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Eight and oh!

Strike a pose, Cameron Newton. 24-17 and Auburn is the lone SEC team still undefeated.

This is the Twitter feed during the LSU-Auburn game. Because Twitter will drop these comments eventually, and brilliant play and wry observations should be remembered forever. Pictures are included, as are after-the-fact thoughts included in bold.

One tailgating party has a musician playing the Van Helsing song from Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It is really good.

At the RBD library they are playing Brickhouse. If you walk up those steps on the side of the parking deck and just as you reach the landing you here the baseline kick in you may count yourself as having a good day. You might then knock over a Direct TV dish, as I did. And then apologize to the people who’s tailgate you’ve just disturbed. They were nice people.

Another day, another blimp. I also counted a light wing plane, a helicopter, two small hawks and a yellow butterfly. And also Nova, who flew right overhead. I’ve got great pictures in the photo gallery.

I smell corndog people!

Fighter planes overhead, a tank under center. Let’s play!

No better place than Jordan-Hare Stadium today!

@Z_Etheridge4‘s third down interception return to midfield sets the tone.

@cameronnewton laughs at your idea of broken plays.

Let’s review: Terrell Zachery, Mike Dyer, Cam Newton. TOUCHDOWN AUBURN 7-0.

What do Cam Newton and Heisman trophy winner Pat Sullivan have in common? They’ve scored the same amount of TDs in one season. And of course Newton would have that bit of poetry later in the game, and still four more games. Sullivan’s record stood for four decades. How old will we be when someone breaks Newton’s eventual number?

Lucky there wasn’t an unfair decapitation of the quarterback penalty there. How did he get up from that? Lucky, too, there was no roughing the quarterback penalty on that deadball dead lift and body slam. I suppose you could argue no one heard the whistle, but everyone else on the field stopped and I heard the referee blow it dead from the stands. Dodged a bullet there.

RT @wennybrown: Announcer: “Clock. Management. Problems. Where have we heard that before??”

Auburn’s defense holds, LSU settles for a figgie. 7-3.

Just so you know, there are a couple of Superman shirts in the north end zone, to which Auburn is now driving.

@wesbyrum boots a field goal. He is now Auburn’s all time leading scorer. 10-7.

Or 10-3. Accurate and it sounds better. Pardon me, we’re in the section of the stadium that goes delirious for field goals.

Finally get a kickoff out of the back of the end zone … and have to re-kick. Penalties still must be a concern, this just being one more example of something that a championship caliber team needs to cure. This resulted in a net of 16-yard gain for the Bengal Tigers. They’d drive to midfield and then punt, starting that sequence of drives Auburn began at the goalline. A competent offense takes advantage of this 16 yard gift.

Nick Fairley does not like Cajun food. He does like bayou quarterbacks.

@CameronNewton would run for class president, but he is too busy running through LSU.

@supurmario27 also makes it look easy.

Auburn, from their own 1, slices through a generous LSU defense, but the field goal try is missed left.

Do not make Nick Fairley mad. He will only haunt your daydreams, too.

“Hi. There’s no one within 10 yards of me, I don’t need this football.” How many of these gifts will the Auburn team (generally) and the secondary (specifically) get this year? How deep does this karma cache go?

The Miles Quatum Singularity: four minute drives last three days, and refs stop the game clock for reasons they can’t explain.

10-10 at the half. This game should be SO much different. Corollary: it will be in the second half.

Mike Dyer is a cannonball. Darvin Adams is, in fact, smooth.

@cameronnewton is coming to Baton Rouge to walk old ladies across the street. He will score many touchdowns in the process.

@cameronnewton runs 50 yards for a score, runs upstairs to review the play and back to the field to call it a touchdown. Should have sent a poet.

Little known ref fact: side judges are Bama fans. Not a conspiracy theory, but fact. He waved and we saw the colors peep through his uniform.

Best not to talk about the fumble. The only team that can beat Auburn’s offense is Auburn’s offense.

Fear the LSU kick team. Everything else appears manageable.

Aubie had a Trojan horse contraption. Mike the Tiger tore the head off. Ahh, the pageantry of football.

Worst spot of the game. The ref’s stripes are purple and gold. This being the Kodi Burns forward progress abomination. The fair reaction: this is the an unintended consequence of better camera angles and, ultimately, the huge network deals the SEC has signed. Everyone sees the officiating. Officiating has always been hit or miss, of course, but it isn’t improving as the game gets faster. There have always been calls made and others missed. Now every play can be closely scrutinized, even as unfair as that criticism of officials may (or may not) be. The unfair reaction: is that guy from Louisiana?

The fans are wishing the officials a booooootiful Halloween.

Someone text the Auburn coaches and tell them Lee can’t throw on the run.

A hasty tilt-shift shot of the crowd at Jordan-Hare.

What is this? Every year of SEC football before Gus Malzahn showed up? #fieldpositionfootball

@cameronnewton is not an Ent, but he did inspire Tolkien.

Mike Dyer also plays rugby.

And we start the fourth quarter feeling in control, but Les Miles is eating chlorox pellets. There is no control.

Auburn has 364 total yards through three quarters. 278 of them on the ground. LSU has 192 total yards.

Les Miles strikes with his first bout of successful irrationality. Let us hope it is not diarrheal. 17-17.

Third and long? Run a draw!

This game now enters Bizzaroland, population: the SEC. Les Miles, mayor.

@wisematize, a Texas Tech man, asks “When did you re-hire Tuberville?”

@wisematize In a moment I’ll tell you we were just doing what we do. Whatever that is this week.

Nick Fairley dislikes the color yellow. He thinks you look stupid in purple, too.

TOUCHDOWN AUBURN! Onterio McCalebb! 70 yards! 24-17!

Auburn over 500 yards of offense tonight so far, the fourth SEC game in a row the Tigers have done that. Never before. Savor it, because it can’t last forever. A few more years isn’t too much to ask, is it Gus?

6:10 left on the clock. Just to counteract Les Miles Auburn needs a 6:35 drive.

This place is the thunder dome.

This is a fourth quarter defense, designed to wear you down early and tear out your heart late.

If @cameronnewton doesn’t win the Heisman the Eufaula Tribune will give him the inaugural Camsman Trophy.

Eight and OH! Auburn sits all alone atop the SEC the Tigers get ready for Ole Miss. 24-17.

On to vict’ry! I believe in Auburn (and it has nothing to do with football).

Gene Chizik just leaped the rail to get to the student body. And the Heisman chants are echoing to the Downtown Athletic Club.

It is remarkable how many people are lingering in Jordan-Hare Stadium.

This post-game video on @AUHD is great.

Like that.

Alabama / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
21
Oct 10

Poor pregnant pumpkins

Class was interrupted today because the professor had a surprise baby shower. He’s expecting a daughter in a few weeks. The surprise baby shower was interrupted because the professor, also our new dean, had to leave to go house hunting.

He’s expecting to upgrade in a few weeks.

They got him out of class by saying there was an emergency that needed his attention. Later he told me of some of the problems he’d been dealing with lately. He said he was bracing for one of those things to reappear and, instead people gave him cake and a car seat.

Better than the alternative.

I visited with my adviser. We discussed the art of conceptualization. I missed another professor, who was dashing about late for a class after a long meeting. So I had lunch.

You’re familiar with the giant silver tea containers you find at fast food joints. I snapped the valve right off one of those today. When you do this, tea doesn’t drip down, but rather shoots out at a 90-degree angle, with force. So I’m simultaneously dodging the stream, figuring out what went wrong and how to solve the problem. And getting sprayed with tea, because the first part of my plan was only 90 percent successful. Finally, after four or five days, someone notices and comes to help.

She grabs one of those little stainless steel food prep containers, realizes this will not hold all of the tea gushing out of the Deepwater Horizon rupture I’ve caused in her restaurant and asks me if I wouldn’t mind holding that valve over the still pouring tea. I’d figured out by covering the opening I could at least stem the flow.

She disappeared for 45 minutes or so. When she returned the pitcher was removed. I washed my hands of the evidence. As I ate she brought me a nice gift card. She said it was for my help, but really it was because I broke something. So, the point of that story is that Chipotle is awesome, though they need to finally get around to fixing the tea container.

I was told this has happened several times.

Met with another professor. Did work. Drove home.

The Yankee and I had dinner at Provino’s with our realtor-friend. The night started with a conversation about peaches and leather and ended with a Beavis and Butthead reference. All topics were covered in between.

Saw this today:

There’s going to be a lot more of this in the coming days. Pumpkins need an advocacy group. Gourds are people, too. At least the ones with their scalps still attached.

Alabama / Auburn / journalism / links / photo / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
20
Oct 10

Stuff, which is better than things

Every productive thing I did today was about work and class. And since I don’t want to bog you down with those details today, because you’ve had your own already, I’ll just share the leftover things that haven’t made it here this week.

I forgot to link to my football scribblings again this week. My friends at The War Eagle Reader made a post out of my tweets from the Arkansas game, similar to what you saw here on Saturday.

And then on Monday half of my Q&A ran on al.com:

Alabama question 1: … What can the Tide show against Tennessee to put restless fans at ease heading into a bye week?

As for Tennessee, that breaks one of two ways and Alabama can’t win it psychologically either way. Option one: Alabama dominates and we all realize, “Oh, UT is the worst team in the world since San Jose State. This proves nothing.” Option two: Alabama and Tennessee find themselves in the traditional knife fight-rivalry model and we say “Oh, they can’t even separate from a terrible Tennessee, who might need an overtime against San Jose State.”

Sometimes the third Saturday in October comes along at exactly the wrong time.

Especially since this game is played on the fourth Saturday. No one got this joke. Subtle humor was lost on this crowd. Today they ran the second half:

(S)haky as the defense is, there isn’t another team on the schedule where Auburn is going to have to score 50 to guarantee a win. This is the logical conclusion of what I was wondering aloud late in the fourth quarter at Jordan-Hare: Has there ever been a game when you could score 50 and STILL lose to Auburn? This has never happened in any modern context.

The Arkansas game, odd as it sounds considering they gave up 43 (and 330 yards and four scores to the number two quarterback), is thus far the most complete game of the season. It wasn’t complete, but the most complete so far. Blocked punt results in a touchdown. Two big kickoff returns, including a 99-yarder, turn into scores. The kicking game was solid. The offense was terrifying. The defense ultimately sealed the deal with turnovers. It’d be nice to see that for four quarters, but you have to think of that as an unexpected surprise if it ever does appear. And since that isn’t going to happen with any kind of regularity you have to readjust to the new reality: The Arkansas game is the new complete when you dress it up in orange and blue.

The formulation is simple. If Auburn scores points — and you’ve never, even in 2004, been so confident of Auburn’s ability to produce on any given drive — they win games. I’ll take Auburn over LSU, but with the caveat that it can’t be a one score game late, because there is one-sixteenth of Les Miles’ soul that he can sell for another bizarre finish.

Meanwhile, LSU’s Les Miles is thinking of invisible players to try to stop Auburn’s Cameron Newton. I wrote about that very thing three weeks ago. Nice to know coaches are reading your scribblings.

I added a new page to the War Eagle Moments blog. That one came from friends in Washington D.C. this weekend. Since it is football season and some of you are the Auburn traffic I get this time of year, feel free to check out that photo blog which exists simply to brighten your day.

This evening I visited Walmart. The entire trip, to a slowly remodeling, but working store, was to look for a picture frame. They did not have one I liked. But, at this price, I took two of everything on the shelf:

Finally, the update from yesterday’s Alaska journalism story. No charges for anyone.

And, apropos of nothing, this story features an Alabama lawmaker who was smart enough to physically threaten a television reporter while his camera was running.

Just makes you proud.

history / links / Monday / photo — Comments Off
18
Oct 10

The future is now, the past is still here

Woke up yesterday tired. Never could shake it, until late in the evening, oddly enough. Brian hung out with us until the afternoon and then went home to take his sister-in-law shopping. As he got in his car we mentioned there were things we need him to help do, boxes we needed his help to move.

“Tell me about it,” he said. And then he shut his car door in my face for effect.

Just for that I’m putting rocks in those boxes.

Woke up this morning stuffy and with the sniffles. Sudafed, being a modern day miracle drug, knocked that out by late afternoon. Which is good because there was work to do. This lecture is called “Fun with numbers.” It’s official title is “I want to be a journalist so I don’t have to use numbers!”

This requires careful attention, just to make sure I don’t mess up the math.

Here, add this up:

Intellitar, will be releasing Virtual Eternity on Wednesday.

“The whole concept is legacy creation and preservations,” said Don Davidson, the founder and CEO of Intellitar.”The idea is I can use a number of technologies available and create a living legacy.”

Think of it as “a digital clone, if you will,” he said.

A “digital clone” on your computer screen.

Davidson said Virtual Eternity takes genealogy websites, such as ancestry.com, to another level.

I talked to the CEO’s avatar. Right now that particular figure is a bit limited in his responses and, humorously, tries to give you a best guess when it is way off base. But he says that can get better because you can spend as much time improving your avatar as you like. Presumably a CEO with a big launch on his hands hasn’t spent every moment programming every conceivable answer.

“An artificial intelligent brain drives it,” (CEO Don) Davidson said. “It has the ability to capture and maintain a virtually unlimited amount of content.”

That’s the real Davidson, not his avatar. This could get confusing. But incredibly cool. After you get past the somewhat limited (for now) database of replies and the Perfect Paul voice and the odd way his hair moves, and yet doesn’t, you can see a lot of potential. Think of the first telephone and the advances from which we’ve benefited in a century. Imagine if the same sort of improvement pattern is duplicated, or improved upon. Ray Kurzweil is pleased.

The avatar isn’t self-aware. (And who thought we’d ever read that sentence in the present tense in our lifetimes?) And the avatar doesn’t know when that might happen — but the answer it offered was fun. If you can one day get the avatar out of the computer, well, the comments have that figured out.

From present, to past. Let’s check out some Monday history.

This name didn’t jump out at me in my very thin bit of historical understanding, but the simplicity of the marker — and how new it looked and how basic the language was — deserved some attention.

One of the local writers, Joe McAdory, picked up the story:

Here’s a story of a slave who loved his master. Amos Wynn was the slave and playmate of the young Jeff Wynn. As legend has it, Jeff Wynn was tragically killed in 1859 by his first cousin in a hunting accident. Mysteriously, the boy’s grave was not marked by his family, an omission that bothered the slave.

Upon Amos Wynn’s emancipation, he was determined to put a marker at the place of his friend’s grave as a memorial. Amos Wynn dug wells and graves to slowly pay for the new headstone. Through hard work, Amos eventually raised enough money to pay for his fallen friend’s memorial.

Ironically, when Amos died and was buried across town at Baptist Hill, he was laid to rest without a marker – a problem which was later rectified.

Dr. R.P. Wynn shows up on the roster as a student of Auburn — then East Alabama Male College — in 1861. That was the year the university closed because of the war. The campus served as a military hospital and finally reopened in 1866.

But this isn’t that R.P. Wynn. This marker says Wynn was born in 1817 and died in 1859. So he was born in the state before it was a state. The Mississippi territory was divided in 1817 and Alabama’s statehood was granted two years later. And the Internet knows nothing about this man. Though I think I found his wife’s name.

Colonel Nathaniel J. Scott was the brother-in-law of Judge John Harper, Auburn’s founder. Scott served as one of the four commissioners who laid out the town and was Auburn’s first state lawmaker. He was instrumental in the creation of the Auburn Female Masonic College in 1847 and the East Alabama Male College (now Auburn University) in 1856. You have to think he was intent that none of this made it onto his marker.

Federal troops encamped at the spring behind his house, Pebble Hill, when they invaded Auburn in April 1865. Today the home is still standing as an arts center for the university.

John Ross served in the Macon County Reserves, a militia unit, during the Civil War. At least seven members of that company (of 121 men) are buried in Pine Hill. There are lots of mentions of that unit, but no details of their experience. I stumbled across this one simply because it was on Find A Grave. I emailed the guy who posted the request, but he didn’t know much more about the Ross family.

So that’s two hits and two misses on the old markers. That’s about the same ratio I got from the avatar.

photo / site / weekend — Comments Off
17
Oct 10

Catching up (briefly)

What are you looking at?

What are you looking at?

Everything else you’ll need for today is in the photo gallery.