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Wooten 5K

My first thought was that the light at 6:30 is lovely. My second thought was that there shouldn’t be a 6:30 on a Saturday morning.

And if there must be a 6:30 on a Saturday morning, I should remain blissfully unaware of it.

Nevertheless, there we were. And by we I mean me and my running shoes:

We did the Marie Wooten Memorial Run today, a scholarship fundraiser. There were bananas:

And other snacks:

We saw our friend, the theater director, and another guy The Yankee knows from the pool, who is a librarian. The woman who was running with Dean Wooten the day she was killed was there to run, as were a lot of dogs. They need fuel too:

While we didn’t win place on the podium — we weren’t racing, though — The Yankee did win a hat as a door prize:

And we posed with our friend, Emily, who ran with us.

I ran home, another two miles and change, because why not? Yesterday I had a rambling ride through campus and town and the suburbs to put a simple 22 miles into my bike. Tomorrow I’ll have a longer ride. Now I’m going to watch football. This will involve a great deal of sitting. I’m OK with it.

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15
Sep 14

The man on the wall has no comment

It occurred to me that I’ve never noticed the bas-reliefs of any other governors in Alabama. Perhaps I’m overlooking them or am drawing a mental blank. Maybe this is a lasting affection for George Wallace. Perhaps part of it is that George Wallace was governor for so long, from 1963 to 1967 and then from 1971 until 1979 and again from 1983 to 1987.

Here he’s standing in front of the restroom door:

That rest area was built during the 1970s. Maybe it was a boom period.

A bit ambitious, wouldn’t you think?

I had a nice, easy 30-mile ride yesterday. It should have been longer. I climbed more than 1,200 feet and rode for under two hours. I topped out at 37.7 miles per hour. Twenty percent of the ride was over 20 miles per hour. (Which is slow for most, but pretty nice for me.) Most importantly, it didn’t all fall apart in the last few minutes. It reminds me that I should ride more.

Things to read … to remind you that I should ride more.

I’m always circumspect about a small thing, like a small sport, playing big social roles. But we all have our roles to play and we all have our spheres of influence, I suppose … Biking Toward Women’s Rights in Afghanistan:

The Women’s National Cycling Team of Afghanistan is only a few years old. Its 10 members, most between the ages of 17 and 22, have yet to finish a race. But they are determined to persevere in their chosen sport despite multiple barriers, and are aiming to ride in the 2020 Olympics.

Men driving by insult them. Boys along the road throw rocks at them. Sometimes they don’t have enough money to buy adequate food to fuel their rides. Every day, they are reminded that it is taboo in Afghan society for a woman to get on a bicycle. And still they ride.

“They tell us that it is not our right to ride our bikes in the streets and such,” says Marjan Sidiqqi, one of the young women on the team. “We tell them that this is our right and that they are taking our right away. Then we speed off.”

[…]

Galpin says that for the generation of girls coming of age in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, bicycling is another manifestation of the freedom to be an educated person in the society. “Young women who are in university and high school, young women who are educated, their families have promoted that and helped that happen,” she says. “These young women look at it very cut and dry: ‘My brother can ride a bike, why can’t I?’ They’re cognizant that they have this right.”

“We cannot become a hero by sitting at home,” she said.

This is called neuroplasticity, or the amazing things the human body can do … An adult woman was found to be missing her cerebellum:

So essentially, it took less than a decade of life for the rest of her brain to pick up the missing cerebellum’s slack. The fact that the patient is alive and thriving is incredible. This is only the ninth time that doctors have found someone to be missing a whole cerebellum, and most of the others have only been discovered after their early deaths.

She was given a photograph after 9/11. Every year at the anniversary she’s tried to find the people in the picture. This year, the mystery was solved … Mystery Solved: The People in the 9/11 Wedding Photo

I saw the first part of this story yesterday in the paper, and it is worth reading today … Beulah’s David Eastridge battling back from life-threatening accident:

Balance has been one of the toughest parts for David since the traumatic brain injury. His depth perception in his left eye is still affected, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain balance at times. It’s why he wears that soft helmet whenever he does anything that requires movement.

He climbs stairs, but only to show off. Sutlive has shifted focus away from that because of the progress David has made. Now
they spend time on the treadmill. David has to hold the railings, but he gradually begins to pick up the pace.

Sutlive asks him: “What’s the fastest you can go?”

“Let’s show them,” David enthusiastically responds.

He reaches 3.1 mph on a slight grade; a brisk jog. Five weeks earlier, he couldn’t walk on his own.

Tough kid, that.

If you watched the Georgia game this weekend you might have noticed when the announcers mentioned this story. It is a pretty nice, quick little news package:

And, finally, here’s a little feature on Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field … Recapturing a Game and Days Gone By. The story is told through the eyes of the author’s 77-year-old mother-in-law and is understandably precious.

If you like baseball history, I did a decent podcast about Rickwood several years ago. I’ve also sold photos of the nation’s oldest active baseball part to ESPN.

The good old days. Today was different than all of that. All of my days are though, that was eight years ago, after all. Instead of interviewing David Brewer, I was discussing tips of interviewing with students in a classroom.

I always find myself bringing up the time I was asked to interview the congressman who’s best hunting dog had just died, or the times I annoyed governors, or that a newly elected (and still sitting) senator tried to insult me. Grieving interviews, funny interviews, boring interviews, the ones where you know the person is lying to you, and all of the different ways to get answers from your sources. Good stuff, good times.

I wonder what it was like to interview George Wallace. (He died in 1998, but I met his son once, in passing.) Maybe I should stop back by that bas-relief.

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12
Sep 14

The dangers of barbecue

We spent Monday and Wednesday talking about story ideas in my writing and editing class. Today we shifted to research tools. The conversation was all about primary sources. So I got a state accident report form from the police folks. I showed off health department forms from the restaurant inspectors. I downloaded the university’s Form 990 from Guidestar. The form is an annual reporting return that has to be filed with the government, listing programs and finances.

I started out asking “Who wants to know what the president of the university makes?”

People always want to know about the boss, don’t they?

This may be my favorite stretch of classes. Next week we’ll talk about online sources and research. It isn’t for everyone, but I’m going to try and make it interesting in the “yes, you have access to this sort of thing and there are millions of stories that can come from it” vein. We’ll see how many people are intrigued.

I got in a short ride before darkness fell, about an hour’s worth. I wimped out, taking a standard, easy route with only 700 feet of climbing. I topped out at 38.1 miles per hour. There’s a section of my cycling app that allows me to add notes about the ride. This evening I typed in “Perfectly forgettable.”

Sometimes those are the best rides. Nothing remarkable on the two little climbs, nor the one long sprint. The hills close to home slow and manageable. I caught all the lights and worked back through the neighborhood just in time to see the headlights shining. It was mindless and a great wind down from the week. It also wasn’t long enough. But, I’ll ride again in the morning and we’ll find out if I like morning rides. There might be an appeal there. But will it be more appealing than the snooze bar?

This is the best story you’ll read today. It defies excerpting, but we’ll try. This young woman found herself homeless when her lost her job. They bounced from shelter to shelter before things turned back around a bit …

‘I didn’t want to just be average.’

Koen’s family got back on its feet and found a new house her senior year of high school, but she was living in homeless shelters for most of her high school education, which made school work a little difficult.

“At the shelter you have to work and take hours and have to do chores,” she said. “Or if volunteers come to hold events or programs, it would be rude to not go. I studied when I could. I didn’t want to just be average. I had made it a goal my freshman year I wanted to be in the Top 20 every year.”

And that’s exactly where she finished—as one of about 20 students who had such high GPAs the computers named them all No. 1. She graduated high school with honors and an advanced academic diploma.

Koen just started her first year at the University of Montevallo, where she plans to join the honors program and continue to volunteer.

She is one of five young people in a scholarship competition. She’s local and remarkable, so I’m voting for Rebecca Koen.

They’re all moving stories, should you feel the need to be moved this lovely day.

Things to read … because reading makes every day more lovely.

Birmingham exports down 20 percent from 2011:

According to numbers from the U.S. Department of Commerce, in 2013 Birmingham exported $1.8 billion in goods from industries such as transportation equipment, machinery and primary metals. But that number is down 20 percent from 2011, when the city exported $2.3 billion.

That dovetails nicely with certain economic events.

You can’t see it and you can’t know why … Court won’t release costs of Gitmo camp:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Pentagon need not make public a document detailing the costs associated with a Guantanamo Bay prison camp used to house so-called high-value detainees.

In a ten-page opinion (posted here), U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell rejected the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg brought seeking records of the costs of creating or maintaining the camp.

The Defense Department said it found only one record, a single page, responsive to Rosenberg’s request. That page was classified in its entirety.

The court filing describing the reason for the classification and level of classification is itself classified

Don’t you just want to know why you can’t know how much it cost?

This happened to me in Birmingham … Visitor’s barbecue from Joe’s Kansas City gets confiscated at KCI:

Bob Porter wasn’t about to leave Kansas City without tasting our world famous barbecue.

Porter, a government affairs consultant from Washington, D.C., flew in over the weekend to attend the Chiefs game with a group of friends. Before catching his return flight at Kansas City International Airport, he stopped by the Leawood Joe’s Kansas City for a pound of brisket, a pound of smoked sausage and a small condiment cup of sauce.

Porter says he assumed the barbecue would be fine in his checked suitcase because it was wrapped in butcher paper and, for good measure, a plastic laundry bag from his hotel room. But when he arrived home in D.C. Monday and opened his suitcase, the barbecue was gone. In its place, he says, was an empty plastic laundry bag and a note from the Transportation Security Administration that said it had gone through his luggage.

“Really? That’s what you’re taking? My barbecue?” Porter says. “I’ve traveled all over the world, and I’ve never had anything like this happen before.”

I had some very dangerous banana pudding confiscated by the heroic blue shirts at the Birmingham airport. It all came down to an idiotic argument about whether it was a solid or a gel. The hungry TSA worker thought it was a gel. If it was frozen, he said, that wouldn’t be a problem. Consider that. If it were a solid quart I’d have a brick, much more dangerous than your regular batch of bananas, pudding and vanilla wafers. Porter, meanwhile, was trying to smuggle dangerous brisket from here to there. Or maybe it was the artery clogging sauce.

So you can now feel much safer the next time you fly.

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8
Sep 14

A day full of things to read

I have been accumulating a wealth of links these last few days. They are all wonderful in one way or another. I will share them here now.

But before all of that, here is a video featuring the parents of a fine cyclist and, wouldn’t you know it, Davis and Connie Phinney were world class cyclists themselves. They have an incredible story of success and heartache and recovery and peace and satisfaction. It is worth 15 minutes for the archival footage alone:

And now for some interesting news from near and far:

Al Qaeda Wasn’t ‘on the Run’:

In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden documents were primary source material, providing unmediated access to the thinking of al Qaeda leaders expressed in their own words.

A comprehensive and systematic examination of those documents could give U.S. intelligence officials—and eventually the American public—a better understanding of al Qaeda’s leadership, its affiliates, its recruitment efforts, its methods of communication; a better understanding, that is, of the enemy America has fought for over a decade now, at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.

Incredibly, such a comprehensive study—a thorough “document exploitation,” in the parlance of the intelligence community—never took place. The Weekly Standard has spoken to more than two dozen individuals with knowledge of the U.S. government’s handling of the bin Laden documents. And on that, there is widespread agreement.

From the Office of There’s a Special Circle for This Guy … Woman beheaded ‘with machete’ in north London garden:

One line of inquiry for detectives is understood to be that the man was inspired by recent footage of terrorists beheading two American journalists in Syria.

Some residents claimed last night that the suspect was a local man who had converted to Islam last year, but those claims could not be verified. Detectives said they had ruled out terrorism.

For a different kind of frustration … We Could Have Stopped This:

(T)he world largely ignored the unfolding epidemic, even as the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym, MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action.

Even as the leading physicians in charge of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s Ebola responses succumbed to the virus, global action remained elusive. The neglectful status of the WHO was, horribly, by design.

Meanwhile, closer to home … Stop and seize:

After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.

Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.

The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.

More than 100 teens swarm Memphis plaza, ‘knocking out’ shoppers

Seldom do most people wish to be a teenager again, but there are some people who would like the chance after reading this … Teen with autism victimized in disgusting ALS ice challenge prank:

Although their son is doing well and bravely returned to school, the parents have a message for the teens that humiliated him:

“I hope you will be punished to the full extent of the law, which still to me would not be enough, but that’s what I wish,” said Mensen.

School officials say no disciplinary action will be taken until after police have completed their investigation.

We watched this documentary this weekend:

You should watch it. There will be sobbing. I’m not sure you can say enough about It’s Time. Not every story is as great, or terrible, as the one that brought Chucky Mullins and Brad Gaines together, but it is a tremendous look at what football, the region and story telling can be. You’d be hard pressed to make a much better sports documentary.

You can tell a lot about the world around you by the business news:

Alabama’s economy in slow recovery

August Jobs Report Disappoints

Fed: Under Obama, only the richest 10 percent saw incomes rise

The 3% Surcharge Catches On: The Lucques Group Introduces Healthcare For Employees

On the other hand, there is apparently a market for this … Pampered Babies Kick Back and Relax at the Floating Baby Spa

And, finally, some good economic news, locally speaking …

Reliance Worldwide Corp. plans $50M expansion in Cullman

YP affiliate to add 165 jobs in Shelby County

If you can end a post with good economic news, and on a Monday, no less, you’ve really done something, I think, so we’ll call it a day. Hope yours was a great one!

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5
Sep 14

You just go faster

Nothing like having your last event of the work week being a meeting, and then being stood up. I waited for half an hour, no word, and left.

I’d have rather had the meeting, and been done with it. Who knows when it will happen now. On the way home I had this view as a brief consolation:

But, hey, we got to talk about story ideas in class today — always a fun topic — and I still made it home in time to get an hour on my bike. I need more than one hour at a time, of course, but you take it where you can get it.

The Yankee and I set out together, but she said “See you at home,” which I took to mean, “Go have fun,” which really meant “Go hard.”

That was the plan, at least in two places. There were two courses I wanted to try to conquer today. One seemed easier than the other, but I had zeal for both of them. At least until my lungs gave out, which has a direct relationship to zeal. I was halfway up the long slow hill that marked the course I hoped to mark a new best time when everything seemed to give way. I pedaled harder, but it seemed I was going slower. I told my legs and lungs I wanted nothing to do with their protests, but they protested anyway.

And when I got home and checked the app I discovered that I had sliced 48 seconds off my best time on that course. That gave me the course lead over the next best time, by one whole second.

On the back half of my route today was the other course I wanted to master. And there it started to rain on me. Also, it was getting close to get dark. I ride on that particular stretch of road frequently, but this was only the second time I have timed myself on it. The course is designed for someone who can go all out for three straight miles. This isn’t my strength — I don’t really have a strength, I think — but we are all full of weaknesses and average talents of one sort or another. I dropped 1:38 off my last timed trip down the course and now I have the fast time on that segment, too.

On the last rode before the clouds came back again and I was rained on again. The twilight had turned to a full on flirt with the night. Two police cars passed me going the other direction and I expected one of them to turn around and give me some grief. But I pedaled furiously and made it home in the last embers of the day. The Yankee wasn’t very far behind me. I’d gone hard, and she did too.

Then we went out for Pie Day.