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Another day on a cruise ship with no immediate destination, he said to himself before his first cruise, seemed silly or even boring. Now, a grizzled cruise veteran — and doesn’t that sound odd and incongruous? — I admit I look forward to them most of all. I look forward to the sea days the most. Today was one. We took a tour, and met this guy:
Today’s video:
Tonight’s desserts:
We made it home just before midnight, too tired and too hungry for the usual “Huzzah for home!” public sentiments. I was not, however, so tired as to have the terrible “Am I more hungry than tired? Or more tired than hungry debate?”
Throw a soup in the microwave, unload the car, eat the soup while fending off the angry/relieved cat who is demanding, in equal parts, all of your attention and all of your soup. The common post-holiday tale.
Before all of that, though, my mother-in-law’s friend came over for a multimedia presentation. It seems she is interested in visiting Peru at some point in the near future. It just so happens that my lovely wife has just returned from Machu Picchu. She took a lot of great pictures, which you can see here. They camped on the Camino Inca Inca Trail for three days, working their way up to the 15th century site. The short version: Beautiful, great, hardest thing she’s ever done.
I think she talked the family friend into a Peruvian vacation. Check out those pictures and you’ll want to go. And the good news is, you can just take a train ride direct to Machu Picchu. But if you do, the hiking campers may judge you. Or so I’ve heard.
We hit our favorite little Italian restaurant after the slideshow, here’s my best girl now:
Back to the in-laws’ home, then, wrapped up the backing, loaded the car and off to visit some more people. Hugs and kisses and more assertions that “You should come visit!” and then off to the airport.
The holidays always bring about the strategic planning of what to bring and what to ship. What is the temperature differentiation? What am I going to need right away? When we checked in both of our bags were just under the 50-pound limit. Hers was 48 and mine was 49. We’re getting good at that. I carried a smaller roller with most of our presents inside.
At the security checkpoint I met a new TSA agent who still cared. He was conversational, but quiet. He had the patter down, but the patter didn’t yet have him down. While he waited on the pat down scanner to make sure my jeans weren’t explosive, he said he changes gloves for each freedom grope. The way he said it suggested that wasn’t the protocol. I asked him how many he goes through a day.
About 140, he said. And that’s his job.
So the real winners here are those glove manufacturers, and the people advertising in the bottom of the personal belonging trays.
Some shots from the plane. I’m guessing this is either Plymouth Meeting or Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But you can’t really read the street signs at night:
No idea where this is:
And this is coming into Atlanta:
So we landed and everyone demonstrated their zeal to leave the plane by standing up immediately. That took a good long while — it always does when you stand up while the plane is still on the runway — but then off the plane and down to the airport tram. We caught that just as the doors opened. We made it to baggage claim just as our 50-pounders where falling down the conveyor belt. We walked out to the shuttles just as ours was loading up. An Army veteran took credit for making the driver wait for us. The shuttle was full, I stood in the aisle with the luggage, but we got back to the hotel we used as a park-and-fly. The car was there. We loaded up and turned right to the interstate and then headed home with open, clean, dry roads rolling off into the inky night.
It was an easy trip home, then, wrapping up a nice trip away.
Tomorrow I’ll tell you about one of the new books I got over the holidays.
Do you notice the problem of symmetry in the following photo?
The pilot comes on to say this curtain — and that’s basically what it is, think of the heaviest curtain you’ve ever seen in a 1960s-70s time capsule home and you’re pretty close — is regarded by the FAA as an essential piece of equipment. And it would need to be replaced.
“Those first class folks don’t need to know you’re back there,” basically.
This after four hours of driving, rain and the mindless inanity of the TSA.
One blue shirt, I promise this is a true story, said to me “We’re just a little short handed tonight is all.”
A guy with a badge in a blue shirt said this to me in the world’s busiest airport on the night before Christmas Eve.
After 20 minutes or so of waiting for my freedom rub I eschewed the silliness of the whole thing, figuring, “Hey, at least the mysterious backscatter disease will get here faster than these people.”
In that time, people are just telling them “Oh, I’m 75,” and they get passed right through. There is a woman who has a singular job, yelling, in vain as it turns out, for opt outs. She puts her whole soul into it, bleating out her nasally phrase every six minutes or so, whether anyone comes or not.
And did you know a handkerchief can stymie the new security equipment?
I learned that safety tidbit tonight, talking with another exasperated blue shirt who was so decidedly going through the motions you wanted to ask him how far away his supervisor was just then.
So, yeah, this was what you then wanted to see for an hour:
Which is not fair. I timed it. The elapsed time from this gentleman bringing the new essential curtain onto the plane until he put his tools away was just over 14 minutes. The delay caused by it, mind you, was about an hour. This on top of a scheduling delay because of mid-air logistics elsewhere. Also, there’s weather coming in.
And this thing is broken. We were just about the first ones on the plane and saw it hanging dangerously close to failure, threatening to let the two classes of passengers mix without regard to proper aeronautical decorum. And so they took it down, the announcement was made and they scrounged up another from somewhere. Meaning there’s a room in the airport with these things in them.
Somehow, this is how you know you aren’t in the Matrix. That would just sort of pop right into place without you every consciously realizing why, the glitch in the Matrix from which you would benefit. Not us, though, not tonight.
It was decided, at one point, that this was a weight-bearing curtain. Why else could it be essential? And if that doesn’t make you want to drive everywhere, you’re a braver traveler than I.
But let’s talk about this guy. Everyone is staring at him. He’s struggling with the essential equipment. There’s a flight attendant holding this flashlight. Passengers are trying to “help.” The captain, who clearly has places to be, has come back to inspect the progress. And this poor guy knows everyone is watching him and they all want to be anywhere but on this tarmac, still. And he would like to have Christmas too.
I feel for the guy.
Meanwhile:
But we made it. One more destination safely reached. More lovely people to see. More snacks and Christmas cheer to pace ourselves on. One more misuse of the word “legendary.”
“Sit back, relax and enjoy our legendary Delta cabin service.”
Tell me another one, Santa.
Enjoy the Glomerata post I put up earlier today? Have you been checking out the Battle of the Bulge map posts? I’ve got about two more weeks of those, tracing my great-grandfather’s time in Europe.
I woke up this morning and did one of my favorite things, which is sit with breakfast, or tea or both, and read. I got a lot of reading in this morning and then we did some paperwork errands this afternoon.
I drove The Yankee to Target and she picked up two shirts. We walked down the street to a store called Ulta, which is not missing an R from the sign. I’m not sure I knew this store existed until this afternoon, but then I’m so rarely on the cosmetics market these days.
We picked up grain and sourdough bread at the grocery store. I remembered we needed some eggs, so I hustled to the back corner and got the six-pack container. The first one I opened had a busted egg, which reminded me of my best poultry story. I told it to my lovely wife and the cashier at the front of the store. One of them found it funnier than the other, but they both smiled politely.
We saw this car. Now, ordinarily, I’m not a fan of the reindeer antlers, but I’m willing to change this stance. The rule now is this: if you put those things in your windows, you must commit to the giant red nose on the hood of your car.
We had a dinner guest tonight, one of our sweet friends who brought a soup and stayed for brownies and a movie and uses the word “assuaged” correctly. It was a lovely evening.
Things to read …
I remember waking up on this December morning in a full sweat. It was unseasonably warm. That afternoon we watched the F-4 tornado ravage Tuscaloosa, just 35 miles away, on television. That night, up the road in Birmingham, I drove home under the largest snowflakes I’ve ever seen in the South. It was a tragic and weird day. Celebration Of A Life Saved
Many of your remember this remarkable photo by Michael E. Palmer that was in the Tuscaloosa News, the day after the December 16, 2000 EF-4 tornado that killed 11 people. Michael Harris carries an unconscious Whitney Crowder, 6, through debris in Bear Creek Trailer Park after the tornado passed through. Whitney’s father and 15-month-old brother were killed in the tornado.
That post is two years old, when young Whitney was graduating from high school. It was a nice bookend to that tale.
So these two guys are political activists. They represent different parties and they are brothers. They were on C-SPAN to promote this documentary about the weird dynamic all of that creates. They got into a political name-calling debate and then the show started taking phone calls. Then … well, just watch and see:
This is worth a read. Former AP Reporter: I Didn’t Leave Journalism, It Left Me
A journalist for more than 40 years, Mark Lavie was based in Jerusalem for most of them and then in Cairo for two – during the “Egyptian Revolution.”
Lavie is no longer a journalist.
But he didn’t leave the profession, “it left me,” Lavie says.
Now Lavie is speaking out in as many fora as possible. He seeks to alert the public about the dramatic difference between what journalism used to be – and still pretends to be – and what it actually is.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, Advertisers Will Pay Up To 40% More For TV Sponsorship Deals Linked To Social Media, Says TV4
“It means that we need to work with story-telling on digital platforms, and that we need to engage and potentially also reward our users,” she said. “This is obviously very interesting for us, both from our perspective, and also from a commercial perspective, in terms of what we can offer our advertisers on these platforms.”
Lundell said that TV4’s experiments with extending linear TV formats into the social media sphere had shown that “you need to pay more than for ordinary sponsorship – and advertisers are prepared to do that. So, yes, we’re making money.”
The first thing I thought when she said “work with story-telling on digital platforms” was wondering why plots of scripted shows aren’t continued on other platforms. You already see supplemental webisodes of some of your more engaged shows, why not story arcs on Instagram?
First there was ESPN, the movie channels, last month it was CBS and now … Up To Speed: NBC to jump into live-streaming
This is solid. 5 tips for streaming live video from a smartphone
Livestreaming video from a mobile phone is a way for journalists to get footage which may not be possible to film with more traditional broadcast equipment.
“There are sometimes these stories where you don’t want a big camera crew, you want to try and keep a relatively low profile, in riots, in public disorder, or in places where you need to be sensitive,” Sky News correspondent Nick Martin told Journalism.co.uk.
“You can use that technology which is smaller and more compact to still get what you want to, but not [have] all the big crew considerations that we have.”
Media organisations such as ABC News have also started looking at mobile livestreaming as a developing part of their video programming.
For journalists who want to incorporate video streaming into their work …
As I told a colleague this evening, within the next year or two we’ll likely say if you’re not doing video with almost everything, you’re going to find yourself behind.
That’s why I spent the better part of my Saturday night building up video templates for future projects.
I haven’t ran through a day’s worth of links on the site in about two weeks. You’re welcome and/or I’m sorry. I’ve been saving them up for a rainy day. And while it is cold and sunny outside, today is that day.
For this mega-installment I’ve broken it up into segments. If you’re here for the journalism or the tech links, they’re down below. Beyond that you’ll also find a social media section and something I just named “deep reads.” That section holds a few pieces that defy excerpting and are important.
First, some nice or important stories of late.
Rankings: Auburn-Opelika fourth smartest metro area in America:
Not only is Auburn-Opelika the smartest metropolitan area in the state of Alabama, according to NewGeography.com, but it’s also the fourth-smartest metropolitan area in America — only behind St. George, Utah; Bloomington, Ind. and Ocean City, N.J.
“For the most part, the top 10 on our list of the 51 largest metro areas is dominated by places with large concentrations of colleges, and those that long ago made the transition from industrial to information-based economies,” survey authors Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill stated on NewGeography.com. (Other college towns in the top 10 include Bloomington, Ind., Hattiesburg, Miss. and Lawrence, Kan.)
Grew up watching this guy play. This is a hard story to read. Broke and broken:
Those closest to Darryl Talley are terrified. His wife, daughters and former teammates openly cry for him. They lament what has befallen him. They dread what his future might hold.
Talley’s life is in tatters. Loved ones say his mind is deteriorating. He’s begrudgingly starting to agree.
He’s 54, but his body is a wreck and continues to crumble. He suspects collisions from playing linebacker for 14 NFL seasons, a dozen with the Buffalo Bills, have damaged his brain. He’s often depressed beyond the point of tears.
He’s bitter at the National Football League for discarding him and denying that he’s too disabled to work anymore. He says the Bills have jilted him, too.
He learned after he retired that he’d played with a broken neck.
Shared this in class last week. We all agreed the video added a little something extra to the story. Family hears son’s heartbeat in another man’s chest:
Doctors say Matthew Heisler’s heart stopped beating twice. And soon after, there was no brain activity.
Turns out, Matthew Heisler signed up to be organ donor when he was 16 years old. After renewing his driver’s license, Matthew Heisler asked his father, Jared, what he had done by “checking the organ donor box.”
“He made the decision that if life ever slipped away from him, he would give life to someone else,” Jared Heisler said.
And that decision was no small feat. Tom, who waited nearly three years for a lifeline now lives with Matthew’s heart.
Eight month’s after Matthew’s death, his parents and younger sister, Casey, listened to Matt’s heart beat inside of Tom’s chest.
Rare cancer can’t keep Oxford teen out of 10K race:
Oxford High School ninth-grader Keyshon “K.J.” Lynch woke up at 6 a.m. Thanksgiving Day. He was nauseous, but didn’t tell his mother, Christeena.
He was afraid that if he told his mom he felt sick, she’d try to keep him from running in the annual Plucked Turkey 10K in Golden Springs. It would be his fourth time participating in the 6.2 mile, bragging-rights-only race, the proceeds of which go to the YMCA of Calhoun County.
Lynch is no stranger to an upset stomach. He finished his fourth round of chemotherapy Wednesday.
Yes, the VA story can get more shameful. Bad things happen to whistleblowers when watchdogs become attack dogs:
“It was a disappointment,” said Peterson, a Navy veteran who served with a Marine unit in the Persian Gulf in the late 1980s. “One of the core things you are taught in the military is to take care of your brother. That stays with you. How can I wear a uniform and then cower to the VA mentality?”
What happened to Peterson is not unusual, according to outside watchdogs, members of Congress and a review of recent media reports involving whistleblower retaliation at numerous federal agencies.
I don’t care if it is true. Nichelle Nichols deserves to have people loudly stand up for her. So I want the punchline here to be true:
Unfortunately, as is the case for many people her age, she has some mobility problems and was seated in a wheelchair as we approached the metal detector. With some difficulty, she got out of the chair to go through the machine, and the TSA Officer waiting on the other side ordered her to take off her shoes.
Wartime spy finally accepts she is a French heroine:
“It wasn’t until after my first round of training that they told me they wanted me to become a member of the SOE,” she said in a rare interview five years ago, “They said I could have three days to think about it. I told them I didn’t need three days to make a decision; I’d take the job now.”
A close family friend – her godmother’s father – had been shot by the Germans and her godmother had committed suicide after being taken prisoner by the Nazis. “I did it for revenge,” Mrs Doyle told the New Zealand Army News magazine in 2009.
In Britain, the SOE operatives were trained by a cat burglar, released from jail especially. “We learnt how to get in a high window, and down drain pipes, how to climb over roofs without being caught,” she recalled.
Couple marries at Harvest Thrift Super Center:
Takeia and Nelson Alvarez Lopez came with their daughter Royalle to Alabama from New York without realizing how their lives were going to be changed.
A wedding was held for the couple Thursday evening during Harvest Evangelism’s annual Christmas party at the Harvest Thrift Super Center. Pastor Rick Hagans officiated the wedding. The wedding dress came from the Harvest Thrift Super Center, and the bride’s ring was donated.
That’s an adorable story, though it is a bit disorganized. I hope those crazy kids make it, they’ve surely got a lot of people cheering them on now.
The journalism links:
Why Serial is important for journalism
How to handle fast-paced multimedia reporting
Note the word “former.” Former Sun deputy news editor: Inventing quotes to ’embellish’ stories is ‘standard journalistic practice’
Corrupt politicians suffer only when there’s local media to report on it
Miami Herald continues to treat some South Florida neighborhoods as though they don’t exist
Five steps for shooting the perfect sit-down interview
A new study looks at the interplay of journalism and PR in the digital age
Rolling Stone’s disastrous U-Va. story: A case of real media bias
Rolling Stone’s Rape Story: A bigger journalistic train wreck than we thought
Uh huh. This never works the way you want it to, senator. Defining ‘journalist’ may become necessary
Senate leader Del Marsh taking heat for advocating an official state definition of ‘journalist’
Google News: The biggest missed opportunity in media right now
How much of your news site’s search traffic comes from Google News? Probably 5 to 25 percent
How 5 media outlets are using Tumblr
The newsonomics of the newly quantified, gamified news reader
The social media links:
Tumblr Overtakes Instagram As Fastest-Growing Social Platform, Snapchat Is The Fastest-Growing App
Five companies doing social media right
Anheuser-Busch Is Plotting to Win the Super Bowl With Four Social Media Command Rooms
The tech links:
How the iPhone 6 Plus Impacts Where We Read & Watch
Netflix CEO: Broadcast TV Will Be Dead By 2030
NAB Labs: FM Capability in Smartphones Rises
56% of Digital Ads Served Are Never Seen, Says Google
Discarded Laptop Batteries Keep the Lights On
Older viewers also abandoning TV in favor of phone, computer
New cord cutting data spells trouble for traditional TV
Research Confirms the Crowd: Netflix and Others Are Upending the TV Business
Deep reads:
‘The most expensive regulation ever’
Cartelists’ conundrum: OPEC meets
Chief justice questions whether rights might be curtailed in Internet speech case.
Cost Still a Barrier Between Americans and Medical Care
Cycling over the Pyrenees with one leg
Love the A-10. America’s Toughest, Ugliest Warplane Is Going Back Into Battle
Pearl Harbor survivors reunite in Hawaii to mark 73rd anniversary of attack
There’s something for everyone in this post. Thanks for making it this far. Please bookmark it and come back for more of these links. If they are here, they are worth a quick look.
And come back tomorrow. There will be more pictures and, perhaps, things to read.
