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cycling

Ode to flashmobs

We have half the grapes that we started the day with. And one less navel orange. Also, the leftover spaghetti from last night disappeared. And then I was full for about an hour. But white grapes only last so long and I had to talk myself out of an extra lunch. Miles on the bike speed up the metabolism, or so I tell myself, and I want to eat everything.

Strange since my energy was all over the place yesterday. I chased The Yankee around town, counting my second, third and fourth wind. These things should be more predictable, but yesterday I was left amazed at how I couldn’t find my legs to get over this hill, but soft-pedaled over the next one, with my legs feeling bored with it all. The body is an amazing thing, and a body on a bicycle is a curious miracle, all balance and whirring and swaying and moving forward. I’m not a good cyclist. Usually I do well just to stay upright. Balance and whirring and all that. At my best moments I’m either trying to make nice little circles with my feet or, if I’ve given up on that, I just try to make it all look casual. That’s also impossible.

But, 30 more miles yesterday, and I really need to start putting more miles back in. We got home just as the wind picked up. She’d forecast the afternoon perfectly. Meteorologists call her for input, or they should.

And now back to work today, the cold week of spring break is over, replaced by a cold regular week.

In class today we talked about films, which means a lot of clips of special effects. One of the students found a five minute EXPLOSIONGANZA of CGI that just melted everyone’s brains. Oh, for a few scenes of expository. Or even a Stallone quote.

When they talk about film they also talk about awards, which everyone loves except me, apparently. I’m fine with it. I did enjoy the Oscars poster someone showed off. It had the statue in the foreground surrounded by floating lines from memorable award winners. I saw this famous line and thought about adding in some running commentary — we’d recently talked about civil rights, the 50th anniversary of various events in Birmingham and across the south, how critical a time that was and how there is such a great museum just over the mountain — so bringing up In the Heat of the Night would have been perfect.

I decided against it. I’m not sure kids born in the 1990s would understand 1960s Mississippi and why all of this was so important. Even the television show was off the air by the time my oldest student was born. Sidney Poitier, though, he just gives you more every time you watch that quiet moment.

Everyone always remembers this, perhaps a cinematic first:

They filmed most of In the Heat of the Night in Illinois because of conditions in Mississippi. The country’s come a long way in those two generations.

There are two new things on Tumblr today. One is here. This is the other one.

I call that Tumblr page “Extra stuff in an extra place.” That is, perhaps, the most apt thing I’ve ever written.

And, finally, I’ve watched this twice now. It will be the best five minutes of your day on the web.

If you’ve never read the Wikipedia entry on Ode to Joy, you should.

Back to work for me, have a lovely evening you. See you tomorrow, when there will be more on Tumblr, more here, always more on Twitter, another Glomerata and who knows what else we can find.

cycling / family / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
14
Mar 13

Anyone have any marshmallows?

Pausing on a quick evening ride:

I saw a fire as I rounded for home. I believe someone was doing a prescribed burn to clear out the underbrush, but there was no one around.

I sit there for a moment or two, looking or waiting for someone to come back to the fire, but no one is around. The occasional car or truck cruises through, slowing down in the smoke and haze, and I’m taking pictures. So, great, someone probably think I started this. I did not.

The sun was just to that point of getting to ready to let go and the world was quiet, except for a little whirling wind over distant crackling. It was as if a great thing had been done, but the environment didn’t know what to do with it. There was a stunned feeling. There was an anticipation.

Love the woods, but not a fan of this fire. Just down this little country road there was a house and in the driveway of that house there was a man who made a big point of waving at me as I went by. In his yard was another small fire. I assume he was taking care of the serious business of the controlled burn. He wave awfully emphatically.

Most importantly, no one stopped me to ask if I did it. i did not.

Atlanta by nightfall, we picked up the in-laws for the weekend. There was a former basketball player waiting at the airport and giggling teens and people who were happy to take their picture with him. There was a family looking for their Marine and a limo driver flagging down clients with names on his iPad. Everyone was walking to the left of everything. It was amazing and awkward at the same time.

Sort of like Segways, which are now appearing at the airport. Because navigating the crowds isn’t challenging enough on most days. Who needs a Segway here? There are already shuttles and a train. There are wheelchairs and carts. I suppose if you’re working there and going back and forth you could use something that moves at slightly faster than walking speed that’d be the way to go.

But I rode 30 miles late today, through fire.

Alabama / cycling / memories / Monday / photo / Samford — Comments Off
11
Mar 13

A very rainy Monday

This is today:

I drove in that, trotted across a parking lot in that and then watched it from indoors fall on the quad at Samford. It is a rainy day. That’s about an inch of rain, apparently. I question our precipitation measuring methods. This was a lot of rain.

Hard to conceive that yesterday looked like this:

That was about 20 miles into my ride yesterday evening, about halfway back down the home road. It gives the impression in this stretch of riding on a ridge line. I’m not sure why, there’s no real drop off and houses dot the right side. But the pastures on the left tend to slope down a tiny bit, so you feel like you’re riding high and on top of everything. Only the hill you just crested isn’t that much of a hill, really, but everything is relative and when you are surrounded by rollers you can be King of the Molehill.

In a few more weeks, and a little to the right of that shot, there will be the most amazing wildflowers. A few days after that, and back down the hill to the left, there will be a yard filled with eight-foot-tall flowering bushes. This is a fragrant area.

Anyway. Being a rainy Monday, I made today Copeland Cookie Day in my class.

Dr. Gary Copeland was one of our grad school professors. He died last January, just after his retirement which was doubly sad in that he was so very much looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren.

He was the kind of man that people just don’t stop missing, I think. I had the honor of being invited to a Facebook page in his memory that remains active even today.

And so I wrote there that it was Copeland Cookie Day in class. In honor of the great man and his epistemology and ontology class I pick a day each semester, put a picture of his on the board, tell them about this colorful character, feed the students cookies and, most importantly, talk about things that aren’t on the syllabus.

It is one of everyone’s favorite classes. Mostly because of the cookies.

Dr. Copeland was the instructor of my first class at Alabama and was on my comps committee. He was one of the good ones, and I like telling students about him, and his Copeland fests and taking students out to eat and his general kind and giving nature.

When I wrote about it this afternoon on Facebook 16 people liked it, most of them his former students. At least one professor said he was going to make his own Copeland Cookie Day and word is getting around our department that I do this. He would laugh at the silliness of it. But he was a giver and would have enjoyed it, too, I think.

So we talked in class about trips we’d taken so far and how some people who have similar majors from elsewhere are waiting tables or how someone read a survey about how it was a tough career. And those things are important to hear, but for freshmen and sophomores there are a lot of positives too. At the end of the day its not unlike most other things: work hard at it and good things can come to you. Dodge raindrops where you can, look fondly back on sunny days and forward to even nicer ones.

It is that time of year, where the weather always seems on on the cusp of ever nicer days, and we’re all looking forward. The oncoming Spring Break isn’t a bad excuse, either. Not that anyone is counting the days, the number of which is four.

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / history / memories / things to read / video — Comments Off
8
Mar 13

An altogether lovely Friday evening

Shelby County, Ala. made The Daily Show earlier this week:

And then Shelby County made the Colbert Report:

So there’s that.

Here’s some stupid:

A Michigan elementary school is defending its decision to confiscate a third-graders batch of homemade cupcakes because the birthday treats were decorated with plastic green Army soldiers.

Casey Fountain told Fox News that the principal of his son’s elementary school called the cupcakes “insensitive” — in light of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut.

“It disgusted me,” he said. “It’s vile they lump true American heroes with psychopathic killers.”

The principal chimes in and, as you might expect, does not acquit herself especially well of the situation.

Here’s another one, some 100 students have been suspended for taking part in Harlem Shake videos:

According to the National Coalition against Censorship, about 100 students across the country have been suspended for making and posting their own version of the viral video on the Web. School districts have offered a variety of reasons for the suspensions, said NCAC Director Joan Bertin, with most saying that the videos, which feature suggestive dancing, are inappropriate. However, Bertin said, she believes that regardless of how the videos could be interpreted, decisions to suspend students and keep them out of class cross the line. The NCAC has compared the schools’ actions to the plot of the 1984 film “Footloose,” in which a town outlaws dancing and rock music.

“It seems a rather disproportionate response by educators to something that, at most, I would characterize as teenage hijinks,” Bertin said.

[…]

“We are very strongly in the camp of telling schools that this is protected speech. Even if it’s unpleasant, we do protect that kind of speech in this country and should, as much for students as adults,” she said.

Disproportionate response seems the right words to use there.

When I was a little tot my mother used to tell me about how dirty Birmingham was. It was an industrial center back then, the Pittsburgh of the South, right up until the 1970s. Bio-tech, medical service, UAB and banking changed much of the economic landscape. Between those shifts and more strict ecological rules it changed things in the air too.

The air, my mother said, used to be brown.

Never sure if I’ve ever seen a picture of that, until today. That was the summer of ’72, when there probably was no such thing as air quality reports and ozone alerts. Your emphysema will kick in just looking at it.

And so it was that I enjoyed a much more clear evening outdoors tonight. There’s a lot to be grateful for, if you like, and being breathless under blooming pear trees because your bicycle has your heart rate up is one of those things. Better than the heavy industrial alternative, at least. I got in 21 quick miles this evening, my first time on the bike in several weeks because of travel and sickness. That’s the way of it: build up a bit of form and a few miles, something else always comes along to distract me.

At the baseball game, Auburn led off with a triple, one of Jackson Burgreen’s two hits of the night. He’d also score later in the inning, before sending in a run in the second:

We moved from behind the plate to over third base, so we could enjoy the heckling. Brown had four errors in the seventh (they’d make another later) when I had what was roundly considered the line of the night. The Brown shortstop was standing on third, and he was just about the only guy in his entire infield that hadn’t erred. So I asked him “J.J., do you know what you can make with four Es?”

The professional hecklers in Section 111 made the sound, so I simply said “A Taylor Swift song.”

Turned around to see them bowing to me. It was a bit awkward.

Brown’s left fielder, Will Marcal, had a nice night. He gathered two hits and demonstrated a cannon in the field. I bet no one runs on him more than once:

Auburn won 9-4 and we caught the Brown head coach enjoying all of the playful little jokes the hecklers were sharing with his team. Guess we’ll work on him more tomorrow.

cycling / journalism / links / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
31
Jan 13

I quote Keating

I found the perfect 20 mile route around town this evening. Leave the house, pedal around the loop and add on this road and that and come down the last hill and then up through the neighborhood and 20.00 on the Cateye, precisely. Remarkable.

And I was only almost hit by a car once. This never ceases to amaze me. On any country road around here people will move way over to the left as they go by. Get on one of the four lane roads and they’ll get as close to you as possible, even if every other lane is open to their use. Today this particular driver was obviously unprepared or unmoved by the three feet law — 36 lousy inches, that’s what you’re supposed to give. Had I been glancing down at my gears, and had my left shoulder or right foot been down at the time, I would have drifted just a bit and that car would have hit me. It was chillingly close, which is a delightful way to make you question if you’re full comfortable in the saddle again.

Anyway, lovely ride notwithstanding. A little faster than I’ve recently been, but still nothing worth mentioning. The heart rate is the thing, and all that.

Some things to read: Salesman: Bama players used spray:

Key said players bought products at a rate he cited as confidential.

“They want to win,” he said. “After the games they said they couldn’t believe how they weren’t tired and how much energy they had.”

I know they are sports writers, but even those guys should be able to identify when they are giving unscrupulous commercials to people. I don’t really care one way or another about this story as a sports story. It is frustrating how the reporters have really allowed themselves to be complicit in these miracle elixir pitchmen to glam themselves up. That’s a shame.

Oral history of the Super Bowl Shuffle, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Or taxes, if you prefer. Alabama tax system lands in ‘terrible 10’.

I like this one, Eight ways journalists can use SoundCloud:

1. To post news programming

2. To report from the field and post audio from interviews

3. Record, edit and upload a recording from an iPhone

There are a lot of great ideas and details there.

And, finally, a real thinker: How to redesign the beat for engagement, impact, and accountability:

Instead of going to the candidates and talking to them about their agendas, we flipped it. We made a public call: We’re coming to your neighborhood. Show us what needs fixing. We then sent a reporter into each district for one week. The reporters did ride-alongs with locals, quizzed residents, and found out what city-level issues mattered to them.

We wrote about those community needs. Then, we took that residents’ agenda back to the candidates and asked what they would do to address it.

The approach sparked a series of revelations that have reshaped how I look at the fundamental choices we make as journalists. It turns out our coverage for years had been focused on things that didn’t seem to matter all that much to even active San Diego residents.

There’s a difference between monologuing and conversing.

This is the sixth and cumulative point of a draft plan I’m writing on right now, it falls in step neatly with that, and may be helpful in preparing young journalists for the world they’ll one day enter:

Engage your audience. Ask for their questions. Get and share the answers from appropriate sources. Follow your most active readers and repost their most compelling material. Engagement becomes reporting, which draws more readers, who increase your engagement. Remember: the audience, in the aggregate, is always going to know more than you as an individual.

“‘Twas always thus, and always thus shall be.”

Check out the historic marker series earlier? Breeze through the full and growing site! There’s always Twitter! And Tumblr too!