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My mother and me, in the snow, some decades ago at my grandparents’ home. I wonder who took this picture.
Perspective: My students are the same age, or older, as my mother is in this photograph.
Further perspective: When she was my age today, my mother had a 15-year-old son learning to drive. Frightening.
How she did it I’ll never know, but all of the things a mother must do, she did well. She’s a special lady.
And I don’t feel a day older. Just don’t stare at the silver in my hair, OK?
This year’s family ornaments have been made. Took longer than it should, but life is full of little tasks that you think you can complete in 45 minutes that take upwards of three hours of your evening.
First there was going through 11 months of photographs for the ones worth of putting on our tree. And then that list must be cut in half. Agonizing is then done to get it down to the requisite number. I do three a year.
The tree has grown nicely at that rate, there are ornaments from Belize, San Francisco and Louisville. Our graduations from the master’s program we shared together are there, football is there and our engagement and wedding. But there are also regular pictures, days in the park or picnics by a pond.
Anyway. I get these through Cafepress, where I have made money in the past. Remember “Don’t get stuck on stupid?” Made several bucks off that slogan on a bumper sticker a few years back. Occasionally something else sells, but I don’t spend a lot of time there. Except for today.
I had to open the shop, blow out the cobwebs, sweep, put the chairs down and upload the chosen pictures to the slowest servers not involving Julian Assange. Fortunately I didn’t have to re-edit any pictures, making the banal turn boring and flirting with tedious. The assembly process — choosing the product I wish to make, putting the image on the product, ordering and repeating — is somewhat more pleasant than sausage making, gives way to a very nice product, however. I love those ornaments.
And for maybe the first year I’ve smartly ordered the ornaments early enough that they might actually make it on the tree this year. Usually it works like this “Merry Christmas. You can put these on the tree next year!”
Next year we might have to get a small tree for this. I think we’re outgrowing the plastic apartment tree The Yankee bought some years back. One day, I hope, they’ll take over the main tree. Of course we have all of the other ornaments. At some point we’re going to have a tree in every room, I’m afraid.
Links: Just two today, because putting these two together amuses me.
Journalists, says Alan Mutter aren’t objective. Never have been, he says. And we should do away with the pretense.
In other news, ALIEN LIFE!
NASA has discovered a new life form, a bacteria called GFAJ-1 that is unlike anything currently living in planet Earth. It’s capable of using arsenic to build its DNA, RNA, proteins, and cell membranes. This changes everything.
NASA is saying that this is “life as we do not know it”. The reason is that all life on Earth is made of six components: Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.
[…]
The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding organisms in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.
Once again, that’s (alien-ish) life imitating art:
Back to Mutter on approaching news with a nod to appreciating our objectivity:
For journalists to be able to report effectively on the news and its significance, we have to replace the intellectually indefensible pretense of objectivity with a more authentic standard that journalists actually can live up to.
The way to do that is to treat the public like adults by providing the clearest possible understanding of who is delivering news and commentary – and where they are coming from. Hence, the following proposal:
Let’s take advantage of the openness and inexhaustible space of the Internet to have every journalist publish a detailed statement of political, personal and financial interests at her home website and perhaps even in a well publicized national registry. Full disclosure would enable consumers to make their own informed judgments about the potential biases and believability of any journalist.
No one would read the individual disclosures, but they could be consulted when Spidey-senses started tingling. Blogs and their endless archives, searchable and permanent, would be a good place for this. But who reports on the disclosures? And would my biases inform my disclosure? Or would they stifle it? Perhaps I leave something out, is it a sin of omission, or just a harmless mistake? Or what if a particular detail of my life and my beat didn’t previously intersect, but now do.
Suddenly it sounds like a wiki.
In domestic news, I was instructed to put a lasagna in the oven this evening. Our friends Shane and Brian were here for dinner and they stayed late telling stories. The bigger picture is that I’ll get to have lasagna leftovers for the next three days. This is an excellent development.
As I tried to put the dining room table back in order Allie was jumping on every chair as I tried to move it. In a previous life, she might have been a snow skiing cat. She’s longing for the lifts.
Tomorrow is Veterans Day, and today marks the 235th anniversary of the creation of a fine force of warriors. There’s a long line of Marines in my family and I’m thinking of theme today. One of them lost a leg in Vietnam, others served in more peaceful times.
A few years ago we watched a battalion graduation at Parris Island. I spent two years there is a child and watched countless graduations. I don’t remember any of them, but I think of the men I saw four years ago. I think of these young Marines today, and I hope they are safe and still serving proudly.
Semper Fidelis, Marines.
That’s this evening at Samford. Evenings being relative. Three weeks ago that same time was the afternoon. At any rate I was walking from one errand to a meeting and had the best view. By the time I made it back to the office it was completely dark. And that shouldn’t happen.
Spent the better part of my night working on a paper for my media effects class. I wrote, revised, edited, re-wrote and moved things up and down until it didn’t make sense any more. That’s when I quit, having achieved a level of perfection that is not easily reached. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and realize two or three things that I should have added, but you should live by this motto: Print early, never second guess.
That’s a great motto, but hardly a practical one. I’ll continue on with this paper until the bitter end — trying to massage every possible detail into a very finite, five-page space — and hope my professor makes sense of it as well.
Random fun: In 1995 Dr. Clifford Stoll could see no future to this Internet thing. Newsweek, a fine brand today weakened by both content and their very name and now being absorbed by The Daily Beast, published his scribblings:
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
Remember, this is 1995.
(T)he Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
Sound like any curators (or journalists or producers) you know?
Then there’s cyberbusiness (sic). We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete (sic). So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
He decries the lack of human interaction, the virtual communities and some sense of isolation.
Dr. Stoll’s Wikipedia page says he’s now mostly a stay-at-home dad and sells custom-made blown glass on the Internet. Good for him.
OK, back to that paper, lest it become an all-nighter.
World’s Fair update will be along in a bit.
Sitting at the red light to make my turn back onto campus I looked out of the window to see a gust of leaves making their adieu from trees. Floating there, in that transcendent space between instrument of photosynthesis and ground matter, they are so graceful. For all of their work on the branches and all of their nutritional value on the ground it is a shame that they are free for such a short period of time.
So I decided to record their moment. This decision always seems to take a long time, in retrospect. And when the neurons finally connect, assess and send the signal that documenting this visually might be fun, I must still pull my phone from my pocket. This can be cumbersome. The screen must be unlocked, the camera accessed and the video feature selected.
Of course this was when the remaining leaves grew resilient, their petioles growing stronger than the breeze.
That is one long red light.
Grand day. Had a class where students skewered the published works of learned authors. Enjoyed a delicious lunch where things were off the menu, and then back on the menu, but the other supporting item was off the menu instead. The poor waitress had to recite the sides three times through the confusion.
Took part in a meeting. Met a new student, the first-in-their-family type. Very nice person.
Punched out of my weight class in a particularly thorny carpentry problem. Longtime readers will recall I have no business even being in that conversation. But screws, the cheaply made international kind, were breaking off at the wrong time. They must be removed so that other screws of decidedly sturdier stuff can be put in their place. I invented a tool that would facilitate removing the offending broken screw.
But only after my super-powerful magnet idea was dismissed.
Turns out it already exists, this tool, but I didn’t know about it. Even still, it is gratifying to know when you’re on the right track, even if someone patented the thing decades ago.
This was the scene when I left this evening:
Samford is a beautiful campus.
Dinner with friends. Our realtor is now a friend. He’s been to our house after we’ve moved in. He didn’t even judge our staging. He had us over to his place for a football party last weekend. We have dinner about once a week now. You probably aren’t supposed to be friends with your realtor, especially if you moved onto an Indian burial ground, but he’s a nice guy and tells the best jokes.
So we had pizza tonight at a place called Little Italy and I brought home the leftovers. These are of the New York style, and while The Yankee has spoiled me on New Haven pies, Little Italy is pretty good stuff.
I just found the obligatory store opening story from two years ago. Those always amuse because the writer inevitably talks about how this new place uses only fresh ingredients. As opposed to, what? Stuff they found in a dumpster around the corner? Whatever fell off the farmer’s truck while he was on his way to market? Something frozen from the Green Giant?
I probably wrote the same thing. Years ago I did a restaurant opening story for a chicken joint just four blocks down from this pizza place. They framed the story and put it on the wall, which was cause for only a slight amount of chagrin when I would later dine there. The chicken was fine, but they had live music and I happened to live across the street from the place, so I found my way there a fair amount. Eventually they moved to a new location, and now Urban Spoon tells me the place is closed.
Those are always the more interesting stories — What did happen to that young couple? — but you don’t see them as much.
Busy and full day. The Glomerata covers will be updated momentarily. Tomorrow will be another full day, I’m sure, and it will come equipped with a full night as well.
That’s part of a spam comment I received yesterday. They snare you with the first part of the phrase, a nice little comment meant to appeal to the author’s ego, and then snap you back with the hard realize that this is all just a lie and you are really just a tool for The Man, and we need to get our people out of Vietnam, man! Johnson is ruining everything.
And then the HUAC is re-formed and things get nasty from there.
I was going to really dissect the spam for fun, but something made me Google it. The 2,740 results suggested that this particular Russian server gets around a bit, but it problem isn’t the most prolific one.
Plus, Dr. Jim Pangborn, a English-lit, poetics, cultural and media history scholar has already done the heavy lifting stretches the idea beyond English. Pangborn takes the idea back to Socrates. You could take the thing all the way back to plumage and scales and cilia.
“Mine are better, softer, sturdier more colorful, more bountiful. Whatever you need, babe. Clearly life with me is going to be better than life with that guy. How droll.” Then the female, having been impressed with the dance and the spontaneous sense of the male’s dance interpretation, takes a chance. And now the male is at the bowling alley four nights a week, coming home late reeking of booze and cigars. And she thinks Maybe, just maybe, the male with less scales or feathers wouldn’t have been so bad after all. She goes to look him up on Protozoabook and thinks Still less plumage/scales/cilia but he is a senior developer at Endoderm, so there’s that. You never really think of Darwinism with that particular brand of cynicism. Back to the Lomophotography. I took two pictures today on my iPhone for comparison’s sake, one using the Lomo app, and the other with the conventional technique. 
I like the effect, but it is always going to be a novelty to me. I blame the years of rational empiricism training.
Critiqued the Crimson this afternoon. This year’s staff has grown into putting together strong papers pretty rapidly. Very proud. There was one or two minor problems, but I figure if the editors discover them before I point them out they are on the right track.
I showed them the new template for the website re-launch, as designed by the online editor. The mock-up has turned into a working page that will go live sooner than later. Now we begin the talks of more photography, more video, more social media, more, more, more. Dream big, I say, because the answer is frequently yes.
Picked up the Wall of Fame plaques today. They’ll be given out at Homecoming in two weeks. Another good class of inductees, and now I have to write blurbs for their displays. It is no easy challenge to distill a career of success into 30 words. Guess what I’ll be doing this weekend?
Studied. Read. For class tomorrow I am critiquing Lang et al. (2005) “Wait! Don’t turn that dial! More excitement to come! The effects of story length and production pacing in local television news on channel changing behavior and information processing in a free-choice environment.” This is not the longest journal title I’ve ever encountered.
My professor, an internationally respected scholar and a talented and kind man, studied under the author. (Lang is mentioned mid-way through this spiel from one of my former professors. I recorded that in the spring of 2009, which seems a long time ago now. Indeed, I’d almost forgotten I had it.) I know one of the co-authors. It is a good paper and I can only find three or four things to mention in class tomorrow. Hopefully it will be a worthwhile critique.
For this class I’ve now almost filled two large three-ring binders with papers on cognition, method and effects. My three-hole punch is getting dull under the strain. I didn’t realize you could do that.
More from the 1939 World’s Fair will come along shortly.
