The Sunday installment that is long on pictures! And sometimes there is even context!
OK. The context is that these pictures are holding serve for Sunday. I pressed the shutter button recently and didn’t have anywhere to put these pictures, but I still wanted to share them. Better than writing about football, which I’ll do below anyway.
This guy ran up on the back porch one day recently. Not sure what he was looking for. Of course I couldn’t get the cat to pay attention. Maybe that’s a good thing, since she wouldn’t have had idea how to react to seeing this:
Last weekend I took this picture of my lovely wife. Behind her you can see the picture of a young man who is trying to wear her number:
Here is a pepper. We got it out of a basket of locally grown veggies lovingly assembled by hand. Now we need to find a recipe that calls for one red bell pepper. Did you know that Christopher Columbus is who we blame for the inaccurate name? Or that this thing is loaded with vitamin C? Or that the test can depend on growing conditions like soil and when it is picked and how it ripens? Wikipedia taught you that:
Breakfast! We love breakfast at the Barbecue House: The secret is the bacon, I think. Yes. The secret is always the bacon.
Cam Newton, when he scores touchdowns in the NFL, gives the ball to kids in the stands. Sometimes it is a Christmas miracle. Today, just another day of a kid wearing an Auburn hat and Carolina teal and getting something great to talk about in school tomorrow. And that’s the only excuse for this color scheme:
We blew a bulb in the kitchen. The Yankee, who’s never been a fan of the style of lights that were in the kitchen, bought some new ones. The box says “natural light.” When they get warm, they are supposed to radiate us with 1080 lumens, which is how lights measure horsepower.
I measure it this way: If I turn on the lights in our kitchen and the lights dim at the Eagles game in Philadelphia, these are plenty bright.
Now we can see everything in the kitchen. So we’ll invest in more 409 …
It has some formatting problems that weren’t there in my submission or the version they returned to double check. No matter. There’s a better, longer version, published here, but, still, Smithsonian.
This is hardly the biggest thing in the world or even the best publication news I’ve had in the last month. But I get to say I’m published on the Smithsonian’s site.
Back in the old days — and I mean about 1996, which is in no way old, or far enough removed to suggest they are the old days — I perfected my dry sarcasm and speed typing on a chatroom site that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. As we have learned is the norm, a bigger company bought the little company. They made changes, ruined the aesthetic and people left. Some of those people stuck together on ICQ. My ICQ number, which I can’t grab at just this moment, was shockingly low. But the friends stuck together, from Maryland and out west and the Deep South and somewhere in London and in Australia.
One by one they all sort of fell away. Life demanded them. They grew bored. They lost their password or their Internet connection. And finally that group was down to just two people. So there was me and this Australian lady. We’d talked for a couple of years by then. Carol was friendly, and liked folk music and all manner of interesting decorative styles. She worked in the government in Canberra and had a big burly husband who sounded hysterical.
We even talked on the phone a few times. We discussed the virtues of the Australian accent in the United States and my accent, which she found charming, in Australia. I was well underway in my broadcast career by then and thinking a lot about sound. Carol figured I could do very well in Australia. I hatched the sort of plan that you never even try to implement — summer in Australia wooing girls with my southern accent and then running from the winter there to have summer at home in the States, wooing girls with a blended Aussie, Southern accent.
She was my mother’s age, almost. So I jokingly called her my Internet mom. Or, mum, being Australian and all. Her parents were English, but she was raised in Australia, so she had a terrific mixture of both sense of humor. She was a sweet lady.
And yesterday she found me on Twitter.
“You remember me!” she said.
It was the biggest, dumbest smile of the day, lasting into the afternoon.
Saw that this is closing.
Sent the picture to The War Eagle Reader. They made a few calls and turned it into a story.
I have claimed DIBS! on the neon sign out front. You. Can’t. Have. It.
Sullivan looks at his career through those relationships he’s cultivated along the way. His Heisman Trophy experience was no different.
Back in those days the announcement came as a halftime feature during the Georgia-Georgia Tech game. Instead of being on the front row in New York, Sullivan was in Auburn.
“We were actually at practice that day because we had Alabama on Saturday. My parents had come down to hear the announcement … Our TV went on the blink so we had to go rent a room at the Heart of Auburn. We watched it on TV just like everybody else,” Sullivan said.
Sullivan, perhaps the last Heisman Trophy winner to stay at the Heart of Auburn, says his room number has been lost to history. There are plenty of clear memories from the night, though.
“After the announcement we went back over to (Beard-Eaves-Memorial) Coliseum and all my teammates, coaches and their families, (Auburn President Dr. Harry) Philpot and Coach Jeff Beard (then the Auburn athletic director) were all there and I was able to share that with them. That was something that I’ll never forget because I know I didn’t win it by myself, they were a part of it.”
Hints that water once flowed on Mars. In every previous instance of water in human history scientists have found life. Does that project out to Mars?
Sadly, Birmingham News staffers depart as paper ceases daily publication. On Monday the new company, Alabama Media Group opens for business. I have friends and colleagues at both. There are plenty of talented and caring people involved. I project, after a slow start, big things.
Today I purchased the 2013 sticker for my car tag. Take that, Mayans.
My DMV experience lasted 33 minutes, which was the longest I’ve ever waited in my two years visiting this particular office. But it is the end of the month.
Usually the post office here takes longer than the DMV. I’m pretty sure I’ve tapped my toe in our post office for longer than 33 minutes.
This was nowhere near my longest DMV experience. I seem to mention the DMV every year. Once, in Bessemer, I read the better part of a book while in line. I seem to recall I took a two-hour lunch break to mutter at the DMV in Homewood one year. The other times I’ve bothered to quantify it have all been four, six, 20 minutes or noted as “painless.” I checked.
I’ve had a big week, coupled with a long few days, where I did too many things and now my shoulder is informing me I regret those decisions. Can’t wait to tell the ortho about it next week.
Suffice it to say, because I’m tired of even writing about it: I’ve figured out it takes precious little to aggravate my collarbone, the muscles in my one shoulder and, when that really gets going, across my back into the other shoulder and up into my neck. Maybe I should do less.
Maybe I should do like these guys:
This is studying on the Samford quad. Hammocks are a big part of the culture here. I’m surprised the administration allows it to continue, but I’m proud they do. I’m also surprised the hammock scenes don’t make their way into more of the promotional literature they send out.
I should write a memo about that …
Nah. I’m taking the rest of the evening off from writing.
Our regular critique of The Crimson was moved to this afternoon. Here is a big stack of newspapers:
We had four pages in color. It was a 12-page paper today. We went through every one of those issues, just to see if we could find the typos in the same places in each copy. We did.
(Find the same errors. We did not go through every issue. We are thorough, but we have other responsibilities, too.)
And now, a few pictures. This is meant to reflect a full day of newspaper topics, email, meetings, text messages, library time and cleaning my office and is in no way designed to get us over 100 photos for the month. That is purely a happy coincidence.
This is the Davis Library at Samford. I visit there from time to time to enjoy the plush leather seats and the many books they have. And also access to scholarly topics. Yesterday I read through about 30 papers in here:
Here’s a side view. Every so often I catch the perfect moment of the afternoon. The sun is at this precise moment realizing it is no longer high and suddenly sinks far more rapidly. But first it sets that window on fire:
And, just a moment or two later, now looking to the west, here is the view of Hodges Chapel, with vinyl canopies going up for some Friday function:
Samford does have a beautiful campus. I took these shots while playing with Picle. Audio! Video! On the iPhone! Together! With no editing-in-post! Drag and drop! And then I learned Picle doesn’t let you embed. That would be an oversight, guys. Embedding is important.
Anyway, here are a few quad shots taken while the carillon was playing the afternoon concert.
Lucky to go to work there.
Video of the carillon? Sure. I shot this in April:
Steve Knight, an amazing man, is the carillonneur.
A new photo found its way onto my Tumblr. And, of course, plenty more ramblings on Twitter.
Did you know that the history of video has recently been re-written?
British photographer Edward Raymond Turner patented color motion picture film in 1899, but the credit for the first fully functional system went to George Albert Smith’s Kinemacolor in 1906. Researchers at the National Media Museum recently discovered that Turner had in fact shot a few rolls of color film that were languishing in the museum’s archives and set out to see if they worked.
Edward Raymond Turner had no idea in 1899 that you would see this:
From the first parrot, the first people shot in color, to the biggest blockbuster of 2012, re-imagined by the people at Honest Trailers:
A friend had this to say about that trailer:
OK, as a Marvel pseudo-expert, allow me to punch some holes in this “honest” trailer. First, Bruce Banner has ALWAYS been able to turn into the Hulk, just not the other way around. He spends most of his life trying NOT to turn into the Hulk. If you want misunderstood character, see Edward Norton’s Hulk. Anger is what sets off the Hulk, not heart rate. However, in the very first Hulk comic, he changed whenever it turned night. Back stories change. But this one got it right.
Second, every true comic fan knows who Thanos is. If you don’t know who Thanos is, then you aren’t a fan, you are someone who went to see a movie. And that’s fine. But don’t hate because you like superheroes with S’s and bats on their chest so you know who to root for.
Third, Loki didn’t die at the end of Thor, he just let go. He’s a god. He’s immortal. He also has inter-dimensional teleportation capability, see character back story.
And that’s what happens when the comic book set chimes in.
Story about news of the day: Alex Green is the editor of the student newspaper at Bryan College in Dayton, Tenn. One of his professors, he learned, was leaving school. Green started looking into into the public records and learned the professor was facing of “having attempted to meet with a minor child” at a gas station. He wrote a story. School president Dr. Stephen Livesay ordered it killed.
All of that to get you to the latest, from Jim Romenesko:
This morning I talked to Bryan College Triangle adviser John Carpenter and asked: Are you aware that Alex Green called and asked me to remove the post?
The adviser said he was.
Did you or someone else at the college tell him to make that call? I asked.
“I can’t comment on that,” Carpenter said.
OK, that answers that question, I thought. (Someone else I talked to this morning believes the editor “has been guilted” by the college president to believe he did something wrong by publishing a story about a professor charged with trying to hook up with a minor. Green hasn’t returned a message that I left this morning.)
And that, friends, is a president big timing a student. (For even more, here are notes from a meeting the president had in the aftermath. He would not allow that meeting to be recorded because he can flex that particular puny muscle.)
Yes sir. For all sorts of reasons. First, while The Triangle is a class project, and thus under the purview of the administration, Green published this of his own accord after you shut him down. Second, you overreached in your reaction with regard to the intrepid young report. Third, from the university’s PR perspective you’ve now made this much bigger for you than it had to be.
Sure, this is a private school, and we can talk all about the case law. But there should be more to the ethical and moral leadership of students than the case law. The good folks at Bryan, as Dr. Livesay said tried “doing the right thing to protect the privacy of a man charged, but not convicted, of a crime” briefly forgot about their other obligation. Seems that everything is being righted now.
Quick links: When the Tuscaloosa News won their Pulitzer last year for tornado coverage, an important part of that was how they used Twitter. But don’t tell the Associated Press, which is vowing to not break news on social media.
