The weekend before last we went to a year-end party for the tri club that my lovely bride is a member and captain of. It was a nice affair, private rooms at a local restaurant. Big tables. Fixed menus. Only one small speech. An entertaining slide show. Good company. I met a guy who was car shopping. Big NFL guy. There was another gentleman at our table who has worked the chain gang for local college football games for decades. He retired from the job, which he did for free all of those years, but he was so good they brought him back this year. There was a couple who had one daughter in college and another on a travel cheer team. And these are the people you just want to ask what they do for a living, because it all sounds outrageously expensive. There was another couple I’ve met before at our table too. Anyway, it was all delightful.
At the end of the night, we took home one of the small bouquets of flowers from one of the tables. It sat, for a few days, on the bookcases in the library. And then Poseidon, who is the reason we can’t have nice things, found them.
I moved them, when he wasn’t paying attention, to an even higher spot. He found them immediately.
So now we’re playing keep away from the ruiner of iron and the ruster of stone.
They’re doing amazing things with cut flowers these days. This is now, what … 11 days or so since we took them. Still in fine shape.
I’m planning on keeping them around for a while. Changing flowers fit a certain melancholy mood, but I find the way the colors change, and don’t, to be fascinating.
Now we just have to keep the cat distracted.
Anyway, back to work. I have to finish a final tonight. It’ll be available to students tomorrow. My online class is rushing in toward their final group projects, and that means a lot of back-end of the semester work is flooding in. And we’re going to wrap up some talk about scandals in org comm tomorrow. But, in criticism, we’re watching a documentary. It will center on a fair amount of scandal, too, as timing would have it. Should be a lot of fun!
Guess who has been giving me the business for not talking about them here. You guessed it. They get a whole month of highlights, and then I overlook their contractually obligated weekly appearances for a few weeks and the howling, yowling protests I receive … these cats should have been agents. They’d be devastating in negotiations.
Anyway, here’s Phoebe, in between lodging her protestations. She’s surveying her queendom.
On a recent cold night, Poseidon cuddled up next to me, on top of me, and under the covers.
That’s the boy that wants to go outside all of the time. Always needs to be under the covers, but wants to try on the cold of all outdoors.
Here’s Phoebe considering a bit of dust on the steps. I like how the tail curls around the paws.
And here’s Poseidon doing his best noir cat act.
He would have been great in an old noir movie. He’s got real charisma on camera. But he also has versatility. If he couldn’t get top billing, somehow, he could play a good mid-level henchman.
So the kitties are fine. They’re ready for Thanksgiving, and an extra day of cuddles.
And while Thanksgiving is Thursday we did have class today. The university is only closed Thursday and Friday. So we had class today, those of us that showed up. In my criticism class we discussed Mo’ne Davis is finally ready to play baseball again
Back in 2014, when she was on top of the planet, when she was the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series, when she was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and getting recognized everywhere she went and fielding requests from what felt like every corner of the country, Davis heard something that she never forgot.
In the immediate aftermath of that wild run in Williamsport, Pa., her coach told her, “Mo, I don’t want this to be the greatest thing you do in your life. I don’t want you to be 35 years old stuffing yourself in your old Little League jersey and signing at a card show.” She took that message to heart.
That was not his plan when he delivered it to her. “When they’re 13, you feel like they’re not even listening to whatever you say,” Steve Bandura says now. He was stunned when Davis, now 24, recently used that quote in a newspaper interview to describe what had shaped her life after that famous shutout. You remember that? Of course she did. Bandura met Davis back when she was in elementary school and had coached her in multiple sports, and he’d always recognized how smart she was, how good a listener, how thoughtful. Of course she would hold on to something like that.
She was invited to the White House. She published a memoir. She struck out Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show, she was the subject of a documentary by Spike Lee, and she had not yet turned 15. She kept thinking about those words from her coach all the while.
It’s a good story, and it’s about her, but it’s also about this new baseball league, and the modern star, and the commissioner, and the draft, and Davis’ coach is our real tie to the younger star of years gone by.
The draft for this new league has since taken place. Davis was picked 10th overall. The Women’s Pro Baseball League is scheduled to begin play next May.
DPS troopers found Kneeland’s vehicle crashed on southbound Dallas Parkway near Warren Parkway. According to the report, Kneeland fled the scene on foot and officers searched the area with help from K-9 and drone units.
As authorities were looking for Kneeland, a dispatcher told officers that people who knew him had received a group text from Kneeland “saying goodbye. They’re concerned for his welfare,” according to recordings from Broadcastify, which archives public safety radio feeds.
Approximately three hours later, Kneeland was found with what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Happy Thanksgiving, boys and girls.
That’s a morning-of story, and one of the few breaking news style pieces of copy we’ve looked at this semester, so there were plenty of new things to talk about. And, as a palate cleanser, I ended the day with three quick videos, each with something we could discuss in a useful kind of way.
In org comm, we talked about stereotypes, prejudice and diversity. We discussed the organizational aspects of diversity and inclusion, and we talked the substance of organizational success. You could see them staring at the screen, with my extremely exciting slide deck. You could see them dreaming of turkey.
The blog is taking a few days off. See you next week. When I make my quiet little list of things I’m thankful for, I’ll be including the readers of the site in that list. And, of course, the kitties.
Monday / photo — Comments Off on A sky recap 24 Nov 25
Outside on Saturday, I tried to recall how many days it has been since I’d seen the sun. I couldn’t come up with the number, which means it has been plenty. Plenty means too many. And Saturday looked like this.
This was the least cloud cover I found on Saturday.
I’m over it. Seasonal, you may say, but I dispute that. We moved away, in no small part, to not have an endless schmear of gray days define our lives. Cloud cover has its uses, but I have no use for it.
Yesterday, though these drab and boring skies were finally burned away, and we were paid in full with a fine little sunset. First, on the way from here to there.
And then, right here in the neighborhood.
This evening’s sunset was pretty good. I stepped outside long enough to get a panorama. Click the image and the larger version will open in a new tab.
Today was a class prep day. We’re discussing stories tomorrow in one class and wrapping up several exciting days of discussion on diversity in another. In my online class, I spent some time sorting out the next two weeks. And also I spent some time wondering how many people will be in class tomorrow. The university’s Thanksgiving break doesn’t begin until Thursday. Students often don’t see it that way.
It’ll probably be a light week around here, too. Tomorrow, for sure, we’ll check in on the kitties. We’ll see if anything exciting comes up after that as we begin our slouch dive headlong into the holiday season.
We had a faculty meeting today. Many speeches and introductions. It is part of moving into, and creating, a new college. There are many questions, we don’t yet have all of the answers, but good and talented people are working on it. Answers will be found. These things don’t happen overnight.
Here’s how overnight they don’t happen. We’re in a one-year status quo pattern. As that happens many new procedures are implemented. It’s the first year of a three-year fact-finding and solution-creating process. Sometimes it seems like three years might not be a long enough for that. Sometimes you’re made aware of all that goes into it. And then you’re made aware of all of these other things too. And then there are concerns you aren’t familiar with. There’s a lot that goes into it. You can see that even if, like me, you’re only familiar with just the trees in your section of the giant forest. And people get highly specialized, of course. Also, this is not a thing that happens all of the time, these big department-college merger things. No one specializes in that. But campus communities do love making committees, and sometimes you get some great work out of them. I’m sure that’ll be the case in this instance.
This meeting was held in a building with a big auditorium, because this new college is a huge college and it needs the space for meetings such as these. Down the hall from this auditorium are the offices of the RTF department, and parts of the journalism department, which is moving in there. And on the walls are a lot of old newspaper front pages. These are always such great displays. Maybe I’m one of the only people that stops to look at them, but that’s why they’re there.
Those walls have framed prints of local and campus papers, as all journalism departments seemingly have. The farther you get from this January 1991 issue, above, the less frequently new pages appear. It occurs to me that one of the less important, but nonetheless sad, side effects of ending newsprint is that one day we’ll have no more displays such as these. The last yellowing page on the wall there is a 2018 installment of a local paper (then in the process of being assimilated by a larger entity) running their Super Bowl edition. I wonder who was in charge of deciding which ones to keep. Some are obvious, some may take a little more contextual appreciation.
You could study the look of this paper, and I have considered it. For its day, that’s a strong small paper design. The layout only feels long in the tooth to my 2025 eyes. You’re nine years into the influence of USA Today and all of the influences that emanate from there. I can’t speak to the history of that particular publication, but a quick glance at their digitized archives on newspapers.com suggests they were pretty responsive to industry and consumption trends in that era. Most importantly, it is sharing the information you need, and you know there’s more inside.
Also, there are no ridiculous SEO headlines. It was also all done locally. In 1991, the layout was made with some relatively basic software. If they were using QuarkXPress, this paper was very much an innovator. It would be five more years before a version worth talking about was released. It’s also possible that they did a lot of that with razors and glue. Old school.
Not that you came here for a lot of thoughts on old software. Not that you knew what you were getting here to end the week. I didn’t know either, to be honest. I also don’t know what we’ll have here next week. There will be something, though. We’ll need to check in on the kitties, for instance. There will be some other stuff, too. What will it be? It’s a good question. There are many questions. We’ll find out together.
I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.
It started, perhaps, as an in-joke. Maybe a brother-in-law joke. Or a t-shirt, one of those hastily designed gaudy numbers you see at fan shops. Maybe the whole thing began as a bit on talk radio. Sometimes the organic nature of jokes, or even traditions, can be lost to us without a very serious investigation.
This is not that.
I remember it all those ways. A guy said it on the air, off the cuff, from the hip, and wherever else one-liners fall from. I saw it on a shirt. And, if you’re there long enough, you live it, unfortunately.
You don’t book weddings on fall Saturdays in the South.
I have been to several Saturday weddings in the fall in the Deep South, an exercise designed to weigh your love of sport and the ol’ alma mater against these two people standing up there. Who are those people, anyway? Strangers, probably. I mean, do you know the bride’s third quarter rushing stats? Have you memorized the tackle for loss numbers the groom has put up this season? What even is the win-loss record of the person performing this ceremony, anyway? Alternatively, it could be a deliberate measure to keep attendance low.
I mention this because, of course, weddings are organized far in advance, but not farther out than the more-than-a-century long tradition of watching dudes hit each other as hard as they can for temporary victory and immortal glory. Long is the memory, short is the ceremony. The same is true for any given football play, but one of these two events lasts longer in the memory of most of us.
Authurine Babineaux and Merrick Bourgeois — two people we don’t know at all, but who prove my point nicely — were married on Saturday, October 31st in 1959 in Cankton, Louisiana, right there at St. John Berchman Catholic Church. The writeup in the paper, as was the custom, describes the bride’s dress and what her attendant was wearing. There’s a photo with the notice, the image has gone fuzzy with digitization, but the new Authurine Bourgeois looks beautiful. The groom is wearing a white jacket. They had a little reception in the cafeteria of the school they both attended. Maybe they met there. Maybe they hit it off there. We don’t know. We do know there was a four-layer cake. We don’t know when the celebration ended, or if they were able to catch Billy Cannon’s immediately legendary punt return.
There are more than 2,000 returns for “married Oct 31” in the 1959 Louisiana newspapers. And some of, most of, or, perish the thought, all of those people who attended missed Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run at Death Valley. But which did they talk about more, as the years passed?
My first fall wedding on a Saturday in the South was in 1993. It was November 20th. It was 11th ranked Alabama at number 6 Auburn. It was the Iron Bowl.
It was a wedding in someone’s home. And they chose to do this event during the football game.
Perhaps there was some other event scheduled in the living room in the next hour.
Oh, the service was lovely, marred only by my running up and down the hall, getting scoring updates from the radio from the bedroom where the groom had previously been getting ready. “Does anyone have a reason these too should not be wed? And what is the score, young man?” Even then, as a young football fan, I wanted to share the news, and that news was the game and newly emerged folk heroes.
Auburn won that game 22-14. The Tigers were on probation that year: no bowls and no TV. Some entrepreneurial outfit sold Radio National Championship bumper stickers. They were everywhere for a time.
That house, where the wedding was, was full of people. I wonder which event is more memorable all these years later.
In October of 2012, my wife and I (who were married in the summer, thank you very much) attended a wedding that was scheduled on the Third Saturday in October. In the South, you capitalize it just like that. The Third Saturday in October. This is the Alabama-Tennessee game, a joyous collision that seriously impacts commerce in two states. Alabama being atop the polls and facing a heated rival probably hampered the wedding’s turnout. There were some other big games with implications that day third-ranked Florida was taking on ninth-ranked South Carolina, number six LSU had Texas A&M, ranked as the 20th best team in the land.
Why, I asked the bride, beforehand, did you choose this time of year? This date? She attended a huge football school. As did her brother and her mother and her father before her. As did everyone up and down her family tree. As did her husband.
She offered that the weather is too unpredictable in the spring. (It is not.) And that there would be TVs at the reception. (There were not.) It was a fine wedding. I remember there was a bar at the reception – but no TVs with games. On the bar were little chalkboards which told you the preferred drinks of the bride and groom, so you could order the same and be just like them. I don’t remember her choice, but the groom’s drink was rum and Coke.
You don’t have to ask yourself where he was on the idea of a Saturday wedding in the fall.
A few years later, in 2016, we attended a wedding in Tennessee. One of those where the bride and groom had reserved a beautiful chapel and everyone looked terrific, and every single person was in a festive mood. It was a mild October day. I was just getting over a cold and had a terrible coughing fit during the middle of the service. I left so as not to interrupt the beautiful ceremony.
I regained my composure but couldn’t get back to my seat without causing another scene, so I eased up the side of the chapel, and stood along the wall behind these guys.
He was anxious about the event; the game I mean. That installment of the Tennessee-Georgia series turned out to have one of the wildest finishes in the history of the sport. Those border rivalries are always tense, taut, and played close to the rented tuxedo vest.
The young couple got married and we gathered outside for the ceremonial send off. The bride and groom ran through the gathered loved ones and into the waiting car. That’s when the bomb was thrown, and the subsequent Hail Mary.
And that’s when this grown man, the guy above, a pillar of his community, a member of the local education board who was eager to see off a loved one started doing chest slides in the lawn in front of the chapel. The bride was beautiful. The bride was upstaged.
This isn’t about me, but that would become one of my bigger moments on social media. All the right people and outlets amplified the post and eventually it got back to the guy above, a person I did not know. I thought he might be angry that I’d outted him in profile. He thought it was hilarious. I assume that’s because his team won.
And that’s one of the risks you take with a wedding during football season. What happens if the wrong team wins. Now who has a sour taste in their mouth about your wedding day? Your guests? Your partner? Your parents? You?
“But, dear writer,” you may say, “this is not my concern. I am not in the South. I will not be wed in the South. I live here, in the world wide web.”
Fair enough, bride-elect or bridegroom-elect, but consider, that sport is part of culture. We, being social creatures, export the best parts of our culture. This, of course, is made that much easier – and each game made that much more important – because of the dazzling array of streaming and cable packages available to us today. These, then, are cautionary tales for the entire country, certainly a lesson less and less limited to the South.
Put another way, UConn and UMass have been at it since the 19th century, that series is tied, and they have two contests coming up in the next few years. Don’t ask a Huskie or the Minutemen to choose.
If you’ve got love and joyous union on the mind and there are leaves and footballs in the air, consider your audience, and consider the spring or the summer. Green leaves also make for a beautiful photographic backdrop. Baseballs are flying around.
Your guests will likely be paying much more attention to you than a routine pop up to right.
