Thursday

history / journalism / Thursday — Comments Off on I went back 11 years to jump back 82
11
Feb 21

I went back 11 years to jump back 82

Somewhere in all of my feeds, someone today discovered Radio Garden. Someone is always discovering Radio Garden. It’s a place where you can listen to almost any sort of radio station in the world. If there’s a stream, there’s a way. It’s a fascinating idea portrayed in a Google Earth-style interface, and it’d be easy to while away several hours and learn about other places or get homesick as you like.

It’s a fascinating online experiment. And, like any online experiment, it always feels like a proof of concept, like a demo. And, like any online experiment, you always want a little more. I want not only every radio station, but old feeds, as well. I’d like to hear the personalities I knew when I listened all the time, and when they were in their primes. I would like to hear the people from places I’ve only heard about. I’d like to make sure none of audio ever made it onto the site.

I’ve lately been going back through the “Memories” function of Facebook. I’m deleting dumb things, removing useless items and typos and laughing at how bad cell phone cameras were in 2009.

On this day, in 2009, I apparently discovered A Day in Radio. You can hear what was going into the ether in 1939. As I noticed when I discovered that site 11 years ago now, and I would note once more, the 1939 newscasts have this horrible pull of history. The newsman is superb. It is riveting, knowing what is to come; knowing what you can’t tell them, what they can’t prevent.

I suppose it’s like that all of the time. It’s easy to develop a mistaken impressions, when you learn about things as thumbnail sketches over a great distance of time, that a lot of what happens happens in isolation. It’s a surprise, a shock to the system. Who could have seen that coming!?

This first ran in a small town weekly.

But, as it often turns out, a lot of people aren’t completely surprised by the developments of the day, if they paid attention. And many people did! The war in Europe and the madness in Asia were front page news, of course. The newsreels were doing their best to keep people informed, and that was working. You could tell an American in 1939 about Pearl Harbor and they’d most likely wonder what a Pearl Harbor was, but they knew about Japan. On this day in 1939 the newspapers talked of Japan seizing islands, increasing tensions between Germany and the British over the Spanish Civil War, a bunch of new planes going to London via the lend-lease program.

The tea leaves were there. Maybe they always are. Or maybe history is unfair like that. You sometimes had to do more than skim the big headlines. Meanwhile, the decision makers were getting ready. The world was mourning the death of a pope, Congress wanted to reinsert itself into foreign policy and stories like this were popping up more frequently.

And in California …

That’s the famed P-38.

Makes you wonder what we’re paying attention to, doesn’t it? What we don’t understand because we don’t enjoy a holistic view, or, worse, what we’re missing altogether while we’re in our apps and reality TV.

photo / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Questions of a different kind of distance
4
Feb 21

Questions of a different kind of distance

I helped moved a few things from one room to another room today. And, when we were done with that we all sat down, carefully distanced — because we are conscientious about this sort of thing, except for the one guy, who, look, I happened to have a tape measure on me at the time and I ran out several feet of tape and pointed this out and I know you to be a smart individual, step back — and properly masked and all of the usual things, because we’re almost a year into the routine of it, now. Except the one guy, I guess.

Oh, if he were the only one, right? But there’s always the one person, in any walk of life, in any scenario you might think up. Parties, the game, the store, in a social distancing context, there’s always that one individual. And I chant “patience and grace” to myself, and, these days, I’m grateful the mask covers 64 percent of my facial expression.

Anyway, he left, and there’s no point to his presence in this story, or to the story, really. But he went about his day and we all sat down to chat and I sat on a chair that had this sticker on it.

Because, eventually, we all take turns being that guy.

I remember covering a hurricane once where the pre-landfall story of dubious origin was that the authorities were patrolling the areas under evacuation orders and handing out toe tags to anyone that had stuck around. The point being, that there’s a certain type of personality that doesn’t take a hurricane seriously. So, maybe this comparison won’t stand out the way the expert would have hoped. At some point, you get it or you won’t get it. Eleven months in, I’d argue, we’re well past that point. Nevertheless:

The first thing about this is, Well, that was obvious and apparent as a potential problem. The second part is, the sample size is, obviously, demographically skewed. So this is what you’ve have to work from as an observer.

Take this incredible woman’s story, for example.

The third, and equally important thing is, this won’t get better as we slide down the age scale.

What if we brought in the people from Chick-fil-A, Amazon, the IRS and each community’s most successful delivery start up and start a super group?

Don’t you just love when your brain seizes on a bit of history?

I spent some time looking through the online records. Mr. Hall was a man of some achievement and professional notoriety. As always, you’re getting the thinnest of outline notes in newspaper form. But what I’ve learned leaves a lot of interesting questions that you’d like to have answered these many decades hence.

So if anyone knows their grandchildren or great-grandchildren … send them my way for a quick conversation.

bespoke / cycling / Thursday — Comments Off on Two high-water marks
28
Jan 21

Two high-water marks

I got in a 26-mile bike ride on Zwift this evening. The first little bit of it was a VO2 max workout. That’s about your oxygen consumption in an exercise of incrementally intensity. As it turns out, the last vestige of any athletic ability I ever possessed can be found in my fairly decent VO2, and so this exercise was more fun than hard. Five four minute intervals at 225 watts. Look at those pretty, even, graphics.

But that was just an hour, and so I decided to ride some more. I did two laps of this course:

And that’s how I spent about 90 minutes, looking out at the melting snow in the diminishing light. We had 11 hours and two minutes of daylight today, Nautical twilight was at 7:04 p.m. and tomorrow will be almost two minutes longer. One of the real treats here, the increasing length of days.

This summer I’ll be able to stand in the yard and see a still-light blue sky at 9:30 at night. And summer can never get here fast enough or stay long enough, in part, because of that.

I finished up my DIY pocket squares. This is the final batch of seven. I probably won’t use all of these, those floral prints are a bit much, but they came in the mini-batch with the purples, which seemed like a color to have on hand. The days are getting longer. Spring pastels will be out soon, after all. (So that’s how the stay-at-home has been treating me. Why do you ask?)

So I counted and now I have … a lot of these things. But my jackets will look sharp, so I’ll have that going for me.

adventures / photo / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Leave it
21
Jan 21

Leave it

On our walk late this afternoon, when it was unseasonably warm, you could hear it before you could see it. There was a breeze blowing and cars whirring by and it was all punctuated by our conversation but there was a crinkling, crunchy dispute of it all.

We’d already seen one driver, breaking the state’s hands free law, almost rear-end a pickup. We were making our turns based on maximizing the weak winter sun. We were talking about trips we couldn’t take when the dry parchment sound set upon the ears. Those dry, plaintive leaves, still hanging on in defiance, rustling in the wind.

It’s funny, the idea of trips. We had three scheduled last year that were canceled, plus probably three holiday visits. I don’t think I’ve been anywhere since Christmas of 2019. I mean anywhere farther than I’ve pedaled my bicycle. The Yankee has made a few trips to make appointments in Indianapolis, and that’s it for both of us. The curiosity of a staycation has been satisfied, and continues on. We, like the leaves, are still hanging on. But, lately, I’ve spent idle time planning other interesting trips that one might do. These don’t rise to the level of let’s make plans, but, rather ‘Wouldn’t that be neat?’ My favorite one was a four or five day bike-riding trip through New York … or a vacation home that’s both far away from everywhere, and yet easy to reach, and warm … or a B&B somewhere quiet. Crinkly, crunchy leaves would be required.

There’s another cold snap coming this weekend, and maybe some snow and ice, so a few more of those leaves may fall away before we find ourselves there again sometime next week. And while it is too early to think this way, in just 11 long weeks or so, those proud leaves will be replaced by a new generation of green sunlight collectors, and we can pretend like some of this never happened. But only some of it.

adventures / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on I rewrote the last sentence three times
14
Jan 21

I rewrote the last sentence three times

By the third try I’d cleaned up the tone, made it more concise and got to the heart of a truism.

It was sunny today. Sunny and cold. We’ll take it.

We celebrated with a walk. We have a nice three-mile circle we’ve developed where we lately figure out the solutions to life’s mysteries, make plans, figure out some research thing or run into a colleague.

Snow is in the forecast through the long weekend. Maybe we’ll see this big beautiful glowing orb by the middle of next week.

Also got in a quick 20-mile training ride this evening. I feel so very trained, having learned all about heart rate and cadence, which is odd since I wasn’t wearing a heart rate monitor and I don’t have a cadence sensor on my bike right now. Basically, I learned about cadence on a flat course. So I didn’t learn much of anything. But I got in a nice hour on the bike out of the deal. Take advantage of doing things you enjoy.

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