photo « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

photo

You will get teary-eyed by the end of this post

We’ve come to the part of the week where I wonder if I could be doing more, right now, to help future me. Future me is the me of next week. And the answer is, no, I can’t do a lot more next week. I could do more. We all could, but where’s the fun in that. But for the version of me that will be task oriented and checking things off lists next week, I can’t help that guy yet. The To Do must still be formulated. The lists are just big piles of things to grade.

And so I wait. And rest. Next week, there will be around 100-140 things to grade. That is not an exaggeration. Seventeen of them will be easy to work through. Another 40 or so can be evaluated rather painlessly. But there will be 40 or so items that will require time and care and repetition. And that’s three days, easy.

There is a valuable lesson in this for me. The next time I build a multi-class semester, there will be flow charts, fact sheets, multiphasic slide decks and calendar overlays, just so that I can make sure key assignments are staggered for everyone.

And by everyone I, of course, mean me.

But you can’t do the work on Thursday that will be turned in Saturday through Monday. And so earlier this week I felt like the carefree grasshopper. By tomorrow, it could be the neurotic ant who is waiting for the other boot to land on his exoskeleton.

That’s probably one of my best remembered fable from Aesop. That and the boy who cried wolf and the lesser known The Writer and Public Domain.

Why hasn’t someone reworked these for a cynical, metal audience? Do you mean to tell me that the world isn’t ready for a version of The Crab and the Fox where the crab wanders into that meadow and doesn’t get eaten by the fox because, I dunno, global warming hardened her shell, or she’s got crrrrrrab power or is about to persuade the fox to leave her alone, big, stupid fox, thereby subverting the patriarchal paradigm of knowing one’s role and overcoming caste systems inherent and explicit while on the way across that meadow and into Red Lobster for a crowd pleasing plate of cheese biscuits, which signifies our consumerist society and a heavy dose of postmodern irony through a crustaceanist lens?

We could churn these out in a few days, get a clever artist to illustrate the thing and be on the late night talk shows by next week, is what I’m saying.

But I’ve got all of that grading to do. Good point.

It turns out we have not two, but four pear trees on our property. Two are well apart from one another. And this one, and its twin, were carefully planted close by one another.

Pear trees need to be in proximity to bear fruit. And, also, they need to be the right sort. Unfortunately, these aren’t the right sort.

Fruit-bearing pear trees would be awesome.

Never mind. I just looked it up and it takes three to five years for a tree to begin producing fruit, and there is an impressive amount of work in between. So while I can’t do next week me any favors today, I just did the me of 2025-2030 a huge solid.

I’ll just go buy pears from a produce store every once in a while.

I am enjoying the blooms on these trees, though. More trees and shrubs should be perpetually in bloom. It’s a cheery thing, really. Particularly right now.

We saw quite a few elephant seals in California last week. Here are some of them now. Hunted to the brink of extinction for oil by the end of the 19th century, their numbers have since recovered.

This beach does look like a nice place to nap. If your seal friends will leave you alone long enough.

These are northern elephant seals, and they grow large. Mature males weighing more than 8,000 pounds!

What do you suppose the largest one in that video weighs?

These guys spend their lives across North America’s Pacific coast. They breed annually and are seemingly habitual. Some of the older ones here have been visiting this beach for a while.

There is so much money involved, and the audience can be so stratified, that it makes sense to see an increasing number of analytics and metrics in play. Fox, Netflix quietly built sports ad deal that wasn’t based on TV ratings:

More advertisers are trying to tie their ads to so-called “business outcomes,” such as making a purchase, visiting a website or showroom, or asking for information to be sent about the product or service being pitched. The thinking on Madison Avenue is that knowing how many people watched an ad just isn’t enough; it’s better to understand how many people took an action that brought them closer to an actual sale. Interest has grown as the size of TV audiences has been cut down by the rise of streaming.

Creativity beats fascism.

To simplify, the Allies used signal counterintelligence, inflatable tanks, audio, and a bluff with Gen. George Patton to convince the Nazis that the 1,1000 members of the 23rd HQ Special Troops were actually two divisions, 30,000 men, massing to attack elsewhere. In more than a dozen engagements in 1944-1945, they feinted, disguised and distracted from actual assaults, tying down enemy units and, it is estimated, saved thousands of lives among Allied ranks in the process.After decades of secrecy, the ‘Ghost Army’ is honored for saving U.S. lives in WWII:

Present at Thursday’s event were: 100-year-old Bernard Bluestein, who joined the visual deception unit from the Cleveland Institute of Art and went on to pursue a career in industrial design; 99-year-old John Christman, who served as a demolition specialist and 100-year-old Seymour Nussenbaum, an avid stamp collector who joined the Army from the Pratt Institute. He helped make the counterfeit patches worn by the unit, and worked in package design for many years after the war.

[…]

“The Ghost Army’s tactics were meant to be invisible, but today their constructions will no longer remain unseen in the shadows,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., one of the bill’s two Senate sponsors. “Their weapons were unconventional, but their patriotism was unquestionable.”

[…]

While the Ghost Army helped liberate Europe and end the war, it wasn’t publicly given credit for another half a century.

“Following the war, the unit’s soldiers were sworn to secrecy, records were classified and equipment packed away,” says the National WWII Museum.

Wormuth said Thursday that immediately after the war, Ghost Army soldiers received a letter of thanks from then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, with a memorable P.S.: “If you tell anyone, I’ll see that you hang.”

Beyer told WUNC before the ceremony that the mission had been so deeply classified that the “Army basically lost it.”

“It kind of forgot about it until the late 80s, when they suddenly rediscovered this and started bringing Ghost Army soldiers to the Pentagon for briefings,” he explained.

I shared an obituary yesterday, and i have one more today, simply because this story should be told over and over and over and over again.

(Amnon) Weinstein was the founder of Violins of Hope, an organization that provides the violins he restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust.

[…]

“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in a 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound is standing for a boy, a girl and men and women that will never talk again. But the violins, when they are played on, will speak for them.”

There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.

Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps, and who were then forced to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was tossed from a train to a railway worker by a man who knew his fate.

“In the place where I now go, I don’t need a violin,” the man told the worker, in Mr. Weinstein’s telling. “Here, take my violin so it may live.”

[…]

One afternoon in the 1980s, a man with a prisoner identification tattoo on his arm arrived with a beaten up violin that had, like him, survived Auschwitz.

“The top of the violin was damaged from having been played in the rain and snow,” Mr. Grymes wrote in “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust — Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour” (2014). “When Amnon took the instrument apart, he discovered ashes inside that he could only assume to be fallout from the crematoria at Auschwitz.”

[…]

During a radio interview, he asked listeners to bring him instruments connected to the Holocaust. Soon, families began showing up at his workshop with violins that had been stored away in attics and cellars, each with its own haunting story.

Mr. Weinstein was especially shaken by those recovered from concentration camps after the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945.

“This was the last human sound that all of those people heard, the violin,” he said in a 2016 radio interview on WKSU in Ohio. “You cannot use the name beauty. But this was the beauty of this time, these violins.”

A previous interview with the famed luthier.

And the concert in Cleveland where the Violins of Hope sang out again. They played Beethoven.

Beethoven!

California / journalism / markers / photo / video / We Learn Wednesdays / Wednesday — Comments Off
20
Mar 24

The most wide-ranging Wednesday post in a while

This evening I watched a man in a custom suit and sneakers talk about his life’s work, listened as he painted a picture that he thinks everyone is out to get him, that money is everything and that having a life is secondary to having work. It would have been disconcerting if it didn’t come off as sadly insecure.

It’s one thing to be driven. To have gotten, undeniably, indisputably, to where you want to be and still come off that way, it seemed difficult, in the day-to-day. I could be wrong. The guy had on a great suit. It fit him, and the rest of the vibe.

Where as I was wearing shoes that look good, but don’t exactly treat my feet well. I like them, but there better not be a lot of walking around in them. And I’m secure enough about my feet to be able to say that.

It is not a phrase I use. It’s not one I think of often. If I were trying to sum up a person, or a presentation, or an attitude, it’s just not a descriptor I reach for. But at one point during the talk it slipped out of my mouth, under my breath, to no one in particular. At the end of the talk, as everyone stood to leave, the strangers in front of me stood and looked back and we all made eye contact, as you do. One gentleman said, “He seems very insecure.”

Also, I’ve become a huge proponent of having a life and an identity away from the office. One day I’ll even make one!

Right now I’m too busy watching things bloom, and waiting for it to get just a little bit warmer. But instead of a steady, constant, climb of mercury, we are stuck in this middle ground of 48 degrees. We are stuck in that time of relative temperatures. Six, seven weeks ago, you’d take 48 degrees, and you’d be pleased with it. But now, somehow, the body knows better. It isn’t supposed to be 48 degrees anymore. The rational mind has known this for some time, but now the body has gotten wise.

That’s when the impatience really kicks in.

But the budding and flowering things don’t seem to mind. The magnolia liliiflora is getting ready to put on a show.

It’s a small tree, basically, because the Overambitious Shrub Lobby got to the policy makers. It’s from China, though it’s often called Japanese. And, as you can tell, it will offer many, many blooms before the leaf buds open.

It is a slow growing thing, about six inches a year or so.

Makes you wonder if we cut it back too far last fall.

I guess we’ll find out in two or four years.

Here’s another video from last week’s visit to California. Here, the waves are rolling in on William Randolph Hearst Memorial Beach. Just across the highway and well up the hill is the Hearst Castle. They’re rather fond of the old media magnate. Gave him a nice, quite, beach too.

The Hearst family owned it all, until they gave it to the state in the 1950s.

We were only there for a short while, of course, but it looks like there’s a lot to enjoy there.

Once again it’s time for We Learn Wednesdays. Today’s is our 29th installment, and I don’t know why I’m still counting that. Anyway, I ride my bike around the county to find the historical markers via bike. Good way to see things, and it’s amusing to take pictures of sometimes important old places in funny clothes. This is the 50th marker in that effort, and I shot this one last December in a stockpiling effort.

The stockpile should last until it gets warm, and I can put some road miles in my legs. But I digress.

I digress because I have nothing.

Here’s the building.

And here’s the marker.

It’s gone on sale again just this week. It’s seemed to have been off and on the market a lot in the last several years. It’s been a mixed use rental for the last decade or so. And the building, according to property records, was built in 1888.

The web will not tell me what makes this place deserving of being on the historic register. You’d think the historic register people would put that on a site themselves. The historic register people do not.

Next week, we’ll learn a tiny bit of a long-gone social club. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Sometimes you run across a good obituary. Obituaries are a celebration of the living, we were taught in J-school, and sometimes the obit writers remember that. It takes a great skill to write a quality obituary, though some of them do come easier than other, prepackaged with magic or memoirs or flacks as they are. A remarkable person, a life well-lived. All of it is found in this one:

As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.

After a fellow prisoner taught Max how to sew, he mended the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, sliding it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.

The garment transformed his life. Other prisoners thought it signified that Max enjoyed special privileges. Guards allowed him to roam around the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he worked at a hospital kitchen, they assumed that he was authorized to take extra food.

Max ripped another guard’s uniform. This time, it was deliberate. He was creating a clandestine wardrobe that would help him survive the Holocaust.

“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven decades later, “was the day I learned clothes possess power.”

At every turn the obituary gets better and better, and you don’t say that about a lot of newspaper copy. It’s one of the best obits I’ve ever read. And is, without a doubt, the most memorable piece I’ve ever read in a fashion section. Give it a try.

adventures / California / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
19
Mar 24

I made a beach video, just for you

What day is it? What time is it? We didn’t take a red eye, but it seemed like it. I’m an amazing lightweight when it comes to being thrown off by travel, so it is not a great surprise that, a mere 36 hours removed from being on the other side of the country, and five-and-a-half degrees of a lower latitude, I’m still trying to determine my identity, and which shoe is for which foot.

Lewis and Clark would be very, very disappointed in me.

Of course, they knew nothing of time zones. They might have known about coordinate cartography. Sailors of their day certainly did. But did that really figure into the slower pace in which those hardy souls crossed the nation?

And how was their cell service when they did that, anyway? Because some places on this trip, it was surprisingly spotty, even now.

There’s a joke to be made here. Something about how one of the members of the expedition had a great data plan. I’m not convinced people really know Toussaint Charbonneau well enough for the joke to really land.

Spring is finally showing up here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet. You can see it on the ground and in the mulch and on the ends of the little sticks that have been protruding from the bushes and trees all winter long. We took two nice little walks, in a sunny chill, around the yard yesterday to see what had popped up while we were out of town.

The peach tree, for one, is making a lovely show.

We had so many peaches last year. Gave bags and bags of them away. Ate a lot. Froze a bunch more. I look at this beautiful little flower and think, We better start eating those we froze.

Peach smoothies for days. Maybe some peach shakes and peach ice cream, too.

But first we’re going to need about 15 more degrees, day and night, please.

I had class last night, of course. There’s nothing like the first evening class after spring break to give you a sense of who is invested in the class. Everyone, I hope. They have an exam next week. And so that is what we spent the evening discussing, how the exam would work, a few tips on what to look for, a review of key terms. A few exercises.

You know what’s embarrassing? When you forget a thing right when you’re trying to make the point, and someone asks about it. It doesn’t make for the most graceful deflect ever to say, “What do you think it means?” But there I was last night, doing exactly that.

It was one of those tip-of-my-tongue moments, sure, but it was going to take a while to pull it all together. And I’d done the exact same thing in this class in our last meeting. I can’t let on that this is happening all of the time, of course.

Anyway, the students have good material with which to prepare. I hope they all do well on their test.

I’m guessing, if I spread them out evenly, there are two, maybe three weeks of videos from our west coast trip to share. If there are that many, I decided I should hastily make a California banner. So I made a banner. May as well use it.

Most of these, I think, will exist without context. I shot a lot of them thinking, this will be a nice moment that readers can use as a quick, calm, break. I was fortunate and made it to the beach. Just in case you didn’t …

That’s late afternoon on Moonstone Beach, in Cambria. The seaside village has a population of 5,678, but that’s a number for the larger, sprawling area, surely. It came up as a lumber, ranching and mercury mining town. The ranching is, one supposes, not a coincidence. The Obispeño name transalted as “Place of the horses.” Today, it feels like it has been an artist village for a good long while. It’s a lovely place. And, as you can see, the beach is quite nice as well.

Not bad for a 60 second vacation, no?

And now, to catch up on things. Or was it, to get ahead of things?

Difficult to tell after such a trip, and the accompanying jet lag. Toussaint Charbonneau would be unimpressed.

California / Friday / photo — Comments Off
15
Mar 24

Your weekend meditation

This is probably the sort of deep philosophy you can get from a weather-beaten, or even an artificially weathered, plank at Hobby Lobby, but I saw this at a restaurant in Cambria this week and I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before, and look …

Sometimes, you get a thunderclap. Something short of an epiphany, but no less important. Sometimes they happen in dreams, or staring in the mirror, or in random moments at red lights. But this one was a carefully stenciled platitude on a weight-bearing column in a seaside restaurant and it was perfectly timed …

There’s a few ways you can use that expression, perfectly timed. It could mean, in this context, that you receive a quick stab of clarity. Or it could mean the introduction of new information or a new concept when you’re ready to be receptive, and willing to give real thought to what you’re told. I suppose it could also mean both. That’s how I’m choosing to take this. I was ready for the sudden 2×4 across my brow, and willing to learn what it meant. And at that moment, as I passed this on the right, and looked up, there it was.

Maybe it was having just come off the sand, or having that persistent feeling of salt on my skin. Maybe it was the jet lag. But, most likely, I’m just ready to accept real wisdom when I see it, even if it is from a fortune cookie or, as in this case, a restaurant motto.

It seemed fundamental. It seemed obvious. It was like any straightforward invention where you smack your head and wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Why didn’t I think of that?

It doesn’t hurt that it was a restaurant with really good fish tacos, either. So, thanks John and Kernn. (And thanks for the tacos, too.) There are a lot of ways one could take to heart. I’ve already started pondering them. And will continue to do so.

That word, the one at the end, that’s powerful.

adventures / California / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
14
Mar 24

Down to Burbank, and our conference

We loaded up the rental and headed south from Cambria this morning. The mini-vacation has come to an end. The three-day convention is beginning this evening.

Cambria is about three hours down the road. The first two hours or so was views like this.

It looked like this for a long while, until we reached the high high winds in the San Emigdio Mountains and, then, back to the towns and cities that orbit Los Angeles.

The winds were something. I found a weather report that says 25 miles per hour, but that must mean there are no weather stations in the mountain passes. You could get buffeted, hard, from any direction. At one point, the wind was even coming through the mountains.

Including Burbank!

That’s where the conference we’re attending is being held. The conference is the International Association for Communication and Sport summit. This year it is hosted by the University of Texas.

They have a facility, right there in Burbank. This is no fly-by-night thing. No strip-mall-with-folding-fairs-in-the-shadow-of-Hollywood program. It is a proper school facility with a small satellite office set up. Two classrooms and all the amenities. Some real thought went into that space. Many will be hooked, most will be Texans. I am referring to it as the Texas embassy for the weekend.

Anyway, the conference began at Dodger Stadium this evening. Light dinner in a luxury box area. Great views down the right field line. And our friend, Ann. (She’s from Canada, you don’t know her.)

They aren’t plotting to take over the world in Dodger Stadium. I’m told that conversation will take place tomorrow.

The Yankee is presenting two papers at this conference. I’m watching those and visiting with friends and, tomorrow, trying to get ahead of next week. The weekend itself, though, will be a great deal of fun. Lots of nice people, and people you know from other places. Nods, waves, and some actually delightful conversations.