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I returned to the Black and White section of the site.
Since no one remembers this — it has been a while — I occasionally pick up random photos and try to figure out their context, or create one of my own. I have tons of these waiting to be scanned. Click the previous link to start at the beginning. Go here to see today’s four photographs. I’ll try to make this a weekly exercise once again.
The final hours of summer are upon us. I had a meeting at Alabama Monday, and a class there Thursday. I have a workshop to attend at Samford that afternoon. We’re jumping right into the fall.
You forget how much you appreciate the summers when adulthood turns you into a 40 hour a week, 50 or more weeks a year person. That happened to me. Summer wasn’t a time to be off, but rather a time to work some more. So it was just more time. It was time out of time, which is what summer is, for children, but only different.
Two years ago when I returned to campus professionally I looked forward to the summer. All that happened during those three months was marriage, a promotion, a move and the busiest nine hours of my graduate school career. It didn’t feel especially like summer. Which was fine. I’d been used to that for years. Long years, in fact. It has been 20 summers since I’ve had either no classes or no job.
And so this summer, I’ve looked forward to it for some long time. All we did was go to Europe, buy a house and move. I did the tiniest bit of research, the smallest bit of work and otherwise enjoyed the summer. And got spoiled by it.
Now we return to reality. I have class and work and they are wonderful and I’m blessed that this is my career and my daily experience, truly. (But wanting a little more summer is only natural, right?) Next summer — not that I’m looking that far ahead — I’ll be finishing my dissertation. I’m guessing that won’t feel like much of a break, but this one has had a very nice feel.
One of those many signs of the return of campus obligations is the dreadful Beloit list. This was, once upon a time, a more entertaining collection. It is aimed at professors, to try and give them some humor and insight into the cultural positioning of incoming freshmen. I suppose it also makes some professors feel old. It also stretches the bonds of credulity:
9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.
12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.
65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.
72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid” and always has been.
9. But probably not, since Hal was a robot. In space. And also because the Cyrus family is only going to one campus this fall. Odds are it isn’t yours, no matter what that girl in freshman bio said about seeing Hannah Montana in the quad.
12. This presupposes that every student stays away from cable television and has no fathers, grandfathers or other family members with a predisposition to westerns.
65. Is just insulting, really.
72. A humanities professor is tied to this list, but he should have spoken with his political science colleagues. Surely they speak here of Clinton, but in reality it has forever, and shall always be, about the economy.
The list also stretches the boundaries of chronology:
1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.
28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.
1. I know that they are teaching to the test at elementary and grade schools now, but surely there is an itinerant English teacher who insisted they could pull off a cursive lowercase F if need be.
19. Really? The timing of these just looks at things like market penetration of wireless and cell phones, but doesn’t consider the ubiquity of former tools. Some people still even have these phones, which mean the class of 2020, even, will know that plastic, rubbery feel.
28. I’m testing this on my students and will let you know the results.
Others are there to indulge the righteousness of the professoriate:
21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn.
41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.
42. Potato has always ended in an “e” in New Jersey per vice presidential edict.
21. While I’m betting the wrist gesture still works, I’m certain Woody Allen is far removed from the students’ minds, to say nothing of Soon-Yi. But he’s important to some film prof.
41. Because the political nuance must be attended.
42. That Dan Quayle sure was dumb.
Now let us do the math. By comparison of years, the Beloit Mindset list — had it existed when I was a freshman, would have referenced something Walter Mondale did in office. None of us would have understood the reference, either. Which is the point of the list, I suppose.
Usually, this is a better instrument of enlightenment, of whoa and wow. Perhaps, though, we’ve reached a point where the changes over the course of a generation are less earth shaking. Maybe we’ve reached the post of post-modernity. For example, “The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy” isn’t keeping kids up nights. Today’s students, their peers nor their peers likely sit to reflect on annus horribilis.
“Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.” But, then, REM was creeping onto the classic rock station when I was in undergrad. And “The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.”
Have I told you the story of last year’s freshmen? I did a presentation with this picture:
I asked “Who knows who this man is?”
Nothing.
Crickets.
The man had been off the air for only five years.
See the entire Beloit list here. Enjoy more cogent thoughts on the subject from the always impressive James Lileks.
Elsewhere I used today productively. I struggled with and tried three different ways to build the websites The Yankee wanted. She had one lapse on her a while back and since her classes are starting these things must be restored. I experimented, about a month ago, actually, with the WordPress MU platform. I have a small handful of photo blogs I’m running off of MU. I figured it out in an hour or two.
And so, naturally, when I settled in to do this for her I found that WordPress has incorporated the MU into their basic platform now. Somehow the changes and how to make it work escaped me. We came up with a workaround, however. This was my afternoon. I tinkered with code and listened to hours of TiVoed television. Lovely afternoon.
Tomorrow you’ll see the beginning of the 1939 World’s Fair project. You can hardly wait.
Tomorrow I’ll get a hair cut. I can hardly wait.
This is complete filler, as much or more than you normally find here. But it was a low key day — that’s nice to say again — so I’m sharing a few pictures from last week and catching things up on the site.
I saw these at Angel’s Antiques, the place where I bought a grill. It was not an antique, but new and cheap. I am at least one of those things, hence buying a grill there. I also bought two more Glomeratas there. I stopped shopping after that. As Jeremy Henderson said, “That place is like crack.”
A site dedicated to Pennsylvania beer history notes “In the forties and fifties Schmidt’s was famous for Tiger Head Ale, a brand acquired from the Robert Smith Ale Brewery after prohibition.”
They had facilities in Pennsylvania and Ohio and this can has survived for decades. It is still full, too. On the side is a price. On the bottom there’s another sticker which reads “Not for consumption.”
There’s no chance of that.
Someone took all of their ticket stubs from old Auburn games and thought they should cover this box with them. Inside, out, bottom and top are full of tickets, mostly from early 1990s games. In a few decades from now this will seem incredibly cool, now the box is just waiting in an antique mall. Time is funny like that.
This is from a coffee company in Iowa. Apparently the bag dates to the 1960s, which almost works with the graphic style. Other than seeing a few bags for sale online I can’t much more about the people. Was it good? Did it taste better at altitude? Was it really parachuted on customers? Were they expecting it to fall from the sky?
Speaking of pictures, I caught up on the photo galleries, which haven’t been this neglected in ages. The July gallery, destined to be a bit underwhelming, is finished. The August gallery has finally been built and is now in progress. Only took half the month.
Tomorrow: I think I’ll show you a video.
Visited the meat lab today. Students process the meat that is farm raised on campus and the savings are passed along to me. The deals are outrageous. We picked up a few steaks for the weekend, but you couldn’t go wrong with any cut of beef, chicken or even eggs. You could buy 30 eggs for less than three bucks.
Put that with the fresh peaches and okra and tomatoes we picked up at the farmer’s market yesterday and we’ll be eating well. There’s apparently a fish market, too, and if we can figure out when and where that takes place you’ll have to read about the catfish and the shrimp and whatnot.
To live in a place where the shrimp and catfish come from “down there on the left” is really cool.
So I promised you scanned things. I finally finished the Glomerata project. That only took three-and-a-half years of on again off again scanning, editing and writing. But, I’ve made observations and jokes on four years of the yearbooks. The final 10 entries. I really like the way it ended, in a more complete and, I think, better way that I wouldn’t have expected when I started this in February of 2007.
And that just leads me to the next big scanning project. When I picked up those first two books from the early 1950s I started down a path that has turned into a serious collection. I have 76 books from the now 113 volume set. I want to scan all the covers and show them off, because there are some handsome ones worth seeing. If I offer you two of those a week we can stretch that out until February.
The other project is the guide to the 1939 World’s Fair. I’ve started scanning some of the models and pictures and illustrations and we’ll make fun of them together. I’ll start showing those off next week, and it should run until Thanksgiving.
And with that I’m going to head out into the dark and thunder and find some dinner.
Visited the local college bookstores today so The Yankee could make sure her texts were on the shelves. Found seven at one store, found four at the second store and met the very nice manager. Found a few at the third store. At the university bookstore we found a big stash. They are all expensive, but textbooks always have been.
I pointed out the prices. It always aggravated me when a professor was shocked to hear how much the text he or she demanded was costing the students. It is a simple enough thing, stop by the store and empathize, for just a minute. So that’s what I do.
The bookstores here let students rent books for the term. Oh you can still buy a $90 text and sell it back for $12. You can rent it for half that price and return it at the end of the term. Wish we’d had that option during undergrad.
My favorite book, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has stayed the same low price these last 15 years. I appreciate that.
On the way back to the car we listened to the marching band. Is it football season yet? Apparently we’ll have a tribute to Frank Sinatra this year. They sound good, but the director insists you’ll hear more trumpet in this number when they are on the field.
I’m not faux-marching, I promise. Apparently I’ll need to work on hand steadying techniques before pulling out the iPhone. After this take they had a break and were then going to spend 45 minutes on Luck Be a Lady Tonight.
We put a lot of pictures on the walls this evening. Just a few more rooms to go on that project. We had a delicious dinner:
Just add the veggies, shrimp, cooking wine, butter, salt and pepper to taste, stir over a respectable heat and serve.
We stood outside and watched the first of the Perseids (Thursday night is the big show), hung out with Jupiter to the east and tried to pick out unfamiliar constellations thanks to my new app, Planets. (That’s a great, free download.)
We had a great day. How was yours?
On the site: New, artsyish banners across the top and bottom of the blog. The blur across the top is the cardinal I vainly chased this afternoon. The one along the bottom is the yard in late evening repose. This is an excellent opportunity, then, to remind about the new banners page, meant more for me than for you, but nevertheless, see ’em again. Also, there’s a new picture on the home page.
And someone stop me: I’m thinking of redesign ideas.
