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football / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
13
Dec 11

Sick, making this a photo day 2

I feel better. I feel approximately 45 percent better. That’s not to say I am operating at 45 percent. I’m running at about 17 percent right now. That’s how bad yesterday was.

So Thursday night I felt it coming along. The cold steel bolt in the bottom of my throat, the watery eyes, something was coming up. So I started taking pills.

Kept it up through Friday, but felt OK through most of Saturday. Popped a fever Saturday night just before we got back to the hotel after the game. That fever broke overnight, though. Sunday I felt really good.

And then yesterday when I could feel the ancient indians pulling the soul from my body. Sinuses. Throat. Coughing. Congestion. Periodic minor fevers. I had all of that and more, really it was everything but the flu.

Today the sinuses are much closer to normal. I’m willing to swallow at least once an hour now, so that’s some improvement. I am still fighting off mild fevers, but doing so with ease. The coughing is killing me. I haven’t moved around very much.

And so there’s another picture to take our minds off of it.

This was on display at the USAA tent at the Army-Navy game. This football is from the 1945 China Bowl, played in Shanghai, some 13 hours before the Army-Navy game was played back home. But you have to change your thinking about the Army-Navy game from now to then. In 1945 Army was on their way to a national championship. Navy was a one-loss team and would finish second in the nation. This was at the height of their powers when it came to football respect.

Anyway, this was also 1945. The war was just over. This game was played by a bunch of Army soldiers against sailors of the line. The Navy won. This football was signed by all the members of that team and sent back home. Today it is on display for pictures like this.

But look at that date: Dec. 1, 1945. Who, four years earlier, could have pictured themselves in China?

Monday / photo — Comments Off
12
Dec 11

Sick, making this a photo day

I’ve been struggling to describe how it felt to wake up this morning, where I communicated with gestures and grimaces for the better part of my first waking hour because the idea of talking hurt. Also, I was trying in vain to avoid the inevitable ancestry-cursing activity of swallowing.

I’m not sure how to express it, other than to say that if Death had a next door neighbor, and that Death thought that neighbor needed to lighten up just a bit, I might have understood how the neighbor felt.

Things got a bit better through the day, but only a bit.

So, anyway, here’s a picture to hold us over for today:

That’s the USS Torsk, which is on display as a museum ship at Baltimore’s inner harbor. She was called the Galloping Ghost of the Japanese Ghost, and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Torsk is important because she torpedoed the last enemy ship sunk by the U.S. Navy in World War II.

football / photo / weekend — Comments Off
11
Dec 11

Catching up

The Army Navy edition. We’ve spent the day traveling back home, and so here is as good a place as any to post a few pictures from our big day at the game.

First, here’s a panorama of the field during the march on by the cadets of West Point. Click to embiggen:

Teaching them young with the lightweight .50-caliber machine gun:

Marine One comes in for a landing with the president and vice president:

The traditional “exchanging of prisoners” in the pre-game. The cadets and midshipmen had spent the semester with their opposite academy as exchange students.

Navy’s Kriss Proctor, a prototypical option quarterback, scores the first of his two touchdowns of the day to give Navy their first lead. Proctor’s mother didn’t want him to go to the Naval Academy at first. Her father had spent 18 months as a German POW during World War II. He talked her into it, sat for a few years behind one of the best quarterbacks in modern Navy history and here is now:

Army quarterback TRENT STEELMAN (the Internet requires his name to be spelled this way options to Raymond Maples.

Maples is the first member of his family to go to college. His bio says he’s the first person from his high school to attend West Point.

Steelman’s dad lettered in football at Appalachian State University, his mother has run dozens of marathons and his sister lettered in soccer at Wofford College. Jocks. Also, one of his grandfathers served in the Air Force during World War II, he had an uncle in the Army during the first Gulf War. A great uncle was an interpreter at Nurenberg Trials during World War II in Germany. West Point offers incredibly rich bios.

My favorite player on this Navy team, diving into the end zone. Alexander Teich is a fullback, but he’s smaller than I am. He plays fullback the right way, though, and was a lot of fun to watch run. Football tough, the senior is hoping to join the Navy SEALS after graduation.

And now a few crowd shots:

“Nine dollars for a beer?” asked one happily annoyed fan. “Is there a discount for veterans?”

The vendor could only say “It ain’t me, blame Daniel Synder.”

Daniel Snyder, owner of the Redskins and this park and blamed for most everything else around Washington sports, can take the heat.

Malcolm Brown scores for Army, keeping the Cadets in the game:

And now, more fans:

adventures / Friday / iPhone / photo / video — Comments Off
9
Dec 11

Baltimore

We are in Baltimore. Or one of the suburbs. It is hard to keep all of this straight.

We visited the National Aquarium in the inner harbor this evening. Here’s some video I shot of some of their big attractions:

And a few pictures. Fair warning: there is a photo of a snake a little further down the page.

I sat next to the gentleman on the right on the plane ride up. He’s a graduate of the naval academy. We’ve read the same books. He told me of a time when he was stationed in Panama and reading the top secret dossiers on Manuel Noriega and Fidel Castro. It was amazing, he said, how much information that had been collected over the years.

The guy he’s talking to here, on the airport shuttle, is a graduate of West Point. He ran track at the military academy. They compared class rings and duty stations.

Frog! (Remember, there’s a snake coming up, right after this.)

This is a tree boa. They are non-venomous and can grow up to six feet in length.

Megalodon!

family / history / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Dec 11

Reload early, reload often

More grading. All day, it seems.

This is downtown Homewood, late in the evening. Had dinner on the southside with a college buddy. This was part of the drive afterward:

Normally this road isn’t so empty, but Homewood rolls up the sidewalks by 9 p.m., even during the Christmas season.

A wide version of this is now one of the rotating footers at the bottom of this page. There are now 17 of those. The bottom of the page has to catch up, though. There are 38 images in the header. Reload often!

More grading tomorrow, and the last class of the semester.

Pearl Harbor links. One of my uncles, if I am remembering this story correctly, was at Pearl Harbor soon after the attacks. This is him, a few years ago:

Here’s a story from yesterday about some young local boys who rotated through there in 1943 on their way to the Pacific front.

Every now and then I tell a story about something like this, because it astounds me that a lot of these people were my students age. Like these kids, who happened to be in Hawai’i to play football when the Japanese flew in. That’s a great read. And it is hard to imagine those could be my students.

Historic Page Ones.