Today was Copeland Cookie Day in my class. This is Dr. Copeland:
He was my first professor in the doctoral program at Alabama. He served on my comps committee and was always full of great jokes and good advice. Not too long after he was on my committee, and just after his retirement, he died. Dr. Copeland was a giant sweet-hearted man. There’s a group on Facebook that is still growing long after his death, which probably says a lot in the modern context.
He always did a lot for his grad students. He’d take them out one night for drinks. He gave them tickets to the pancake breakfast his Kiwanis chapter ran. He’d take one class and bring cookies and put away the syllabus. He’d just talk about whatever seemed important: conferences, papers, dealing with colleagues. You could have viewed it as a night the guy didn’t want to teach. In time, I think, we came to realize that a lot of the most important things we learned came from there.
So that’s why I have a Copeland Cookie Day every semester. I bring in snacks, put aside the plans and just talk about industry, courses, war stories, whatever. Today was Copeland Cookie Day. These are all that remain:
The students always agree, after I tell about the man, that Dr. Copeland must have been a good man. They are right. His students knew it too. That Emmy was won by one of his former students. Instead of displaying that in his home or office, or giving it to his parents, he brought it to Dr. Copeland. There are at least a half dozen Copeland Cookie Days going on around the region this semester. I just thought you should know.
We spent almost the entire afternoon in the car, but we’ve finally arrived somewhere:
We are on Amelia Island, a well-kept secret coastal getaway just outside of Jacksonville. I’d never even heard of the place until my friend moved here. And my friend is why we are here. Tomorrow, Chadd, one of my old radio mentors, is getting married.
Chadd helped me get started in broadcasting in Auburn. I worked with him doing high school sportscasts. When he moved on I moved into his spot. And I’d follow him up in a broadcasting job in Birmingham, too. He moved on to nationally syndicated shows and ESPN and now runs a sports talker in Jacksonville. Earlier this week they announced they were becoming the flagship station for Jaguars football. Tomorrow he’s getting married. Some week. Some guy.
We saw them tonight at a little mixer. It was the first time we’d met his bride, though we are friends online — one of those modern conditions of modern life. “Oh, finally, we meet.”
She’s going to be a beautiful bride tomorrow. It is an outdoor wedding, if the rain holds off. There’s a big concern of that. Every forecast is different, the entire week, we’re told, has been a weird weather experience.
This evening was lovely, though. We sat outside on a beachfront patio for dinner. We’d walked in and they asked “Inside or out?” My first thought was “Why would you come to the beach and eat inside?” My second thought was “Why is this woman singing Wagon Wheel? And why is Wagon Wheel suddenly the ‘I have country’ bonafides?”
Outside was louder, but the band was better. And, boy, could this lady sing:
She went from the very reverend Al Green directly into White Stripes and she actually made it work. Not bad for a patio band.
Slowing traffic for several miles on the way home …
My first job after college was reporting traffic on the radio. College grad! It was originally supposed to be a job where I flew around as a passenger in a small plane and reported from the sky. Something happened, I forget the details, where the guy I was replacing stuck around. So I worked in the office.
The office was a big bullpen with miniature studio bays instead of cubicles. There was one guy who had the job of calling police stations, listening to scanners and taking the occasional phone call about traffic reports. He was inputting all of this data into the system so that people like me could read on various radio stations in the region. On any given day I was reporting on five or six stations. We all had stations and times and some people crafted miniature personalities behind it. This was, after all, something of a stepping stone job for some people.
One of those guys, an older gentleman, did this cantankerous bit, like the accidents, the minor ones at least, were an imposition to him, already at his office. It was probably funny in a sympathetic sort of way. One day he called a car fire a “Car-B-Q.” That seemed less funny to me, since these are more serious than a fender bender. I always think of that whenever I hear about or see a car fire.
You never hear what became of the people involved. Did they escape safely? How many of their things did they bother to reach for? How did it start? You only know it ruined more than their weekend plans.
Things to read … because that is almost always in the plans.
Some of America’s best cancer hospitals are off-limits to many of the people now signing up for coverage under the nation’s new health care program.
Doctors and administrators say they’re concerned. So are some state insurance regulators.
An Associated Press survey found examples coast to coast. Seattle Cancer Care Alliance is excluded by five out of eight insurers in Washington’s insurance exchange. MD Anderson Cancer Center says it’s in less than half of the plans in the Houston area. Memorial Sloan-Kettering is included by two of nine insurers in New York City and has out-of-network agreements with two more.
In all, only four of 19 nationally recognized comprehensive cancer centers that responded to AP’s survey said patients have access through all the insurance companies in their states’ exchanges.
If you haven’t come around to the reality that there is a difference between “coverage” and “health care” then you are well behind the curve.
The decline is small so far. Video subscribers across the entire pay-TV industry, which includes Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), DirecTV and Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ), dropped by 251,000 last year to about 100 million, SNL Kagan said in a statement today.
The industry has seen this coming for a while; research firm IHS said in August that TV subscriptions would decline to 100.8 million from 100.9 million in 2013. And cable companies have been suffering declines for years as satellite and phone carriers wrested away market share. In fact, DirecTV (DTV), Verizon and their ilk still gained TV subscribers last year — just not enough to make up for 2 million lost cable subscribers.
Pay-TV carriers have been preparing for this inflection point by developing services for watching video on tablets and smartphones. They’re also investing to boost Internet speeds as broadband services become more popular, often at the expense of TV subscriptions.
On our Blu-ray player there is an option for all manner of non-television video platforms. Most of them you probably don’t even know are out there. Seems we won’t need a la carte cable, we’re going to get it in some other fashion.
Remember when CNN stood for something? Now they’ll fall for anything.
I like to tell people that I think we all have a superpower, no matter how lame. Mine, I say, is that I can always anticipate the size of plasticware needed to store the leftovers. It isn’t going to save the world from alien invaders, but at least it is helpful in the kitchen. Unlike the Incredible Hulk.
It is a fun joke. It usually gets a little laugh. It starts a little “What’s your superpower?” conversation. Tonight, though, in maybe the third such event in the history of my discovering my comic book destiny …
Take note for this this day in history: @kennysmith's super power failed him. He misjudged the Tupperware needed for leftovers. #offday
That was this afternoon, this beautiful, clear, cool afternoon. Not a cloud in the sky, high of 55. Have we discussed how this is March?
Tonight I got a call from Stephen, at around 8:30. He was in town and invited me to his parents’ place to shoot a little pool. So we retired to the basement, my old college friend and his wife, whom I also know from college, and his father. Brooke and Stephen’s two kids were asleep upstairs. We were down among personalized photos of Reagan and antique gas station epherma and Rotary Club paraphernalia and played doubles. Brooke and Stephen won the first game. His dad and I won the next two. We played a game of cutthroat and I won that, too.
But this was the shot of the night. Mr. W. dropped the two in the corner pocket without the 13 even noticing.
Always such a reserved gentleman, it seems he was something of a pool shark in his younger days. You’d never expect it to know him.
As we played Stephen regaled us with impersonations and tales of his in-laws. Before we played he told one of those “Well, I’m old enough now, dad, you can’t do anything about this” story. Stephen is a lawyer, so he used the old statute of limitations line, which made it sound so important, particularly opposite the silly story he told. It involved mud and a lot of walking, like more than a few stories of youth in the South.
So I look at us. I think of all of our other friends, some who came up in conversation tonight and others who didn’t. How did we all get here, sitting over a pesky three ball I can’t knock down, in a life grand as all this?
Life gives you interesting questions on a Thursday night, doesn’t it?
The bird seed was left on the back porch, one of those “Let me put this down and deal with something pressing and I’ll get back to it” decisions. After a short time it was forgotten. At some point after that the squirrels and the chipmunks found it. The squirrels bit nice holes into the bag.
We noticed because Allie noticed:
We’ve learned, over the years, that the little meeping noise cats make is because they are frustrated. “I want IT.” Allie makes that noise when she sees wildlife in her yard. She also twitches up a bit. She’d really love to go outside and catch the thing, whatever it is she sees. But this cat is not a hunter. And even if she had enough speed to keep up with the other creature — bird, squirrel or chipmunk — she’d have no idea what to do about it.
A mouse, in a story so embarrassing a cat would beg you not to tell it, once scared her away.
She is fierce, this cat. Which is why, I suppose, I have a long scratch on the back of my hand right now. One of the few times she’s ever really done that. I choose not to interpret it as “You didn’t let me catch the thing, so you’ll do as a substitute.”
In baseball today Keegan Thompson pitched seven innings for Auburn. He allowed no runs and only two hits in collecting the win 4-1 over Mercer.
She is wrong. This wasn’t Thompson’s second win of the year. It was his third:
Actually I have no idea what she was talking about. But she held that position for a long time, so it must have been important.
A cutie at the park:
With one out in the ninth, Mercer had three runners on and the tying run at the plate. A ground ball to first sent center fielder Sasha Lagarde to the plate. The umpire said Lagarde slid in under this tag to score.
Auburn’s manager, Sunny Golloway, disagreed. He had a discussion about the best pizza toppings with the umpire. The plate ump decided he’d learned all he needed to know about the local fare. Golloway still had some things on his mind, so he circled back and brought up the best places around to get wings:
The umpire, not being a wing man, threw Golloway out of the game. Not everyone dips in ranch, Sunny. But the big emotional outburst — “How can you not like celery and carrots!?” gave struggling closer Terrance Dedrick the opportunity to regain his composure and he shut the Bears down from there.
Things to read … because some things are more important than a beautiful afternoon at the park. (Or so we’re told.)
I met Lance Cpl. Kyle Carpenter three years ago. It was a unique and humbling experience. Now, it seems, he’s getting the Medal of Honor. When you read his story, the instantaneous decision of a Marine of 21, which I thumbnailed in the first link, you’ll understand the common experience people get when they meet him, and why he’s up for the nation’s highest military distinction.
At Clay County Christian Academy, they call their favorite player “Codyman.” They have blue T-shirts with “Down syndrome awareness” surrounding a Superman logo on front. The logo has “C” instead of an “S,” and the back of the shirts says what Codyman fans feel about No. 12, Cody Morris: “Codyman, sort of like Superman (only cooler).”
Morris had his time to play in most every game this season, called “Cody Time.” It was that final minute when the sophomore took the court in the same uniform with his friends and teammates, and they made sure he got chances to shoot the ball.
And make no mistake. Morris can shoot.
I do enjoy those stories.
Finally: Chris Hemsworth. Liam Hemsworth. Meryl Streep. And Tom Hanks in The Bitman Begins:
In a way, this is actually a small culmination of the post-modern, highly social, remix era. The thing is somewhat funny on its face, but to maximize the video you have to understand several layers of nuance and references. Everyone probably has some basis for reference tough. The “Charlie bit my finger” clip now has more than 675 million YouTube views, so maybe you don’t need subtext.
