Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

Auburn / iPhone / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
4
Jan 11

Just two videos

She’s helping.

Just a few things today. I neglected to add this yesterday in my jelly bean rant — and an update on that, the Sudafed capsules were about twice as big as the beans, yet we swallow one and chew the other — so I’ll finely get to it today.

In South Korea there is an Auburn graduate teaching English to young students. He’s also doing a little brainwashing …

Lauren Bercarich, the reporter, is teaching and doing video during her travels. Chris Lowe was a philosophy major at Auburn. This is all done in fun, but “Auburn wins 0-0. Oregon sees Auburn before the game and forfeits” would look great on a t-shirt. More than 12,000 people have seen that video.

I like the view counts on the videos, I always check the number. Don’t know why. I seldom return to the same video again to monitor their progress, but I did this evening. I watched this video 12 hours before this writing and it had less than 400 views. Now, it has more than 386,000.

Let’s assume this is all on the level. Ted Williams apparently has a new Twitter account. There’s a Wikipedia entry and a NY Daily News story on him. I’m going assume that it is legitimate and not a radio stunt. (If it is I won’t be surprised, a good radio stunt is art.) But let’s say this is the real deal.

YouTube just Steinbecked this man, giving a face and a (marvelous) voice to a man trying to put his life back together. He’s going to be on the air with a local station tomorrow. The comments, on the story (and even on the YouTube video!) are incredibly encouraging. A lot of good could come from this for Williams. Apparently he’s being besieged with offers and opportunities.

Two minutes seldom changes a person’s life for the better so significantly.

Alabama / Auburn / family / football / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
28
Dec 10

My day

I woke up warm, which was ironic considering I spent all yesterday cold and today wasn’t exactly spring. We’ll be in the 60s by Friday. Why can’t it already be Friday?

I make this joke a lot, and usually I’m joking. I talked with my grandmother today, it was her birthday, and she might despise the cold more than anyone I know. Whenever I run out of small talk, I can always retreat to the temperature. At Christmas, on a white Christmas, she brought up the year my cousin was born. It snowed that day too. My cousin is 27.

Anyway, I joke about the cold, but she hates it. I don’t care for my feet being cold. Socks, slippers and a space heater aren’t getting the job done tonight. Come on Friday.

Anyway. I ate. I read. I wrote maybe four pages on a methodological feature. I now know more about repeated measures design than I did before the day began. I learned other things today, too, but not enough. Tomorrow I’ll read and learn more. Comps, meanwhile, are beginning to loom large.

This Oregon-Auburn magazine came in the mail today. My step-father bought it for me, ahead of the big game. Normally I’m not a big commemorative issue kind of guy, but this is pretty nice. If you’re familiar with one of the teams at all at least half of the writing will be stuff you already know, but the photography is great. You might think of picking one up if you’re a Duck or Tiger fan.

Otherwise, there’s not much. So here are the three videos I watched today. Enjoy.

Time lapse snow video:

That is … a lot.

It was only a matter of time before someone mixed clogging with contemporary music to produce mildly amusing results:

“Hey guys, I got a new sword!”

“I got a new camera!”

“I wonder what we can do with the both of them?”

If some physicist doesn’t take that footage and rethink the way we sword fight — What? You don’t? — I will be very disappointed.

It must be good: the comments on YouTube are fairly genial about the video. We might have reached the end of the Internet. Even the Aztecs wouldn’t have predicted that.

iPhone / photo / Tuesday — 1 Comment
21
Dec 10

Can you spare a battery?

A suburb of northern Atlanta. Don’t tell anyone I took this picture.

They love the alphabet at the Atlanta airport. I’ve yet to learn why these are named this way.

Back home, tonight. Flew in late in the evening. Found the car’s battery did not have sufficient juice to start the drive home. The parking deck people aren’t prepared to deal with this. Apparently it hadn’t dawned on anyone this can happen.

The MARTA police are no help. The taxi drivers want to charge you. There is no decency at this time of night it seems.

But I remembered that we’ve already paid for this service. So I call AAA, and the car-jumping-van shows up 45 minutes after they said he would. He waved his parking deck ticket at me and said if this ran more than 15 minutes I was on the hook for it.

“Let’s hustle then.”

So he breaks out a tester. He has his trainee connect it. The battery, all of four months old, is found wanting. This is The Yankee’s car, so I am unimpressed with the quality of the cell. This is the battery we installed the night we moved — and you want to talk nightmare, spend some time in a dark parking lot futzing around with a battery installation while you’ve got boxes to pick up and transport — so I’m less than pleased.

He finally connects the jumper cables, while my brain is running this 15 minute clock, and we succeed in putting power to automobile. He asks me to turn the ignition off so he can complete his test. He completes his test. I’m ready to be done with this.

The car will not crank. He jumps it again. I thank them, wish them well and leave. I drive home with no incident. I parked in the garage, backwards, for the inevitable battery replacement.

Now I must go make nice with the cat, who was beginning to think she’d been abandoned at Christmas. She doesn’t understand the holiday, but she knows the big green thing with the water in the bottom and the shiny things on the side isn’t a regular feature. She also knows what a suitcase means. And I know that the first night back home means a full night of getting stomped on.

adventures / iPhone / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
14
Dec 10

The coldest December

This is about 45 seconds after the day’s best light has passed through the library. The sun is very fickle just now, but we can still have beautiful golden tones in short bursts.

A few minutes later we went out for an afternoon walk. It flurried on our walk two days ago. It is merely bitterly cold this evening. We stopped by the drug store and then the grocery store on our walk. One lady at the grocery store said she’d noticed us as she was driving in and wondered at our long walk.

Another woman stared very hard. She was thinking the same thing.

We brought home fish for dinner from the grocery store. It froze on the walk back. We had hot chocolate when we got back inside, and now we’re all warm again.

The house is clean, the laundry is done, the walk has been made. Now to bend back to my reading and notes.

journalism / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
7
Dec 10

“In it, something is.”

With the semester winding down, I indulged myself for three minutes of deleting the garbage from my spam filters. In my Email account the subject lines always amuse. One urged me to think of myself in the crystal clear waters of some exotically named please.

Every day, Mr. Spammer, every day.

I’m getting some nice spam on the block. Some of it appeals to vanity, “Bravo, your phrase it is brilliant.”

I haven’t written anything brilliant here in some time, I’m afraid. Others are just, well, a little overzealous.

Comfortably, the article is in reality the greatest on this noteworthy topic. I concur with your conclusions and will thirstily look forward to your upcoming updates. Saying thanks will not just be enough, for the extraordinary lucidity in your writing. I will immediately grab your rss feed to stay privy of any updates. Genuine work and much success in your business efforts!

Generally my blog spam is polite. Much of it is complimenting a post or gently disagreeing with something I’ve written. I’m starting to get a lot of comments from the spammers who say they are too busy to comment, but … and that makes us all happy.

And then there’s Yoda, who’s turned to the dark side. “In it, something is.”

Taught the next-to-last class of the semester today. Students are working on broadcast scripts. I went from that to a sales meeting. And from that to sitting in my office working as the paper staff put together tomorrow’s issue. It’s a nice life.

I’m now pulling readings for my comps exam. Want to help? Want to take the thing for me? It’ll only take four days of your time. Don’t worry about the weeks of studying beforehand. You won’t notice them.

I’m probably going to talk about this a lot in the next month. I’m sorry in advance.

As a break I’m reading about the treaties that came about after World War I. Hindsight is a powerful thing, but George, Wilson and Clemenceau, weren’t really doing the rest of the world — or the people from then to here — many favors. These were impossible problems to wrestle with, and fascinating to consider forensically, but everything just leads grimly to Czechoslovakia and Poland. Some of the French knew it, Wilson knew it, but no one could stop it.

It is best if you don’t look for parallels or conspiracy theories. This is, after all, light reading.