More grading today. But I’ve made good progress on this batch of grading and feedback-ing. So many words to write, and metaphors upon which to expand.
I stopped for two things. First, a quick 25-mile ride this afternoon. Nothing like 90 breathless to reinvigorate you to come back, sit down, and sound knowledgeable about the topics at hand.
The other thing I did today was actually something that we did tonight. We went across the river.
Eddie Izzard was in town, touring on a 35-year career, playing some of the hits. We watched a lot of Izzard in the oughts and early teens, so it was fun to see some of the old bits.
This classic bit made the cut tonight.
We heard the Romans, Carthaginians and elephants story. The woman sitting next to me repeated parts of it word for word, which was cute.
And Izzard closed with the Death Star canteen, of course.
It was a fun show. We had front row seats on the mezzanine. Not bad for spur-of-the-moment tickets.
I am deep back into the grading of things which must be graded. Students were reading a piece written by a colleague and new friend in our department on privacy issues around social media platforms. Some of of the student commentary is thoughtful to profound. They’re taking it to heart, which is gratifying.
I started working on this after midnight last night and should wrap this up late Wednesday. Maybe Thursday, if I must.
I did step outside for a break, and found some lovely flowers brightening the backyard.
It is warm and sunny and beautiful in the second week of October, and this can’t last forever.
But it should.
Let’s return to the Re-Listening project. I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. This silly little feature here, then, is where I write about it, to pad out the site. These aren’t reviews, but it does make for a good excuse to put up some good music here. And the Re-Listening project will do both this week, with a 2001 release that I picked up around 2006 or so.
It’s a tribute album, and a solid one at that, honoring the great Hank Williams. I think of this almost exclusively as an in-my-car CD, which is where I listened to it, but that also makes it a bit eerie, given that its Hank Williams. But each track is inspired by greatness by the same man.
It’s an interesting mix, some of these efforts pay direct homage to the original artist, and some are done in the contemporary performer’s style. Just take a look at the track list, it’s a who’s who.
I Can’t Get You Off Of My Mind – Bob Dylan
Long Gone Lonesome Blues – Sheryl Crow
I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry – Keb’ Mo’
Your Cheatin’ Heart – Beck
Lost On The River – Mark Knopfler
You’re Gonna Change (Or I’m Gonna Leave) – Tom Petty
You Win Again – Keith Richards
Alone And Forsaken – Emmylou Harris
I’m A Long Gone Daddy – Hank Williams III
Lovesick Blues – Ryan Adams
Cold, Cold Heart – Lucinda Williams
I Dreamed About Mama Last Night – Johnny Cash
Dylan, who rarely does covers, leads the thing off. Sheryl Crow yodels. Keb’ Mo’ is Keb’ Mo.
Beck is returning to his roots, and it’s beautiful and haunting. Particularly if you’re driving a lonesome highway. And that’s before you remember, “Your Cheating Heart” was the first posthumous release.
I am not a Tom Petty fan, in particular, but his cover of “You’re Gonna Change” is a standout. The Songbird took over “Alone and Forsaken.”
Hank Williams III, for the first 10 years or so of his musical career, did anything he could to distance himself from his father and grandfather. It makes sense, I suppose. When you see him, and you hear him, it’s obvious why he was initially hesitant to go that direction. He is the spitting image of sound and likeness.
Trey is back to doing metal and punk, with some country tinge, I think.
That’s one of the songs I’m always looking forward to when this CD is playing. That, and “Lovesick Blues.”
This record came out some 48 years after Williams died, of hard living, at just 29. The tribute genre was certainly a bit tired by then, but it’s difficult to imagine who could have done this better, or who got left off the playlist. It’s a fine thing, “Timeless,” and if it turned on another generation to The Hillbilly Shakespeare, then it was a project well undertaken.
It’s a record worth having for passive Hank Williams fans, and a good way in for people unfamiliar with his incredible, and unfortunately abbreviated catalog.
What’s next in the Re-Listening project? We’ll find out together, next week!
On Saturday, a beautiful day for a bike ride, I crossed 17,000 miles with this machine. Raced and ridden in six or eight states, I’ve added new derailleurs because of rust, replaced a snapped saddle last fall and swapped out a handful of chains over the years.
It makes all of the right noises, this bike, especially the silent ones. It goes slow uphill, except for those times it’s gone fast. It will go fast downhill if I ask it to. It goes where I steer it, and has always brought me back again. And somewhere along the way it became a breathless place to catch my breath.
Like I said, it was a beautiful day for it. Jump cuts incoming!
Altogether, I got in an easy 82 miles this weekend, including another beautiful sunny afternoon ride with my lovely bride, where we passed the farmers in their late season work.
She was ahead of me much of the time, but then I caught her, and then I attacked on a road near the end, just because the timing was right and I wanted to try to set a new Strava segment PR (which I did). And when I got home, I looked at the times and realized one of our friends holds the record on that segment, one second faster than me. Back to the drawing board.
On the final stretch before we got there, though, she attacked me, and it was well timed.
It was a beautiful weekend of riding.
And, now, back to grading.
Until tomorrow, then, the latest installments of Catober? Poe had the prime spot today, Phoebe will be back to show off her cuteness tomorrow. See them all here.
This round of grading is done. And now the rest of the day I, so deeply immersed in the effort, may just stare at a screen and think, I should really get back to those grades …
But what I really should be doing is getting on with the three or four other projects before me.
What I’ll probably do is look forward to all of the grading I’ll have to do next week.
Anyway, did you see Poseidon in today’s installment of Catober? They’re taking turns. Today was his solo debut for this Catober. He took this role very seriously. Tomorrow it’ll be back to Phoebe’s cuteness. See them all here.
I did not go on a bike ride today. A second rest day seemed important. But I did shoot this video on a ride last week, and I’m trying to clear out some old stuff, so here you go, a road that deserves a slower pace.
This evening I stepped outside to water some plants and take out the garbage and I found some great big blooms on some great big bushes.
It is the first week of October Catober and these guys are just having a show. I choose to see this as a sign of an exceedingly mild and pleasant end to the calendar year, and a warm and dry beginning of the new one.
Because now I have to mildly worry about that for the next four months.
Anyway, a light day today, if only because I thought every other day this week would be thin and they were and I’m tired, and so on. But there will be more tomorrow, plus Catober!
Welcome to Catober, where we daily highlight the kitties, because once a week isn’t enough. They also get their own posts in October, because they slipped that into their contract when we weren’t looking. So, I’ll take turns highlighting each cat. Tomorrow we’ll have some amazing Phoebe cuteness. You can see the full collection of lovely cat poses right here.
I’m mid-thigh in grading things. Fortunately not hip deep, and only that deep because I stayed up far too late — even for me — grading stuff. And so today I graded stuff. Tonight, I will grade other things.
At this rate I’ll be grading things all day and night tomorrow. I believe I have it paced out so I can finish grading on Thursday. Just in time for this weekend’s stuff to start rolling in for grading next week …
Whoever set this schedule up deserves a talking to. Me, it was me. I deserve a talking to.
Here’s a video I shot on yesterday’s bike ride. There are a lot of fields turning a beautiful, bright yellow just now. I might have caught these just a few minutes too late in the evening for the color to really pop. Still lovely in their own way.
Since it is the beginning of the month, we should check in on the mileage. September was a good month, my best September ever, and it turned into the fourth most miles in any one month, be they ever so humble. And we can see the progression through the first nine months of the year on this neat little chart.
The blue line is this year, the red one is last year, and the steady green one is a simple what if projection of doing 10 miles per day. I’ve been trailing behind that, sadly, since mid July. Now I’m making progress and I’ll be back over the green line before you read this.
And there are some humble, yet cool-to-me milestones coming up on the bike. You’ll be underwhelmed.
I’ll be whelmed.
That’ll be the extent of it.
Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project for a brief update. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. At some point, I figured I could write about it to pad out the site with a bit of content — share some videos and the like, but these aren’t reviews, because no one cares. So let’s get to it, so I can get caught up. (I’m only behind by three albums, I think.)
We’ll return to 2006 or so, when I picked up a copy of Live’s 1999 record, “The Distance to Here.” It was the band’s fifth studio album, it went platinum in a month, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 chart, topped the charts in three other countries, and settled into the top 10 in a half dozen more. They promoted three singles from the record, all which became at least moderately successful on the Alternative Airplay chart. But it never really worked for me. This is the last Live album I bought, and by the time Ed Kowalczyk left the band a decade later, I had no idea.
But I have two things here. This works a whole lot better now, for me, than it did back then. It could be a small doses record at the very least. And one or two of these tunes could be sticky — which is sometimes good and sometimes “get out of my head.”
The other thought was centered around this show at a concert. I saw the band at a festival when they were touring on this record. They closed their set with this song, and they were working out the instrumentation so that, one-by-one, the band slipped away off the darkened stage. Then there was only Kowalczyk, and the whole sweaty crowd was singing along and he stopped strumming his guitar, they kept singing, and he waved and walked off. It was better than this version, which came about some years later, but similar.
Kowalczyk rejoined the band after a few years away. And then he fired the band. They were all, as I recall, southeastern Pennsylvania high school classmates who got their break soon after, and became a 10-years-later overnight success. And now, they’re taking turns suing each other or some such. Kowalczyk is touring with the name, but all new band mates. They just came off the road from a midwestern swing last week.
In the next installation of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try out a pretty decent tribute album I’d entirely forgotten about — which is entirely the point.
And now, back to grading. And next for you, more Catober!
