The Sunday post with the most! Pictures without context, that is. We’re just passing the time with a few extra photos that haven’t landed anywhere else. On with it, then.
On Saturday night, after the baseball doubleheader, I bumped into my friend Phil Smith, who is a local photographer. He said the gang was all going to Little Italy for pizza. And, apparently, I’m a member of the gang. Hooray!
Anyway, we sat down at a corner table and this was right in front of me:
Allie has been exceedingly cuddly the last few days, even for her, which is saying something. She says hello:
Just as I was about to head out to the airport this evening to pick up my lovely bride this song came on the radio. I haven’t heard this in a while and, surprisingly, the song holds up pretty well.
Freshman Keegan Thompson threw his second consecutive complete game, striking out 10 and scattering four hits while allowing two runs. (So it was a disastrous 5th inning by his standards.) He threw 121 pitches. His 111th pitch was clocked at 91 mph. The kid is unbelievable. I hope they don’t break him.
Auburn won the first game 5-2 to take the series from the visiting Aggies. Thompson came out in the second game and played first base for a while. Auburn was put away easily in the last game of the series, falling 9-0.
So let’s talk fans! This group includes two of the four new Aggie friends we made today. Scroll beyond the photographs. There are things to read below the pretty pictures.
Things to read … because today hasn’t been all about baseball.
International news: Venezuela is likely more important to us than Crimea, though whatever Putin is doing in the home office is interesting. Meanwhile, just common sense suggests that of all the places you could cut the military here, slicing off parts of the navy is an inherently risky strategy.
Journalism items of interest: The lengths people will go to try to prevent reporters from doing their jobs often borders on the absurd. Here are two examples, and correspondence from Great Britain, which has been milling about on the wrong, lost, broken path for a while now, it seems.
Just stories: The first one is just strange, the kind where you know you don’t know the whole story, where maybe the whole story doesn’t matter so much, so long as the person is OK.
What a lovely evening for a bike ride. I have a ride scheduled for triathlon training — a schedule I am poor at keeping, but here’s a chance to ride — and this is a beautiful day and we’re just that much closer to spring:
But those aren’t the only signs we’ll see:
No problem. This is probably a bridge. There’s one down there. And I’ve gotten over bridges on closed roads before. Besides, going around means another five or 10 miles. While I’m not concerned about the miles, I am on a schedule, and the sun is growing weary in the western sky, so press on …
OK then, they’ve adequately sealed off the road with heavy machinery, as is the style here. This particular piece of awesome construction power fills the entire road. I’ll just walk my bike around on the shoulder, then, and ease over the old (or new) creek bridge. This is going to be a problem. There’s no road there:
How big of a problem? Can’t jump that distance:
Let’s be honest. I’m not jumping any distance.
The problem became that I had to get from this side to that side. And while getting down to the creek bed from myside wasn’t difficult, getting back up to the road was a challenge. On one side the opposite back was vertical, and covered in underbrush. On the other side it was almost vertical, and covered in pumpkin-sized erosion rocks.
The thing is I usually, for better or worse, come to a conclusion about things very quickly. I sat there on the side of the road for a long few minutes trying to figure this out. I had to get down, over and back up, carrying my bike. I’m as much a cyclocross rider as I am a jumper, which is to say not at all. Ultimately I went up the near-vertical side with large rocks, pulling myself and 17 pounds of aluminum and carbon with me. Suddenly, spandex didn’t seem that cool and cycling shoes didn’t seem that practical.
But I made it. Didn’t hurt myself. Managed to get scratched by a tree limb and got a dusty knee. Slowed me down enough that I ended up racing the sun home, which was not my intention. And I missed the start of the baseball game. But I got in 30 miles. And Auburn beat Texas A&M 4-0 to start SEC play.
Even when the roads are closed you can have a good day.
That was this afternoon, this beautiful, clear, cool afternoon. Not a cloud in the sky, high of 55. Have we discussed how this is March?
Tonight I got a call from Stephen, at around 8:30. He was in town and invited me to his parents’ place to shoot a little pool. So we retired to the basement, my old college friend and his wife, whom I also know from college, and his father. Brooke and Stephen’s two kids were asleep upstairs. We were down among personalized photos of Reagan and antique gas station epherma and Rotary Club paraphernalia and played doubles. Brooke and Stephen won the first game. His dad and I won the next two. We played a game of cutthroat and I won that, too.
But this was the shot of the night. Mr. W. dropped the two in the corner pocket without the 13 even noticing.
Always such a reserved gentleman, it seems he was something of a pool shark in his younger days. You’d never expect it to know him.
As we played Stephen regaled us with impersonations and tales of his in-laws. Before we played he told one of those “Well, I’m old enough now, dad, you can’t do anything about this” story. Stephen is a lawyer, so he used the old statute of limitations line, which made it sound so important, particularly opposite the silly story he told. It involved mud and a lot of walking, like more than a few stories of youth in the South.
So I look at us. I think of all of our other friends, some who came up in conversation tonight and others who didn’t. How did we all get here, sitting over a pesky three ball I can’t knock down, in a life grand as all this?
Life gives you interesting questions on a Thursday night, doesn’t it?
I had a four-and-a-half mile run this morning. I felt it through the first part of the afternoon. And by felt it I mean “Would you mind getting that for me so I don’t have to get up? Or even raise my arms?”
My office has been hot all week — spring almost shows up and they finally figure out the heat in our part of the building. That, combined with a base temperature that stayed around the “Oh yeah, we ran a lot this morning” range, I’ve tried not to move so as to not break into a sweat. This is considered a problem in my world. I’m pretty fortunate, I know. I’m starting to get into the running.
I do not know what is happening.
Had guest speakers in class this afternoon. Jeff Thompson is the executive editor and Madoline Markham is the managing editor of Starnes Publishing, a five community newspaper chain in the Birmingham metropolitan area. They talked about what Starnes does and what their careers held before their current stops. Somehow we got into a metaphor about how journalism is like heroin production. (It was a supply/demand example and turned out to be useful.)
We talked about all of the bad stuff. How hard it is to land the job. The hours you sometimes work. The frustrations that you sometimes encounter. I want the students to have a worts-and-all perspective. Give ’em everything, I always say.
I asked “Short answer, is it worth it?”
So you are listening to a guy who takes on the crusty, hard-bitten, cynical newsman role. You let him go on and on until you think he’s turned off the entire crowd, two classes worth of students, and then he gives a sheepish little grin.
“Yes. Winning is good. Every small victory is a big thing.”
The amount of data collected on the Internet is overwhelming. Facebook alone collects 500 terabytes a day. As of 2013, there are 667 exabytes of data flowing over the Internet annually. And these numbers, as hard as they are to wrap our heads around, are only going to continue to increase — rapidly.
In the journalism sphere, massive data collection has produced data journalist roles. These writers and editors use data collected by third-party agencies to create some of the most viral images on the Web. Anytime The Atlantic publishes a map of the states with the highest poverty levels, they use big data. Anytime The New York Times publishes a quiz about where your accent comes from, they use big data.
These stories and photos get shared hundreds of thousands of times and are driving much needed traffic to publishers. This is about much more than an interesting listsicle. Data journalism is about taking big data concepts, visualizing them for the audience and showing readers who they are — or at least, who the data says they are.
This, as they say, changes a great deal about the active role of journalism. Read on to see how.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, sat in his small office at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva and started work on a new system called the World Wide Web.
On Wednesday, that project, now simply called the web, will celebrate its 25th anniversary, and Mr. Berners-Lee is looking ahead at the next 25.
But this moment comes with a cloud. The creators of the web, including Mr. Berners-Lee, worry that companies and telecommunications outlets could destroy the open nature that made it flourish in their quest to make more money.
This is an important topic, so here’s another excerpt from the same story:
The idea behind net neutrality is simple: The web material we see on our laptops and smartphones, whether from Google or a nondescript blog, should flow freely through the Internet, regardless of its origin or creator. No one gets special treatment. But companies like Verizon hope some people will pay more to get preferential treatment and reach customers quicker.
“The web should be a neutral medium. The openness of the web is really, really important,” Mr. Berners-Lee said. “It’s important for the open markets, for the economy and for democracy.”
He worries that people online have no idea what could be at stake if large telecommunications companies took control of the web and the type of material we now have access to without any blockades or speed barriers.
(U)sers coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors.
[…]
The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do.
Two Alabama men will travel the country opening lost and abandoned safes as part of a new TruTV series called “The Safecrackers”.
The show, which will center around locksmith Phil Crawford and his safe-cracking partner Blaze, will allow viewers to get a look at lost valuables from various eras as the duo tracks down and cracks a range of safes, including giant bank vaults, intricate antique safes, armored vehicles and more.
I hope this is, shall we say, less fake, than the warehouse storage shows.
Medal of Honor recipient Ola Lee Mize dies at 82. The story doesn’t offer an appropriate summary, so I’ll do it the old fashioned way. The son of a sharecropper, Mize would become a member of special forces, serve in Korea and VIetnam. It was in Korea, when he was about 22, that he took part in a fierce battle which would ultimately make him a recipient of the Medal of Honor. His face was supposedly so badly burned that, after the battle, his officers couldn’t even recognize him. He retired a colonel.
M/Sgt. Mize, a member of Company K, distinguished himself by conspicuous gallantry and outstanding courage above and beyond the call of duty in action against the enemy. Company K was committed to the defense of “Outpost Harry”, a strategically valuable position, when the enemy launched a heavy attack. Learning that a comrade on a friendly listening post had been wounded he moved through the intense barrage, accompanied by a medical aid man, and rescued the wounded soldier. On returning to the main position he established an effective defense system and inflicted heavy casualties against attacks from determined enemy assault forces which had penetrated into trenches within the outpost area. During his fearless actions he was blown down by artillery and grenade blasts 3 times but each time he dauntlessly returned to his position, tenaciously fighting and successfully repelling hostile attacks. When enemy onslaughts ceased he took his few men and moved from bunker to bunker, firing through apertures and throwing grenades at the foe, neutralizing their positions. When an enemy soldier stepped out behind a comrade, prepared to fire, M/Sgt. Mize killed him, saving the life of his fellow soldier. After rejoining the platoon, moving from man to man, distributing ammunition, and shouting words of encouragement he observed a friendly machine gun position overrun. He immediately fought his way to the position, killing 10 of the enemy and dispersing the remainder. Fighting back to the command post, and finding several friendly wounded there, he took a position to protect them. Later, securing a radio, he directed friendly artillery fire upon the attacking enemy’s routes of approach. At dawn he helped regroup for a counterattack which successfully drove the enemy from the outpost. M/Sgt. Mize’s valorous conduct and unflinching courage reflect lasting glory upon himself and uphold the noble traditions of the military service.
He is believed to have killed as many as 65 members of the enemy in that one engagement. In his career, he earned five Purple Hearts:
“That terrible night in 1953 in Korea at Outpost Harry was one I would never want to repeat,” he wrote in a foreword to “Uncommon Valor,” a book about Medal of Honor recipients from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Too many good young men . . . gave their lives to take or hold that miserable piece of high ground.”
In conclusion, the embarrassing gentlewoman from Texas:
Serious question:
Who's more dumb, Sheila Jackson Lee or the people who keep voting her into office?
