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memories

Early fireworks

Fireworks are the most temporal of our celebrations. After the fact you’re happy their gone. You can think mean things of the neighbors still lighting them after the calendar suggests they should be stowed for New Year’s Eve.

Never mind that the Declaration of Independence was first published in a newspaper on July 6th. We forget it was shipped to the Brits and read publicly on the 8th. Few recall that Gen. George Washington had it read to his soldiers on the 9th and that it was August before the signings began. The vote was the 4th and that’s when the fireworks retailers really need help getting their revenue in order, so that’s when we buy and light the things.

Fireworks on the 6th of July are just right out. There’s just no ring to that whatsoever.

You can light fireworks early, that’s festive. Unless your neighbors are the type that call the cops. Police officers hate the “shots fired” call which is really Old Lady Eveready mistaking your firecrackers for a revolver. Some cities burn through their pyrotechnic budget before the grand day. Opelika is one of those towns. Their “Celebration of Freedom” was tonight.

They have food and music and inflatables and face painting. The local parachute group leaps into the sky to bring the American flag to the city elders. Kids have scattered out decorated paper plates beforehand, hoping the guy with the flag lands on theirs so they win a prize.

People are sprawled everywhere in the beds of pickups and in lawn chairs. Two teenagers are making out and some old people nearby really wish they’d just stop. People see each other outside of work or school or church, maybe for the first time in a long time. Kids are playing tag over here and blowing bubbles over there. The entire scene is almost perfect and lovely. The only thing missing is John Mellencamp.

Promptly at 9 p.m. organizers throw thousands of dollars into the night sky and hope that, while it doesn’t reach escape velocity, it somehow catches fire and burns in many colors and shapes and sounds. More often than not that is precisely what happens. Here’s tonight’s finale:

For the video I shot last year I wrote “why not make it a several day celebration? A birth of a nation should merit that.”

Why not, indeed.

God bless America on this Third of July.

memories / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
3
Jul 12

Memories of Andy Griffith, who died today at 86

To grow up in a certain time — which was, really a stretch of about 30 or 40 years thanks to syndication — meant a friendly and devoted relationship with Andy Griffith. My generation met him as the kindly sheriff and father from Mayberry.

A little bit later we were all introduced to this other side of Griffith, the brilliant work of the comedian:

And then later we learned of his outstanding early movie work. Suddenly the kind old Mayberry father-figure (He debuted as Andy Taylor a year younger than I am now. So I take it back; he wasn’t old, it was a trick of the black-and-white film.) was young. He was 32 when the hysterical No Time for Sergeants play debuted as a movie:

Did you catch Corporal Klinger in there? Jamie Farr played the un-credited co-pilot in the movie.

Years later we’d see A Face in the Crowd, and it would turn everything upside down. Andy Griffith as a bitter, cynical, hard Lonesome Rhodes? It changed everything. It was hard to process this man playing a role like that when you had the ability to see Andy Taylor (and Matlock, and some of us just assumed we could make Matlock an extension of the Taylor character, sort of an apology for RFD in a new setting) on your television almost every day for your entire life.

He’d say later he’d had exactly one acting class before that film which, by the way, holds up remarkably well, 55 years later.

After a while he could only work those heavy roles, but it was the character from Mayberry that endured, persisted and informed us as an audience. For all of his range, as an actor and generationally, what happened in that fictional little North Carolina town is what everyone thought of this morning when they heard the news.

Several years ago AV Club did a list of wonderfully irrelevant Andy Griffith show conversations. This scene description was fitting for the series:

It rarely makes the list of the greatest Andy Griffith Show episodes, but the first seven minutes of “Class Reunion” should be issued to anyone who wants to learn how to write Southern characters, and how to act them. Beginning with Knotts and Griffith moving a heavy trunk and worrying that one of their pants might’ve ripped, the conversation evolves into a discussion of those “make money in your spare time” ads, and then a conversation about what’s in Knotts’ trunk, starting with a rock that Knotts used to strike a match on to light his father’s pipe.

Here’s that scene, and it is pitch perfect still:

And of course the smartest thing Griffith ever did on that show was to play it straight. Don Knotts was destined to be the comedic relief, but that wasn’t the original plan. Andy Taylor held the town together, but Barney Fife brought the show down through the generations:

Here’s Griffith just after Knotts died in 2006:

Here they are together in 1996, both near 70 years old and 36 years after the show took the air. Griffith says Mayberry, shot from 1960 through 1968, was really about the 1930s. They’re talking about the characters, which is just about the most charming conversation you could imagine two old men having:

Did you know the great theme had lyrics?

Well, now, take down your fishin’ pole and meet me at the fishin’ hole,
We may not get a bite all day, but don’t you rush away.

Makes you want to run right out for an Andy Griffith marathon.

adventures / Auburn / cycling / iPhone / memories / photo / Tumblr / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off
27
Jun 12

Picture filler

Just working on work things today, writing a bit. Forgive me if there isn’t much here.

Here are some leftover pictures from the Art Walk held downtown a few weeks ago. You’ll remember, if you follow that link, that one full block of Magnolia turned into a road of kids young and old writing in the street.

There’s a crosswalk in the middle, and a couple of young adults claimed that area as their own. They were insistent that you see their art in the right order. This was very important, in the way that art must be explained. So I am sharing the crosswalk art in the proper order.

Nice sentiment, as far as it goes:

Rode 30 miles this evening, up and out through the neighborhood and over the side of one of the big hills, marveling at my dead legs. Then down the hill, reveling in gravity, and turned around to go back up the hill, looking for my legs.

I circled part of the bypass, and then up one of the false flats, past the airport, over the interstate and back into our part of town.

The local cycling club has a time trial course nearby, a road we ride frequently. But now I’m trying to ride the entire thing with time in mind. Today was the second attempt at that, which was not as good as the first. Mostly I’m slow, but also I found myself concentrating so much on breathing I messed up the math involved in timing myself. So I gave in a bit early, feeling defeated when my previous time clicked by just before I made it to the finish of the time trial. I’m just riding against myself here, so there’s no real shame in exhaustion and bad math.

Mostly, though, this ride was not as good as my first attempt because I’m slow.

RIding at a tongue wagging, eye bulging, rib ragged way has a lot upside, the best being that you seem to breathe so much better afterward. After, that is, you can breathe again. And so I doubled up on the course, back down half the time trial course, over that same hill from earlier and sped through a subdivision, chasing an SUV in a sprint I wish I had in that time trial — sometimes the great challenge is putting it all together at the right time, that’s why I keep coming back to this I guess. Finally into some nice downhills. That’s a great end to the route, helping satisfy my last goal of any ride: make it back into the house without sounding like I’m hypoxic.

Such a simple thing, two wheels and respiration. Everything in between needs improvement, though.

But there’s always that next ride. Always the chance to have a great kick up a hill. Always that voice in the back of the helmet: smile when it hurts. Especially when you’re in the middle of the road.

Thanks for stopping by. Come back tomorrow for … something. In the meantime, check out the Tumblr page, where a new picture landed today. And the Twitter account, which had a lot of good reading today. And none of it was filler.

adventures / honeymoon / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
20
Jun 12

Remembering the big day

Three years ago today we started this adventure:

And of our adventures — we went to Europe for our honeymoon, for example — I’ve always felt the small ones were the best of all.

The big day itself.

Love ya, Ren.

Auburn / cycling / football / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / photo / site / things to read / weekend — Comments Off
16
Jun 12

Signs, signs, everywhere are signs

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.