Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

New York, Day 1, Part 1

So here’s the plan. We’re spending two days in New York City, so I’m breaking this up for the site. This post is about today, the first day. Tomorrow’s will, obviously, be about tomorrow.

While we’re spending Tuesday and Wednesday in New York City, I’m rationing out the rest of the pictures and details to get the site to the weekend. Everybody got that? Can someone explain it to me?

The sign at the train station. The Yankee’s dad dropped us off. We were running behind, but not so much as other people, apparently.

We made it into the city with no trouble. Got off at Grand Central, showed Wendy around the station, remember, she’s never been to New York. We walk outside and … these are the first four pictures I took of her and sent home to her mother. The top picture is the first thing she saw in Manhattan. Go figure.

If you’re curious, I created that little image with a handy little free app called Diptic. I enjoy it very much.

Anyway, one of the things Wendy had on her list was to see the Statue of Liberty, of course. So we hopped a bus and walked up to the Circle Line to take the tour.

This was my fourth trip in front of the statue, now, and each time I (still) have this little feeling of surprise at the thought of being there. There are a lot of places and things in the world that I admire from afar without having ever seriously considered the opportunity to see, but here’s one, and here we are.

The Yankee takes a picture. I bought those rings from Wendy’s father. Small world, gemologically speaking.

Some nice stranger took this picture for us. We gave them great shots in return. Do you ever wonder if those people wonder about you? How is that guy that took my photo just after the first of the year? But I digress.

From the East River, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building in one picture. Also, a lot of other buildings thrown in for scale.

Still looks a little odd at the World Trade Center, but there’s a distinct change taking place here. The new construction is slated to be open in time for the 10th anniversary later this year — 10 years, difficult to believe. The first time I took the Circle Line (five years ago!) the guide spoke at great length, and with poignant eloquence, about September 11th and the loss and the first responders and about St. Peter’s, a local church with pews now scarred where those rescuers took breaks from their horrible task. Today the guide talks about what is coming to the site, and what has been gained in that part of the city and that was nice to hear.

She’s breaking the law.

And there was a lot more to the day. You’ll see more pictures of it on Thursday. (Tomorrow will be about tomorrow, naturally.) We caught one of the new trains out and headed back to Connecticut for the evening. The new trains are nice. They’ll feel out-dated before the end of the year, but still better than the brown on brown aesthetic of the old trains.

Here’s a brief interview I conducted with Wendy on the small town girl’s first day in the big city.

journalism / links / memories / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
May 11

Popular media publication

Just discovered I had a piece run in the Smithsonian Magazine. Sure, it was a submit-your-own kind of thing, but that hardly matters, does it? But I’ll take it and stick it next to “Published by ESPN and “appeared in almost every major broadcast market” as small professional successes.

Stumbled into each one of them. The major market work happened because I was at the scene of something interesting — the first victims of the DC snipers (John Allen Muhammad was executed 18 months ago), bad storms, my good timing to be in D.C. when the Iraq War started, sports scandals (Chris Porter is in trouble again) and so on. Just bumped into Jim Caple at the ballpark, which turned into a nice little photo gallery for ESPN, piggybacked on a nice package I did on Rickwood for al.com. I wrote the Smithsonian thing when I should have been studying.

See, kids? Procrastination can be good. So is timing.

In other news: I’m still sore from where standing water beat me up this weekend. Sometimes I feel a little bit better, and then other times I am less than ideal. This will take some time, it seems.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I have been perfecting that story, though: Did I tell you about the time my wife beat me up? She’s strong.

Or: Did I tell you about the time I leapt from a plane, thwarted three ninjas mid-air, lost my chute and landed in a convenient lake, cartwheeling to a halt with a bruised up body? Those ninjas weren’t nearly as strong as my lovely bride. (Sometimes we must suffer for our art.)

If you see me moving a bit slowly the next few days, you’ll know why.

cycling / errands / football / iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
May 11

Waiting for 4.0

That tree will haunt your dreams. I want to go back to Big Lots, buy it and bury it so it doesn’t frighten little children.

Would anyone like to hang it, instead? Or maybe put it in a lake as a fish reef?

Pedaled around the southern part of town today. Again it was very cool. The high today was 68 degrees. I set out down the hill of death and up the two hills of shame, took a right at the light and raced past the back of the subdivision. Turned right, passed a school, up two huge hills where I geared up as far as I could and still had to just put my head down, grit my teeth and make mind-deals. Just 20 more strokes and you’ll be there. OK, five more.

Crossed the interstate on the narrowest overpass in town, dodged traffic on the bypass and then cruised through one of the great old neighborhoods. When I made it to campus I turned around, cruised the neighborhood the other direction, got caught by a bunch of buses on the bypass and then made it home feeling strong.

Later I went back downtown to see about a watch. The crystal needs replacing, and the jeweler at Ware’s with whom I spoke could not see through the scuffs to read who made the watch.

It’s a Fossil.

“Oh,” she said shaking her head sadly. There’s bad news here. “Fossil doesn’t let us do any work on their watches. They have some sort of warranty deal, though.”

And then I asked the wrong question. Is that pretty much a standard thing? Would that be what the rest of the jewelers in town would say if I went asking?

“You could try Walmart, but we have some of the best jewelers in the state right here …”

Right. Well then.

She was happy to not help me, though, so there’s that.

So I went to the bike story, because I have this issue with gears and hoped someone would answer my question. But the answer was no better than what I’d read. Score one more for the Internet. Now if it would just get me up the hills a bit easier … (That’s web 4.0, I hear.)

Started watching The Pacific tonight. Made it through the first two discs, thanks to Netflix. We’ve seen Guadalcanal and Pavuvu. This was all promoted, when it debuted on HBO, as the Band of Brothers of the Pacific Theater. And the men that fought there have long had a legitimate claim that their stories have gone unnoticed through all the retellings of what happened in Europe.

The series, four episodes in, is fine. It is no Band of Brothers. I’ve seen that many more times and read Ambrose’s book that spawned the series and two memoirs (Dick Winters’ and Lynn Compton’s) around it. That story was much more about the camaraderie. I’ve only read one of the memoirs (Eugene Sledge’s) that was the source material for The Pacific, and will one day get around to Hugh Ambrose’s book. So far, this one is about the sun and palm trees and firefights at night and grim desperation in the daytime. But there are six more episodes to go, maybe it will get there.

The island hopping miseries are an interesting thing. Somehow you wonder if you’re getting the full story, but if you look around at enough perspectives you realize how this may have been a period of the deepest deprivations (from both sides) of man and maybe you don’t want to know every little terrible detail.

Finished an article I’ve been working on. The task was this: write a 2,000 catching-up-with profile. And the focal point gave me a lot of coachspeak and platitudes. Not that I blame him. The interview was fine — the coach is a very nice guy and has always been an accommodating gentleman — but coaches get in the habit of speaking like coaches. They’re always a little bit leary, because you never know who’ll read the thing. That just carries over, hopefully not at home, but whenever someone breaks out a recorder or a notepad.

So write 2,000 words on a series of humble “doing greats” and “we’re excited about the season” and “one game at a time” and “we see it as a business trip.” This took a bit of creativity.

I’d written about 2,200 words and then cut a few hundred, which just made the thing better. I wrote one ending, but decided against it, so it became the end of a section. And then, to finish the story, I wrote back to where the tale began.

Sent that off, it’ll be on shelves this summer, wrote this and now time for bed.

Oh, when I took out the garbage tonight I noticed I could see my breath. May in Alabama. It was 48 degrees.

adventures / friends / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
10
May 11

Finals

Busy, busy day. You could spell it bizzy, but that’s just adding an extra letter and takes up more time.

Drove in to give my final exam this evening. Stopped by AAA to pick up a form they neglected to give me on my two other recent visits. The same very pleasant woman I talked with the first time was there today. She saw me playing with a map on my iPhone. She asked if I had the AAA app. I do.

“But do you have the other one?”

I do not. And if this conversation sounds at all familiar that’s because she and I had precisely this same conversation the last time I saw her, when she did not give me the form I needed.

But things happen. I had to drive more or less right by the place anyway. No big deal.

So we went to lunch at a place called Urban Cookhouse to meet with friends. They want you to buy local and eat urban. And it was spare and delicious. You could tell right away you’d soon be hungry again. But we all feel better about ourselves since this was the one meal of the day that was local and organic and probably healthy. Aren’t we the upwardly trendy types?

And then there was work. One meeting about cameras, followed by another meeting about some cameras in particular. And then a trip to UPS to package up some cameras. This took a long time, but you could have safely kicked the box down a flight of stairs, or floated on it in the ocean, without damaging the cameras inside.

And then there were Emails about the cameras, and a phone call about some cameras. And then I helped turn an office into a video location for tomorrow.

After that I helped a student with a tricky little coding problem. And then I had a snack, because it had been four hours since that spare, healthy lunch and I was starving. So I had some crackers while writing another Email about cameras.

Interject a few more camera things in here and you get the idea.

Finally came the final, where my students must present the fruit of their hard work in trying to simultaneously understand the mysteries of building a website and why the Adobe people put things in Dreamweaver as they did. The students all did quite well for themselves.

Nice guy that I am, I stuck around a little while to help with one on-going project. And the next thing I knew it was 9:30. So that meant an impossibly late dinner. My lovely bride, though is patient and likes Whataburger. It worked out.

Now all that’s really left to do is to calculate and tabulate the semester’s grades. I’m leaving this stuff out so any grading gremlins can stop by and take care of it for me overnight.

music / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
3
May 11

A random assortment of observation-like observations

This cropped up on the this day in history feature. That wreck is almost as terrifying as the production values. Bobby would walk away and outlived his sons, Davey and Clifford, and his friend Neil Bonnett, who all lived and died in racing. The rest of the Alabama Gang are still around. Bobby is doing commercials, his brother Donnie is retired, Jimmy Means is a race car owner and Red Farmer was racing in the 21st century, into his 70s, a product of an era where he even he didn’t know how old he was.

But back to what’s important. Here’s the early race from Talladega this year. That’s television in 24 years.

You never really think of the late 1980s as being ancient for an art and technology like television, but there it is.

Cold today. It was 54 degrees this afternoon, this is odd being Alabama in May. It was warmer, by 15 degrees, at my in laws in New England than in the deep South.

Sitting in my office and shivering I discovered that a bit of a Jerry Lee Lewis song I recently taught myself is actually a Rabon Tarrant (or older) riff. Listen to this.

Hear that piano? Speed up Blues With A Feeling and you’ve got the Killer. A few weeks ago I pulled up a tutorial from YouTube and learned how to peck that out on the piano. Tarrant played in brass bands all over the country during Prohibition and switched to the blues and left orchestras somewhere around World War II and started playing the blues. He recorded a lot with Jack McVea and now, 64 years after Tarrant laid down Blues With A Feeling here we are.

Artists back then might not have given much thought to the longevity of their music. It was here, it was recorded, you played it in dank, smelly clubs and then the little checks came in. You had to write more tunes to keep the money rolling, to keep the car filled with gas so you could play more of those clubs. No one probably had any time to consider that the great-grandchildren of the people they were playing in front of might also discover their music.

Three-and-a-half hours in class (and extra time) with Dreamweaver this afternoon. This was the next to last day of the class, where most are rounding the corner from being perplexed or dismayed by the program to having something almost ready to show off. Most of their portfolio sites I’ve watched them build from the ground up, helping out a bit here or there with the tricky parts. There are a few that have big strides to make, but by this time next week everyone will have managed to shuffle themselves into pretty good shape.

Amazing how a deadline will do that for you.