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6
Aug 14

Signs, signs

A few weeks ago I wrote about one of the signs in my grandparents’ part of the world. The old Coke sign had been there all my life, and finally it faded beyond recognition. And then the city elders, or the Chamber, or the Coke people, someone, repainted it.

This is a few years into the new version of that sign, and it still looks obnoxiously bright. For some reason all of the Coke signs of the world should be distressed or full-on ghost signs.

Except for this one, in Cartersville, Georgia, which Coke has authenticated as the original outdoor Coke sign and restored.

I took that picture in 2006. I wonder what it looks like today. Here it is in 2012.

Just down the street from the new-old Coke sign is one of the best signs ever:

I don’t know what a deer-turkey is, but I’ve always been curious to find out.

If you notice the last line it says “Drive a little to save a $” and then there’s a picture of a deer head. So they do either taxidermy or emoji. Who can say?

Anyway, said all of my sad goodbyes and sad and extra hugs and then hit the road. Stopped at campus, where we got new computers installed in the newsroom and in my office. Signed paperwork, delivered paperwork and hit the road again, for home.

Dinner with friends, and then a quiet night with the cat.

cycling / Friday / friends / memories / video — Comments Off
25
Jul 14

One does not simply tempt the sun

I don’t know what you were doing two years and two days ago, but I was having killer headaches and singing the praises of ice cream therapy.

Also, we dodged a solar bullet. How a solar storm two years ago nearly caused a catastrophe on Earth:

On July 23, 2012, the sun unleashed two massive clouds of plasma that barely missed a catastrophic encounter with the Earth’s atmosphere. These plasma clouds, known as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), comprised a solar storm thought to be the most powerful in at least 150 years.

“If it had hit, we would still be picking up the pieces,” physicist Daniel Baker of the University of Colorado tells NASA.
Fortunately, the blast site of the CMEs was not directed at Earth. Had this event occurred a week earlier when the point of eruption was Earth-facing, a potentially disastrous outcome would have unfolded.

“I have come away from our recent studies more convinced than ever that Earth and its inhabitants were incredibly fortunate that the 2012 eruption happened when it did,” Baker tells NASA. “If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire.”

Who knew?

Rode my bike for the first time since the race last weekend. I needed a little break, I took too long of a break. So today I just pedaled through the neighborhood and then up and down the time trial course and over the back of the big hill, mostly mad at myself for being off my bike for so long.

It is always that way. I’m never disappointed in a ride, but I always regret not going.

It wiped me out, though, which was predictable and sad at the same time. I could have gone for a few laps in the pool, but I had no energy. My diet has been off, I think, because there is always something, or two things, that can be done incorrectly at any given time.

He said, while eating sliders for dinner with friends.

We went to visit Kim and Murphy. We took cupcakes, they made delicious tiny burgers. We watched QVC and no one really seemed to know why. But I can tell you all about the luxury deluxe makeup organizer. It comes in your choice of one of three colors and can hold 30 of your favorite lipsticks at a time!

I should have applied for a job at QVC years ago, surely.

Do you like blooper? Everyone likes bloopers. These were a bit difficult for me to wrap my mind around, because the show is so often grim, but here are what are apparently rare Game of Thrones bloopers:

Dear Internet: Let’s make a pact. If you embed every YouTube video that you find interesting, and I embed every YouTube video that I think you’ll find interesting, we’ll never have to go to the actual YouTube page and read those comments.

Hope you are planning a wonderful, comment-free weekend.

cycling / family / Friday / history / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / running / things to read / Tumblr / Twitter — Comments Off
11
Jul 14

Scene chewing

Today I changed a doorknob. Four screws out, the new hardware in place and four more screws to install it.

I was listening to Pandora at the time. It took less than two songs, and that was because one of the screws was stripped.

But that wasn’t even the height of my industriousness today. I also built one of those shoe racks that you hang over a closet door and immediately regret having purchased! There’s just no end to my usefulness, it seems.

The door knob was on one of the houses that my great-grandfather built, let’s say, 60 years ago.

Here he is, the older gentleman:

He built three on some of his property for rental income. They’ve all stayed in the family over the years. A few years ago I sanded down door frames in one of the houses and went through all those decades of paint. It was a smooth glimpse of archeology.

At the time I wrote:

And suddenly I’ve found myself kneeling in the dust of the place, sanding smooth at least six layers of paint, peeling away the canvas of perhaps a dozen lives or more, letting that old lumber breathe again for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.

Sometimes I overwrite.

I walked around the side of that little rental and saw this, and wondered much the same thing as I did about the paint: Did he hang this?

That’s a small question that’ll never be answered. Who would remember? Who is left to know? Who would pay attention to the details of when a screen door went in? And is that the original, or something put up during the Reagan years?

I noodled up and down the road for five miles and then jogged one, the last effort before the Sunday race. We’ll see how much I come to regret that.

Usually, by this time, I am very much aware of how unprepared I am for the thing. This time I am choosing to not consciously acknowledge how unprepared I am.

Because, you know, I am.

Played with my grandparents’ dog:

She’s a smart one.

Things to read … so you can be smart, too.

There’s a super moon tomorrow night. Pretty large tonight, too.

US GIVEN HEADS UP ABOUT NEWSPAPER DATA DESTRUCTION:

In a statement to the AP, the Guardian said it was disappointed to learn that “cross-Atlantic conversations were taking place at the very highest levels of government ahead of the bizarre destruction of journalistic material that took place in the Guardian’s basement last July.”

“What’s perhaps most concerning is that the disclosure of these emails appears to contradict the White House’s comments about these events last year, when they questioned the appropriateness of the U.K. government’s intervention,” the newspaper said.

The White House said Thursday that the British government had acted on its own in destroying the Guardian drives.

Digital advertising will pass 25% of total ad spending this year:

Global spending on advertising will hit $545.4 billion this year, according to a report from eMarketer, and digital ads will make up more than a quarter of that spending.
Digital ad spending is likely to hit $140.15 billion this year, with $32.71 billion spent on ads for smartphones and tablets.
Growth in total media ad spending should be 5.7 percent this year, eMarketer said, more than twice the growth rate a year ago, which was 2.6 percent.

A properly sanitized report, from ESPN. Pete Carroll headed to Trojans HOF

And when ESPN disappoints you like that, they redeem themselves like this. Marcus Lattimore doesn’t walk alone

The Widespread Effects of Facebook’s Latest Outage:

The lesson, therefore, is a poignant one: When utilizing any third-party tags, particularly ones that have such a big effect on your end users interaction with your site, it’s imperative that you make sure the code is asynchronous with your own to prevent it from affecting your entire site’s performance.

Whoops. Anthrax investigation turns up ‘distressing’ issues at CDC

Stuff on my Tumblr: The mysteries of modern shipping, an examination of modern currency, an old Scout and an older swing.

On Twitter:

Maybe I should just start using this as a sarcasm face … pic.twitter.com/TuOzfR6NO4

— kenny smith (@kennysmith) July 12, 2014

Leonard Nimoy had just stolen all of William Shatner’s scene chewing.

I made fun of the Horta episode, with plenty of photos. Check it out.

cycling / history / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / things to read / Thursday / Tumblr — Comments Off
10
Jul 14

There’s a can’t-miss offer at the end of this post

I had a V8 for breakfast this morning. “Start the gut,” they say. And I thought to myself, “I’ve forgotten how much I like V8.”

And then I read the nutrition label, remembering what I would find there, and realizing why I liked V8.

It is the potassium.

Oh, the old days in radio, when I would get to the studio at 4 a.m. and do three hours of air work and then rush down the mountain to the gas station for a V8 and a juice and some snack or other to get me through lunch. There’s nothing like faking energy on the air before 5 a.m., but, then, getting off before 2 p.m. had perks, as well.

Finally, about the time I convinced all of my friends that, no, really, I have to go to bed at 8 or 9 p.m., I was out of broadcasting. Sleeping in again never felt so good, and I probably haven’t had a V8 since.

I had lunch at a barbecue place, today, a little chicken, a little potato salad, it was delicious. And then later I went for a ride on my bicycle. I checked out 22 miles of the route for this weekend’s race. Here’s the beginning, and the end:

I didn’t do the very beginning, because it involves a small climb up from the river bank. I joined the circuit three miles in, where the country roads begin. This area will offer some long, gentle, slow climbs, rather than the rollers we normally ride. Always it felt like I was going uphill, or that I had dead legs, or both.

Then I’d look down at the computer and see my speed and be pleasantly surprised, except for the two hills of note. It will be a fast course through neighborhoods and beautiful corn and soybean fields and beyond pastureland stuffed with cattle. I think the layout only calls for six places where you have to slow down for turns, and so it is technically easy, and very pleasant. The roads are good. They are quiet.

Though I did have a car round a curve from the other direction so fast he was entirely in my lane. Not “I’m in the country and I can hover over the centerline a bit because I clearly see no one is coming,” but instead “For a moment there, I thought I was in England and driving on the left.”

And there was also, at the very end, the minivan full of children that wanted to pull up a little too close. People are people.

Anyway, the race planner has done a nice job, at least in the bike leg. I suspect several triathletes will come away very pleased with their times. (I will finish behind them all somewhere.) I hope I am. I didn’t even work very hard and had a high pace and absolutely bombed my way through the last turn and downhill.

Now the never-answered question: How much harder should I work during the race, knowing I have to bluff my way through a 10K after that?

Things to read … because if you read all of these you won’t have to run later.

Look out Hawaii, Samoa and Spain! We’re coming after your stuff! Or: Finally, Y2K arrives. 14,000 DRAFT NOTICES SENT TO MEN BORN IN 1800S:

The Selective Service didn’t initially catch it because the state used a two-digit code to indicate year of birth, spokesman Pat Schuback said. The federal agency identified 27,218 records of men born in the 1800s, began mailing notices to them on June 30, and began receiving calls from family members on July 3. By that time, it had sent 14,250 notices in error.

All the voter fraud people are surely wondering how many of them are still voting.

One commenter notes that perhaps they can find the IRS’s missing emails. Chinese hackers broke into computer network containing personal data on thousands of federal employees

I did this about 10 years ago. Man angry over child deaths videos self in hot car to prove a point:

“I’m sitting in the car with the windows rolled up cause I want to know how it feels to be left in the car, strapped in a car seat with the windows up, and the doors probably locked,” Williams says on the video. “I would never leave my kids in the car like this, man.”

The thing the story doesn’t mention is that babies can’t regulate their temperature as well as adults do. So when he locks himself in or, as I did, road 25 minutes from work to home at 3 p.m. at the apex of a summer in the South, there is an advantage we have. And, yes, it gets incredibly hot.

I think we’re down about a third in this category, based on the last numbers I recall seeing. I also recall working the statehouse beat, sometimes all alone, and seeing cobwebs in the old rooms that used to be the news bureaus’ — and all of that was a few years before the big cuts. It is sometimes worse on the local level. This means a lot when the politicians start to notice. Pew study: New media outlets attempt to fill void in statehouse coverage across the U.S.. The report says less than a third of the nation’s daily newspapers staff their respective statehouses. That is an embarrassment. Here are the state-by-state numbers.

First 5 Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellows Named:

The Fellowship provides a unique platform for U.S. Fulbright awardees to build awareness of transnational challenges, comparing and contrasting cross-border issues. Fellows will share their stories on nationalgeographic.com.

Finally, I made my triumphant return to Tumblr today, the place where I publish the random pictures I take so that they can one day be published on Tumblr. Today, you can enjoy amazing things like This 18-wheeler! A truly incredible chair! Or how about this postcard with a classic note? And, finally, the most amazing peanut cans ever!

There will be more tomorrow. See you then!

Auburn / football / memories / weekend — Comments Off
29
Jun 14

Auburn great killed in accident

I’m having a difficult time with this, truthfully. It was stunning and tragic to read about this morning. Two young men killed in a late-night traffic accident. There’s a fair amount of disbelief from a lot of people today for a variety of reasons. I tried to write what I thought might be a common community reason for The War Eagle Reader. I’ve reproduced it here.

A car crash early this morning in Lagrange, Georgia killed two, including UGA baseball player Ian Davis and Auburn great Philip Lutzenkirchen.

If you think really hard about it, you might remember the first time you tried to pronounce the name “Lutzenkirchen.” It might have been when your friend emailed you the link to that YouTube clip from his high school play:

“This guy is coming to Auburn,” your friend wrote. Then you spent the entirety of your next weekend cookout teaching each other how to phonetically pronounce his name.

But it didn’t take much longer than that. The boy from Georgia became an Auburn man and, just as quickly, became a fan favorite. Maybe it was the clean cut look, or the physical stature. Perhaps it was the calm way in which he always seemed to comport himself.

Maybe it was the style of play:

It could have been how he embraced Auburn that made you embrace him back. From beginning, to the middle, to the end. It could have been the charm or how he accepted what became his legend. And think about that for just a second: Here was a guy at — what, 19? — who became a legend. Look how he handled himself.

Maybe it was that you could see him around town, at Momma G’s, having Japanese or wherever you’d run into him, and how a guy who was such a BMOC was always seemingly so approachable.

Other things you knew mattered, too, even more important things: the prom story, how he gave of himself to others, the respect he earned from his professors or for how he stood for what he believed. Perhaps it was the graceful way he said goodbye or the sense of humor he had about his sibling Iron Bowl rivalry or his burgeoning professional work or his promising coaching career.

Maybe that is what it was. The promise that Philip Lutzenkirchen always showed and the way he seemed to carry it with ease, returning all of your smiles and War Eagles and even embracing that dance.

Maybe it was that he was so personable as to make it seem he was always all of ours, and the way it seemed to bemuse him, like he was always us, too.

Auburn lost a great one today, an irreplaceable one. Our thoughts and prayers are extended to his friends and family, who feel the loss most personally. As sad as we are, it is difficult to imagine your profound grief. We thank you for sharing him with us. We grieve with you over the loss of a great Auburn man.