We’re traveling to Augusta for a race on Sunday. At a red light in tiny Jackson, Georgia, I saw this historic marker.
I like markers. They give the passerby just enough information to be of slim interest. Some of them may even go home, or to their phone, and look something up on Wikipedia. Or they could just be things you race by without reading even the minimum. Or you could at least get a glance from the header. “Noted Indian Trail” being the most benign one ever.
This was an important trail though, ultimately becoming the Old Federal Road, which connected Savannah to what would become Fort Stoddert in modern Mobile. The Oakfuskee Trail had routes to spots in northeast Alabama, to Oakfuskee Town which was west of Dadeville, Alabama on the Tallapoosa and several other places in between. From those paths came roads and on those roads and in those natural harbors and rivers came towns and cities and that is an important path.
Yes. I would love a used tire, and thank you.
Is there a big market for used tires?
Near home there is a “Bubba’s Medicine Shop.” The place may be great, I don’t know, but I imagine it would be hard for me to shop there. I’m a Big D’s Discount man, myself:
I wanted there to be an incredible backstory for Mr. Big D, especially after this next shot:
Here it is, from the Progress-Argus, and it is the story of a family owned business, two generations worth. Big D is now owned by Fred’s Pharmacy, out of Memphis. Barrett Hoard sold it last year. His father, Danny, was the pharmacist Big D. The mural went up after Danny died a few years ago.
Local lore that I just made up suggests he held every pill bottle up to the light to make sure the free peppermint was on top. He looks like a guy from whom you’d be comfortable picking up an antibiotic.
Danny Hoard bought the store from Parrish Drugs in 1973.
In Jackson, for some unknown reason, there are several pink houses.
Maybe it is in the medication.
We arrived in Augusta safely, just in time for dinner. We met friends at the hotel, they checked in, up from Florida, just as we did. On Sunday we are doing a half Ironman. We’re probably not prepared, but it will be a fun weekend.
He’s judging you. The nose looks worn and with a sunburn that has been hard-earned. He’s trying to disarm you with a half smile, but he can’t fake it well enough.
He’s throwing that arm up on the car door, all casual, like he’s talking about the weather. But he’s showing you his watch. Time is short. He isn’t going to put a lot of his time into you disappointing him. You can see it in his hand. He’s already getting antsy.
She, on the other hand, is sending mixed messages. The classic closed-arm pose: she’s not interested, shining through his semitransparent arm. But also there’s that lovely and warm smile. She won’t put up with it, but she cares about you anyway.
That is Harmon and Grace Dobson. Harmon founded Whataburger. He married Grace in 1955, somewhere between store number five and 20. He died in a plane crash in the 60s. Grace ran the place until the early nineties. She passed it along to her son, who broke the 500-store mark. Grace died in 2005 after building an empire and raising three children. No wonder she could hit that pose.
I saw that last night and thought it was an interesting setting, even without any context. The young man and the older woman. It all makes sense now, except for Harmon’s see-through arm. I’ve seen a few photographs of him, and he has one of those mugs that just fits right into the time, whenever it is, 1950s, Somewhere, Texas. He’d been a bush pilot, a diamond courier, a car salesman and a wildcatter. No wonder he looks like he’s in a hurry. Just leaning here for a moment.
Whereas, Grace, even when she stepped down from the day-to-day was still seen with reverence. The company execs didn’t like to boast about what their success for fear of her hearing. Just leaning here for forever.
Things to read … because reading stays with you forever.
Like so many others, I was hooked. I progressed to longer distances and in 2012, signed up to complete my first IRONMAN—IRONMAN Arizona. Training was going well and my wife and I welcomed our third child (our first girl) that July. Three weeks later, after a morning workout, I began having severe abdominal pain and was rushed to the hospital. Scar tissue from my previous surgery had wrapped around my small intestine and twisted it over on itself. I was rushed into emergency surgery. My IRONMAN dream was over—for a time.
Recovering from surgery brought some dark days. I had doubts about whether I could do an IRONMAN with this disease, and if I even wanted to try again. This was the first time I had ever truly felt beaten by the disease. As I was feeling sorry for myself, Hurricane Sandy threw me a curveball and forced me out of my funk. The building that housed my dental business was inundated with over eight feet of water. Everything was destroyed. The next few months were a blur as I healed from surgery while trying to rebuild my business. I had no time to feel sorry for myself.
You read those things and you realize how amazing people are, and how much of everything is just a mental exercise.
This is a personal story about a SR-71 coming apart at more than three times the speed of sound. I’m just going to excerpt one quote, because that should be enough to get you to read the whole thing, Bill Weaver Mach 3+ Blackbird Breakup:
I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be to have survived one disaster only to be done in by the helicopter that had come to my rescue.
So we were uneasy to learn that some reporters have been pressured to alter their reports by the publisher, aka the White House. While some of the emendations and deletions (a presidential aide’s swoon, a politically charged Obama joke) might seem frivolous, what’s at issue here is precedent. This represents the peak of a slippery slope we don’t want to go down. And that’s why we think it’s time to for the reporters to begin putting out their own pool reports.
The practice of the White House disseminating the reports dates back to the paper era, when reporters obtained poolers’ notes from copies that White House press assistants placed in bins in the White House press room. Today’s technology offers an opportunity to liberate the pool reports.
For the boy, the poetry first showed up in the trees behind his family’s home in Gadsden. The words came to him through the sunlight in the loblollies, with the swallowtails in the pines — in the Alabama he knew and loved on that Etowah-Calhoun county line.
For the man, the poems appeared in the names on a stone outside the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. These words came to him through the stories of 39 men, women and children, martyrs of the civil rights era — people Jake Adam York never knew, who died in an Alabama he didn’t understand.
“He used his poetry to take on the beauty and the responsibility of being Southern,” said his mother, Linda York.
Taken too soon, York died at 40 in 2012. He liked LL Cool J and Run DMC, it says. But who didn’t? Allen Tate would have loved LL.
Kidding. Tate wouldn’t have understood, or cared for LL Cool J at all. But he did, during his third marriage, have an affair with a student of his, a nun. Wikipedia says a citation is needed for that, but even if it is wrong that’s a story dying for a lyric …
His first, and second, wife, was novelist Caroline Gordon, who was a great Southern writer. She died in 1981 in Mexico. Maybe that means she passed through Texas. Maybe she enjoyed Whataburger.
I never met Mr. Davis, but I worked with his daughter, Tiffany. She was fresh out of college and I was about two years removed. She was smart and talented and charming. She was friendly and amusing. She learned a lot and worked hard and got better. She was a lot of the things that we probably all hope we are. She talked about her father an awful lot. They always sounded like a devoted family. He sounded like a good man.
She still is all of those things, by the way. She’s moved out west, but we’re still friends online. I imagine her brother is all of those things too, but we’ve never met. You’ve probably seen him on television, where he comes off as an incredibly likable man who works hard and knows his craft.
It seems to me that to have raised two children like his, you must be some kind of lucky and some kind of parent. Mr. Davis just recently passed away. Rece wrote about his dad, a wonderful and intimate remembrance proving the kind of man he was.
Those are my favorite verses, too.
Spent the afternoon counting things. I do this every year, taking stock of the department. Demographics are important, and one must always know how many of these and those there are, to say nothing of the thoses and thises. I do this every year and this is still the best method I have thought up:
You don’t change the classics. What you can change is the spreadsheet which holds the data and digests it into simple charts and graphs. There are pages and pages of data, and I get it down to one page of information, all thanks to the humble and inconsistent tally marks.
Things to read … because reading leads to pages and pages of information.
What’s less certain is why, exactly, Wakefield put the chopped-up chocolate into her cookies to begin with. A few versions of the story have her creating the recipe accidentally—she was out of nuts, she thought the chocolate would melt into the batter, the chips fell into the bowl by accident. Wyman, in her book, argues that Wakefield was too much of a perfectionist to have come upon the recipe so haphazardly. In support of her argument, she cites a few accounts from the 1970s in which Wakefield tells reporters that she’d been planning experiments with chocolate chunks.
And, of course, she had no idea what it would all become. It says she gave permission to Nestle to reprint her recipe. It does not say what she got in the deal. There’s also a link to the original cookie, if you’d like to try it.
Online retailers and publishers are pushing back against Facebook Inc.’s efforts to track users across the Internet, fearing that the data it vacuums up to target ads will give the social network too much of an edge.
Web traffic experts say there is less data flowing from some sites to Facebook, suggesting they have been reprogrammed to hold back information.
Because they figured out what they were giving away, that they weren’t a partner with Facebook, just a vehicle for it.
When this social media tool first came out, many people were worried that certain *ahem* risque behaviour would take place at a much higher rate. However, since its launch in late 2011, it’s became pretty clear that college kids mainly use Snapchat for selfies, pictures of their pets and photos/videos of the events they attend. And seeing as a new study by Mashable reveals 77 percent of college students check their Snapchats daily, it’s definitely an outlet not to be overlooked when planning your higher ed social media strategy.
We’ve considered that, put it on the back burner and considered it again. I’m sure it will ultimately happen. We do like stories, after all.
Opelika-area residents and Coca-Cola enthusiasts are invited to the unveiling of one of the oldest untouched Coca-Cola painted wall advertisements in existence.
The unveiling event will be held on Oct. 9 at 4 p.m., at Smith T Building Supply in downtown Opelika. Historians from The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta and community leaders will be in attendance. Vintage bottles of Coke will be given away while supplies last.
The experts think the sign was painted in 1907 or 1908. The ad is being seen for the first time in more than a century. How about that?
I had these shots from my ride on Sunday and I’ve been staring at them. The colors are beautiful. The light is perfect. The road just sings to you. There’s a great whir, whir, whirring in my imagination from the rubber tire on the road. When you get close enough you can smell the clay:
On my bike I am always trying to ride hard and fast, because I am not fast. But in my daydreams I’m lazily drifting onto the center line, where the road noise is different, quieter. When I have the space to ride on a painted lane I always wonder if it moves faster. Maybe the paint makes less friction, somehow. It is quieter. There’s just your breathe there, just the whoosh of the wind in your ears. And then you can really see the things around you:
Not far from there at all, really, I looked up the road and saw the prettiest site I’ve seen on an otherwise normal, and freshly paved, ribbon of road:
And I started doing the only other kind of riding I know how to do, the slow back and forth tilts from the shoulder to centerline, making big swooping curves over the asphalt. Sine waves. Sign language.
In my mind I’m sitting on the saddle. In reality I’m sitting in my office chair, wondering why it is lately less comfortable.
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.
