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Tuesday

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.

iPhone / journalism / movies / Samford / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
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.