site « Kenny Smith | Omnes hic sumus discere.

site

photo / Rowan / site / Thursday — Comments Off
1
Oct 26

Welcome to Catober

Welcome to October, when the certitude of the season becomes a certainty. We are past the equinox. The temperatures are dipping. The days are indisputably growing shorter. For a decade now I have not had the best reaction to fall. I’ve struggled with enjoying its many pleasures because of what follows it. Living in dread of something later is a great way to miss out on today. So, this year, I am trying a different approach.

I’ll start with the idea of being present. I’ll take deliberate efforts to enjoy this moment. Not that I am ignoring anything, but just because I will probably spend all of the winter indoors anyway, why hate that? Plus, El Niño is supposed to give us a milder, wetter winter. Conditions are ideal, then, to figure out how to not miss today. I should have rationalized that yesterday.

We’ll see how long it lasts. At least until tomorrow.

Catober has begun, as you might have noticed. We’ll have daily photos of the cats every day all month long. Tomorrow Phoebe will be at the top of the page around noon. Saturday, it’ll be Poseidon. Sunday Phoebe, and so on, throughout Catober.

And because it is the first of the month I have done all of the boring computer stuff. Cleaning old files to try to save a little space, changing the file structures, and so on. Also, I have updated the photos on the front page. After two tries of putting these together … they still aren’t working as well as I’d like. This is a beautiful creature, my photos notwithstanding. Anyway, if you go to the front page of the site, you’ll see photos like this.

That’s a lilac breasted roller (Coracias caudata). There are 15 photos. If you sit there for a minute you’ll see them all. Go on, have a look. We’ll wait for you.

In class today I finished up a week of talking about the sharing of data and surveillance. I used a lot of recent videos. I like this first one because everyone sits up a little bit straighter from the implications.

This one, I think, someone has to think about a great deal, but it lets me delve into some communication theory stuff.

And I played this one as a way to let us get to doxxing. Everyone knows about it. No one wants to think about it. And we should all pay a lot more attention to it.

And here’s a handful of recent stories that we touched on today, too.

Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content

LinkedIn and X are flooded With AI spam, browsing data suggests

Australians could soon be able to choose what appears in their social media feed. How would this work?

Warhammer YouTuber pulls the plug after 10 years amid games workshop takedowns, death threats, and doxxing over 3D printing designs

US judges are worried for their safety — and their independence

Elon Musk’s Grok AI is doxxing home addresses of everyday people

AI can now doxx your anonymous accounts? Here’s what’s going on

Somehow, because I worked on it quite a bit, I managed to make it a full class. Hopefully it was useful and helpful.

Later, I went to pick up my lovely bride across campus. There was a crowd at the parking deck elevator. And also fire fighters. I asked someone if the elevator was working. Seems like someone was trapped inside one of the cars. So stairs it was! What a great day to park on the fourth floor.

A fireman went up behind me, keeping pace. He had to go to the top of the deck, which is six flights up, to do something that aided in the rescue of people in a small metallic box. I was pleased he stayed the same distance behind me on the way up and that he didn’t feel the need to render assistance to me. Four floors isn’t that many floors, but my backpack is heavy.

I don’t know what the protocol for elevator incidents might be, or the specialties involved, but they sent out two trucks.

So that was twice this week — at least! — that they’ve rolled out to that building. I’m not nervous about next week at all, no. Why do you ask?

The sun and the sky and the clouds were putting on a great show for the ride home. We got in and sat out back and read for a bit, until the bugs came. The mosquitos outnumber us at least six-to-one, and we can also read indoors, which is what we wound up doing.

Before I went inside, I stopped by one of the hydrangeas. I love this part of the season for them. There’s so much character in the blooms, and they’re all so very different.

I’d like to think there’s a grand reason for that. Some epic story of success and minerals, trials and winds, and the way the rain drops land just so.

Maybe it has something to do with the sun or a bumpy part of the soil. Probably its just how the photosynthesis works on the thing, and how quickly or slowly some thing is going on in the root system.

These are all facing the morning sun, though, and what could make up that difference? Maybe its the fairies. Maybe it is plant energy. Maybe it is fairy energy.

Maybe each of these blooms has a different, but evolving, view of autumn.

One year, when I’m not busy, I’m going to watch that plant a lot more closely. It’ll be a photo study. We will figure this out.

Anyway, that’s enough for today. Happy Catober. Come back tomorrow for another great kitty photo. We’ll have a great time.

Alabama / Friday / history / site — Comments Off
25
Sep 26

Back in the Valley

I am back home. It’s never been my home, but in all of my childhood memories, going home meant coming here. It’s where my mother is from, and she’s there. Here. And, for the weekend, I am too. Flew in to Nashville last night. Late, as it turns out, because the airline can’t get its act together. Drove in, went to sleep.

Woke up this morning and did some work, because there was work to be done, but also to prove, I guess, that I do work from time to time.

There’s a small family routine of a Friday breakfast, so we went to that. It was my mother, my grandfather, my great-aunt and great-uncle. Two different cousins came — one of them of my generation and another that is younger. Much, much younger. That jerk.

He’s a delightful young man. He’s about to get married. About to move into a starter home. I’ve probably had the chance to see him six times in his life. Breakfast this morning is the most time I’ve ever spent with him. He sat next to his grandmother, my great-aunt, and they spent the entire morning clowning on one another, effortlessly, joyfully. I’d watch an entire series of buddy cop movies starring the two of them.

We — my mom, my other cousin and me — confirmed and corrected for him a bit of family lore about his grandfather. I don’t think he was listening at the moment. But also we didn’t tell the whole hilarious story. It involved a specific and embarrassing injury he sustained while tending to his cattle.

After we saw our elders off my other cousin and I traded platitudes and hugs. Then I went to the bank to ~~play some video games~~ do some banking. Back at my mom’s house, I unrolled a rug, moved a rug, re-positioned some furniture, and changed seven light bulbs. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon asking her if there was anything she wanted me to do. There was not.

I seldom get to use that banner.

Water, as I have noted in this space before, is the predominant geographical feature of the area where all of my family live. The Tennessee River forms near Knoxville, Tennessee and flows to the southwest, into Alabama, before looping back up, helping form the Alabama-Mississippi-Tennessee borders and then heading to Kentucky. It created a topography that has defined all of the people that have ever lived there.

The Yuchi tribe, the Alibamu and the Coushatta, of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy, lived on this imposing body of water. They called it the Singing River. Alabama became a territory in 1817, white people moved in and it became a state in 1819. Some of my ancestors were among the first white people in the area, some even before the Native Americans were forcibly displaced by the federal government. From what I can glean, my people were hardscrabble dirt farmers. Even if you grew enough to sell, but shipping was difficult. The shallow, turbulent water at Muscle Shoals was the problem.

Then the Great War came.

There was a worry that the Imperial German Navy would cut off shipments of nitrates from South America, so the federal government decided to build their own nitrate plants, driven by hydroelectric power. Muscle Shoals was understood to have the greatest hydroelectric potential east of the Rockies.

So in 1918 they started building a dam, a project which became a city unto itself, employing thousands. They had a school, barbershops, a hospital and more than a hundred miles of sewage lines. But the war ended before the construction did.

It is a narrow, two-lane dam, always a bit intimidating when I was a kid. Back then, it was one of the last little bits of road on our two-hour trip to my grandparents’ home. My mom would tell me about how she learned how to drive on that dam, in the snow.

Well, I haven’t done that, but I have driven over it. Not too long after I’d gotten comfortable with that — those lanes are narrow! — the traffic pattern changed. But that amazing structure is all about change. Without question it changed the region. In 1933 the dam was handed over to the newly formed Tennessee Valley Authority, which also touches everyone and everything in the region. The dam was put on the historic registry in 1966, and boasts the highest single lift lock east of the Rocky Mountains. They used to give tours of the place. Today you can still walk on the very tiny sidewalk, but once upon a time, the tours would allow you to walk through it, from one side of the river to the other.

I’ve jogged over it, biked over it, fished beneath it as a kid, marveled at the power of the spillways and the respect they commanded from people on the water, watched the ships pass through the locks, and, now, I’ve dined above it. (I’ve never been quite so aware of how that ascent/descent figures into the design.) I didn’t grow up here, but the dam is omnipresent in my story because of the river it sits on and because my family lives in its orbit.

Anyway, the views from the restaurant are nice. You drive down to the river, of course. You get in an elevator and go up – up – up. Some 300 feet or more, to get commanding views like the one above. The food is better than I’d expected. I don’t know what I expected, but that’s a fine place. We ordered a stuffed crab cake appetizer. My mom got a steak. I ordered a short rib.

I had a bite of the steak. If I ever go back there, I’m ordering the steak.

Did I mention that the restaurant spins? We’d gone just in time to see the day’s last bright light on the dam, and then we spun to the west.

And in this one, you can see the last interesting bit of the sunset and a bit of the Singing River.

Also, I ate so much that I had to walk it off. So I walked home. That’s not right. I drove back, and then walked around the neighborhood. Here’s one of the houses in the neighborhood, waiting patiently, under a bright moon, for this big moment.

A word about those banners. The Spillway was a newspaper clipping, one of those little social happenings sections of The Florence Times, the pre-merger ancestor of the modern Times Daily. The Northwest Alabamian is an old masthead from the still publishing paper of the same name. It’s been a twice-weekly community paper since 1965, tracing it’s own heritage back to 1911. The current publisher has been there since 1983.

family / photo / site / sport / Tuesday — Comments Off
1
Sep 26

First day of classes

Oh it was hot today. The shade was a good four or five degrees cooler, and I was grateful for the shade. There’s a reason people move more slowly where I’m from, and this is that reason. In the old days, before forced air, a person would perish in the real heat. And sometimes they’d do that before they burst into flames. It’s true. You don’t read about it in books all that often, because the books would ignite too. Also, they ban some books there now, which is, we can all agree, just about the most offensive and dumbest performative thing you can do to a collection of ideas. Though the act of doing so does seem to create a lot of curiosity about the ideas contained therein. An inquisitive and rebellious human nature has that going for it.

There’s no reason at all I’m on that subject. It’s really hot here today. It was hot tonight. And humid. It was humid like home. And there were insects everywhere. But we’ll get to that.

Well, class. I have one class on Tuesday. This is Digital Media Processes, and its about the structure and concepts behind our social and digital media. And if that sounds fun, it is! But more is watching me stumble my way through trying to find an easy way to discuss what it means to discuss the conceptual nature of things without getting ahead of myself, which is precisely what I did today. Hey, it was my first day, too.

This was my 19th first day. One day, I’m going to be good at it. Maybe on the 20th first day.

This class was supposed to be in the same building where my office is, but it got moved for logistical reasons and so now I must walk some 450 feet feet and around a corner, to another building. There on the corner is a fiberglass statue. It is a statue of a man and woman in a deep hug and perhaps a passionate kiss, depending on where you are standing. And I’m wondering how many times I’ll walk by it before I think something like, “Awwww, that’s nice,” or “Get a room you guys!” Twice as I walked by it today, I had that sort of reaction to the statue. Let us chart, this semester, how long it takes for something to sink into both sides of my brain.

The class is on the fourth floor of this building, which is where they put all the great classes. All of the professors wind up in the hot box eventually, according to the campus tradition I just made up. They don’t, apparently, put air conditioning in that class. I was sitting at the desk in the front of the room sweating, and it wasn’t nerves. My jacket may have been too heavy for this early in the term. Every jacket is.

Anyway, we did Syllabus and Expectation Day. I talked about what the class was. You’re threading a needle there, I think. I need them to come back. I need them to think this is interesting or useful for them. I don’t want to overwhelm them on the first day. I also need to tell the story of the class and introduce myself and get them talking just a little bit, because they’re going to be doing that a lot this term. And I need to show them the course and a slide deck and I have 75 minutes to do all this.

Here’s my bet, I’ll get back in the groove of laying out and delivering a 75 minute class before I figure out that statue is a statue. Time my brain understands — despite how often I am late in arriving at places. I can still talk 60 seconds without a clock and wrap it up on the post, because of my time in broadcasting, and I haven’t been on the air since the Bush administration. Seventy-five minutes I’ll get adjusted to. My other class, which runs two hours and 45 minutes, I’ll get adjusted to. Can I manage both in one semester? Is that a statue, or are those real people, moving slowly? Very. Very. Slowly.

We traveled from our campus to another campus to see my god-niece-in-law (just go with it) play in her first university field hockey game. I’ve known this little girl her whole life and now we’re watching this young woman, on day two of being a college student, start for her field hockey team as a true freshman.

She’s playing as a forward. She’s been working hard and I’m sure she’ll continue to work hard. The game didn’t go their way this evening. There were two lightning delays. And then the bugs descended. Have you ever been to an event at night where that really fine mist plays on you? The sort where you can’t really see it, but you can feel it and it is so obviously there? And then you look up into the lights and you can see all of that rain dancing and reflecting the light? This was like that, only with insects. More insects than you need to see at one place. The team we were there to see were the visitors and the home team needs to invest in some bats. If they did, those bats would live well.

At one point, the insects were just falling on us. Not flying into us. Falling on us. We joked that despite the two lightning delays, and the continued lightning that the officials ignored in the second half, that they would only call the game if two more almost-plague-like events occurred.

The home team, who no one likes very much won the game. The Knights, who we were cheering on, will fight on again another day. Lane played 52 minutes in probably the most humid conditions any of those young women have ever experienced. It felt like home, honestly. We — her parents were there, as where her grandparents and her aunt and some of her cousins — were sweating just sitting, dodging insects, and cheering on the Knights. Field hockey players do a lot of running.

I have seen enough to see how she is progressing at the craft. When she’s had a few more games in hand I’ll be interested to hear her opinion on how this game is different than the high school version. I noticed a bit of that here, in this one example, and this sport is inscrutable to me. (I stood behind the goal of one of her last high school games and, to me, a soccer goalie, I could see the game a lot better and understand it a bit more, but there’s always a lot to learn.)

Started her first game! She is that rare young person that can peer into the long term. I suspect she’s going to soon come to realize that if she keeps working hard, even better things are going to come her way. Sometimes the ball lands at your feet. She’ll be ready to put it in the cage.

Finally, since it is the first day of the month, I did all of the regular first-day-of-the-month things. I cleaned my desktop. I cleaned the downloads. I emptied the computer’s trash bin. I updated my boilerplates. I updated the spreadsheet where I keep site stats. (Doesn’t everyone do that?) Last month had the most visits in the 22-year history of the site. More than a quarter of a million! I don’t know why you’re all here, I’m grateful for every one of you that isn’t a bot. I’m glad you came back. I hope you’ll do it again.

Also, I updated the art on the front page of the site. This is another 10-photo collage from South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope. Here’s the theme, but then go look. This will be here when you come back.

Those images will stay up for a month. I’ll update them again for October. Let’s all have a great time until then, shall we?

More tomorrow, including the second first day of classes.

errands / Friday / photo / site — Comments Off
14
Aug 26

Do you know praying mantis?

Sometimes strategies that you develop turn out to be accurate. There’s always the possibility you’re wrong, or you misread a situation or a third alternative arises. But sometimes you get it right. In this deliberately obscure case a time management strategy I’ve been employing has worked in my favor. So, go me? The thing about patting yourself on the back about barely referenced strategies is that you can’t count on the next one just because you were right on the last one. That’s just hubris and it will eventually catch up to you. Or me, in this case. And where will you/I be with the much ballyhooed time management choices then, huh?

You’ll spend all of your time searching and stretching for a metaphor that explains the thing without explaining the thing, thinking that one day, some seven or eight years from now, you’ll come across this post again and recall and know exactly what was going on here. You will not. I will not, in this case. I think exactly one time in the decades-long history of the site is there an allusion to something unsaid that I can recall and regard as important. And it was! And you’ll never find it, because I’m not telling.

(I wrote three paragraphs of a personal anecdote I like, one of those recollections-of-a-life-lesson I taught myself in 2003 or so, and I included the phrase “lightning bolt and thunderclap of clarity,” because I’m proud of that realization. It was an important story and a great lesson, but doesn’t fit here, so I deleted it and you are welcome.)

I woke up roughly on time this morning and made my way downstairs and outside. Parts of the southern side of the house and the gardens there are still shaded a bit, and I needed the shade to crawl around on hands and knees and do more weeding. I plucked at grasses and mints for about two hours.

I made a friend.

For a few moments, we did a bob-and-weave dance together. The insect craned its neck this way and that. I did it in response, then the mantis did it again. Then I did it again. Mid-way through the third round the insect got bored of it. But, I felt, we’d bonded in that time.

Then I felt bad about ripping up all of the green things upon which it had been living its best life. But it scurried off, headed for another patch of growth I wasn’t going to pull up. Other insects and greener pastures and all of that.

One year and one day ago I met this guy on the northern side of the house. I wonder if they are related.

How often do various insect groups have family reunions? I only took one entomology course in college and, I must confess, that did not come up. If I had undergrad to do over again, I definitely would not ask about that.

Late this afternoon, after pretending to do some computer work, I took all of the fruits of my weeding, five giant bags over four sweaty hours, and loaded them into the car to take them to the county’s drop off site. I drove there, smelling of decaying green things, and dropped them off. Usually there is a crowd, maybe even a line, but there was only one other vehicle there as the Friday closing hour loomed. I gave the bags the ol’ heave-ho without making a mess of things and then climbed back in the car.

This is my favorite part of the recycling and waste run. There is a little building that sits in the lot and the man that runs the place, when he’s not outside moving stuff around or doing the other things he does, sits in there. You can’t see into the building because of the light and glare, but I also give it a little wave. Here I’ve been working on my uninterested-but-thankful expression. A fixed lip, a nod, a casual wave, and then down the gravel drive, onto the road and that chore is done. Until the next time the chore must be done, and I will try another version of that wave. Maybe three fingers next time.

I went over to one of the local grocery stores, picked up a few things, and then pointed toward home, where I almost got in a tangle with the driver of this vehicle.

It’s a company car, and the driver was rather aggressive. I followed him a bit as he weaved through town and near a school zone at high rates of speed. Soon, I caught him at a light where the road allowed me to go past him and better see the company logo. And don’t you know I looked them up. It’s a local concern. They work on restaurants and businesses and commercial remodels. I sent the family-owned business an email, sharing the license plate, telling them the driver was erratic and dangerous on their insurance and, what’s more, with a great big company log on the side of the van. “That’s probably not the word of mouth you want,” I concluded. “Certainly it isn’t the risk the rest of us should accept from your company.”

That felt like a good way to end a Friday. I hope it is an issue for someone in their office on Monday.

memories / Philadelphia / photo / site / sport / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Aug 26

I can see mulch and top soil again

What a fine day. Productive and rewarding in several senses, but not in all of them. One can’t be productive in every sense. We weren’t designed for that. How else would we have developed imagination, hope, and ambition? How else would we have ever learned to fly, go to space, develop life saving vaccines, study the planet and what we’re doing to it? If we could do everything all at once, how would we have internalized concepts like dreams, lists, and ways to judge our neighbors against our efforts? Someone had to have the idea of emulating the birds, and s/he and their ilk were scorned for generations, until one day it wasn’t a flight of fancy, it was a flight. And you couldn’t do that or go to space or any of our other marvels, really, without the ability to create and pursue lists. We’re talking about human pursuit here! You can’t pursue everything at once. The neighbors would stare and talk.

I hope not too many people are doing that around here, because we’ve given them something to judge of late. There’s a lot of weeding to be done, but it’s been so deliriously hot. The temperatures settled into the low 90s today, however, and I went outside in the morning and pulled things out of the ground for a while.

My first job was a summertime thing working for one of my teachers. She was a horticulturist, and she had a summer side hustle landscaping one of the big houses on the mountain. The husband was a surgeon. A plastic surgeon, I think. Or a heart surgeon. Something that set him up well enough to marry a woman who descended from old money. (People knew the family name.) It was a gorgeous house, made to look ancient by the stone work that didn’t come from our red clay hills. It had a commanding view of the city in the valley below, the city her family had left a few generations before. The city where her family name was on one of the skyscrapers downtown, which you could see standing at their sink, or at their pool, or in any part of the house that looked to the northwest. They had a Rolls Royce Phantom 2 in the garage, giant oil paintings of themselves in the foyer that was, itself, bigger than any house I’d ever seen. And they had landscaping needs that meant after we’d worked our way across the whole of the yard it was time to go back to the other side and start again. I was in the 8th grade and it was incredibly hot and that job taught me a lot, namely that I didn’t want to do that kind of work. My teacher also taught me about Tracy Chapman that summer. Everyone knew Fast Car, but she talked about that debut album and the followup, Crossroads and how somehow that had inspired her to go into the Peace Corps. That didn’t make sense at the time, but I guess I can see it now.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today, pulling weeds in my own flowerbeds, stuffing lawn bags and sweating and listening to Tracy Chapman. I was also hoping none of the neighbors would walk by, notice me doing all that and giving me the nod of disapproval.

“About time he got around to that.”

“The last owners would have never.”

“No they would not.”

Yeah, well, they had kids and I’m guessing the children got sent out to do their share of the work. Or they hired someone. We’ve done that. It’s been … spotty. Sometimes great. Sometimes aggressive. Sometimes questionable.

Anyway, one man did walk by and, even across the yard, you could hear that he was on the phone. I paused to listen, wondering if he’d say “He’s actually doing it. I know. I know! No really, he is!”

I didn’t get it all today. I don’t know that I can, or want to get it all. Pretty much the entire Tracy Chapman catalog is great, much of it peerless, but it would need to be much larger for me to get of this weeding finished. Plus, there’s other work to be done. But there are things on the southern side of the house that I didn’t want to get choked out by undesirables, so I did that for a while, until it was time to come in and cool off. Because while it was only 88 degrees, I still managed to do a credible sweat test this morning. But two hours, noon, 88 degrees, and three comically large bags of now dead green things are ready to be disposed of. The bulk of the work on the south side of the house is done. I could still probably pull weeds for another hour there, plus a good 20 minute weed-eating session. But enough is enough.

Also, we had afternoon plans.

A while back we met a man at a conference who runs this development program for kids where soccer is the entryway, but they’re ultimately working to create scenarios where preschool through high school kids and beyond can build healthy bodies and minds. They have an indoor park, outdoor fields and people show up for the soccer, but find a full slate of programming and services for their community. It sounds amazing and so today we went to see the operation.

There was some high school pick-up soccer underway on their indoor pitch. No one invited me to play, thank goodness. We saw the rest of their facilities, which are lovely and growing. It’s not a community center, it’s more than that. We talked with the people that run the place for about 90 minutes. They’re six years in and still growing and doing some great work. It’s not just sport. Sport gets kids in the door, but then there is programming that helps the children learn about things like nutrition, interpersonal skills, money management, confidence building, and so on. They aren’t trying to build soccer players, the goal is to help kids in ways that matter on a real and human level. It’s quite charming, they’re very passionate about it, and it’s easy to see why.

Sport, as we talk about in classes a lot, means a lot more than just what happens on the field. In one class I teach a section on the real values of youth sport — fair play, collaboration, health, socialization, discipline, rules, respect, etc… — and that’s what this organization is after, too. What’s really interesting, to me, when I talk about those life lessons with other people that played youth sports, even college students who aren’t that far removed from it themselves, they quickly see how it helped them. We don’t always realize it at the time, but it is apparent in retrospective. It is obvious the value we can offer people. It is a mystery there aren’t more deliberate programs just like that.

And when you compare that to the infamous travel ball experience … no contest.

Stuff on the site I’d like to do, since I mentioned it … There are two or three of the old running projects I’d like to return to, and I will. I have to wrap up the local markers project. Easy enough, and that’s the one I combine with bike rides anyway. When the weather turns. I want to return to the happy habit of scanning photos from old books. It’s time intensive, and that’s the problem, but ultimately it entertains me and makes this place look, determined to follow ancient thing.

Another thing I’d like to do more is diving into old newspaper clippings. It’s a great way to learn about a place, or remember about a place. But it seems odd to do that about places where I no longer live. And the place where I do live doesn’t have a wealth of digitized newsprint online. This could devolve into a “where do you belong?” paragraph, but this is Wednesday and while all of my projects on the site ideally would have a day of the week, roughly, the old existential issue is not a Wednesday item. (Wednesdays are for markers, if you’ll recall, and they will be so once again.

These projects one need only invest the time and I say the thing I always say to myself, “After so and so … then you can do that.” And that never changes, but it at least has the added advantage of being frustrating.

Tomorrow, back to the classwork. If I can bend my fingers to the keyboard.