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We went to a football game today:
We were treated to a very nice sunset midway through the thing:
Prior to the game, we saw these guys again, the 2004 undefeated Auburn team. It was neat to see their recognition. They were a lot of fun to watch as players:
They’re all watching this package on the big screen:
Did I mention the rain? It rained at the tailgate. The hot summer day turned into an impressively humid one. And then the sun came back out and we baked ourselves in the shade.
We loaded up on sunblock, went into the stadium and watched most of the game before the lightning came. Lightning means delays. And so they took everyone off the field. They asked the fans to go hide. Most of them did. The storm cells with the lightning passed.
And just before the teams came back on the field to resume play, the rain finally came. The stadium speakers blared rain-themed music, the hearty students that stuck around sang along:
That raindrop at the end of the video is pure art, no? Purely accidental art.
We’d talked to a guy earlier who recalled when he was in the student body during the great monsoon of 2009. He said that game, the West Virginia game, was the best day of his life.
I recall getting rained on once or twice when I sat in the student body. I did not have the same recollection of good cheer. But the football wasn’t quite as good at that moment, either.
Anyway, this was before the storm, the cheerleaders wave those giant flags after scores. They are quite cumbersome, even on a still day:
And this is the storm as it wrapped around the northern end of the stadium. It was an impressive site:
Football is here. Friends are here. Triple-digit temperatures are … close. Triple-digit heat indexes … are close. We sat outside and in the sun and shade and it was 94 degrees. The company was good:
As we were walking up the ramps to the upper deck, we had a great view of fans coming in to the stadium:
We could also see the storm that delayed the game coming in:
Twitter’s new analytics tell me that almost 20,000 people saw that picture tonight. At least four different meteorologists retweeted it. But I didn’t get any lightning shots.
I did get a clear view of the rain shafts, though:
Auburn won 45-21. It was hot. The friends were lovely.
Started my morning with a run. I got in a nice 5K before a series of meetings — fortunately, there were no meetings about meetings. My workday also ended with meetings about social media. In between, I gave a lecture on the “changing concepts of news.” I started around the muckrackers at McClure’s and worked up to the modern moment. In 2015, remember, Back to the Future II showed us flying robot reporters working for USA Today.
We talked a bit about the Oculus Rift work. I showed them the latest androids being developed in Japan:
Think about all of the changes that have taken place in journalism and storytelling in the last 40 years, I said. Imagine what it will look like toward the end of your career, in another 40 years.
That android, that so many of them thought to be odd or creepy today, will be positively old fashioned by then.
Things to read … because reading will never go out of style.
(We hope.)
How the news upstarts covered ISIS:
The rallying cry for those bemoaning the demise of newspapers was, “Without The New York Times, who would cover Iraq?” Well, quite a few places, it turns out.
As traditional media companies have scaled back their foreign bureaus, newer news organizations like Vice and BuzzFeed have expanded their mandate to fill the void. (Not included in this review is Global Post, the online startup that James Foley worked for, since it started with the express purpose of covering foreign news.) But can a bunch of relatively small upstarts cover the world’s hot spots? ISIS, one of the year’s biggest stories, is as good a test case as any to see how five have been doing it.
Here’s more pessimism for print advertising:
For newspapers, continued print advertising declines will mean more pressure on circulation (print subscribers and paywalls) or new revenue (digital marketing services, events) to make up the difference. Most likely, they won’t, and we’ll see more cuts.
If the rate of print ad decline does slow in 2015 (from 8.9 percent down to 6.2 percent down), that would be…semi-good news, I guess, after several years of drops in the high single digits? But there’s nothing here to predict a leveling off, much less a return to growth.
The ‘guiding principles’ of Quartz redesign
The Miami Herald’s new publisher is moving the paper a bit closer towards irrelevancy
VA ‘Oscar the Grouch’ training angers vets:
The beleaguered Department of Veterans Affairs depicted dissatisfied veterans as Oscar the Grouch in a recent internal training guide, and some vets and VA staffers said Tuesday that they feel trashed.
The cranky Sesame Street character who lives in a garbage can was used in reference to veterans who will attend town-hall events Wednesday in Philadelphia.
“There is no time or place to make light of the current crisis that the VA is in,” said Joe Davis, a national spokesman for the VFW. “And especially to insult the VA’s primary customer.”
These people will apparently not get it. And its a delightful little series of events to which we can all look forward.
The first college football game of the year was tonight. This guy was the referee:
I hadn’t realized that Boyd Crowder had taken on a side job:
Justified should be back around January. But football is here now. Hooray football.
On my bike ride today, an Alabama fan honked at me three times, because Roll Tide, I guess. But, since it was an Alabama fan, I was really honked at 15 times, wasn’t I?
The SEC Network launched today, with much giddiness and silliness, and football season is around the corner. There will always be Bama jokes, it seems.
Also, on one portion of my ride — which involves a downhill, a turn lane and then an explosion onto a beautiful, freshly paved road — a car pull right out in front of me. The driver panicked. He stopped, filling the entire lane. So he’s perpendicular to traffic, me, because he is no longer making his left turn.
Bikes are agile, but they don’t exactly stop on a dime. The emergency stop, as it were, is to burn up your brakes, slip off the saddle and put your body behind the seat tube. This shifts the mass, and slows things down, but doesn’t mean you’re stopped. Also, I find, it is hard to unclip when you’re behind the seat, so there’s not really a graceful way to put your foot down and burn up your shoes.
Instead of turning, as I’m trying to stop, he’s waving me through, to pass across the front of his car, into the oncoming lane.
This would have been so much better if he’d just looked to his left before he tried to turn to his left.
Later, on the TT segment, I tried to best yesterday’s time. I fairly well buried myself, dropped two other cyclists and improved my time from 9:34 to 9:03. That moved me from seventh to fourth for the year. The leader sits on top with a time of 8:35. I’m not sure if I can find 28 more seconds to shave off that time. Something to shoot for, I guess.
Speaking of cycling, here’s one last incredible Robin Williams story. Famed designer Dario Pegoretti, fighting lymphoma, met Robin Williams at a convention:
“He talked to me about my situation, and gave me a lot of strength,” Dario Pegoretti said from Italy on Wednesday.
At dinner, the virtuoso comic actor and the virtuoso frame-builder talked about bikes, but they also talked about things besides bikes. Williams spoke a little Italian, and his Italian was pretty good. He recalled his visits to Rome, about once meeting Fellini. To everyone’s delight, by the end of the night, he also did an extended Pegoretti impression for the table.
“I was just rolling on the floor,” said one of the dinner guests, Nelson Frazier, a rep for Gita. “It’s the only time I’ve seen Dario pretty much speechless.”
“It was really a beautiful night,” Pegoretti said. “I have so many beautiful memories.”
And speaking of the SEC Network:
Consider the SEC Network as indirect pay-per-view for college football games involving your favorite team.
[…]
According to Sports Business Journal, the network will cost cable companies $1.40 per subscriber in states inside the SEC footprint. If you live outside that footprint, the cost is only 25 cents per subscriber.
If the SBJ report is correct, then the SEC Network could be the third most expensive channel for local viewers. Figures from the Wall Street Journal show ESPN ($6.04) and TNT ($1.48) are the only ones that would charge more.
Right now? No one cares. Football.
