The grading continues. I am currently reading about four dozen feature profiles. Some have some nice potential, a few are already there. Many of the students writing these pieces have found interesting people to write about. That’s the first step.
After that, well, you have to spend time with them, spend time on them. Learn all about them. And then write it. Feature profiles aren’t hard. They take a lot of time. And then they get difficult. There’s a great craft to writing a profile about a stranger, and having your audience wants to read more. And because of all of that, it’s interesting to see how people take their first attempt at trying to write such a thing.
At my current pace I should get everything done at just about midnight, tomorrow night.
I try to give everyone some useful and specific feedback, you see. So it’s time intensive for me, too. For some, I am encouraging them to continue to work on this story. A few aren’t far away from being published. Hopefully one or two will take that advice.
For one of my breaks away from the computer today I went outside to … pick up sticks. The yard is littered with them from a storm here and wind there. Initially, I despaired at what I would do with all of these sticks and small limbs. And then I remembered: we have a fire pit.
So now we have a growing stack of kindling.
It sits near this pear tree, which still looks lovely.
Also nearby is a nice little growing stand. A good place for herbs and other things that have a shallow root system. In a week or two, perhaps, we’ll get to this in earnest. But, for now, I am enjoying seeing the things that pop up all on their own.
I’m cheering for you guys, and I’ll put a version of that picture will eventually make its way into becoming another banner here on the site.
Let’s head back to California for another peaceful little beach video.
Relax. Enjoy. Repeat.
And if you, like me, are a fan of the slow motion crashing of waves, here’s another one of those.
Not to worry. There are plenty more videos where those came from.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is going to be sunny tomorrow, I know this because I looked ahead at the forecast. And also because I saw some color to the sunset.
After four days in a row, now, of rain and/or gray skies, I’ll be pleased to see some blue in the air and shadows on the ground.
This is just four days in a row, mind you. But it makes me wonder, how ever did we live entire winters like this?
I did go outside a few times today. I am conducting a towel experiment. The experiment is trying to get the smell of ethanol out of towels. I put the smell of ethanol in towels after Poseidon broke something with ethanol in it. (It was one of those cute little floating thermometer doodads. We got it for Christmas one year, one of those $10 and under parties, so the broken gauge is, itself, not a great loss. The almost two hours I spent cleaning up the mess is a different story. As is the three times I’ve washed these towels, and, perhaps, my sense of smell. That I continually have to hide more and more and more things from that cat is the biggest loss. We’ll be living in the basement, and he’ll still be finding ways to destroy things upstairs, I’m sure of it.)
I have five big bath towels blowing in the breeze, and also six kitchen towels. And my fear of having them around an open flame has diminished somewhat. But they still stink.
So, anyway, I was outside, and I noticed this. I believe it is a camellia.
I don’t think I even saw this last summer or fall, until we had cut away a few years of overgrowth. It sits along one of the back corners of the house and it’s a bit out of the way.
The blooms might have already had their show and come and gone by the time we arrived last summer, too. (I confess to not knowing the calendar of every plant under the sun under the dim gray clouds.) But! It’s going to be beautiful in just a few more weeks, you can tell already.
I wonder what color it will be. I wonder what else we’ll discover when the flowerbeds start their show.
This is what it looks like outside. Also, this bird was circling me, until I pointed at him. He moved down the street on the next gust of air. All casual like.
“What? Me? It’s just the thermals, baby …”
Anyway, grading stuff. I hope to wrap up this round of grading by tomorrow, after which we’ll be precisely halfway through the term.
[…]
I just tallied, and removed, the total number of things that leaves to assign and grade over the course of the semester, and then deleted those two sentences and the final number. It’s not a small number.
You know what is a small number? I’ve been challenging myself on Zwift to ride with a robo-pacer that’s faster than me. Previously I held on to the better bot for 17.3 miles. Today, when I joined his already-in-progress ride, he dropped me after just 2.3 miles.
Still set two Strava PRs, though. One on a slow and steady climb, and another on a sprint that Strava tells me I’ve done 123 times before.
Strava said I hit 30 miles per hour on that sprint. That’s not a small number. Even in the moment it didn’t feel hard. I think the fastest sprint I’ve ever produced was about 36 miles per hour on a false flat and probably a tailwind, so that’s why I kept waiting for the other people’s avatars to keep trying to come around me, but no one could, which is nice. I won a 500-meter sprint that means absolutely nothing!
Grading. Forever grading. What I’m poring over is a basic hard news story assignment. There’s only about 40 of these, and most of them from various school board and town council meetings. There are a few people who went to the same meetings, and that’s fine. The students found different angles to report on. But what’s most interesting, to me anyway, is the news they found.
Sadly, a lot of these meetings aren’t getting covered in the small towns because of the spiral the news industry is presently in. Some of the stories my students are writing about are absolutely worth the reporting. Some of the stories are quite good. I know I’ve learned a lot about some of the regional goings on from these stories. I hope my students are getting something out of the feedback. It’s a treat to write all of that feedback, but it can be time intensive — sometimes, I think they, are longer than the stories —
Me? Write long? Never.
Today’s bike ride was interesting. Let’s set the stage. A week ago, this month became my most productive bike riding month, in terms of miles. I’d put in more miles in 22 days than I have in any single month in the last 15 years. (This probably helps explain some aches and pains.)
Somewhere in this area on today’s ride, I eclipsed my first thousand miles of the year.
Definitely helps explain some of the aches and pains. And also the parts that feel pretty good. That’s probably not a lot, 1,000 miles in two months, but I’ve never even had one month with 500 miles or more, until this month.
Which is where this gets silly. I have a spreadsheet with all of these little cycling tidbits on it, you see. Because of that, I knew I could get over 1,000 miles today. And that seemed a great winter goal. Soon I’ll be riding outside again, but to have 1,000 miles as a base, in the basement? It was appealing.
So, when I opened the spreadsheet to add today’s totals to the ride, I looked at the page where I keep the month numbers and realized, if I did just 1.5 more miles, I would have a 600 mile February. Again, not that much, but it’s a lot to me.
So there I was, after dinner, getting back on the bike, just to get that extra 1.5 miles. I did this in jeans, and slowly, because this is silly. But it’s a goal to hit, even if I only just became aware of it.
So I did three miles.
February 2024 is a month that’ll be hard to top. And, since we’re at the end of the month, here’s the big chart.
The green line is a simple projection of where I’d be riding 10 miles per day. The red line reflects my 2023 mileage. The blue line is what I’ve done so far this year.
It’s been a big offseason. And, sometime soon, I’ll be back to riding outside once again.
There are a lot of roads to explore!
OK, I’m out of photographs. I’m going to share one more photograph next week, because it comes with one of my favorite stories of our New Year’s trip. I still have a lot of video to share, but I’m running low on the still images.
Here’s one of me with some grunts and other reef fish in the background. I can minimize my bubbles too!
And this is the saddest site in diving, when you’re back to being just below the surface, and the dive is over.
So, Monday, one fun story, and then a lot more videos in the days to follow.
I suppose I should get back to the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. I’ve been (intermittently) writing about them here to pad things out. These aren’t reviews, because who cares, but usually just memories and excuses to post some music. The problem is, where I am in my collection right now, there aren’t a lot of big, prominent memories attached to any of these.
I was in a burning discs phase, you see. A lot of fairly interesting things were getting slipped into my CD books, but none stayed in the stereo so long that I could tie a lot of experiences to them. This installment sees us in November of 2004. A colleague — who also left the newsroom and returned to a university campus, as a social media manager, where he seems to be doing well for himself — made a copy of U2’s “How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” for me. I can’t recall what I made for him in return. Hopefully it was decent. This is decent.
And so there’s the whole album, if you want to hear it. Nothing quite as iconic, perhaps, as their early stuff, but when I listen to it now, it sounds like U2, and that’s never a bad thing.
Except for the catorce in “Vertigo.” You can still roll your eyes at that.
