I’ve been trying for three days to get the next bike ride in. So, needing the content and having been cheated out of bike photographs, I stood on the porch, and in the rain and in the driveway, and did …
… that.
Not as good as a bike ride. But the grass is nice and green!
I also updated the images on the front page. You’ll want to check those out; there are a dozen amazing new shots to enjoy. (See all 12! Then let them recycle and count each one, to make sure you’ve seen all 12!)
Otherwise, I’m just explaining things to the cats.
“Don’t worry, Poseidon, that’s just electrons coming to the ground, heating the air to about 50,000° Farhenheit, then cooling, leaving a resonating partial vacuum behind. Air nearby expands and shrinks, vibrating, echoing and reverberating, making the sound we call thunder.” pic.twitter.com/SL72idEu9s
I should have shared the weather radio one, too. But that would have just read like crazy talk.
More tomorrow. Until then, did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account. And don’t forget my Instagram. Leep up with me on Twitter, too.
There are 24 pieces in this project I’m working on — the project that will never end. On Tuesday I sanded down the last of the eight long pieces. It’s all been under 400-grit sandpaper now. There are 16 shorter pieces. I’ve gotten to know all of them down to a 400-grit, as well.
So, today, I started sanding the ends. There are 48 ends, some will be visible in the final build. All will be exposed, but above or below eye level, or near a wall. But because they’ll be exposed I want them to take the ends to an even smoother finish, so today I began applying a 600-grit wet/dry sand paper to the ends.
The right side of each of these pieces has seen 600. The left side will be a joint, and no one cares. The 600 side, though, will feel like a sheer furniture grade finish when it’s done. (When it’s done. Hah!) Sheer, that is, if the stain can get in to the pores. If I haven’t closed all of the wood pores on those pieces.
I am now down to working on the last 12 pieces. This involves going through individual dry fits, a final inspection for splinters (after a 400-grit sanding, mind you) filling any awkward spots that don’t look solid and, finally, sanding the ends of those dozen pieces with 600. Then I have to clean all 24 pieces of wood and stain the thing. After the parts are finished, of course, it must be put it all together.
I’ve been hoping it all fits together for a long time now. It better all fit together.
Ever get fundraising letters and emails from your alma mater(s)? This 1922 copy circulated in newspapers around Alabama, a sad story that came from one of my alma maters, and it is more impactful than all of those donation letters.
This was part of an important campaign for my alma mater. Auburn was in a deep economic hole compared to the other schools in the state, which had been uniquely successful in creating a deep economic hole for all of its schools anyway. So all that spring of 1922 they prepared for this campaign that they hoped would raise $1 million dollars which would equal … quite a few more million these days.
It was a substantial ask, am ambitious plan and, if you’d be willing to listen to the whole of the tale I can draw a pretty clear line between that campaign and the institutional politics that still appear there, 100 years on.
Ralph Boyd appears in the papers one time before this syndicated piece, in a small brief about his death in Montgomery that February. His last surviving sibling passed away in 2017.
In the 1922 yearbook there’s a mention of the Greater Auburn campaign. They called it the greatest thing Auburn had ever undertaken. But there doesn’t seem to be a mention of young Ralph Boyd in that edition.
So there’s not much here today, but I did run across that, which is really an excuse to share the greatest century-old graphic you’ve ever seen.
That’s recyclable, is all I’m saying. It’s also amusing that they were using the Auburn name in the university’s campaign efforts, a formal usage if you will, decades before they changed the institution’s name.
I changed a visual element of my website today. This is the first time it has been changed in 15 years, which is an unreasonable amount of time. It’s a front-end thing, and you’ll never notice it. No one will even be aware that this particular thing has changed. But, if you look at the top of the page, or the tab you’re reading here, you might figure it out.
Tomorrow I have to start looking at viewership data at the office, so this evening I examined some of my own YouTube metrics. There’s a wealth of information in the analytics dashboard these days. You could go blind and silly trying to put all of it into some sort of coherent explanation. None of it makes sense.
All of it makes sense. How it is reflective of user habits makes very little sense. Let us, for example, consider a few videos and a key metric, the average percent viewed. The scope covers the month of April.
(And, before we dive in, I must say: If you press play on any of these videos, watch them to the end, or you might throw off the whole analysis, or at least the space-time continuum.
This video is from 2017. It is Dunnet Head, the most northerly point of the mainland of Great Britain. (The most northern Scottish isle is still some 170 miles farther on.)
Scapa Flow – a prime naval base region for the British and the final resting place of much of Germany’s WW1 high seas fleet – is out there in the distance. Today petroleum, tourism and diving are big. Here, you are asked to imagine standing watch, like the British boys of the 1930s and 1940s did.
The people that have watched that this month have watched an average of 92.1 percent of the video.
This is a video last fall from The Yankee recovering from her first popliteal artery entrapment surgery.
It’s a seemingly rare problem, involving compression of one of the arteries in the leg because of muscle development. A week before that video she limped back into the house after the procedure at the Cleveland Clinic. Every day was a bit more walking. She started rehab on that leg a week later. (Last month she had surgery on the other leg. Today she went out for her second post-op run. We had our first bike ride last weekend.)
The people that have watched that this month have watched an average of 94.9 percent of the video.
This video is from May of 2018. I’d gone on a walk and saw these geese flying toward me from some ways off. I had just enough time to fumble for my phone.
This one has an average percentage viewed rate of 96.8.
Ahh, our old friend, the Short Film of No Consequence series makes an appearance. This is from a candy store in Savannah. I shot, and edited this, in the store, in January 2016, and I hope all of those delicious treats found happy homes.
Viewers here have watched an average of 97.5 percent of the video this month.
In the summer of 2017 we visited Scotland. Ceannabeinne Beach, in Durness, is known as the beach of the burn of bereavement and death. The story goes that an elderly women fell and drowned in the burn here and her body was later washed down to the shore. There are ruins of a small fire here, but like all of the other locals, the tenants were forced out in 1842 for sheep farming. Just off the coast there’s a small island, Eilean Hoan, or the burial island. It once was prime grazing land and home to four families, until the Clearances. Now the island is a national nature reserve.
That beautiful scenery has earned a 99.1 percent video view.
Let’s goo to another beautiful part of Scotland. These are a few extra bits from an afternoon walking around Torridon.
I can brag about this one having a 99.7 percent viewed rate this month.
(You can see why on these. All of Scotland is stunning.)
This one feels like a cheat. It’s an eight-second clip. But it got a perfect 100 percent on the ol’ view-o-meter.
We’d just returned from a red-eye flight across two-thirds of the country. And I thought that would mean a nap. For most people it would mean a nap. For me, it meant going on a really hard bike ride. It was great.
Which brings us to this video, which I shot late last summer in Alabama.
It is presently enjoying 179.1 percent, meaning people are watching it almost twice.
Which means you have to watch it almost twice, to keep the numbers consistent.
The most viewed video this month? This 2017 flooding footage.
One other analytical note which, also doesn’t matter, but my site, for reasons that escape me, this month hit 4.6 million views.
Thanks for clicking the refresh button so often, everyone!
I had a delightful moment of id today. I’ve been wrestling with a website that wouldn’t let me log in. No email. No password. But I kept getting these messages which said they’d send the requisite information to my email, which they apparently don’t have. (Despite saying they did.) There was also a helpful phone number to call if all of this didn’t work. So, after a few days of this going on in-between other things, I called the number.
A very helpful person finally caught the other end of the line and, after she verified I wasn’t a dribbling idiot and I demonstrated my grasp of erudition and and reason, she set about helping solve the actual problem. This required reciting, several times, the requisite information. Finally, she was ready to create my account — he one that didn’t exist, but which the database was pretty sure it did somehow, maybe a nickname or something, perhaps. Before she could click the final click, she had to read me the terms of agreement.
She said that I could agree at any time. And she said that with the studied patience of a professional. There was a little emphasis on any time. It stood out. It wasn’t declarative. It didn’t sound like a complaint. But she wanted me to know I could agree at any time.
And dear internet, I did this for you. I have never, in my life, been more interested in the terms of agreement. In that moment, you would have felt the same way. So she read them all.
But at the end of it, I could finally log in.
I also had a moment of herculean achievement. Normally, I run my day on email and two or three calendars and some notepads and the crucial points from all of that get distilled into a notecard. Usually a day fills a card front and back. Some days I get to do other creative things with the back of the card, like observations or notes about some item from the front or tic-tac-toe. But the card seems to fill itself up nicely, thank you.
But today I managed, after several tries, to distill the next week onto two cards. A sign of the last stage of the semester. It was a beautiful sequential list, a slug, a time, date, location, day-of-the-week stuff. The only thing left to do was to remember what each slug meant, and what was required of me for each point. One week. Two cards.
It was immediately, immediately, made obsolete by the next email that floated in.
This is a class a colleague is offering in the fall. I am trying to reconcile the clever top line and Topic 1.
I think it is clever. And I know the professor running the course, and it should be a good one. But if it’s a class on social media manipulation someone should really lean into the notions contained in that graphic. Have some fun with it. Make the art such that, if you invert it, or flip it, there are secret messages to let students know you’re in on the joke.
Maybe there’s one in there already, and I just haven’t caught it yet. But I am looking. I’m looking every time I walk by the signage and this image is on the screen. I’m also counting the fonts.
We have an apple tree in the back yard. We discovered this just last year. First year since we’ve been here that it produced fruit. We looked forward to seeing them get ripe, but the squirrels had other ideas. They ate every single apple.
I haven’t found a countermeasure yet, but I’m sure I’ll find something on Google that will in no way be effective.
But at least the tree is blooming now. (In the final third of April, it surely ought to.)
I noticed that when we were sitting on the megadeck this evening. We stayed out there until the sun got too low and the temperatures fell and the fire element went out. I took that as a sign to go inside.
