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journalism / photo / podcast / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on Dip your toes in, the water’s fine
9
Jun 20

Dip your toes in, the water’s fine

And, now, a scene from “the beach,” which is how I mistakenly thought of the lake’s shore line when we were out there for a few minutes today. That says something about how long since I’ve seen a beach.

It was Christmas, last time I saw a beach, and that was just looking into a sound, so it might not even count. If you don’t count that you have to go back to last July. I’m not the biggest beach person in the world, but that still seems like too long.

So we were at the lake for a few minutes. It rained. I sat under an umbrella talked on the phone while The Yankee did some considerable distance of freestyle swim. And that was lunch. Down to the lake, in for a quick dip and then produce a show.

Talked to an economist today. Bottom line is … we know a lot of things, but that really just illustrates what we don’t know. We’re about to start stage four of back-up-and-at-’em here, which will be normal-ish but for some restrictions that won’t get honored a lot, I’m sure.

The good news is that the jobless claims are coming down from the spring. The bad news is they are still very high. The other bad news is that state tax revenues are taking a hit. This was not a surprise, but still, it is underway and impactful. The good news is that people are going back to work and so there is progress to be made. But don’t take my word for it. I have a minor in economics. This is an actual economist:

I have a love-hate relationship with security-footage-as-news stories. It doesn’t devalue a story, but too often it elevates a story beyond its natural worth because of suddenly compelling available video. Compelling, easily available video. (That part is important.) Or, even worse, it elevates a story because there’s video and no one else has anything better that day.

It’s a tricky thing, when visual drive messages. I see and have worked with and teach this stuff, so I consider all sides of the argument. I think we all should consider all sides of its use before using it, and that’d be a great starting point, I’d say.

And then there’s stuff like this …

Funny how video has helped bring to light rampant injustice in society. Funny how necessary that video is for this sort of circumstance. Sometimes the visuals have to drive the message.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

Monday / photo — Comments Off on Go faster on Mondays
8
Jun 20

Go faster on Mondays

Phoebe is guarding my office door for me. She’s my new hire in the Keep Poseidon Out, 2020 campaign.

Poseidon, meanwhile, is trying to gain entrance by being sneaky.

It’s a real cat and homo sapiens sort of game.

We had a bike ride this evening, one of our regular routes, as it was a light and easy sort of day. Leave the neighborhood, breeze through another one, take three stop signs and then some long open stretches featuring a few turns and one turnaround and then one respectable hill. After that you hang a right and work through a stop sign and then over two hills, a few more turns and then back to the house. And, at the end of it, it came down to 48 seconds. If I’d worked a bit harder and found a way to drop 48 seconds off the total time my average speed would have gone up a tick.

You can’t do anything about that after you’re back inside and looking at the data. It’s hardly worth kicking yourself over, but after you’ve caught your breath and had some electrolytes and you’re not sitting in the saddle you find yourself thinking “Forty-eight seconds. I could surely have mustered that from somewhere.”

Getting to that next, higher number would mean nothing. I was two-tenths off of it today. Big deal! Two-tenths faster and I’m still traveling at average speed, over largely favorable terrain that I ride constantly. But it would have felt satisfying.

Here’s the thing of this ride. Somewhere along the way I lost The Yankee’s wheel. It was one of those days when she was stronger than me and I love those days because I have to work like a maniac to try to get back on and sometimes I do. Sometimes I have to use all the little tricks I know to do it, diving through corners and doing ridiculous super-tucks and going uphill in all the wrong gears and so on. But, sometimes, I can get back on terms with her pace. I had to do that in this ride. I’m not exactly sure how I came uncoupled, but you look down and you look up and it’s happened and that’s the way some rides go.

You smile at that because if, like today, like there’s an effort in you then you have to try. I had that today so I tried that today and so I watched her for several miles moving at her own fine pace a quarter-mile, a half-mile up the road, while I was yo-yoing and sucking air and then surging and ebbing until, finally, I realized that the next little bit of topography favored my ride. And I did catch her, right at the end. I was riding hard, but I think I could have ridden just a little bit more.

Forty-eight seconds. Really, that’s time I should have ticked off at the front of the ride, when you’re still behaving casually. But you don’t think of that over electrolytes, either, just that you could.

You could. That’s something special about a bicycle. There’s always the feeling of you could.

Trick is moving that from inside the house to on the road. And doing it from the start.

cycling / Friday / photo / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Wrapping up this week
5
Jun 20

Wrapping up this week

There are a few Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus) down at the lake. I’ve seen them flying around and play-fighting a few times. Photographing butterflies is easy with a proper camera. If you’re using your phone you have to be first, sneaky, and, then, lucky. And I was almost one of those two things today:

That was while The Yankee was getting in her laps, though one doesn’t really do laps in a lake. She’s doing concentric shapes, and always improving the open-water swim. It’s the opportunity found in all of the pool closings. Plus, butterflies.

And, now, some scenes from today’s bike ride.

It was a light week, so we only rode two hours today. That is a thing you say, sometimes. It is one part posturing. “Yep. Light day, just two hours.” It is also one part something you can be incredulous about: “I’m not even training for anything and this was a light day and it was two hours.” Or you could be incredulous in another way, as I was: “It took me how long to go that far?”

Anyway, today’s route was a simplification of the recent Friday regular. We just went out a ways and then turned around and retraced the route. Instead of making the big circle, or having the one proper climb in it, we went close to the lake. All of the fun, without the refreshing water views or the dreadful climb after.

It was good, then it wasn’t. Then it was all over the place, which is what usually happens with my rides, so it was good. Except for the parts that aren’t.

I went through one little slice of town and set out for more rural communities and pedaled 55 minutes in one direction, at which point I turned around, figuring that’d the reverse course would set me up at one hour and 50 minutes, which was, I think, the goal, and my understanding of math. And the math worked out, perfectly, before I added an extra mile or so at the end to put a unique finish on a regular route.

Now we just have to find some long flat routes around here. (We won’t.)

Much more on Twitter today, like …

Be sure to check me out on Instagram and listen to the On Topic with IU podcasts, as well. And have a great weekend!

Bloomington / history / hobby / Indiana / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Fossils
4
Jun 20

Fossils

Here are some crinoids I picked up last weekend. I was wondering down by the creek bed enjoying myself quite nicely and it quickly became a scavenger hunt. Right there at my feet I found three of these at a glance. Why, then, I had to wonder around a bit to discover a few more.

Old seaborne fossils. Or, around these parts, definitely freshwater fossils. You can find them most anywhere that has water, seems like. Why do I still pick them up? Why do I bring them back to the house to take pictures of them?

These are, I believe, crotalocrinites. They are the sort I’ve always found. They are extinct now, but they appeared about 300 million years before the dinosaurs.

I’ve just discovered, online, there are star-shaped fossiles called pentacrinites. I want to find some of those.

Let’s jump in the time machine, though, and move up a few hundred million years. I pulled back the break lever just a bit too soon, however, and we’ve stopped 103 years before. It’s June 4, 1917. What’s going on in the world?

Oh. That. So the summer before there was a massive sabotage in New York. And two weeks after this Congress passed the Espionage Act, something Woodrow Wilson had been on them about for several years. I can’t find any details today about this person. So we’ll just have to be satisfied with these news briefs:

The next day you had to go sign up for the draft. Married men couldn’t duck it. You’ve already seen that peaceful registrations were predicted. And we now from earlier editions of the paper that several American men, even some locals, are going off to war in some capacity or another. Just down the page there’s a brief listing another handful of names. In New York, when the draft went into play, it was anything but peaceful. So, I’m sure, people were hoping for the best.

There are two creeks on either side of us that have these names.

And while people are out surveying damage, and you’re reading in another column the news that a former local who had moved to Illinois just had his house destroyed in the storms, you get this little ad:

A.H. Beldon had been a grocer. By the teens, he was doing insurance. He made it to 80 or 81 and died in 1939, the same year as his wife. Their son flew planes for the Army in World War I, in Texas, it looks like. That guy’s son served in the Army during World War II.

Enoch Hogate had some paralysis, and then he did not. Much improved was he, a relief to all it was.

Hogate had joined the law school in 1903 and served as the dean from 1906 to 1918. He also had a turn in the state senate prior to all of that.

Polio caused paralysis. I wonder if that’s what it was. He passed away in 1924.

This was the vessel, The Success. It was not built in 1790, but rather 1840. It was not a prison ship, unless it was. Sometimes Internet searches are contradictory. Anyway, it was by now a museum ship. A good fraud well executed, from the looks of things.

She was scuttled in 1891, re-floated the next year, restored and then sailed to England. In 1912 the vessel came to the U.S. and returned to cargo service in 1917, after which it sank. It was re-floated and turned into a museum in 1918, appeared at the Chicago World Fair and fell apart. The Success was to be scrapped on Lake Erie, but it sank for a third time. Someone pulled it up again in 1945 and it promptly ran ashore. In 1946 there was a fire that consumed it. The moral to that story, I guess, is don’t make up a fake history about your ship.

Get ’em a camera!

I wonder if they’re still hiring …

The second and third pages of the four-page rag were just poorly scanned photos of the graduating high school class, which is why we jump immediately to the scolding baby.

Look, baby, nobody likes a scold.

This one had a column jump, which is why it looks weird at the top. But let’s get a load of those people. George Washington Henley had graduated from the law school here three years prior. He went into private practice and got married soon after.

The well-known home boy would serve as a state lawmaker for a decade and, later, sat on the state Supreme Court bench for two months. He was a replacement until the end of a term, but he didn’t want to stay on. He needed to get back to his own clients and he just wanted, Wikipedia says, the prestige. He died in 1965 and was eulogized by the university president. His wife survived him by a dozen years, and was living in California when she passed away.

This is why you should keep Googling names. One of the attendants of their wedding was Paul Feltus. He would become a newspaper editor, witnessed and reported on the atomic bomb tests in 1946 and served as a board member for the university. He wrote four silent film scripts, served in the artillery in World War I and was a colonel in the state guard in the 1940s.

Now, a life of 81 years can’t be distilled into a paragraph, but a paragraph like that hints at an interesting life.

Because the second and third pages were poor artifacts, and because the last page was torn right through the copy, you’re getting a second wedding announcement.

This was Melvin’s second wife. His first died young after just six months of marriage. She was ill most of that time. They had 17 years of unalloyed happiness, I hope. His second wife had a child and died in her 40s, in 1934. Fender kept on farming, retired, and passed away in 1958 at 74.

OK, “Bobby.”

I spent a lot of time looking into this ad. I’m not sure Bobby was a real person.

IU / photo / podcast / site / Wednesday — Comments Off on Give this a listen
3
Jun 20

Give this a listen

Today is going to be brief, because I have decided to take a bit of this day away from this glowing machine. So here’s a flower from a recent walk.

And if the photos look a bit larger around here today, they should. I decided to change the default photo size earlier this week. Mondays, first of the month and all of that. Usually these sorts of changes are made in August, in honor of the anniversary of the place. And, who knows, I have this vague idea that I’ve done this before and that somewhere along the way I forgot that and reverted to the older habit. Habits are like that sometimes.

Said the guy who knows he’s got too many of them.

I talked with sociologist Jessica Calarco today. She students social and socioeconomic inequities and their impacts on families, children and school. It seemed a good set up for the end of the school year, when the state’s school experts are expected to make their first announcements about next fall later this week. She gave us a really great interview.

I have at least three of them lined up for next week. More school issues, more economic issues, and who knows what else may appear. You should just go ahead and subscribe so you can get the latest episodes as they are released.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

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