Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

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18
Oct 11

Or as we call it, Tuesday

“Are you hungry? Do you want to get breakfast?”

I like the way this is going already.

So I wake up and The Yankee and I set out for a biscuit. We visit Mr. Price’s because he has the best breakfast in town. We make it just in time, between the late breakfast crowd and before the painfully early lunch crowd. I had eggs and hashbrowns and ham and it could have just gone on forever. I like our breakfasts. Very peaceful.

A little boy was there with his mother and when they got up to leave Mr. Price gave him two bags of M&Ms for his Halloween pumpkin. Two bags! Two weeks away!

He did not give me any.

And now I want M&Ms.

At home, finishing the preparation for my long day, I watched the forecast. Rain, being pushed through by a cold front. Close the windows then, to keep out the rain. Study the radar and perform multivariate calculations on the pace of the line of storms and my drive to campus. Where will the two intersect? How can I minimize the time I spend in the rain? And do I have time for all of that?

I did not have time for all of that. So I risked it.

This was one section of my drive:

The road had a generally sunny disposition. It sprinkled in one tiny spot, but everything else appeared eager and happy to be in a bright, sunny October day.

After I drove through those clouds in the distance, I found some more:

Glad I snapped that picture when I did. The road curves to the left just after that, and there was nothing but blue sky beyond.

Gave a 20 question current events quiz in class today. Held forth on photojournalism after that. I enjoy that lecture, I get to talk about people like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Arnold Hardy and Lewis Hine. And then I get to put up pictures I’ve taken, which is about the only way these comparisons can be made. After class a few students stuck around and talked about stories they are working on. I really enjoy those one-on-one coaching sessions beyond the classroom.

And now grading, lots of grading. And also the newspaper, where even now student-journalists are at various levels of putting together tomorrow’s paper. Some of those bright young minds starting talking this evening about their future. “It is in your hands, as a draft, right now,” I say. I’m expecting something close to a perfect edition tomorrow.

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11
Oct 11

Two plus too equals …

Health status: Still here. Still sickly, but there are moments of improvement. Then I make the mistake of thinking I can stop taking pills.

Twenty-two minutes later I can’t breathe again. So back to the pills. Four minutes later the chest-quaking, throat-burning, head-aching coughs return. And so there’s the Nyquil. To keep the bugs guessing, I sometimes change it up for Robitussin.

I’ve taken enough of this stuff that I’m beginning to acquire the taste. This should be a gustational impossibility, so you do what anyone would after drinking the stuff for several days: check the expiration date. Still valid, so it must be me.

I can’t taste much else just now, but the Robitussin, well, that’s just got a hint of a cherry and an undertone of oak.

Breakfast with The Yankee this morning at the local breakfast place. This is a rare treat that we’ve come to enjoy. Fresh biscuits, tasty bacon and a leisurely time to sit and chat about nothing of consequence. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially if there is a BLT involved.

Spent about five hours working on a math for journalists lecture. That’s always one the students love. “Math? I’m in a writing major!”

I can sympathize. Felt the same way, but then you find yourself writing a story, or a press release and there’s percent changes and per capita and then you have to mix that with things like strong verbs and now you’ve found yourself writing with numbers. It has happened before.

So that was a lot of today. The numbers have to be just so.

Returning to an old feature that hasn’t yet been completed. Here’s the resurrection of the Glomerata covers:

These are annual volumes of the Auburn University yearbook, which I collect. Here are three new additions to the Glomerata section as we begin the sometimes tumultuous 1960s.

Since this hasn’t been here in a long time, you might need a refresher. Start at the beginning, here. For a more detailed look at some select Gloms try here.

The plan is to return this to a regular weekly feature until we work our way through the full list of covers. This will take some time.

Also, the September photo gallery has been completed. And, for good measure, the October photo gallery is up and running.

And now to write a math exercise …

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4
Oct 11

Venus Mars household habits

The Yankee is a great wife. She’s fun and silly. She appreciates my silliness. She is very smart. We exist together well and shuffle along in a reasonably efficient manner when such frivolous things as “work” or “other plans” interfere.

We had a pretend disagreement on Twitter last night about silverware in the dishwasher. Somehow this became a discussion about brownies — she threatened that I would not get a snack, I took a picture of them in defiance, she accused me of licking them. And then two other families became involved in the Twitter conversation. One took a very clinical and precise approach of efficiency and ergonomics. (They’re architects.) Other friends contributed, and their part of the conversation became about the proper use of the toothpaste tube. We all have our pet peeves. And for those particular friends, the debate rages on at the beginning, middle and end of the day.

Personally, I’m a wherever-the-thumb-falls-on-the-tube kind of guy. I assume most people, and particularly, most guys are. That his lovely wife, a photographer, disagrees with him, an editor, only speaks to the nature of the gender difference, organizational tendencies and the way they get along. Probably it also has something to do with their professional roles.

And this is my theory that will go precisely nowhere. Your formal training inspires what you do in the most minute way, which is really probably what started you down your professional or avocational path to begin with. I submit that the chicken came first, but in a calcium carbonate format. Take this, for example. About the only thing I’ve ever naturally done well is string a bunch of words together in a way as to seem almost credible.

But I digress.

My wife is a lovely lady. And about the only thing we disagree about is the preferred method of waking up. Her alarm goes off. She hits it and wakes up. She is one of those.

I maintain that the best treatment for an alarm, if you must have one, is to pound the plastic casing in a highly ritualistic manner in precisely timed increments. Sociologists, I believe, call this hitting the snooze button.

And I wore it out this morning.

Normally this is where I would delete all of that, write “I just wrote eight paragraphs on oversleeping” and move on with my day. But I’m rather proud of those eight paragraphs, so they’re staying in.

And this was a day of a one quick meeting and signing a bunch of things. It was a day of computer disorganization, class preparation and a teaching demonstration. There was another quick meeting, this time with bubble wrap and styrofoam peanuts.

Now, I am wrapping up the evening with the newspaper. There is apparently something in tomorrow’s edition that will stir conversation, and also many faces in the photographs. Every week is a little better than the issue before, so I’m eager to see what they’ll have tomorrow. No snooze button for me.

Lots more tomorrow.

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27
Sep 11

Four more minutes of the riff, please

My office is next door to the campus radio station. My desk is oriented in such a way that there is only the one wall between their primary studio and my computer. They play smooth jazz and broadcast Samford’s sports and news programming. Occasionally, when my office is quiet and they are inspired, I can hear their broadcast, or even the people inside laughing.

This evening, I heard:

In class today we discussed more language and grammar. You haven’t embraced your day without a hearty conversation about the precise and proper placement of commas.

That’s the circle of life, though I’m sure the students would disagree.

It is, in part, a class on copy editing, and so I think often of John E. McIntyre’s speech:

This is not a gut course. Writing is difficult enough to do. It does not come to us as naturally as speech, and we have to spend years learning it. Editing is even harder. We can write intuitively, by ear, but we have to edit analytically.

Before we even get to the analytical aspect, we will have to do some work on grammar and usage, because if you are like most of the five hundred students who have preceded you here, you will be shaky on some of the fundamentals. You will have to learn some things that you ought to have been taught, and you will have to unlearn some things that you ought not to have been taught.

I should also caution you from the outset that this course is appallingly dull. A student from last term complained in the course evaluation that “he just did the same thing over and over day after day.” So will you. Editing must be done word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, and we will go over texts in class, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. No one will hear you if you scream.

I’m going to turn my back for a minute so that anyone who wants to bolt can.

Now, if you are willing to stay—and work—I can show you how it is done.

Want a heat-seeking ground-to-air missile? Libya is the place for you, apparently. Thousands have gone missing from unguarded ammo dumps and now the chase is on to try to recover, or buy them back.

If this sounds familiar, it is. The Americans had to buy back missiles from the mujahideen after the Soviet Union’s adventures in Afghanistan. After having spent between $3 to $20 billion in outfitting the Afghanis, they had to go back and try to buy back the armaments, reportedly for as much to $100,000 a piece. But that’s just the monetary perspective. The security concerns are astounding.

Sen. Barbara Boxer calls it a nightmare. Have a nice day with these little factoids, just one more note that causes one to wonder why we got involved in Libya and, more to the point, if we had to, why didn’t we do it right?

Democracy? Not that necessary:

“I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won’t hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover … I really hope that someone can agree with me on that. You want people who don’t worry about the next election.”

Says the governor of North Carolina.

One of Gov. Bev Perdue’s staffers would later say she was speaking in hyperbole, which is code for “I wish my boss would shut up.”

Oh, look, newsobserver.com have posted an mp3 of the governor’s speech, so you can figure out her tone.

If you play it backward she’s clearly singing along with the Temptations.

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20
Sep 11

Do not be dissuaded by the gray atmosphere

Rain today.

But it is like summer isn’t even trying anymore. Summer knows this is her last official week, and is conceding the point. The rain was just a sprinkle, a pat dropping of precipitation. There was nothing dramatic about it. It was probably even cold.

So maybe summer is slinking off. Maybe that will make way for an actual season of autumn this year. Maybe there’ll be months of the stuff, instead of days. Maybe we’ll grow weary of crispy mornings, sharp colors and the fragrant smells of the grill and evening fires. Maybe the crickets and the katydids will stick around, and the lightning bugs, too, but the mosquitos will be pushed off in an evening breeze.

It’s a pipe dream, but a good one. Summers are lovely and long. It will be mid or late October before the seasonal average high dips below 75. There may be troughs and cold fronts and odd chills in there, but there will also be the spikes. Beyond a certain point temperatures flirting with 90 are a bit demoralizing. That point is October 17th.

So we’ll see how that goes this year.

Class today. Students working on stories, some of them are quite strong. All have promise. Fifteen kids given one assignment and there are probably nine different angles they’ve explored. These can be interesting times in the development of young student-journalists.

Some of those stories will possibly be in The Samford Crimson sometime soon. That bunch of student-journalists, a bit older than those in today’s class, are working on their latest issue now. All of this is great fun.

Like sports teams, each year’s staff has their own personality. This year the Crimson has more guys on the editorial staff. There’s more talk of fantasy football teams than sorority functions. They all work hard, though, each staff going late into the night, and early into the next morning at the beginning of the year.

So far this year’s new staff has finished their paper at 5:30 a.m., just an hour before it went to press, and then 3:30 a.m. last week. At least I think that was the time last week. I find it hard to remember now. I can’t imagine why.