memories « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

memories

I crashed my bike again

I’m fine.

Just a perfect, beautiful, lovely, chamber of commerce day. The sort of day you want all the time. The sort of day that you know is really a marker. The sort of day that will stick around, for a while, if you’re lucky. The sort of day you know isn’t going to last.

But I got ahead of things, and so I found a way to sneak outside and enjoy it for a whole hour.

I invited my lovely bride out for a bike ride, so that I could chase her for 45 minutes and then slowly drift away from her, which has been the way it has worked this year.

After the turnaround, and before I got dropped, I managed a few photographs. We totally posed this.

And here’s me saying goodbye to her, because, for most of the rest of the way, she would be in the distance, and then gone, and I could just sit there and pedal into the wind with my thoughts and playing the rest of my week’s work out in my head. I wonder if I would go faster if I did that less. I wonder if I did that more I’d go slower, or if the work would be better. I didn’t have time to ask her, because soon after this, she was gone.

What happened next was, well, exactly what I said. The headwinds caught me, I sat up, started thinking about stuff and just casually pedaled my way home. I counted the vehicles that passed me dangerously. I’d just been thinking about how I’d gotten away from using that as a bit in class, and I should get back to that. Today, there was the commercial service van that almost hit The Yankee and gave me a little more room. Then there was the oversized black GMC pickup, which almost hit me, And then the white Chevy Silverado which almost clipped me while trying to save two seconds to immediately turn in front of me. I’m not sure why your two seconds are worth risking another person’s life, but that’s how it works.

Today, all of that happened within 36 minutes.

But the real fun was later! I completed much of the planned route, returned to the neighborhood, and then lost my back wheel. I felt it go to the right, felt me go to the left, and felt me hitting the ground. Heard myself saying “Ow! Ow!”

I landed on my surgically repaired shoulder, which is fine. I landed on my knee, which is scratched. I landed on my elbow and forearm, which has some nice road rash. For some reason I couldn’t get up in my bike shoes, so I kicked them off, and stood up, trying not to get a leg cramp at the same time. Looked around, surprised that no one saw this. Picked up my bike, where the left handlebar had gotten wedged beneath the top tube, the front wheel cranked all the way over. I couldn’t get undo that. Also, the handlebar was pushing the rear brake line, so the whole of my bike was shut down.

So I carried it, bleeding, the short distance home. I was very close.

Put my stuff away, inspected my helmet and was pleased to see I didn’t smack the ol’ noggin. I celebrated by hammering free the headset from the top tube, checked the wheels and the brakes, and then went inside.

Cleaned my wounds, took an angry, painful, shower. We did the first aid routine. Gauze, bandages, marveled that all of the bleeding parts are right on the bending parts of my limbs. So we made use of some ACE bandages. Then, I got ready to go to class.

Our department had an open house today, so the floor was filled with students. I tried to stay out of the way, hoping no one would bump into me. Already, I’m a bit sore, and that’ll become a problem tomorrow and Friday, but also, see above.

In class, I had to apologize for sitting sideways, because we mummified my leg. Also, I had to apologize for being delayed with grading a few papers. That was supposed to get done this afternoon, but the day got away from me, as you might imagine.

This class was about fan identity. I do this whole lecture through the lens of being an Auburn man. I make fun of Georgia. I discussed social identity theory, role identity, and identity fusion theory, which is my favorite of the bunch. I show this video, as an example of a shared experience. I show them where I was in the video.

They were a bit interested in that one, because it is surreal. And it was surreal. (Also, I think, it is why I don’t like being in crowds.)

I talk about Warren St. John’s Rammer Jammer, which has some incredible anecdotes about fan sacrifice. I show them videos of the viral Roll Tide Willie guy. Some of them know of him, but one of the local stations did a nice little profile package on him, and it is entirely different.

While it is playing I’m trying to count the number of people I know who are that guy. More than one. He looks like a caricature, but he’s a real guy. And since I’ve been asking them to think of fans as a client rather than as being a fan themselves, it seems important to give the guy a little understanding.

I show a terrific NFL hype video, which won’t embed here, but does allow me to point out roughly all of the positive things we’ve been talking about.

As a test, I showed this video. It doesn’t really get laughs. I don’t know why.

After I gave them my big Go Vote speech we got out a few minutes early.

I drove home, called my mom to tell her I got her grandfather’s pocket watch working. Missed a turn and wound up way off course before I figured it out. Every nondescript field looks the same in total darkness.

Got home and learned that I’d bled through the bandage on my elbow. Bled into a white shirt. I could feel it during class. Didn’t want to make a scene. All of that blood will come out of the shirt, though. And it’s an old shirt, so that’s not a problem. But, I need to figure out how to clean the elbow of my sport coat. And now I get to figure out how sore I’ll be tomorrow, how much more sore I’ll be on Friday, and what Saturday might feel like.

bespoke / family / memories / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — No Comments
6
Oct 26

There’s a lot about time

Some habits that we have are good. Some habits that we have are bad. Some habits become routines and rituals because we do them long enough, because of expediency. Some habits need to be dismissed, because they do us no good. Checking email early in the morning is, for me, in that latter group.

I say that because, this morning, I woke up, checked my email too early, and then bothered to read one of the unsolicited junk emails.

Look, Michael, whoever you are … mine is not the inbox you want for this. If you knew what I teach, and how I do it, or if you understood my approach to all of this … which, after technological constructivism, brings me to an internet trope. If my phone was listening to me, it wouldn’t allow things like sales pitches like this, or gambling apps, or prediction market scams, to come my way. It’s wasted effort, wasted air, wasted ads. Wasted time.

I’m never so aware of time as when I feel it is being wasted.

It’s not impatience, you understand. Sometimes the small lulls are necessary, or meditative, or peaceful. Some of them are too short to be of real consequence. Waiting on an elevator, for instance, is not a chore, unless you’re separated from an important meeting with a restroom by the doors that won’t open. Maybe that’s why people don’t advertise on them a lot. Maybe marketers don’t want us to associate their product with “Hurry and open up.”

This is the elevator in the building where my Tuesday-Thursday class is. It isn’t an advertisement, per se, but is a university affirmation, a new marketing slogan. Perhaps it is our call to action.

In class today we discussed a reading about Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before Congress in 2018. The reading uses a fun little kitchen metaphor — you cutting carrots, and the fingerprints you leave on the knife.

Imagine, if you will a kitchen knife. If you were asked about the purpose of the knife, you may think “to chop some carrots” or, more indirectly, your intentions may be to eat healthfully, save money, or take time to sit down with your family. In any case, your intentions are likely to cut up food for a meal.

Now let us suppose a crime has been committed. The police, in searching your home, take fingerprints from your knife, analyze them, and even add their findings to a national fingerprint registry. If you were asked whether those were your fingerprints the answer would most likely be yes. While the fingerprints may not have been something you intended to create with the knife, you still made them. In other words, you unintentionally created some content. You have also indirectly helped to expand the fingerprint registry, perhaps assisting with the development of new information and improving analytic techniques.

The metaphor goes on: Facebook, Meta, is the knife maker, but also the knife owner, and, of course, the police. I brought that together with a few real-world stories that drove home the point.

We also talked about what’s transpired with Meta since that testimony. (Spoiler: a lot, and all of it damning.) I’m beginning to worry this class thinks my goal is to turn them off of digital media altogether. That’s not the goal, of course. Among other things, though, they need to think closely and carefully and critically about these things.

After class I walked back over to my building. Happily, it was still standing. The fire trucks were gone, and people were moving about as normal. On the way, though, I walked by the statue, Contact. I wrote about it here. Then, two week, we looked a bit more closely at the couple’s hands. Last week, I offered a closer look at some of the textures. Today, we’ll have a quick glimpse at the hugging couple’s faces.

You can’t get a good look at the man, given his positioning, but it’s all overwhelmed by this out-of-every-time hairstyle. It looks like he is peering into some far away place though, doesn’t it?

If you noticed his tangled, thorny bristle of eyelashes, I did too. As you can see from here, they are painted on, and it feels like the most hasty thing on the installation.

And the woman, well, I caught this on a great day. It had just rained; the single single tear adds something to the maudlin tone of the installation. Maybe so, anyway.

As I look at her face again, she looks like a thousand people you know. How you can do all that and rush through the eyelashes, I do not know.

Next week, we’ll take one last look at this statue. There are some other details we’ll want to see.

I was putting away some papers last night in the office, looking for the right folder for it, when I stumbled upon a little bag of family keepsakes. This was an out of sight, out of mind sort of thing, but as soon as my fingers touched what gave the bag its heft I knew what the bag contained, what each item inside of it was, and at least a part of the story of each of those pieces.

One of those items was my great-grandfather’s watch. My mother’s grandfather. She gave it to me a few years ago. I’d put it away, waiting to find a place that might be able to get it working. I had, in fact, looked for and found shop like that not too long ago. It’s only about 20 minutes away, but it’ll take a deliberate trip to get there. So as I pulled the watch out of the bag, and the little felt bag within it, I figured I would set the watch somewhere prominent, so it was in sight and on my mind, so I could actually get it looked at.

Then I did something unusual. I wound it. And it worked.

This isn’t a particularly old watch, and he was a humble farmer, so there’s nothing that’s fancy about it. But my great-grandfather, Henry, died in 1982 and this has sat in a box since then.

It runs a bit slow, but that can be remedied, and so now I really do want to get it looked at, tuned up and find a way to wear it properly. It’s a working family heirloom. Today, I’ve pulled it out of my pocket more times than I needed to know the time.

books / history / memories / Monday / photo — Comments Off
31
Aug 26

The first last day of the summer

It was a calm weekend around here. There were two big highlights. Someone ordered a pickup meal from Longhorn Steakhouse in Florida and used my email as the space filler in Darden Restaurants’ data mining operation. I made fun of their meal. Why do you order seafood, in Fort Lauderdale, from a steakhouse?

And why do you order it for curbside pickup? Do you like lukewarm fish? And chowder? In August? It was 80-something degrees in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. Did you need to warmup? With a shrimp lobster chowder?

How does strawberry lemonade even figure into this? I’m no purist about lemonade flavors, or so I thought, but the more I thought about all of the bad flavors in this styrofoam box and paper bowl … lemonade should be lemonade flavored. Otherwise you’re just telling me about a lifetime of taste bud punishment you’ve inflicted on yourself.

All of this, somehow, costs 41 bucks. But not me. It wasn’t my meal. I did get a survey, and don’t you know I filled that out. I made several pointed comments about Longhorn, and their curbs. But not their service. No need to cause problems for the people working there.

And don’t you know? It worked.

I got a coupon for a free appetizer. There isn’t a Longhorn within less than a half-hour from here, so who needs an appetizer?

The other thing that happened was that my lovely bride did her first time trial this weekend. Just you and your bike against the clock. At the end she found herself on the podium. Third place is great! And enough to send her back again for more.

Otherwise, this weekend was the deep breath in before the semester begins. Classes start on Tuesday. At some point on Sunday I stopped stressing about it. It’s weird. I do more work throughout the term, of course, but I’ve spent a lot of time working on stuff and trying to layout materials and anticipate problems — and then throwing some of that work away and starting over because of, sigh, reasons — throughout August. That whole time has been worry, one stress, one series of second guesses after another. I figured that would all go away after a class or two, or a a few weeks. It usually does. But, last evening, it just disappeared. The classes will be the classes and they’ll be useful and we’ll do fine.

It’s let me do other things. I cleaned one corner of my home office this weekend. And I did a lot in the on-campus office. The Yankee and I have been sharing an office for the last two years, but she’s being moved to a different building, and we moved her this weekend. I’m keeping the old office, so we packed her up Saturday. I brought in a big box of books of my own, which have been sitting in storage for the last three years. I rearranged the desk and generally lamented losing my roomie. What, we’re just supposed to see each other at home? That’s hardly enough.

We had a nice reading date this weekend, and so I point once again to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. I’m in that bittersweet part of any book you enjoy. You want to plow through it. You want it to last forever. This is an excellent read. Highly recommended.

But I have once again had it confirmed for me that I wouldn’t want to be an 18th century sailor. I’ve been sure of that for a long time, but that impression is confirmed.

There was a bit in here about some French sailors who had been kept on their vessels for more than a year, the details of which were inhumane. But that’s war, and that was navy life, and they didn’t have the comparative advantages of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the sailors of which, by all credible reports, have been on a nightmare service cruise.

If you have the opportunity to have three different people come out to do work on your home in one day, definitely don’t do that. We did that today. It took up the whole day, about six or seven hours, but it was productive. First, we had a guy come out to give us a quote on chimney repairs. There are a few light problems outside and, distressingly, we had some water get inside during last Thursday’s monsoon. That first guy glanced at the chimney from the ground, said we needed a new crown, that his shop would make a customized job. We talked about the stucco. He came inside to look inside the fireplace, and found some problems. He quoted us a price off the top of his head and asked for a 50 percent down payment. We asked him to put his quote on a piece of paper and sent him on his way.

We had an electrician come out, his second time here. Nice fellow. This is the end of a saga that has stretched from April to now, and involved four different companies. He stayed and worked for a long time, trying to figure out the intricacies of this, and the idiosyncratic wiring that had been done to that. Finally, finally the poor guy got things the way they should be. (One of those companies that had been … let’s say involved … won’t be getting a lot of calls from us in the future. They’ll get a letter. I’m pretty close to naming names.)

As he wrapped up his work a second chimney guy came. He deployed a drone so he could actually see what was going on up top.

The previous guy just glanced up that way. We talked about the problems and the options. He had a sneaking suspicion that he could fix that leak straight away, so I trimmed the hydrangea for easier access while he sealed up the flashing. That paired nicely with the spot weeding I found myself doing while chatting with the electrician earlier in the day. Then he, the chimney guy, did some sealing of the places where the lower levels of the chimney touches the house.

He came in with photos, and showed us the before shot of a big hole in the stucco, and someone’s slapdash silicone solution. He said he figured it’d been there for about 10 years. As ever, we muttered the previous owners’ name.

So maybe the leak is fixed. As our guy said, we can’t interrogate the water. If it comes back inside in the next huge storm, though, I’m certainly going to try.

Anyway, that was the weekend and Monday. Somehow I got done, today, all of the things I needed to do — emailing this class and that class, changing some settings on Canvas, doing a little roster prep — but none of the other things I also wanted to do. And that’s OK. They’ll be there for another day. Just not tomorrow. Classes start tomorrow!

cycling / memories / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / woodworking, sorta — Comments Off
25
Aug 26

Back to it

Today was a day of waking up at a reasonable time. I had forgotten there was a 7:30 a.m. I am not the morning person. I’m fine when I wake up, but just let me sleep in. It’s my natural condition. So imagine, if you will, the 10 or so years I did morning news. I had one job where I was in the studio at 4:30 a.m. That might the next job’s 6 a.m. arrival seem positively easy. The upside was that you had an afternoon to get errands done. The downside was you can’t, in your 20s, convince people you need to be in bed by 8 p.m.

Reader, I never was.

I was not last night, either. I only had to wake up at 7:30. This was rude enough.

Fortunately, my classes are all in the afternoon and evening.

Anyway, we had a meeting at 9:30 a.m., our first faculty meeting of the semester. This involved sitting in a classroom, reading an agenda, talking about the various items. Trying to stay on track and on schedule, and so on. (This group has a terrific sense of staying on time, and that’s a nice thing to be a part of.) It ran for six hours, this meeting. Six hours is not easing back into things. I suppose all of the work I’ve done these last four weeks have been the easing back into things. And, also, the sudden increase of email that has coincided with the work. Perhaps that has been the easing back in. (Just four more days of easing back in until the full stride begins. But I don’t want to wow you with all of that just now.)

The good news is that we’ll be on the clock for the work next week. Once we get started, then we can get started. The feeling before classes begin is an odd one. It is a stew of excitement and anxiety and you-still-have-time and you-have-no-time and there-are-days-to enjoy-yourself-so-relax and who-can-relax and, also, I-need-more-days-with-which-to-relax. This paragraph breaks no new ground — as opposed to every other ‘graph on this site. It has always felt like that. I suspect the days before a new semester begin feel like that for a lot of people. I imagine it always will, at least so long as we have semesters and people teaching in them.

And now, notes from real life.

We went out for a morning bike ride yesterday. A simple 20-miler, one of the traditional routes. I decided, wisely, that instead of trying to stay out front for as long as possible, I would ride sensible, hanging onto my lovely bride’s wheel, and then maybe I’ll still be there at the end. Going out front would have probably been a better option. She’s riding so well lately and I am not and that’s how you find yourself going 20-plus miles an hour and squinting into the distance, trying to determine if you can still see someone in the distance.

Nothing on that ride was terribly bad. She’s just super great at the moment.

Some farmers, in some places, talk about a second season. We have that here, and here’s evidence of that. I rode this same route a few weeks back and the corner was taller than me. Now, it is not.

This, if I remember my corn growing rates, is pushing the boundaries of the science, which is pretty cool. Double-cropping is a growing thing, and I need to read more about it. I can’t recall if it is efficient or inefficient. (Most likely that depends on the crop.)

For today’s bike ride I recreated a route I did three years ago, this week. It was a ride-every-road-within-shouting-distance-until-you-get-to-20-miles route. I did it at just below a tempo pace. I finished it two minutes and two seconds faster than I did in 2023. I wish it had been faster.

After my ride I finished this project. It’s the same picture I shared yesterday, because the face of it looks the same. This evening I had to attach the cleat to the back. From there, hang the cleat on the wall.

This took four screws, but they had to be precise because the cleat isn’t quite large enough. The cleat isn’t quite large enough because it is a leftover cleat that I made last summer. I got a corner cabinet and mounted it in a dead space in the garage and there sit the bike shoes and the helmet. All of this was an effort to get the bike stuff all the tool stuff. Only, lately, the sunglasses and have migrated back to the tool stuff. So, I had some extra lumber and wanted to try my new brad nailer and everything worked out well. Until I had to get those screws in. There were about three millimeters for error because, again, I cut twice and measured once on this project. It is garage furniture.

And now it is sitting on a wall cleat and holding sunglasses and it doesn’t even wobble when the garage door goes up and down.

There are no cats in this tunnel. Phoebe ran into the room for attention and settled down in her favorite spot for speculative belly rubs. I gave her a nice pet and then shot this, just because I like the way the light was playing off the tunnel.

That’s a new tunnel that my mother sent the cats. We now have two tunnels, so our jealous sibling cats can get along with one another. I’d randomly move them around the house, but these little guys are such creatures of habit I’m not sure how they’d react to upsetting their routine with such an offensive gesture.

Outside, I looked up just in time. This plane is going to London. By the time you read this, of course, the people are already there. Probably over the jet lag. I wonder what they’re doing today.

Sometimes you should look up even when there’s no rumble or roar of an aircraft overhead. Sometimes you just get lucky. Just about every time, really, if you think about it.

Think about it.

cycling / memories / Monday / movies / photo — Comments Off
24
Aug 26

And so begins the last week of summer

The penultimate weekend. There should be something grand here, but there’s not. At least the last weekend of summer has plans. I think I’d rather have the plans this weekend and nothing next weekend, but the people that schedule big citywide events don’t ask me these things.

It’s nice not being asked a lot of things. But if you never get asked things you can’t have input. It’s a tradeoff. And of all of the tradeoffs we make in life, many of them are worse than that. Still, if someone asked your thoughts, you might think your thoughts had value. You might think you could maybe contribute in some way. You might think it was appreciated, what you had to offer. Cities should ask your thoughts on when they schedule big events is all I’m saying. If I am, in fact, talking about cities.

And of course I am. Why wouldn’t I be? There’s a huge cycling event next weekend and we’ll be there to see it. Guess what photos I’ll be showing you this time next week.

Today, though, it’s just the usual from around here. For instance. Like many of you, I am a newly minted Internet Ancient Greek scholar. And, finally, we went to watch The Odyssey. Knowing I’d have some important thoughts in line with my public scholarship I dressed for the occasion.

These were my thoughts: the movie was very loud. I’d like to see it again, a version without the score. Also, it was a good movie. On the other hand, I’m not sure it met the hype. On the third hand, how you can you live up to an epic. On the fourth hand, it was still sweeping and grandiose. It was also a good set of cast members, but on the fifth hand — five hands, what am I, one of Zeus’ misbegotten offspring? — not everyone seemed well cast. On the sixth hand, I don’t think this movie will age much better than the Romans-with-English-accents era of 1950s and 1960s cinema.

Also, I really would have liked to have heard the siren’s song. You’re going to eventually tell me that the Trojan horse was some iconic visual element, you’re going to go long (and rightly so!) on the great pains to be authentic with clothing and brag about the visual effects, you could give me the siren’s song.

It’s been a long time since I read The Odyssey. I think we read portions of it in high school. In an undergrad literature class I read The Iliad and the Odyssey. I’m not sure — because time makes me forget things — if the professor was truly an expert in the Greek classics or she was just covering bases, but if I had that to do over again I’d insist. Epics of the western culture demand expertise, I’d say, so that I will be better prepared to comment on this after I see a movie in a few decades. But with that in mind, this. The movie changes Homer’s story. That’s fine. It’s art. And also it was an oral tradition. Things change. If you want Homer, read Homer. If you can’t read Greek, get in your time machine and … well, yeah, that’s still a problem. Fine, there are several dozen English versions in part or in toto. I think one was written by someone who doesn’t write English. E.V. Reiu’s translation in the 1940s was the first. Richard Lattimore’s translation is well regarded for accuracy. The relatively recent work of Emily Wilson’s is an excellent version for people new to Homer — she is also the one catching a lot of social media broadsides. Go figure. Anyway, the changes itself aren’t bad. People will quibble with how some of the changes come about. And as I am realistic about the Homeric question — probably there’s more than one author, certainly the story changes over time, also, and this is important … it’s fantasy I’m OK with the descent into madness version here. It has been a long while since our last film that was universally regarded as a descent into madness theme.

Or was that just the woofers in my theater?

I set out Sunday afternoon for a moderately different route. The river run is a simple out-and-back to the river and it gives you a steady 15 miles — yep, 15 miles, every time — and you’re back in the neighborhood in 45 or 50 minutes. But the weather was nice and I figured I’d try a different road. It starts like this. When you get to the river you can turn left or right. Usually, we turn left. But I’ve gone the other way a few times, just for variety. And when I go to the right I take the first right, effectively doubling back with two-plus extra miles for the effort.

But, I thought, what happens if I turn right … and don’t take that first right. So, yesterday I took the second right. I chose this one because I looked at it on a map beforehand and the street name has something to do with tall climbs. There are none of those around here. In fact, at one point on the river road you are three feet below sea level. Well, let’s see what’s on that road. It is the usual array of warehouses, which are the state flower. Also, these guys.

Hey, there’s the hill the road sign was talking about. Actually, it’s a five-mile road (and I was only punish passed twice) and there are four of these hills. You might call them rollers. By the end of the road which was so boastful of its hills I’d climbed about 120 feet.

I’m not judging. I’m merely pointing out that the terrain here is flat. I’m faster on flat roads than I used to be, but I probably couldn’t get over a proper climb without a tow rope anymore. (I did two big hills in Switzerland last summer, first climb in a few years, and it felt exactly as I remembered. My chain and derailleur fell apart before I could complete the whole hilly route, however.)

Anyway, back home, and I finished up the work on this rough little piece. I used my new brad nailer to mount these little bits as shelves. It’s garage furniture, I cut once and then measured twice, and this will get the job done.

I’ll make another version that’s smaller and neater, one day. I have already mapped out the plans in my mind. For now, I just have to attach the cleat to the back of this one and put it on the wall. But fun like that you have to spread out over several days. We’re not totally uninhibited.

Here’s the view, last night, as I took out the garbage. It’s about midnight.

Believe it or not, there are three planes in that shot. One of them flew directly overhead, and had no ADS-B transponder signal. It came from Washington D.C. Those tracker apps are such great fun, and the flights without all of the information might be the most fun of all. Sure, that one plane is going to Boston and the other to Florida, but the mystery of this plane, that’s loads of fun.

Speaking of fun, the first meeting of the semester is tomorrow. We’re easing into things with a six-hour effort.