Had a meeting canceled this morning. Samford closed at 11 a.m. Everything else closed simultaneously. And then the snow descended. And people panicked, because it is white.
Here’s the real problem with snow in the South. It isn’t that we’re Southern. The snow doesn’t send us into a tizzy. It stuns us. And the snow, which is more wet than anything, then quickly turns into ice. And then the in-tizzification begins.
So people are stranded all over and that’s dangerous and unfortunate and miserable. Can’t wait to see who we blame this time.
The road that runs across the front of Samford’s campus is a high-traffick artery. That road is gridlocked, so we brought a lot of people up from their cars into the relative comfort of the university. The athletics department is loaning space and towels. Mattresses came from somewhere. Every shower is being put to use. If you didn’t get out between 11 and 11:05 odds are that you were stuck on the road for a long time. A colleague wrote that she normally has a 15 minute commute, but it turned into four hours and 15 minutes today. And she was on the fortunate side.
It is the ice. See? It is always the humidity.
Campus is holding up nicely. The facilities staff and the grounds crew have worked tirelessly. They were blowing snow and spreading for ice even as it came down. They didn’t stop until late in the night. We have power — and that’s the biggest, understated victory of this storm, the power outages everywhere seem to be comparatively minor — and we have food and everything is peachy keen.
The place is usually full of good spirits, perhaps even more so today.
Here’s a video I made:
More from the wasteland tomorrow.
photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Photo week – Tuesday 21 Jan 14
Went to give blood today. Ran up three flights of stairs, read the required blood literature and so on. Answered all of the donation questions. Some are now done orally, some were done on a computer.
The woman who walked me through the process and drew my blood was thoroughly disinterested at the end of her day. The organizer said they had a slow morning, but things had really picked up later in the day.
I learned that, among the things they are doing when you give blood is to time the donation. I was told this is for health reasons. If it takes you more than 20 minutes, that is problematic. If you are done in under four minutes, that is a different kind of problem. I was finished in four minutes and 17 seconds.
The problem being they give you that little sponge ball and tell you to squeeze often. So I just absentmindedly squeezed constantly.
Accepted the juice and cookies. Decline the t-shirt, though it was a pretty good one.
I did get some stickers:
The young lady that signed us in said they were old. They look it. A lot of people are jealous of them, but all they have to do is go give a bit of blood. It only takes 4:17.
I’m thinking of adding a new category of pop culture criticism … and this is going to take more caffeine. Pardon me for a second.
There. A hot tea on a cool day should do the trick. Don’t drink coffee. Never touched the stuff. My grandparents, who drank it like water, were convinced that if you gave a baby a tablespoon of coffee they’d never want it. Or so the story goes. Don’t know how old I was, or if this actually happened, but I don’t even care to go down the coffee aisle at the grocery store. I don’t even like the smell. So it is tea, for me, then.
Anyway. I’m thinking of adding a new category of pop culture criticism which is really just another opportunity for me to creep more steadily into the Get Off My Lawn subculture. In this, the neo-post-post modern age, I will call this category 21st Century Living, in that it is simultaneously obvious, conversant, ironic and has a whiff of both despair and angst, but not in a way that suggests I care that much, as I am already dismissive of the entire enterprise.
See? I’m not into the Get Off My Lawn subculture just yet. I understand things, I simply recognize the unworthiness of the general condition.
Take this commercial, for instance. Watch the first five seconds, over and over again, until you figure it out:
Or this CNN “package” where Anderson Cooper tries, really hard, to make some sort of wry observation by cunningly asking non-questions to a giggly reporter.
So I guess they don’t drug test at CNN? This is simply life imitating art. Consider Anchorman 2 (which, hysterically gives Ron Burgundy credit for the sad state of modern broadcast news):
About the commercial in the first video: Someone thought, “The stations that we are buying airtime, have stupid, stupid audiences. Someone will go try to build a time machine. We should stop that with some fine print, so as to ameliorate any potential culpability we have if some kid does invent the flux capacitor.”
And that’s 21st Century Living.
Things to read … because this stuff is worth your attention, no matter what century you’re in.
I collected a few of the reactions on an in-state “story” today. This is all about the headline.
Anytime you curate replies you are liable to get some colorful retort. And if you publish them you are just as likely to get someone accusing you of cherry picking. Doesn’t mean you use the most off-color one as a headline if you are aspiring to be the premiere news outlet in the state.
Todd Stacey is a staffer for U.S. Rep Martha Roby in Washington D.C. He previously worked in Montgomery, hence Chuck Dean’s “you guys” swat. But see what Dean did there? “Hey, it isn’t my fault. What’s more, if you don’t like what I wrote, go do something about it. But it is just a heads up, really.” This entire piece provides little to no public service, which is still the publicly stated goal for news outlets, but it could also do as much with a more appropriate headline.
Twitter and Facebook are setting themselves up for a battle for news supremacy among social media networks. Twitter, though, holds the upper hand, according to Eric Carvin, social media editor at the Associated Press. Twitter has “come to realize the value that the news industry has in terms of what people want to consume on social,” Carvin says. In an interview with NetNewsCheck, Carvin discusses potential news moves from those social platforms, along with the sleeper potential of Google Plus.
About half of the nation’s 3,069 county economies are still short of their prerecession economic output, reflecting the uneven economic recovery, according to a new report from the National Association of Counties.
The overall U.S. economy had reached its prerecession level of gross domestic product three years ago, Commerce Department figures show.
National statistics “mask the reality on the ground.”
There is an interactive map. How is your county faring?
The individual school breakdowns aren’t out yet, apparently, but we can look at some recent numbers. Here are the superlatives for the state in the 2011-2012 year. Charles Henderson High listed a 58 percent graduation rate, the lowest in the state. Coffee County boasted a 94 percent.
The often copied, and originally Auburn tradition of Tiger Walk — where the plays walk from the athletic department to the football stadium a few hours before they play — now has a companion tradition. When the team travels there is a Reverse Tiger Walk when they get back home.
This is the walk from earlier tonight, when Auburn’s team returned, tired from a cross country flight and a bus ride across half the state to make it back home. They found hundreds of fans waiting to welcome them, to congratulate them, to thank them:
They lined up diagonally across the length of the indoor practice facility. They were two and three and four and five deep on either side of the path the players would take. The team, fresh off a plane and then a bus, walked through the crowd, looking a bit tired, but there was plenty of enthusiasm in the air.
Athletics director Jay Jacobs greeted the hundreds in attendance and told the players in front of him, saying “This is truly what the Auburn Family means.”
To the fans, he noted, in case anyone lost count, “In the last 10 years no one has won more SEC championships than the Auburn football program.”
Head coach Gus Malzahn spoke to the crowd:
Senior running back Jay Prosch briefly greeted the crowd:
And so did senior defensive back, and Iron Bowl legend, Chris Davis:
Here is some video:
And that wraps up the football season, and the last real football thing I’ll write about here for a while.
Good thing we’re getting back in the pool tomorrow.
This is Maria. We had dinner at her restaurant, Tutti’s, tonight. Her husband is a master chef. They have a professional soccer playing son and a daughter who is in investment management. Also, the food is delicious. Order anything there.
Got an email this morning from the site where I monitor my exercise. It said I’ve pedaled 1,722.9 miles this year. A very low number. But there’s always next year!
This morning it was cold. Very cold. It was 26 degrees at midday. Before that we went out for a run. So there is the last of the Christmas snow on the ground, ice puddles in small holes and frozen mud, the stuff that doesn’t accept your footprint.
I ran a little over four miles. After we got started it didn’t feel cold. I passed an old couple who were out with their little dog. The guy told me I was doing great and looking good. I also looked like a fool in a windbreaker and shorts. (At least my ears and hands were covered.) As I finished my last big circuit around this park and pronounced it the right time to quit. The chill was starting to get in at the very end. Why not? It was in the twenties.
I’m starting to like running, then. You’d have to, to do something as crazy as that.
So we spent most of the afternoon warming up. Dinner at Tutti’s. We made it back home for football. Johnny Manziel had a New Year’s Eve party on the field:
We’re watching the ball drop in Times Square, relatively warm and in no crowd. The phrase of the night seemed to be “a million people, a million people.” Who needs that?
Anyway, enjoy your arbitrary demarcation of a new solar circuit. As you put the old one behind you — should you find you were fond of it, or simply find that you are fond it is over — I wish you health and abundance and twice the happiness in the next trip around the sun.
