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I’d like my blue skies back, please

Cold. Rainy. Miserable outdoor experience. The high was 46. The low was only 41, but even thermometers can be fooled. Just gray and yucky all day. Yucky is the preferred meteorological term.

I went out for a run, but it was drizzling and I realized I didn’t need to run that bad.

So I didn’t run, except back inside to put on warmer clothes.

More phone calls and other assorted things, all of which make for riveting site reads, I’m sure. Instead, we’ll move on.

Things to read … The Guardian’s Gabriel Dance on new tools for story and cultivating interactive journalism:

I can go to someone on my team, give them a topic, and ask them to report on that topic and the process is very similar to how that might work with a more traditional print reporter. They go out, they explore it, they see what information is available. They schedule some interviews, they gather data, and they come back and we work on what form it might take.

Are we producing articles with strictly text? No. But I think what we are producing is much closer to what you saw in Decoded, which is what I guess I’d call web-first journalism.

When people talk about this as new and different, it only really is if you’re looking at the old things as the status quo.

This would work for branded journalism, too. That’s a great Q&A, worth your time if you’re interested in the topic. Also, I have other topics.

Gene Policinski, whom I’ve had the good fortune to meet and spend a day with, writes: Inside the First Amendment | Privacy the impetus for conflict

(I)n our lifetimes — and more since just last June — privacy and its implications for First Amendment areas ranging from free speech to the freedom to assemble have taken on a new urgency prompted by government surveillance of the World Wide Web, phone calls and high-tech gadgetry.

Beyond questions of how much does the government know about our individual lives through captured emails, online search logs and records of whom we telephoned, where and for how long, there’s the looming impact on whether we will feel free to speak our minds even in “private” moments, and whom will we be willing to be seen with?

US B-52 bombers challenge disputed China air zone:

The US has flown two B-52 bombers over disputed islands in the East China Sea in defiance of new Chinese air defence rules, officials say.

China set up its “air defence identification zone” on Saturday insisting that aircraft obey its rules or face “emergency defensive measures”.

A Pentagon spokesman said the planes had followed “normal procedures”.

The islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, are a source of rising tension between the two nations.

Turn an eye to the east. That is getting interesting in a hurry.

Sports fan? TV buff? This is a great read. Inside the chaos and spectacle of the NFL on Fox:

To watch a football broadcast is to see much more than a football game. There are only about 11 minutes of actual action during a three-hour game, which means 95 percent of the time there’s something else going on. The graphics, replays, highlights, and analysis that make a football game into the at-home experience millions of people know and love — it’s all from Fox, and it’s all done on the fly. Nearly everyone on the crew says that while they broadcast the game, what they really do is make television.

It starts at 6AM on Saturday, in the cold, dark Foxboro morning, as the Fox team shows up to unload three 53-foot trucks. Stadiums don’t have much in the way of built-in A / V equipment, so Fox (and every other network) carries everything the crew will need for the weekend inside those trucks — the show has to be built and broken down every weekend. This Saturday, it has to be even faster: there’s a college football game at 4PM.

That those things never occur to you is a testament to the quality of their work, really.

We’d like you to meet a paralympic sprinter Blake Leeper. He was a guest on Arsenio Hall’s show. Hall brought on a surprise special guest. Leeper’s reaction is priceless.

This is a candid and refreshing read. If you followed Auburn last season, it is a nice way to, maybe, finally, close the door on all that. The former head coach, forever gracious, gave a wide-ranging interview to USA Today. Coach Gene Chizik on Auburn ouster, team’s current success:

I think you’d have to start with the players. What people don’t understand is from a coaching perspective when you struggle like we struggled last year, you hurt so much for the players. The players, you brought them there and told them that this is the way it’s going to be and give them this vision of championships and things of that nature. And when it doesn’t unfold exactly like that and go through the struggle we went through last year you hurt for the players. So I’m ecstatic for the players.

I couldn’t be happier to sit there and watch them win these games, particularly these close ones, however they pull it out and we all know how that’s gone this year. It’s an absolute joy for me to watch them celebrate and be happy and win. I think without question, that’s what I get the biggest joy out of.

Gus has done a fantastic job, and he and I worked together for three years and he’s done a fantastic job of regrouping the troops and them buying into him and the staff he brought in and it’s really nice to see those guys rebound and do what we recruited them to do and that’s win. They’re definitely a talented group of young men, and they’re great kids and they deserve this.

A nice Samford sports story, too: Summerlin And Shade Named Players Of The Year:

Samford senior quarterback Andy Summerlin and senior linebacker Justin Shade were named Southern Conference Offensive and Defensive Players of the Year, respectively, by the SoCon Sports Media Association, when the league released its postseason awards Tuesday morning.

They’ll start a playoff run this weekend.

Leaf update:

It is gone. Fell this morning or overnight. A new picture would just be of branches and twigs. I wouldn’t want to embarrass the tree that way.

Tomorrow it will be sunny again. And warmer. Has to be, right?

Auburn / football / iPhone / journalism / links / photo / running / things to read / video / weekend — Comments Off
13
Nov 13

I ran a lot, let’s just leave it at that

Here are two extra photos from last week’s fall foliage kick. This tree probably won’t have anything left on its limbs the next time I see it. But it is flaring beautifully:

This, more about the sun and the darkness, really, is at my grandparents’ place. While I prefer the longer days like everyone else, we do get some great angles from the sun this time of year:

Elsewhere, I ran my first 10K tonight. I was going to run the usual five, but everything felt OK, so I kept going. When I got to five miles, my previous personal best, I decided I could press on to get the nice round kilometer number. And everything felt more or less OK.

And that continued until I stopped running and took a shower. After that it all seemed like a bad idea. Since then, through the night various and different parts have been achy. My feet and my knees. My feet and my quads. My feet and my calves. Always my feet.

Clearly I have room for improvement.

Things to read …

Which brings us to this, from the Wall Street Journal, that bastion of considerate opinion and coverage of serious issues: OK, You’re a Runner. Get Over It. Once upon a time, kids, the Journal did write about serious things. Promise. I suppose we should blame the Internet.

I learned new terms today: “Snowplow parents” and “teacups.”

This young woman was on track to graduate early. And then she had a bad car accident, with a traumatic brain injury. She had to learn to walk and talk and feed herself again. And then she went back to school and graduate. That’s the short version of a remarkable story. Now her brother is trying to raise money for continued therapy. Read about it, and please share that link.

My friend Jeremy from The War Eagle Reader recites the greatest story ever written about a college football game. Worth a listen for football fans:

Here’s the text version.

cycling / I do not know what is happening. / running / swimming — Comments Off
31
Oct 13

The month’s workouts

This is what I did on the bike and on my feet and in the pool. It was not the kind of month I want to have. I can do better.

At least I rode my bike (red) more this month than I did last month, but they were all short rides. There is very little swimming (light blue). I didn’t realize that until just now. So I’ll fix that. (red) to be found. I just started swimming (light blue). And I need more running (dark blue). All units are miles. (Ignore the numbers above the calendar, which are wrong.)

Taken another way: I wasn’t doing this spring, so there’s that.

friends / history / I do not know what is happening. / iPhone / photo / running / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
22
Oct 13

There is a great rhyme below

I rotate things onto one of my office walls, just like everyone who has large, blank walls. Recently I decided to make a World War II theme. I have two V-E and V-J editions of Stars and Stripes, dusty, yellowed pieces of newsprint from France and Italy. Sometimes they allow me to talk about the appropriate time to use the 72-point font. Sometimes they allow the opportunity to demonstrate how language we use today might be frowned upon in the future. Also, they are just terrific relics.

Some time back our friend Adam gave me a lithograph of his cousin’s World War II plane. And since I decided to make a themed display, this seemed like a great place to put it. You may recall that I met Adam while asking him about his cousin, Dean Hallmark. I wrote a piece about Dean for TWER. Adam is a military man himself, a historian and we became fast friends. So I learned more about the Doolittle Raid of which Dean was a part, and then this poster tube arrived with a sharp print of The Green Hornet.

People should give each other more framable works, I say.

So I wanted to take a picture to send to Adam, since I have a series to show off. This meant moving a piece of furniture. This meant stowing that table elsewhere. This led to me destroying the wire archiving system we use for newspapers. This allowed me to recycle some old stuff I didn’t need to keep anymore. And that brought me back to rebuilding the wire crate structure which grows more precarious by the year.

That led to me cleaning a corner of the newsroom, looking under the sofa for runaway joiners for the wire-crate-frame-finger pincher device that had to have been developed in Eastern Europe.

And, finally, the picture I’d wanted to take.

That’s Dean on his way to deliver — and in this configuration on the wall, the Japanese are ready to accept — his payload. I think about Dean now and again, and what he and some of his compatriots went through:

It was a choppy day at sea and the deck was wet when Dean flew to Tokyo with the rest of the Raiders, dropped his bombs, made a second pass to drop more bombs, and finally made his way to China.

He ran out of fuel though, a by-product of being forced to launch early, and had to put his plane into the sea just off the coast. Dean was catapulted through the windshield in the crash, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body. He was hurt, but he and his fellow officers survived. The two enlisted crewmembers on board drowned.

Once ashore the officers evaded the Japanese for eight days before being captured.

They were tortured and malnourished. Dean’s navigator, Capt. C. Jay Nielsen, grimly wrote of his time as a POW at war’s end.

“They had put straps on (Dean’s) legs and arms and pulled them until he thought his joints were coming apart.”

Nielsen would also tell of having bamboo shoved under their fingernails. Their captors would light the bamboo on fire, demanding to know how they’d gotten to occupied China. Another captive would later write of being water boarded shortly after their capture.

They were about to be executed, Nielsen said, but the Japanese soldiers’ orders suddenly changed. That meant more torture.

Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. The Japanese military tried Dean, his surviving crew and five crewmembers from another bomber on trumped up charges. Nielsen said Dean dropped 50 pounds and was on a stretcher, because of his illness, during the farcical court martial.

We met Lt. Col. Richard Cole, who was Doolittle’s copilot on the Tokyo Raid, at Adam’s wedding a few weeks ago. We saw Dean’s marker at Arlington this summer:

He was 28 years old at the time. He would have been 100 next January.

I guess I’m thinking about that as I’ve wrapped up the big family project I’ve been working on. I found the last details I’ll likely ever be able to find on my great-grandfather’s time in the ETO. Now I just have to copyedit the text and finish assembling the presentation. I’m disproportionately excited to show this off in a few weeks. Between that and the new book I’m reading I just have the period on my mind.

Had a nice run this evening. I said on Facebook that it was a 5K that didn’t feel like a 5K and, thus, I did not know what was happening. I said that after my run, before dinner and before I had the opportunity to go down a set of stairs.

And then it felt like a run. Now I have the impression it is going to feel like one tomorrow, too.

I did this on a treadmill this evening, because it was already dark and threatening to be coolish, and I’m just not ready for that. On the treadmill there was a television. And on the television I watched a closed caption longform feature of a young baseball player doing something special, saving a life halfway around the world. You’ve got an All American kid, leading his college on the football field and on the baseball diamond. Then, with scouts watching, he gets a call that his bone marrow is a match for a girl in Ukraine. And then you met this beautiful little girl and you spend the next few seconds trying to keep it together on a treadmill in public.

What a good story.

Things to read, which I found interesting today … First a chunk of stories, if any of these headlines intrigue you:

Mobile is the ‘first screen’ for half of 18-34s

Twitter Overtakes Facebook as Teens’ Most Important Social Network

Louisiana police department will post photos of people who exploited food stamp glitch

Down and out: the French flee a nation in despair

From the multimedia blog: What is important is the money

Perhaps you heard about the student in north Alabama that recently killed himself. It has been in the news a bit because of some indirectly related things. Now his father has come forward, telling an incredibly moving tale:

Adamek said blaming Christian’s suicide on one event is “terribly over-simplistic” and called the national publicity over Christian’s streaking and subsequent death a distraction from the more important story. He explained that his family had been struggling in vain for months to find Christian the help he needed for depression.

“Nobody should have to make more than one phone call to get that kind of help, because there’s just not that much time,” Adamek said.

Adamek declined to go into specifics about Christian’s problems, saying “it doesn’t matter anymore,” but said that the family had tried for months to find the right mental health professionals for his son. They were met with obstacles like insurance issues and a lack of the right doctors.

“We followed every avenue apparently available to us, through the medical community, through the hospital system, but still couldn’t get the necessary diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring that he so desperately needed,” Adamek said.

“We needed to know what he needed. That’s the help we were looking for.”

How heartbreaking that must be. And if the text didn’t get you, the video at the link, will.

And now for something funnier, healthcare and the highly efficient rollout! Jon Stewart:

Surprised he didn’t make a “Glitches don’t get you stitches” joke.

errands / journalism / links / running / things to read / Thursday — Comments Off
10
Oct 13

Downloading a tux pattern to avoid this in the future

And I ran. I ran not far away. Really a jog, just a little ways …

Enjoy those seagulls in your head. They chased me for 2.5 miles today. And then I was finished running. It was, as they say, one of those bad days. I would have previously thought you’d need a series of good days with which to surround a bad run, but this is apparently not the case.

The Yankee said later to think of it this way: You ran 2.5 miles and you think that was bad, which you wouldn’t have thought at the beginning of the year. Which is true, but also missing the point. It was not a good run.

But it was fine. The sun and shade were delightful mixtures. The pavement was suitably hard. The body parts weren’t in a terrible amount of discomfort. The breathing was no more labored than normal. I was just finished. My body seemed tired and my mind didn’t bother to try to convince me otherwise. So I stopped running.

Need to make sure that doesn’t happen again anytime soon.

Physical therapy today, where we moved up to the two-pound weights and added some new muscle movements, which together really wiped me out. I hope that is the saddest sentence I write today.

You stick a towel under your arm, pinch your shoulder back and move your arm in and out or up and down, depending on the routine. My amazing physical therapist had me do something today with both hands, which was new. Interestingly enough my bad shoulder felt better about that exercise than my good shoulder did.

Told you she was amazing.

There are the famous Thera-Band exercises. (We look like a physical therapy office at home, by the way, with my many Thera-Bands.) There are row exercises and bicep curls and lateral movements and so on. Then I get to repurpose a chair and use it for something approaching a push up. I dislike this exercise because it hurts my hands and wrist.

After all of that there’s the torture table where I go from resting on my stomach to arching out in such a way as to make a close-parenthesis mark that has fallen over. There is pulling on nylon and rubber straps that are attached to springs which lock into pulleys and eye-hooks. I try not to think of all the things on this table that could accidentally hurt me by pretending I’m doing a snow skiing long jump. Sometimes this distraction actually works.

We closed the session with an exercise I get nothing out of, which more than likely means I’m doing it wrong. You take a ball and roll it around in little circles on the wall while I pondering the now timeless dictate: wax on, wax off.

Picked up my tux this evening. This is the fifth visit to the rental store, each a more silly waste of time than the last visit. The first drop in was punctuated by a helpful gentleman who left you cold with the feeling he may or may not know what he’s doing and it may or may not be realized on your transaction. The second was the opposite, a man who knew his stuff, but with an air that suggests you might be leery of letting him park your car. The third visit was the first man, and this time came the measurements and he knew about this stuff. The fourth visit was Monday, because in true guy fashion, as soon as you get the thing arranged there will be a change in the parameters, necessitating a further visit, and a third and fourth person plugging aimlessly through software that was a bad idea for Windows 3.2.

So today was the fitting, double-checking the size and making sure no last minute alterations were needed. Which, if that were the case, would of course require a sixth visit. Happily that was not the case. A fifth person was there to make sure everything fell just as it should. She struggled in vain through this tedious software which would see semaphore as an upgrade to find me in the cobweb filled corners of the computer system.

What I’m saying is Jos. A Bank could do a better job of this if they wanted too. The staff have been helpful and polite, how they maintain that attitude in dealing with their software is a mystery.

So the tux is in hand. Looks nice. Fits well. Tomorrow it gets to travel.

Things to read which may be of interest …

Patriot Act author preps Freedom Act to rein in NSA:

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), the original author of the USA Patriot Act, said Wednesday that he plans to introduce legislation in the “next few days” to restrict the National Security Agency’s surveillance power.

[…]

In a speech at the Cato Institute, Sensenbrenner argued that the Patriot Act’s “relevance” requirement was meant to prevent the kind of bulk collection the NSA is now conducting.

“This is something that Congress would have never authorized,” he said. “And since the administration has assumed this authority, Congress should not hesitate to stop it and stop it quickly.”

Long overdue. Here are more details, from The Guardian, which has seemingly beaten all of the traditional American media to the story. Curious.

And now a series of journalism pieces:

The rise of the reader: journalism in the age of the open web

Student newspapers in Northampton, South Hadley follow news industry trend with online editions

Report: Obama brings chilling effect on journalism

The Effects of Mass Surveillance on Journalism

And today’s Dumb Thing Which Is Dumb, which is threatening to become a regular feature here, Student stopped from handing out Constitutions on Constitution Day sues:

On Sept. 17, Robert Van Tuinen was passing out copies of the Constitution in honor of Constitution Day at Modesto Junior College in California when he was asked to stop. Officials told Van Tuinen that if he wanted to pass out literature, he could only do so in a designated “free speech zone” on campus and under college policies would be required to get permission in advance.

[…]

After the incident, Modesto Junior College President Jill Stearns issued a statement saying the school apologized to Van Tuinen and was working to clarify with campus officials that policies allow students to distribute printed material “as long as it does not disrupt the orderly operation of the college.” Stearns also said the school was reviewing its policies.

Is there video? Yes, there’s video:

First of all, the guy should be cited for holding his phone incorrectly, but that’s secondary.

I understand the concept. I appreciate what the universities, and Robert Van Tuinen’s Modesto Junior College is far from alone here, are trying to do. The application of “free speech zones,” however, leaves something to be desired.

One of those appeared on campus when I was in undergrad. It was a small square on a campus of 1,841 acres. They were, I’m sure, trying to balance the school’s real need to fulfill educational and research goals while limiting distraction. (The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education may disagree.) Regardless, the solution is poor. One must also be aware of the supposedly largest free speech zone in the world, the 3.794 million square miles that is the United States.

Oh look, the local chapter of Young Americans for Liberty just had a demonstration at Auburn. It reads like a success. And, it turns out, the president of the YAL chapter at Samford is one of our photographers. Good for him.

Anyway, every campus being different — the layout, the culture, the traffic patterns and so on — there is no blanket solution. Some moderate to high traffic areas, some respectful distance away from classroom doors and windows and no amplification technology seem like a good place to start. Bring in too many opinions on the question and you run the risk of getting “That green space behind the alumni building” as a working policy.

Finally, someone distributing the U.S. Constitution should always be acceptable. We have enough problems with civics in this country as it is. We shouldn’t hamper it further.