football

cycling / football / IU / Monday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Just some videos to fill the day
9
Sep 19

Just some videos to fill the day

It is the rare day indeed, this year, that I get out in front of The Yankee. The closer I got to the end of yesterday’s ride, the more I felt like this:

I just knew she would pip me before the end, and so I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, and somehow I managed to stay away, but only just.

And if you’re here for a different sort of video, this is the funniest one of the weekend:

And this is a cool little bit of something cool the Indiana athletic department cooked up:

But there’s something important in there:

George Taliaferro’s story defies excerpting, but let’s try:

As the first day of school approached, Taliaferro asked the football coaches when he was going to be moved on campus. He was told black students didn’t live in dorms.

“I called my father and told him I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t live on campus, where I couldn’t swim in the pool and where I couldn’t sit in the bottom section of the movie theater,” Taliaferro said. “My father told me there were other reasons I was there, and then he hung up the phone on me. I was never so hurt because I thought the one person who could understand being discriminated against was him.”

That tough love stemmed from two things his parents, neither of whom went past sixth grade, told him every day as he grew up. “They’d say, ‘We love you,'” he recalled. “And, ‘You must be educated.'”

And then:

He played seven seasons of pro football, six in the NFL with New York, Dallas, Baltimore and Philadelphia, three times making the Pro Bowl. He became a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Baltimore, advised prisoners adjusting to society upon their release, got his master’s in social work at Howard University, taught at Maryland, was dean of students at Morgan State, returned to Indiana as a professor and special assistant to IU president John Ryan, and helped start Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Indiana in Bloomington.

You can’t put that in a gif or a football video, but you certainly oughta try.

football / Friday / IU / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Sports in spite of ourselves
6
Sep 19

Sports in spite of ourselves

Here’s the other show the sports guys produced last night. It’s a talk show, and this episode follows the traditional format, but I hear things may be getting changed as we progress through the year. There’s a new host and new producers eager to stretch their legs.

The guy that hosted that show for the better part of the last two years graduated this spring and just started working as a sports reporter for a television station down on the Gulf of Mexico. Everyone that comes through our little station gets hired. For good reason, too. If you stick around these parts for too long, this is bound to happen:

For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find ways to pay less attention to football. It’s grown less important, the older I get. And yet, where I’m from, there are heavy duty cultural implications. Of course, I’m not there anymore, sadly, so that helps. But there’s plenty on television. And it’s good television.

There’s also the safety aspect. It’s become more difficult to enjoy watching people do these things that could potentially be so self-detrimental. But, I’ll watch. Because it is fun. And it isn’t all bad. Way up and way out and all that. Tribal joys

Plus, the ethos. Look at the guys from this school in Indianapolis doing all the right things:

How can you not be romantic about football? How could you not want to be a Marian Knight?

football / IU / photo / podcast / Tuesday — Comments Off on Spent the night in the studio
20
Feb 18

Spent the night in the studio

Talked a little tackle football on the podcast today. There’s a bill pending in Sacramento, California that would ban a tackle version of the sport before high school. That’s the story sports researcher Jimmy Sanderson brought to us today. Pretty interesting stuff.

In the evening, we were in the television studio. The students were making news shows. And Zoe was giving us our weather forecast:

Anna and Katrina were holding down the news desk:

Then we had some sports banter with Joe Canter:

Later, Laura and Alex recorded an episode of What’s Up Weekly:

There were other things, but they were mostly as exciting as email. It was one of those days when you just spent most of your time hacking away at a thicket of emails and attachments and replies and drafts and they never seem to thin out. Sometimes the studio is easy to get to, other days you really must work at it.

football / Friday / photo / podcast — Comments Off on There are two podcasts embedded in this post
19
Jan 18

There are two podcasts embedded in this post

I have this friend that is a designer in an architectural school. We used to sit and discuss things, trying to find some way that we could put this thought process and that expertise together. There was always something there, we thought, but we never could quite grasp it. Probably because the rest of us all think design is one of those things that is easy, and the folks who do that just generally graceful enough to not laugh at us in person.

What do the rest of us know, anyway? Just because we’re binge-watching E.R. right now, after all, doesn’t mean I’m ready to run a trauma code.

“Give me CBC, Chem-20, lights and dip the urine!”

See what I mean?

I, of course, know absolutely nothing about design. But I do love all of those pictures you see online about design versus user experience. They are an insufferable way to point out that we see, in retrospect, what someone else couldn’t get right beforehand. “Haha, we are nerdier than you nerds, but we are casual about it, and only making jokes about it online, using someone else’s designed interface that may, or may not, be a well designed user interface. But believe me, I’m getting to that, just as soon as I find where I stored all my really cool gifs.”

Really, what those photographs always suggest to me is that we are a path of least resistance species. And right angles, while aesthetically pleasing, are inherently asking a lot more than a lazy person is willing to give.

I thought of that this evening, when we were walking out to the car and I saw:

When there isn’t snow on the ground there is a slightly worn path there. I’d have to really check, but the user experience path might be even longer in the snow. Because it is cold, I suppose.

Hey, Spencer Elliott of The Tennessean joined me on the show today. We talked about Uber and Lyft and how you work and communicate with your peers when you don’t have bosses or colleagues and what it all means for the future and there is some really interesting stuff here:

This is another good argument for driverless cars, I think. But I’m not sure how I’d feel about my Nissan logging on and then getting bummed out by something it saw on thepeopleyouferryaround.com/forums

And because my Nissan is a car, and not a person, it would never crave Chinese, never get the pork noodle thing I ordered tonight and never read the fortune that came inside the cookie that the guy dashed into the bag at the last possible second:

Why, yes, I am already lucky boy. More lucky than I deserve, I am sure.

I actually recording another little thing today, just because I love this story and it will be dated before the weekend is up. It is only five minutes of my soothingly smooth monotone:

football / IU / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Some things to watch
26
Sep 17

Some things to watch

I spent the evening in the television studio. What did you do with your evening?

Two shows were put in the can tonight. The news show there and this helpful little program which keeps you up-to-date on current events and pop culture:

Here’s another great segment of television that is worth watching this week:

This topic is going to get stretched and twisted in nine different ways in the next few weeks, but this is important.

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