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And having turned the page

Poor soundbites from the president and indistinct ends aside, we’re now in the new post-modern when it comes to the United States in Iraq. There is a bit of dissembling and, of course, best-foot-possible posturing going into the spin, but the fighting isn’t over. There will still be combat and sacrifice and families separated from loved ones in this, the fourth chapter of the Iraq War.

I covered the launch of the war while in Washington D.C. Like many others I know friends or family who served there. Fortunately they’ve all come safely home. Here’s hoping the rest get back safe, too.

Random journalism observations of the day: Nice to see Chris Fowler can keep his journalistic distance and not shill for Nike. That sort of thing stopped mattering a long time ago, but still.

Check this out, I’m still working my way through the high school workshop circuit and I just found a school where every teacher has, and uses, a blog for classroom purposes. So every student is required to visit it, which means we now have the four R’s: reading, riting, ‘rithmetic and RSS.

Journalist, entrepreneur, philosopher, pundit Alan Mutter muses about a return to the Tampa Model, tying a newspaper and a television station into one newsroom to share coverage, merge manpower and effect cost savings. For a while the idea was thought of as the future of the news industry, but as Mutter notes, the joint Tampa Tribune and WFLA enterprise has not been without it’s difficulties. Others in the comments note a few other aborted examples.

At the macro level the problems are abundantly cultural. What newspapers are after and what television needs are different. The language the two newsrooms use are different. The skill sets, obviously have more than a little variation. Television staffers write differently than newspaper folk. Print reporters don’t always function in the visual medium as well as they might like. The presently natural place to put together a combined print and video product is on the web, but most traditional print and TV organizations aren’t exactly comfortable with that.

So, in a merger, the problems that Tampa model has exhibited for the last 10 years become apparent. Perhaps the problem is in the merger. Maybe the way to proceed would be with a creation of an entirely new news operation.

We’re working to converge our newsrooms at Samford and I’m hoping we can make great strides to do even more of that this year. In many ways these transitions have to happen slowly and, I think, culturally. The people doing the work have to see the need and the value, and that can only happen over time.

A new generation of students who are using the Internet as a matter of course in every classroom are already learning the values of accessibility, utility and multimedia.

On the site I’ve started a new September feature. I shot lot of pictures of Allie the other day, so I figure I’ll add a new cat picture every day. Because if the Internet isn’t powered by cat photographs yet some IT guy somewhere is working on making that happen.

Also I’ve split up some recent posts, pulling out the regular features from the daily entries. I’d been on the fence about it for some time, but figured if I was going to do it now was the time. Better to pull out a handful now than a few more handfuls in the future. This presumes I’ll decide to separate them in the future, of course. I separated them in the present because … let’s say a phone booth landed in the front yard with a future version of me and told me I came to that decision.

A phone booth? I hate to pick on Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure for the film’s otherwise excellent authenticity, but they really whiffed on the phone booth, didn’t they? The goofs on IMDB, they are priceless:

There is a heinous number of most egregious factual errors in the depiction of the famous historical dudes, their lives, their works, their time periods and the state of their hearing.

Someone, upon having that idea, was very happy to find that no one had written any notes for the movie on IMDB.

I forgot to mention that I made the front page of al.com yesterday. I could say that in some way or another every day once upon a time. The sports producer wrote me a few weeks ago to ask if I’d participate in a roundtable discussion throughout the football season. Here’s a segment of my first installment, the topic Auburn’s chief worry:

Break them down: QBs, wideouts (to a smaller extent) and every individual grouping on defense. These are the ones you have to look at. All of those guys have different numbers on the jersey, but the name on the back may as well be John Q. Potential. There’s loads of it, but it now simply has to develop. Stars no longer matter. Recruiting class rankings are now ancient window dressing. The feel good quotes from teammates and coaches must now be tested — and not against the Arkansas States of the world. At this point we must all just see who pans out and how.
[…]

Even if one of the other elements can’t reach it’s potential, though, the regression to the mean seems an improvement over last year’s baseline. And you can worry less because there is no way humanly possible that each unit finds itself in that situation. Overall, Auburn finds everything looking shinier than this time last year.

Special teams, I concluded, is on the clock.

We’re grilling hamburgers tonight. I’m getting my act together for class tomorrow and, soon, uploading the newest additions to the 1939 World’s Fair section. Come back to see those, and more, soon.

errands / movies / video / weekend — 3 Comments
28
Aug 10

Shower head for the touchdown

It wasn’t my first thought of the day, but it didn’t take long after waking up to realize that, this time next week, we’ll be watching football. This makes me very happy.

I watched, over the course of three installments, It Might Get Loud, a documentary where producers took three guitarists and put them in a room to see what happens when they stop being polite, and start talking about chord changes:

The Edge describes himself as an architect, which makes perfect sense when you hear his explanation. Jack White has this artistic struggling “I think I’m a little more important than I really am” vibe. Jimmy Page is Jimmy Page. They’re all great in their own ways, though Page of course transcends by virtue of his longevity and the genetic condition known as Being Jimmy Page.

If the producers are looking for a follow up project, I’ve just given them a title.

It is a good documentary. I’m no musician, of course, but I enjoy hearing the discussion of how these works came about. A lot of times you get the sense that there is this Thing and they wanted to Express It and eventually it made it to a recording studio, became a hit or important piece and now they have to Explain It. Trying to verbally explain this Thing which has become Transcendent must be an interesting exercise.

I watched this over Netflix. We signed up for the free trial last night. The Yankee downloaded a few things from the instant viewing feature. She’s watching television episodes on the television. I watched Full Metal Jacket — which has not aged well — on my phone. That was R. Lee Ermey’s third role, but the one that made us all aware of him. He’s done more than you realize, since.

Also, he might be the star in a sentence featuring the best ever use of the word refused.

R. Lee Ermey was involved in a jeep accident during the making of the movie. At 1:00 a.m. one night he skidded off the road, breaking all the ribs on his left side. He refused to pass out, and kept flashing his car lights until a motorist stopped. In some scenes you’ll notice that he does not move his left arm at all.

“I am in a great deal of pain, indeed old boy. But I shan’t to acknowledge it. I will not acquiesce to the sweet morphine that is mental surrender. So be a good chum, ribs, and stand fast while I flag a motorist.”

For some reason, in that story Ermey turns into a very proper Englishman in my mind.

Where was I? Oh, yes. It Might Get Loud. I had to watch it in three installments because I decided to replace the shower head. I made this command decision about 15 seconds after I broke the older shower head.

We have a slight dripping leak and I thought if I turned the plastic shower nozzle a bit tighter … SNAP.

So we visited Bed, Bath and Beyond. The Yankee walked us directly to the shower fixtures, which was a bit disturbing considering we’ve never been in this particular store. She mulled over the options.

Buying a shower head that would match the one in the guest bathroom was out of the question. The store no longer carries them. But you can get one online for 25 bucks. Of course, at the store, your options range from 29 to 99 dollars. I’m tempering my instinct to put my foot down with my guilt about breaking the shower head to start with. She buys a sensibly priced one. I suppose.

It is made by a company that calls itself Oxygenics. If you break it down, that means oxygen-born. More than air should fall from this device. The literature assures me that this might be the last shower head I’ll ever purchase. And it better be, if there’s anything that makes you feel more stupid than reading language on a shower head’s packaging I don’t know what it is.

Consider:

“The storm is coming … prepare to be drenched.”

Do you know what I do when a storm comes? I go inside. Out of the rain. So, already, we’re a little counter-intuitive in the marketing.

“A powerful, pressurized monsoon of water will envelope and sweep you away to a wonderous place.”

Again with the imagery. But doesn’t all of this sound wasteful? Oh no.

“… while saving 23% water and energy compared to industry leading brands.”

I’d like to suggest to the good people at Oxygenics that they add the word “other” to that phrase. Right now they just look like a trailing brand.

It has “1 drenching spray, 54 anti-glog spray nozzles” and is “guaranteed not to clog.” No pressure there, nozzles.

Here’s the best part, the 9 inch adjustable shower arm — mentioned by a sticker-like logo on the package, as if they weren’t sure when they designed the thing how big they could get that little rod — has two joints. From which water will spray. When you add the wall attachment and the shower head attachment itself that means there are four potential places from which water can escape.

Oh, but it has a monsoon, you see.

We visited the grocery store for a few staples. At the cash register two young men were there to help us. One was the bar code digital transfer engineer, the other the product package and dispersal supervisor. Whenever we make it to check out I try to find ways to entertain them. Who knows how long they’ve been working. It is new and clean and so happy with itself, and most of the customers are in the pleasure-zone known as Publix shopping, but you never know if the guy just had to deal with the guy that really ruined his Saturday.

So the patter today was about how we forgot our ecological shopping bags. Not to worry! I just bought a new shower head which will save 30 percent on energy. I am, as the cool kids say, offset. We hate the earth. The hemp woven, hand stitched, biodegradable hues of those items were left safely in the laundry room, where they are doing us a great service by hanging from something, so that we won’t forget them should we venture to the grocery store.

We live a mile-and-a-half away. One day the person will ask paper or plastic, I’ll remember I left the bags and ask him to hold everything for three minutes while I fetch my own.

He suggests we leave them in the passenger seat. But where would the passenger sit, my good man?

I point out that we usually keep them in the trunk, where they are also often forgotten. And then the conversation turned into one of those “A-ha! You’re my witnesses moments” that you just live for.

If we ever see those two guys up front at the grocery store again I’m going to have the world’s best follow up joke, brought to you by items on the condiment aisle, just to see if they remember.

We grilled steak. We baked potatoes and enjoyed okra. That’s a win. And next week we’ll be watching football.

movies / Twitter / video / weekend — Comments Off
22
Aug 10

When I think school, I think Juno

I woke up, I turned on the television, and there was Julius Caesar, the 1970 version, starring Charlton Heston, Jason Robards, Sir John Gielgud and others. I wrote about it on Twitter:

Watching Julius Caesar, starring prototypical Roman, Charlton Heston. Great American cast reading English dialect about Italians. #globalism

Heston played Marc Antony three times. Unlike Caesar he accepted it thrice. People made Planet of the Apes jokes the second and third time.

Twitter News Alert: They just stabbed Caesar. In a related story, the music is odd percussion, reminding audiences of Planet of the Apes.

Marc Antony gives a stirring, populist speech for Caesar and the people riot. He then drinks from a wooden bowl that breaks like glass.

Robards and Johnson just tear up the big Brutus/Cassius scene. It is exhausting to even watch it. “Fret till your proud heart break!”

Cassius’ death scene was so bad that when Brutus arrived he looked around, as if were expecting to be Punk’d.

Exeunt Robards nee Brutus. Heston comes on to say “We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up!” Credits!

This film isn’t well received at IMDB, I suspect because of the understated power and hammy acting of Charlton Heston. There are times when he feels like he’s performing on a stage for a great audience, waaaay in the back of the house, but forgetting the camera is right there. It is, though, a terrific movie for a day when it is too hot to move.

In the late evening we went for a bike ride. The bike I was riding is, well, messed up. It won’t go above fifth gear. Half the time it won’t go below it. But I can pedal in fifth! So I can coast or ride that one speed, or try to force the chain. Doing that means an awfully big downstroke which creates the other problem: the seat won’t stay up. Every hill or so I have to stop and reset the height, pressing the little clamp down as hard and as far as I can, hoping it will hold.

And it does, for a while. And then, seemingly at random, the clamp gives way, the seat slides down into the tube on the frame and whatever symmetry I had is replaced by something more or less perpendicular to the road, with my splaying feet and knees feeling like they are inches from the ground.

So I only did about five miles like that. The Yankee came in too, it was getting a little dim. Guess we’d started too late.

That’s OK, because after we got cleaned up we made dinner and enjoyed a delicious spaghetti parmesan. We watched the Back to School marathon on USA, which featured Juno, the story of a precocious 16-year-old who gets pregnant and judges everyone in lines a little too dated for someone her age.

Got a one-liner, an adoptive family and everything turns out great! Your parents will support you and your friends will come around. Welcome back to school, kids!

Tomorrow, I’m dumping a bunch of pictures and things on you from the last week. Thinking of making that a regular feature, too. Anything to pad another day around here.

iPhone / movies / Tuesday — Comments Off
20
Jul 10

Garage, Day Two

More cleaning, whittled the garage chore down to one box. Brian and Elizabeth came over as I finished up. Elizabeth retreated to the air conditioning while Brian played with my phone as I finished the last box of the day.

I mean he could have helped.

Now there’s just one big pile of papers to pour through. Should they be saved? Should they be shredded? Can they be thrown away? That’s the box I’m dreading.

Brian did help. He set up a few things on my iPhone. He downloaded a flashlight app — which I’ve yet to figure out — reworked my Email set up and synchronized my calendars. I firmly believe you should find a guy who’s better with technical things than you are, flatter him, give him the occasional meal and volunteer to chauffeur him around if he needs a driver. It pays off.

They had dinner with us tonight. The girls watched the first two Eclipse movies and — because I’ve watched them, and Brian took my advice not to — he and I visited the dollar theater.

We watched Iron Man 2. It was good. Action, explosions, comedy. I think I’m spoiled by the latest iterations of Batman, though. There almost seem to be too many jokes here, but that’s Iron Man and a wry Robert Downey. Meanwhile, like Samuel L. Jackson’s role? He’s going to do it eight more times.

One of those will, of course, be in the 2012 Avengers, Many a comic book fan will be happy about that. Given the absence of subtly with which they discussed it in Iron Man it will be beyond ridiculous how much publicity and interest that film could stir.

We also watched A-Team which was, honestly, a lot better than I expected it to be. I haven’t checked yet, but they might have set a record for explosions per reel (non-John Woo division). Murdock was great, Quinton Jackson was a serviceable Baracus — though Mr. T could still play the role. Face was fine. I couldn’t get based Liam Neeson, but I always have that problem with him. It seems that the theme here is that planning is hard. Hannibal thinks, but only because no one else can, and he’s a bit troubled to have to make the effort. Ultimately the moral to the story, aimed at 10-year-old boys, is to understand the virtues of contingency planning. That’s a good lesson for kids to have.

I am not troubled by the film and how it treated the original because I have no illusions about what the show was. Everything held together fairly well until the bad guy delivered an RPG through a barge. That was just a bit much. But otherwise, it was a reasonable summer flick. Surely worth the dollar for the ticket.

For both movies, watch through the end of the credits. We caught them because we were trying to help people find things on the floor of the theater. I still can’t use that flashlight app.

Even more pressing: the girls are going to watch the third Eclipse movie this weekend. I need to find something to do as an excuse to avoid it. Any ideas?

errands / movies / Tuesday / Tumblr / World Cup — Comments Off
6
Jul 10

Back to the future, at the post office

When out and about to accomplish things, always strategically plan the order of events. It would not do, of course, to visit the grocery store, buy frozen things and then leave them in the trunk for two hours while taking in a movie. You don’t go across town on no gas to pick up a rare book without stopping at the gas station.

I’m a great believer in pre-planning the round of events. There’s a certain order to things. Some stops just make sense A to B to C. Some stops just make sense for traffic patterns. Some sequences are purely psychological.

Like this: Visit the post office first, and then stop by the bank.

If yours is like mine you find little redeeming about the post office. The lines are long, painful and slow moving. The person you finally draw to help you with your transaction is doing you a favor. He or she is really bitter about this, but has yet to make an examination about the choices they’ve made in their life. And, no matter how many extra books of stamps you buy, you always walking away feeling dissatisfied.

At the bank, they’re dealing with your money. And they’re making money on your money. In fact, they are still running a great con that a few keystrokes costs six to 20 bucks of your money every time. Of course they’re happy to see you. And, if yours is like mine you find they’re going a little overboard to demonstrate your enthusiasm to see you.

To be fair, the guy at the post office today was helpful, full of sirs — every third word of the conversation between us was “sir” — and generally competent. The life hadn’t been beaten out of him yet. At the bank the teller was a very nice lady. She reminded me of someone from a lifetime ago and had the same first name, but she was younger and nicer. Could be because she was getting my money.

See?

Uruguay’s run came to a close in the World Cup. They’ll still play in the consolation game, of course, but Netherlands handled them effectively enough, 3-2. The cheap goal at the end didn’t mean much in the scheme of things. The Oranje are right where they want to be heading into the final weekend f the tournament. I’ve always liked the Dutch style of play and it is nice to see them do well here.

Now, who will they meet for the championship game? Germany or Spain? We’ll find out tomorrow. Could be a good game, could be a snoozer.

Pedaled 10 miles this evening. I just ran out of gas right at 10. Could be the absence of protein for the day. So instead of riding more I did a few ab exercises and called that a workout. Tomorrow I’ll eat better and ride more, promise.

We had delicious pork chops for dinner, after which I started scanning things. And then I started editing them a bit in Photoshop. Tomorrow the Tumblr blog returns. The first several dozen things that will appear will be things I brought back from Europe. I have a big stack of water bottle labels, funky business cards and odd looking pamphlets that I picked up along the way. I lugged them halfway around the world, I’m sharing them with you.

Now I just have to figure out the problem with the Tumblr section on the right side of the blog. That’s never worked right, and I’m at a loss on a good widget. It isn’t enough that you see these things on a separate site, you should be able to find them here.

No, I won’t tie it all back into my Twitter account. Though I have found a way to write in my Tumblr, cross-post to Twitter, call it into Facebook and then publish back here. I’m only one step away from what Doc Brown cautioned against, creating “a time paradox, the results of which could cause a chain reaction that would unravel the very fabric of the space time continuum, and destroy the entire universe! Granted, that’s a worse case scenario. The destruction might in fact be very localized, limited to merely our own galaxy.”

I had to look that up on IMDB, not to worry. Also on IMDB, I’ve just learned that Carl Sagan and I have something in common, we both like Back to the Future.

It seems I’ll do anything to put myself with a prominent scientist.