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6
Feb 26

We crammed in a full day in the whole day

Made it up to the 50s here today. It was glorious, even as I spent most of it indoors.

This morning we walked in the brisk morning air to one of those legendary neighborhood hipster brunch spots. Walked right in, sat right down. And despite the ” target=”_blank”>Flying Biscuit Cafe having 45 locations around the South, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it, let alone been there. I ordered the chicken and waffles. It was filling, which was the point. Pretty decent, but nowhere near as good as the entertainment.

There was a man sitting across the store, a loud talker, telling his breakfast companion about alien conspiracy theories. I was intrigued, right up until we got to how they are now among us. Also, he couldn’t keep which set of his physics he wanted to use. I wanted to go over and ask him what the aliens were doing here. What’s the goal? Domination? They flew here, they’ve got us on tech. Just hanging out? We can be laughably entertaining. Political refugees? That’s just bad timing on their part. Then I started looking around, like I was in a scene from Men in Black.

I mean, you never know, you know? Especially once you know they’re here.

I saw no aliens. But I did see my first robot car. Or should I say my first full-sized remote control car.

Then we saw them all day. The novelty wore off incredibly quickly.

I enjoyed this crosswalk. All four sides of that block had rainbow crosswalks, which was colorful and joyous and wonderful and, honestly, we need more variety in public life, and if some of it makes a statement about people’s rights, that’s great too.

Another fun thing is art that makes shadows that spell things. Reverse shadow type, very clever, and all you need is the sun.

We had a department meeting via Zoom. Almost as fun as a meeting in person. Students were nominated for prestigious awards. We considered plans for how they should be honored. All of that is fun. I always like how passionate faculty are about honoring students. We discussed departmental application and enrollment and numbers, which are all impressive. Other items now have pins put in them. Still other things were teased. We tease information among colleagues.

I do not know why we do that, but we do.

Also, I remedied some technical problems with my online class. Thoroughly productive in every way.

And then my lovely bride did a radio hit, via Zoom. A producer wrote her to set up an interview with Times Radio’s Henry Bonshu.

The topic was politics in sport. It seems there is an Olympics going on. She is a globally renowned expert in the Olympics. And while this has never happened before, there seemed to be some sort of controversy surrounding one of the Olympians. A British skier left a message in the snow. And so that was the interview. Click Bonshu’s name and you can hear the interview, which was heard by all of Great Britain. Scroll about 90 minutes into the show.

We attended the welcome party for the wedding. Saw the groom, who is the Yankee’s former student. We reunited with another one of her former students and had a lovely catch-up chat. I lot can happen in a decade, it turns out. We also visited with the groom’s parents, who we are friends with. They had a successful barbecue concern, but retired two years ago. And now both of their kids are married off and they’re just the cutest, sweetest people.

The mother of the groom was given carte blanche on what she is wearing tomorrow. No one had seen it. Not her son, not her husband. But she showed us a photo. She’s going to be stunning. I looked up from the photo, made eye contact with her husband and said, “Prepare yourself, sir.”

It’s a black tie wedding, and she’s going to steal the show in a very elaborate ceremony.

That’s tomorrow. Tonight, here’s a little art I saw on our evening walk. What do you think is going on here? I’ve no idea, and could use the help.

Maybe we can figure that out by Monday.

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5
Feb 26

Left, on a jet plane

Want to guess where I am? You can guess where I am. Here’s your first hint, I am not at home. Here’s your second hint, it’s a quick trip. Here’s your third hint, here’s the mode of travel. Or, at least, part of it.

We are attending a wedding this weekend, meaning a few nights out in hotels and restaurants and with one or two people we know. We’ll be in and out in no time flat. Getting married is one of my lovely bride’s former students. (This is the third wedding we’ve been to out of that particular cohort.) It is a black tie affair. (No pressure, other former students.)

We are also chummy with the groom’s parents, who are delightful people and I am looking forward to seeing them all tomorrow.

From the airport, and after an easy direct flight, we took an Uber to the hotel. The woman that drove was was just adorable and hilarious. She told some stories about some of her clients. And she let me lean into a few jokes about them. A little small talk with a southern woman is a thing to behold. She dodged traffic and avoided idiots and got us to our hotel.

We checked in with no problem, and then had dinner at a newly opened hipster tavern a few blocks away. I had one of those burgers that was overstuffed with condiments. You had to be careful to lean all the way over your plate to avoid dripping anything on you. Also, they had spicy ketchup which was, authentically, spicy. I don’t know what inauthentically spicy ketchup tastes like, but this wasn’t that. It had a flavor profile that haunted the taste buds, lingering there like a hint, and a memory, a smoke that won’t leave the room, a spice that burned after its welcome was worn out. Fortunately, I could wash it down with a glass of sweet tea. Another thing to behold, and I held it, right there in my hand. And then I had a refill.

Maybe another. Who can count such a joyous thing?

Tomorrow, we have meetings, and then a welcome party for the wedding. And some virtual work on this tiny little desk in our little room. It’ll all be charming, and about 25 degrees warmer than home.

We started working on a survey instrument today in Rituals and Traditions. I’m going to have the class survey members of the campus community. The survey data will, hopefully, help them in their group projects. So there I sat, keyboard in hand, typing up the suggested questions that the class came up.

We started as a brainstorming session. No question too silly. Well, may not that question, that question is silly. We wound up with about 40 questions. And then we took a pass through the whole lot of them and struck a few that probably wouldn’t help too much. We re-framed some of the questions to shape them up a bit better. And now I have to cull the 30 or so that remain. Thirty is probably too many for the type of survey we’re going to conduct, so I have to get this list down to 15 or so. And then build the survey.

Great fun!

In Criticism we watched the HBO documentary Fists of Freedom, which covers the lead up, and protests in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

I like Lee Evans’ part of the story, because he seems like a fun guy. The best segment here is Bob Beamon’s record-breaking long jump. It’s a beautiful moment of filmmaking. Scrub ahead to 36:08 for that.

They called it the leap of the century, and it took something like 15 minutes to resolve the distance. In the end, he’d jumped 21 inches farther than the previous world record. (And the world record holder was in the field at those Games.) Beamon’s mark would stand for decades.

The whole documentary is well done. (Though there are some weird edits in the embedded video for some reason.) Released in 1999, almost all of the primary participants are included here. Bronze medal winner John Carlos, notably, is absent. And we’ll talk about that in class next week. This documentary, and next week’s will hopefully set the stage for how we think about documentaries over the rest of the term.

But I’m not going to think about that until Monday. For now, I’m going to relish these 35-degree lows and contemplate the sheer novelty of a 50+ degree day tomorrow. It is not that at home. Spring is about to hit, here, right on time. I know that because things will be budding by February 14th, when a normal spring should arrive. I know that because I have the curse of experience, which becomes an embittered thing in the second week of February and I see a low temperature of … 15.

At least, when it gets even colder at home this weekend we won’t be there. Until Sunday, when it gets even colder. But not here, and not right now.

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2
Dec 25

New look to the front page, btw

For fun, I made some certificates for colleagues. They’re all inside jokes for conference friends. Polite, smart, funny, kind-hearted people. One of them was about one guy picking on another guy. That second guy got one for being up for anything. Another certificate for was for someone running the circus. A third was for another guy, “and he knows why.”

He does not know why. But, you know, I don’t know why either. He’s just about the sweetest, most decent guy you could meet. If he’s ever done anything out of line no one knows about it and he’s buried it deeply in his subconscious. I could go on and on, but, really, we’re just lucky he’s a good friend.

Anyway, we all attend this one conference. And we’ve all held various leadership positions there over the years. We’re trying really hard to become the cool club within the club. Or just to amuse ourselves. One year, my lovely bride won the junior scholar award and at the conference and got a nice plaque. The next year, she won a top paper award and got a plaque. The year after that, I got a top paper award there. (I got nothing.) She also has some certificates from when she ran different divisions of that conference. I’ve run the same ones. (I got nothing.) In our text chat, the rest of the group realized they have been similarly shortchanged. So I made certificates.

Her certificate recognized her many conference achievements. So meta.

And so as to inoculate myself from a return joke, I made one for me.

That’s one of the two or three semi-notorious things I’ve said at that conference over the years. We were participating on a panel on the social constructs of this or that and I held up my phone and said something like, “We are all roaming little balls of hate with hate rectangles in our hands.”

Actually, I said exactly that. The quote was immortalized by someone who got a certificate today.

I get to see them in April, and I’m excited for it.

This evening I updated the images on the front page of the site. They look similar to the most recent version, but different. They look like this.

They are photos from a particular tree-covered road that I shot in October. And here I am, finally getting around to uploading them. This being one of my core hobbies, and being about five weeks behind on getting them here says a lot about my time management lately.

Maybe I’ll get better at it later this month, when the term is over, and the grades have been submitted.

At which time I’ll take three, maybe four deep breaths, and start planning for the spring term.

The good news is I only have one new class prep in the spring! (Three this semester was … a lot.) One class I have will be unchanged. The one will be new. And I’ll make some small adjustments to the criticism class. I’ll refine the details for that in a few days.

Yes, I have carved out two 15-minutes blocks of time, Thursday and next Tuesday, to figure that all out.

In today’s installment of the criticism class, we discussed this story. I chose it because it is a different sort of piece than anything we’ve read all fall. And I wanted the class to see the mechanics of how the writer wrote about the mechanics of deaf soccer. I played when I was a kid, and when I first saw this story last summer I thought, “How do they do that?” Soccer is basically played, and communicated, from behind you. But if no one can hear …

Soccer — and life — through the eyes of the U.S. deaf women’s national team

The first thing to know about deaf soccer is that it is soccer, and a match looks the same as at any level of the sport.

Instead of a loud, profanity-laced pregame speech from the most extroverted leader on the team, players gather in a circle and execute a synchronized movement of quick fist bumps and back-of-hand slaps. During the game, the center official raises a flag in addition to blowing their whistle for fouls and stoppages of play, and games are typically quieter than the average match that features more verbal communication.

From a technical standpoint, players must have hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in their “better ear” to qualify to play deaf soccer and, crucially, hearing aids are not allowed in games, ensuring all players are on a level playing field.

On a hearing team, communication often comes from the back. The goalkeeper and defenders see everything in front of them and can direct their teammates accordingly — and verbally.

“For us, that’s not possible, that’s not realistic,” Andrews says.

The process is more about inherent understanding and movement as a team. If a forward pushes high to chase a ball, everyone behind her must follow. Halftime or injury breaks become more important, Andrews says, because they represent rare opportunities to look at each other as a group.

One guy, at the bginning of class, wondered the same question. How does that work? I said, “You should read the story. It gets explained about 20 percent the way through the story, and it’s a good one, and you’d like it if you read it.”

He just smiled an embarrassed smile and put his head down for a while. We carried on.

We also read and discussed this story, How the Texans and a spa enabled Deshaun Watson’s troubling behavior, mostly for the troubling headline, so I could make some important points about headlines. But the copy is worth reading, too, if you can stomach it.

The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous.

Two grand juries in Texas this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.

It is time, Watson and his representatives say, for everyone to move on.

Yet a New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.

The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.

In org comm we talked about crisis and conflict. Specifically, what are the differences between crises and scandals. This is one of those classes where you get to use popular instances of players the class knows and try to understand why things transpired as they did. For us, it is all building to next week’s work. And toward the final, but they don’t know that yet.

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21
Jul 25

Barbecue, batteries, books, bikes, and also batteries

Saturday night was date night. This was our date. We went out for dinner, barbecue at one of the better places around. Barbecue is one of the only things I’m legally allowed to be a snob about, and I take that seriously. What we had was flavorful, and moist. It was probably slow cooked. It was not over an open flame. If there’s no chimney stack coming out of the building, it isn’t technically barbecue. But, here, and in a pinch, it’ll do.

My lovely bride order the brisket, and there was some modifier on the order, which threw me for a loop. What did that mean? So I just said, Order whatever you usually get for me, because I was struggling to understand the variation in her order. She gave me a look. “You change your order so infrequently, how do you not know what you get? For some reason this amused the young woman running the register. She thought it was undeniably cute, and asked us to please come back often. I did a little joke or two and The Yankee wisely, but slowly, said, “Don’t encourage him.”

Wise because, of course, she knows better. Slowly because, of course, the encouragement had already happened.

I took this as my cue to get the drinks.

I got the drinks. And then there was our food, which we enjoyed.

And then, to cap off date night, we went to Lowe’s.

The store closes at 10, we got there at 9 and picked up the things we needed, filters for the air conditioner, some plumbing supplies, steak seasonings.

We did not get steak seasonings, but they had an entire end cap devoted to some of your finer mid-range shake-on condiments. We were in the market for a weed eater, because ours recently died, and the weeds did not stop growing out of respect for our loss.

So there we stood, trying to figure out the thises and thats. And an employee walked by. Volunteered to help, and was very helpful. (When was the last time either or both of those things happened at a big box store?) Helpful for the most part. Some of the things he said weren’t accurate, it turns out, but that’s OK. He was helpful in the ways that mattered the most. Then he gave us a brief bio on the 1960s-1980s band Badfinger. He was definitely the sort of guy that could do that. And then he gave us his testimony. He also saved us $20 on the list price.

We decided that going late at night is the time. Because the guys might help, and they’re really just trying to get you out of the store, of course.

So we bought a battery-powered weed eater. The selling point, to me, seems to be the battery life. Otherwise, dig out machine, machine turn on, machine chop up green things. Store machine. So the little tags at the store said this battery runs for 25 minutes, this one for 70 minutes, and this one works for 45.

I figured that the 45-minute battery is sufficient for our needs. And if it’s not, I could buy another battery. The batteries are expensive, so rationale number two. If I run down the battery, I simply go inside, charge the battery, cool off and live to eat weeds another day.

Sunday afternoon, buzzing after our successful date, I assembled the weed eater, glanced at the manual, and went outside already sweating from building the thing in the garage. I ate about six weeds, and then went inside to charge the battery. (The guy said it was 70 percent charged out of the box. It was not.)

I charged the thing. And then went out later and gave those weeds the what for.

Right away, the battery-powered element of this new tool paid for itself. I didn’t have to collect the extension cords. I didn’t have to run them to an outlet and plan my attack based on cord length and outlet placement. And, when I was done, I didn’t have to roll cords back up. Two or three more rounds, I figure, and this will have paid for itself based on convenience alone. And when has anyone ever been enthused about running a weed eater.

So now I’m rethinking my positions — not strongly held, mind you — about battery-powered power tools.

Today, buzzing after my successful weed eating efforts, I spent the afternoon at one of the local libraries doing school work. Being a public library, it was only somewhat useful. But nevertheless, I got something for my efforts. See if you can guess which one of these books was the most helpful.

The one in the middle. I picked it up as a flier, and eventually decided it will define an entire day’s worth of lecture. Then I bought the book. Not from the library, which would make it a store. But through the powers of the 21st century I found it on e-bay and had it sent directly to the house. Next week, I guess, I’ll start making slides.

As I write this, there’s a back-to-school commercial on, which isn’t bumming out anyone.

Anyway, this class will meet 28 times in the fall term. I think 19 of those meetings are now accounted for, so I have had some productive summer work.

But there is much more to do!

We got invited for a bike ride by our neighbor. The guy that lives behind us is also a big fan of the self-propelled two wheel experience. He’s of the sort that must decide which bicycle he wants to ride today. It’s a problem to which I aspire.

He bought a new computer and the Varia radar, which we have and enjoy. It’s a light that you attach to the seat rails. It sense cars and communicates with the headset and you when cars are coming up from behind. Or, as one Reddit reviewer wrote, it’s “The peace of mind I didn’t know I needed.”

We coached him through it, though he had most of it figured out in the brief ride around the neighborhood to our place. Then my lovely bride found she had a flat, so she had to switch bikes. (It’s a problem to which I aspire. The bikes, not the flats.) Not wanting to hold us up, she didn’t put her Varia on her bike. And, of course, after about half an hour mine died. (So, after all that about battery-powered tools above, I’m now looking for an extension cord version of the bike radar.) That meant our neighbor had the only running radar.

Of course, we put him the front, as you see the shadows pictured here.

It would, of course, make sense for him to be in the rear, so he could call out the cars. But it was in the evening and we were on some mostly abandoned roads and it wasn’t a problem. Plus we can watch out for vehicles the old fashioned way, listening and looking.

There’s not really a good point or resolution to this story, other than we enjoyed a nice ride. As we got back to the neighborhood they turned right and I kept on riding, just to add a few more miles before dinner.

There are always more miles ahead.

OK, that’s 1,220 words, and the best ones were about bikes and a weed eater. I should probably wrap this up.

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7
Apr 25

Back from Old Dominion

We are back from the conference, and I will now try to get back into the regular routine. Two conferences so close together, and at this high-volume stage of the semester … It will probably take weeks, if it ever happens at all. The nice thing is that Wednesday is group presentation day. We’ll learn about 10 new countries and I don’t have to do the prep work.

Why, I may as well go to another conference! Or back to Norfolk. The views were lovely.

This is from the VIP lounge atop the conference hotel. We aren’t I, and hardly VI, but we found ourselves sneaking in using the argument that we are, in fact, Ps.

The guy working the desk at the VIP lounge didn’t care, either way. It was as if knowing of its existence was the password. And so we had commanding sight lines of the waterfront.

So we went back another time. Because they also had some pretty good cookies.

They also had a clip-art-photo-ready conference table. We sat around that and enjoyed our powerful position dominating the skyline and talked about … nothing of importance. It was great.

We had a great view on Saturday evening, too, at a business meeting. As the discussion of the mass communication was discusseed, you could look right over the table and see this view behind the speaker.

Being on the water does have its charms.

We drove home yesterday. All of our friends caught their flights — indeed, we took one to the airport — outside of which I saw this modern art masterpiece.

Some of them made it home on time. Others got diverted because of weather, but they are eventually got in safely. And we’ll see them again next year, I hope. At least once a year is better than once every seven.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go come up with some presentation ideas for next year’s conference.