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memories

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18
Apr 11

Random Mondayness

I interviewed a former Heisman trophy winner this morning. Had a very nice chat. When I type up the notes in the next few days I’ll give you a little more insight into the piece, which is a freelance article I’ve been asked to write for a summer publication. So come back for more details on that later.

Hint: It was not Gino Torretta. He had a similar outcome to his post-Heisman bowl game, however. Like Torretta, it happened in the Sugar Bowl.

Much of the rest of the day was spent making recruiting phone calls, reading and grading. These things have seemed to take over most everything lately. But that’s fine. I enjoy talking with prospective students, though I get a lot of machines and write a lot of email. I do love to read. And grading is … well … everyone needs to have things graded.

This evening I visited the Galleria for the first time in probably a year or more. On Twitter I wrote, “Places I’ve been less crowded than this mall: Nevada desert, Belizian rain forest, Alabama library, IRS parties.” It was amazing how dead most of the place was.

Just for context, I worked there for part of my senior year in high school. A classmate helped me land the easy job of selling coupon books in those little mid-mall kiosks. You don’t antagonize people, you wait patiently for them to come to you. And the hourly pay, for a high school student, was extravagant. (I think I was making about $9 an hour.) Anyway, one night while I was not selling coupon books to the random passers by, a famous Southern winter storm descended upon us. Everything closed up quickly. This was like that. (Incidentally, that particular night, there was no snow if I remember correctly.)

There was no bad weather tonight, either. Just the economy, the Internet and people tired of malls, apparently.

I went looking for clothes sales. Finding none, I also left the mall.

Speaking of mall culture … Who’s ready for a third in Bill & Ted’s storyline? Besides Keanu, I mean.

“When we last got together, part of it was that Bill and Ted were supposed to have written the song that saved the world, and it hasn’t happened. … So they’ve now become kind of possessed by trying to do that. Then there’s an element of time and they have to go back.”

Ghostbusters III doesn’t look like a bad idea in comparison, now, does it?

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17
Apr 11

Catching Up

A new warning came down Friday that a line of storms would bring wind and hail. So, naturally, you go outside.

And we might not have received the 2.5-inch diameter hail we were promised …

But this was painful enough. We’re standing in the garage, between our cars and the ice starts racing down from the sky. Brian’s car is in the driveway, unprotected by the safety of any roofing or tree limbs.

A tarp! I have a tarp!

Knowing that hail storms are brief, but violent, I took the most direct route, which was around the exterior of the house. Barefoot. And when I got to the back of the house it really started coming down. And that began to sting. Hail on soft, moist earth isn’t so bad, even for a tenderfoot. Hail on cement is not a lot of fun.

I race back, now covering my head with the tarp.

I have a tarp! I need a plan!

We decided to cover the windshield.

About eight seconds after we have the great green piece of protective plastic spread out evenly — which exposed tender skin to more angry ice — the hail stopped falling. The yard was covered. There were abnormally large piles of the stuff everywhere. There was an unearthly moisture in the air as the hail steamed itself into oblivion. It looked like an X-Files setting.

The car was undamaged.

The Yankee got these two tigers from the balloon guy at Niffer’s the other night. We see him there often. This has become his regular gig the last few years. On weekends he is at the baseball stadium in clown makeup making balloons. He’s often here or at parties, or delivering a manifesto on the current political climate, while he makes a balloon beanie hat. The guy’s talented. He said it took him about two years before his hands could create while he chatted with customers.

Nice guy. He carries a duffle bag stuffed full of balloons. He said he spends thousands of dollars a year on the stuff. This is his job.

There’s a feature story in that guy.

I found her, in the checkout line at the grocery store, reading the Enquirer. Hard to believe this has been six years. Beth Holloway has a new show coming out. (The good people at WBRC struggled with the math on that story.)

“Vanished with Beth Holloway,” will follow real life cases of missing persons; digging into the mysteries behind them and searching for clues to solve the cases.

I liked it better when John Walsh and Robert Stack did that show.

If anything, she’s proved it isn’t hard to sneak into a Peruvian jail.

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16
Apr 11

Spring weather

It seems unnatural to have such pitch-perfect weather just a day after such deadly storms.

Seventeen dead were killed yesterday and last night across four states. Three of the deaths were near the scene of that picture, which is from ABC 33/40 meteorologist James Spann in Autauga County, Alabama this morning. Many more were hurt there. The church is destroyed. (But they are congregating in the morning at the local high school; the human spirit can be indomitable.) Four more people died in rural Washington County.

Tornadoes are curious, scary things. My elementary school was on the top of a hill. Back then, school districts didn’t shut down a day in advance of a storm. The siren howled and we all lined up in the hallways, even in the first or second grade wondering about the usefulness of the head-between-the-knees technique. During one spring storm they told us a tornado skipped up one side of the hill, ramped over the building and down the other side. I don’t recall seeing any damage, but remember that story vividly.

It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve had friends speak of destroyed front yards and pristine backyards. I’ve watched news reports of babies picked up and placed unharmed in dresser drawers far from home. I saw a report once of a farmer who got caught on his tractor in his field and couldn’t beat the storm back to the barn. He ran off for safety and came back to find his tractor OK, but the gas cap gone, presumably spun open by the swirling winds.

I’ve covered lots of tornadoes. Chased a few, from a safe distance, too. Having lived a great portion of my life in a volatile springtime area the closest we’ve come to being impacted is in donating to those in need. Thirteen years and two weeks ago, in 1998, we adopted an awesome little storm dog. Oak Grove, a community near my home, had been devastated by one of the largest tornadoes ever recorded. Thirty-two were killed. When they went in to clean up they couldn’t tell lot from lot in some places because there was just nothing left. Here’s a brief video from that storm:

Watch your radar closely.

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26
Mar 11

More conferencing

Presented our paper today on the media participation hypothesis, which suggests that, as political involvement grows reliant on new media formats and technologies, use of interactive public affairs media will produce more satisfaction and efficacy over time as media become more interactive. The concern with this hypothesis, we argue in the paper is one reflected in current research which struggles with logistical challenges that the Internet presents.

That’s what this paper is about: this doesn’t exactly work, that doesn’t exactly work, we need a model to help with understanding new dynamics, and so on.

There were nodding heads during the presentation, which is always a good sign at these sorts of things.

We had a pizza lunch with two of our friends from Mississippi schools and another from Texas. After more sessions and meetings in the afternoon we had dinner with our colleagues at The Flying Fish.

This place was new in Little Rock when I lived here. (Almost a decade ago!) It is delicious. I went to the Flying Fish because it was one of the few places in a re-developing downtown back then; now Riverwalk is a bustling, thriving area once again, thanks to years of development and the Clinton Library. I was glad to see the place was still around. It is, I believe, the best catfish I eat — and there’s a catfish joint in my family.

And apparently it is a regional chain, so the next time I’m in Memphis it’ll be ribs and fish.

Part of the decor:

Outside they light the building with lamps made of outboard motors.

Anyway, the company was the best part. We had dinner with four exceedingly bright and funny people, two old friends and two of them new. Shame we’ll only see them at conferences, it has been a while since I’ve laughed that much, that hard.

So that’s the day: the presentation, the conference and the food. Tomorrow is the drive back home. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

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25
Mar 11

Meanwhile, back at the conference

I need a Hall of Justice wipe, don’t I?

We walked into the conference this morning just in time for this session where The Yankee was chairing and I was responding to the papers being presented. The presenters were graduate students, their scholarship quality.

One wrote a piece on the rhetoric of Photovoice, which is a particular photographic methodology. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with the paper until I heard the author present. She’d written her master’s thesis with this method, but had now changed her mind on it. And that made a lot of sense.

Another was a look at the rhetoric of Blaxploitation films. The paper was good, though it isn’t anything I’d ever consider doing myself. But I did find myself quoting some of the movies he mentioned for the rest of the day.

A third paper on the panel was an analysis of some of the political segments on Saturday Night Live.

Somehow I managed to give my response without referencing this segment:

This one did come up:

I love those bits.

Which made the schema-relational-media theory paper look smarter than all of us, really. Always nice to learn new things, and that’s what happened for me in that paper.

We took in a session featuring some of the great political academics of the region, including our old professor Dr. Larry Powell. I love to hear him hold forth. He’ll sit back, cross his arms and tell you how this most recent campaign was like something Goldwater did. And how it was different, too. He’s just a walking education and a very nice man.

I dropped in on an undergrad presentation because one panelist was talking about the rhetoric of World War II posters, an art form I really admire. She talked about this one — essentially women were hard at work, but being “protected” or “held back” by their husbands. Note, too, the form-fitting overalls. On this poster she discussed the rhetoric of mid-century race relations. More gender roles and race rhetoric is found in this poster, she argued.

And then a young woman stood up to deliver her paper on the rhetorical analysis of photojournalism on Katrina coverage. It was more gripping when she discussed how she was an evacuee of that storm.

Later in the afternoon The Yankee delivered her paper on the Kay Hagan-Elizabeth Dole North Carolina senate race. She won top paper honors for this research. (She’s very good.) And then she took a picture of me taking a picture. (She’s so meta.)

We had dinner at Famous Dave’s, a barbecue place from whom we’ve been holding onto a gift card for years. We walked in and Ray Charles started playing on the speakers, so everything was just right. Good food, we just don’t have one around us. Being Friday, which is Pie Day, we had the pecan. (I like everything about pecan pie except for the pecans.)

I drove her past my old apartment, showed off a few things in town — but not my former station because, really, when you’ve seen one building you’ve seen them all.

And then back across the river to our hotel room, where I must prepare for tomorrow’s presentation.