Tuesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Tuesday

Combien de temps?

It was 44 degrees and sunny outside today. And the days, as Wendy Waldman wrote, are getting longer. I’ll take that.

I talked to a former colleague today. He’s in Las Vegas working on Super Bowl productions. He said it was raining and cold. So maybe I have the better end of the deal today. Who can say.

Anyway, I have some writing to do and some grading to get to … so let’s work through a few things quickly here.

In class last night we talked about selected readings of Marshall McLuhan and Ibrham Kendi. This particular group seems unimpressed by McLuhan, which means I should have prefaced the assignment a bit better, but they were good sports about the reading, and several fine points were made in our discussion. I think I’ll show the class the first 90 seconds of this video next week. “And you … are numb to it.”

From Ibram Kendi, we discussed a chapter of the book that inspired this upcoming documentary.

The chapter that they read and talked about comes earlier, and focuses on Portugal, and Prince Henry, and an influential book. I think the assignment is powerful given the times and, sometimes, the personality of the class augments that. But the basis of the reading, for our purposes, is about the timing of the book written by Henry’s biographer, Gomes Zurara, and Portugal, and soon, Europe’s increased navigational skill. Circumstance meets opportunity, meets economics, basically. Or, at least, it seems so from way over here in the 21st century.

But if that is to be a documentary coming next fall, I wonder if this particular reading will stay in the syllabus for much longer after that.

When I taught this class last fall, the Kendi conversation was a bit different. So often these things just come down to the dynamic of the people in the room. I know that to be the case, and yet it always impresses me, one way or the other.

Just so you don’t think there were no photos of me diving in Cozumel, there were. Here’s me and Jennifer the turtle.

So we’re checking this turtle out, and she’s wedged herself into that little rock and coral formation pretty good, such that I wondered, for a moment, if she was stuck. You stay a reasonable distance away, because you’re not trying to harm or even spook the creatures. And after we’d been there a moment or two the turtle seemed to realize that we weren’t going to do her harm, and so just sat there, ignored us and allowed us to take pictures.

These are drift dives, and there are seven people in the water. But what a drift dive means is that not all seven people are in the same place. It’s hard to swim against these currents — more on that on another day — and so you c’est la vie in bubbles. You see this, you miss that. With Jennifer the turtle, then, was the local divemaster, me and my lovely bride. The dive master, at one point, takes his fin off to try to show a sense of scale, because that turtle was very large. We’re all moving around, taking turns giving the best views. At one point the dive master is just to my left and I hear him scream. Underwater, of course, that sounds like “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

Now, I know that only the three of us are here. I know where all three of us are in relation to one another. And I know it’s this guy, the professional. The first three synapses that fired were “The dive master is yelling,” and “It can’t be good that the dive master is yelling,” and “What will I need to do for this man, and then what?”

All of which happens, of course, in the moment it takes to turn my head to look at him, to my immediate left. I see him there, wide eyed, and he’s pointing back across me, to my right.

We’d been so focused on that turtle that we hadn’t seen the shark, sleeping just four feet away from us.

This was a nurse shark, and nothing to be scared of. The yell was more of an “OHMYGAH! LOOK WHAT WE ALMOST MISSED.”

This was funny because when we got back to the surface and he was telling the other four divers about it, he tried to tell the story like we had somehow missed it, but for his expert eye. Someone pointed out that he was the one making the “RAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!” noise.

And that someone …

He also said, did the dive master, that believe it or not, he named that turtle. He was the pleasant jokester sort, and so I asked, with a big grin, if he meant right then. No no, he said, several years before. So that’s Jennifer the turtle, and it was lovely to meet her. And her shark neighbor.

Let us quickly return to the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I am playing all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. And today’s installment puts us in the late summer or early fall of 2004. It was a good time for music collection, if you were around people with musical tastes you liked, or if you had a good library close at hand. If you had one or both of those, and a CD burner, you could add to your collection quickly and inexpensively. Both of those two things will be the case in a few of these upcoming installments. The library, in this instance.

I borrowed from the local municipal lending institution, R.E.M.’s “Eponymous.” I did not own a copy of a single R.E.M. song at that point. Hadn’t needed to. But here was a greatest hits and here was the clean copy at the library and i had one of those giant cylinders of blank CD-R discs at the office.

And so …

Because this is a greatest hits — I think in the most artistic possible meaning, which is to say they wanted to fulfill their contract with I.R.S. and get onto their new deal at Warners, and a greatest hits record is a good way to check a box on a list — there’s not really a great point to dissecting this. And since it was a library addition, I always thought of it is a catalog addition, something to round out a corner and fill up a part of a CD book. It’s great, but I never listened to it all that much because, basically, most of these songs were always on the air somewhere, it seemed like.

I was struck, listening to this yesterday, though, how the tracks improve over the course of the CD. The instrumentation, the lyricism, the production values, all of it. The tracks were shared on “Eponymous” in chronological order, so that makes sense. And somewhere around “Driver 8,” which was off their third album, you can hear the full band understanding they were going to reach their real potential.

So that’s fun.

Also, and there’s no really good way to illustrate this, but while you’re basically listening to the first wave of modern rock music there (Remember, it’s the early 1980s and the boys from Athens are the absolute antithesis of everyone else playing anything at that moment. So we’re talking R.E.M., The Pixies, Camper van Beethoven and not much else.) you are also hearing the stuff that inspired the next 15 or 20 years of music.

They called it quits in 2011, of course. They’ve denied reunion rumors and said no in countless interviews in the years since. It’s easy to believe. And probably the right choice for everybody involved, but still a bit unfortunate for fans.

Update: And just a week later, this happened. There’s a touring act commemorating the 40th anniversary of “Murmur” and that show was in Athens and look who all got on stage. Reportedly, this was the first time they’d been together in 17 years.

Cozumel / cycling / photo / Rowan / SCUBA / Tuesday — Comments Off
30
Jan 24

That was some sunny day

It got up to 42 degrees here today. And, for the best part of the day, it was sunny. This, I think, is why I have the unshakeable and mistaken feeling that spring is just around the corner. It’s the sun. I’m in recovery from years of the midwest’s monotonous gray skies. Right or wrong, early or on time, I look outside and think, it’s coming.

“It” being spring.

But it’s not. Not yet. We could be two months out from spring, somehow, but I see green grass and blue skies and shadows and I smile. I smile and I wait and wonder.

Where I park on campus I have to go through a little security checkpoint. There’s a guy in a hut and he’s looking for a sticker on my car. The guy that works the evening shift is an older gentleman. Quick with a smile and full of good patter. Every time I see him my goal is to make him laugh. I don’t think he gets a lot of that in his work role, because he’s always the one delivering the cheery spiel and the interactions may be plentiful, but they’re necessarily brief. So I try to bring a joke, or an unexpected reply to a gregarious man who has one-liners down to an art. But when you get him, he’s got a fantastic laugh. I asked him if he, too, thought it felt like spring. Two more months, he said.

I was afraid of that. But I smile and I wait and wonder.

Tonight in class we talked about some of the work of Lev Manovich and Jurgen Habermas. The students get Habermas pretty well. Manovich is a bit of a mystery, but they come around. We also talked about Photoshop, because that’s coming up in class.

I start this spiel like this. You don’t have to know everything about Photoshop for this class. You do need to some things, and we’ll touch on many of those. We have terrific tutorials available to you online, and I’ll try to one-on-one with you, if it might help you. I tell them they can follow along on the incredible tutorials and spend 19 hours and be well-versed. I tell them the way you learn this program is by doing, and that there are several ways to do the same thing, which comes down to preference and your efficiency. I tell them I have been using Photoshop for a quarter of a century, now, often on a daily basis, and I don’t know how to do everything. Don’t sweat it. You learn as you go.

I say, if I were a gambling person I would bet you a dollar that I will learn something about Photoshop, this program I’ve used for 25-or-so years, in the course of this class. And so then we do a few things on the big screen — which the students tolerate, I’m pretty sure.

In the new version of Photoshop there are mini-tutorial videos built in. You mouseover a tool or a panel and this little box pops up. You can play a short video that gives you an overview. It’s well done. I point out a few of those. And then, on the third one, I actually play the video. It runs 52 seconds. Tutorial demonstrated.

And then I say to the class, “Remember how, about 10 minutes ago I said I would learn something about Photoshop? Just did.”

Big laugh. Human element of the class instructor established. Another thing crossed off the To Do List.

Back underwater. It is a mild winter here, but I’m still in Cozumel in my mind.

Check out this anemone, which the divemaster is helpfully pointing out.

Look who is strong!

In an upcoming post, I have a great and impressive anecdote to share about strength underwater. So keep coming back to look for that.

But, for now, here’s another mysterious brown bowl sponge.

Or, if fish are more of your thing, here’s a closeup of a sergeant major.

And this is the saddest site you can see on a good dive. You’re tank is running low, and you’re having to ascend on an afternoon dive.

I’ve got another good six, eight minutes of air there, guys.

(For some reason, I suck down the first third of a tank like I’m never going to breathe again, but I can stretch out that last 1,000 or 1,200 for longer than anyone would think possible.)

It probably has to do with heart rate. So let’s talk about cardio. Since I last talked about riding my bike, last Wednesday, I’ve covered 164 miles, and am on a nice little streak of six consecutive days with a ride. My legs are starting to notice, too.

One of those rides was in virtual Scotland. I saw the virtual aurora borealis.

A friend of a friend has a wife who seems … I only met her briefly, once, several years ago. She leaves an impression and it might be the wrong one altogether. Anyway, we were talking about Alaska and she was talking about the shopping there and what there is to do and what isn’t there, and all of those sorts of conversations are insightful about a place, because you can learn new things, and a person, because you can learn what they value.

She found the aurora borealis to be utterly boring. And the malls, too.

I have never seen the aurora borealis in person, but whenever there are photos, videos, when a news story pops up, or when I see them in virtual Scotland, I get a good laugh.

So boring.

Anyway, with any luck, in a few days I’ll set a new personal mark for most consecutive days riding. This is the sort of thing that means nothing to anyone, but the person doing it. Eventually, it won’t mean much to that person, because there will be other goals to achieve.

If my legs keep working.

Tomorrow, we’ll see how January worked out, mileage-wise. The cycling spreadsheet returns for 2024.

photo / Rowan / SCUBA / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
23
Jan 24

Getting ahead of myself

We are still in winter mode. Though it seems like I’ve been there for a while. It’s more of a feeling than a concession to the calendar. And it’s not a glum feeling. Not a “Gah!” for a change. Rather, it is this feeling that spring is just around the corner. Weekend after next. I blame early commercials for the Master’s and auto racing, the earliest signs of spring. This is, of course, where the trouble kicks in. I think it is almost spring, but we’re nowhere near it.

Back home, they’re still three weeks out, minimum. And this is the real problem. The part of my spirit that thinks about the southland in the springtime knows when that is coming. It knows that, mid-February, a big, impossible, miraculous transition will be upon upon us, that nature’s fanfare is set to provide a paradigm-shifting crescendo early in the act. But only there. Not here.

Being my first winter here, I am also looking forward to my first spring here. I have no idea when that will be. But I found a site that suggested the coldest average historical day of the year is in February. Right about that time it turns to spring back home. So it isn’t a glum feeling today, but give me three weeks.

The thing about the weather is that it sticks around. We still have icicles in the air.

And all of the snow is still on the ground.

It’s supposed to warm up a bit today and tomorrow. This will all start to disappear. It’s only been around for four or five days now.

I had a class on campus this evening. My first in-person class of the semester, which began last Tuesday. It is an evening class, the last class block of the day and, as such, it was the last first class of the term.

I did my song and dance, learned the names of a third of the room and the something interesting about almost everyone. In a few more weeks I’ll have most everyone’s names under control. This semester is going to be my best one yet for matching names and faces.

I showed the class this video, which is always more impressive to me than any class that has ever watched it with me.

I think this was the first time I’ve ever watched that where I didn’t see something new, and I’ve watched that video a lot.

We talked about the class, and that felt rushed. I also gave a 36-slide presentation that covers, roughly, 3,000 years of human communication. So we went from Egypt to Martin Luther — with brief stops in Japan and Ghana — in a hurry. Next week, we’ll discuss the late middle ages and the early modern era of Europe. It’s a class called New Media, and this is the curriculum. We stare at all of human history for two weeks, and for the next month or so we’ll read a bunch of brilliant 20th and 21st century scholars discussing all manner of communication concepts that will get distilled down to television and social media.

I’m looking forward, most of all, to the sidebars. I taught this class last term. Occasionally the conversations ran off the rails. Each time it did, that was the best part of the class that day. I’m curious to see if that will be at the same places as the fall, and if this group of students’ comparisons and explanations will be same as last semester’s comparisons and explanations.

Anyway, if there’s snow outside, there are the warm waters of Mexico on this page. Please enjoy with me a few more photos from our recent trip.

The other day I said I’d never seen a filefish, which may as well be a generic a name as you’ll find on the sandy ocean bottom, that looked quite like this. And then, suddenly, I started seeing them everywhere.

The other fish is the black triggerfish (Melichthys niger). In Cozumel, you’ll bump into them quite a bit, but usually only in ones or twos. They’re beautiful, and they only look black underwater. With proper light they take on a complex color scheme. They can even modify their color somewhat. I don’t know where they fit in the Disney hierarchy of fish and underwater creatures, but they seem like they should be in a stately position to me. Something about those two little stripes.

But then you read about them, how they are aggressive looking for food, how they hunt in packs around Ascension Island. Mob feeding, they call it. How they’re opportunists and relentless, and while that probably hurts them in the saltwater caste system, I admire them even more.

One day on this trip, after our dives were done, I confessed to my lovely bride my unpopular opinion of reef diving. I don’t get agog over lobsters as everyone else does. They just … sit there … waving their antennae at you. Now, those times when you see one crawling along from A to B, that’s interesting, but otherwise, meh.

And so she took it upon herself to make sure that I saw every lobster anyone found for the rest of the week. That’s what dive buddies are for. Here are two of them now.

She’s still my favorite fish, though.

I felt like I saw fewer yellow tube sponges (Aplysina fistularis) than our trip last year. This is purely observational, of course, as I was not taking census survey data. I love these little things, and not because of Spongebob. That color really pops, as you can see, and the formations that the sponges make are sometimes highly ambitious.

The hawkbill turtle is a big yellow tube sponge predator. And that’s probably the cause here. As we’ll see in some other photos later, the turtles living on the Palancar reef are quite impressive.

As are the brown bowl sponges. This one needs some scale, and it didn’t work out that anyone was nearby at the moment. But do you see that fish in the bottom-right corner of the photo? That will at least give us some sort of perspective.

A small person could hide in this sponge. I am sure of it.

And we’ll hide from January with more photos, and a video, tomorrow of course. See you then!

Cozumel / photo / SCUBA / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Jan 24

Winter up here, fishies down there

There is snow. How much? I do not know. It doesn’t matter. There is no need to wander out and try to estimate or otherwise measure things. It is only important that it is on the ground. It is only important that it remains.

Today is the first day of classes, though my first class isn’t until next Monday. But the weather — the snow, the ice and the commute, I suppose — closed the campus. Sorta? I think? It was a little confusing. Such are our times. Professors have discretion. Online classes are a possibility. Attendance could not be taken. This part seems fair, some students come from wide and far. Some faculty do too. But as soon as the university said there would be no attendance, the emails must surely have poured forth: I can’t make it, for my driveway is iced in. I have, you see, spent the last 36 hours pouring ice cubes on the cement.

I did a little class prep. Stared at the walls. Wondered where the day went, and, with itm, my energy. It’s surely out there covered in snow.

Let’s go back to Cozumel! The low there today is 73. The high was 86. Why wouldn’t you want to be there, seeing fish like this?

That is, I think, a beautiful specimen of the Atlantic blue tang (Acanthurus coeruleus). That purple tint tells you it is a juvenile. Their colors change during growth, with yellows and blues along the way to maturity. This fish has some biofluorescence ability, emitting different colors under different light. That’s probably useful in it’s day-to-day life. They’re also an effective cleaner fish.

But the best fish in the sea is right here.

She’s growing gills, I’m sure of it.

The blue striped grunt (Haemulon sciurus) named for the pig-like grunts produced with their well-developed pharyngeal teeth located in the throat.

Though they don’t know much about it, experts say this is the beginning of their spawning period. So, sorry to have intruded?

Here are a bunch of orange elephant ear sponges (Agelas clathrodes) growing inside another, large, I-can’t-ID-it sponge (Unknownus identificationus.).

And here’s another look at a beautiful queen angelfish.

They don’t know anything about snow accumulation. Lucky fish.

adventures / Cozumel / photo / SCUBA / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
Jan 24

No dives today — sad diver face

Day three in Mexico, day two of diving. Except today’s diving was canceled by high winds. We lost four dives. That hurts. So we sat under the shady palm trees of the beach. Later, I went back to the room to take a nap. For some reason I woke up this morning, early. The room doesn’t make sense, so I had no idea what time it was. After a time I went to the bathroom, and checked my phone on the way.

It was 4:30. I could still get almost three hours of sleep.

I could not go back to sleep. So I was tired.

With no diving to be had, I enjoyed a late afternoon nap.

Rallied just in time to see the sunset, though.

And that ain’t bad.

A few more shots from yesterday’s dives, since I have worked through about half of the raw photos of the day. (Seriously, we’ll be at this for weeks. It’ll be great.)

There’s my mom, diving since the G.H.W. Bush administration.

Me too, come to think of it.

Sometimes people ask you, what’s the secret to taking a good photo of a person underwater. (No one asks me that, but let’s assume they did.) I can tell you definitiely: the secret to taking a good photo of a person underwater is to go diving with someone who doesn’t breathe.

Rule number one of diving is this: Keep breathing. But that’d mean you’d have to start. As far as I know, she only ever breathes when she runs. That is an undoctored photo. There are five little bubbles. Behind her, the tank is leaking as much air as she is exhaling.

When a tank and regulator rig let’s a little air slip through an aging o-ring like that it isn’t a concern at all. And you see it a lot, especially on this tourist-rental set ups. When a person runs through air as slowly as the tank, it’s impressive.

We drifted over this conch shell yesterday. Whatever is inside is going somewhere.

You wonder where it’s headed, and how long it has been on the move.

You wonder how long it has taken, and what the critter inside will find when it gets there.

More diving tomorrow, hopefully.