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football / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on Content cheats from the weekend
2
Dec 19

Content cheats from the weekend

A treat from the weekend:

We took the in-laws out to eat dinner on Sunday. This was our dessert on a cold and rainy night.

Something sweet from the weekend:

Turns out that when it gets chilly, the two cats, which have a mercurial relationship, get along nicely. For warmth.

The most successful tweets from the weekend:

More on Twitter, of course, and check me out on Instagram as well.

Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on You’ve gotta get up early in the morning to think this up
19
Nov 19

You’ve gotta get up early in the morning to think this up

The booking photo looks about like you’d imagine, after you hear about this story. I suppose they rarely surprise. The story is as old as winter, but with a twist.

It seems a gentleman here in town went out to warm up his car yesterday morning. He went back inside his apartment, only to see his car being stolen. So there’s someone out in the parking lot, at 5:30, shivering, waiting for some knucklehead to come crank their car, leave it running, unattended and unlocked.

That happened. The knucklehead, having seen the car being stolen, ran outside, got into his other car and chased off after it. Presumably without warming it up.

At this point, I’d like to point out that both of the cars in this story are reportedly the knucklehead’s girlfriend’s cars.

But why call a guy who’s just having a terrible morning a knucklehead?

Dear reader. You’re asking the right question at the wrong time. Because this knucklehead chased down the stolen car at a nearby gas station. And then he made the outstanding life choice to start shooting into it.

He reportedly fired 13 rounds at his girlfriend’s car. Which, to me, means you had 12 opportunities after catching up to it to ask yourself what the desired outcome would be. At best, at best, a person — chagrined at having stolen a car, disappointed at being chased down, scared to death for having been shot at — gets out of the car and peacefully gives up and the knucklehead sits on him until the police arrive. But, really, is that going to be what really happens? Next, you just fire into your girlfriend’s car, causing a lot of damage you have to get repaired. Then the options get grim. You wing the car thief, who is now bleeding all over the leather upholstery and fine Chrysler carpet. Or, you know, you just kill the thief, and that’s going to take up the bulk of your day, seeing as how you have no grounds to shoot this person.

Anyway, after the gunfire started at this gas station the one bad guy drives away in the still-stolen car. And the knucklehead continues to give chase. Eventually, he finds the car, abandoned. (And not too far from our house.) The car thief has yet to be found. There was no blood in the car. The knucklehead has been charged with criminal recklessness with a firearm, pointing a firearm and carrying a handgun without a license because he decided firing 13 rounds at someone stealing his girlfriend’s car was the right play.

A safe and civil city, indeed.

Friday / site / Twitter — Comments Off on Taking the easy way out
15
Nov 19

Taking the easy way out

I added two new banners to the top of the page today. They look like this:

There are now 102 banners across the top and 101 across the bottom of each page of the blog. Since they are presented using a random script, you’ll have to come back — or reload the page a lot — to see them all.

This was a good hashtag.

That’s enough for now. Hey, it’s Friday.

More on Twitter, and check me out on Instagram as well.

adventures / football / Monday / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on It was a nice, full, weekend, thanks
4
Nov 19

It was a nice, full, weekend, thanks

There is an alarm clock in our guest bedroom. It is blinking because of the last power outage. I walked in there one day in the last week or two and thought I should reset that. But then I realized, No, I’ll wait. ​

And now I can do it, around the microwave and the stove clock and the cars and whatever else has to be done the old fashioned way. Thank goodness your computers and phones and DVRs and tablets and thermostats change themselves these days. The miracle of technology is nearly limitless. Nearly. Maybe if I had a smart refrigerator it would change the milk for me. That’d be helpful these days.

I mean, I’d change the batteries in the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, but, by then, I’m just so exhausted. It turns out this well-oiled machine is impacted by just the tiniest bit of melatonin.

Anyway, lovely weekend. We attended a football game. Indiana got to seven wins for the first time in ages, these poor suffering football fans. They’re going bowling and they keep winning and there’s another win on the schedule, perhaps two, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Let’s get ahead of ourselves. This is a super young team and they are playing against type in some real and serious ways.

Michael Ziemba is a junior, and he’s been around on this team so long he feels like an old man. He was in my class last fall. Nice guy. Not old at all. He had the one tackle on the night:

Michael Penix Jr. is the quarterback, and he’s had the injury bug this year, but he’s also helping to lead a team that has scored 30 points in eight games this year. He’s a redshirt freshman. So big things to come:

Here’s James Miller, another redshirt freshman. The linebacker finished with three tackles and an assist. He’s chasing Aidan Smith, Northwestern’s backup quarterback.

Hunter Johnson is the Wildcats’ stating QB, but he’s been out while his mother undergoes cancer treatment. He did play in the game, though. And, most importantly:

“She has a couple more procedures, but really the bulk of it is out of the way. The chemo is done,” he told the Tribune. “My mom has been unbelievable through all this, so strong. She hasn’t flinched a bit. It has been tough for her, but she has kept a great face. It has been inspiring to me to know she will get through it.”

This past week Whop Philyor was added to the Biletnikoff Watch List. The junior is among the nation’s best receivers. He had a quiet night. Two catches for 76 yards.

And here’s Stevie Scott scoring one of his two touchdowns on the night.

The public address announcer calls out the jersey numbers. So it’s always “Number Eight, Stevie Scott carries for 27 yards.” But it sounds like he’s saying “The great Stevie Scott … ” He rushed for 116 Saturday. The sophomore is closing in on his second 1,000-yard season.

Penix, the IU quarterback above, got hurt in the second half, meaning Peyton Ramsey came in. Ramsey was a starter in his frehsman season, started all 12 games last year and he’s been great as a spot starter this season.

But here are the real stars:

Last night we went to the theatre, he said without any sense of flair.

It’s a funny show. Full of high energy. Great performances, and it makes fun of an entire belief system.

That last part is kind of important.

But that’s not everything! There’s more on Twitter and on Instagram and many of the fine places that don’t require I change a clock.

television / Tuesday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on One where I tried to tie the day together
8
Oct 19

One where I tried to tie the day together

Students I know created this show:

Other students I know produced two shows this evening, and they’ll be online tomorrow. And in between this and that, on a hectic night of shooting, where I might have just been accidentally getting in the way on purpose, I did get one of the better jokes I can make in a studio …

We got one in last spring, too …

The infinity effect is a classic joke. Maybe I appreciate it more than other people, but that’s OK. There was a great cartoon, probably from the 1960s or 1970s, that I can’t find today, but I’ve never forgotten and it probably predisposed me to the bit. At some point you have to be able to amuse yourself in the course of your day.

Elsewhere, this evening, I saw a presentation from the great Doc Searls, who has been a fellow at Harvard, NYU, UC-Santa Barbara and a widely published journalist. He’s also a best-selling author. One book he co-wrote, The Cluetrain Manifesto, was an important component of a class I used to teach. So this was a great opportunity to hear an important thinker. I could say a lot more about the guy, but you’d think I was overselling it.

Isn’t it interesting how well that applies to everyone, except for those to whom it does not apply? And then, for fun, go live in that lifestyle for about 12 hours, or try to conduct your daily business therein. Where is the water that fish asked us about?

I remember the first time I said this, in a political communication panel at a little regional convention. The room was full and there were some seriously accomplished scholars in the room. The looks I got when I said “We should stop differentiating between the real world and our time online.” This would have been immediately after Barack Obama’s first presidential election, when online strategies had been so critical to many of the campaigns we saw the previous fall. I can only assume it seemed an odd thought to the more accomplished scholars because they were of a vintage that, when they thought about it, were still thinking of other mediated formats.

The bigger problem, tonight, is that more people should have heard him speak. But that’s a problem for a different day.

I made a joke today about the vulnerability of the Internet, one demonstrable weak spot, of course, being …

Then The Yankee and I went to lunch. She dove into her purse to pay and pulled out … cash. I saw an Out of Order Post-it on the little loyalty card sticker. As I am convinced the societal part of our world will come to an end just after the adhesive of hastily scrawled notes on carefully applied squares of paper gives way, this was not a good sign. Especially after that joke I made this morning.

But she just wanted to pay with greenbacks today. Sometimes you go with the classics. It was only the loyalty scanner device which was down. We won’t put too much thought into that as a metaphor. All of this, I guess, made sense, given the moment (the moment is the message, by the way) wasn’t typified by people stacked up at the cash register how they were going to get by this guy who was between them and their noontime habits.

If you know anyone looking for a project …

Someone out there is thinking big thoughts about the intersection of sports media and geo-policy and geopolitics. With the world getting smaller and sports getting larger and the money … well, the money is just a form of communicating these days. That’s the moment we live in. That’s the adtech that Doc Searls was talking about tonight.

And it won’t be going away any time soon, no matter how I mangle the spelling of Silicone Valley.

More important than all of these things is this beautiful expression:

You go have yourself a wonderful Wednesday tomorrow.

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