Here’s the deal I, a southern boy, have made in my decade of living in northern climes. Below a certain temperature, I don’t go outside if I don’t want to. At the same time, I acknowledge that life has brought me to a place where winter happens. (Items one and two here generally take of each other.) If winter is going to happen, it should stick within certain calendar confines. (I never get my way on this one, really, I mean look at us.) Anything after February 14th won’t do, because, back home, trees are budding and the lilies have burst through the soil and the jonquils aren’t far behind. Winter is going to happen, though, and so I will accept days that are cold and bright, or dull and warmer. The wrong combination there is unwanted. And, somewhere in February, because I can’t have spring on schedule, I begin to think things like “Oh this feels awfully warm!” and it is 51 degrees. This is the Stockholm Syndrome that comes in the last third of winter.
The last third, because we’re not done yet.
There has been entirely too much of this in the atmosphere for March.
Walking into our building on campus today I could see my breath. This wasn’t so much about the cold, but the dew point. It was one of those days where everything felt like it would be cold soggy forever.
In Rits and Trads we wrapped up the student presentations of traditions they found. Someone actually showed off the Red Wings thing. While they love it in Detroit, where it is presumably gray until May, this strikes me as problematic for a lot of people.
Another student showed a video from his high school, which was cool, but I’ll never find again. The idea was how they integrated the marching band and the football team taking the field. It was simple, and neat.
Someone discussed the Red Sox playing Sweet Caroline. Fits the bill. Crowd loves it.
And the Buffalo Bills do a Mr. Brightside thing now, which is on its way to becoming a tradition, it looks like.
Admittedly, these guys right here aren’t the best singers, but this is all about the choreographed stadium atmosphere. The Buffalo snow probably helps.
I wonder if they’ll take this song, and emerging tradition, next door to the new stadium this year.
In Criticism, we watched this documentary, which I thought was fascinating, as it takes on issues of gender, politicization, culture, history, and colonization. It’s a slow start, which allows the whole story to breathe, but most of the last half hour feels like a sports film. Also, it shocks the sensibilities a bit to see 8th and 9th and 10th graders having to fight to play a sport they love.
We talked about those things, and a few others, after the film, which is now 10 years old. Apparently not a lot of people have seen it, but maybe more should.
It’s a good way to avoid a bit of winter, I’d say.
Woke up tired, going to end it that way. And was tired most the way throughout. It was another busy and full day, too. When last we talked, I was taking a brief break from the big job packet. Yesterday was the clear-my-head-of-it day. Tonight, I started working on a dead tree edit.
You can edit the file you’re working on, but there’s a lot more you can catch on paper. At least that’s what I tell myself. It has the added benefit of being true. Also, this is a mortifying exercise.
I found the first typo on the Table of Contents. By page four I found my sixth correction.
It went on like that, for about 15 pages, which was just about all I could stand tonight. I’ll do the rest in the morning, and send it off.
I’ve read Dillard, I’ve admired Steinbeck’s journals, and Sarton’s memoirs. I’m sure they’re all more interesting than that, and — though it has been a while since I’ve read some of them, I don’t recall them talking a lot about editing comma splices and redundancies.
Today in Rituals and Traditions the students presented some interesting traditions that they found. I’m sure they all worked tirelessly, evaluating any number of these things from across the country and the world, studiously evaluating the premise behind any number of these things from all of the sports. That, I hope, is what they took from my directions. I wanted them to find something interesting, figure out where it came from, and tell us a bit about the thing. Why does it matter, and so on. The goal was to expose everyone in the class to a bunch of new ideas. You never know from whence inspiration will come. By and large, that’s exactly what they did.
Someone showed us a video of lighting the beam.
Someone else talked about the milk at the Indy 500.
And we also talked about how the Philadelphia Union bang a drum.
And maybe the inspiration will be that we wire a light to a drum, a drum soaked in milk, and then the most valuable player of the game will hit the drum over and over until the stadium lights come on. And then we’ll throw octopus on the playing surface. That Detroit Red Wings tradition keeps coming up in class, somehow.
In the Criticism class we talked about two pieces. The students picked these, and if nothing else it lets me prove there’s something to take away from anything we can read. Take, for instance, this column from The Athletic. The U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team won gold — and then lost the room:
In the immediate aftermath of their victory, the team took a customary, congratulatory call from President Donald Trump, and some players laughed at a misogynistic joke about the gold-winning women’s hockey team that many Americans wouldn’t find funny. They celebrated in the locker room with beer-chugging FBI Director Kash Patel, who is now under scrutiny for using taxpayer money to fund a sports getaway. Then, after a wild night of partying in Miami following their return from Italy, some members of the team announced plans to step in the House Chamber – a stage upon which symbolism is never neutral – and make an appearance at Trump’s State of the Union.
In normal times, this would be an obligatory celebration for a championship team. They take presidential calls. They party too hard. They visit Washington and stroll through the corridors of power.
But this isn’t a neutral climate. This isn’t a neutral president. And in a nation this polarized, the proximity carries weight whether the players are being intentional or merely naive. America no longer experiences these rituals in the same way, and it may never again. Athletes would be wise to recognize that, in this climate, celebration is easily repurposed into political capital.
So we talked about how columns are different than articles, because we live in a time where people don’t read enough to have learned to distinguish between the two. It is, and take my word for it, a real problem.
That piece also let us talk about the Miracle of Ice, which at least one person was not at all familiar. So, as I reminded myself these are 21st century students, I tried to paint pictures about the Cold War, the Carter administration, small fuzzy TVs and nationalism. So we also talked about nationalism in sport, and the politics of sports in two different ways. And then the propaganda value of politicians (of any stripe) glomming on to successful sportsball teams.
All of which is what I planned on at the beginning of the semester, even if they didn’t.
Nick Castellanos watched from right field as Orion Kerkering’s ill-advised throw home sailed over catcher J.T. Realmuto to end the Phillies’ season.
Castellanos saw the Dodgers pour out of the third-base dugout, sprinting past a stunned Kerkering to swarm Andy Pages at first base to celebrate their 2-1 walk-off National League Division Series-clinching win.
Then, Castellanos broke into a sprint of his own. He rushed past the euphoric Dodgers on the infield dirt to get to a visibly emotional Kerkering.
“That’s second nature. That’s instinct,” Castellanos said. “I understand what he’s feeling. Not the exact emotions, but I can see them. I didn’t even have to think twice about it, that’s where I needed to run to.”
And here we talked about tone and intentions and beat writers. There’s something to learn in every story. At least for me.
Happy Monday, and happy March! We have survived the brutal months. Now, the month that makes the difference. All of the snow has mostly melted. Spring, overdue, has been promised. It has not yet been received here. It will be received with great interest when it shows up. And we’re getting close. We’ve had some mild temperatures. We’ve had sunny days, like this weekend. Now we just need to put it all together … and we will … and then keep it that way, until late November or so.
I better not be writing paragraphs like that very much longer.
It was a productive weekend, all spent right here at my desk. I did the monthly cleaning of the computer, updated the monthly spreadsheets, created new subdirectories and updated some boilerplate code. I put the February page of my master assignment calendar behind me. (I have several task-specific calendars running and when the stress of things hits my move is to make another calendar. Late last month I made the master panic calendar, filled it out through May, noticed almost every moment between then and March 28th was spoken for and then set about marking things off the list. Nowhere on that calendar is there a note to make another calendar. Five is sufficiently silly.)
I settled on two new documentaries for class. One of them will be a midterm, and I finished writing that today. The other we’ll watch in class. I’ve had it on my radar for some time, wanted to watch it, want to write something about it. About 14 minutes in I knew it was going into my Criticism class, too. I’ll pretend like this was all by design, because it should fit perfectly.
Also, I finished the draft of that work packet. Presently the thing clocks in at 29 pages, with all of the appendices to go. I wrote the service and research and professional development sections last week. I detailed the teaching section, filling up the maximum seven pages. I have two years of classes, peer observation, student reviews and subtle notes about the future to get into just seven pages. It took some doing to make it fit. Happily, all of the scores from my teaching evaluations are good. The lowest score I’ve registered in the last two years was about the difficulty of a class. Message received: that class will be more demanding and challenging if I get to offer it again.
I’m taking today off from that packet. It’s time for a break from thinking about myself. Besides, I have to think about tomorrow’s classes. Tomorrow evening I’ll do a dead tree edit of the packet, and then send it to a colleague who has generously offered to make sure I’m not omitting anything. After that, final corrections, final assembly, PDF the thing, and send it in. All of which takes place by mid-March. Not the longest thing I’ve ever written. Not the most tedious thing I’ve ever written. But it is a lot of me. Call it … maybe 60 or so pages? I can’t say yet. The checklist, though, tells me I have to have TWO tables of content. That’s always a signal.
On to more important things. We need to do the weekly check=in on the kitties. Phoebe would like you to know that she is not on the table. She is on the runner. And nowhere in the contract does it say she can’t be on the table runner.
Poseidon, himself no slouch when it comes to jailhouse cat lawyering, finds the argument a bit tiresome. Though you can be comfortably certain he’ll be doing much the same thing tomorrow.
So the cats are doing great. Lots of cuddles and big purrs over the weekend. Everyone is doing great.
I did manage a few quick rides. On Saturday, I was in Switzerland! This is just to the northeast of Zurich. I rode up and out from the small rural, forested village of Mosnang and over to the equally small and wonderfully charming Kollbrun. This route was part of one stage of the Tour De Suisse in 2024 and, while I did not see that particular race, I can see why.
I only wish that the person who recorded that route had done so on a brighter day. Switzerland is stunning most everywhere you look. Beautiful lakes, mountains a plenty, gorgeous values, and a huge array of glorious architecture. You can see ancient Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Art Nouveau. But there’s just a little too much Modern and Post Modern architecture, some of which is bordering on Brutalist. Much better to be among the trees and the hills and the rivers and streams. Even if it’s just my basement.
Anyway, here’s that route.
And this evening I rode in Corsica. (But still my basement.)
The last four rides have felt really nice on the trainer. This is notable because everything prior to that, since November, has felt bad or worse. I was getting demoralized. Now, though, I want to see what kind of trouble I can get into riding uphill on Rouvy. I did that tonight. I found myself a little Cat-2 climb that let me climb 1,110+ feet over 3.82 miles. Saying I rode in Switzerland on Saturday, and tonight in both Corsica or Mallorca, where I powered up that hill, is nice, but I’d also like to go outside. I’m ready to not be in the basement.
If for nothing else because I’m kicking myself by how little I’ve done down there this winter.
But spring is coming in now. That’s what the top of this post told me, anyway.
In Rituals and Traditions we discussed the notion of traditions as spectacle. We started with the basic definitions, the unusual, the notable, the entertaining, the exciting public event that is visually striking. All of those things that go into making a gameday atmosphere. I love that stuff. I want to know how they all started, and how they came to pass. And some of these we can get to pretty easily.
For instance, when we talked about aural expressions, I showed this video, and part of the origin story is tacked on to the end.
We discussed other chants and cheers. And the silent expressions. I thought about just showing raw footage of Taylor University’s silent night, but this TV package explains the whole thing.
We discussed visual displays, and I showed this video, while I also confessed that dotting the i does nothing for me. But if it was like this every week, it’d be one of my favorite traditions. Dotting the i is 90 years old this year, and it’s thought to be one of the first big marching band arrangements, and certainly one of the longest lasting.
And, since I’d poked fun at the Aggies on Tuesday, I gave them a little video redemption today, sharing part of this package on midnight yell practice. All of which, as I explained, stems from there not being anything else to do at College Station.
And we talked about stadium performances, like this new thing that Clemson is doing. It’s great! I know, in my part of the world Clemson and great don’t often go together, but this is great, which the game announcers conveniently explained for us.
I talked more about Osceola and Renegade than perhaps they wanted to know, but this is a fascinating piece of lore.
Just to change it up, I touched on the La Barra Brava at DC United. No one knew what barra brava meant, but we talked about Bolivian immigrants coming to that region and attaching themselves to the club in the 1990s and now it’s impossible to think about a game there without them, even as what they’re doing isn’t routinely expected at U.S.A. sporting events.
And then I shared an example of one of the few instances of tifo in the U.S.
There are a lot of compelling examples in soccer, mostly from Europe, where these fans have tied the game and the club to their community, where it feels far more intensely wrapped into identity in a way that we don’t often see here, but you can’t everything in in one day.
And now, next week, they all have to share examples of rituals and traditions they’ve found, in brief individual presentations. We should get two dozen new examples out of the exercise. Or at least I hope we do.
During office hours, since no one came to visit, I knocked off some work, and then I started writing a column. I had this idea the other day and it has been bouncing around in my head long enough that I had to start whipping it into shape. I didn’t finish the job, but this evening I’ve made the thing much better. We’ll see, tomorrow, if I can perhaps try to make something of it.
We watched these videos in Criticism today. This was a long-form ESPN package that ESPN wrote, which followed up on a newspaper article we discussed in class on Tuesday. This woman is just incredible.
We also watched this one, and I think I’m retiring the video. I like it better than two consecutive classes. And I don’t think they’re as impressed with what’s going on in this production, or my explanation of it, than perhaps they should. But the man at the end is a hit.
And then there was this video, which two or three of them had seen, but more were interested in. Many excellent questions were raised. They couldn’t answer them all themselves, but right now I’m pleased to see them thinking their way into the questions.
It occurred to me, watching this once again before the class met, that this particular game was perhaps the first time a where-were-you-when moment took place that everyone had phones in their pocket. They didn’t make that specific point in the piece, but they walk you right up to it.
That’s enough for now. I have a meeting in the morning for which I must prepare. And more things to grade. And other items to work on, too. Keeps me out of trouble.
I had the weirdest dream this morning. But no one cares about your dreams. If you’re writing a blog, or someplace that’s not your own dream journal, or the Journal of Altered Conscious Mental, Emotional, and Sensory Experiences, no one will. This should be a lesson to you. Don’t write it out for others, because no one is reading about your dreams (and Freud isn’t coming along to analyze you in the comments.)
Simply do this instead. Point out you had a dream or dreams. This signals that you have not only slept recently, but done so to the extent that you could enter REM sleep. And then, share that you, too, are dismissive of the dreams, that you know that no one cares. And then, by definition, you are hip.
Not only are you hip, but you, my friend, are a dreamer.
And this is the sort of thing I normally charge $84.95 for down at the airport Ramada, where the lonely, bored, and vaguely motivated will fall all over themselves to see my latest slide decks.
No one cares about your slide decks. All the above? You can apply that to your presentations, too. Oh, sure, you put in a lot of work and they’re interesting, noteworthy, sometimes even compelling. But, and this is the key, they are those things in the moment, not in the re-telling.
Pick your spots.
No one cares about your spots.
Except for infectious disease specialists. Tell them everything. Do not charge them Ramada rates.
Here’s the view from the 6th floor almost-corner office. Not bad out there. Most of the streets on the way in were in great shape. Just one, screen by trees and hills and houses, looked a bit rough. At least for our commute. Quite a few people didn’t make it in today. Not everyone has the same snow experience. You can also see that, below, just by carefully observing which people have shoveled their sidewalks 48-plus hours after the snow stopped and who hasn’t.
In my Rituals and Traditions class today I tried to frame things so that we start thinking of these things more like a team, a league or a school, and not like a fan. I presented them with some research on rituals from a marketing perspective. (Rituals have staying power and create conditions where highly identified fans want to come back, take part, and come back again. Also, most of them spend more money on other stuff at the venue than the ticket price itself.) The lecture got us through about a decade of marketing of fandom research and a few more years on sports fan sociology. Also, I showed them the Aggie War Hymn at weddings, with which I made a point about things in, and out, of context.
And then I explained the song. It’s a song about hating your rivals. I explained the history of the song. J.V. “Pinky” Wilson wrote the song in a trench in France during World War I. He came home to College Station, finished his degree, and sang the song in a quarter. Some of the A&M yell leaders heard it, and convinced him to enter it into a campus song contest. It won, and since 1920 it has been an integral part of Texas A&M fandom. I mean, they sing it at weddings.
At which point I paused, and deadpanned, “White people weddings, man.”
Then I said, there are a lot of these videos on YouTube.
We also considered the shared affiliation of rituals, as in the example of the running of the Gumps. Look at that zeal! And the footspeed!
And then we considered what it means to be a part of 61,000 people singing to your favorite team.
I was also able to cite to them a study that told us some 98 percent of fans engage in sports rituals. Most of them have to do with wearing the team gear and colors, but that study broke out 15 other criteria, and quite a few make the cut for people.
On Thursday, my students’ surveys will be completed. We’re asking questions of our study body. Hopefully some of the information will be help to our class as we try to help find and or develop things our athletic department might work on.
In Criticism, we discussed baseball, beginning with this story about one of the Phillies recent relievers. As a young man he caused a terrible car accident that killed one man, badly injured a teenager and almost derailed his own life. But then one of the truly selfless and remarkable things about humanity happens. It’s a terrific story.
I asked the group what they would like to know at the end of the story. What’s not here that’d you like to see in a followup. Someone said they’d like to see what happened if the pitcher and the family met. Just you wait for Thursday.
We also talked about a museum piece — meaning copy from the Smithsonian — about Jackie Robinson. It didn’t really fit the bill, but we were able to discuss why, and also story curation and, again, what’s not in this piece. What wasn’t there was what Robinson did after he walked away from baseball, and that’s every bit, or more as important, as his time with the Dodgers.
In the evening, as the day is getting later everything felt sunny and cheery, even if it was cold, and it looks like Hoth.
We’re right at the point where 12 hours of the day is in daylight. Right at the point where it seems we might make it once again. Right at the moment that should have happened two weeks ago, but will take place three or four weeks from now: it’ll finally feel like winter is behind us.
Since it isn’t, I rode in the basement this evening. I’ve been suffering through the little riding I’ve done of late. Everything got out of whack around the holidays and my cardio slipped and nothing has helped and it just felt like a big chore — a big painful chore.
But this brief ride, for the first time in a long while, things finally felt good. I don’t know why it seemed to click back into place, physically or mentally, but it was about time. Also, Spain. And I went up a hill prominent enough that it got its own little graphic in the heads up display.
I’m sure that’s useful for climbers, so that they might time their exertion to perfection. But it does something else for the rest of us.
Anyway, 30-some minutes over a lumpy area of Tossa de Mar, with two little Cat 5 climbs according to the profile, way off in the northeast of Spain. I hope I get a few more rides in a row that feel as decent as this one.
