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adventures / history / Ireland / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
Mar 26

Burrishoole Friary

We’ve come to the Burrishoole Friary, the ruins of a Dominican friary founded in 1469 by Richard de Burgo of Turlough, and built on the sly, without papal blessing. About a generation, and two popes later, Pope Innocent III forgave the brothers there, which must have come as some relief, whenever they found out about it. Slack, in the 15th century, was notably unreliable. Maybe some communication issues were why they didn’t get the initial node from Pope Paul II. Or it could be that de Burgo didn’t bother to ask. Until that forgiveness, though, the whole community was at risk of being excommunicated. That must have been a tense 17 years.

But the Dominicans had been around here for more than two centuries, by then. They knew what they were getting into and they were used to building houses.

It’s a beautiful and peaceful space. The exterior of the church and the eastern wall of the cloister remain, while the other structures have long since been destroyed and removed.

The grounds cozy right up to an estuary of the nearby bay, and there’s just one road leading people past the place today, but it was once a much more lively, and profitable, and controversial place. Politics and religion have always worked with and one another in these parts, and when the Dissolution of Monasteries came in the 16th century, they were at risk again. At some point it became a military base. And at other moments in history it was seen as a source of income. The water meant dozens of English ships visited each year. The land is good. There was an iron mine. Fishing was profitable.

By the 18th century the abbey was in ruins, with the collapse of its roof in 1793 marking the start of its decline.

The grounds of the friary continue to serve as a cemetery. It is also a national monument.

Inside the husk of the building are graves and memorials, as if nearly every square inch was to be given over to thoughts of the dead. This is not uncommon in Europe, though I think of it more in churches that are still in service today.

As you move through the grounds, and through the silent old stone building, you notice the markers aging along your path, and other people’s lives can flash before your eyes. The winds and the water take away almost all of the basic details of life, and as you read what has been left of the people who have left, you are faced with the lasting and spare nature of stone.

This cross has been erected by the parishioners of Burrishoole to the memory of Father Manus Sweeney a holy and patriotic priest who was hanged in Newport June 8th, 1799 because he had joined with his countrymen in the Rebellion of 1798. His name shall be in request from generation to generation. May he rest in peace. Amen.

Manus Sweeney was a local, born of merchant stock, who came to his position to replace someone as the local curate because the previous person had been having “seditious conversation among the lower classes.” This particular part of western Ireland was comparatively disinterested in the British, and Sweeney is around during a time when the French were stirring things up. Sweeney loved Celtic monuments and antiquities, so there was a bit of a romantic, in him. Much else that is said of his regular life is steeped in folklore or embellishment. Sweeney is said to have studied in Paris, and might have been a Francophile decades before we had the word. His problem was that the French abilities in the region were beginning to wane. It’s a classic story from there, where the man of the cloth tried to rally the locals in a desperate and bold move against a dominant force. It doesn’t always work out, and so Sweeney found himself being spirited about, living, for times, in literal holes in the ground and caves, evading capture, until the English caught up to him. And so the man who one of his contemporaries, a bishop, called hare-brained, was soon put to the noose. The rebellion, which had started in May of 1798 was largely over by October. Too small, too localized, too unorganized. And after the French suffered defeats on land and sea, the Irish were gripped even more tightly by the British, and here we have Sweeney’s marker, which remembers him fondly.

We are all, hare-brained or not, a product of our times. And some people are bold enough to rise and to meet them. But not all are asked or moved or required to act in the same ways. Not too far away from Sweeney’s marker is one for woman named Mary, died aged 84 in 1991. Her marker tells us and reminds others “A woman of substance was she, what she liked most was an old chat and a good cup of tea.”

And as such we are remembered. What will that message be? I love a good cup of tea, too, but does that strike the right note for all of time? Or at least the several years to come?

We like to think that the stone is an eternal monument, but that’s our own vanity and shortsightedness, a conceit of the living. Nothing lasts about stone. Even in this peaceful place, the wind and the rains and the things that grow in it are having their way with old markers, taking on the job of slowly erasing even the most basic details of our lives.

There are a few boats pulled up on the shore, sitting in the shadow of the old friary. They look like they’re in for a nice long rest. Even that fiberglass, and the one small road, don’t take away from the idea of the peace that has come to this place. It is a place where you can feel an unknowable truth: time moves differently for the dead.

adventures / history / Ireland / maps / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
16
Mar 26

Up the west coast a bit

We woke up in Dublin on Sunday, which was great, because that’s where we went to sleep on Saturday night. The conference was over. I had spent time grading and working and finishing and delivering presentations. My lovely bride had spent her time running the conference and presenting and generally being awesome. (I never have that last requirement, which comes as some relief.) So, come Sunday, we were ready for a day with less to do, which meant, of course, we packed up our things, hailed a cab, and drove to the airport. There, we rented a car and departed the airport, reacquainting ourselves with driving on the left.

It’s an alien thing, and we’re now taking bets on who messes this up first by driving on the wrong side of some road. Also, we’re working on the terminology for the turns, which is the real challenge. Driving on the left and turning left makes sense, but you still have to wind up in the ~~right~~ correct spot. So it’s “tight left.” Driving on the left and turning right is fundamentally at odds with gravity, religion and the economy. So far, we are using “wide right” as our reminder to one another.

Anyway, we drove through some real countryside, heading across the island to Galway. Roughly, this route.

In the middle of nothing we found the need to satisfy hunger pangs and happened across a gas station that had a miniature food court stapled on to it. It was crowded because the local villages were holding weekend St. Patrick’s Day. While we waited — and waited — for your our food, St. Patrick himself wandered in. Good outfit, giant staff, clean white synthetic beard, awfully modern sneakers.

We arrived at our hotel, The Twelve, a fine modern hotel suite experience, where we stayed for approximately 17 hours, all of which was working, or sleeping. Before dinner I bent over the computer working on my TRP contract for work. It’s your self-report. Your what-have-you-been-doing-these-last-few-years report. I’ve been writing all of this for weeks and it’s actually a useful exercise. There are places where you can be reflective and philosophical and, if you allow for it, you can perhaps learn something about what you’re doing. Its the creative process of writing and self-discovery. Those parts were what was already done. Last night I was just putting all of the parts together, creating the internal links, making the PDFs. And then it was dinner time. We set out to meet our friend Sally Ann, her husband, and her student who presented at the conference. We went to a fish and chips joint and had a lovely time. Then it was back to the hotel, and back to work. After a few more hours I realized that the entire day’s work was for not. All that I have been coached to do is not what the CMS demands. That was a little moment of joy. Well, gather yourself, jot off a few emails, tear down the product you’ve made and send it in its individual parts. This document has grown to 88 pages. That’s what I’ve done the last two years. And much of that time felt like it was working on this. But it is submitted. One more thing off the list. And no small thing. Happy to have done it, happy to be finished with it. Wish I’d timed the whole effort, just to see what it took.

I didn’t even think about it at all over breakfast.

A good Irish breakfast is a fine thing. Lots of flavors. Some of them make no sense to my American sensibilities, but all of this was good. And it’s filling. I didn’t want anything until dinnertime, which is good, because after breakfast, after getting out of the room (hampered by a broken shower and solved by going to the room right next door) we were in the car and on our way.

We are driving about the northern portion of Ireland to see The Wild Atlantic Way. Here is a little video montage of the day. More below.

First, we hit Silverstrand Beach, which might not be on the Wild Atlantic Way. It’s about 250 meters of beach, meeting Galway Bay and stiff winds out of the west. Also, on the other side of a jettied pile of rocks lies this lovely cliff face.

(Click to embiggen.)

We’re finding a lot of shells with holes in them like this. Maybe we should make a necklace.

We stopped by Trá an Dóilín, Coral Strand, a beach filled with the remains of a seaweed called maerl, which has been pushed ashore, crushed by the water and bleached by the sun, it looks like coral. Maerl, when it is living, is a nice purple-pink color and in large quantities creates a spiky underwater floor. Scallops shelter in this prickly little carpet.

In the summer, this place will be dotted with snorkelers, looking for jellyfish and wrasse in these clear, cold waters. Historically, vessels called hookers would be at sea here. The shallow draft of the hookers meant they were good for the bays and the inlets, shallow waters and rougher seas. They’re not work boats these days, but for the last 50 or so years they’ve been pleasure craft. They host regattas for the hookers these days. It’s a small three-sail boat, with a lot of heart. One sailed all the way to New York in the 1980s.

Here’s a wider view of Trá an Dóilín.

(Click to embiggen.)

Then, we visited Glinsce. Not big enough to be a village, but important enough for a quick stop. The nearby sign had a helpful pronouncer, “gl – EENSH keh.” This area is important for its local fishing economy. The coastline here is quite rugged, and there are piers sprinkled along the coast up and down. We’re at one of them here.

Fishermen went out on row boats called currachs, simple wooden framed vessels that had a hide or canvas stretched over it. During the Drochshaol, the Great Famine of the mid-19th century, the government encouraged more production out of the fishing industry, and so they built these piers and boat launches and the local boatbuilding industry took off.

The fishermen named their boats after saints sometimes, like Caillin, a 6th century Irishman. He is said to have studied in Rome, returned home, to this area, and started a monastery. Every other thing you can find out about him is fantastical, but scholars are apparently certain he was actual person. The boat builders put a little bottle of water from St. Caillin’s holy well into the keel off the vessels.

Let’s go see a castle!

No, that’s not it. That’s just some modern piece that’s meant to hide the house and BMW just behind it. Only kidding, this medieval-style gate dates back to 1815. The castle, about a half a mile walk down a sodden, muddy path, was built between 1812 and 1818. (There was a house and a Beamer right behind the gate, though.) Please stare at these cattle we passed on our way down that path as I tell you the tale.

She was not pleased with me getting so close and kept throwing hay at me until I got the message. It takes me a while to get the message.

Anyway, these castle ruins are near the town of Clifden. It was built for a man named John D’Arcy, whose family had owned thousands and thousands of acres in this area for centuries. Indeed, the original estate of Clifden Castle originally covered more than 17,000 acres. D’Arcy, a balding man with a prominent nose and worried eyes, grew this little area, and government funds helped the impoverished. By 1832, some 1,257 lived in 196 houses in Clifden, which also boasted schools, churches, a brewery and other industries. But a lot of this came at great personal expense. He died in 1839 and the land passed to his son, who wasn’t quite as good at managing things as his old man. Then again, it might not have been entirely the younger D’Arcy’s fault. The Great Famine came along just a few years later. Many of the people living on the lands fled or died, and the family went bankrupt.

Some wealthy Englishmen bought the castle, and it was a holiday escape for their family for several decades. Ultimately, it fell into ruin before the Great War. A local butcher bought the land for grazing, but that leads to an entirely different story we don’t tell around the cattle.

We walked carefully down the rutted tractor path, downhill and up, curving this way and that, trying in vain to keep water from seeping into our shoes. And then, at the final bend, we were stopped by water that was shin deep. I know this because I watched a man in rain boots walk back up from the castle toward his car. He said it would not be worth walking the rest of the way down, and I trusted his advice. This was our best view.

And then we headed on up Sky Road.

We’d been on Sky Road for a bit, but just after the castle it forks and you can take the Lower or the Upper Sky Road. Guess which one we did. And I don’t know that the steepness gives the road it’s name, but I don’t know that to not be the case, either. Up here, you get a grand view from up here over Clifden Bay and the offshore islands, Carricklahan East.

And you get the wind. Big gusts. All day long the wind would move you around. When we got here, the car was pointed downwind, and the breeze ripped the car door out of my hands and very nearly off its brand new hinges. This, believe it or not, was a relatively calm moment near the top of Sky Road.

It tops out at about 492 feet above sea level, which is, of course, just off to your left as you drive in this direction. In addition to the Atlantic, and the islands, you can also enjoy views of the fields, cut up into patches of heaths and grasses. The shoreline gets rugged here, as we are drawing a bit closer to the northwestern corner of the island, and the seabirds are making themselves ready for the spring. They’ve been told the sun may come out this week.

Improbably, especially given today’s wind, we saw a sign that described a growing national cycle network and this area has four loops, ranging from 16 to 40 kilometers. Today, the wind was blowing at close to 50 miles per hour. There were no cyclists, to be found … but only because we couldn’t find a place to rent bikes.

Our last stop, in the day’s dying light, was at the Aasleagh Falls, a picturesque place between where we’d been and where we were going. I was driving, following the GPS, and missed the turn. But I took the next turn, which worked out better because we went through a parking lot and down a path that went from charming country villa access to deeply rutted single track road, surprisingly quickly, before meeting an equally eroded path at a severe angle. You could only turn right. The GPS recalculates, and it wanted me to go left, but there’s no way I was making the angle in a car I’d only just met, while also driving on the wrong side of the car. So we got out and walked that direction while I pondered how I was going to back a car up out of the mess I’d just put us in. And then we found that there was a gate that was locked on that original road, so this worked out better anyway. So long as we could exit. And so long as no one locked the other gate.

We have a bag full of protein bars and warm clothes and a tank full of petrol. We could rough it.

The falls were lovely, you saw them from the side in the video, above, and you can see them in the distance here.

This is the Erriff River, which flows into Killary Harbour and then the Atlantic Ocean. So, if you come at the right time of year, you’ll see salmon jumping those falls. But I know you want to know how we got out of there. We didn’t! I am writing this from the back seat of the car! Guess who is mad at me?

No one, because we did not get stuck. I drove to the right, found a turnaround spot, and then gunned it back up that rutted path. We traveled on to the fabulous Knockranny House Hotel, an incredibly charming place in Westport. The only problem was getting in, because we timed it such that just before us in came a group of people who were very drunk, or who had never stayed in a hotel before, or quite possibly both.

I don’t know what the Irish version of “Count to 10 customer service” is, but the poor woman at the welcome desk was doing just that. Fortunately, those people got situated, after much trouble and deliberation, and went to the right. We checked in in under three minutes — I timed it — and went to the left. Here at Knockranny they have a restaurant that, a few years back, was somehow judged the best hotel restaurant in the world. This sort of honor seems silly and exclusionary. (There’s a lot of hotels in the world, and there’s a great little diner attached to the side of one in Tangier you just have to try …) But let me just say, this restaurant, The Fern Grill, was quite extraordinary. We’ll eat breakfast there in the morning before we set out for more adventures.

But, first, I have to write some students. I wonder if I should tell them where I am.

adventures / history / Ireland / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
12
Mar 26

Have another

I attended the Sport and Discrimination conference today. It was being held on the Dublin City University campus. Today I saw presentations on Olympians who suffered abuse over social media. The authors of this study examined the accounts of 1,917 Olympians from the Paris Games and found 809 instances that were verified as abusive, and 128 of those were escalated for “additional action.” I saw another great study about the diversity (or lack of) in European sports administration and sports media. There was another fascinating presentation about athlete activism, the discussion and findings of which I am sure will work their way into a future class. I took many notes.

I also took this photo out of one of the classroom windows when the day’s presentations were done.

This was a two-day conference, and it was paired with the IACS conference. The timing worked out for both groups, and there’s a fair amount of crossover in the scholars and the scholarship. I registered for, and enjoyed attending the sessions in Sport and Discrimination today, but I’m presenting twice in the next conference. One of them is a piece I’ve worked on with my lovely bride. She is also the rock star that is the executive director of the organization, so she’s running the thing. The International Association for Communication and Sport’s summit began unofficially tonight, with a mixer.

We took a trip, in two buses, almost 200 people, to the Guinness brewery or museum, or both. It wasn’t clear to me. It’s a tourist attraction, basically, opened at the turn of the century. This is not the sort of trip I would take, but everyone seemed excited about the prospect, and I heard a few people saying this one thing off of their trip’s checklist, and there we were, having dinner. (Which was small and light, but incredibly tasty.) Before dinner, we got a tour.

But before the journey began we saw the actual original lease, which is mounted in the floor.

It is dated 1750, and Arthur Guinness agreed to pay £45 per year for 9,000 years. Eventually this becomes the largest brewery in the country, and then in the world. Today it is remains the largest brewer of stout. But in between the company purchased the property, so this is just an artifact at this point, and many of the buildings in the area. Making the drink was an intensive process. They had their own power plant.

Today, the museum is a well curated walked display. A lot of polished things to see, not a lot of places to linger, which is good for a walking tour. You’ll pass this cool display.

The characters are made of falling …

Water is a big deal here. Beer has the four ingredients and you can’t make it without water. We learned that once it took 11 pints of water to make one pint of Guinness. At some point that came to sound ridiculous. Our guide told us the process is nwo down to three pints of water to make one pint of the stout. They are targeting a 1:1 relationship in the near future.

You can see some of the old equipment. This mill dates to 1906 and the Ganz people, based in Budapest, made their first mills. The last mill they bought was acquired in 1916. Inside it, malt, roast and barley were milled and dropped into a kieve below. From there, it was mixed with water and sent to the second stages of the brewing process.

Here’s a side view of the mill, because moving parts are interesting and not at all a workplace hazard.

You don’t want to be the brew man getting your sleeve or tie snatched up in this machinery.

Nearby was the triple ram pump of 1958. The sign tells us that it circulated yeast through the coolers and other vessels in the storehouse.

Behind it you see the rest of the gear. Steam kept the stainless steel cylinders, valves, pistons and chambers clean.
All of this was made by David Brown & Sons. By that time I believe it was the son. The firm is still in operation, and they’re works are all over the UK, fancy buildings, tractors in fields, you name it.

Steele’s masher was created by a man named William Steele, and it mixed milled barley and water together. This one which dates back to 1880 or so, worked in brewhouse 1, which no longer exists. Not sure when that was razed.

The sign says this is “Manway door from No. 3 copper, Park Royal Brewery. This copper lid was installed in the Guinness Park Royal Brewery on opening in 1936.” The door was made by Robert Morton & Company, in Burton on Trent, which was founded in 1840, but was acquired by another concern in 2023.

They do professional taste testing for quality control every morning, hence this clock. Apparently this is a serious part of the business. You are doing the work at 10 a.m., but you can’t have eaten anything or drank certain things, you can’t have showered beforehand, and so on. You wonder how much of that is necessary and how much is historically traditional

Here’s their first advertisement. You can tell because the ad copy itself says so. It’s from a 1929 national newspaper.

And that was both their first ad, and the first one displayed in a tidy little section. Our tour guide seemed to suggest that not all of the advertisements were grounded in truth.

But it is a toucan, and toucans are always a marketing win.

Whereas this one also seems farfetched.

What you don’t see enough of in advertising are seals. (Or sea lions. Let’s not quibble the art.) Gilroy knew it.

Gilroy was John Thomas Young Gilroy. He was studying at Durham University when the Great War took him from the books and sent him into the Royal Field Artillery. After the war he went back to school at the Royal College of Art in London. He later taught there and another arts school. By 1925 he was in advertising, and that’s how he came to Guinness, his style features in a lot of the mid-century English advertising, though. He also created cover designs for the Radio Times, painted portraits and national propaganda during WW2.

It’s not clear how much time he spent in farm country though, this is all wrong.

He knew something about professionals, though. But, from our perspective decades hence, this reads different.

Opening time means you’ve had a bad day, or have a big problem. Go home, toucan, you’re already drunk.

Everyone seemed to think the highlight of the Guinness experience was the opportunity to learn how to pour a proper Guinness. There’s a process. Fortunately, they offered a good teacher. Hilariously, all of the professors found this to be intimidating.

You take a bunch of people who like to learn and feel the need to perform at a high level and then ask them to do it in public, and in front of one another … it gets stressful, I guess. That guy talked everyone through it, though. You hold the glass just so, 45-degree angle, and pour until the black liquid reaches the golden harp. Then you put it on the part and let the chemistry do it’s part. Bubbles of nitrogen rise and that forms the iconic head of the drink. After that’s done it’s work then you go back to the spout and top it off. Despite their nerves, people were getting it right. They earned themselves a fancy certificate. I’m sure some of them will be displayed in offices soon.

OK, now I have to go finish up my notes for tomorrow’s presentation.

Friday / history / journalism / photo / Rowan — Comments Off
21
Nov 25

There are many questions

We had a faculty meeting today. Many speeches and introductions. It is part of moving into, and creating, a new college. There are many questions, we don’t yet have all of the answers, but good and talented people are working on it. Answers will be found. These things don’t happen overnight.

Here’s how overnight they don’t happen. We’re in a one-year status quo pattern. As that happens many new procedures are implemented. It’s the first year of a three-year fact-finding and solution-creating process. Sometimes it seems like three years might not be a long enough for that. Sometimes you’re made aware of all that goes into it. And then you’re made aware of all of these other things too. And then there are concerns you aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot that goes into it. You can see that even if, like me, you’re only familiar with just the trees in your section of the giant forest. And people get highly specialized, of course. Also, this is not a thing that happens all of the time, these big department-college merger things. No one specializes in that. But campus communities do love making committees, and sometimes you get some great work out of them. I’m sure that’ll be the case in this instance.

This meeting was held in a building with a big auditorium, because this new college is a huge college and it needs the space for meetings such as these. Down the hall from this auditorium are the offices of the RTF department, and parts of the journalism department, which is moving in there. And on the walls are a lot of old newspaper front pages. These are always such great displays. Maybe I’m one of the only people that stops to look at them, but that’s why they’re there.

Those walls have framed prints of local and campus papers, as all journalism departments seemingly have. The farther you get from this January 1991 issue, above, the less frequently new pages appear. It occurs to me that one of the less important, but nonetheless sad, side effects of ending newsprint is that one day we’ll have no more displays such as these. The last yellowing page on the wall there is a 2018 installment of a local paper (then in the process of being assimilated by a larger entity) running their Super Bowl edition. I wonder who was in charge of deciding which ones to keep. Some are obvious, some may take a little more contextual appreciation.

You could study the look of this paper, and I have considered it. For its day, that’s a strong small paper design. The layout only feels long in the tooth to my 2025 eyes. You’re nine years into the influence of USA Today and all of the influences that emanate from there. I can’t speak to the history of that particular publication, but a quick glance at their digitized archives on newspapers.com suggests they were pretty responsive to industry and consumption trends in that era. Most importantly, it is sharing the information you need, and you know there’s more inside.

Also, there are no ridiculous SEO headlines. It was also all done locally. In 1991, the layout was made with some relatively basic software. If they were using QuarkXPress, this paper was very much an innovator. It would be five more years before a version worth talking about was released. It’s also possible that they did a lot of that with razors and glue. Old school.

Not that you came here for a lot of thoughts on old software. Not that you knew what you were getting here to end the week. I didn’t know either, to be honest. I also don’t know what we’ll have here next week. There will be something, though. We’ll need to check in on the kitties, for instance. There will be some other stuff, too. What will it be? It’s a good question. There are many questions. We’ll find out together.

adventures / football / history / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
14
Oct 25

Between Saturday and the Revolutionary War

This is how my back feels. I carefully squatted down to pick up my mostly empty backpack. I put my mostly empty backpack on my home office chair. I slipped my laptop and my notebook inside. I zipped it up and carried it downstairs. Because I was being helpful, I went back upstairs I did the same for my lovely bride’s backpack. Same procedure, squat, chair, laptop, two notebooks, zipped it. I carried it downstairs. And there near the end of that little trip the muscles around my shoulder where this little incision suggested they might not like me to do that anymore.

So I did not.

How it works this semester is that we drive to one building, where she has her classes, and I drop her off. Then I drive over to the building where our office is, and where my classes are. There’s a parking deck right behind it. (We have, probably, the best parking arrangement on campus.) I go to whatever floor, park, and then walk down the stairs, around the side of the building and about half a block to the door. Up the elevator to the office, and so on. And about the time I got off the elevator, I didn’t want to carry my bag for a while.

Again, this is basically an intense pulled muscle sort of sensation. A “hey, you really shouldn’t” kind of thing. And I am fortunate in that I can obliged that feeling, follow the doctor’s advice and still do the things I need to.

Which, today, was class. In Criticism in Social Media we talked about this story which was OK enough to make two or three small points on. And we also talked about this story, which was worth a bit more dissection. Back with Dodgers, emotional Freddie Freeman details son’s health scare:

Max woke on July 22 with a slight limp and went into full paralysis four days later, prompting Freeman to rush home from a series at the Houston Astros. By Wednesday, doctors removed Max from his ventilator.

Five days after that, Freeman was back in the Dodgers’ lineup for the start of a three-game series with the Philadelphia Phillies, playing first base and batting third. He finished 1-for-4 in the Dodgers’ 5-3 win and was greeted by a long standing ovation before his first at-bat. The Phillies joined the applause from their dugout. The pitch clock was stopped as he stepped out of the batter’s box, removed his helmet and waved to the crowd, before then touching his right hand to his chest.

“I was doing OK tipping my hat and then my dad was sitting first row with my stepmom, and he was — I don’t know if I could call it crying, but he was choked up and teary-eyed,” Freeman said. “That’s what really got me going.”

Max spent eight days in a pediatric intensive care unit before being discharged Saturday. The next day, he began physical therapy.

At my next opportunity, I’m going to have to pick a few stories that aren’t emotional stories, lest I give my class the wrong idea about this. And looking at some of the documentaries I’ve selected for later in the semester … I need to do that soon.

In Organizational Communication in Sports my normal slide deck theme gave away to egregious fandom. And since Auburn got ripped off Saturday — this was one of about four games I’ve watched in three years, and what a clown car the whole thing has become — I turned it into hating on fans. My hope was that it would make for a comedic, and memorable, conversation. So it started with this.

I rather like that shaker theme, though. So I put up all sorts of unflattering photos of Georgia fans — I won’t reproduce them here, but they’re out there — and talked through Social Identity Theory. There was one photo of a Georgia fan, in his best Georgia t-shirt (it only had three stains on it) proudly shaking hands with some klansmen. Then I said, “whereas my guys are good Christian boys.” And here’s a shot of a big chunk of the team praying in the end zone. “And patriotic?” Boy you’ve got no idea!” And then there’s a shot of them celebrating with some ROTC students. It just went on like this for a while, talking about the cognitive choices of Social Identity Theory, the purpose of it all, the In-Group / Out-Group nature of sports. Most of this we all inherently know, but some days you get to put a name and some scholastic explanation to things.

I pointed out that, of course this is unfair. I’m cherry picking these guys in outlandish ways to try to make a point. You can do this with any fan base if you want to. It’s just easier with some then others.

We talked about Presentation of Self, which let me show people dressed up all nice for something as silly as a football game. We talked about Goffman’s notions of front stage and back stage. We talked about social identity as our fandom extends beyond the venue. Look, I’m wearing this tie, and this tasteful lapel pin, and so on. And then we came around to highly identified fans, and I talked about the most highly identified fans I know. And that’s where I played clips of Bama fans.

I ended it with mascots. Here’s a shot of 11-time mascot of the year Aubie in a library. And here’s Rowan’s mascot, with the way the university describe’s Who R U on his own page: fierce, ready to attack, full of aspirations and expectations. I dug up a shot of Rowan’s next football opponent’s mascot, a big black bear that’s goofy in the appropriate sort of mascot ways. Pio is his name, and his site says this bear represents the values and attributes of their students: gritty, confident, persevering, fun-loving and the first in the family to attend college.

Because, ya know, he’s a bear, and not a lot of bears go on to higher education.

The Yankee came to see what that lecture turned into. She said it went well. Said she might steal some of that material the next time she teaches this class.

We left our building and went across the street for a special presentation. Some of the faculty here know the filmmaker Ken Burns, and he graciously allowed them to screen the first episode of his upcoming documentary.

Six episodes, starting next month. We were asked to not discuss it at length, and I’ll respect that. But I’ll say this. Episode one was quite good, I can’t wait for the rest. Also, the voiceover casting is just incredible.

One of the professors, who is a professional film critic, talked a bit. A history professor, a public historian who is a key figure in the ongoing work at a nearby Revolutionary War site also spoke. She’s the perfect kind of historian, in my view. She has such an enthusiasm for her work that it makes you want to be enthusiastic about it, too. Maybe all teachers should be that way. I try to be that way. Maybe it comes through. For Dr. Janofsky, though, it is obvious, and infectious.

She passed around this piece of shot that had recently been pulled from the ground. For 250 years this had been buried beneath the soil, and just before that, it was hurtling at an enemy with great urgency.

Janofsky did not say whose shot this was. I’m assuming they know. We also know a lot about the muzzle velocity of 18th century cannons, and we know there was a fair amount of variation between them having to do with a lot of different variables, the type of shot, the canon, the powder and so on. I’ll just go with a number that keeps popping up for British cannons of the era, 487 meters per second. That’s a bit over 1,000 miles an hour. No one wants to be standing downrange of that, in any century.

And then something controversial, that had nothing to do with work or the Revolutionary War happened. I’m running out of pixels today, so I’ll type about it tomorrow, when there will surely be more to know, anyway.