Spent a couple of hours on my bike today. (Sounds so nice I want to do it again.) I waited until the afternoon sun was dying out and the heat and the ultraviolet weren’t so oppressive and then I set out for a three stage ride. I cruised over to Opelika, intent on picking up a few more pictures for the Historic Marker Series.

As you may know — or if you don’t know or if you’ve just come back from that link and would like your assumptions confirmed — I’m hitting all of the markers in the county on my bike. I found the locations on the historical society’s website. I made a map, which heads up that page. But I’ve learned that between the descriptions and my best guesses there’s sometime a bit of discrepancy. So I’m fixing the map as I go, but I’m also spending a lot of time just cruising around looking for the signs.

So the second stage of today’s ride was riding around the downtown area of Opelika. This was little more than soft pedaling between red lights and looking confused. There were eight markers downtown. I found that I’d placed four or five accurately on my map.

I found them all. And the biggest inaccuracy was no more than a mile or two off. (That one was purely a guess anyway, so it wasn’t a mistake so much as having no real idea to begin with.) But I found them all. I dat on a bench in the shade in Opelika and had a little snack. I took all of my pictures and then pointed toward home, catching that last one on the way. Turns out I go by it every so often, but I’d never noticed it.

I also found two more signs. The ones I’m photographing are by either the state or the Chattahoochee Commission. The extras were put up by a tourism board and a church. But I was there. I had the chance to read them. Why not?

So I’ll add those to that section of the site eventually too, as always, one a week, on Thursdays.

The third stage of my ride was the return trip home. The sun was falling and the route I’d planned involved a lot of tree cover — meaning darker even a bit earlier — and I had no blinkies on my bike. In cycling the expression is to “put the hammer down.” That doesn’t apply to me, but I put it down anyway.

I average 24 miles per hour over the last eight miles, making it home just before the sky grayed.

And then we worked on paper ideas. Now we just have to write the paper. Meantime, we’re enjoying homemade muffins with fresh picked, locally grown blueberries. I think even the cinnamon was fair trade. It sounds far more ostentatious than it really is. But it is also more delicious than it sounds.

Best story detail of the day:

Leftfielder Nick Clark hustled in, trying to catch a sinking line drive.

“I ran up and at the very end I said, ‘OK, we’ll sacrifice my body,'” Clark said.

Clark went into a diving slide. He caught the ball.

He lost his leg.

The rest of us? We’ve lost the privilege of complaining about aches and pains for the rest of the day.

And, with the death this morning of Rodney King, the Associated Press published their Where Are They Now feature on some of the key players of his beating and the later riots. Some of these aren’t surprising at all.

Years ago I dropped my subscription to Newsweek because of a stupid cover story. And now you can see the latest cover that wasn’t. It was to be an image of President Obama in a hoodie. Here’s why they didn’t publish it:

In the old days, a cover is a cover, and that was it. Today, she says, there’s an “aftermath of imagery” one must take into consideration. Will this cover be used by white supremacists? Will it take a bad turn in its meme lifecycle?

This was to be one of their new artistic covers, because a news photograph is no longer desirable. But Diana of Wales, were she alive today, now that, they think, will move magazines! They get people to talk about the magazine occasionally, but they do nothing for news, or to buttress the once proud reputation of the old magazine. Issue sales are stagnant or barely moving. Advertising is sadly way down. Putting the president in a hoodie isn’t going to help those things.

We’re watching the Clemson-Auburn 2010 game tonight. (I hope Auburn wins!) I’m not sure how they pulled this game off. Clearly the purple and orange set clearly played better in the first half of the game and, if memory serves, for the better part of the third quarter as well. But they never quit, and there was a big hit (there were a lot of those in this game) that limited Clemson’s quarterback. And then that heartbreaking, for them, overtime experience.

Clemson came to play that Saturday night, and they gave the eventual national champions one of the three biggest scares of the year. I talked to some of their fans after the game. That was exactly how they expected the game to play out: a strong start before they found a way to give the game to Auburn.

I took pictures of that game. Had a few good ones, too. You can see some of them here. Watching it tonight, the 2011 beatdown that Clemson gave Auburn is a lot less surprising.

The two teams start the season against one another this fall in Atlanta.