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23
May 23

We play the song “Crazy Life” at the end of this post

I took this photo the other day, and I keep forgetting to publish it. That’s too bad, because it’s a great nod to the apparent lack of thoughtfulness of others. This is outside our building on campus, and these are handicapped parking spots, as you can see from the blue lines and the sign.

All of which makes this installment of Hoosier Hospitality amazing.

You can’t really move scooters unless you rent them, of course. The wheels are effectively seized to prevent free rides. So you have to muscle them around, which is what I had to do. But, on the off chance that anyone needed the space, at least someone was thinking about you.

I can say this about Hoosier Hospitality: it’s alliterative.

We haven’t run the tab feature in a few weeks, and my browser is groaning under the pressure. This is the place where I am memorializing pages that I might want to refer to again, but might not earn a bookmark.

The 25 best documentaries of all time, ranked:

The documentary genre is a more varied one than many people give it credit for. As a type of film, documentaries do usually aim to inform or educate about some kind of non-fiction story or topic, but that’s not their sole purpose. Some aim to evoke certain feelings or experiences more than anything else, others aim to present an argument or point of view in a persuasive manner, and others are mostly concerned with simply entertaining audiences the way a work of fiction might.

Furthermore, some documentaries aim to do a combination of the above, or maybe even none of the above, instead opting to do something else entirely. Exploring the world of documentary filmmaking can be a truly eye-opening thing to do, and reveal worlds or unique perspectives that aren’t as easy to explore through other genres.

James Brown’s historic concert, staged 24 hours after Martin Luther King’s assassination, is now restored and free to watch online. This show helped calm down Boston somewhat. It’s a legendary performance.

6 do’s and don’ts when buying used scuba gear:

Ok, so you’ve decided to buy your own scuba diving equipment. Whether you are newly certified or a seasoned diver, used scuba gear may seem like a great opportunity to save some money. Buying secondhand diving equipment can either be the greatest deal of your life or the biggest mistake, the difference is knowing what to look for.

We like to look out for you guys, so here are 6 tips to buy used scuba gear:

How solar farms took over the California desert: ‘An oasis has become a dead sea’:

Deep in the Mojave desert, about halfway between Los Angeles and Phoenix, a sparkling blue sea shimmers on the horizon. Visible from the I-10 highway, amid the parched plains and sun-baked mountains, it is an improbable sight: a deep blue slick stretching for miles across the Chuckwalla Valley, forming an endless glistening mirror.

But something’s not quite right. Closer up, the water’s edge appears blocky and pixelated, with the look of a low-res computer rendering, while its surface is sculpted in orderly geometric ridges, like frozen waves.

“We had a guy pull in the other day towing a big boat,” says Don Sneddon, a local resident. “He asked us how to get to the launch ramp to the lake. I don’t think he realised he was looking at a lake of solar panels.”

We return to 1998 in the Re-Listening project. For the blissfully uninitiated, I am going through all of my CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a stroll down a musical memory lane. It’s fun. And I’m writing and sharing some of it here. These are not reviews, because the web definitely doesn’t need another quarter-century-too-late alt band review. But they are a good excuse to post videos, pad out some content and have a little fun, which is kinda the point of most music.

This record is from 1997, but from what surrounds it in my old CD books I know I picked this up the next year. I imagine I got it from one of the two independent music stores that were in town at the time, but I don’t remember that part, here. This is one of the alt bands that personified the 1990s, and you can hear that immediately in the first track.

Toad the Wet Sprocket saw this record, their last for more than a dozen years, climb to number 16 on the Billboard 200, both on the strength of what had become a dedicated fan base, but also the single “Come Down,” which settled nicely in the top 40 in the U.S. and in the top 10 in Canada.

That song was so ubiquitous I was certain Toad was putting it on every record, and every musical coordinator had it in shows, movies, and commercials, but apparently not. I can only blame myself, and the A&R people at Columbia Records who had this on the air somewhere within ear shot every 17 minutes of my early 20s.

And here’s Glen Phillips doing “Throw It All Away” solo. I can never decide if this, or the full band, is the better version.

The answer, of course, is which ever you hear live.

The whole record is a fine continuation of Toad the Wet Sprocket’s work. The production is great, it’s hard to argue with the instrumentation. Glenn Phillips and Todd Nichols are in full throat. Everything works and there’s a little something for every mood. But I am always listening to Coil to get to track 11.

This is what I wrote when I finally, finally saw Toad the Wet Sprocket live last year.

I don’t know if “Crazy Life” was my first protest song or the first for my slice of my generation, but I’m pretty sure it was the first one I really noticed. The first one I read about. And I read a lot about Peltier. I’ve never really settled on how I felt about it, not really, but this is Wounded Knee.

The Eighth Circuit thought a jury would have acquitted him had information improperly withheld from the defense been available, yet the court denied a new trial. And if you really dive into the story it’s easy to question how the system was used. But I don’t know, not really. None less than Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and the Dalai Lama have campaigned for him, though, and that means something.

The point is, this song made me look it up, and think, and ask questions of things in general and specifically. And I probably shouldn’t like a pop song this much, but anything that scrapes your brain for a quarter of a century is worth noting.

And I love Todd Nichols’ sound.

Toad have released two records in the years since, 2013’s “New Constellation,” which was a crowd-funded album, and the Starting Now (2021). Some of their other work, and re-work, will show up later in the Re-Listening project. And like Chris Spencer says at the end of that 1997 video, you can catch them on tour this year, too. We did, twice, last summer, and I’m a little bummed I won’t get to see them this time out. But you can!

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19
May 23

Oh, the laughs we had today

I’ve been working on cleaning up the ol’ email. I use my inboxes as To Do lists, so the email count there never gets too high. Right now there are 20 emails in my inbox and that, to me, is too high.

The other side of the coin is that there are folders aplenty. And sometimes those need to be cleaned out, too. Anyway, today I was able to wipe out the last of the old communiques from a no-longer important folder. This was the graphic Google rewarded me with.

I’ve deleted the label name to protect the innocent, but seeing that … that was a good feeling.

And it was worth a giggle. But not the biggest giggle of the day. But you’d need several anecdotes worth of backstory and 71 words to be able to properly appreciate that one.

After all of that email fun, and other paperwork fun, I got out for a nice little bike ride this evening. It was an easy hour, just 17 miles and change before the dark clouds threatened.

More urgent was the absence of any legs. This, I told myself, was just one more ride to try to feel better in the hardest gears. It was the regular roads, but the third ride in the last six days, after a week or so being off the bike. Just — huff– getting — wheeze — my legs back.

It was an almost perfect ride, though. There are presently four criteria in this category of bike rides. First, it has to either feel super easy or incredibly hard. Second, no matter which of the first, I have to be able to exit the bike at the end with grace and ease. Third, my shoes stay in the clips for the entire ride, meaning I never have to put my foot on the ground. And, fourth, no close passes.

The first did not happen, because the sensations were mediocre throughout. I almost got the second one — but since the first criteria wasn’t satisfied, it doesn’t count, not really. The third one did happen. My feet stayed in the pedals the entire ride. And the fourth criteria was almost met, but for a truck just near the end of the route. Thanks, black pickup truck.

So, really, about one-and-a-half of the criteria were met.

We were trying to recruit, via text message, a colleague and friend to a particular cause this evening. It’s a poli sci, comm theory guy, but he might be professionally miscast. He’s an outdoors man, a keen student of nature. And now he is very much interested in, among other ecological things, the health of the insect world.

Like most serendipitously random conversations that can tolerate puns, I drove the initial joke of insect biodiversity in the media straight into the ground.

My lovely bride? She knows who she married.

We’re still trying to make up ground on the Re-Listening project. I’m listening to all of my old CDs in order, of course. That’s not the part where I’m behind. I’m behind in needlessly writing about it here for content filler — and embedded videos. So let’s get to it.

We’re in early 1999, contextually, listening to Duncan Sheik’s second record, the 1998 release, “Humming.” He’d gotten accidentally famous on his debut record, which “Barely Breathing” helped drive to gold record status, earned a Grammy nomination and stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a year. I vaguely recall an interview once where he talked about playing small clubs this week, and then giant theaters the next. I’ve always thought, on the basis of nothing more than that interview, I’ve always thought that this release was a deliberate choice to go the other way. Less obvious pop, more introspective art.

That’s the first track. The album title, I’m pretty sure comes out of these lyrics after the bridge. You’re also listening to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which makes several appearances throughout the record.

Atlantic Records released this one as a single.

Didn’t really register on the charts, but it got him a guest slot on Beverly Hills, 90210.

This was the second single, and part of why I think choices were made on this record. Also, why couldn’t they get John Cusack in for this video?

Probably I’ve mentioned this before, but two lifetimes ago when I was a reporter and on the air everyday, I decided to replace vocal exercises with a few musicians. Duncan Sheik was one of those. And, for a time, this record was one of those things I played in my car a lot at 3:30 a.m. on my way to work.

I just rubbed my face, hard, at that memory. Evening typing “3:30 a.m.” made me tired. The point, though, memories of being ultra-sleep deprived aside, the vocal work Duncan Sheik does always impresses me. The man’s still got it, too. I ran across this cover a year or two ago.

These days, he’s not working as a touring musician, but he’s produced a lot of others’ work. There’s a lot of theater credits under his name — he won a Tony in 2007 — and you can find his music is all over movies and TV, as well. He won a Grammy the very next year.

He’ll appear in the Re-Listening project once or twice more, too. And he’s got about five more albums I don’t own, besides. And so I’ll add those to the list, too.

Up next on the list, musically speaking, another staple of the 1990s alt rock scene. But, first, the weekend!

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16
May 23

I criticized the font of the eye chart

I had a nice tomato basil soup for dinner this evening. It aged well.

Which is a thing I can say because the little date stamped on the bottom of the can was well behind me. This is from the Covid 2020 stash. Stuff I bought in February of that year. The Yankee was off to watch a marathon, had probably not even heard the word “Covid” yet, and I went to the store to stock up.

This was the first weekend of March of that year. I hit the grocery store, counted out enough things to get through two-plus easy weeks. Then I went to the hardware store next door and me and another guy there tried to figure out which of the few masks they had on hand were the right ones for the circumstance. I knew a tiny bit more than we did, we made our decisions and parted ways friendly, each with half of what they had — which wasn’t much. At the house I found a big plastic storage bin and stowed all of my new food supplies in it, in reverse order, so the most perishable things, the crackers I think it was, would be on top. I had notes, so that every so often, there would be an injection of those things nearing the end of their shelf life into the diet.

Fortunately we never had to rely on that bin, because grocery store workers were essential workers for a time, whether they were paid that way, or supported that way, or not. For a brief time, as I recall, we even ate better than normal. I remember being on a chat with friends and we were comparing dinner notes and someone shared their menu and I thought, “Who knew dystopia would include crab cakes?” But despite the occasional to regular shortages on shelves, we never had many problems. With the exception of peanut butter, and having to change bread brands for a while, we were exceedingly fortunate.

Over time that bin got out of sight, and then out of mind, but recently I dug it up. Now I’m going to work my way through what’s left inside of it.

Meaning lots of soups. But, around here, we say “Hooray soup!”

There’s a School of Optometry at IU. And you can do eye exams there. I’d never gone, but everyone you ask will rave about it. You’re seen by a student studying optometry, and they are supervised by a professor. The only knock is that if you make an appointment you should settle in, because it takes a while.

So I was ready. Appointment booked, calendar cleared. Showed up a few minutes early, even. And then a tall young man came out, called my name, took me upstairs, called me sir a lot and gave me the full two-hour workup. He’d been doing this clinical internship for about two months, he said, but he had the calm, patient and steady demeanor of someone who’d done this for a long, long time. He’s about halfway through the program, he said, and he plans to go home and practice in Winnipeg, where he studied biology in undergrad.

Also, I am a terrible patient. He got to the point of the exam where he had to drip drops in my eyes and my face is not interested in any of that. By the second time of dripping drops — this is a complete exam — my eyelids just refused to open. I had no control of them. The poor guy had to pry my left eye open, like it was a fight.

It’s a water on my face thing, an anything in my face thing, really. I step out of the shower and must immediately dry my face. In the pool, in the ocean, get that water away from my eyes. The dentist’s office? An exercise in zen patience that I can only just muster. Its those hands in my face.

Which brings up that little blue pen light test. It is attached to the exam station, the one where you put your chin in the little cup. The examiner sits on the other side, all the special lens stuff between you, and one of those devices is a long, slender piece of equipment, the blue light which comes right to your eyeball. Right up to it, he says, which was funny because my poor ol’ eyeballs were so recently traumatized by his foreign liquids.

It is some sort of hand cranked device, I think, and he moves it closer. I’m sure it is operating smoothly, but all of this is happening in the most compact focal plane possible, so it felt, to my traumatized eyes, like it was moving in fits and starts. The aversive part of my brain was not having that, either.

I am a terrible patient, but my intern was great. We had to wait for his supervisor to come in for the final sign off, so we talked about all sorts of optometry things. I learned a lot about things they can diagnose before your GP, which was rather fascinating.

And, I had photos taken of the layers of the back of my eyeballs. My guy said they’d had the machine for just a few weeks, and that IU was one of two American universities that had this on campus. My eyes were examined by cutting edge technology.

He also said “Perfect!” a lot in relation to my eyes. After a thorough exam — because my guy is learning — we can say my eyes are, in fact, pretty good. For my age.

No surprise here, but I am very much behind on the Re-Listening project. So let’s get into it so, over the next several days we can get through it. Before long we’ll finally make it into the 21st century. I think we’re in 1999. Remember, I’m playing all of these in the car in the order that I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, of course, but just an excuse to fill some content and play some music.

How far behind are we? We might catch up by the end of the week. At which point I’ll have probably worked through a couple more discs.

Anyway, it’s 1998 or 1999, though this CD is from 1994. It’s the band’s first studio album, though their second record was their major label debut. So after “Somewhere More Familiar,” I went back and found Sister Hazel’s eponymous record. (Universal re-released it because the entire music business is just a naked cash grab.) No singles, but it does have an early acoustic version of their breakthrough hit, “All for You.”

That track got a whole new recording for their next record, and that second version peaked at number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Everything on this particular record feels a lot leaner, somewhere between a collection of demos and a polished high-end production. But sometimes that lets the instrumentation and the heart shine through a bit more.

Also, someone’s dog makes a wonderful guest starring role, which makes the bubba riff forgivable.

The real gem of the record, the one that you’ll want to skip other songs to get to, is the last track, a pretty great Sam Cooke cover.

I’m almost a Sam Cooke purist, but that cover does something right.

Anyway, this was a record for Sister Hazel fans, and, to me, generally a cheery background soundtrack. They’ll pop up once or twice more, later in the Re-Listening project. Or, if you don’t want to wait that long, go see them on tour. I caught them a few times back then, and the boys from Gainesville, Florida (they’ll mention that a lot) put on a good show. They have 28 dates scheduled across North America this summer.

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14
May 23

Not just another Monday

This evening I asked my lovely bride, who is now fighting off a head cold, if she would be offended if I left her on the sofa and went on a bike ride. It was my first ride in a week or more, somehow, and I hate when that happens, because I hate how those breaks make my legs feel.

But the light under these trees, on a gray and overcast day no less, was magical.

This is the same road, but coming back out from the dead end.

So that was one of the highlights of today. One of ’em, anyway.

One of the highlights of the weekend was Saturday morning. My lovely bride, who was not fighting a head cold then, was off in a local sprint triathlon she does every year. It’s close enough that there’s no travel involved, but she still has to get up early. And, thankfully, she lets me sleep in for this one.

But I had errands to run, so I set an alarm. I set an alarm for Saturday morning. (Oh, the indignity!)

First, it was to the recycling center. It’s a task that always seems bigger than it is. We sort as we go, so it’s just a matter of putting four big tubs in the car, wrangling in whatever cardboard you can get in there, and then driving two miles to the conveniently located recycling center. The hard part is remembering which of their giant bins is for steel, and which is for glass and aluminum. (I think they move some of them around.) So it’s easy enough then, which means I’ve now built momentum.

After that, I visited the Surplus Store. It was a special, overstocked Saturday sale, and you never know. So I did two laps, saw nothing I wanted or needed, and then hit the third chore of the day: a drive across town to replace two tires on the car.

The tire shop I use is on a road filled with mechanics and auto parts places. It’s an area I have no real need to go to on a regular basis, so I use a maps app. As luck would have it, they were able to fit my car into their schedule for the day. Moved the front tires to the rear, put two new tires on the front. The same thing I did three years ago and not all that many miles ago, actually, so now I have almost matched tires.

I got hungry as I waited, so I opened up the maps app to see if anything was in walking distance. There was a Steak ‘n Shake, another restaurant that uses apostrophes incorrectly, but they’ve got good milkshakes, so all is forgiven. I started walking that way. Along the way, I called an audible, because there was also a Mexican restaurant nearby, a bit closer, in fact. I went there. They had sweet tea, which is why you always ask. I had huevos con chorizo, and a tea. The waiter, a kind, older gentleman with reasonably good English kept calling me buddy. It amused him that I ordered mostly in Spanish, but I did not know the phrase “tortilla de harina.”

Finished my lunch and walked back to the tire shop, trying to recall the last spontaneous thing I did like that. Trying to remember the last time I ate alone.

It was before the pandemic began. One of my favorite things to do has always been to sit and eat and read. Only we don’t go out to eat anymore, except when traveling, really. Surprisingly, I don’t miss dining out, something I’d long seen as one of my bad habits. But there I was, being spontaneous, and eating out, and doing it alone. It was, I realized, a big day.

Which was just before I realized I need to liven things up.

Can do! Just you wait and see.

Anyway, I have new tires now. And The Yankee made it back from her triathlon, her first since her big, horrible crash last September. Two weeks prior she finished her PT, but she still projected as being a few months away from a full recovery.

She won her age group.

I spent a few minutes yesterday finally updating the art on the front page of the site. Same style, different decoration. There are a dozen new images for you to enjoy, though, all from our trip to Andorra in March. They look like this.

So, if you like mountain views, click that link, and enjoy.

Which brings us to the site’s most popular weekly feature. It’s time, once again, to check in on the kitties.

Here’s Phoebe, enjoying yesterday afternoon on her blanket. We have four blankets like this. This one she’s claimed as her own. And if it isn’t out, there’s a whole ordeal of silent staring and judging.

She also enjoyed a bit of window time this weekend, looking out over the shrubs, watching the birdies and the squirrels.

Poseidon found a new box, and so, of course, Poseidon had to get in the box.

He was not successful in this case, though he did push it all around the floor for a while.

I am not sure what is going on with this pose. It took me a while to figure out which paw was which. But he looks cozy, I guess?

The cats are doing just fine. And if they understood Mondays, I’m sure they’d wish you a happy one.

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28
Apr 23

Semester, wrapped

Today we wrapped up a production project that started, improbably, in the summer of 2021. The last day of the shoot was in one of our new studios, Studio 9. (The last shoot of the year for IUSTV was simultaneously taking place one floor down, in Studio 7.) In 9 we had faculty from the School of Public Health talking about their work.

Each person that came through was even better than the last, with their titles and dual appointments and achievement. Almost all of them would much rather be doing their work than talking into a camera about it. So, today and these last few weeks, we’ve been coaxing performances from these seriously impressive people.

A few of them have done some on-camera work. Some were able to accept the contrived nature of a video production with ease. But a few, a few of them were extremely trepidatious about the prospect. These are the ones that are actually a lot of fun. If they can just get through 10 minutes of this, they can stop dreading this thing they’ve been ducking for a while, and get on to their weekend and finals, to summer and research. They’re also the ones that take the best coaching.

One woman just raced through her mic check, like she was an air traffic controller who just finished her auctioneering course. I said straightaway, I can already tell, you’re going to want to slow down. She raced through her first take. I pointed it out. She slowed down for the casual parts of her second take, but again raced through the names and titles and terminologies. She tried once more and I stood next to the camera, just nodded my head along to her script, and she slipped into that rhythm. It was good fun.

One woman was so complimentary of our work with her, because of the coaching that we offered, the encouragement from our ace production students who were crewing the project, and how painless they made it. After one of her takes, I said to her, “I don’t know if you noticed it, but there was a place in there, an exact syllable, where you relaxed and everything slipped into place.”

One of the guys was very expressive. Someone said he was using his face well, and we decided he should keep using his face. Somehow, I have to work that into regular usage.

Anyway, next week I can take this project of the tote board. I figured, we’ve been slowly marching to this moment since June of 2021, I can stretch out the feeling of achievement for one more day.

Late this evening I took a bike ride, ticking one more Makuri Island stage off the list. It was just 27 miles, but it was late at night and I was moving fast. I set three new Strava PRs. I finished sixth on the first sprint, had the third-best time on the second and third sprints, and won a green jersey on the fourth sprint. (I am not a sprinter.)

Also, this was a scenic route. I could ride on roads like this all day, even if they’re just virtual.

There’s a charming little village to breeze through. If you go through at night the lanterns give off a great ambiance.

And then, just as soon as you leave that little digital village, you round a curve, and there’s a Mount Fuji facsimile.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 103 routes down, 26 to go.