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memories

Monday already

I wanted to ride this morning, but Monday mornings race by and this morning needed to linger a bit. Besides, it had rained and … OK, maybe I didn’t want to ride this morning. I was a bit sore last night, actually, aching in places I haven’t in a good long while. And that’s probably the perfect reason to clip in.

Also I need to find out where the guy in the neon yellow jacket went yesterday. I turned onto one road behind him, met a cyclist heading the other direction and decided to overtake the guy in the loud jacket.

What if the cyclist going the other way turned around? He should see me put this guy between us so he can, naturally, destroy me with ease, I thought.

And then I realized where I was.

I could pace and pass this guy, but I struggle on the next hill and he’ll get me back there. That would be embarrassing.

So I decided to close the distance, but not force the issue. At the next intersection, from about 40 yards back, I watched him turn left. When I made the intersection — going straight — I glanced after him but he was gone. That was impressive. Or he might be missing out there somewhere.

That was yesterday’s 32 mile ride. Today damp asphalt and things to do kept me inside.

Class today. The conversation was led by a group discussing online media. One of the guys was controlling every computer in the room and a low-orbit satellite from his iPad. He was a good choice for this topic and, as usual, it was a great job. I have very sharp students.

I’m also buried in a spreadsheet. And I have a stack of things to grade, a few more phone calls to make. I have plenty of school work to do. So this is brief.

Things to read: Sustainability consultant tours good and bad of Birmingham:

Hopping aboard a bike, former Bogota, Colombia, Mayor Enrique Penalosa took a six-mile ride through the good, the bad and the ugly of Birmingham in advance of today’s Sustainable Smart Cities Conference.

After biking through depopulated portions of Titusville and Elyton, marred with abandoned and burned-out houses and grim housing developments, Penalosa was aghast.

“What I saw today was one of the most depressed areas I have ever seen,” he said.

He suggested that residents in the sparsely populated areas be bought out to make way for a “crazy” project

When a mayor of Bogota is telling you your business …

Mitt Romney Remembers Things That Happened Before He Was Born!:

Romney recalled he was “probably 4 or something like that” the day of the Golden Jubilee, when three-quarters of a million people gathered to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the American automobile.

“My dad had a job being the grandmaster. They painted Woodward Ave. with gold paint,” Romney told a rapt Tea Party audience in the village of Milford Thursday night, reliving a moment of American industrial glory.

The Golden Jubilee described so vividly by Romney was indeed an epic moment in automotive lore. The parade included one of the last public appearances by an elderly Henry Ford.

And it took place June 1, 1946 — fully nine months before Romney was born.

I love false memory stories, and only partly because the earliest memory I can muster (and that’s a good word) is, when I describe it to my mother, something that can’t possibly have happened.

If Romney isn’t cynically pandering with the idea that no one would bother to cross-reference the dates, this is a simple mistake. Of course no mistake on the campaign trail is simple. And this story, which is far more likely Romney’s re-telling of a story he heard in his family his entire life, is probably just a planted memory. Sometimes you can’t win for losing.

Jeff Jarvis at his best, Leave our net alone:

The internet’s not broken.

So then why are there so many attempts to regulate it? Under the guises of piracy, privacy, pornography, predators, indecency, and security, not to mention censorship, tyranny, and civilization, governments from the U.S. to France to Germany to China to Iran to Canada — as well as the European Union and the United Nations — are trying to exert control over the internet.

Why? Is it not working? Is it presenting some new danger to society? Is it fundamentally operating any differently today than it was five or ten years ago? No, no, and no.

So why are governments so eager to claim authority over it? Why would legacy corporations, industries, and institutions egg them on? Because the net is working better than ever. Because they finally recognize how powerful it is and how disruptive it is to their power.

Jarvis was the president of Advance Internet during much of my time with the company.

Friends of local Auburn legend Johnny “Mr. Penny” Richmond hold impromptu vigil:

Cards and flowers were left and candles were lit at the corner of Dean Road and Samford Ave. tonight in honor of a hero.

Johnny Richmond, affectionately known as Mr. Penny by students at Dean Road Elementary School where he worked for 37 years as a custodian and crossing guard, suffered a self-inflicted gunshot wound Monday morning, according to Auburn police. News outlets have backed off earlier reports that Richmond later died from his injuries, and as of 9 p.m. Monday list him as being on life support.

I wrote the next piece, the short, just-in-case bit of copy that you hope never has to run. Right now he’s hanging on. He’s seemingly one of those people that you can’t find anyone that has anything remotely to say about him. This is Mr. Penny:

Jeremy did that interview in 2011, after the community rallied to raise money to send him and his wife to the BCS National Championship game. We live in a great place.

Auburn / baseball / football / memories / photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
19
Feb 12

Catching up

The weekly attempt to share a few more of the pictures that haven’t, as yet, made it elsewhere on the site.

Ronnie Brown and Cadillac Williams spent some great years playing football at Auburn. They were both taken in the first round of the NFL draft after their perfect 2004 season. Shame about the people they ran around with when they were in school, though:

Look at the fu manchu, the handlebars, the eye patch, the neck tats. Those kids are of ill-repute.

That’s actually a chart-your-growth-compare-to-NFL-caliber-athletes-and-try-not-to-be-disappointed poster. It is still on display at Momma Goldberg’s, some eight years after it was timely. The location means the second half of that sentence makes perfect sense. People can see the picture alone and know where I’m standing at that moment.

Meanwhile, one of the current football superstars was having dinner on the patio, just outside, when I took that shot. And, yes, we were about to have dinner outside in February. Life is good.

Quick! Count the typos! There are a few. This is the fine print on the back of a gymnastics ticket:

This pitch is too low:

That’s from the Friday game against Missouri. Auburn won. The Saturday game was rained out. Mizzou won both of those games, the last one was shortened to 7 innings because of time constraints. (Missouri had to catch their plane.) Auburn left 29 runners on base in 25 innings this weekend.

It was a cold and drizzly day for baseball. Friday? Friday evening was beautiful. (Click to embiggen the panorama.)

And now, a few more gymnastics pictures from Friday night:

Still more in the February photo gallery.

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12
Feb 12

Catching up

Of all the random Auburn folk art — this stuff becomes generational or iconic, it ages well or it disappears — I’ve never run across this one. But in my quixotic quest to get my car fixed I found this in the office of a body shop. The tiger ate the Alabama A logo. And the poor predator looks miserable:

If you look closely, however, you might realize that it isn’t folk art. That’s why it would be unfamiliar to young eyes. It is, in fact a newspaper editorial cartoon. Someone clipped it from the Mobile Press Register and had it matted and framed. I believe the date says 1985. That tiger and Bo Jackson ate the A.

I wonder what was on the other side of the newsprint.

At the famous Drop It Like It’s Hot church on one of my bike rides:

Coach Frank Tolbert, you see, is such an important man that near the end of his career he gets both sides of the church sign. That’s a rarity in this part of the world, where a common approach is to assume that the people going east might need a different message than the people going west.

When I was in college I had the good fortune to broadcast the postseason run for one of Tolbert’s trips to the Final Four in basketball. He is a stern, but kind man. He doesn’t suffer nonsense, but it isn’t hard to see how the kids he works with are where he starts and stops. The community has been fortunate to have his help in shaping lives for more than four decades.

This gas station cover is at Niffer’s, hence the charming graffiti and the unfortunate security sticker. (Pro tip: When people sign their names to things, don’t put an adhesive on that surface. That isn’t advertising, it is an annoyance.)

Interesting, though, is to wonder how old this thing is. Niffers just turned 20 last year, so it could be in that ball park. But it has to be earlier. Note the total sale. No one anticipated you buying more than $9.99 at a time from this pump. The price registered in cents per gallon. (As it should, say car drivers everywhere.)

Sort of makes you miss the old days of the plastic tumbling numbers rather than the digital displays now sucking your wallet dry.

Directly above our table at Niffers, meanwhile:

Phone numbers were four digits when that sign was installed at its original location. Dunlop & Harwell is still around today, but it is a small firm. You don’t see many of their signs, metal or otherwise.

Alabama / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
31
Jan 12

Dr. Gary Copeland

Not to be weepy about it — he’d make a joke about that, I think, in a wry way that amused you and left no doubt about his point — but we learned today that we lost a talented scholar and a good man.

Dr. Gary Copeland was a professor emeritus and former department head of the TCF program at the University of Alabama. Alabama was lucky to have him. He was my first teacher in the doctoral program. He was a terrific scholar, brilliant in his work and kind in his demeanor. He was also kind enough to serve on my comprehensive exam committee, among his last chores before retiring.

One of the last times I saw him was as he left that committee. We shook hands, I thanked him for his help and he headed out the door to some other meeting that needed more of his precious time.

My favorite memories are of Dr. Copeland giving: tickets to the Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast; his seats at a gymnastics meet; cookies for class and his strategies on navigating conferences and academia and life. From Dr. Copeland we received a lot, both small and significant. Sometimes you would only come to realize it much later. It was surprising all of the things he managed to seep into his conversations.

He had a gentle spirit and it was a privilege to study with him. It remains a privilege when we sometimes find ourselves citing his work. It is a great shame that he did not get to enjoy more time after retirement with his beloved grandchildren.

Those of us lucky enough to know him only a tiny bit — that Emmy belongs to one of his former students who wanted to display it in the professor’s office — can’t help but be saddened by the news and can’t imagine his family’s grief.

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30
Jan 12

Back to it

The first day of the semester. Samford has a Jan-term, an accelerated short term in between the holidays and the spring term. My department didn’t have classes, so I got to work on things like recruitment, a new lesson plan, reading and so on. Today, though, is our first day back.

And so, of course, today was the day my printer decided to miscount the number of things I asked it to print. It also decided to jam about 90 percent of the way through.

“So it is going to be a Monday, eh, HP?”

My printer had nothing to see. Its gears were full of mutilated pulp.

Dig the paper out, successfully pulling out only microfibers at a time. I have some special chemical blend of paper that shears at the subatomic level. You can pull on this stuff for hours and not get it out from the reticent printer’s teeth.

With every passing year this becomes more entertaining to me. My youngest step-sibling is working her way through undergrad, but she’ll be done soon. When that happens I won’t be able to try to convince the new students that I understand their plight. “We’re practically the same generation,” is the implication, despite my silvering hair.

This has turned itself into a running cinematic joke in my classes based on a conversation I had with students a couple of years ago. For whatever reason the gag hinges on Spaceballs as the denouement of movie humor. I don’t have a real theory that we crossed some boundary in 1987; Spaceballs was simply the high water mark of post-modern film parodies, he said, hoping it made him sound sophisticated.

Anyway, almost everyone in the class said they’ve seen the movie.

“One day” I told them, “I will start a semester by saying if you haven’t seen the film don’t come back until you do. I will give bonus points for the first person that catches a Spaceballs reference.”

They all sat up.

“That will not be this class,” I said.

They slid back down into their seats.

Two posts on my school blog today. One links to a great list of necessities for every mobile journalist. The other asks the question “Can a good journalist be a good capitalist?” More and more we should be thinking of questions like that.

Flush and full, busy first day back. By tomorrow, perhaps Wednesday, everything will be moving at a normal speed again.

Except the printer.