Welcome to the weekly post of place-holding photographs. Usually this is where unloved snapshots from the rest of the week come to live. This week, however, it is taking on an autumnal theme. Enjoy:
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1
Nov 13
Broke 4,000 miles
I call this one “Where I’ve been, where I am and where I’m going.” I broke 4,000 miles on my bike this afternoon — not all at once, of course. It took far too long, actually. Took a few pictures, including the odometer on the Cateye. Here’s to the next thousand miles:
I got honked at today. I was doing about 26 miles per hour at the time. I’m pretty sure the full framed gentleman in his truck has never done that under his own power. But I won’t judge. Sometimes I pass trucks. Sometimes the guy inside hurls a slur. It all works out. The late afternoon and early evening was beautiful and life is grand.
That was a 30 mile ride which is, I’m embarrassed to say, the longest ride I’ve had since August. Felt like it, too. Have to ride more.
Things to read …
This is a long — but vitally important — one. And also an attractive example of modern web design. The Guardian offers NSA files decoded: What the revelations mean for you
Coolest story of the day: San Francisco Will Become Gotham City For One Day To Make A 5-Year-Old Boy’s Wish To Be Batman Come True
And since I talked about foliage yesterday … this was one of the better parts of the scenery today:
The clocks move back this weekend. Fall is here. I’d hope for more warm weather, but that is beautiful.
31
Oct 13
The non-Halloween post
The neighboring yard has a red maple. Shot this this evening:
Had the opportunity to ride a few hills before it got dark today. It was misting and sprinkling a bit, a few hours before the meteorologists said it should. Perhaps this kept away the early trick-or-treaters. I didn’t see any while I was riding. I was the only person in a costume, a sorry cyclist huffing up little hills. The trick was on me.
Watched Oz the Great and Powerful, where James Franco was dressed up as an actor.
This explains that:
Because Time Warner owns the rights to iconic elements of the 1939 MGM film, including the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland, Disney was unable to use them nor any character likenesses from that particular film. This extended to the green of the Wicked Witch’s skin, for which Disney used what its legal department considered a sufficiently different shade called “theostein” (a portmanteau of “Theodora” and “Frankenstein”). The studio could not, however, use the signature chin mole of Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West.
It was a fine movie. You can see the 3D elements, even on your TV, which is to say the many obligatory things that are rushing out of the screen to “immerse” you into the film. The poster probably read “Some of the effects are better than others.” It was a kids’ film, and it plays that way. But it was humorous if you’re in a light mood, and Franco inhabited the role, as they might say. He’s laughing all the way to the bank.
You know, there are many adaptations of the Oz universe, but this one makes less sense than most. Some could exist in their own universe, like The Wiz, for example. Others, like the Muppets and animated versions, were just cashing in with other franchises or audiences. Great and Powerful, though, has allusions to the popular 1939 Judy Garland version (which was not the first Oz on screen) despite a different company owning the rights, as discussed above. So if you assume this one is referring to the Judy Garland-universe of Oz then it is something of a prequel. A prequel of her concussion-induced dreams about a place and people that didn’t exist.
OR DID THEY?
You’d think, more than 80 years on, we’d have some answer to that question.
And so it begins: the annual Parade of Sullen Ingratitude.
— James Lileks (@Lileks) October 31, 2013
We didn’t do Halloween tonight. Singlehandedly we are responsible for the poor candy sales this year.
It is a good neighborhood, though, none of the little ghouls and princesses had to go without. Kids have their parents drive from the next town over to case this subdivision. Apparently all of the good candy comes from our nearby grocery store.
So we left off the lights and sat in the back of the house, hiding from the children, of whom we were not scared.
After an appropriate amount of time I went out to pick up some dinner at the Chinese restaurant of choice. The owner knows us by name now.
When I returned home there was a clutch — Or was it a gaggle? The costumes make it hard to tell. — patrolling down the street. I swept into the garage before the door was all the way up the rails. Waited until the kids were out of sight before I turned on the lights in the kitchen.
We’re not scared of those kids.
I got my fill of the costumed little ones on Facebook. This is, for my money, the best day of the year on that site. One guy has a boy and a girl. He posted their front door shot and their Halloween conversation.
“What do you want to dress up as for Halloween?”
“A fairy princess butterfly! … (Pause for dramatic effect.) And he could be a dead butterfly!”
So, he concluded, in the spirit of keeping his son alive, he went as a miniature John Wayne.
Another lady has two little boys, who dressed as Luke and Yoda — green knit cap with great ears, felt feet already rolling up on his shoes. The youngest said his “lightsaver” was the best part.
Now I feel like I have to go pick up candy to go give those children. But I saw the pictures. They cleaned up.
30
Oct 13
Signs of autumn: The absence of summer
It wasn’t fall today. It was 75 and clear, which means it wasn’t summer, so it may as well be autumn. The maple in the front yard, already giving up the fight, right in the heart of the tree.
The maples are always the first to quit, but they sometimes hang on a bit longer than some of the others in the yard. In the front yard we have this maple that goes yellow and a towering elm that flares yellow before burning out as a dry orange. In the backyard there is a southern red oak, a white oak and a few pin oaks — the oaks the rest of the oaks would disown if they had hardwood lawyers — another maple that turns yellow and a dogwood that will flame out as a defiant red any day now.
If you could get all of those in one spot they’d surely be a beautiful collection.
Had this in the office today:
I’m not a big pumpkin spice fan, but if you like pumpkin at all, you should try the Hersey’s Kisses. Two was plenty for me, so no need to share. But you’ll probably want to keep them all for yourself.
Things to read …
Or watch. The BBC now has a hexacopter. They have one more copter than I do. Maybe one day I’ll catch up. But check out those shots. (I’d embed it, but the Beeb’s code is ridiculous.)
I was reading last night, in Rick Atkinson’s book, about Lt. Ralph Kerley at Mortain. He only appeared briefly, but it was enough to make me look him up. Whatever happened to that guy? The Internet suggests he mustered out a lieutenant colonel and died in his native Texas in 1967.
He also shows up in this column by The Oregonian’s Steve Duin, which should really change your opinion of the deceased author/historian Stephen Ambrose:
Weiss also was furious that Ambrose had described his commanding officer, Lt. Ralph Kerley, as — after four days and nights of fighting off the Germans — “exhausted, discombobulated, on the edge of breaking.”
Not true, Weiss said: “To the dishonor of the man. Kerley was one of the coolest, most fearless men I’ve ever seen. The way (Ambrose) footnoted that looks as if he got the material from me. If in that little bit of material he took from my book he created that kind of fiction, how many other times has that been done?”
Bob Weiss was a Portland, Ore. lawyer who served under Kerley. Weiss took exception to the Ambrose depiction and then had a nasty bit of correspondence with Ambrose over some other questions of attribution. But, mostly, Weiss was worried about the way Kerley showed up in Citizen Soldiers — which also sits on my shelf, though today I’m a bit reluctant about that.
Kerley earned the Croix de Guerre, Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. I was at Mortain for the exact same amount of time Ambrose was, which is to say not at all, which is also to say six days less than Weiss, Kerley and the 120th Infantry Regiment of the 30th Infantry Division. I just read the Ambrose passage again … given his history let’s just call it poorly-written narrative.
Anyway, local veterans are recalling their experiences in the military:
“I flew a B-25. That’s why I’m here,” Buford Robinson said, smiling. “I flew 43 missions.”
From 1944 to 1946, Robinson served as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. He fought in the Pacific Theater of the war and participated in the rescue of 500 American POWs at Camp Cabanatuan in the Philippines.
Thom Gossom, the first African-American walk on at Auburn and the first African-American athlete to graduate from the university, got a bit of publicity today. He’s an actor today (and author), charming and engaging and wholly approachable. Here’s a story he told at homecoming a few years ago:
Quick hits:
ObamaCare screw up sends callers to cupcake shop
From Buzzfeed: Things That Took Less Time Than HealthCare.gov
How the NSA is infiltrating private networks
Insurance Insiders ‘Fear Retribution’ from WH Amid Pressure to ‘Keep Quiet’ About Obamacare
And there are two new things at the Tumblr site I forgot to mention yesterday, here and here.
Allie? She’s right here:
28
Oct 13
No pigs were harmed in this post; Ritz crackers damaged
Doctor’s appointment first thing. You arrive precisely at 8 a.m., you are seen right away. Didn’t even have the opportunity to get settled in the waiting room. Or in the examination room. Everything was … unsettled, then.
No. The doctor is a fine fellow, the very personification of sincerity. Firm hand, assuring tone, appropriate levels of sincere concern. We were in and out in no time. All things are proceeding accordingly, nothing to be concerned or alarmed about. All blue skies from here, as they say.
So the lesson is be the first appointment of the day, or you’re waiting for 90 minutes.
A grocery store run for provisions. This, too, is the time of day to be there. I found the crackers. Do you know how many varieties of Ritz crackers there are available to you today? I’ll document this on the next visit, as I was in a bit of a rush today, but there are more non-Ritz flavored Ritz crackers than there are Ritz crackers now. I just want a few sleeves of Ritz-flavored Ritz crackers.
That’s a problem of the 21st century, if ever there was one.
So while that was bemusing, the bread choices were underwhelming. We are a two-brand household. If it is on sale we get the Arnold bread, but it was not on the shelves and the buy-one-get-one signs were not on display. So I turned to the Nature’s Own, which has that comforting title and those marvelous symbols of Midwestern enterprise: wheat and a sugar jar. One loaf of that, one box of crackers, one box of Ibuprofen and (success!) I found English Teatime. Which means I should back up.
In the last half of the summer I cut way back on my tea intake. It turns out I can drink a lot of tea. So we’ve made exactly one large pitcher in the house since July. However, we’re enjoying more and more hot teas. We have an entire shelf in a cabinet stuff with packets we’ve purchased or picked up or been given over time. So there is a lot of sampling going on. Lately I’ve settled on three favorites (because I drink a lot of tea). The problem being I ran out of the preferred variety. I’d visited the giant box store with no luck, but now, at Publix, where shopping is a pleasure, I found the English Teatime again. So I bought a box today.
I’m trying to arrange the part of the day I would drink these in: English Breakfast, Mint and English Teatime. The mint is obviously an after-dinner treat. The Teatime varieties that I’ve had have, thus far, seemed strong than the Breakfast stuff. Though there are people who disagree. All of those reviews came from 1,367 reviews of the Bigelow brand on Amazon. Of those, 15 mentioned Teatime. If there’s one thing we’ve come to love, it is sharing our sometimes-insightful opinions with others. Here are a few more reviews. The downside, of course, being you don’t know what is going on with these folks, and how do you address the reviews that diametrically oppose one another? Of course the lay review is sometimes better than a professional effort, which can seem officious for tea.
Even better are the reviews on Steepster. There are some people in that community who are very casual with their reflections, and others who are trying a bit too hard. (Simply put, did you like it? Was it strong or weak? What was the flavor like? Let’s move on.) Some of them, however, offer incredible bits of biography into the things they write. Seule771, who has commented there 587 times, and presumably mostly about tea, writes:
This tea belongs to my mother-in-law yet, I help myself to a cup of this tea every now and again, as she takes notice of the tea bags missing. I take one tea bag and put it in my cup adding the boiled water to it. Tea colors right away to a pinkish dew, not dark red but more like mahogany; rose-wood red and smells very robust as fine black teas tend to. When sipping of the tea it is malty with creamy texture. This is a fine cup of tea and I don’t need to add a thing to it.
In all, this tea has a lovely color and aroma of a freshly brewed cup of tea; robust in texture and body with an invigorating aroma to waken or refresh one’s mid-day drawling of sobering thoughts. This is an ideal cup of tea for all occasions.
Makes you wonder what the mother-in-law thinks of the tea, and tea theft in general.
Steepster invites you to “dive into the universe of tea.” But they still don’t offer a simple chart that has “Ease into a restive night” on one end, “Tea for brunches sanguine or sublime” in the middle and “Pulls your taste buds through your eyelids with a domineering efficacy that will remind you of countries lax on human rights policies” on the other end.
This is a tea chart we could all use.
But I digress. Purchasing crackers, bread, Ibuprofen and tea I wondered what the cashier thinks when you checkout by the handful. No one ever gives a consideration to the idea that he or she is judging you when you have a great big cart full of groceries. “Restocking the shelves at home. Big weekend ahead, no doubt,” is about all that the unimaginative cashier could have for that. But when you bring up four items, you get judged, pal. “This guy is having cracker sandwiches. Guess he never heard of Atkins.” And from there that imagination really kicks in.
The great mystery of the day was also found at Publix, where the staff is under strict order to be conversant with everyone that it could be said made plausible eye contact. I guess they have meetings after hours and watch the camera footage. “Jenkins, you ignored two ladies on the canned veggies aisle. One more of those and you’re gone!”
An assistant manager, I saw him just enough to catch that part of his tag, did the standard hello and how are you today. He was walking one way and I was walking the other. By the time I’d given the expected reply he was already ticking off inventory on the cake aisle. Hard to see the point.
Class today featured profile features and editing and the great question “How do I find out about a person’s warts?” One student searched and searched and finally pronounced that Josh Groban, in fact, has no warts. He is, it was revealed, perfect in every way. So there you have it: Jesus and Josh Groban.
She did find a Groban wart — which sounds like an unfortunate looking thing that can be removed in an easy outpatient procedure — but then later conveniently discarded it. The previous narrative was better.
Also, in the class I discovered a book on the Three Little Pigs. This edition was a bit more detailed than I remembered.
It seemed the momma pig pushed them out. The first two got by on begging and convincing naive farmers to gimme gimme. Alas, the most jubilantly drawn wolf possible blew down their homes of straw and sticks. The pigs disappeared just in time, never to be seen again. (One had a racquetball tournament, the other a drinking problem.) The third pig won some bricks in a radio station contest — or stuck up a brick mason, I forget — and built Fortress Porcine. It could not be defeated without air superiority, of which the wolf had none.
So the wolf went the other direction, guile. There are turnips nearby, let’s go get them together. This pig, smart enough to take out a loan from Freddie Mac to obtain bricks and mortar, went early and enjoyed the turnips. So tomorrow, the wolf said, let’s try this apple orchard. The wolf, wise to the pig’s game yesterday, also arrived early, but not earlier enough. An hour earlier still, because this pig has insomnia, the pig was up a tree. Never mind how that pig got there. He escaped by the ancient art of distraction and Canidae ADHD.
So the wolf later said, hey, I know this fair, only we have to go there at 3 a.m. The pig, desperate to watch another installment of Adam Levine on a late night Proactive infomercial, reluctantly agreed. But, again he went early. And, again, the wolf almost caught him, but the pig, remembering his ancient Greek — remember, this is the big that baked his own bricks and watches television and scales trees — hid in a butter churn and rolled home right past the antagonist. Porcum ex machina, if you will.
These are the geekiest jokes I’ve made in some time, no?
Recruiting calls into the evening. You leave a lot of messages, you slow down to say your phone number so it can be written down. You always are a little concerned that you might have transposed a few digits.
Occasionally they call you back. Every so often you catch a student at home and they are very excited about the prospect of talking to you. You get to tell this young person all of the cool things that are going on in your department. You mention the neat places students intern and the awesome jobs they get one day.
You forget entirely that, for some reason, there was a Three Little Pigs book in the classroom today.
Then a bite to eat and reading and writing this and doing other things that I couldn’t make into a silly play on words. It is a fine life.
Things to read …
This story has the best quote about a silly adventure imaginable. People wobbled but the record didn’t go down:
“Everything that could go wrong went wrong between rehearsal and execution,” she said at halftime. “We had some folks to come late, we had microphone problems, we had sound and speaker problems, we had some timing problems. But it does not mean we’re going to give up.”
Not to worry, Gene Hallman, president of the Alabama Sports Foundation, tells us: “The Mayor will make sure the PA works properly next year.”
This is a great relief to everyone, except people holding the current Wobble record, one assumes. I’m uncertain what that number is, or if Guinness recognizes it. None of the stories I’ve read so far have addressed that angle.
Here’s one of those obvious stories that only clicks when it is actually written, and it has given rise to a terrific expression. The Information-Gathering Paradox:
The Internet industry, having nudged consumers to share heaps of information about themselves, has built a trove of personal data for government agencies to mine — erecting, perhaps unintentionally, what Alessandro Acquisti, a Carnegie Mellon University behavioral economist, calls “the de facto infrastructure of surveillance.”
This is interesting. There was an unfortunate bomb threat at Central York (Penn.) High School recently, but … Central York High School journalists tweeted live updates about the bomb threat:
Students turn to social media when something happens, and Fuhrman and Kristen Shipley, editor-in-chief of On the Prowl, the school’s entertainment magazine, began tweeting the news through @CYHSProwler.
They reported as the students moved from the football stadium to the baseball field and finally to the soccer field. They reminded everyone to remain calm. They informed students about when they could return to the school building to retrieve their belongings.
The student journalists also tweeted pictures from the scene and interacted with those on Twitter. They responded to questions, saying they would seek answers if they didn’t know.
Sounds like they handled it like pros.
Meanwhile, Old Meets New: Newspapers Take to Instagram:
Newspapers haven’t flocked to Instagram the way they have to Facebook and Twitter. Which makes sense. Instagram, unlike the other platforms, can’t drive people back to the site because the photo-sharing platform doesn’t embed live links. Also, they can forget about monetizing.
Still, some papers that do real journalism (and are looking to attract real readers) are on the photo sharing site, if only to have another venue to showcase their occasionally stellar photography – or, at the very least, remind the digital kids that they still exist.
What about that other shoe? Some health insurance gets pricier as Obamacare rolls out:
Now Harris, a self-employed lawyer, must shop for replacement insurance. The cheapest plan she has found will cost her $238 a month. She and her husband don’t qualify for federal premium subsidies because they earn too much money, about $80,000 a year combined.
“It doesn’t seem right to make the middle class pay so much more in order to give health insurance to everybody else,” said Harris, who is three months pregnant. “This increase is simply not affordable.”
[…]
Pam Kehaly, president of Anthem Blue Cross in California, said she received a recent letter from a young woman complaining about a 50% rate hike related to the healthcare law.
“She said, ‘I was all for Obamacare until I found out I was paying for it,'” Kehaly said.
The Los Angeles Times goes on to note that some of those who will actually benefit will do so because “the federal government picks up much of the tab” to demonstrate they couldn’t connect a straight line with a ruler and a dotted path.
Quick hits:
Census Bureau: Means-Tested Gov’t Benefit Recipients Outnumber Full-Time Year-Round Workers
America’s New Lost Generation, in One Map
Army Fleet Service at Fort Rucker to lay off 300 workers by year’s end
Owing to the wise decisions of the good people at News 4 San Antonio I could not embed the video from that last story. That’s a beautiful little girl though. Here’s her homepage. That’s two leukemia stories I’ve seen in six days. Here’s the National Marrow Donor Program site, which explains the donation process and lists all of the drives going on around you.
