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Tuesday

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30
Nov 10

Watch this video, but not the movie that follows

Bitterly cold and falling just now. Winter has arrived. Or it has signaled it’s imminent arrival. Honestly I can’t tell anymore. It is easy to personify the whimsy of nature to a point. But when you get to the days of 40 degree temperature swings — as some parts of the state enjoyed today — you go beyond a singular personality. You have to accept the possibility that the weather personification you’ve been building might have a friend in there.

And that doesn’t even get to addressing those delightful outlier days where winter is officially here, but everything stays in the low 60s. Maybe your personification has an ADD consideration. The pharmaceutical companies are working wonders on this sort of thing these days, just ask them. Maybe they have a drug big enough for all outdoors.

I’m sure that day is coming. And that will be the day that Neo reveals Skynet was just a ruse to distract us from the Matrix. And you just thought you had identity issues before that.

So it was cold. Actually, it started warm. I put on a sweater this morning to walk into 72 degrees with a dewpoint of 68. Around here the meteorologists call that disconcerting. After driving through rain storms, one of them so angry that people were tempted to pull off the road, I made it to work in a chill drizzle. And things have been deteriorating, weather-wise, since then.

Photojournalism in class today. Our faculty member that teachers photojournalism offered to come in and give the lecture. It is always nice to see how others do it, especially those who’ve been doing this for quite some time. This particular professor now travels a lot professionally — some gig, eh? — and he brings back these majestic shots from all over the world. He shows a lot of his pictures, and then showed the great Eugene Smith.

It is enough to make you want to grab your camera, shake your fist at the rain and demand a low angled light so you can take tight closeups. People are the thing. I forget that a lot in my casual shutterbugging. You must always remember it if you’re working.

And also, reporting. Even Eugene Smith’s almost-groundbreaking work is lacking if you don’t have the information to go with. Pictures, words, light, pens, all of the above. Photographers are journalists too. I try to make this point a lot.

Two quick links, and then back to it: I cause trouble. The sports guy at al.com sends me these questions and I try to answer them in the most un-antagonistic way possible. Still I get almost 100 comments in 90 minutes.

Don’t read the comments. They’ll hurt your head.

So of course that’s about Auburn and Alabama football. For just a little more, read about this piece my friend Jeremy is putting together on Bo Jackson. Very interesting little letter, there. It might not be your time or your place or the pinnacle athlete of your generation, but put yourself in Jeremy’s shoes. You can interview the Mickey Mantle, Muhammad Ali or the Bo Jackson of your childhood. What a possibility.

Do read the comments on that one. They are very good.

Later: I don’t expect you to watch this, but I slogged through Under Heavy Fire tonight. Or, as IMDb calls it, Going Back. Sure, lots of films have working titles and international titles, this one just had two different names. I think it was trying to get into the witness protection program. Anyway, I half acknowledged it playing on Netflix and only link to it here because someone went to the trouble of getting the entire thing on YouTube.

I did not embed it, however, because it might be the worst Casper Van Dien movie that has ever starred Casper Van Dien. It is a shame, since it is Casper Van Dien, and his square jaw of truth here just demands respect. But nothing else does. Shame, because the primary story — OK, there is no secondary arc — could actually be an interesting tale. Every place, that might display conventional thought, or logic, or other key things like dialog, this movie is lacking. There is a lot of screaming, and a little acting.

Casper Van Dien is really hoping Starship Troopers 4 gets the green light about midway through this project. He pulls aside one of the other characters for a sidebar and you almost expect him to break the fourth wall and start talking about this movie.

This being a Vietnam-period piece it must be told in the tone of the self-loathing post-modern Americanism. So much so that this may have been geared for an international release. The guy that directed it was also behind three of the four Iron Eagle movies (Did you know there were four? I’ve seen the first two and was contemplating the final films as a joke, but now that I’ve put all of this together I just don’t have the stomach for it. This might be the worst military film to roll out in 25 years, and this guy didn’t direct Iron Eagle III. How bad must that film be?) and Superman IV. So there you go.

Just as a means of comparison: how did these movies fare on IMDb’s notoriously generous star rating system?

Iron Eagle 4.9 stars
Iron Eagle II 3.3 stars
Iron Eagle III 3.2 stars
Iron Eagle IV 2.9 stars
Superman IV 3.4 stars
Going Back 5.1 stars

So I won’t be watching the last two Iron Eagle movies tomorrow.

I will be shooting you one, though, as we make our way into December it is time for the first-of-the-month thematic video. December, hmmm. I hope I can think of something.

family / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
23
Nov 10

Travel day

We headed north to visit my family for Thanksgiving. Two days of family and food. I’m tired and full just thinking about it.

journalism / links / photo / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
16
Nov 10

The wisdom of pancakes

Clouds

There were a great many low, dramatic looking clouds today. You’ll see some more here and here. In ancient times this would mean the gods were angry, and that the late crops had to come in, pronto. You knew that to be true whenever the gods brought those orange barrels overnight.

(Most think those are about traffic, but actually that’s just a cultural nod, the departments of transportation have a think for old mythologies.)

This cloud formation means nothing today, except that a storm system is blowing out and a higher pressure system is moving in.

Taught today, spent the evening with the newspaper bunch. Took some time working over a survey and playing with QR codes.

Very cool stuff, turning any flat surface into a link. I suspect there’s a better QR reader than the free one I found tonight. (Any tips? Mine isn’t as fancy as the one in that CSI clip.) They’re just begging to become more of a multimedia tool. (But maybe no one will get around to doing that for a while and I can.) If they were a bit more aesthetically pleasing they’d grow bigger, faster, but sometimes the look of things is a slow growth.

Links, upon which journalism was practiced: Staff Sgt. Salvatora Giunta was formally presented with his Medal of Honor:

Obama said Giunta “charged headlong into the wall of bullets.” The sergeant at first pulled a soldier who had been struck in the helmet to safety, then sprinted ahead to find two Taliban fighters dragging away the stricken Sgt. Joshua C. Brennan.

“Sal never broke stride,” Obama said. “He leapt forward. He took aim. He killed one of the insurgents and wounded the other, who ran off.”

As bullets rained, Giunta dragged Brennan by his vest to cover and worked feverishly to stop the bleeding until the wounded Americans were flown from the ridge.

Giunta’s is the first Medal of Honor that hasn’t been a posthumous award since Vietnam. That most surely is a terrible oversight.

I let NPR’s Most Popular box dig up the rest of my reading. These two were interesting to see right next to one another. One suggesting this conversation about sexuality is a good conversation to have, the other suggesting that talking about it can be a bit precarious. These are conflicting times.

Dave Barry has been felt up at the airport: “Well, I would say whoever wrote that it’s not punitive was not having his or her groin fondled at the time.”

So I’m adding this to my list of unorthodox public policies. First, there’s the Nixon rule: If a president’s approval number ever falls to Nixonian levels you should retire from office, extending arms in a large motion with fingers stabbing the sky in a V, escaping the public eye for a decade or two before trying to rehabilitate your image. (Neither Bush made it there, but Truman did, predating Nixon of course.)

Now, the second of my unorthodox public policies goes like this: If Dave Barry can’t make a joke about what you’re doing, you’ve gone woefully astray and things need to change.

Read this. It will only take a moment. And then flip through the slideshow, enlarging the pictures. What a terrific project. I’m being vague because you should read it.

And now, to IHOP, for a late dinner. I have a craving for pancakes. It was there that I learned the all-important lesson “It isn’t whether you win or lose, but where you eat afterward.”

One night, during a particularly bad semi-pro volleyball game where nothing went right the coach called a time out. We gathered together and tried our best not to bicker. The jokester of the team picked his spot perfectly. In between the “What are you doings?” and the “Pass the ball better!” he said “Where are we going to eat later?”

And then we all went out for chocolate chip pancakes.

iPhone / journalism / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
Nov 10

Tock tick

Need a good college? Samford is on another one of those nice good-value lists. Samford’s overall rank was 80th and is second cheapest in terms of total cost per year, fifth in need-based aid and just eighth in average debt at graduation. So there’s a good value, if you’re looking for a place to attend, consider Samford.

I’ve been in recruiting mode lately, can you tell?

Meanwhile, The Yankee’s alma mater also made the list, Fairfield University, was ranked 85th.

Another fun set of statistics I found today, Wall Street Journal is trying to parse out what your cell phone says about your spending:

The average monthly credit card bill was $6,872 for iPhone users, compared to $5,693 for BlackBerry users, $5,330 for Android users and $5,076 for Windows Mobile.

Happily none of the data in this piece applies to us. We couldn’t afford it, even if you cut the numbers into much, much smaller fractions.

We have a 21st Century problem in the newsroom this evening. The heater is blowing cold. This isn’t unusual. The nice people from the facilities department loaned us some space heaters, with strict rules to be sure to turn them off and unplug them whenever we looked away from them. I think someone suggested that it would be a good idea to turn them off even if we looked askance at the heaters.

When it got cold, we tried out our new toys. That warmed things up a bit.

We learned that the circuit didn’t care for two space heaters. The breaker tripped twice, so we went to just one heater, which warmed things up half as much.

Could be worse. I’ve worked in newsrooms and studios were it was so cold I could barely type. Ours tonight was merely just chilly.

Here’s retrograde fun: These last two days I’ve become aware of the number of clocks for which I’m responsible. I, like you, am disappointed we don’t have better logic chips for every device so these clocks can’t all change themselves. They’re so used to changing anyway, what’s one more tock?

After a certain point precisely matching up your clocks can be a challenge, but that just comes with the territory. To make it a little less tedious I’ve come up with a new game. In the fall I like setting my clocks over a series of several days. You should try it. It feels like you gain a lot of hours that way.

In the spring I concede the point and do them all at once.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
2
Nov 10

Vo – ho – ho

We haven’t even finished election night and already Santa Claus is moving behind the podium, stealing the evening from a night full of winners and losers.

Interesting elections here. The people voted for a Republican for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. The new secretary of state, treasurer, state auditor and commissioner of agriculture and industries are all Republicans. Voters gave the courts to the GOP and made a little more history, to boot.

For the first time since Reconstruction the state legislature is majority Republican. Democrats fell in many districts that were engineered to ensure Democratic wins. The state Senate adjourned with 20 Democrats and 15 Republicans. When they meet in Montgomery next time there will be 22 Republicans and 13 Democrats. Democrats had held 60 of the 105 seats. Now Republicans will sit in 62 seats.

Just two statewide offices are now held by Democrats. They weren’t on the ballot. Only two Democrats were elected above the county level. It was a rout in every respect. Celebrate or be upset as you find the need.

This was the first win for a woman in a contested race in the state. In fact, Alabama will send two Congresswomen to Washington D.C. One of them, Terri Sewell, became the first black woman elected to Congress from Alabama. She’s also the lone Democrat in the state’s D.C. delegation.

Things may change, but Santa is still on every shelf.