At the end of the night, our hotel concierge asks how things are. “Well, I’ve been hit by a van and almost ran over by a teenager on a bicycle.”
This, and a few other interesting non-traffic things happened within a five-block walk.
The concierge points out this is Miami, and they are all notoriously bad drivers here. Turns out he knew of an insurance survey ranking them at the bottom of the list, and everything. There’s a lesson there. If you cite your source, even if it was one of those publicity surveys, you’ll always come off as an expert.
The van incident was a mutual fault kind of thing. We’re on the sidewalk and the van is trying to join the road to which we’re walking. He’s looking to his left and we’re approaching him from his right. The Yankee walks quickly in front of the van, which might not have been smart. I walked behind her, which definitely was not smart. The van driver started his acceleration as I’m in the middle of his path. I hop back and smacked the hood of the van twice. Hard. Scared him to death, aggravated me, terrified The Yankee.
But I’m fine. I hurt my hand hitting the hood, purely a defensive measure. I tweaked my left ankle in trying to hop back in an effort to create some distance between flesh and bone and bumper and grill. I was happily able to walk off the ankle as the night wore on. I’ve grown very protective of my feet of late, as I have recently noticed I use them to walk and run and ride my bike pretty much everywhere.
So that was a big highlight. A van! Hitting me!
Other highlights include this little story: Last week in Connecticut the woman who runs the little Italian place we visit there told us she was cruising out of Miami today. Her two children had booked a trip for their parents. Knowing we were also going to be in Miami we said “Maybe we’ll see you on your ship, haha.”
We checked into our hotel, got up to the room, took in the view, looked out the window to the left and:
That was their ship pulling out for a week-long party.
Dinner tonight was at Havana 1957. I’d recommend it. I had the Fricase de Pollo:
Here’s their placemat, and how often do you take a placemat from a restaurant?
I’m going to shoot a lot of video in the next few days. Here is one from today, just some shots of the city:
When you get inside it just smells like the best pizza you’ve ever had. And your nose is not lying.
Here are some of the guys putting together the tomato pies:
They’ve been at this for 89 years now, the oven in this store is built brick-by-brick like in the original. The fire door is a molding of the original. They take Frank Pepe’s idea pretty seriously. So do we.
Seven of us ordered four of these. The before:
The after:
Later, we saw some hockey. I shot some video.*
Kevin Poulin made 34 saves to pick up his second shutout of the season, Alan Quine and Sebastian Collberg each scored in the third period for the Sound Tigers as Bridgeport won 2-0. We were there to see it.
There was also a youth hockey exhibition, dominated by one too-big kid, but adorable for all the little ones. I caught two goals near the end of their skate in this video:
*Yes, the footage isn’t the best. (I shot it on my phone, shot about six minutes in all from a fixed position and now this much about hockey.) Pardon the mess, as they say. This is all about trying to make the workflow efficient.
Back to that comet for 90 seconds. USA Today offers us the chance to hear the spooky-beautiful “sound” the thing makes.
Sure, those are clicks and pops in the magnetic field, amplified for the human ear’s range. But why is it, Mr. Smart Space Guy, that science fiction always has a similar sound to the creatures who are chasing the protagonists?
Isn’t that neat? You just listened to a comet. The 21st century is a pretty amazing place. I’m happy to be here in it with you.
Today’s post is brief because there was class — we discussed aggregation and curation — and then reading a bunch of paper that had to do with a news story and then a flurry of emails about it, the last weighing in at something like 1,500 words, with three footnotes. (Pro tip: When you go back to revise and shorten the email and it just keeps growing, press send and walk away.)
Got home just in time for dinner, so we went out with our friend Sally Ann and had a wonderful Pie Day.
The vegetable of the day was green beans. I mention this because, even if you are a huge supporter of the vegetable of the day concept, there’s no way you can stand by green beans as being worth a mention.
I like green beans, but they hardly win any given day. But if you have a recipe to jazz them up, I’m ready to hear about it.
Adding almond slivers does not constitute jazzing up green beans.
I plan on being asleep before it gets late, so you can see why I’ve so quickly come to the green bean portion of the festivities.
I did not have green beans.
Things to read … because you have to provide nutrition for the brain, too.
This is a fine, worthwhile essay about events taking place at the high school level. There are a few issues on some college campuses, but nowhere near as many and, thankfully, not on ours. At the high school level is where you see the pernicious influence. Still, ever vigilant, First Amendment: In land of the free, why are schools afraid of freedom?:
In one community, for example, school officials ban coverage of student religious clubs while permitting coverage of all other student clubs. But in a very different community, administrators instruct students not to report on LGBT issues because a few parents once complained about a profile of a gay student in the school paper.
Under current law, school officials may review what goes into school publications (though they aren’t required by any law to do so). But they may not turn “prior review” into “prior restraint” with overly broad and vague restrictions on what student reporters may cover.
Unfortunately, many public school administrators are either unfamiliar with the First Amendment or simply ignore it.
Facebook doesn’t just track what you do on its site. It also collects information about your activities when you’re off Facebook. For example, if you use Facebook to log in to outside websites and mobile apps, the company will receive data about those. It also gets information about your activity on other businesses it owns, such as WhatsApp and Instagram, in accordance with those services’ privacy policies.
[…]
Everything is fair game. Facebook explains it best: “We collect the content and other information you provide when you use our Services, including when you sign up for an account, create or share, and message or communicate with others.” Plus, Facebook says it also collects information about how you use Facebook, “such as the types of content you view or engage with or the frequency and duration of your activities.”
Last week I was talking with a student and somehow we came to discover the Krispy Kreme Challenge. He’s a sprinter, but now I’m trying to talk him into doing this race — 2.5 miles, a dozen doughnuts and then 2.5 more miles. I’m going to do it in my neighborhood I said, just to see. I found the 2014 times of the race. If I can finish it, I at least won’t be last.
“It’s mostly being in general good shape. There’s two components–running and eating. You can do one or the other, but the skill is to do both. This kind of race is hard to train for.”
This could be a mistake, but I think I might be that kind of guy. This could be a further, more grievous mistake, but next weekend I have a date with the track and a dozen glazed.
I don’t know if you have heard about The Snappening yet, where thousands of Snapchat user accounts hacked or otherwise violated, but this could be a big story. And that led to, perhaps, the most insightful thing I said today:
Who really needs to invest greatly in PR, preventative and crisis comm: Anyone working in cloud storage.
Not to make this a culinary thing, but after several Fridays of bad examples, I am disappointed to have to say that the new cafeteria vendor has ruined fried chicken. It seemed to me that they deserved a few weeks under the Benefit of the Doubt accords, and I gave them that. There are a lot of carbs on a daily basis, and the basic foodstuffs seem to rotate on something close to a monthly schedule theme — so we’ve heard. But, and this is important, Friday is fried chicken day. And they’ve missed on all of them so far, in my humble and hungry opinion. Today I noticed the menu and knew it would be no better.
Protip: There is no other fried chicken. Any attempt at making fried chicken in any way not like a grandparent does is an abject failure and poultry abuse.
I apologize for that outburst.
OK, one more food related note, Five Dairy Queen locations in Alabama fall victim to data breach. Thankfully I am not impacted. Hopefully it doesn’t effect you. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I dined at Dairy Queen. I recall the last time I ate at a restaurant that used to be a Dairy Queen. It is a barbecue place now, most remarkable for the way they cut their fries.
That former Dairy Queen is the same place where once, many years ago now, the young lady working said that they had no ice cream for their blizzards. This was in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. I always thought she should have locked the door and called it a day. No one is going for the chicken fingers in July, right?
Back to the point, with every passing data breach story I read I am more and more convinced we’ll be returning to a more cash-based exchange, soon. Customers assume a lot of risk, and they assume those retailers have their networks under control, and, sadly, that isn’t hasn’t always proved to be the case.
Sorry for all of this food talk. In a few minutes we are going to a dinner party. I’m taking my appetite.
Things to read … to whet your appetite.
Couldn’t hurt, but it isn’t a 100 percent requirement, Should all journalists be on Twitter? Think of it this way: there are plenty of community papers out there with a minimal online component, if that. They still cover their market. They are still journalists. Now, you’ll find that some topics demand Twitter or other online tools, of course. Others, the online tools could serve as a great compliment. This is the point the piece tries to dance around in a snarky fashion.
Have you ever wondered which buildings near you are listed on the National Register of Historic Places? If you’ve ever tried to look this up, you probably had trouble finding what you were looking for because until the summer of 2014, there really was no user-friendly way to browse map-integrated National Register listings. Now, thanks to the Wikipedia Summer of Monuments campaign, there is a free, simple, and interactive map that shows all places listed on the National Register.
An Alaska couple knocked on the door of their son’s long-time girlfriend Thursday, intending to inform her that he’d been killed in a car accident.
Karen and Jay Priest instead were stunned when the son, 29-year-old Justin Priest, answered the door. They had mistakenly been told by Juneau police that he’d been killed in the crash.
Karen Priest said her husband started sobbing, and she was in shock.
“They told me she drew something that resembled a gun,” said Rebecca. “According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said, ‘pew pew,” said Rebecca.
She said her child was given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts.
“[They] Asked her if she was depressed now,” said Rebecca.
Without her permission, Rebecca said her child was given the Mobile County Public School Safety Contract to sign stating she wouldn’t kill herself or others.
“While I was in the lobby waiting they had my 5-year-old sign a contract about suicide and homicide,” said Rebecca.
It takes a village. And that’s part of the problem, wouldn’t you agree?
Honestly, this is just about the stupidest thing you could conceive. And it is happening here, which is mind-boggling.
It was a good run, but common sense appears to be losing out.
Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.
And that, as they say, is its own reward.
My other reward was veggies.
Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.
(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)
Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.
“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.
Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.
“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”
At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?
But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?
If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:
The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?
