The maples always give up first. They are always noticeable. This is the first one of the year, and this is how it will go from here on in. Leaves and things falling onto the car, into the yard and showing the thinning trees and the sticks. It is demoralizing, even without the symbolism. But this is how it goes, a bright red, a shocking yellow and then browns and grays and the long, deep holding of one’s breath until the first buds of spring.
I think it will be harder this year.
Slept a lot of yesterday afternoon away. I was just so tired all weekend. Of course by the time I’d recouped enough to feel close to normal evening had arrived. By the time my third wind arrived I was wide awake for the witching hour. So I got a few things off the DVR, at least.
Up early this morning, and then subsequently at ’em. If they ever figure out we’re at ’em things are going to change. No one ever discusses that, but it is a distinct possibility we have to consider.
Class today and then office stuff and helping with a few story ideas. I had dinner at a place where the menu said one price and my ticket indicated another, higher one. I pointed this out to the server, a cheerful woman who has seen me enough to offer a really solid — but incorrect — guess about what I was having for dinner. She laughed it off. I’ll remember that when I don’t go back anytime soon.
After dinner, this was my view:
Which wasn’t bad, really. The maple leaves are getting drunk and falling down, but the temperatures are still nice and comforting and warm.
Things to read … because reading is comforting, and can keep you warm — if you’re someplace warm.
He might not be presidential timber, but he’s an interesting man. This is another little insight into the man from Massachusetts, Mitt Isn’t Ready to Call It Quits.
Army Ranger, Sgt. 1st Class Cedric King ran a half Ironman. He swam 1.2 miles. He cycled 56 miles. He finished his day with a half marathon, 13.1 miles of running. King stepped on an IED in Afghanistan in 2012. Earlier this year he finished the Boston Marathon. He is a hard man.
Rangers lead the way.
He passed on his second loop just after I’d seen a woman, of whom I wrote: “Just gave a high five to perhaps the last contestant on the course, looking beat, looking haggard. Looking determined, looking awesome.”
She was awesome, but I’d already seen King once as well. Before Cedric King came back by the locals started pulling up the cones. Cedric King just kept motoring along, having run, twice, past signs with head shots placed in honor of his brothers in arms who gave their lives in the Middle East.
I slapped him on the back as he came by the first time, and I wanted to go run through a wall after that. Demonstrations of will are always an impressive site.
(All of those Cedric King links are to different things. You could do worse, today, than spending a few minutes to click and read and listen to those.)
I feel good today. I am tired. I feel like I rode a bike for about three hours and then drove for about four. Mostly because I did. Today, then, is just kind of a get-through-it day. Here are some pictures of trains that have been tagged.
Hey, graffiti has always been popular on this site.
I wonder how Sgt. 1st Class Cedric King is feeling today. Awesome, I hope.
Some friends and I have a little joke on Twitter we call Why I Love The Internet This Week or #WILITW. Usually the subject matter is a video, but the premise is always “Without this amazing tool, we would have never had the opportunity to enjoy this.”
But for the Internet. I gave you this week’s entry:
Isn’t that adorable? Two cheers for the Wallkill Mighty Mites from Wallkill, New York. But now let’s watch it again and analyze some of the constituent parts. The first thing you notice, while keeping in mind this is in slow motion, that the entire team was running through that sign no matter what. That’s an admirable esprit de corps from such a young team so early in their season.
The second thing is the cheerleaders. Those girls never gave up the fight, and that’s a great demonstration of boosterism and support.
Which brings us to the mom in the foreground. She held her end of the sign for several waves of the team to break through. That’s dedication. That’s belief. That’s probably a mom who thought her son could get through the thing.
As opposed to the woman holding the other end of the sign. She literally turned her back on the pile up.
Meanwhile, the cheerleaders are cheering and clapping and jumping. And a half dozen kids will always remember this, all through their football careers, and they’ll never feel the need to be at the front of the team to break the paper on the high school gridiron.
The good news is they brushed it off and, apparently, won the game.
I got in a 43-mile ride yesterday evening. I was hoping for about 46, but I had to cut it short because of darkness. So I came home the slightly shorter way, with the big hill, which I was in no condition to deal with after 43 miles, thinking I need to start my rides earlier in the day.
My route was an amalgamation of two that I’m familiar with. It took me through a modern residential area, a shopping mecca, a historic part of town and then out through the countryside. I sailed by the old union headquarters that is now apparently a church and another old plant that will probably never have a new tenant. I was almost clipped by a pickup and the trailer he was hauling. And I worked my way back out into the countryside, where I turned off of a road with a name onto another with just a number.
The road bottoms out at a creek bed and you’re surrounded by judgmental cows and someone shooting a nail gun nearby. I went by a man sitting on his porch and another working on his roof. I cruised by the brand new post office that is shiny and new for a community that consists of a church, one store and a volunteer fire department. Just past that is a stop sign and that store, a junk store, where I years ago discovered my love for junk stores. If you go straight you find yourself on about a mile of the worst chip/seal pavement you can find in the rural South. But then you go under some trees, round a curve, pass a pasture and you find yourself on a brand new and nearly pristine asphalt and large rollers.
I did about five or six miles on that, surrounded by red clay and pine trees and only the most occasional house, before I turned around for home. I stopped there and took a few of the pictures that were shared here yesterday, where I was talking about the lumber yard and old wood. I also took this picture there:
What is in those woods? The whole road which, again, has always been eerily empty, is covered with various posted and no trespassing signs. But a human silhouette target sign? I didn’t previously care about that gravel path, but now I’m curious.
Things to read … because reading keeps us curious.
In short, while the journalistic staffing is shrinking dramatically in every mature market (US, Europe), the public relation crowd is rising in a spectacular fashion. It grows in two dimensions: the spinning aspect, with more highly capable people, most often former seasoned writers willing to become spin-surgeons. These are both disappointed by the evolution of their noble trade and attracted by higher compensation. The second dimension is the growing inclination for PR firms, communication agencies and corporations themselves to build fully-staffed newsrooms with editor-in-chief, writers, photo and video editors.
That’s the first issue.
The second trend is the evolution of corporate communication. Slowly but steadily, it departs from the traditional advertising codes that ruled the profession for decades. It shifts toward a more subtle and mature approach based on storytelling. Like it or not, that’s exactly what branded content is about: telling great stories about a company in a more intelligent way versus simply extolling a product’s merits.
With the president-felling image of Woodward and Bernstein still hanging over the profession, and a geekily hip narrative of data-driven analysis pointing to a new future, few journalists like to acknowledge the role PRs play in their stories. Many are well-informed, professional, clever, helpful and fun. Some are former colleagues. Some become friends. But for most journalists, it is an involvement we put up with warily. PRs are spinners of favourable stories, glossers-over of unfavourable facts and gatekeepers standing between us and the people we want to get to.
But as journalists bemoan such PR obstacles, they rarely admit an important fact: the PRs are winning. Employment in US newsrooms has fallen by a third since 2006, according to the American Society of News Editors, but PR is growing. Global PR revenues increased 11 per cent last year to almost $12.5bn, according to an industry study entitled The Holmes Report. For every working journalist in America, there are now 4.6 PR people, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 3.2 a decade ago. And those journalists earn on average 65 per cent of what their PR peers are paid.
On Friday night, in front of thousands of friends, family members and fans at the Gopher-Warrior Bowl, that is exactly what happened.
Principal Lorimer Arendse, now in his fourth week at the helm of Grand Prairie High School, was let in on the plan shortly before halftime and the planned announcement of the homecoming winners.
“In all my time in school, this is probably the greatest moment I’ve ever experienced as a principal,” said Arendse, who has five years of prior experience in school administration.
It occurred to me that I’ve never noticed the bas-reliefs of any other governors in Alabama. Perhaps I’m overlooking them or am drawing a mental blank. Maybe this is a lasting affection for George Wallace. Perhaps part of it is that George Wallace was governor for so long, from 1963 to 1967 and then from 1971 until 1979 and again from 1983 to 1987.
Here he’s standing in front of the restroom door:
That rest area was built during the 1970s. Maybe it was a boom period.
A bit ambitious, wouldn’t you think?
I had a nice, easy 30-mile ride yesterday. It should have been longer. I climbed more than 1,200 feet and rode for under two hours. I topped out at 37.7 miles per hour. Twenty percent of the ride was over 20 miles per hour. (Which is slow for most, but pretty nice for me.) Most importantly, it didn’t all fall apart in the last few minutes. It reminds me that I should ride more.
Things to read … to remind you that I should ride more.
I’m always circumspect about a small thing, like a small sport, playing big social roles. But we all have our roles to play and we all have our spheres of influence, I suppose … Biking Toward Women’s Rights in Afghanistan:
The Women’s National Cycling Team of Afghanistan is only a few years old. Its 10 members, most between the ages of 17 and 22, have yet to finish a race. But they are determined to persevere in their chosen sport despite multiple barriers, and are aiming to ride in the 2020 Olympics.
Men driving by insult them. Boys along the road throw rocks at them. Sometimes they don’t have enough money to buy adequate food to fuel their rides. Every day, they are reminded that it is taboo in Afghan society for a woman to get on a bicycle. And still they ride.
“They tell us that it is not our right to ride our bikes in the streets and such,” says Marjan Sidiqqi, one of the young women on the team. “We tell them that this is our right and that they are taking our right away. Then we speed off.”
[…]
Galpin says that for the generation of girls coming of age in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, bicycling is another manifestation of the freedom to be an educated person in the society. “Young women who are in university and high school, young women who are educated, their families have promoted that and helped that happen,” she says. “These young women look at it very cut and dry: ‘My brother can ride a bike, why can’t I?’ They’re cognizant that they have this right.”
“We cannot become a hero by sitting at home,” she said.
So essentially, it took less than a decade of life for the rest of her brain to pick up the missing cerebellum’s slack. The fact that the patient is alive and thriving is incredible. This is only the ninth time that doctors have found someone to be missing a whole cerebellum, and most of the others have only been discovered after their early deaths.
Balance has been one of the toughest parts for David since the traumatic brain injury. His depth perception in his left eye is still affected, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain balance at times. It’s why he wears that soft helmet whenever he does anything that requires movement.
He climbs stairs, but only to show off. Sutlive has shifted focus away from that because of the progress David has made. Now
they spend time on the treadmill. David has to hold the railings, but he gradually begins to pick up the pace.
Sutlive asks him: “What’s the fastest you can go?”
“Let’s show them,” David enthusiastically responds.
He reaches 3.1 mph on a slight grade; a brisk jog. Five weeks earlier, he couldn’t walk on his own.
Tough kid, that.
If you watched the Georgia game this weekend you might have noticed when the announcers mentioned this story. It is a pretty nice, quick little news package:
And, finally, here’s a little feature on Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field … Recapturing a Game and Days Gone By. The story is told through the eyes of the author’s 77-year-old mother-in-law and is understandably precious.
The good old days. Today was different than all of that. All of my days are though, that was eight years ago, after all. Instead of interviewing David Brewer, I was discussing tips of interviewing with students in a classroom.
I always find myself bringing up the time I was asked to interview the congressman who’s best hunting dog had just died, or the times I annoyed governors, or that a newly elected (and still sitting) senator tried to insult me. Grieving interviews, funny interviews, boring interviews, the ones where you know the person is lying to you, and all of the different ways to get answers from your sources. Good stuff, good times.
I wonder what it was like to interview George Wallace. (He died in 1998, but I met his son once, in passing.) Maybe I should stop back by that bas-relief.
I have been accumulating a wealth of links these last few days. They are all wonderful in one way or another. I will share them here now.
But before all of that, here is a video featuring the parents of a fine cyclist and, wouldn’t you know it, Davis and Connie Phinney were world class cyclists themselves. They have an incredible story of success and heartache and recovery and peace and satisfaction. It is worth 15 minutes for the archival footage alone:
And now for some interesting news from near and far:
In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden documents were primary source material, providing unmediated access to the thinking of al Qaeda leaders expressed in their own words.
A comprehensive and systematic examination of those documents could give U.S. intelligence officials—and eventually the American public—a better understanding of al Qaeda’s leadership, its affiliates, its recruitment efforts, its methods of communication; a better understanding, that is, of the enemy America has fought for over a decade now, at a cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.
Incredibly, such a comprehensive study—a thorough “document exploitation,” in the parlance of the intelligence community—never took place. The Weekly Standard has spoken to more than two dozen individuals with knowledge of the U.S. government’s handling of the bin Laden documents. And on that, there is widespread agreement.
One line of inquiry for detectives is understood to be that the man was inspired by recent footage of terrorists beheading two American journalists in Syria.
Some residents claimed last night that the suspect was a local man who had converted to Islam last year, but those claims could not be verified. Detectives said they had ruled out terrorism.
(T)he world largely ignored the unfolding epidemic, even as the sole major international responder, Doctors Without Borders (also known by its French acronym, MSF), pleaded for help and warned repeatedly that the virus was spreading out of control. The WHO was all but AWOL, its miniscule epidemic-response department slashed to smithereens by three years of budget cuts, monitoring the epidemic’s relentless growth but taking little real action.
Even as the leading physicians in charge of Liberia and Sierra Leone’s Ebola responses succumbed to the virus, global action remained elusive. The neglectful status of the WHO was, horribly, by design.
After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America’s highways.
Local officers, county deputies and state troopers were encouraged to act more aggressively in searching for suspicious people, drugs and other contraband. The departments of Homeland Security and Justice spent millions on police training.
The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found. Thousands of people have been forced to fight legal battles that can last more than a year to get their money back.
Although their son is doing well and bravely returned to school, the parents have a message for the teens that humiliated him:
“I hope you will be punished to the full extent of the law, which still to me would not be enough, but that’s what I wish,” said Mensen.
School officials say no disciplinary action will be taken until after police have completed their investigation.
We watched this documentary this weekend:
You should watch it. There will be sobbing. I’m not sure you can say enough about It’s Time. Not every story is as great, or terrible, as the one that brought Chucky Mullins and Brad Gaines together, but it is a tremendous look at what football, the region and story telling can be. You’d be hard pressed to make a much better sports documentary.
You can tell a lot about the world around you by the business news:
If you can end a post with good economic news, and on a Monday, no less, you’ve really done something, I think, so we’ll call it a day. Hope yours was a great one!
