Tuesday


21
Feb 17

Live! From earlier tonight … and also this morning …

I ran five miles this morning before work. I’m not a morning runner. Wait. Let me start over.

I jogged five miles this morning before work. I’m not a morning jogger. I’m barely a jogger, but it certainly isn’t the thing I wake up and think “Oh, boy! Let’s get out there and pound some pavement!”

I’m much more of a pound the snooze button sort. I mean, sure, I can stretch, get in five miles and walk a cool down back home in an hour, or I could sleep for another hour in nine-minute increments. That’s what I am, a morning snoozer.

Nevertheless, I jogged.

There is a walking path out back of our house, and if you do the full length and go up and down the access paths to the road in front of the house you can almost get in a full mile in just over one complete trip. So I did that twice and then jogged out of the neighborhood and up the hill to the big intersection and then back down hill for a mile and a third. Then I turned and jogged back uphill to finish my course, five miles, just entering the neighborhood. It was damp and chilly and foggy and I had a full sweat. Some people were walking dogs and I found a few more signs of spring:

Of course the temperatures will fall through the floor by the weekend again, and you can’t see any sky for the clouds therein just now, but we’re in the 60s. We’ll hit the 70s on Thursday, for a day. And spring:

Anyway, in the studio tonight, I thought I’d take a picture to show you what the on-camera folks see. This is the corner where our interview area is. We have four red chairs for a more casual sit-down segment or, as seen here, the prep for one of entertainment shows.

What is weird, to me, is that I should show up in the monitors attached to the cameras. I’m standing right behind both of the hosts. And yet, you can’t really see me. I zoomed in to the original, just to be sure.

Funny, I don’t feel any different.

After What’s Up Weekly they taped their news show. I stood in between the cameras and did a brief video of my own, because I suddenly remembered I could do that.

Status: getting ready for another installment of Hoosier News Source on @iustv.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

I should plan those things better.


14
Feb 17

My sun-eating Valentine

Some pictures are worth remembering. Some pictures you just know perfectly. I have about 13-plus years worth of snapshots on my website. And after Lauren, earlier today, posted a picture of the two of us from our 2013 trip to Ireland I wondered if I could recall the first one of her I uploaded.

The sun-eating one, I figured, had to be high up the list. And so I went back through our early months of knowing one another. I scrolled through the people we knew, most all of whom have kept us around, since then, until there I was, 12 years ago. February 2005. I remember the night I took this picture going down the highway, and that one is probably from a library, because I have always liked repetition in my pictures. These next two are at a Super Bowl party in Five Points we were invited to.

The Patriots beat the Eagles in that game. Paul McCartney was the halftime show. (I had to look this up.)

And, oh look, here are a few sunsets and clouds. And there she was. The 10th photo I uploaded in February 2005, the first one of her.

We were in her car. I know precisely where that was, two cities, two jobs (for each of us) and one car ago. She was probably taking me home after work one day. We were carpooling at the time. We’re traveling north, to soon turn west.

That next weekend we got invited to a dinner party — (thanks again, Laura!) and sometime after that we realized we were getting invited to places. That people in our little world thought of us as a package deal. I skimmed through the rest of the 2005 series of photographs. Jamie​ shows up, and so does Greg​ and Brian​. Look, there’s Justin​ and RaDonna​ and Wendy​, too! There are family shots in there, also. There are pictures of colorful people that you pass by in life. There are blurry, low-res, sometimes underexposed pictures in the collection. There are trips and sports and bands and Lauren figures into most of all of those pictures, somehow, even though she’s not in a lot of them. That’s how you remember, though, the circumstances and the stories and the time you went to the place and saw the thing and tried the unusual item on the menu. “Who” is how you remember those. Some are worth remembering. Some you just know perfectly.


7
Feb 17

Needs smellovision

Tuesdays are full days spent in the office, pecking away at emails or this and that and then an evening spent in the studio watching students do their thing.

Our two anchors on the news show tonight, Lauren and Amelia:

It was Amelia’s first time on the desk. She did a fine job. You could hear her improving in each story, which was pretty cool.

On the pop entertainment show, they had on a special guest. Alex, on the left here, is talking with Brooke:

Brooke graduated from IU last semester and now has her own soap making business, 12 Months Soaps, which has a goal of celebrating black history throughout the year — so a good February interview. And Alex is a good interviewer.

Also, the soap smells great. Shame you can’t get that across on television.


31
Jan 17

Live to tape

The unfortunate part about showing off the finished product of a television project is that you can’t really point out all of the other people who are hard at work on these projects. Take these two shows the IUS-TV set produced tonight:

There’s about 10 other people working on the show as it is being created, plus another small handful who have already had their fingerprints on it somewhere or another. And there will be another dozen or so on tomorrow’s sports show, a handful on the morning show that gets produced Friday and then a whole new group doing news on the next program after that. Pitches, production, live reads, graphics, audio and so on. I get to watch all that happen.

Not bad for a bunch of volunteers who have to put up with me.


24
Jan 17

Camera three? Camera two!

I watched two shows get produced this evening. First was What’s Up Weekly:

Sierra and Sheila are going to take you through all the important and cool events going on around town. And there might be some fashion and celebrity gossip thrown in there, as well. They have a lot of fun on that show.

And here is the group getting ready for Hoosier News Source:

Tonight Sophia and Mackenzie are on the desk, and you see Lauren and Meredith who are doing a bit of floor directing and last-minute wrangling before the cameras started to roll. It was a decent-sized show:

This is the best story of the day. What the tweet doesn’t tell you: this was from 1,800 meters away. Her Majesty’s best man did this from more than a mile away:

The story says the bad guys were about to start shooting at a group of women and children.

Best headline of the day: The Girl Behind The Sparkle-Shooting Prosthetic Arm Is Just Getting Started:

The last 10 months have been a whirlwind for Jordan, who was born with a left arm that stops just above the elbow. After Fast Company first wrote about Jordan’s sparkle-shooting arm last March, she’s presented it at events all around the country, including a trip to Disney World, where she won the Dream Big, Princess award. Autodesk and Dremel gave her a 3D printer to use at home, and Awesome Without Borders chipped in $1,000 for filament.

“It’s just crazy,” Jordan says of everything that’s happened over the last year. “Good crazy. There’s no such thing as a bad crazy.”

And, finally, The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece.