Before games at Auburn the football team takes the short two block walk to Jordan-Hare Stadium from the athletic department. They’ve been walking down this hill for years and, at some point in the 1960w this became a very organic, ground-up tradition. Young fans would line the road and greet the team, cheering them on to victory even before they were in the stadium, even before they were in their uniforms.
Fans still re-create the tradition. Tiger Walk is two hours before kickoff. The picture above was taken an hour before that. Far up that street is where the players begin. And, as the coaches said yesterday, for young players Tiger Walk itself can almost be like playing another game.
Here’s the video, shot from my iPhone at the end of their walk, just as the players are about to enter the stadium.
Travis Williams, a former Auburn player who is now a graduate assistant for the team, produced a video that they played in the stadium just before the game. It is OK here, but best seen on a screen 30-by-70 foot screen inside the stadium.
Are you ready for football? This is week two of the high school season. Drove by this one this evening as the team was warming up. I’ll try to get to a high school game this fall, the school I covered many years ago is doing very well, but we are especially excited about college football. That, of course, begins tomorrow.
Reading and class prep today. And resting. Strained my back at the gym this morning. Did squats and everything was fine. Did what I think of as the jail break exercise — the move started years ago by some anonymous person is slowly digging through the corner of the cinderblock wall — and everything was fine. Did a curl and dropped down a weight. Did another curl and my back tightened up. Wisely, I put the weight down.
A comfy chair and a heating pad this evening have helped. I’m fine, just moving a little gingerly. Tomorrow I’ll be good as new.
Pie Day tonight at Mama Q’s. We had the chicken tonight, which was delicious. The dutch apple pie, we decided is a consistent winner. Give them a visit.
We checked out the soccer game tonight. The fans got a great show.
(I downloaded a pseudo tilt shift application for my iPhone — two of them, actually, but I think one is a bust — and I’m playing around with it a bit. Now I have to figure out which subjects look best in the tilt shift style. My apologies in advance.)
Florida State was controlling things with a disciplined effort on the ground. They snuck in a goal in the 28th minute and Auburn struggled against the fifth ranked Seminoles through the middle portion of the game.
In the 73rd minute Auburn’s Lydia Townsend found a glaring hole in the center of the FSU defense. She chipped in the ball over the goalkeeper on a breakaway.
Florida State scored on a header in the 83rd minute and Auburn answered with a goal in the 87th minute to force overtime. In college they play two sudden death periods of 10 minutes each. After that you just settle for a draw. With two minutes remaining in the second overtime, so in the 107th minute, Katy Frierson picked up a loose ball outside the 18 off of a corner kick and struck the ball home.
Here’s Frierson earlier in the game:
And here the Tigers celebrate the game winning goal:
They are celebrating Auburn’s first win over the Seminoles since 1995 and the first win over a top-five team since 2004.
I’ll have more pictures in the photo gallery early next week.
Which leaves us with the last installment of the evening, YouTube Cover Theater, where we turn the place over to people pouring their talents and odes and ambitions or fears out there for our consumption. Tonight’s featured coveree is Duncan Sheik. We’ll start out with an incredible rendition of She Runs Away:
And now, for your listening pleasure, we have a nice run at That Says It All:
Sheik, apparently, has written a musical. Here’s one of his fans’ playing his favorite tune:
And, finally, we’ll hear from the original artist himself as Duncan Sheik covers … Radiohead?
Who doesn’t enjoy a good cover?
Who doesn’t enjoy football? Are you ready? Tomorrow Auburn has Arkansas State. Look for us. We’ll be the ones in blue.
The last few days have been … mildish. Given the recent weather the upper 80s were delightful. Over the weekend we actually enjoyed a day of weather that, in comparison, seemed almost cool. And, yes, Deep South, September. I understand. We have this conversation often, The Yankee and I. These are perfectly natural temperatures here, I remind her.
Doesn’t make you sweat less.
But, today, we returned to a heat index of 97 degrees at one point. I like summer, but there comes a point in September when it just begins to feel cruel. We’ll reach that point in a week or two, the point of Rubbing It In. The point of Oh, Really? The point of biology where the body says “You know, there’s no more sweat to be had.”
And suddenly a subarctic lifestyle doesn’t seem like a bad idea. That’s when you walk into a restaurant’s cooler and realize “A little more summer might not be so bad.”
Spent the morning researching media effects. Had a meeting with one of my committee members to start discussing my comprehensive exams. He’s such a cool guy. Very kind and energetic and incredibly intelligent.
So naturally we talked about NASCAR and iPhone applications.
At Samford I had a meeting with the new editor. She’s getting ready to run her first issue of the newspaper next week. The online editor joined us to hammer out a few policies for the new year.
We turned it into a teleconference, which turned into a site re-design project in the next few weeks. And from that conversation a lot of exciting things will happen. It was an enthusiastic afternoon full of a great deal of promise. We’re looking forward to new partnerships, bringing in more news outlets to the site, breaking more news on the web, adding more sports and more.
It’ll be a good year.
Traffic? Not so great. Eight miles of construction to get through, all of it behind this guy:
Soon after I passed the buses carrying the Florida Atlantic football team. (Later: FAU blocked a UAB field goal attempt on the final play to win, 32-31.)
I also saw this guy:
Temperatures or not, that’s the first sign of fall. Football is here!
In fact, there are five games on my television tonight, so if you’ll excuse me …
First class of the semester. For the professor in me, at least. Samford gets the benefit of a later start. Classes began yesterday, mine kicked off this afternoon. I’m teaching editing to a class full of eager young student journalists. I’ve had some of these students in previous classes.
We did the standard fare introductory stuff and then I gave a quiz. Now I’m that professor.
I showed them this video:
The point of the video being to speak and write with conviction and purpose. Seemed appropriate for an editing class. Took them a while, but they got into it by the end.
Should be a good class, if the professor does a good job with his part.
Had a meeting with the boss. Had a meeting with our new sales manager. We brain stormed ideas and then a few more and then one or two more besides. Now she just has to go out and spread the good word. Had a third meeting.
And then I read a lot.
That’s for class on Thursday.
The black and whites will be up shortly, but that’s it for the day. Tomorrow will be more workshop stuff, more studying, more work. More more more. (And another new, September long feature.)
I’m going to wonder this for years — perhaps long after the chore is no longer mine, perhaps long after I’m in a different place in life entirely — but how does the organizing of a one day workshop take up so much time? My task these last few days, and for the next several days, will be to call teachers.
Do you know when the best time to catch teachers at work is? During the day.
Do you happen to also know what they typical spend their day doing?
Aren’t you surprised some office assistant somewhere in America hasn’t gone crazy and hacked up phone lines? After all, this is only the 6,428th time it has been said this school year, “She’s in class!”
So that was the morning. Emails and phone calls and searching for Email addresses and the proper person for whom to leave a message.
The afternoon I spent putting the final polish on the syllabus I’ll hand out tomorrow. I’m teaching an editing class this term. I’m giving spelling tests, among other things.
I don’t remember how this was received when I was in a similar class way back then, but I’m sure we thought the idea of a spelling test was a novel idea. And then we took those tests, carefully calculated to find the most challenging words in English or other languages that might one day be used by an American journalist. Having come full circle I’ve included some of those words on my list.
Tomorrow, on the first day of the class, I might also give a quiz. Set the tone. Or, as the hip kids say “Be THAT professor.”
I’m going to show a video, though, so I can also be THAT professor. And I’ll talk about typos in banners and semi-permanent paintings and … well, there is always this example if you really need one:
It was supposed to say “hopefuls,” but “when we’re typing and the computers freeze, sometimes it takes so long to unfreeze that we completely forget what we were trying to do when it froze,” explains the editor.
I’ve no doubt that was simply a horrible mistake. The Alligator is a fine paper. And the explanation strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The excuse could use a little more punching up. “We forget” might not satisfy the aggrieved parties.
We grilled out tonight and I reminded myself of a painful less. When lighting fire to the grill, be careful you don’t catch an ember in your eye.
I’d never forgotten that one, actually, it is always good to say out loud, however.
What I did forget was the exact inventory of what was going on the grill. Two pork chops, I thought, I can be economical with the briquettes. But I’d forgotten the corn until The Yankee came home and reminded me that I’d requested roasted corn. So there was an attempt to cook everything over the small mass of charcoal. That proved unsatisfactory. So I spread a few more of the magical black rocks that give fire on the other side of the grill. And now I have a flame discrepancy. So I let it burn and then covered the grill thinking I’d starve the fire. Which I did, right out.
So now nothing was grilling at the proper pace and, really, this is the worst part of my day. Life is so good.
The pork chops were good. The Yankee has this nice seasoning that we must now order online. Stores stopped stocking it, so messengers from Jakarta now deliver it to our door. It goes great with pork and is the sort of thing that makes you think it should stand well on any dish. But, then, if you put it on fish the salmon would stand up and say “Keep it on the swine, friend.”
The corn was a little under-done, but 45 extra seconds on a grill for a fresh ear of corn is not a catastrophe.
Last thing for the night is a fun new iPhone app I discovered. Storyrobe is a free app that let’s you make slideshows (as mp4s) from your photos. You record narration, control when the image flips and can share your project via Email or YouTube.
The finished product is a bit small, but this could be a useful app for a journalist on the go, or to share events with friends and family. Or even storyboarding jokes. We’ve been doing that tonight too. You’d have a hard time finding something free that can make you laugh for as long as this has done.
You have to know all of the ways you can use the tools you download. Knowing the silly ways are important, too.
