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A day in the multimedia life, in pictures

This was my day, in four pictures.

The Samford Crimson launched a new look this week for the last quarter of their academic year’s publication run. Looks pretty sharp:

Also there’s a new Target now open just down the street.

Here are two more quick shot of the inside layout. They worked hard, had extra meetings, were excited and it shows. This section is designed by our Society of Professional Journalists award-winner features editor Megan Thomspon:

The sports section is designed by SEJC award winner and sports editor Clayton Hurdle

I tinkered with that page in InDesign last night after they’d finished it. It is solid.

I left a meeting discussing the Crimson to drive over to a television station. CBS 42’s Bill Payer was giving my class a tour. Here he is showing off their mobile production unit:

They built that from the ground up two years ago. They didn’t copy anyone, just built what they thought they needed. They got everything right, except they forgot a kitchen and restroom. Payer tells me that the station could burn down around them and they could go on the air from this truck and cover the news.

Being at CBS meant a chance to see the always welcoming Mark Prater. We sat in the studio and pitched around ideas while, downstairs in the studio, the students were hearing a bit of breaking news. Seems some officers were out serving a warrant on a woman and she sliced them up with a box cutter.

Three officers were taken to the hospital for treatment. Another was treated on the scene. Samford grad Kaitlin McCulley reports:

And so what started out as serving a robbery warrant will now likely become four counts of attempted murder.

There was also a big fire leading the news cast, and as I told the news director, the days I really miss it are the days when I am watching a newsroom buzz. He invited me to join in, but I figured they had it covered. Kaitlin was reporting, after all.

books / photo / weekend — Comments Off
3
Mar 13

Catching up

It is time for another installment of Catching up, the weekly post that allows extra photos to finally go some place. WordPress tells me this is the 100th installment of Catching up. Not sure what to make of that.

The guys in Section 111 that heckle the opposing team gave me a shirt this weekend. I made them laugh with a few witticisms of my own. Didn’t have the heart to tell them we were doing this years, and years before they showed up. But that’s a nice shirt, and I subscribe to their philosophy on how to confuse and amuse the poor players from the other team. The 111 guys definitely have their moments, and now I get to pretend to be like them. Here’s the front and back:

She appears to be studying the computer screen intently:

Started a new book tonight. I’ve finished two others recently, and I’ll try to mention them here tomorrow. But this is from Marshall Frady’s Southerners: A Journalist’s Odyssey. Something about this book might make you rethink the South, or journalism, or both. I don’t know for sure yet, but that’s the vibe I got early on. Here’s an early passage on Huey Long and George Wallace.

Even before that I was making a mental list of who should read this collection of essays. I bought this book, published in 1980, off Amazon in the fall of 2011 for $4.25 (as a library book sale, apparently) and it has been sitting patiently in my To Read bookcase ever since. Now it seems you can’t pick this up anywhere online for less than $76. So I did OK.

Here’s the review on Amazon: “You feel the thing he’s writing about, you understand it, you see it, you want more – this is everything writing can do.”

Well, something to look forward to then.

Auburn / baseball / iPhone / photo / video — Comments Off
2
Mar 13

It came a blizzard of hyperbolic proportions

So it is cold. Overcast. It flurried all morning. The flurries were supposed to stay well north, but no, here they are in my yard.

We have baseball tickets. I’m still coughing a bit and fighting my sinuses, but I slept some last night and generally feeling a bit better. This is the beginning of feeling better, anyway. In a few more days I’ll be tip top.

Today, though, there is baseball. And snow flurries. Deep South in March, baseball and snow.

So I’m wearing thermals and a sweatshirt and a parka — I’m wearing my honest, actual parka — and we carry two blankets and hats and gloves into the stadium. I managed to stay warm for about seven innings. I imagine the only person that was really warm was Aubie:

Even still, he had to work to keep up his body heat. Here he’s showing us a new dance:

It flurries for the first four innings and the last two innings. Nothing sticks, but for a brief time it was really coming down. It was all very hysterical. And I couldn’t feel my feet after a while.

Auburn won 14-7. We got snowed on. The guys from Eastern Illinois, who no doubt booked this southeastern swing to avoid a few days of winter, were probably less than pleased about all of that.

We got home and were just starting to prepare ingredients for dinner when we got a text invitation to join our friends Adam and Jessa at a Mexican restaurant. We closed the joint down. We should do this every week.

Auburn / Friday / iPhone / photo — Comments Off
1
Mar 13

Auburn hosts Maryland gymnasts

Think Pink! Flip for the cure!

I’m not feeling any better, really. Mostly because I can’t sleep, I think. I wake myself up coughing and then 30 minutes later I wake up looking for handkerchiefs. So, this evening, it was time for the gymnastics meet and The Yankee said “Do you even want to go?”

Since it is just the sinuses I can not-breathe there as well as I can here. And, besides, this was the big fundraiser event.

Also, we had to see if Auburn could score 196+ for the sixth time in a row. They did. That’s a program record and even if you know as little about gymnastics as I do, it is an impressive record.

Even more impressive, the gymnast who won her fourth all-around of the season is only a freshman. The ladies are ranked 11th, the highest they’ve been in four years. They set a program-record high score just last week. There’s a big future ahead for this program.

There are video highlights in that link. I’d share them here, but the athletic department has chosen not to write an embed code for them.

We had pizza tonight, which was not as good as breakfast was this morning. This has been a strange little illness when it comes to food. I’ve maintained my appetite, but I’ve found nothing especially interesting to eat all week, except for breakfast this morning. I’d been looking forward to that for days. And it was delicious.

Now I’m going to see if I can break my streak of two consecutive nights of tossing and turning.

Happy weekend!

iPhone / movies / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off
28
Feb 13

Day four of sick watch

I’ll eat this orange, I thought to myself, and maybe that will help.

So, champion orange peeler that I am, I struggled with that for a few minutes at the end of my day in the office. Vitamin C! I feel better just smelling it! This was a great idea! I exclaimed in my head.

(There are exclamation points in there.)

By the time I got home I had a mild fever.

Thanks, orange.

So more sinus medication, now some Nyquil and a Costco-sized handful of cough drops are the order of the day.

I saw a terrible accident on the freeway. One killed and four hurt. Backed up traffic for four miles the other direction. Everything was in the median and it looked gnarly, perhaps one of the more violent rear-end accidents you might see:

I found the coolest story on al.com today, a high schooler is building prosthetics out of old bikes, for about $25. Here’s a little rewrite I did. I just love that he was feeling lazy and bored one Saturday and dreamed this up. Of course this kid has had more than a dozen physics classes, so his idea of bored might be relative.

And, finally, the existential dilemma of our time: Rocky and Rocky II are playing opposite one another. Now what? Do I fear Apollo Creed or having a grudging respect? Then Rocky V came on, too. What are the movie channels trying to do to me?

How the franchise could have ended: