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memories / photo / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Commitment to topicality
13
Aug 26

Commitment to topicality

I have now locked down the prep for one half of one of my classes. Unless I am forgetting something, every concept will be less than 50 years old and almost every example will be from the 21st century. It is this commitment to topicality for which I am known.

Doing this part of the work was fairly easy, owing to the class already being in place and some of the work I’ve already done to set up today’s effort. Easy enough that, maybe I should just go ahead and finish the thing right now.

Naaaaaaah.

OK, fine. You’ve convinced me. Be right back.

[…]

[Some two hours elapse]

I did it. I blame you, and appreciate the nudge, because of which my org comm class’ structural prep is now complete. Now I must simply refine the lectures which I’ll do as we move through the term, staying eight days ahead of the class, if I am lucky.

But that nudge, that guilt-tripping nudge, that rolling-your-eyes glare, has done the hardest thing to do this time of year: build momentum.

Now I must complete the work for two other courses. One of them has a To Do list with seven items (some of them still require some thought and decision-making on my part). But there’s always tomorrow, this weekend, and next week. The other class has one item on the To List. It reads: Everything. Tomorrow, this weekend, next week.

This morning I made the mistake of looking out a window. I was prepared, as I had prepared myself in sliding out of bed, readying myself to meet the day, and going downstairs, to look out of one of the kitchen windows to admire yesterday’s handiwork. Weeding was done. Two hours, much sweat, and still sore hands, but the weeding was done. And so I looked and realized that, in the patch directly below this window, I’d only concentrated on the truly obnoxious stuff. Where I should see a big patch of deep and rich browns and blacks, there are still some offending sprinkles of green undesirables.

Well, Saturday. Maybe Friday. Those two days we’ll only get up to about 87 degrees, if the forecast is anything which can be believed anymore. (Some days are more questionable than others, thanks to rank policy changes that will in no way impact us on a daily basis.) I will go back out there, do the shuffle-bend-and-squat, and pull up some more stuff. Also, I will deploy the weed eater to work around some of the features of the yard. We purchased a battery-powered trimmer last year. The guy said the battery would run about 45 minutes. I figured that, given a few experiments, I could figure out a way to get all of my trimming done in under 45 minutes. And, if not, that’s just a sign to go inside and rest charge up the battery anyway. If there’s one thing we all know about weeds, they are patiently persistent. No second expensive battery needed.

I figured I’d use it twice a year, but you know what? I’ve enjoyed breaking out the trimmer this year. Also, I have found it necessary. It is efficient, it works fast, and it helps.

I will also deploy the hedge trimmer. There’s one shrub in particular that has gotten out of control. I might also need to haul the ladder into the mix for this task. There’s nothing as safe as using electric-powered dual-action shearing blades while leaning well out from a six-foot rung on a ladder.

Guaranteed, doing that will take less time than the set up and tear down.

Trimming hedges is an oddly satisfying chore, perhaps because I’ve never hurt myself on the thing. Bringing something into a desired shape is fun. Removing the cuttings are less so. For may years I have used the tarp-as-drop-cloth technique, where you tried to land most of the branches and leaves on the tarp and then pour them into a yard bag. Earlier this year I tried landing them into an oversized plastic bin. That worked somewhat. The cleanup depends on the type of shrub, and that should absolutely figure into your next shrubbery purchase: How much of a problem is this going to be next year? Species, I’ve got thoughts on all of ’em.

We watched Thunderbolts last night. Did it the old fashioned way, turned out all the lights and peered into a TV screen that doesn’t show blacks very well and wondered why so many movies have dark scenes. (I’m pretty sure it is a budget-saving, drama-heightening concept.) This was a deliberately unbalanced movie. Delightful in places. Halting and evocative of “What Dreams May Come” in other places. All of that fits in with the overarching theme. It suffers, however, in the antagonist area. Any action movie that needs an abstraction as an antagonist is going to have a struggle.

From IMDB:

The fifth lowest-grossing MCU film worldwide, after The Marvels (2023), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), and Black Widow (2021). These are the only five MCU films to gross under $400 million worldwide.

The web tells me today, because I looked it up, that a sequel is in the works. The Marvels is an overlooked film. (Iman Vellani is brilliant.) Of course, you can’t have much of what follows (this was the 32nd movie in the MCU) without a long bet on the supposedly underperforming Captain America. The movie business is a weird business like that.

Then again, they’re just following the music business, which is even more demanding with its bottom line repercussions. This is not a new realization, of course, but you can be reminded of it with literally any followup album or musician’s story. And, as luck would have it, we watched the first installment of the two-part Billy Joel documentary this evening.

Imagine having a guy under contract that had produced The Piano Man and not being certain, for six more years, that you had a hit maker on your hands. That’s the record business. Seems obvious in retrospect, but the first half of this documentary has been “I do stupid stuff a lot, my childhood, my early career … and finally we all realized I was a star.”

So we saw the first 15 years of the five-album overnight success in part one. We’ll meet Christie Brinkley in part two, I’m sure.

Two years ago we saw Joel’s 101st concert at Madison Square Garden. (She was there, too.) The year prior he announced that he would end that historic run on his 104th show. And so my thought was that this was an important opportunity to see an event, one of the last few remaining. It was a happening that broke out into a pretty great show.

We sat way up high, well off to the side, and had a great time watching him mug for the camera.

Appreciating longevity is the gift of the moment. No one listening to “You May Be Right” and “It’s Still Rock And Roll To Me” in 1980 would have counted on concluding an MSG run 45 years later. (They’d only just discovered nostalgia in 1972, after all.) We’ve all been a part of a different kind of topical commitment, really.

cycling / Friday / Instagram / photo / video — Comments Off on Alien plants have landed
7
Aug 26

Alien plants have landed

I got in some good work today. For about three hours and change I worked on straightening out one of my fall courses. I have the first six weeks of lecture notes all set up. Everything is organized through mid-November. Then it got confusing, because I got blurry-eyed. It happens. I’m surprised I was able to keep it together that much.

It isn’t the material. The material is fine, but rather the organizational part. All of those dates, all of those moving parts.

I did realize that one of my better lectures lines up nicely an important part of the football schedule this year, so there’s that.

After a time, I took a break for lunch, which was my first mistake. Lunch was good. We sat around and talked about this and that, as people do. Then we decided on the thises and delayed the thats. We moved some furniture around. We sat and had a little read. I called my mother for a chat, as people do. And, somehow, that was the day.

Oh, and I checked a few of the growing things in the backyard, where some things are having a great year.

Especially the weeds. As in not here yesterday, embarrassing large today, and pulled this evening. So I pulled a few weeds — I need to get more yard bags, and so I can’t too invested in that.

Besides, I just went to look at the things that were a-blooming.

The things we want to bloom, anyway. I can hear my old teacher, and all of my old friends who studied horticulture even now “a weed is anything undesirable. A rose could be undesirable if you don’t want it where it is growing.”

Well, I don’t know for certain what this is. Stonecrop, I think. And I’m not sure if it has grown in this spot before. Or if we want it there. Good thing I don’t have those yard bags, right?

I’ve said that a lot in the last month or so, which goes a long way to explaining all weeds which must now be addressed. Well, soon, anyway.

This evening watched today’s stage of the Tour de France Femmes. We watch a lot of sports, of course, and more than our share of bike races, as you might imagine. At the risk of testing your patience, this stage had what became one of the greatest climbs in mathematical history. (That phrase has never been written on the web.) Here’s the highlight version.

Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, who has previously won the Tour, attacked on the lower stages of Mount Ventoux, one of the sport’s most iconic climbs. This is the first time women have raced up Ventoux in the tour — how you say … patriarcat. The two women in the lead group with her were Demi Vollering and Marlen_Reusser, two of the most accomplished riders in the modern peloton, and they found themselves locked in their own tactical battle behind. As they all progressed up the mountain Vollering and Reusser botched their own responses to the attacking Niewiadoma-Phinney, who stormed up at such a blistering pace that it changed the circumstances for Vollering and Reusser two or three times as they made their way up.

Usually, the circumstance and the interpersonal dynamics of a bike race, and how each determines the other, are what I found most interesting, but Niewiadoma-Phinney’s metrics are what matters here.

In men’s cycling, the greatest road racer of all time, Tadej Pogačar, recorded a 6.98 w/kg performance for 40 minutes on his 2024 rampage up Plateau de Beille. That’s considered the best climb ever, in terms of the data. Here’s one estimate of her data today.

This is all about how much power the ride can generate relative to their mass, which is how the datapoints are equalized among different people. Niewiadoma-Phinney’s averaged that sort of output for 55 minutes, so 37 percent longer than Pogacar did. And, she was pointed into a headwind for most of the climb.

Also, Taylor Phinney — Niewiadoma-Phinney’s husband, my all-time favorite rider and now on the comeback trail to become an Olympian once again — said her number was actually “more like 5.6” w/kg.

It’s an astounding thing. An awesome thing, in the truest sense: that ride should fill one with some awe. And she did it in the big race on the biggest climb on the hardest day. Most of us can’t produce power like that under ideal circumstances. Certainly we can’t hold it for long. Guaranteed a lot of people will be trying this weekend, but a lot of people are going to realize, very quickly, you cannot match one of the greatest rides of all time.

adventures / books / Friday / history / music / photo / video — Comments Off on Fastest July ever
31
Jul 26

Fastest July ever

Happy weekend! I’m making it a long one. There was work, a little, but then my lovely bride and I decided to sit down and read books. First we read inside. Later, we read in the backyard. We know how to party.

The electricians came back to finish the install of the generator. Took them part of a third day to get it done, but at least this time it wasn’t 108 degrees outside. They’ve completed their tasks. Nice guys, unfortunately their shop is a long way away, or I’d call them our local electricians. Maybe they still will be.

And so we have a generator. The local inspector has to come out and inspect all of the gas and the electrical work, and hopefully that will be painless. Our electricians seemed to know what they were doing. The various gas people who’d come out seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure it’ll all look good.

This is how it works. If the power goes out, the system realizes it, and the generator fires up 10 seconds later. When the power comes back on, the generator set up realizes that, and turns itself off. Our job is to keep the air vents cleared, schedule annual maintenance, and, if the generator has to run for long stretches of time, check the oil.

Since we’ve been in the house the power has gone out three times. Once for about three hours, once for slightly longer. The first time we weren’t home, so I don’t know those details. Always in the back of my mind, though, this is the first time in my life that I’ve not lived on a priority grid — near a hospital or nursing home — and it could take a while to have the power restored if there’s a widespread outage. The neighbors talk about a big storm that came through and famously left them without power for a week. And that’s why we, and the neighbors, both have generators now.

Also, we got a shutter fixed today. Somehow some wind got in behind one, bent it over from the top down, and pulled the two top screws out of the siding. It just dangled there for a few days. It’s too far to reach via ladder alone. Also that roof is steep. Also, once in a while I get the impression that I am not as young and as bulletproof as I used to be. Also, that angle.

Anyway, a guy shimmied up the ladder, pulled out the old one, put up our new one (both are plastic, and look roughly identical) and held up a pleasant conversation the whole time — like he’d done this all before.

I promised to catch him if he fell. He promised to not mess up the gutter. He held up my end of the bargain and decided it wasn’t worth testing whether I meant it. (I meant it.)

Thing is, those shutters, pretty standard aesthetic pieces, come in packages of two. So now we have one extra shutter. Hopefully we won’t need it anytime soon. I put it in the store-it-and-forget-it section.

At the concert last weekend, Train did a curious little medley, the theme of which, if any, escaped me. But the crowd enjoyed themselves an awful lot with it.

  

It’s a party band vibe. A lot of crowd pleasing things, and tons of those local references that make the crowd scream. A lot of energy throughout.

The demographics here make no sense, and that’s probably the best part about it. For every person my age we saw at the show there was one person much older, and three people in their 20s. Age is just a number at a rock ‘n’ roll show. Maybe the demographics never should have mattered.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Sometimes, even writers who have won two Pulitzer Prizers, and/or the editors who edit them, can get punchy.

This is, so far, the only Looney Tunes reference I’ve read.

Col. Donlop was killed at the Battle of Red Bank. It was a poorly conceived assault by the German officer and his British commanders. The Hessians were trying to avenge a previous slight. They thought they had the element of surprise. They did not have the proper tools for a fort siege. They never had the initiative and, ultimately, the battle becomes a big morale win for the Americans.

Some of our colleagues are working at that site even now. Just a few years ago archeologists found the remains of 15 Hessian soldiers there, and the project has become a public and educational dig. Dr. Janofsky is the real sort of archeologist you’d want to meet. The kind that can bring history to life for people who thought they were uninterested. I had the chance to see her speak earlier this year. She’s incredibly passionate about the work and of course steeped in the time she’s studying, but a part of a program that’s using the most modern techniques (isotopic testing of remains!) to further the research. Between the discovery in 2022 and 2024 the researchers have held a few “public dig days” and almost 400 community members have taken part.

Read Atkinson’s book. (If you know how to party like I know how to party, this will be a great start to August for you.

books / history / memories / music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on I had to log into Canvas today, and more fun things
29
Jul 26

I had to log into Canvas today, and more fun things

Today I started doing some back end coursework. Building Canvas shells and preparing the reorganization of things. I started some light reading. The usual, and terribly exciting stuff. But, ya know, it has to get done. And done it gets. So much so that I may do less tomorrow. Is day three too early to take a break? It’s probably too early to take a break.

I’m taking a break.

I shot this photograph, which is nothing special, while doing the weekly garbage can chore, and promptly forgot about it. I remembered it. I edited, uploaded it, and promptly forgot about it again. So here it is, a nothing special snapshot from the wee hours of Monday morning.

The clouds had more patience than me and waited me out. Then nothing happened and I went inside, which is why it is nothing special, and probably why I forgot it, twice. But it’s here, I’m here, the site is here, you’re here, and so on.

The headliner at the weekend concert was Train, which is doing one of those “celebrating 25 years of a hit” tours. So many people are doing these now it no longer seems novel. It seems impractical. It seems a problem. The problem is that so many acts I like are doing them.

Anyway, at one point they launched into a planned bit of spontaneity and played Jack and Diane. Matt Nathanson came out for the back half of the song.

  

And, now, allow me to point you to something that will change your opinion about that song, and give you, finally, the correct opinion about Mellencamp. It was funny, when this happened, listening to the people who knew him, his father, his sons, and their opinions of him from first-hand experience, and watching all the right people fawn and fan over the whole event, and watching the students saying, “Who?”

I have two more concert clips to round out the week. Tomorrow’s video is something you’ve never heard before, guaranteed. Friday’s video is something I’ve, somehow, never seen live before.

I had a nice little ride this evening. I set out for my time trial 25-mile loop, but it was slow. I didn’t really know that when I passed the sheep, but that’s only because I see them in the first five miles or so.

Soon after, though, the numbers looked low, so I decided to do a bit extra. On the long straight road that usually gives me a good tailwind before the final segment I had a crosswind, and instead of turning for the last seven miles home I went down to the next turn, 1.5 miles down the road, hooked a right at the little white house on the corner and then pushed on through some woods, a few warehouses, over some railroad tracks, a few more warehouses, and then finally took another right, to pass by some other warehouses, and finally the bridge over the water at a place where you sit five feet below sea level, and then into a four-stop sign town that dates back to the 17th century.

Turning left at one of those stop signs sends me through one final neighborhood and then four miles of pastureland, and then home. It was a lovely evening for a ride, a lovely ride, felt good and, yet it was somehow slower than I expected. Who knows why these things are the way they are.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Terrific book and today I am again marveling at his source material.

This was just prior to the Battle of Brandywine. Lt. William Hale survived Brandywine, participated in the occupation of Philadelphia and beyond. By August 1778 he knew he was going home, his regiment in tatters. Less than 100 officers and men from the 45 Foot survived their battles and the subsequent trip home. A 1914 unit history by a Captain W. H. Wilkin of the same regiment, writes that Hale “was not a man of note,” and that his letters home “describe the war from the point of view of a British subaltern.” Wilkin, nevertheless, gives Hale’s correspondence a full chapter rich in context and granular observations of some of the battles in which he participated. Hale was 22 and fighting in America. He retired from the service a captain in 1781, married in 1783, and died in Devonshire in 1789.

Hale’s line about his esprit de corps has, of course, been used in still other books as well. How could it not? While I’ve not read those others, I can say that Atkinson is delivering another great work. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Catch up and read along!

books / history / music / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Back to work, a little, sorta
28
Jul 26

Back to work, a little, sorta

I made the mistake of thinking ahead today, and now my head hurts. But sometimes you must do that — thinking ahead, I mean, not self-induced cephalgia — so that’s what I did today. I printed out calendars, September through December. I did this three times. And this is the start of my fall semester. The work begins anew, with a smile, and no pay until September, etc. This work will continue until mid-December, which will roll immediately into the spring term. The second thing I did was to look at all of the academic calendars. Classes begin this day, Thanksgiving is that day, finals will occur on those days. The next five months are defined.

I accidentally glanced at the spring calendar, then quickly distracted myself by figuring out my weekly schedule and office hours for the term. That took three Post-it notes. Now they’re just hanging on the corner of my monitor. Taunting me.

There’s a lot of preparation to do in the next month. But not as much as in some other semesters. One class I must convert from an online class to an in-person format. That’s going to be a task, with some things coming out, some things need to go in the newly vacant spaces, plus there’s the simple trick of doing a class twice a week as opposed to via email.

To build momentum, I’ll start somewhere else. Two classes must be converted from twice-a-week to once-a-week. One of them is get an structural overhaul. The other, just needs to be redone to accommodate the new term. Maybe some more theories. Seemed light last semester. That means more studying on my part, which is fine, great even.

And this, friends, is how I will fill a month-and-change of work. Hence the headache. But I’ll be pacing myself. There’s time for that.

The feature act we saw this weekend was Barenaked Ladies. I hadn’t realized it, but we’ve now established a little tradition of seeing them every summer. We went from my lovely bride, a few years ago, having never seen them to now having an annual appointment. I think this is her fifth time seeing them. And that means she has seen five of Jim Creeggan’s upright bass solos. Here’s one now.

  

Ed Robertson did a freestyle rap. They did the medley that started with “Pink Pony Club” and ended with “Highway to Hell” and included stuff like “Texas Hold ‘Em,” “The Gambler,” and “Hot to Go” in between. They played the hits. I still miss Steve Page. I suppose I forever will.

When BNL are the headliner I still think, Maybe this is the tour, maybe this is the night they bring it all back together.

I try not to think about how he’s been out of the band for longer than I knew him in the band.

It’s been, what, eight years now since they had the Hall of Fame reunion?

Time really has sped up. If the full band ever has the appetite to get back together I hope it slows down so I can see several of those shows. I would go to see several of those shows.

We’re glancing at Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy, which I am enjoying reading a great deal. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Atkinson is aces, as ever.

This is something I’ve always wondered about, ever since some history or social studies class began to teach us about the American Revolution in whatever grade that really began, I’ve always had questions about how one group of people came to find themselves in a position to upset the paradigm (I knew big words as a kid) and the ability to explain their will to others, and win the day. While doing all that, of course, you have to build resources, prepare and fight elements of the best army and navy in the world, and so on.

Representation got them into meetings, and local “committees,” general hooliganism, brute force, and some policy that they managed to institutionalize led to enforcing the new rules of the road (before they were laws of the land). If you were on the fence you got persuaded, or you went to Canada, the islands, or back to Europe. Persuasion came in many forms, not all of it terribly polite. But that’s revolution for you.

Which is, I guess, to say that I would have been terrible in the moment.

Who gave you the right? What are the rights? What are your rights? What are my rights? Who said you could speak for all of us? What if we don’t agree? No king, sure, but there’s a lot of you and you suddenly have a lot of rules and I could see a time, in another 250 years, when it is truly burdensome and sure they’ll have powers baked in by representation and precedent but, you, here, now, who gave you the right?

They might only thought up the idea of tarring and feathering people when they came across someone like that.

Here’s James Allen’s diary that Atkinson is quoting. And therein is yet another way for us to realize and recall that people had their positions for unique and, sometimes, changing reasons. The Allens were a prominent Pennsylvania family. They were loyalists but, as James Allen said once when talking his way out of a bit of trouble, didn’t actively work against it. At various moments people on both sides took a for-us-or-against-us approach, the most basic history can do that, too, but that didn’t always apply to everyone in those years, for all sorts of reasons like laws and history and fear and risk and religion and class and a feeling of what is just or what is at stake and on and on. We never think on that enough. Hard is the fate, indeed.

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