Thursday

IU / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Getting a little fancy with my gifs
8
Apr 21

Getting a little fancy with my gifs

In the studio again this evening, this time for the sports shows, in keeping with the Thursday routine. I decided to do a little something extra with the opportunity. It looks like I’m threatening to one day I’m going to add real production values into my off-the-cuff gif making.

Will has a great Major League Baseball internship lined up this summer. He was telling me about it this evening. He was supposed to have it last year, but, you know. The summer prior he was calling games in the Cape Cod League. I have known this guy for four years now, since he was in my class as a freshmen. None of this surprises me.

I just met Noah this week. She’s from Alabama!

First time in front of our cameras tonight, and she did a great job.

They got a golf guy and a golf guy from Georgia in for the talk show. They made for a great trio.

I’m not a huge golf guy by any means, but I was very much interested in their conversation. It was golf, but lifestyle, serious, but fun. After the show I tried to talk them into doing a daily digest of each round on their Instagram page. We’ll see.

More on my Twitter. Check me out on Instagram and find more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

IU / Thursday — Comments Off on Thursdays are the days that fall into place first
1
Apr 21

Thursdays are the days that fall into place first

I wore an eggshell blue shirt and stuffed a bright yellow pocket square in my jacket and said “This, finally, is spring time!”

And this morning we had snow flurries. It is April. We are fools.

But it was nothing but mildly demoralizing. The day was the day and the day was gray. The Yankee and I had lunch together after her class. She returned to research, I returned to the office and, then, the studio.

The studio was full of people, a delightful condition in April. There’s always a bit of drift owing to competing interests and other jobs and so on. But we were full up tonight. Happy, energetic people making shows about sports.

We had a nice long talk after the shows, and the sports directors were a-buzz with the possibilities of what is to come. They’re thinking the right way, aiming the proper direction, and they must just have the energy for it. I told them they’re at a hinge point. Each year is an installment. In 2016 it was chaos. We spent 2017 stabilizing the thing, some positive things started happening. Then, in 2018, the students began building a lasting culture. Last year, 2019, they were working on making it professional. Today, that evolution continues.

These are small victories over the course of time, an organic thing built by dozens of people. Some of them are just names to the students doing it now. Most would be complete strangers. That’s the way of it, but it’s a great shame.

There are the tiniest little elements of a lot of people — from bits of script artifacts to music, from shot selections to graphics — built into the shows they shot tonight. Some are off working in TV across the country. Some people are at big national networks. And some are making their marks in other businesses entirely, but they were in the room too, somehow. Today’s successes from yesterday’s successes, and all that.

I’d write more, but it’d be too much and I have to be back in the studio in the morning anyway. And I’ll have some more shows to show you then.

IU / photo / podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on Life is full of color, and also a podcast
25
Mar 21

Life is full of color, and also a podcast

While this isn’t where I post all of my little outfit choices — last week notwithstanding, when I was really just trying to share … something — I was rather proud with how this one worked out. You shouldn’t, they say, mix prints. But what do they know anyway? A small plaid and some small polka dots? That shouldn’t be a thing. And your pocket square, they say, should be a mild contrast, to compliment the other thing. A complimentary contrast, if you will. No one really says that in this context, but maybe they should. Anyway, blue and purple are next to one another on the color wheel, and so maybe this shouldn’t work. But it seemed like a good idea this morning, and I think it was.

Maybe it doesn’t work, but I thought it did.

It got an emoji-filled comment on Instagram, which is where I’m putting these, so I can sorta keep track of them. But now I wonder if I should put them in another other place.

I bought these flowers last month. Seemed like a good idea that morning. But as that particular day went on I grew irritated at something that was, of course, of vital importance. I don’t recall what it was. Something was off — or something wasn’t working right, or it was a hard day at work, who knows — and I’d committed myself to going to the store, which has become a stressful exercise over this past year.

So I bought flowers in a bit of a mood, basically. And maybe that was the secret. They lasted until this week. We refilled the vase three times. Five weeks on one little batch of cheap fresh cuts.

Maybe it was the indirect light, or cutting the stems at an angle, or the thickness of the vase, or the quality of the water from the tap. Probably it was that I put so much sugar in the water. Or the mood? I hope it was not the mood.

Now, would you like to hear about the day’s Zoom meetings? Or how I taught someone how to edit audio this afternoon, but just listen to this instead.

It seemed a good topic. And it seemed a decent enough almost-commercial. And, as it turns out, it was quite interesting. The more I thought about the questions I would ask the more I convinced myself this was a good topic. How do college admissions work in a shutdown pandemic world? If you can’t give tours, how do you tell your story? If you can’t show it off, how do you sell the student experience?

Serendipity stepped in, too. As I was working through the two weeks-and-change of trying to get a date figured out with her assistant the university announced they would allow on-campus tours once again. Outdoor tours. Small groups. I saw one the other day, on my way to take a mitigation test.

I am giving one in a few weeks to a young man who has written me throughout the year, eager to see what his college experience will look like. It seemed a good idea, it turns out, because it is.

food / IU / photo / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on More of the same, and some more besides
18
Mar 21

More of the same, and some more besides

I’ve been on something of a streak with clothes pictures for no particular reason. May as well push that out one more day. It’s the content I know purveyors of this site aren’t really here for at all, but, like I said Monday, it’s a light week.

Today, I decided to try encouraging this spring to be an actual honest-to-goodness spring with some light pastel colors.

It did not work. Other forces in the universe are more powerful than my pocket squares. I am just as surprised as anyone.

And there’s been a lot of food here lately, which is odd considering this is in no way a food blog. But, again, Mellow Mushroom’s pizza is important. And when we have occasion to be near their nearest — and too far away store — we get takeout, and plenty of it. For the leftovers, like tonight.

Seventy-six miles is far too far to have to travel to get good pizza, but here we are. And here they are not. Thus far my social media campaign for them to establish a new store in this college town hasn’t been successful. But it’s gaining momentum.

What we’ve not done this week is show you any shows. Shame on me.

Here’s the late night show they shot last week. See it takes place at a bar. Which is a TV set. An always changing and never-completed set.

We’ve got your news here:

And your pop culture — and bagels! — right here:

We’ll have some sports tomorrow. And some more stuff, too. That oughta keep you coming back! See you then.

Covid-19 / IU / memories / podcast / Thursday / Twitter — Comments Off on Here’s a backward way toward hope
11
Mar 21

Here’s a backward way toward hope

A year ago, today, was the day our university began it’s multi-campus shut down. That’s nine campuses, more than 100,000 students and at least two or three professionals, besides, spread out across an entire big state. It was a Wednesday, the Wednesday before spring break and they said everyone was going home and spring break would be two weeks and the situation would be re-assessed along the way.

And, look, a lot of us aren’t ready for retrospectives. I know I’m not interested in it just now, but I just want to say this one piece. A year ago, tomorrow, was my last day on campus for a while. I went in that evening to watch the sports guys wrap it up. Their sports director did a little monologue and he held his last meeting and there were tears. Students were graduating and realizing that it was very likely going to be not at all how they imagined. Well, what has been since, right?

Last March, right away, the entire IU system went to work on handling the most immediate tasks and planning a safer future. I had the opportunity to be a very, very small part of some of listening in to a slice of a portion of some of those plans as they pertained to my corner of things. It was fascinating. It was informative. It was frustrating. And, taken as a whole, there’s no mistaking it: Indiana University put every single one of their experts and their hardest working people on the job of doing this right.

Still, not everyone is back on campus, but we’re headed the right direction. I’ve been back full time since February and three and four days a week in the fall. The campus generally has a slow summer feel to it, and that’s been by design. Meanwhile, statewide, cases and hospitalizations are down. Vaccine uptake is increasing. IU is scheduling an in-person graduation for students in May and a fall term that’s more familiar than unusual.

Did her experts and staff work tirelessly to make the best of this? You’ve no idea. Did some of the top minds in their infectious disease and public safety fields go above and beyond for a full year? They won’t sing songs about those people, but they should. Did the university step up in ways big and small? The university distributed 290,000 masks at no cost. They built two labs to process their own Covid tests, up to 50,000 a week. We did everything but socially distance the storied buildings.

There were hiccups, I’m sure. Universities don’t pivot on a dime, and maybe no one realized until this past year how much that happens in giant operations is attributed to inertial motion. But what IU did is singularly impressive. This isn’t a retrospective, but it’s worth acknowledging that one thing. The university took care of her own.

And, somehow, they let me do programs like this …

I’m pushing 70 of those now. And it’s getting a tiny bit cheerier. Oh! Sweet hope!

And this speech from the president came out today, too. So petty of the White House trying to steal my thunder. But that’s OK. We’ll let them in this instance.

I also saw the saddest, sweetest note today. One of our former students, who is now on air in west Texas, got her first vaccine shot today, a year, almost to the day that her father passed away from Covid. What must that have been like for her? (She already had super powers, though.)

But this is what I’m really excited about.

We are one year into this and we are finally talking about the underprivileged and the rural communities. This state is sending out mobile vaccine units. Companies that are in the smallest towns you’ve never heard of are talking about getting in this fight. It took a year, but on the other hand, it only took a year. (It took less time. It took those places watching the big cities burn and then seeing the embers coming into their neighborhoods, and they started thinking about where their sleeves were in relation to their wrists and elbows.) In under a year, and we’re getting to the far flung places.

When I was in the third grade I developed chicken pox at my grandparents’ house in north Alabama. My grandmother, having raised tiny human beings before, suspected that’s what it was, anyway. And she took me to the pharmacy, the only medical concern in easy reach. The pharmacist there, non-plussed as he was by being asked to diagnose people who walked into his store, confirmed it and gave us the lotion, told us to stay away from anyone else and sent us on our way. That was three-plus decades ago. Last year an aunt and uncle got a Covid diagnosis at that same pharmacy. The closest hospital, where my aunt spent several days, is a 45-minute drive away on a good day. And that’s easy, compared to some of these places. Their little part of the world is hardly detached from the rest of us, but it can sure feel like it if you needed to see someone for health care, to say nothing of a specialist.

That we are already talking about these rural places at all, that medical experts and businesses are trying to figure this out, is a good thing. That different sectors of the economy are searching for a way to add more distribution points so that the people thought about the least can be addressed just like anyone else is a good development. Hope is where you place it. And don’t you agree we could use as much of that as we could get?

There’s a reason Shandy Dearth talked in our podcast about getting a vaccine so grandparents can safely hug their grandchildren again. Hope is where you place it.

In the studio for sports shows tonight. Tried a little something different for the gif. Who knows how this will end up.

The shows will end up just fine. They’re under good direction and I enjoy getting to watch them all work. And you can enjoy these particular episodes online tomorrow. I’ll share them here, I’m sure.

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