Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

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22
Jul 25

The difference between inspiration and vision

Inspiration comes in many forms, and perhaps the sweetest form is when the inspiration is someone else’s and you still somehow benefit. And that was the case at lunch today, when my lovely bride decided that a BLT sounded good.

And I agreed! Because I agree! And, because she is kind, she will also cook enough bacon for me to enjoy as well.

I also agreed because the alternative is to disagree. And I could disagree! A BLT did not sound good today, a BLT sounds good each and every day.

So BLTs were her inspiration, but daily BLTs are my my vision.

Since we didn’t do it yesterday, and I am quite literally getting the business for it right now, we are now past due for the site’s most popular weekly feature, our check-in with the kitties.

After lunch, Phoebe, who has become very demanding in the kitchen, was ready to relax on the sofa. (I was watching Le Tour.)

(Some time later …)

And, now, after a big cuddle with Poseidon, made his feelings about the day known, stretching himself across the keyboard. The work day is over.

So I guess I should take the hint, cut this short, and give him more pets. That is, after all, his vision.

But first I must get the cat hair off the laptop.

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15
Jul 25

Forehand, backhand, and the heat

Just your average sunny, hot, sticky day. The heat index got up to 96 or so, and don’t think I didn’t notice, sweating as i was. So it was a good day to stay inside. I’ve been making that call a bit more often than I normally would during the hottest days of late. I’m OK with it.

Anyway, I made productive use of my time. I watched a documentary, about tennis and equity in pay, which I’ll show in class and made a day’s worth of notes about it that we can discuss in a lecture. One more down, too many to count to go. It was a good afternoon in that respect, and a fine documentary. The goal is to sound like a rhetorician before the semester is done. And this doc is one way I’ll start.

I’ll get another one or two down later this week.

Let’s check out some of the flowers in the backyard, which is busy growing just about everything possible. The brown-eyed susans (Rudbeckia triloba) are doing what they do.

These things will grow most any place, but do well in the sun and sandy soil. Guess what we have here where the heavy land and the green sands meet. They’re beautiful, but the wrong signal. We’re on the back half of the summer. And, also, they take over everything. But they’ll be with us for a while. Still, anything denoting the passage of time in the summer is an oddly unwelcome thing.

I believe this is an orange lily, or a Tiger lily (Lilium bulbiferum).

These are native to Europe, you can find them from Spain to Finland to Ukraine. They like altitude, which we don’t have. But they enjoy the warm sun. Our yard has stuff from near and far, so it’s not surprising to see this guy here. It is a bit surprising he’s outgrowing the weeds.

There is weeding that needs doing. But see above, regarding the heat.

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8
Jul 25

The heat is hot and oppressively so

Not every day produces a widget. Most of mine, in fact, do not. You find other things to measure against, I guess, or you just come to rationalize the very real truth that not every day need a product. It was also prohibitively hot. The heat index got up to 103 by the time I stopped checking. It doesn’t much matter anymore after that anyway. Somewhere as the mercury climbs it is just all painful.

Or put it this way, I stepped onto the front porch long enough to bring in the shipment of cat food, a chore which takes long enough to open the door, step outside, make sure no cats come with me, taking two steps, bending over, lifting a small box, pivoting and walking back inside. It takes no time. And you could feel the heat in that brief amount of time.

Later, I walked outside to check some other thing, a task which took about 90 seconds. In that time I’d already begun to sweat.

Right now, it is raining buckets.

Tomorrow it’ll only be in the 90s. Who knows what I’ll accomplish tomorrow.

The view from the front yard, somewhere between the gloaming and real darkness.

Oh, hey! The art on the front page has been updated. If you click over to kennysmith.org you’ll see a lot of images that fit into this theme.

I have also concluded the monthly computer cleaning, deleting files and updating the thises, and some of the thats. One of those tasks is monitoring the spreadsheet with website traffic data. Last month was the second most popular month in the site’s long history. In the next month or two we’ll hit another big milestone for the humble ol’ dubya dubya dubya. (And I thank you all for coming back more than once.)

Tomorrow, much like today, but even better.

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24
Jun 25

The Olympic Studies Center

We left my in-laws in one hotel and hopped a train to Lucerne, two hours away. We had a meeting. Or, as I explained it to them, “When they heard your daughter was coming to Switzerland, they cleared their schedules and we’re meeting with some serious higher ups. She’s a big deal is what I’m saying.”

Because she is. This is how you know.

We went to the Olympic Studies Center today. They’ve got signs and everything. We met with two librarians and archivists. And then we met with a grants specialist.

They explained their impressive library, signed us up for their newsletter and gave us remote access to their online catalogs. (Which are incredibly extensive. I have so much new information to write about now.)

Being the official archive collector of the Olympic Games, they’ve got, well, everything. Books you can’t find online. (I’ve been looking after drooling over some of what we saw today.) There are proposal reports from every city that has bid to host the Games. Research from every corner of the world. And, as they say in French, Bien plus encore.

I wrote pages and pages of notes. I also took a lot of photos of books I want to find and read. There were two whole shelves of books I want to find, so I just shot video of those.

I’m not an Olympic scholar — my lovely bride is a globally renowned Olympic scholar — but they are making it easy, and tempting, to give it a try.

We took our meetings just casually sitting by the torch from the 2024 Paris Games. I was sitting three feet from this.

I could have written more notes in the meetings, but my mind did wander and wonder: how much does that torch weigh?

The library closed at 5 p.m., and the people there couldn’t have been more charming. We’ll be back. (If we can convince the dean this is a business trip, we’ll be back often!)

There’s a museum next to the Studies Center, but the museum was closed today. On this beautiful — and extremely warm! — day today, though, we enjoyed the sculptures and displays on the grounds. Here’s one of my obvious favorites.

There’s also an Olympic-caliber track, which was installed by the people who actually supply the Olympic track. They had a 100-meter straightaway.

If you can see those little lights on the left (the ones on the right are just regular lights) they are synched up to Usain Bolt’s world record at Berlin in 2009. Each lighting at his pace, so you can see how suck you are compared to God’s greased lightning.

His world best is 9.58 seconds. The lights are synched to that. You do OK on that first light. Probably because you initiate the thing while he had to react to the starter. It’s over at the second light. It’s LAUGHABLE at the third. (Seriously; I was laughing.)

Anyway, we did a few starts, and then the Yankee decided to do the whole 100 and I timed it. So I had to do the whole thing too, and she timed it. I’m happy to say that Bolt, the fastest human ever, at his peak form at 23 years of age, with the finest tech of the day, is less than twice as fast as me, a currently untrained, non-sprinter, wearing linen slacks, a billowy polo and high tops.

About three-quarters of the way down, the thought occurred to me: You’re 48!

Literally in the next heartbeat my left hamstring said: I’m 48!

So now I’m limping.

I did it in 17.4, though, having pulled up in those last few strides. It might have otherwise been 16+, at this age and in those conditions with no training and casual street wear. I’ll take it.

(You also start under a pole vault display, which shows the Olympic and World Records for the men and the women. They get really, really high.)

Anyway, now I am going to do some Olympic writing … writing about previous Olympics, more precisely. It’ll be great fun, just like today

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17
Jun 25

Big ol’ jet airliner

Yep, that’s me. I’m sitting over a wing. The better to ensure there are no monsters out there. You might be asking yourself how I got here — by car. You might be asking yourself why I am referring to “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” which turns 62 years old this fall — it is still terrifying, but for different reasons. But the questions you should be asking: Where are you going? And: “What did you watch along the way?”

I’ll give you a day or two to figure out the answer to the first question. And I’ll give you a very small and indirect hint with the answers to the second question.

First, I watched “Captain America: Brave New World.”

It could have been better, but they were working from a thin comic book concept here. Anthony Mackie deserves better. And how Harrison Ford got involved will remain a mystery. Indeed, it is the copy book of MCU movies.

So, in other words, a good airplane movie. Passed the time. Filed it away. Pleased I didn’t spend time that could have been better spent doing or watching anything else.

Which brings us to our second film of the flight. And, again, Honest Trailer nails it.

There are pumpkins in North Africa, expressions some 1700 years before the technology that prompted them was invented and a newspaper in ancient Rome, where no history is observed.

Look, there are several reasons one makes a movie. Fan service, the box office, high art, or marketing overreach. Others are misguided movie execs, to right a wrong or wrong a right. One of those reasons is “to give Ridley Scott something to do,” and this film is that.

Anyway, the plane has safely landed. And if you’re plotting runtime to try to determine where I am, or otherwise trying to glean some information from the photo above, let me tell you I also watched the first episode of 1923 to complete the flight. We have arrived at our lodgings. Now we fight off the temptation to sleep — didn’t do that on the plane, as usual — so that we may laughingly ward off jet lag.

Tomorrow: more hints.