one cyclist on one stretch and passed another on a climb. I’m also perfectly, embarrassingly out of shape. This was still one of my first rides of the year because of schedules and life and weather.
Owing to the details of life, today I took my second bike ride of the year. This makes me sad to even consider, which is something, I suppose. But travel interferes. Weather, other plans, the comfortable chair I’m sitting in at the time, whatever.
So, today, we ride. The Yankee got all set up and started her ride and I got all my various things together — shoes and helmet and water bottles and stretchy clothes — and chased off after her. She texted me just as I was leaving, so I knew where to follow. She had two miles on me and I wanted to get there. She made me work for it, too, but eight miles later — through the neighborhood, over the time trial and by the stores and up and over two hills and then through more shopping — I finally caught up to her.
Which meant I had to ride harder. But it all felt nice, through the old POW grounds and then up a slow, easy little mile-and-a-half hill where I actually increased my average pace. Then through a downhill segment where I kept the tempo high. Through there I increased my speed, but knew in every way — empirically and by feel and the sound of the wind and the hum of my tires — knew it was a pretty slow effort over familiar roads.
And finally those two last little molehills, those two slow rollers to get back home, something to grind and gasp over and feel your legs burning and “Why did I come home this way? Because I’m tired and I’m tired over a one hour ride. I really need to ride much, much more. I’ll ride tomorrow. It’ll rain tomorrow.”
You can think up a lot of things when you’re slowly, slowly making your way up a small hill.
The new SportsCenter set is the crown jewel of the building: 9,700 square feet of space that will be used to broadcast the show on ESPN’s mass of channels. The revamped set was designed to make SportsCenter more personal, to show anchors moving around and interacting, but also to help the show move at the speed of the internet. ESPN has long been criticized for allowing news to break overnight while it ran repeats of the previous day’s shows; now the premier show in sports can update and broadcast in real time.
TV still matters at ESPN, and in every way DC-2 is wired for the future of TV. It’s capable of broadcasting in 4K and 8K, and if by some miracle 3D actually takes off, ESPN will be ready for that, too. TV is still where the network makes most of its money, and it will be for the foreseeable future. But when – not if, but when — that changes, ESPN says it will be ready. It has moved staff, built buildings, and overhauled how the company operates to make sure of that.
The strategy to keep ESPN on top breaks down along two broad lines. The first is an adjustment in how ESPN sees itself: the company has reorganized to promote more sharing across platforms, even launching the buzzword-friendly Content Sharing Initiative. ESPN the TV network, ESPN the radio provider, ESPN the magazine, ESPN the Instagram account, and ESPN the app maker are all becoming one.
The keys, for all of us, are to understand which of our audience needs what story, ascertain where those stakeholders are, give them that story in the best way possible in the format or with the tool they are using and then to ensure that you’re keeping the thematic elements in tune with your larger branding.
From time to time an aspect of this topic comes up: being poor means different things across time. When Bread Bags Weren’t Funny:
I liked what Ernst said because it was real. And it reminded me of the old days.
There are a lot of Americans, and most of them seem to be on social media, who do not know some essentials about their country, but this is the way it was in America once, only 40 and 50 years ago:
America had less then. Americans had less.
If you were from a family that was barely or not quite getting by, you really had one pair of shoes. If your family was doing OK you had one pair of shoes for school and also a pair of what were called Sunday shoes — black leather or patent leather shoes. If you were really comfortable you had a pair of shoes for school, Sunday shoes, a pair of play shoes and even boots, which where I spent my childhood (Brooklyn, and Massapequa, Long Island) were called galoshes or rubbers.
Removing the prisoners — American, British, Canadian and others, who had dubbed themselves “Ghost Soldiers” — was an unexpected obstacle.
Conditioned by captivity, many POWs thought the raid a trick to kill them as they fled. Few recognized the green Ranger uniforms that evolved from blue or khaki uniforms during their years in captivity.
[…]
Rangers literally booted and shoved some POWs out. Rangers also removed their shirts to make stretchers to carry away sick and wounded prisoners and gave their clothes and boots to the emaciated, threadbare, barefoot men.
[…]
In the end, Allied casualties counted two Rangers dead and several wounded. No Filipinos died. More than 500 Japanese soldiers were killed or wounded. All 512 prisoners survived.
Everything is original — from the gas pumps and retro Saco signs to the fake brown owl in the rafters used to scare off birds.
Even tall blue posts to the right of the station still extend into the sky, holding up a blue bell that previous owner Dick Salmon would ring after every Auburn football win.
After being vacant for nine years after Salmon was shot and killed inside the station’s lobby in 2005, the Saco station, on the corner of Dean Road and Opelika Road, is being revived.
Mike Woodham, owner of Woodham’s Full Service, which will operate in the Saco building, will open his business Monday, hoping to carry on Salmon’s legacy.
Craig Biggio takes the kind of tour we all want, or, if you want to tour the archives, all you have to do is get voted in, Biggio like a kid in the Hall of Fame:
Craig Biggio giggled and shook his head in disbelief. The Astros’ first Hall of Famer grabbed Babe Ruth’s bat and gripped it tightly, locking his hands on a handle that he quickly realized was much thicker than today’s models.
“No way! Babe Ruth’s bat,” Biggio said with a chuckle that served as a soundtrack for most of his tour through the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “Man, it feels good.”
The gritty, determined look Biggio carried to the plate during 20 years with the Astros was softened by a fan’s child-like giddiness Friday morning as he toured the Hall of Fame for the first time since he was elected to the Hall’s 2015 class earlier this month.
He chuckled with enthusiasm often, but he really cherished his visit to the climate-controlled collections area where he got to hold bats that once were used by Yankees legends Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
“It doesn’t get any easier; you just go faster,” said Greg LeMond, who never had to drop me on a ride. (If only because I’ve never ridden with him.) I find it isn’t getting any easier and I’m not going any faster.
I’ve had three days of short, pitiful rides I could complain about. Sunday I stopped because my back was hurting. Yesterday I pedaled home because it was about to storm in a profound way. Today’s ride was incredibly forgettable. The legs are dead. Everything feels off and I feel slow.
At least the scenery is nice:
I’ve been telling myself over the last 40 miles, that it is getting harder because I am about to go faster. That seems to have been the case in the past. Somehow, though, I think this is wishful thinking in this case.
I wrote an interesting PowerPoint presentation on feature stories. Want to see it?
No?
OK then.
Things to read … because you can’t say no to that.
Vintage ads that appeared in The New York Times are getting their own digital archive that will live on the Times’ website. Called Madison in reference to Madison Avenue, the archive initially includes every print ad from every edition of the Times in the 1960s.
“It invites people to view an important part of our cultural history,” said Alexis Lloyd, creative director at The New York Times Research and Development Lab, which created Madison.
But the Times is inviting readers to do more than just view the ads. It’s also asking readers to help shape the archive by sifting through the ads, identifying them and even transcribing their text.
The head of the new Ebola Emergency Response Mission, Anthony Banbury, told the Security Council that none of the three most heavily affected countries — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — is adequately prepared. Only 4,300 treatment beds will be available by Dec. 1, according to current projections, and even those would not have an adequate number of staff members. The acceleration of new cases, if not curbed, could easily overwhelm them.
Mr. Banbury painted a picture of substantial need. Only 50 safe-burial teams are on the ground, he said, but 500 are required. They need protective gear and about a thousand vehicles. So far, Mr. Banbury said, the mission has delivered 69 vehicles.
When the recession sucked away retirement funds of many of Alabama’s elderly, the senior population became a desperate and easy target for crooks, said Joseph Borg, director of the Alabama Securities Commission.
And several scams have popped up that are luring in small and midsized businesses, Borg said during a speech at the Birmingham Kiwanis Club at the Harbert Center Tuesday.
I taught a class, which is to say I returned papers and discussed some of the most pressing items contained there in. We talked about that story I mentioned earlier this week. We touched on story organization, construction and source blocking.
I made an acrostic. It was a terrible acrostic, but I repeat myself. I hated it. But it let me use a cool blocks illustration and gave me the chance to talk about the elements of a story you can move around.
I graded stuff. I left campus.
Made it home in time to visit a store and pick up some flowers. I thought we might brighten the living room with a big yellow clutch of stems and petals in a glass vase of water resting on furniture above eye level.
It works almost as well as the overhead light or the nearby torch lamp.
I took a brief ride, through the neighborhood, up one of the timed courses and then back down it. I rode one half of the time trial and then came up the double hill that ultimately brings everything me back around to the other side of the neighborhood. My times were slow. I haven’t been on my pedals in five days, I would expect nothing less. Or is it nothing more? I could expect nothing more than going slow. I could expect less. My legs could be sodden stacks of newspaper, uncooperative piles of leaves, giant petrified chunks of wood that can’t turn a gear, but bleed when I fell over after I lost balance speed.
I can’t expect anything from my front derailleur just now. I can’t shift from the big gear to the smaller, which would be helpful as I labor over a little climb. There is a trip to the bike shop in my near future.
In my immediate future, though, there is company. Friends from Indiana have come down for the weekend. The plan is to show off tailgating and football.
And also dinner. Late into the night we sat around and talked about places abroad we’d all visited and genealogy and regionalism. It was pleasant and nerdy late into the night. And I am very sleepy.
