There was beans and rice and gumbo — sans the okra, so it wasn’t actually gumbo, but good nevertheless — and there were beads and king cake and some weird jello dessert on hand today.
People dressed up. Or at least put on masks.
I declined the king cake. I don’t like king cake. Came as a surprise to me, too. And I don’t think I’ve had jello as an adult. I’m saving up for a rainy day. I did have some fried okra on the side, however.
And then this evening I ran a 10K. I sprinted some. I can’t feel the lower half of my legs just now.
I built a training regimen that will surely be difficult to stick with in one way or another, but if I want to do triathlons this year I have to get in something approaching a reasonable condition. The good news is that I have the base stuff covered. The bad news is that, eventually, the Saturday “run nine miles” day will at some point become something closer to routine rather than a big deal.
I do not know what is happening.
Maybe I should wear a mask, so no one will see me in pain.
Things to read … the all-link edition! There is something for everyone, I’m sure. Enjoy!
And, finally, this newly released video from my friend Nathan Troost, whom I wrote about here last week. Terrific story, sharp storytelling. It is worth six minutes of your time.
Beautiful day. Just a lovely experience outside. Hope you took a few minutes to wander around in it in wonder. It is almost as if this wasn’t happening just a few days ago:
That was on the Daily Mountain Eagle Twitter account, which is a parody of a rural community in the name of a legitimate newspaper. And that video is, as you might have noticed, hypnotic.
Pulling magazines, I gave myself a massive paper cut on the tip of my index finger. I have now legitimately bled for print media. I don’t even work on that magazine.
Things to read … because people have occasionally bled for the things they produce for us. Not always, thankfully, but it has happened.
A photographer for WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., filed a suit against the Hartford Police Department in U.S. District Court Tuesday, claiming a police officer demanded his employer discipline him after he flew a drone over an accident scene.
In his suit, Pedro Rivera says he was off work on Feb. 1 when he heard about an accident. Once he got to the scene, he flew a drone over it to “record visual images,” the suit says. Police “surrounded the plaintiff, demanded his identification card, and asked him questions about what he was doing,” the suit says. “The plaintiff did not feel as though he were free to leave during the course of this questioning.”
A police sergeant who wrote a report of the incident “expressed concern that flying a drone over the scene might compromise the integrity of the scene and the ‘privacy of the victim’s body.’”
Every single moment of the Sochi Olympics is documented in minute detail. Here’s how the AP and Getty Images, two of the biggest photo agencies on the scene, get their incredible photos from the Olympics to the United States, faster than you can microwave a bag of popcorn.
This past Tuesday in Sochi, American snowboarder and defending gold medalist Shaun White attempted a double cork as his third trick during his run in the men’s halfpipe final, a last-ditch to improve his score. He bungled it, landing on the edge of the pipe, and nearly taking a massive fall.
White came in fourth and walked away without a medal in his best event. But the moment led to one of the most memorable shots of the Olympics so far. Some of the best sports photographers in the world captured the violence and drama of the split-second impact better than any video could. White’s board, looking like it might snap in half. The American flag bandana startled out of place. White’s mouth agape at the shock from the impact. This is what it looks like when you fail to defend your gold medal.
NBC Sports released a statement to several news outlets, saying, “Our intent was to convey the emotion that Bode Miller was feeling after winning his bronze medal. We understand how some viewers thought the line of questioning went too far, but it was our judgment that his answers were a necessary part of the story. We’re gratified that Bode has been publicly supportive of Christin Cooper and the overall interview.”
In an interview with Matt Lauer Monday on Today, Miller reiterated his support of Cooper.
“I’ve known Christin a long time. She’s a sweetheart of a person. I know she didn’t mean to push,” he said. “I don’t blame her at all.”
It wasn’t too much. It was awkward. And it was unnecessarily long. Remember, that interview, like almost everything else in these Games, was canned.
Hilburn, an 18-year-old free safety, went to the shopping center on President’s Day with his brother and father to buy a new suit. As they got out of the car, they spotted a man running through the parking lot carrying a purse. It wasn’t hard to tell something was amiss.
“My dad said, ‘Nicholas, go get him,”’ he said. He didn’t have to tell his son twice.
“I kind of thought about it for a second and looked at his hands to make sure he didn’t have a knife,” Hilburn said. “After that, I didn’t think much about it. I ran and I tackled him. I put a knee in his neck and his face in the ground.”
Only one thought really went through is head, Hilburn said. “When I got him in the air- I kinda body slammed him- and I thought he was a lot lighter than a Hoover running back.”
Wonder how that played with the rest of the family when they heard what the father said.
Purdue University agronomist, Bruce Erickson, says even with all the precision technology, there’s a lot of trial and error on the farm right now. The answers would be clearer if farmers pooled their results.
“We mine the information from farmers’ fields sort of like Google mines information from our mouse clicks and Walmart mines from when we purchase certain products,” Erickson said.
That would be a treasure trove for seed companies. It could help speed up research and establish a track record for new seed varieties.
“People are thinking whole farms could be our research plot versus doing a specific study in a corner of a farm,” Erickson said.
[…]
But that’s where the Information Age gets bogged down in the nitty-gritty.
If their data is sold, will farmers get a cut? What if there’s a security breach like at Target? Those concerns are enough for many farmers to keep their data between themselves and close advisors.
Even the farm is turning into an IBM commercial. Interesting times.
Another day closer to the weather and we’re coming to the realization that it’ll hit us but good.
There are some things we have to keep in mind about winter in the South. First, it is hard to forecast. This is a dynamic region and the one-two punch we’re getting this week has major elements coming from the west, down from the north and up from the Gulf of Mexico. The forecast models change almost by the hour.
Meteorologists are more than happy to share those long-range models and, I’m half-convinced, they just confuse people who really shouldn’t be confused about winter weather.
Also, it isn’t the snow that’s the problem. Except when it is. Our snow is usually wet. And what often happens is the snow melts, the temperature drops and then we have great sheets of ice over everything. You drive on that.
You drive on that, because I’m staying inside.
And all of that may happen again this week. Most of the worst of it, right now, seems to be aiming for Georgia and the Carolinas. But we’ll have plenty, thanks.
Already the weather has canceled the student newspaper this week. It is due out tomorrow, but the printer is to our north, and they are expecting to get walloped. So on and on the fun goes.
To take our minds off that fun, here’s a shot of Allie, The Black Cat, sunbathing on Sunday:
That afternoon we decided, hey, it is a beautiful day, let’s run a sprint triathlon.
So we went to the pool. I had my new goggles and we swam our 650 yards. I started out too fast, which was a paradoxical decision as I am slow in the pool. And so I suffered with that for a while. I figured I would redeem myself on the bicycle, where I thought I would be able to hammer it a bit. So down the big hill and up the smaller, other side. Around part of the bypass, up another hill through campus. I got stopped at a red light, turned around and there was The Yankee. I was sure she would be nowhere to be found, but she was having a great ride.
Up through an old neighborhood, hang a left and then a right. I took a road I don’t think I’ve ever pedaled on before, but a road where we once looked at two houses. I finished the 14-mile route just a minute or two before she did, but she also caught a light I did not.
So I guess I’ll have to win in the run. We ran the first half of our 5K together, because it wasn’t a race. It was a beautiful, glorious, day for an hour and change outside, in shorts and t-shirts, in the sunshine.
We ran a sprint triathlon on a whim, making us those people. Last summer I did three of them, suffering and struggling and dreading them and only enjoying them after they were over — enjoying the knowledge that I’d completed them. (For this I get to thank Bud Frankenthaler, who two years ago I watched finishing a triathlon at the age of 79. If he could do it, the rest of us don’t have a lot of excuses, right? Thanks Mr. Frankenthaler. He will probably outpace me somewhere this year, too.) Today there were no bib numbers, no massage table, no timing chips. We did it for fun. Had a great time, too. I want to do it again. Let’s go next weekend.
I do not know what is happening.
Tomorrow we’ll have snow.
Things to read … because links will keep us all warm.
These are just the links, enjoy clicking through the ones that interest you.
One of the most frightening Muppets, to me, was Grouch. Doesn’t ask me why. I think it was his appearance, home and his voice, which vaguely reminded me of one of my uncles. That’s what I’m going with. I bring this up because the other one that disturbed me is at the bottom of the post.
At lunch today I dropped a plate, basically right in the lap of a young lady who’d made the unfortunate decision to sit between my Point A and Point B. The plate was, thankfully, empty. And it did not break. But this is mortifying. There are eight young women sitting there talking about their studies or their sorority or boys or who knows, and then I happen.
Some distance away I could hear the slow clap starting. That hasn’t happened since high school. My innocent victim noted, as she picked up my plate and I apologized profusely, that at least her table didn’t chime in, an observation I’d already made, and a decision for which I was grateful. But no one else did, either, and the slow clap quickly died. It was probably only three people.
“Frat boys,” one of the students said.
I’m pretty sure they started clapping reflexively, but then stopped when they realized this was an old guy. Maybe one of them was a student of mine. Maybe it just isn’t funny if it isn’t your peers.
For example, the state troopers now say there were more than 700 snow and ice-related car crashes last week, not counting whatever the locals worked. That’s unfortunate for those people, to be sure. Nine people died in crashes. And in this vein some people are making their wacky “Haha, Southerners can’t drive in snow” jokes.
But, hey, we opened our windows and sat around in shorts last weekend.
Here’s another video, a short film featuring Ms. Alice Herz-Sommer. She is believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor, and, perhaps, the world’s oldest piano player:
Things to read … because your parents warned you about watching all of those videos.
A historically high number of people will be locked out of the workforce by 2021, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.
President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law will contribute to this phenomenon, the CBO said, citing new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger-than-expected reduction in working hours—eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021.
The answers were not long, and bad enough that they should have taken a few more minutes to think up something not so insulting.
With the expansion of insurance coverage, the budget office predicted, more people will choose not to work, and others will choose to work fewer hours than they might have otherwise to obtain employer-provided insurance. The cumulative reduction of hours is large: the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time positions by 2024, the budget office said.
The report “rightfully says that people shouldn’t have job lock,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “We live in a country where we should be free agents. People can do what they want.”
“Now you won’t have to work!” doesn’t sound like an especially compelling argument, really, Senator. But have at it.
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
[…]
The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.
[…]
To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. “The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented” in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”
The past two decades have seen a revolution in every aspect of the media industry – technological change has enabled consumers to develop sophisticated and subtle patterns of behaviour, constantly being updated from a variety of sources. Cable news established the 24-hour news habit, but today social media and mobile phones fulfill the instant news needs of consumers better than any TV channel can.
Yet around the world hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be invested each year in news networks. Is this money well spent? Or has the time come to rethink the TV news business? Were live channels simply the product of the satellite age which is now all but over?
[…]
News channels prize being first – a race that they can’t win, and nobody else cares about. “Did we beat CNN?” is a phrase often heard in a newsroom. But in the digital age social media will always win the race to be first (if not always the race to be right). And who, other than the inhabitants of newsrooms, is watching enough news channels simultaneously to know who was first anyway? Those 30 seconds might be important for commodity traders – but for news audiences?
In today’s media environment any broadcaster is first for minutes at most – by which time Twitter or the competition will have caught up. Being first – the primary criterion for 24-hour news channels – is increasingly the least interesting and effective value they offer.
What wasn’t included, but should be: The Weather Channel.
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.
