The post where pictures that didn’t make it here or elsewhere on the site in the past week finally make a quiet appearance. First a panorama. It was at this intersection that I stopped on my bike to stretch a little while waiting out the end of Party in the USA.* Click to embiggen.
The one over-achieving blade of grass in the backyard. Notice the little hairs.
Chevy on a trailer, moving down the interstate. Nice looking body, and the perfect paint job. I don’t know the model of trucks, but if this isn’t from the 1950s you are certainly supposed to assume so with this scheme. Back when Chevrolet was still private, and Ford was still working to rehabilitate their image. A half-century sure does change a lot, doesn’t it?
My grandmother’s new puppy. She sleeps awkwardly. But then most of us do.
She’s an attentive little thing.
We are a glittery state. This was one of those gas pump regulation stickers, of course. It has been pulled for another one which is about six months overdue.
Tennis shoes in the sunset. Is there anything more sad than that? Besides more beat up sneakers, I mean.
*I nod my head like “Yeah,” but I do not move my hips like “Yeah.”
To celebrate the kickoff of the 2011 football season, here’s a picture from every week of Auburn’s championship 2010 season.
Kodi Burns, quarterback turned receiver, scores the first touchdown of the season against Arkansas State, beating the visiting Indian-Red Wolves 52-26. The obscuring shaker just adds to the atmosphere:
Auburn was on the road for their second game, a 17-14 win over conference foe Mississippi State:
The legend of Cam Newton begins in the 27-24 overtime win over visiting Clemson. After only three games he’d amassed 315 yards rushing, 525 yards passing and nine touchdowns. Even still, Clemson had to miss a field goal to allow Auburn to escape from their biggest scare of the early season.
Auburn rallied past South Carolina. Linebacker Josh Bynes forced this fumble and secured an interception, each helping to turn the tide in a 35-27 victory. Cam Newton would be responsible for all five of Auburn’s scores, on the ground or through the air. Freshman tailback Michael Dyer gained 100 yards, proving to college football onlookers that the Tigers suddenly had too many weapons to defend.
Auburn, now in top 10, improved to 5-0 with a tuneup win over Louisiana Monroe 52-3.
Auburn traveled to Kentucky and escaped the Bluegrass State on a Wes Byrum field goal as time expired. The Tigers orchestrated a 19-play, 86-yard drive in the final 7:22 to set up the game-winner. The 37-34 victory has been somewhat forgotten. All of these big scores, though, were only foreshadowing.
The game the scoreboard broke. Arkansas and Auburn set an SEC record for points scored in a regulation game. When everyone recovered from heart palpitations they discovered the guys in blue had emerged with a 65-43 victory that was a lot closer than the score suggested. Arkansas lost their starting quarterback early. No matter, the backup tossed it around for 332 yards and four scores. But in the end the stir he created was the man who would begin to show his Heisman bona fides. Cam Newton rushed for 188 yards and three scores and threw for 140 more yards and another score.
And finally doubters would be satisfied. LSU brought one of the best defenses in the country into Jordan-Hare Stadium, and they were torched for 526 total yards, 440 of which Auburn gathered on the ground. Mike Dyer collected 100 yards rushing, but the man of the hour was the man wearing the number two.
That’s the end of this famous run:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
After gunning down Arkansas and running over LSU, the season definitely took on a special feel. Up next was Ole Miss, who were just a mascot-less speed bump in the way of a juggernaut. Ole Miss was looking for a Halloween surprise, dressing up as a football team (albeit in new, gray unis) but Auburn took the win in Oxford 51-31. Cam Newton caught a touchdown pass from Kodi Burns. The Tigers were showing themselves to be:
Up next was Homecoming. Auburn hosted Tennessee-Chattanooga 62-24, improving to 10-0 on the season, ranked third in the nation and put up statistical superlatives across the board. Cam Newton, in just 30 minutes of play, set a personal best for passing yards. The Tigers put up 484 of offense in the first half, and eclipsed 600 yards offense for the second time of the season. It was the fifth time they’d scored more than 50 points on the season. Terrell Zachery found a career high for receiving yards, including this 80-yard touchdown reception.
Auburn clinched their appearance in the SEC Championship game in a 49-31 victory over Georgia in a controversial reunion of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry. And by controversial I mean that Auburn’s Nick Fairley had one late hit, was flagged for it, and Georgia whined and whimpered about it for the rest of the game. Then they tried to take him out late in the contest, which prompted a fight. Most of Georgia’s sideline stormed the field. Two of Auburn’s players were ejected in garbage time (and suspended for the first half of the upcoming Iron Bowl) and despite all of that, Auburn still won and Georgia looked like poor losers.
But on the day when Auburn earned the right to go to Atlanta, the Tigers’ offensive line deserved special recognition. Guys like Cameron Newton, well on his way to the Heisman Trophy, wouldn’t have accomplished all he did on the field without these guys:
Same story for Mike Dyer, who would in the Georgia game break Bo Jackson’s freshman rushing record:
And the same shot, as told by AUHD:
It was simultaneously the biggest choke ever by Alabama and the largest comeback by Auburn, as the Tigers finished their regular season a perfect 12-0 after the 28-27 victory.
In a year full of tremendous efforts, Antoine Carter may have saved the season on this play, shifting the momentum of the game inexorably into Auburn’s favor:
Some time after this a deranged individual would prove his poor decision making and self-worth by poisoning the trees at Toomer’s Corner.
But before we knew that, it felt like this:
Half of Auburn was in Atlanta for the SEC Championship game against South Carolina. More of us were in the new Auburn Arena to watch a simulcast. The Tigers played their most complete game of the season, proving themselves a force while winning their first SEC Championship since 2004. Auburn thumped Steve Spurrier’s Gamecocks 52-17. More than a few of us grew misty-eyed when the score became 49-14 and we realized these Tigers would have a shot at football glory.
That night I wrote “For 1983, 1993 and 2004. For 270,000 alumni. For every coach and player from Shug to Gene. For Auburn and for ol’ API.”
The state’s newspapers the next day:
A month later Auburn faced Oregon in Arizona and brought home the national championship after Mike Dyer’s run:
… which was exhausting, and Wes Byrum lined up behind senior backup quarterback Neil Caudle to cinch the win:
Kodi Burns, the quarterback who so famously and selflessly said he’d move to wide receiver, unifying the team behind eventual Heisman Trophy winner Cam Newton, scored the first touchdown in the season and the first touchdown in this game. From September through January, this team was a joy to watch.
And then there was the final celebration of the year at Toomer’s Corner:
Woke up in north Alabama, spent the day on campus in the central part of the state and finished at home. Long day, lots of travel.
But I wrapped up a summer assessment project — and learned two new tricks in Excel in the process. I met a new student. Had a nice meeting with the new editor of the paper. And also had two sit-down meetings with faculty members.
Now I have to finish building my first few weeks of classes. Things return to the normal, busy, hectic, gratifying pace next week.
Had the chance for a quick family trip and, amidst the visiting, I got a few old pictures.
This is my mother’s father. He died just after I was born, and so I know him through stories and pictures. Hard to imagine your grandfather ever looked like this, isn’t it?
Here is his father, W.K., on the far left:
Now I have a picture (or a scan of a picture) of my great-grandfather as a child. The man next to W.K. is his father, W.J. , my great-great-grandfather.
W.J. was born in 1860 and died in 1948. He might have had memories of the Civil War, definitely Reconstruction and probably read all about World War II in his local paper. Based on W.K.’s birthday, you can put that photograph as circa 1910.
The above dates are from Tidwell’s The Frank and Jesse James Saga. The book changes the family narrative somewhat. Prior to researching that text for this post, the thought was that there was an adoptive relationship. But, the book has a written family history that indicates that W.J., the older man in the above picture, was a cousin of the James boys. W.J. was orphaned as an infant (his father died in a Civil War prison camp and his mother died soon after) and adopted by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Joshua James, was the uncle of Frank and Jesse James.
Moving a generation or two into the future, here’s a picture I’ve had for some time:
That very tall man young man in the background is my grandfather. The woman to his left is my grandmother. Their kids, my mother and uncle, are in the front center. The older couple are my mother’s father’s parents, my great-grandparents. My great-grandmother, on the far right, looked that way until the day she died four decades later. In 1995, she became the oldest ever graduate from the University of North Alabama. (One of her daughters was the youngest graduate, in the 1960s.) My great-grandfather, the oldest gentleman in the picture above, is the kid on the far left of the previous, ancient picture.
On the other side of the family, here’s a picture of my maternal grandmother’s father:
That’s me on the right, and my cousin on the left. She’s all grown up, and has three kids who are now older than she is in that picture. I doubt she remembers him at all.
That building is still standing at my grandparent’s home. I have two or three scant memories of this great-grandfather, his home and the stories about others’ memories. Research on this side of the family isn’t as well developed, but can be traced back to a few family names I’ve never heard of elsewhere. Alas, there are no ties to outlaw folk heroes.
What concerns me is that there are a whole generation of students who are being encouraged to pay for qualifications that will equip them to work in a 90s newsroom, because the people designing the courses and the industry input they receive are all from people who cut their teeth in a 90s newsroom.
A piece worth reading in its entirety.
Five curation tools you should know about. Pearltrees is a new one to me. I’ll check it out this weekend. The others are variations on one another, reminding you that you don’t have to be in every space. At some point these things are competing with one another. You want to be doing your work on the one that is the winner, which is to say has an ease of use, flexibility to do what you need and the place where your audience is willing to follow (or is already building a community). Otherwise you just build up platform fatigue.
What’s more, curation is a function, not your every solution. All of these things, all of them, are options, tools and components at your disposal. As a journalist your job is to amass large amounts of information, filter, screen and select. Your job here, with these many platforms, tools and doodads, is similar.
Copy editors: read the story before writing the headline.
Also, beware of sneaky copy in those pull out boxes.
Everyone knows of Twitter, and the wise ones are using it to their advantage in their professional life. But now comes Pinq Sheets:
Unlike Klout and other similar services, Pinq Sheets is keyword- and campaign-based, as opposed to user-based. And because Pinq Sheets uses Twitter’s streaming API (instead of the search API), Pinq Sheets subscribers can pull down entire Tweets, rather than just numbers.
Pinq Sheets also does the dirty work for you, compiling the data in readable graphs (see below) that can easily be distributed to your clients. This is pretty stellar. When we do reporting for our clients, we find they love graphs and infographics. When we can make them pretty AND useful, so much the better. Seeing information and insights, for some, is often more valuable than reading a report.
[…]
Additional features include showing users which individuals talk about a particular hashtag or search term the most, giving you valuable insights about either your brand or the brand advocates/influencers.
“If you’re trying to market to a niche, this is the tool that’s going to tell you how to do it and who to talk to,” Jen says.
Was Twitter a vehicle for riots in England? A Guardian study:
Analysis of more than 2.5m Twitter messages relating to the riots in England has cast doubt on the rationale behind government proposals to ban people from social networks or shut down their websites in times of civil unrest.
A preliminary study of a database of riot-related tweets, compiled by the Guardian, appears to show Twitter was mainly used to react to riots and looting.
Timing trends drawn from the data question the assumption that Twitter played a widespread role in inciting the violence in advance, an accusation also levelled at the rival social networks Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger.
That’s part of a quality series from the Guardian, Reading the Riots.
