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We can at least agree that the Aggie War Hymn is an ear worm

I had the weirdest dream this morning. But no one cares about your dreams. If you’re writing a blog, or someplace that’s not your own dream journal, or the Journal of Altered Conscious Mental, Emotional, and Sensory Experiences, no one will. This should be a lesson to you. Don’t write it out for others, because no one is reading about your dreams (and Freud isn’t coming along to analyze you in the comments.)

Simply do this instead. Point out you had a dream or dreams. This signals that you have not only slept recently, but done so to the extent that you could enter REM sleep. And then, share that you, too, are dismissive of the dreams, that you know that no one cares. And then, by definition, you are hip.

Not only are you hip, but you, my friend, are a dreamer.

And this is the sort of thing I normally charge $84.95 for down at the airport Ramada, where the lonely, bored, and vaguely motivated will fall all over themselves to see my latest slide decks.

No one cares about your slide decks. All the above? You can apply that to your presentations, too. Oh, sure, you put in a lot of work and they’re interesting, noteworthy, sometimes even compelling. But, and this is the key, they are those things in the moment, not in the re-telling.

Pick your spots.

No one cares about your spots.

Except for infectious disease specialists. Tell them everything. Do not charge them Ramada rates.

Here’s the view from the 6th floor almost-corner office. Not bad out there. Most of the streets on the way in were in great shape. Just one, screen by trees and hills and houses, looked a bit rough. At least for our commute. Quite a few people didn’t make it in today. Not everyone has the same snow experience. You can also see that, below, just by carefully observing which people have shoveled their sidewalks 48-plus hours after the snow stopped and who hasn’t.

In my Rituals and Traditions class today I tried to frame things so that we start thinking of these things more like a team, a league or a school, and not like a fan. I presented them with some research on rituals from a marketing perspective. (Rituals have staying power and create conditions where highly identified fans want to come back, take part, and come back again. Also, most of them spend more money on other stuff at the venue than the ticket price itself.) The lecture got us through about a decade of marketing of fandom research and a few more years on sports fan sociology. Also, I showed them the Aggie War Hymn at weddings, with which I made a point about things in, and out, of context.

And then I explained the song. It’s a song about hating your rivals. I explained the history of the song. J.V. “Pinky” Wilson wrote the song in a trench in France during World War I. He came home to College Station, finished his degree, and sang the song in a quarter. Some of the A&M yell leaders heard it, and convinced him to enter it into a campus song contest. It won, and since 1920 it has been an integral part of Texas A&M fandom. I mean, they sing it at weddings.

At which point I paused, and deadpanned, “White people weddings, man.”

Then I said, there are a lot of these videos on YouTube.

We also considered the shared affiliation of rituals, as in the example of the running of the Gumps. Look at that zeal! And the footspeed!

And then we considered what it means to be a part of 61,000 people singing to your favorite team.

I was also able to cite to them a study that told us some 98 percent of fans engage in sports rituals. Most of them have to do with wearing the team gear and colors, but that study broke out 15 other criteria, and quite a few make the cut for people.

On Thursday, my students’ surveys will be completed. We’re asking questions of our study body. Hopefully some of the information will be help to our class as we try to help find and or develop things our athletic department might work on.

In Criticism, we discussed baseball, beginning with this story about one of the Phillies recent relievers. As a young man he caused a terrible car accident that killed one man, badly injured a teenager and almost derailed his own life. But then one of the truly selfless and remarkable things about humanity happens. It’s a terrific story.

I asked the group what they would like to know at the end of the story. What’s not here that’d you like to see in a followup. Someone said they’d like to see what happened if the pitcher and the family met. Just you wait for Thursday.

We also talked about a museum piece — meaning copy from the Smithsonian — about Jackie Robinson. It didn’t really fit the bill, but we were able to discuss why, and also story curation and, again, what’s not in this piece. What wasn’t there was what Robinson did after he walked away from baseball, and that’s every bit, or more as important, as his time with the Dodgers.

In the evening, as the day is getting later everything felt sunny and cheery, even if it was cold, and it looks like Hoth.

We’re right at the point where 12 hours of the day is in daylight. Right at the point where it seems we might make it once again. Right at the moment that should have happened two weeks ago, but will take place three or four weeks from now: it’ll finally feel like winter is behind us.

Since it isn’t, I rode in the basement this evening. I’ve been suffering through the little riding I’ve done of late. Everything got out of whack around the holidays and my cardio slipped and nothing has helped and it just felt like a big chore — a big painful chore.

But this brief ride, for the first time in a long while, things finally felt good. I don’t know why it seemed to click back into place, physically or mentally, but it was about time. Also, Spain. And I went up a hill prominent enough that it got its own little graphic in the heads up display.

I’m sure that’s useful for climbers, so that they might time their exertion to perfection. But it does something else for the rest of us.

Anyway, 30-some minutes over a lumpy area of Tossa de Mar, with two little Cat 5 climbs according to the profile, way off in the northeast of Spain. I hope I get a few more rides in a row that feel as decent as this one.

There’s a lot of riding to do.

And a lot of work to do. So … back at it.

adventures / Monday / photo / sports / video — No Comments
23
Feb 26

Big snow, big winds, big visuals

All of our recycling sits in the garage. It waits there, impatiently, until my own impatience tells me to do something with the leaning tower of cardboard I’m assembling. Fortunately, I don’t have to make the trip too often these days. I think I go about once every three weeks. And Saturday was that time. Get that stuff out of the garage so we can walk around a little easier, and not have it threaten to bury me, a fine coating of paperboard and other, heavier, recyclable products. So I backed out the car, put two bins — one large and one small — of our mixed recyclables, and all of the deconstructed cardboard. Drove it all over to the inconvenience center. It’s a fine place, about seven miles away, and they take all of these things and more. Also, they’re not terrible strict, so long as you arrive before they close and back your vehicle into the unloading area. These are the rules and you must follow them.

If you do not, you will incur his wrath.

That bear has been sitting there for … a while. The gentleman that manages this facility for the county is seldom in his little office here, too much work to do around the site, but that bear never misses a shift. There’s a story with this guy. He was fished out of, or saved from, one of the waste bins and now he has this role. I hope he is well compensated.

Did you notice the sky in that photo? Here’s another Saturday view. It was about 50 degrees that day. I did the recycling in a t-shirt. No way, I thought, is it going to snow as predicted. And they predicted a lot. All evidence before hand to the contrary.

Sunday was not bright and blue, but gray and chilly. I watched the men’s Olympic hockey gold medal game. That was fun. Then, at the end, a few of the guys brought Johnny Gaudreau’s sweater onto the ice.

That’s touching. Gold medalists are skating a sweater with Johnny Gaudreau’s name on it.

Gaudreau, and his brother Matt, were killed by a drunken motorist while riding bikes in August 2024.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) February 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM

We did some research on local cycling attitudes immediately after they were killed. I presented it to the city and at an academic conference. We were able to help create a little something useful from it. I try not to forget that the day before they were killed, I was out on a ride, just one road over, at about the same time of the early evening.

The man that killed them is still in jail, awaiting trial. He has a procedural hearing later this week on one element of his case. He has a wife and two children, and so the impact here is widely felt. Johnny had a wife and two kids. They were expecting their third. Matt and his wife were expecting their first. The brothers were back in town because their sister was supposed to be married the very next day. There’s absolutely nothing but sadness around this story, and it’s a widely known bit of business. There were a lot of dusty eyes at that gesture.

After the players got their medals, they all skated to center ice for a group photo. And then two of them held up a finger, a wait-a-sec finger, and skated away. Soon they came back, two children in tow. Those are two of Johnny Gaudreau’s children.

Meanwhile, as the weather loomed, people stopped to add things to the ghost bikes memorial where they were killed. Someone shimmied up that pole and mounted an American flag. Everyone seems to agree he should have been with the team, winning and celebrating with the boys. But for a guy that had too much to drink, was angry, driving aggressively and did all of this in one horribly impulsive, accidental moment.

I’ve been told the memorial continued to grow throughout the afternoon.

And then, later, the snow came. I went to the basement to turn a few miles over on my bike. There was a bit of dust out on the cooler spots in the yard. When I came up an hour later, we had an event. And then the winds came, gusting up to about 40 mph.

It looked like this around dinner time, and every weather model projected snow through about noon today. That it was 50 degrees Saturday meant nothing at all come Sunday night. Sunday night, it was this.

Monday morning, after the traditional chocolate chip pancakes required of a snow day, it looked like this in the driveway, which takes the both of us about an hour to clean.

We had about 14 inches of snow. Mostly light and fluffy, and easily maneuverable by shovel. Perhaps a bit less so by snow blower. The better news is that was the drier variety, and the sun was out to do its work. A fair amount of it melted down today. Unlike the last snow and ice storm that was historic for its staying power, the evidence of this storm, historic for being a blizzard, should all be gone by next weekend.

Is it the weekend yet?

Friday / links / photo / sports — No Comments
20
Feb 26

Cats great, snow gone, writing written, forecast … let’s just not

Since we haven’t done so this week, and since they featured in otherwise as a big part of the goings on around here, let’s do a quick check in on the kitties. They had a visit to the vet on Monday, had a little anesthesia and a dental checkup and came home woozy. But as that, and their disappointment at being asked to go somewhere and doing something they clearly were not interested in, wore off, they’re right back to normal. And it’s the delightful usual antics and comfort cuddles from them. Or for them. I am never sure which.

Anyway, so that I might fulfill my feline contractual obligations, and also boost traffic around the ol’ site, here’s Phoebe, pointing out, once again, that she is not on the counter, but sitting in this little cardboard drink cartoon thing, thus maintaining her status as a good girl.

And here’s Poseidon, patiently sitting at one of the island chairs. That’s not a usual spot for him, but this week he’s been there a few times.

I’d really like to know how cats establish their patterns, and what prompts them to create new ones.

They’re both doing well, and I am sure would like to just stay inside where it warm, dry, and there are no vet techs.

Their view outside has changed. The snow and ice have melted away. Thursday and today were a big day on that front. The temperatures warmed up just a bit, all of the dry air has been pushed out and, for the first time in almost four weeks, we could see what was beneath it all.

Honestly, it was a little weird for the first few minutes.

We went outside to do some yard thing that has been neglected this past month while we lived inside the arctic circle. The ground was spongy and wet. I said, “Ya know? I miss the snow.”

Not to worry, guess what’s in the weekend forecast: A lot of snow.

So the greenish=brown grass was nice while it lasted, I guess. But we could use the water in the soil, so there’s that.

While we were out, we discovered a dead squirrel. I guess it had been underneath the snow and ice for a while. Not wanting it to just stay there for Ice Age v 2.0, I went over and picked it up. By hand.

Kidding, of course. I do not have the latest in steampunk squirrel removal machinery, however, so I used the Squirrel Lever 3000, brought to you by the makers of the Bass-O-Matic. I apologized to the little guy, and then carefully removed him from the premises. Nature gives and nature takes, and a hard winter is hard on some of the furry little creatures.

Also, this is why the birders are getting fatter on our bird seed. Less competition.

I wrote something last night. Got it published today. It’s about the Olympics, and fans, and nationalism. You can click this link and read it.

We know more about athletes than ever before. We see them in closeup HD. We see them in carefully crafted publicity and commercial campaigns. We see them in their social media. Around the Olympics, there’s even more. We see them in the vignettes that NBC produces, well-crafted packages designed to humanize the person who runs faster and skis better than anyone you’ve ever met.

It can create some real parasocial interaction. That smiling young face, the ones with something to prove to themselves and their neighbors, and the ones trying to show their kids what heart and determination look like, they come into our homes, and we think we know them. They are from places we’ve heard of; they wear the same colors in the same patterns which we hold dear.

Even though almost none of us will ever climb to the top of a podium, and few of us have any real chance of becoming the best in the world at something, we carry with us, just as they do, aches and pains and worries and injuries and fear and love. Yet, for some reason, we aren’t so willing to let them do that.

This is what it means to be an American athlete on the biggest stage in your sport. You hear the ringing cheers and are embraced by coaches and teammates and family and competitors. Maybe you hear your anthem played for you. You face ridicule and scorn, vitriol and threats from far corners.

It goes on like that for a bit, trying not to sound like a scold, until, at the end, it absolutely becomes one.

I think I have one more piece to write next week, where there will be no scolding. I just have to get it in among all of the other things. There are so many other things that must get done. Four classes to prepare for next week, about 100 things to grade, my review packet (some 40-ish pages, but 15 or so are done) and two studies to work on. I go back and forth: there is no time for this, or, I’m in great shape, take the day off. Really it just depends on when I ask myself about it all.

But I’m not going to ask myself about it anymore tonight. I am going to stare at the forecast, and will it to chance.

Meteorologists are predicting 18 inches of snow this weekend. Give or take.

baseball / journalism / photo / Rowan / sports / Wednesday — Comments Off
4
Feb 26

I found Bigfoot, he’s looking for money, same as everyone

Below the little banner is the summary of Tuesday. Here, above it, is a brief recounting of Wednesday.

I woke up, did all of the morning’s readings, did the email work. I had lunch. I had a meeting with faculty. I did more email. I wrote a message for my online class. I will send it, some 600 words of insight and updates and cheerful wisdom, tomorrow. I also finished prep for both of tomorrow’s classes. In one, we will talk about a few more typologies, I will stretch two pages of notes into 25 minutes and then we will develop questions for a survey. (I have seven of them already written down, but I’m only showing them three. Don’t tell.) In the other class we will watch a documentary. I also graded some stuff that needed grading. (Everyone did well, as expected; hopefully they’ll keep it up.)

I met with a student and solved several problems. The first problem was how to make Zoom work for both of us. The second problem was about how to do an assignment. Happy to help! The third problem: “How I am explaining something so poorly to this crop of students, when I have explained this same thing, with precisely this same language, to students in 2025 and 2024?” Parts of that problem may never be solved.

I also set up a meeting for Friday. Now I have two Friday meetings. One is at a very precise time, because faculty are keen on precision of schedules. The other is right now “friday works !” But, dear student, Friday does not work. A specific time would work. It is to be a Zoom meeting, sure, but I’ve done the sit in front of a Zoom window waiting for someone to show up all day thing a few times (ahhhh, 2020 …) and that’s too big an ask at this point. Open up your daily planner and figure out a good, specific time and we will have a grand and productive chat.

We’ll get there.

After all of this, it was time to catch up on the evening’s worth of reading.

I do a lot of reading. I think more of it is going to start coming from international media, and also books.

Do not get me started on the Washington Post, lest I bring out my press section banner and write a thousand brisk words about the obvious incompatibility between oligarchs and watchdog journalism, and the cute way little masthead slogans presage the ending of legacy media.

Instead, yesterday!

This was the view on the way to campus Tuesday. Everything looks exactly like this. This all fell from the sky Saturday night and Sunday a week ago. Monday, I helped a neighbor dig out their sidewalk, because this stuff is going nowhere. The longterm useless forecast says we might see 39 degrees Wednesday of next week. Maybe 40 on Friday!

That’d be a full three weeks under 40. That seems … excessive.

In Rituals and Traditions — Rits and Trads if you’re in a hurry — we discussed why we watch sports. I had a list of typologies to share. As we talked about the reasons why people watched sports they managed to list five of the six typologies I had listed before I put them on the screen. So now I’m a magician.

Then I broke them into their groups, because group work will be an important part of the class, and we’re heading that direction rapidly now.

In my Criticism class we talked about our first two stories of the semester. We discussed this story out of Texas.

The Liga Venezolana is a local example of how the millions of Venezeulans who have scattered across the Americas have brought with them an invigorating enthusiasm for the “American Pastime.” Leaving behind a country rife with political and economic turbulence and arriving in new landscapes where they are often scapegoated in political rhetoric, they have used the sport they know best to root themselves in a sense of home.

The league immigrants have created in Austin is far from the popularly imagined recreational softball scene of on-field beers and calm. The Liga Venezolana’s fans know how to intimidate. Its teams operate social media accounts. Many of its players, like Mao, have recorded strikeouts or stolen bases as pros on minor league teams. The league keeps stats and operates livestreams. Its intensity has made it a social focal point for the fast-growing Venezuelan immigrant community that has settled in North Austin, Pflugerville, Cedar Park and Leander in recent years. Since 2021, the league has ballooned from four to 22 teams and from about 70 to 600 players.

We also talked about this story.

Dr. Christopher Ahmad, Tommy John expert and head team physician for the New York Yankees, has performed the surgery on some of the biggest names in baseball. But he has also been privy to the other side of the story.

“The alarms are going off on how devastating this problem is to the youngest players,” he says in an interview with CNN Sports.

“When I first started doing Tommy John surgery about 25 years ago, the population who I was operating on who needed the surgery were essentially very high-level players – they were college prospects destined to be professional, or professional players.

“Now, the population who needs the surgery most are kids.”

Of the 10-15 Tommy John surgeries that he performs every week, Ahmad estimates that between eight and 10 are on high school children, with some even still in middle school.

For a first week of talking about stories, the interactions were pretty good. Started strong, and faded away a bit, perhaps. But we’ll get it there.

I tried, during that class, to play some audio, but the sound was tricky. Knowing I was going to show a documentary, I stuck around to tinker with it. Eventually my lovely bride came in to look for me. Then a woman who had a later class came in to get ready. I don’t know how many degrees we all have, but it took that many degrees to solve the problem, a problem I finally figured out by … adjusting the volume.

To be fair, there are a lot of options and buttons and switches.

Opposite from the elevators in our building are TV monitors and they’re programmed with the time and weather and promoting various events and services. Pretty standard stuff, usually. Sometimes something interesting is on the screen and I can see it for 2.7 seconds, just long enough to realize it is interesting, but not long to read it all. And there are a lot of things to promote. No one, not even me, is going to stand there and wait for the interesting thing to pop back up again.

But sometimes the elevator is slow, and sometimes you can catch a good one.

That’s the total promo. No contact info, no club or school or department affiliation, no deadlines listed. But it’s intriguing enough, I guess. Unless they, whoever they are, are trying to tell people that winning a scholarship is as likely as seeing Nelly, or Bigfoot, or aliens. Clearly it raises more questions than answers. More space was needed, I guess.

Older analog styles are the way to go with sophisticated messaging that has a lot of words, or dates, or URLs. Our building doesn’t have a lot of bulletin boards, which is a bit of a shame. I love taking a few moments to read the useful things, the random things, learn about new clubs and interest groups, and enjoy the truly wacky stuff people produce for public billboards. It’s cleaner and neater, sure, but we are just a tiny bit the lesser for it.

OK, now, on Wednesday, I’ve written about Tuesday and Wednesday. You know what that means for tomorrow, then, right? Back on schedule again. You’re relieved, I can tell from here.

journalism / links / sports / Tuesday — Comments Off
6
Jan 26

Would you like to plug away at work for me?

Last night we went to a township meeting. A family friend was being installed to office as a supervisor. In my mind’s eye, I was picturing a giant metropolis. Big marble stairs, doric columns, a lot of media in period inauthentic wardrobe. Big, ridiculous flash bulb cameras. It was, in fact, a small place. The township is the sort that has a part time police chief. Where the supervisor meetings are held has a grand table, long enough to seat five people tasked with the important duties of the community.

Sometimes the room hosts potlucks.

There were 40 people in the audience, and that just about filled the room. Six or seven people were holding up their phones to record the historic moments of their friends and loved ones being sworn in.

There stood a judge at the front of the room. She is married, I learned later, to one of the administrators. In her full regalia, she swore in five new people, three township supervisors, an auditor and a tax collector. She enunciated carefully. “UniTED,” and “FIdelity.”

Even the tax collector got a round of applause, which probably doesn’t happen again during his tenure.

With the positions filled, the supervisors held their regular meeting, a tight series of procedural votes to start the new year. Partnerships with other cities, the formal hiring of a few new police officers, a resolution or two. It took 21 minutes.

If you need a shot of democracy, go take part in your local government. That’s where the real and immediate work that impacts you and your community is conducted. They need you, your voice, your thoughts, your energy. (Plus it is sometimes unintentionally entertaining.)

The thing about this form of government is that it only works if the people take part.

Just to round out today’s post, before I get back to work. This isn’t a story — it is a list of photos and brief bios — but that is a dynamite headline. Finally got the framing right. Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

Meanwhile, over in the UK … Government demands Musk’s X deals with ‘appalling’ Grok AI deepfakes:

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has called on Elon Musk’s X to urgently deal with its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok being used to create non-consensual sexualised images of women and girls.

The BBC has seen multiple examples on X of people asking the bot to digitally undress people to make them appear in bikinis without their consent, as well as putting them in sexual situations.

Kendall said the situation was “absolutely appalling”, adding “we cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these degrading images.”

In sports media news, NBC is set for Olympic spots.NBCU breaks Winter Olympic ad sales record with sellout:

Today, amid CES, NBCUniversal announced it had sold out of its Winter Olympics ad inventory, with a month still to go before the games. In the process, the company set a new Winter Olympics ad sales record, with the highest linear and digital revenue it’s ever recorded. Plus, the company scored a record number of advertisers. With the news, NBCU has sold out inventory for the Winter Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game, and the Super Bowl, which make up what the company calls its “Legendary February” programming.

[…]

Among other highlights, the Winter Olympics is adding more than 100 new advertisers for the upcoming Games. Of its total advertisers, 85% of brand partners are investing in Milan Cortina digitally, and advertiser adoption of Peacock’s ad innovations has grown 31% from Paris 2024 to Milan Cortina 2026, according to the company.

Plus, the company said nearly 60 advertisers are using unique marketing elements, up more than 174% from Beijing 2022.

That’s a lot of new advertisers. I wonder what we’re going to see. I wonder what they’ll say about us.