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Neva betta

We held a big committee meeting today and held interviews and selected next year’s student media leaders. This is always a great day because our most motivated students come forward and share their ideas and answer a few questions and we try to make sure we pick the right people, and there are so many fine choices for most of those jobs.

I haven’t been to this meeting on a day when the sun wasn’t shining and the people in the room weren’t pleased to be there. Some of the elements of what happens in that meeting are among my favorite things about being at Samford. I get to watch highly-placed people in the university thinking about the best possible thing for a particular student. To be a part of that is to realize you are in a great place, surrounded by people there for the right reasons. That’s a fine thing to know.

Made it home in time to enjoy dinner with our friends Barry and Melissa, who were in town for meetings and things. We’d just spent the weekend with them and others in Louisville, but now they had their sun, who is a huge ball of 5-year-old energy. We saw Dr. Magical, who made Matthew, who is awesome, a balloon. He likes Angry Birds so …

I mention the Boston scanner and listening to that last night. I stayed up until 3 or 4 a.m., late enough to not be sure. I fought my eyelids for a good long time and then when the officers decided to tighten their perimeter and wait until daylight it seemed a good time to get some rest. So I had about three hours last night. And when I woke up they’d turned off the streams to their scanner chatter for security reasons.

That made sense, but it was unfortunate in a way. All last night, when they were chasing people they didn’t know, when they were taking automatic fire and explosions in a suburban neighborhood, when they were searching door to door in the darkness and didn’t know what they’d find, they exhibited the best of their professionalism.

The good people of the great city of Boston have a lot to be thankful for. Their police, and the feds and other municipalities who were involved in all of that performed admirably. Today, too, we found a link to a still-active scanner feed for about a half hour before dinner and it was the same thing, even as they were drawing close, and even as they realized they had their suspect contained.

And so when they announced, when we were at dinner, that they’d caught their man, and started pulling out of town, the road lined on either side with neighbors who looked like the Celtics had just won a championship, when the SWAT team took to their loudspeaker and told the people of that neighborhood that it was their pleasure to be there, that was a beautiful site.

Here is the scanner chatter as they caught their man. “Neva betta” indeed.

There are, already, at least two sites taking donations to collect money to buy the Boston police officers a beer. That seems fitting.

YouTube Cover Theater: Where we irregularly celebrate the talent of the undiscovered, who take their guitars and their computers and show off their song stylings to the entire world, by showing off people covering popular performers. It is a testament to all of the talent that is out there that ought to be acknowledged, and only gets mild notice. We do this by picking one musician and finding people who are covering them. This week’s featured artist is Colin Hay.

This version of I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You is by the U.K.’s Kieran Smith, who is a music teacher, it turns out:

Australian Jace Leckie’s cover of Beautiful World has only been watched 62 times, which is a shame. It is a chill cover of a terrific song:

Here’s a guy sitting at his desk, just strumming out Maggie. No big deal:

Guess it wouldn’t be Colin Hay without some Overkill. Monica Brentnall is handling it. It really needs some more views:

And, finally, a bit of Colin Hay himself. Another great song, Waiting for My Real Life to Begin:

Hope you have a great weekend. Let’s all celebrate it like we’re in Boston.

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17
Apr 13

Spring, finally

Big temperature shifts. Sun, amazingly enough. Cold in the mornings. Humidity at 74 percent in the evening. Finally spring showed up.

Patton Oswalt will guest star on Parks and Rec this week. The Yankee and I have been watching it recently. It is mindless, but the characters have charm. Ron Swanson being the best thing on network television, I’m pretty sure.

This performance won’t hurt anything, though:

I managed to read two things in The New Yorker today. So, you see, I have to look down upon a sitcom. This is an interesting read about the success of the Boston hospitals:

Something more significant occurred than professionals merely adhering to smart policies and procedures. What we saw unfold was the cultural legacy of the September 11th attacks and all that has followed in the decade-plus since. We are not innocents anymore.

[…]

Talking to people about that day, I was struck by how ready and almost rehearsed they were for this event. A decade earlier, nothing approaching their level of collaboration and efficiency would have occurred. We have, as one colleague put it to me, replaced our pre-9/11 naïveté with post-9/11 sobriety. Where before we’d have been struck dumb with shock about such events, now we are almost calculating about them.

[…]

We’ve learned, and we’ve absorbed. This is not cause for either celebration or satisfaction. That we have come to this state of existence is a great sadness. But it is our great fortune.

Several hospitals are clustered nearby. The medical tent was doing triage quickly. Lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan are being put into use. Stellar work meant people lived.

Here’s another New Yorker piece, about the things we say over and over:

I was in Iceland, talking with Stein, the eleven-year-old son of some friends. His English was dauntingly good—and all the more so given that he’d never spent any real time off the island. I’d just flown over in a packed plane, and I said that tourism seemed to be exploding, and he, deliberating, looking older than his years, replied, “Yes, they come from the hot countries.”

[…]

My grandfather was fond of the phrase “Now, I’m not lecturing you.” It sent a sinking feeling into the chests of his children and grandchildren alike, for it reliably heralded a lengthy and dour disquisition on the hardships of life. He came by his lessons honestly. A powerful and athletic figure in young manhood, he was laid low by emphysema in early middle age. Though he was a smoker, I suspect his illness was largely brought on by chemical exposure as a construction rigger back in pre-OSHA days. In any case, pulmonary problems were a grim motif in his life; he lost his first wife to tuberculosis while she was still in her teens.

Of all the helpful lessons he imparted to me, I recall nothing in any detail. No, after all these years, I can retrieve verbatim only one thing he ever said, and this didn’t originate in his dutiful tutoring. It was a spontaneous remark.

[…]

Similar catchphrases, in which casual comments are promoted into a sort of immortality, doubtless exist in nearly every family, every close friendship. I find this notion deeply heartening—that people are everywhere being quoted for lines they themselves have long forgotten. And of course each of us is left to wonder whether, right at this moment, we’re being quoted in some remote and unreckonable context.

What a charming notion.

We need some charm after what happened in West, Texas tonight:

What a terrible scene, hundreds of police and fire and EMT rigs. Triage on the high school football field. Dozens of homes feared destroyed and a casualty rate so high no one will even dare talk about it. (Finally, some sensibility.) All of that in a town of 2,800 people.

This is terrible anywhere, but it strikes a different cord in a place where everyone knows everyone.

So we’ll end on something uplifting from Boston, where people can’t maintain a moment of silence, but they will stir your very core:

More venues should do it that way.

Auburn / history / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Apr 13

Stuck in 1898, part two

I am very interested in some of the pictures from my oldest Glomerata, the 1898, the second one they ever published. Here are a few notes about one of the pictures.

On page 86-87 you find this image and the heading “Best Auburn Records,” which we’ll get to eventually below.

1898 Track Glomerata

These guys were a bit hard to dig up, but meet F. W. Van Ness, H. E. Harvey and W. B. Stokes. This is what we know about them after a few hasty minutes of online searching.

Franklin Waters Van Ness, was born in Pensacola. The 1870 census said there were 7,817 people in Escambia County. Ten years later there were more than 12,000 there. He studied at The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., before enrolling at Auburn for mechanical engineering. In the first track meet in the South, held at Vanderbilt, he ran the half-mile in 2:06.

He’d go into automobiles and had a mention in Motor Age in 1916. He designed cars, vacuum cleaners, and more.

He’d later return to the south to run a cotton mill in North Carolina. He died in 1955, but the Internet doesn’t know where he (or his wife) is buried. They had three daughters. One worked in hotels and is buried in North Carolina. The second daughter died in South Carolina, but is buried in Kansas. Her first husband was an ambassador. Her second was an admiral in the navy. The youngest died in North Carolina. She apparently had a lifetime of health problems.

Henry Everett Harvey died on Oct. 14, 1942. He’s buried just two blocks off campus, at Pine Hill. As a young man he ran the mile in 4:48. That’s all I can find out about him so far.

William Bee Stokes was born in Mississippi, but his family moved to Marion County when he was 14. There were about 11,000 people in Marion at the time. When he moved to Auburn he found himself in a county of almost 30,000.

He was captain on the football team. He played in the first game held on campus, against Georgia Tech in 1896 and scored the first offensive touchdown on campus, a 7-yard run as Auburn was on the way to a 45-0 win. He stayed on at the university for at least two decades, teaching as an instructor and ultimately an associate professor of mathematics. He was making $750 in 1905, about $18,000 today.

In 1920 he took a job running the math department at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in LaFayette. During WWII he worked in the Navy’s V-12 program and taught thermonuclear physics, atomic arithmetic and aerial navigation.

He knew Gen. George Washington Goethals, who was the chief engineer when the Panama Canal was finally completed. He worked with former President Herbert Hoover. He retired to Guin, Ala., which was his wife’s hometown and near his own. He was buried there in 1960. His wife died in 1971.

The records: Auburn, which has boasted 38 Olympians and 35 national champions and a few hundred All-Americans over the years, has a fairly strong program, and it really dates back to these guys. Let’s compare their stats to the current school records. People ran a bit slower in the 19th century, but you really see the difference in the field events. Remember, the modern races are measured in meters, which are a bit longer, and the timers are more precise these days:

	1898	Women	Men
100-yard dash	10.2 sec	11.03 sec (100m) (2006)	9.98 sec (2000)
100-yard hurdles	17.8 sec	12.93 sec (100m) (2000)	13.25 sec (110m) (2008)
440-yard dash	55.2	50.11 (400m) (1993)	44.45 (400m) (2000)
High jump	5′-3″	6′-1.5″ (2007)	7′-8″ (2007)
Shot put	32′-10″	53′-9.25″ (2004)	68′-6″ (2005)
Hammer throw	82′-7.4″	196′-11″ (2008)	243′-2″ (2008)
Pole vault	9′-5.1″	12′-6″ (2005)	18′-4.5″ (1997)

Better equipment, dedicated training, diets, and so on. Anyone that’s watched any Olympics appreciates the progression of athleticism when they see old records fall. But consider that first number. The old 100-yard-dash number, if legitimate, is internationally impressive. The world record was set at 10.0 in 1877, 1878, 1880 and again in 1886. It wouldn’t fall to 9.8 until 1890.

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14
Apr 13

Catching up

The weekly photo dump — extras that didn’t make other posts, and random things that can serve as filler — post. We have a many things to see today. Let’s get to them.

I share this photo as a public service. Should you need to ask for assistance in saving someone’s life in two languages, you might consult this from your memory, where you should now commit the following literature. From the Whataburger on Oak Mountain:

We do get some pretty skies down here. This one was from last Sunday, when we road our bicycles around town in a dying light. Beautiful day:

I have a jersey that highlights Major Taylor. That is all:

The long, straight, flat flat flat roads of Indiana. Off in the distance you can see The Yankee, and I had to work to bridge that gap:

Always loved that sign, even before I learned from places like television that other people were also interested in dirty, rusty distressed signage:

Spring is coming to the Ohio River Valley. That’s good. Back at home now we’ve had a mild spring and are coming to grips with the notion that we’ll go straight into summer. But, for now, Indiana wildflowers:

Crossing that big bridge over the Tennessee River. You can see the trees in the middle of the channel, just peeking over the guardrail there. Good volume so far this year:

This is the Aegon Center, but it received new signage just this month. Mercer is the largest tenant. There remains an open question in Louisville about whether this will be the Aegon Center or Mercer Tower. They say Aegon, but time always wins out. Mercer has been in Louisville for three decades and is a “human resource consultancy” which sounds far too drab and corporate for a building with a cool hat. This is Kentucky’s tallest skyscraper at 35 floors and 549 feet:

The Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral, which is the Kentucky diocese:

They are hanging banners downtown that calls Louisville the Possibility City. They already have four or five other nicknames. But it works, because no one can settle on how to pronounce the official name, which brings us to my favorite bit of the town’s marketing:

One of the world’s largest guitars. And this is the most cliched neon in the city, I’m sure, but the tree looks like it is strumming the guitar!

These next several photographs are in the rathskeller, which is the basement of the historic Seelbach Hotel, where the conference took place. These winged sentries are on all of the columns:

Rathskeller is of German origin — which makes sense for the region — and means “council’s cellar.” Typically they were bars or restaurants in the basement of a city hall or nearby building. This portion adorns the wall behind the bar:

The Seelbach’s Rathskeller is made of rookwood pottery and was constructed in 1907. The plaque outside says it it the only room of its kind intact in the world. These lion seals decorate each wall:

Artisans drew the decorations by hand, and then the clay was fired. All of the glazings were added, layer by layer, before each subsequent firing. Pulling out to see a segment of one wall:

Parts of the ceiling are actually made of leather, including portions of these seals and the signs of the zodiac that adorn the room:

It is a big space. This is wide as I could get in the darkness with a flash. Imagine about eight of these areas subdivided by those massive columns. We had a nice function in this room last night and was absolutely worth the visit:

This is one of two buildings that make up the Waterfront Plaza. Finished in 1991, there are 25 floors and nine elevators inside. It tops out at 339.99 feet. Why didn’t they just add another inch or two?

We saw that building on our way to breakfast with the folks. They came into town to visit with us at Dish On Market, which was good enough for breakfast two days in a row. (Try the pancakes or the omelets.) We had a delicious and lovely little visit, if all too brief. Hugs, stories, historical artifacts, a family tale or two and we had to depart.

We had a lot of driving to do as we left Louisville. A lot of driving. My shoulder is paying for it now. But Louisville, as ever, was lovely.

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13
Apr 13

SSCA, Day Four

I presented a paper this morning titled “Hail to the Chief: Comparative Presidential Face-ism on Online News Sites.” The abstract reads:

Past research demonstrated that visual displays demonstrated varying facial prominence, known as face-ism, among varying subjects with respect to race, gender and prominence. This paper compares the face-ism score of President Barack Obama on prominent news web sites in the early days of both of his terms. The analysis is timely and relevant as the nation’s first African-American president comes to power and constitutes one of the few studies on face-ism online. Results indicated that facial prominence of the president yielded a moderately low score on the face-ism scale which suggests that the editorial choices are reflective of stereotypical scores with respect to race rather than his powerful and prominent position.

Or words to that effect, anyway.

There are numbers in that paper, which is a great way to start a Saturday morning.

In the very next session The Yankee and I presented a paper we creatively titled “Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Virtual Watercooler? An Analysis of Election Night Conversations on Twitter.” We looked at hashtags and what was going on under #Election. She discussed the theory, I talked about more numbers and then read some of the interesting examples from our case study.

These things happened over the course of the evening’s election coverage. In more than 11,000 tweets with #election in that period between the polls closing and the end of the immediate coverage we found:

52 #GOP
47 #Republican
80 #Democrats
45 #Dems

512 #Romney
1,095 #Obama
30 #Mitt
32 #Barack

147 #CNN
47 #NBC
47 #Fox
30 #ABC
2 #CBS

2,992 @ symbols (Conversations.)
205 RTs (Sharing others’ tweets.)
2,487 links (Sharing media.)
21,447 any # (Indexing attempt or punchline.)

120 #Florida or traditional abbreviations
157 #Ohio, or OH
67 #Pennsylvania or traditional abbreviations

All of which is to say that, with the framework of social identity theory — your self-conception realized through your perceived membership in a relevant social group — we can see how formerly passive television viewers and newspaper readers are now not only taking active roles in conversation, but they are using primary identifiers to organize themes, which suggests a fair amount of implications for audience fragmentation, political activation and raises questions about “unofficial” hashtags, harnessing those results and forced versus voluntary interactivity.

Mostly, I enjoyed reading the tweets that we captured for the study. Here are a few I shared with the audience. These are direct quotes:

Dear Todd Akin, I do believe you suffered a legitimate defeat #inyoface #Election #legitimaterape

I feel like you should have to be 21 to vote. Some people just vote for the coolest name #YouDontKnowAnything #Election

The tone of PBS’s election coverage is basically Suck it Romney — Big Bird wins! Hilarious! #Election

Who at #NBC decided to put an #Election results map on the ice rink? Was Jack Donaghy involved in this?

This whole #Election tracker business turned our civil governance process into the highest stakes Fantasy Football game ever played.

I don’t tweet much.. But I hope @JohnKingCNN shuts up… You are so annoying.

Damn this girl on ABC is too fine! #Election

i used to have faith in my countrymen. now that i know my countrymen can be bought w/ phones and biRTh control, not so sure…#Election

Interesting dichotomy: Obama strong in swing states, Romney strong in states that snap their fingers out of time. #Election #Dems #GOP

Romney of Massachusetts might have won this. Romney of Tea Party, 47%, Ayn Rand, Benghazi blather, false Jeep ads… Not so much. #Election

Tuned into Fox News and was surprised to see that they harnessed the power of time travel and brought in Ben Franklin to cover the #Election

But #Romney holds firm in Cayman Islands and Switzerland. #Election

Obama 2012 campaign just announced it will unleash drones over Pakistan to celebrate re-election. #Election

i want to create a burlesque number called “the exit pole.” #Election

Another panelist talked about the making of this ad for Dale Peterson, former candidate for agriculture commissioner of Alabama.

That’s a real commercial. It was produced for the web because Peterson didn’t have TV money, but it was an instant hit online and the money started rolling in. Before long he went from five percent in the polls to pushing 30 percent. But he did not win in the Republican primary, despite his huge online following. The entire case study is an interesting exercise in aggressive, low budget politics.

So we go through all of the presentations and then the respondent, our old friend Dr. Larry Powell stands to discuss each of the presentations. He talks about how each of these studies are important and offered his suggestions for where the research should go.

For each paper he also offered his fake gift. One rhetorician received a copy of Ronald Reagan’s RNC acceptance speech, so that he might give it to Mitt Romney, for example. The author of the Dale Peterson work received a can of cashews.

Everyone in the room from Alabama is now all but rolling on the floor for, you see, Peterson has recently been arrested for shoplifting, twice. The second time he was dining on cashews.

For our paper Dr. Powell pointed out that The Yankee and I met in his class. That he served as advisor on both of our comps committees and now we are married.

“I think I’ve done enough.”

In the afternoon The Yankee was a member of a panel titled “Political Entertainment Television and the Framing of Choices and Consequences in the 2012 Presidential Campaign.”

Here she is now:

She talked about The Daily Show’s Indecision 2012 which was, I feel, the presentation that really brought the panel together.

So after that it was time for another very late lunch. We learned that three of the four sandwich shops within walking distance were closed. You’re in the middle of the downtown entertainment district on a Saturday and all the small places lock up at 3 p.m. Some business model. Back to Potbelly Sandwiches, then, and then back to the conference so that I might run the political communication division meeting. It is my penultimate responsibility as the division chair.

All went according to plan. Things moved along, I printed too many agendas, made a joke no one thought was funny and we conducted the business of the division. The Yankee was elected as the vice chair-elect of the division. That means she’ll program two divisions of presentations in a row, mass comm next year and political communication the year after that. That’s service to academia, for you.

Dinner was just about the strangest, most surrealistic, hysterical thing possible. Also we sang along to Carly Rae Jepsen. And I played the drums. There were drums at dinner and that was the part that made the most sense of all.

So how was your Saturday?