Monday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday

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1
Nov 10

November?

A new feature, this one set to appear once each month if I can pull it off. This is the video of the month, or more appropriately the video to set the tone. This month’s theme: leaves.

When I showed that to The Yankee she was stunned I covered my iPhone lens. They’re just leaves. And then she said something about how only I would record this. Well, yeah, maybe. But then I put in that pull focus at the end and she isn’t laughing any more.

As I raked I wondered why man hasn’t come up with a better way to do this. Just imagine if we’d attacked this problem with the same fervor with which we’ve faced other challenges or ills. If John Kennedy had said that we chose to deal with leaves not because they were easy, but because they were hard …

In my yard, they aren’t easy. I have a small rake.

The nice lady who visited my neighbor while I was raking observed that I did not even have any leaves yet, really. Probably 90 percent of the leaves are still in the trees, as you can see in the video. There are plenty of gray maple leaves, curled like an old man’s arthritic fingers, mixed in with the flat brown of the willow oak leaves.

But, still, half the yard got down as I shot that footage. You should have seen the outtakes.

Class prep today, blurb writing today, video editing today, reading today. The typical Monday barrage of things that make the day so fulfilling.

I opened a watermelon tonight, perhaps the last of the season. Seedless — may contain seeds, the sticker says — and delicious. I’m not ready to concede the season. The mild weather is nice, the open windows and the evening breeze are certainly welcome, but the shortening days and the impending chill could hold off another four months.

And by then it’d be March.

journalism / links / memories / Monday / Samford / video — Comments Off
25
Oct 10

I have 31 slides

Of the PowerPoint variety, that is. If only I had 31 real slides. There would be straight slides, fast slides, curly ones, one or two you could climb up. Our yard would be even more popular with the neighborhood kids.

They’d have to get in line.

Except for that slide that should be renamed The Stick. You run across them every now and then. The slide that burns, rather than exhilarates. And if the sun is out, there’s no saving the skin. The guy who’s in charge of sand blasting the slides must have taken a long lunch that day. That guy took a lot of long lunches.

I don’t know if there is a formally documented ratio of good slides to bad ones. Safe bet if I owned 31 of them I’d get a lemon somewhere in that mix.

No, instead I have 31 slides on graphic storytelling. Charts and graphs and maps and things. I’ll talk about those tomorrow, and hope that all of the graphics on my slides are accurate. A mistake in a pie chart would be embarrassing.

Warm. Sticky. Muggy. A little gross, actually. Somehow the part of the brain that keeps polite social constructs, like calendars, is communicating with the lesser senses and glands. What might be an acceptable bit of weather for early or late summer just feels wrong as October rounds third.

Everywhere, windows that had been wedged up for weeks were lowered today. The air must return because the soggy towel that was hanging in the air outside was coming into the more pleasant environments.

Weather being the most temporal of things we consider, we naturally keep records of a lot of it. Today broke a 70-year-old high temperature mark. Sunday marked a record as well. Tomorrow could, too. Eighty-five isn’t especially hot, just in the wrong place.

The rain is coming behind it. After that, the cooler temperatures. And then we’ll start dreaming for spring.

As is required I will now post my Walkman memories. Thirty years later, Sony has shut down the line. They’ve remained popular in Asia, even as they fell out of favor in the United States, which means the news doesn’t impact us much. After Walkman came Discmans, Minidiscs and then mp3 players, and they all had that same delicious promise of transportable, personal music.

And they were slimmer. The Walkman, even when it was new, always felt bulky. That came with the medium, but this was in a time when something bulky could mean Something Substantial.

They were expensive, too. And we were somewhere in the neighborhood of happily poor. So when I finally got one, probably four or five years into the American version of the Walkman’s popularity before I got my first knockoff. It was blocky. The headphones had bright orange mufflers. The adjustment bar didn’t work the same way as the Walkman’s, but ultimately I thought it worked better.

I loved the clip on the back of the thing, but disliked it’s inability to keep the player on my belt. Those bright orange foam mufflers wore out in a hurry and the plastic edges of the headphones themselves weren’t exactly pleasant. I probably went through more headphones than I did players.

I’ve done that in every medium since, come to think of it.

I believe I might have received that first Walkman knockoff at my great-grandmother’s for a Christmas session I only vaguely remember. I remember playing it a lot, mostly at my grandparents’. I liked to be outside all the time and there were often no children around my age, so I listened to a lot of the dreadful music we all listened to when were young and impressionable.

I remember borrowing a neighborhood kid’s tape and I thought I broke it. It slowed waaay down, and I thought I was going to have to buy the guy a replacement copy. So I asked my uncle, because he’s a very savy man, what the problem might be.

“Let me hear it,” he said.

So I described it to him, out of fear that the pop-rock ‘n’ roll that was on the tape might not meet with his approval. The drums seemed to work right, but the guitars were dragging. My uncle suspected I did not ruin the tape — I was playing it constantly — but had worn out the batteries instead. He was right, I was relieved. Apparently I’d never had a bad battery experience before that.

Told you, we were happily poor.

I think I owned two tapes at the time, Beat It and a Beach Boy’s greatest hits. Not a bad start to an overly indulgent collection.

Eventually we’ll decide we don’t need to own things like music or books in a tangible form. I especially like my books, enjoy my liner notes and the stacking and ordering of things. I might be one of the last people to accept that day. I think it’ll come when I can have access to every book or every song just floating up in the ether. Everything at your fingertips, everything of superior quality, for free at my every whim. Maybe without even having to even type a series of keywords.

Then we can all get Billy Idol or Symphony 41 whenever the mood strikes us. And, if you think about it, we’re getting really close.

Check out this video:

The Power of Music from Life File Videos on Vimeo.

Leslie-Jean Thornton, a journalism professor from Arizona State found that today. I love documentaries like this, the ones that try to say as much with the edits and production choices as the raw content itself. There’s plenty of character in 90-year-old Jack Leroy Tueller’s hands and face and that powerful two-minute story, just one of a life full of memories could be told in a lot of different ways.

I’d like to think I’ll have the chance to shoot some more of those (I got to take part in one WW2 oral history last December), even if they are brief anecdotes like this. (Maybe when I get my dissertation under control next year … ) Tueller has more. And more still.

“Veterans should not retire. They should tell everyone who listens or reads what a wonderful life this is, and what a wonderful country this is.”

That’s a guy who’s mother was essentially killed by his drunken father. And then he turned six. He discovered the trumpet a few years later, worked as a janitor through school. Then he had his trumpet stolen, so he spent his tuition money on a new one. Then the war came. And that’s the start of a wonderful life.

He’s right, you know.

He got married, went off to Europe. Flew one plane, one single plane, through 140 missions. He flew in Korea, retired a colonel, has been married almost 70 years. Oh, and there’s this:

While visiting China, he participated in a test of the repaired aircraft by flying a MiG-21 in a mock dogfight. He was 78 years old and hadn’t piloted an airplane in years when he went up against skilled young pilots that day. The young pilots performed various evasive maneuvers thinking Tueller would try to stay on their tails. In a concession to age, he didn’t take the bait. He waited until they were done with their acrobatics and then came out of the sun and beat them.

The world might be full of men and women like that, but you’d always take a few more.

history / links / Monday / photo — Comments Off
18
Oct 10

The future is now, the past is still here

Woke up yesterday tired. Never could shake it, until late in the evening, oddly enough. Brian hung out with us until the afternoon and then went home to take his sister-in-law shopping. As he got in his car we mentioned there were things we need him to help do, boxes we needed his help to move.

“Tell me about it,” he said. And then he shut his car door in my face for effect.

Just for that I’m putting rocks in those boxes.

Woke up this morning stuffy and with the sniffles. Sudafed, being a modern day miracle drug, knocked that out by late afternoon. Which is good because there was work to do. This lecture is called “Fun with numbers.” It’s official title is “I want to be a journalist so I don’t have to use numbers!”

This requires careful attention, just to make sure I don’t mess up the math.

Here, add this up:

Intellitar, will be releasing Virtual Eternity on Wednesday.

“The whole concept is legacy creation and preservations,” said Don Davidson, the founder and CEO of Intellitar.”The idea is I can use a number of technologies available and create a living legacy.”

Think of it as “a digital clone, if you will,” he said.

A “digital clone” on your computer screen.

Davidson said Virtual Eternity takes genealogy websites, such as ancestry.com, to another level.

I talked to the CEO’s avatar. Right now that particular figure is a bit limited in his responses and, humorously, tries to give you a best guess when it is way off base. But he says that can get better because you can spend as much time improving your avatar as you like. Presumably a CEO with a big launch on his hands hasn’t spent every moment programming every conceivable answer.

“An artificial intelligent brain drives it,” (CEO Don) Davidson said. “It has the ability to capture and maintain a virtually unlimited amount of content.”

That’s the real Davidson, not his avatar. This could get confusing. But incredibly cool. After you get past the somewhat limited (for now) database of replies and the Perfect Paul voice and the odd way his hair moves, and yet doesn’t, you can see a lot of potential. Think of the first telephone and the advances from which we’ve benefited in a century. Imagine if the same sort of improvement pattern is duplicated, or improved upon. Ray Kurzweil is pleased.

The avatar isn’t self-aware. (And who thought we’d ever read that sentence in the present tense in our lifetimes?) And the avatar doesn’t know when that might happen — but the answer it offered was fun. If you can one day get the avatar out of the computer, well, the comments have that figured out.

From present, to past. Let’s check out some Monday history.

This name didn’t jump out at me in my very thin bit of historical understanding, but the simplicity of the marker — and how new it looked and how basic the language was — deserved some attention.

One of the local writers, Joe McAdory, picked up the story:

Here’s a story of a slave who loved his master. Amos Wynn was the slave and playmate of the young Jeff Wynn. As legend has it, Jeff Wynn was tragically killed in 1859 by his first cousin in a hunting accident. Mysteriously, the boy’s grave was not marked by his family, an omission that bothered the slave.

Upon Amos Wynn’s emancipation, he was determined to put a marker at the place of his friend’s grave as a memorial. Amos Wynn dug wells and graves to slowly pay for the new headstone. Through hard work, Amos eventually raised enough money to pay for his fallen friend’s memorial.

Ironically, when Amos died and was buried across town at Baptist Hill, he was laid to rest without a marker – a problem which was later rectified.

Dr. R.P. Wynn shows up on the roster as a student of Auburn — then East Alabama Male College — in 1861. That was the year the university closed because of the war. The campus served as a military hospital and finally reopened in 1866.

But this isn’t that R.P. Wynn. This marker says Wynn was born in 1817 and died in 1859. So he was born in the state before it was a state. The Mississippi territory was divided in 1817 and Alabama’s statehood was granted two years later. And the Internet knows nothing about this man. Though I think I found his wife’s name.

Colonel Nathaniel J. Scott was the brother-in-law of Judge John Harper, Auburn’s founder. Scott served as one of the four commissioners who laid out the town and was Auburn’s first state lawmaker. He was instrumental in the creation of the Auburn Female Masonic College in 1847 and the East Alabama Male College (now Auburn University) in 1856. You have to think he was intent that none of this made it onto his marker.

Federal troops encamped at the spring behind his house, Pebble Hill, when they invaded Auburn in April 1865. Today the home is still standing as an arts center for the university.

John Ross served in the Macon County Reserves, a militia unit, during the Civil War. At least seven members of that company (of 121 men) are buried in Pine Hill. There are lots of mentions of that unit, but no details of their experience. I stumbled across this one simply because it was on Find A Grave. I emailed the guy who posted the request, but he didn’t know much more about the Ross family.

So that’s two hits and two misses on the old markers. That’s about the same ratio I got from the avatar.

adventures / Auburn / history / Monday / photo / Samford — 1 Comment
11
Oct 10

The Indian burial ground

Our home is haunted. And we’ve terribly angered some spirit that also lives here. This is the only logical conclusion.

First it was just bad work. Then a failure to follow instructions. Then bad luck. And now, I’m convinced we’re on some holy ground that never should have seen a house built in this place.

The first item, previously discussed here was a bad replacement effort on our part when it came to light air conditioner work. Then I broke the shower head, which yielded a much larger, funnier and more frustrating repair job that I never wrote about here.

Suffice it to say that you don’t want a plumber to come to your house on a Sunday night. That can get expensive. Fortunately the home insurance covered it.

After that it was the refrigerator. And here we were beginning to get suspicious.

Now the problem is the dishwasher, the previously steady, unremarkable but reliable dishwasher. It just decided not to do its job last night.

So I spent the late evening hours taking it apart. And my investigation yielded one truth: I can’t fix it myself.

Sealed it up last night and spent a little time investigating the possibilities today. The motor turns. The drain is clear. The float switch is free. What do you think the problem might be? I explained it all and asked this question of two appliance places. Neither had any real idea. One was very helpful, printing off schematics that showed what might be the problem, but upon further inspection doesn’t seem to be the case. Another was an old man who’s just hanging on. He has an appliance shop, the kind of place that 85 percent of the people probably pass on their way to Sears to buy a new deep freezer. The shop hasn’t been the recipient of any work since the 1970s. The man himself was straight out of the late 1960s. All of his prices were contemporary, however. He tried, but he came up grasping for straws, too.

The person that fixes it will probably not be those people. My guess is that the problem is the timer, which I understand can fail, or suddenly a power supply issue, for which I can’t test because of the configuration.

Or we’re living on a burial ground.

Spent the afternoon reading conference papers and checking in on one of my grandmothers, who had a little surgery done today. She’s doing great this evening, but could still use a prayer and a positive thought, if you don’t mind.

In that process I’ve learned there is a segment of my family, old and young, that hasn’t found the need to set up their cell phone’s voicemail. I’d just assumed everyone did that, and created a custom wallpaper on the first day with their new phone.

That’s what you’d do, right?

So there’s the Monday history. I’m still working my way through the Pine Hill Cemetery. There’s just mountains of local history under the stones there and I still have about a third of the place to walk. I’ll give you three of the finds today and a few more next week.

The first thing you need to know about Bennett Battle Ross, here, is that he was actually a Bennett, junior. His father, Bennett, was a methodist minister. The dad attended nearby Lagrange College and became a professor of English literature at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (Auburn) in 1872 when Junior was six.

Junior, then, was educated at API, the University of Chicago and abroad. He became API’s assistant chemist, and then a professor of chemistry at LSU. He’d return to Auburn as professor of chemistry in 1893, served as the dean of agricultural sciences, the state chemist and university president for a brief time. He was in every chemistry society in the world, it seems, and, because he was popular, served as a director of the local bank and cotton mill.

That’s Ross, a dashing looking guy, from my 1925 Glomerata.

Auburn’s Ross Hall, built in the year of his death, is named in his honor. It was for years the chemistry building, but after a recent renovation now houses engineering and administrative offices. Check out some through-the-years pictures of Ross Hall.

The interesting ones there are from the building’s construction in 1930 compared to a 1957 photograph. If you’re familiar with the campus the difference between 1930 to 1957 is much greater than the one between that 1957 picture and the supporting 1979 photograph. That’s the case for a lot of the world, though.

This one is both prominent local history and slim, indirect personal history. Isaac Sadler McAdory’s father, Isaac Wellington McAdory, is the namesake of the high school I attended near Birmingham. After the Civil War — during which he served in the Jonesboro Guard, Company H of the 28th Alabama Infantry Regiment and saw action in Mississippi, Kentucky and, most prominently, in Tennessee at Chickamauga and Nashville and Georgia in various battles surrounding Atlanta — he founded his own school, Pleasant Hill Academy. It crops up as a fairly prominent regional 19th century school in post-bellum history.

His son, Dr. Isaac Sadler McAdory, was Auburn’s second dean of veterinary medicine, working at the university for more than 48 years.

That’s McAdory in the 1936 Glomerata, his first appearance there. The university’s large animal clinic is named after him.

Edmund Camp’s marker says he was the first textile engineering graduate in the western hemisphere (at Georgia Tech). It’s an odd sounding thing, but true. He managed mills in Georgia and would go on to found the textile engineering program at Texas Tech and then started the program at Auburn in 1929. These days it is called polymer and fiber engineering where they’re doing cool things like improving the strength of vehicle armor to help keep soldiers safer.

Camp was also an Auburn graduate, earning his master’s degree from A.P.I. in chemical engineering in 1935. That picture is from the 1931 Glomerata. Unfortunately there isn’t much more to tell. Even though he was a chemist and an engineer, I have the feeling his story might be a good one, but the Internet doesn’t know it.

I bet he could fix my dishwasher.

fair / history / hobby / Monday / photo / site — Comments Off
4
Oct 10

Just pictures today

I worked. I read papers for an upcoming conference. I visited the grocery store. I did laundry. I did work. And none of those things seem especially interesting — I discovered a new flavor of Triscuit! None of those things seem especially worth sharing — I found a typo in an abstract! Everything else seems even more prosaic than usual — the weather has turned mild!

Instead of all that, how about some birds?

That isn’t a Yellowlegs, they aren’t purely white as far as I know, but I don’t know what you call this guy. Let’s say he’s a shore bird, for that’s where I found him: sitting on big rocks, a bit upset that I disturbed him.

Behold the mighty pelican.

And, now, the mighty pelican gets dinner:

Even the history segment is brief today. You know the 1939 World’s Fair section will return tomorrow, but did you know I know someone that attended? Henry did. When I picked up that fair guide in Georgia this summer I thought of him.

I gave that book to him this weekend.

You can hear his reaction on the front page of the fair section, too. Also updated links elsewhere on the site. I’ll spare you the 600 word treatise on that particular chore, too.

You’re welcome.

Tomorrow: class, the paper, the World’s Fair and a bunch more.