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22
Sep 10

Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium

Washington

This reminds me of the Bessemer City Councilwoman who foolishly thought she could claim an endorsement from the local football coach — as if no one would follow up on that. Except that lady, in her brilliant moment of mayoral campaigning, managed to Photoshop a picture of herself with the coach at a golf tournament. Of course the coach had made no such endorsement. And, also, the councilwoman’s campaign made a poor Photoshop effort. You can still see the coach’s wife’s hair in the image.

But this is completely real, of course. This young man traveled north and secured the endorsement of our most famous Founding Father. There’s no Photoshopping here. He has another poster standing beside the famous Rocky statue in Philadelphia. With endorsements like those he has to be a campaign favorite.

I love SGA posters. There’s another guy who is using a Forrest Gump theme. The young ladies all have cute designs and slogans, most that rhyme. There’s another campaign who has pressed Ron Burgundy into service. These are amusing popularity contests.

We critiqued the Crimson for about two hours today. They didn’t want me looking over their shoulder last night, and I was happy to oblige them, so we went over it line by line today. For only being three issues into their run the finished product was encouraging.

I picked a lot of minor details and a few obvious things that shouldn’t have escaped their attention. There’s no such thing as a perfect newspaper, but I’m pleased with this issue and still think they hold a great deal of potential. They had coverage of the gubernatorial debate and a Pulitzer winner. There’s also a story on record student enrollment and on Eleanor Clift’s visit.

Clift has covered a lot of great stories, but her own tale is a good one. She was a 1970s newsroom hire when you didn’t see a lot of female reporters. Someone assigned her to cover a darkhorse presidential candidate, some peanut farmer from Georgia no one had ever heard of. Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, and the tradition is that the reporter that covered the campaign follows the president-elect. Clift joined the White House press corps and the rest is history.

That story is a good one. They agonized over it for a long time, they said, because they knew Clift would read it. I’m going to threaten to send every story they write for the rest of the year to the Newsweek veteran.

You can see the full issue here.

Busy day. Started at the gym early this morning, where the biggest problem I had was in almost pinching my pinkie off on the Smiths machine. You’d think, since they named it after me, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, but the left hand re-rack is a tricky maneuver. So I nicked the skin off the top of my knuckle, pinching it between the bar and rack. This flies into my fundamental goal of going through life with all of my appendages intact, so I’ll just move a little more to the right next time.

Visited al.com today. I think this was my third visit since I left there in 2008. My desk is still empty. Prime cubicle space like that simply can’t go empty, though, so they call it the “Kenny Smith Memorial Computer Wasteland Emporium.”

After that a meeting here, lunch there, sales talk, the paper itself, and then studying.

I had to renew my IRB certification tonight. Required every two years for people doing research with human participants, mine was winding down. So I read the things you have to read and took the quizzes you have to take and now I have the nifty little certification to put in a filing cabinet and forget.

Meanwhile my lifeguard certification is woefully out of date. I can’t pull you from a pool, but I can give you surveys and run psychophysiology experiments with you.

If, that is, my IRB proposals are accepted. I have one of those due tomorrow. The Yankee helped (a great deal). And then there’s the reading. Another 100 pages to stumble through tonight. It looks like another after-midnight bedtime.


21
Sep 10

Teeming Tuesday

I’d like to try putting a few more things into a Tuesday, just to see if it is possible. Tuesdays are the fullest of days. Met with the boss. Tried, and failed, to install a new printer on my new iMac.

Called the tech guy who, happily, could not install it the first time. If it takes him two attempts I don’t feel so bad.

Had lunch. Met with the WVSU news director. We talked about Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, who is on campus this week. She’s been in classes and student meetings and will deliver a big lecture tomorrow night. She’s got such a great story, really. But more on that tomorrow.

Tried to meet with a student, but missed. Made copies of everything for my class. Held class, delivering a spelling test, talking about news leads and doing wholesale news rewrites.

We made fun of typos. There were two on the most recent cover of Soap Opera Digest. I can’t find a link and can’t bring myself to upload it here, but the designer has forgotten their rules on apostrophes.

And then there was the paper. The students have worked on it all night. I get a question here, make a joke there and listen and tell stories. Now, around midnight, they’ve announced they’re going it alone. I offer to copy edit the first few editions with them, but they rightly want to remove me from that process. This is the moment where they pedal away, around the block and you’re just so proud to see them go.

Tomorrow they make it back from their circuit around the block. We’ll critique the whole paper. We’ll talk about how to improve their technique, steady lines, standing, brakes and falling. Hey, I might keep this bike metaphor. You’re just so proud.

I decorated a wall in my office.

StarsandStripes

Those are Stars and Stripes announcing the end of World War II. The one on the right is the Paris Edition announcing the Germany surrender. I found that paper purely by accident at a place called The Deal in an artsy Louisville, Ky. That was the same day, incidentally, when I decided to build the half-hearted black and white section of the site.

It was a nice day. I’d spent a long weekend visiting the folks. They took me to a local funky, artisan restaurant and just down the road we found that store. It doesn’t deal in antiques. Or in things that feel like antiques. Everything is from that frozen moment when your grandparents stopped trying to be contemporary. Much of it was familiar, but vague. You could understand the function of all the merchandise, but if you weren’t from the period the why could be lost on you.

We ate at that restaurant and used bookstores and a record store and that shop. It was a great day.

They were stored in a desk pretty close together, the pictures and the newspaper, and they might have once belonged to the same family. There was also a Red Cross map of Paris. The woman sold it all to me for next to nothing, just glad to get it out of her way. She’d much rather sell mid-century modern furniture and clothes.

My step-father bought me a little bookholder there, too. It is sitting on top of one of my bookshelves and holds Winston Churchill’s history of the war. A friend sold me all six volumes for $20. He bought them from a library and realized he’d never read them. I Hope to one day. Maybe I’ll bring that newspaper home next summer and read the books underneath the authentic newsprint.

The paper announcing the Japanese surrender is also from Stars and Stripes, the Mediterranean edition of the military paper. It is a bracing headline, but that too will be a teaching moment. What is contemporary and acceptable today might not be a name that people approve of years from now.

I don’t have a great story for that paper, though. I bought it from e-bay. I wish I’d asked the seller to try and explain that particular issue’s history. Someone thought enough to bring it home from Italy, or thereabouts, but now we’ll never know the details.


19
Sep 10

Catching up

Some of the pictures from the last week that haven’t made it anywhere else yet.

RenAllie

That’s my girl, holding her girl.

Samford

That’s two flags, a plane and the moon. That’s not bad for one composition on a cell phone’s camera. Taken on the Samford University campus.

Samford

They were shooting a scene for a movie on the Samford campus.

Samford

Samford football played on a Thursday. And, suddenly, there’s tailgating. And RVers! I believe that’s a first for SU.

BalloonAubie

The balloon Aubie at Niffer’s, on game day. Niffer’s has a guy that comes through the store some nights making animals for the little kids. Clearly he was hard at work here.

Comer

Comer Hall, named after an Alabama governor, is the home of the Auburn University College of Agriculture. That’s my building. One of them, at least. I haven’t been inside in a decade. The door was open on game day, which probably shouldn’t be the case.

AgEcon

This is the second floor, I spent a lot of time here.

CompLab

Fifteen years ago I checked Email for the first time in this room, in the Comer computer lab. No one remembers this sort of thing, but me.

Books

These books have been in the Comer basement for ages. I’ve always wondered what kind of data is between the covers that needs to be stored so securely and for so long.

Grillin

If anyone needs any birthday gift ideas …

Puff

We’d been out in the sun for a while. It doesn’t look so much like it now, but then, this cloud looked like Puff the Magic Dragon moving in over Jordan-Hare.


18
Sep 10

Clemson @ Auburn

ESPN’s Gameday is here. Lee Corso picked Auburn. That’s usually not a good sign.

The sun was also here. It was a hundred thousand and three degrees. Yes, 100,003 degrees. I spell it out for dramatic effect. In an uncrowded restroom at Jordan-Hare Stadium a lone voice spoke out “I think I’m dehydrated.”

But we saw friends. We tailgated. I walked inside Comer Hall, the building where I studied during undergrad, for the first time in a decade. I’ll have a few pictures tomorrow.

We walked into the stadium as soon as they opened the gates and sat with our newest friends. We are in the student section and found a few very nice graduate students to hang out with. Today they brought us fans, The Yankee brought them a water.

Clemson came out and marched down the field in a simple offensive scheme. And then they punched Auburn in the mouth while on defense. Before you knew it the score was 0-17. Auburn rallied to kick a field goal at the half and the orange and blue Tigers were lucky to be down only two scores.

Clemson’s band marched. Auburn’s band marched better.

Auburn marched down the field in the opening drive of the second half. Cam Newton threw an interception at the goal line. But Auburn’s defense looked as ferocious as it ever has, shutting down Cousin Clem in the third quarter. And then Auburn’s offense came alive, scoring 21 unanswered points to take a 24-17 lead. Clemson rallied to tie the game. Auburn sat on the ball at the very end of regulation to set up overtime.

Clemson won the toss, made Auburn drive first and they could do nothing with the ball. Wes Byrum coolly kicked a field goal to set up a 27-24 lead. When Clemson had the ball they were carving into an exhausted Auburn defense. And no wonder: the game was more than four hours old and it was still in the very humid 80s after 10 p.m. Clemson got close to the goal line, but Auburn’s defense rallied again, which seemed impossible.

So Clemson lined up to kick a field goal. It was good. The score is tied 27-27. But there was a flag. At first the referee signaled a penalty on Auburn, which would have given Clemson a first down at the goal. But the referee consulted with his friends (who were not running a good game, at all). Turns out the penalty was on Clemson. Back ’em up, make ’em kick again.

The Clemson placekicker marked off his steps, and then did it again. And then he pushed his kick right. Auburn won. It was an improbable and ecstatic atmosphere. A mysterious Clemson team played out of their minds in what looked like as physical a game you’ll ever see. Those Tigers gave our Tigers their best shot. Auburn came out cold and found a way to storm back into the game. What happened at the end was luck and intangible and delirious. It can never happen again. Thousands of fans’ hearts can’t take it.

Someone has already uploaded the overtime highlights:

I took 134 photographs on the day. The good ones will be uploaded next week sometime. The nine that best illustrate the day are here.

Nova

Nova flew right over us in his pre-game flight.

Sun

The sun setting over Jordan-Hare Stadium.

Attendance

It’s a sellout.

Touchdown

Darvin Adams gets his toes down for a huge touchdown to get Auburn back in the game.

Incomplete

Adams could not haul in this one, which should have been the game-winner.

Gasp

Speaking of shoulda-beens, if the receiver hauled in this pass in overtime Clemson would have gone home the winner.

AllIn

This is the slogan du jour and the post-game celebration.

Toomer's

A relieved rolling of Toomer’s Corner.

Sign

Saw that on the way back to the car. Seemed appropriate. I don’t know if they put that on the marquee before the game after it was finally finished.


17
Sep 10

Friday is Pie Day, Birmingham edition

Busy, full, long day. So just pictures. Hit the gym this morning, and then worked through the afternoon. Visited with friends at The Red Cat:

The Red Cat

That’s Brad, Jennifer, The Yankee, Andre and Betsy and Brian.

It was just like old times which is, to say, awesome.

And then we hit up Jim ‘N’ Nicks for Pie Day.

Pie Day

Which was always great. Then we drove home, getting back about 90 minutes later than we’d hoped. Hence the brevity. Tomorrow, football.