video


20
Mar 24

The most wide-ranging Wednesday post in a while

This evening I watched a man in a custom suit and sneakers talk about his life’s work, listened as he painted a picture that he thinks everyone is out to get him, that money is everything and that having a life is secondary to having work. It would have been disconcerting if it didn’t come off as sadly insecure.

It’s one thing to be driven. To have gotten, undeniably, indisputably, to where you want to be and still come off that way, it seemed difficult, in the day-to-day. I could be wrong. The guy had on a great suit. It fit him, and the rest of the vibe.

Where as I was wearing shoes that look good, but don’t exactly treat my feet well. I like them, but there better not be a lot of walking around in them. And I’m secure enough about my feet to be able to say that.

It is not a phrase I use. It’s not one I think of often. If I were trying to sum up a person, or a presentation, or an attitude, it’s just not a descriptor I reach for. But at one point during the talk it slipped out of my mouth, under my breath, to no one in particular. At the end of the talk, as everyone stood to leave, the strangers in front of me stood and looked back and we all made eye contact, as you do. One gentleman said, “He seems very insecure.”

Also, I’ve become a huge proponent of having a life and an identity away from the office. One day I’ll even make one!

Right now I’m too busy watching things bloom, and waiting for it to get just a little bit warmer. But instead of a steady, constant, climb of mercury, we are stuck in this middle ground of 48 degrees. We are stuck in that time of relative temperatures. Six, seven weeks ago, you’d take 48 degrees, and you’d be pleased with it. But now, somehow, the body knows better. It isn’t supposed to be 48 degrees anymore. The rational mind has known this for some time, but now the body has gotten wise.

That’s when the impatience really kicks in.

But the budding and flowering things don’t seem to mind. The magnolia liliiflora is getting ready to put on a show.

It’s a small tree, basically, because the Overambitious Shrub Lobby got to the policy makers. It’s from China, though it’s often called Japanese. And, as you can tell, it will offer many, many blooms before the leaf buds open.

It is a slow growing thing, about six inches a year or so.

Makes you wonder if we cut it back too far last fall.

I guess we’ll find out in two or four years.

Here’s another video from last week’s visit to California. Here, the waves are rolling in on William Randolph Hearst Memorial Beach. Just across the highway and well up the hill is the Hearst Castle. They’re rather fond of the old media magnate. Gave him a nice, quite, beach too.

The Hearst family owned it all, until they gave it to the state in the 1950s.

We were only there for a short while, of course, but it looks like there’s a lot to enjoy there.

Once again it’s time for We Learn Wednesdays. Today’s is our 29th installment, and I don’t know why I’m still counting that. Anyway, I ride my bike around the county to find the historical markers via bike. Good way to see things, and it’s amusing to take pictures of sometimes important old places in funny clothes. This is the 50th marker in that effort, and I shot this one last December in a stockpiling effort.

The stockpile should last until it gets warm, and I can put some road miles in my legs. But I digress.

I digress because I have nothing.

Here’s the building.

And here’s the marker.

It’s gone on sale again just this week. It’s seemed to have been off and on the market a lot in the last several years. It’s been a mixed use rental for the last decade or so. And the building, according to property records, was built in 1888.

The web will not tell me what makes this place deserving of being on the historic register. You’d think the historic register people would put that on a site themselves. The historic register people do not.

Next week, we’ll learn a tiny bit of a long-gone social club. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.

Sometimes you run across a good obituary. Obituaries are a celebration of the living, we were taught in J-school, and sometimes the obit writers remember that. It takes a great skill to write a quality obituary, though some of them do come easier than other, prepackaged with magic or memoirs or flacks as they are. A remarkable person, a life well-lived. All of it is found in this one:

As a teenager, Mr. Greenfield was Maximilian Grünfeld, a skinny Jewish prisoner whose job was to wash the clothes of Nazi guards at the concentration camp. In the laundry room one day, he accidentally ripped the collar of a guard’s shirt. The man whipped Max in response, then hurled the garment back at the boy.

After a fellow prisoner taught Max how to sew, he mended the collar, but then decided to keep the shirt, sliding it under the striped shirt of his prison uniform.

The garment transformed his life. Other prisoners thought it signified that Max enjoyed special privileges. Guards allowed him to roam around the grounds of Auschwitz, and when he worked at a hospital kitchen, they assumed that he was authorized to take extra food.

Max ripped another guard’s uniform. This time, it was deliberate. He was creating a clandestine wardrobe that would help him survive the Holocaust.

“The day I first wore that shirt,” Mr. Greenfield wrote seven decades later, “was the day I learned clothes possess power.”

At every turn the obituary gets better and better, and you don’t say that about a lot of newspaper copy. It’s one of the best obits I’ve ever read. And is, without a doubt, the most memorable piece I’ve ever read in a fashion section. Give it a try.


19
Mar 24

I made a beach video, just for you

What day is it? What time is it? We didn’t take a red eye, but it seemed like it. I’m an amazing lightweight when it comes to being thrown off by travel, so it is not a great surprise that, a mere 36 hours removed from being on the other side of the country, and five-and-a-half degrees of a lower latitude, I’m still trying to determine my identity, and which shoe is for which foot.

Lewis and Clark would be very, very disappointed in me.

Of course, they knew nothing of time zones. They might have known about coordinate cartography. Sailors of their day certainly did. But did that really figure into the slower pace in which those hardy souls crossed the nation?

And how was their cell service when they did that, anyway? Because some places on this trip, it was surprisingly spotty, even now.

There’s a joke to be made here. Something about how one of the members of the expedition had a great data plan. I’m not convinced people really know Toussaint Charbonneau well enough for the joke to really land.

Spring is finally showing up here on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet. You can see it on the ground and in the mulch and on the ends of the little sticks that have been protruding from the bushes and trees all winter long. We took two nice little walks, in a sunny chill, around the yard yesterday to see what had popped up while we were out of town.

The peach tree, for one, is making a lovely show.

We had so many peaches last year. Gave bags and bags of them away. Ate a lot. Froze a bunch more. I look at this beautiful little flower and think, We better start eating those we froze.

Peach smoothies for days. Maybe some peach shakes and peach ice cream, too.

But first we’re going to need about 15 more degrees, day and night, please.

I had class last night, of course. There’s nothing like the first evening class after spring break to give you a sense of who is invested in the class. Everyone, I hope. They have an exam next week. And so that is what we spent the evening discussing, how the exam would work, a few tips on what to look for, a review of key terms. A few exercises.

You know what’s embarrassing? When you forget a thing right when you’re trying to make the point, and someone asks about it. It doesn’t make for the most graceful deflect ever to say, “What do you think it means?” But there I was last night, doing exactly that.

It was one of those tip-of-my-tongue moments, sure, but it was going to take a while to pull it all together. And I’d done the exact same thing in this class in our last meeting. I can’t let on that this is happening all of the time, of course.

Anyway, the students have good material with which to prepare. I hope they all do well on their test.

I’m guessing, if I spread them out evenly, there are two, maybe three weeks of videos from our west coast trip to share. If there are that many, I decided I should hastily make a California banner. So I made a banner. May as well use it.

Most of these, I think, will exist without context. I shot a lot of them thinking, this will be a nice moment that readers can use as a quick, calm, break. I was fortunate and made it to the beach. Just in case you didn’t …

That’s late afternoon on Moonstone Beach, in Cambria. The seaside village has a population of 5,678, but that’s a number for the larger, sprawling area, surely. It came up as a lumber, ranching and mercury mining town. The ranching is, one supposes, not a coincidence. The Obispeño name transalted as “Place of the horses.” Today, it feels like it has been an artist village for a good long while. It’s a lovely place. And, as you can see, the beach is quite nice as well.

Not bad for a 60 second vacation, no?

And now, to catch up on things. Or was it, to get ahead of things?

Difficult to tell after such a trip, and the accompanying jet lag. Toussaint Charbonneau would be unimpressed.


18
Mar 24

We’re back! Somehow …

We made it back from California. We were only a little late, but that worked in our favor. But that’s getting ahead of things.

I had two days worth of taco lunch, on Thursday and Friday. Also, on Friday, I did a little two-mile run. That’s two runs this week, and my first two runs of the year. I’ve been spending my time, of course, putting in base miles on the bike. All of which allows me to find ways to get to this old saw: When I see a person riding their bike, I always think, ‘Man, I wish I could ride my bike right now!’ I have never, ever seen anyone run and think, ‘Man, I wish I could go for a run right now!

My run was to the drug store. I should have bought some painkillers for my little run, but the purpose was to get some contact solution. I could have gone to a CVS four-tenths of a mile away, but that’s not a run. Not really.

Anyway, the first run this week was 1.5 miles on a beach boardwalk. This run was downtown, which is a run that, despite the red light, green light, wait for a clear intersection nature of it all, felt like it could go on for forever. Maybe those occasional breaks were why it felt that way.

I saw a bunch of friends, which was delightful. I bumped into a former coworker, who is about to leave the place where we met. She told me how difficult things have become there, which is unfortunate. But she’s excited for what’s next for her, starting next fall, which is exciting. She’s been stretched thin, it appears. Added duties, administrative issues and so on. It all sounds not good. I said, When you get there, and you’re doing just the work you’ve been hired for, the work you want to do, it’ll be a big improvement. And you will have earned that. You’ll just have to be let yourself come to realize that fact. When you do, you’re going to remember how to enjoy all of this again.

Sometimes, I sound like a sage.

The Yankee’s two presentations at the conference were great. Interesting research abounded throughout the conference, none more so than hers. We had a great dinner on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, we were up and out early. To the airport, Jeeves!

This is what happened next. The Los Angeles city government conspired to ruin everything. We’d received an email on Saturday from the car rental people warning us that construction between their lots and the airport was slowing everything down. Arrive early, they suggested. We did. Returning the car was easy. The shuttles to the airport were non-existent, stuck in traffic somewhere around wherever. This, despite an early morning flight, backed up customers at the rental car lot. On the third bus, we were able to board the bus. The driver was awesome, but she was flabbergasted. The construction project had reduced the lanes to the international airport to a minimal level. After a long, long, long time on the bus, we just got off and ran the last mile and change, backpack and suitcase in tow. (So look! Three runs in one week!)

After which, the federal government conspired to make it worse. At Terminal 5 at LAX, there are two TSA agents tasked with the important job of checking driver’s licenses. Yesterday morning, there was a man and a woman on the job. Around two corners — not counting the serpentine crown lanes — I managed to get in the woman’s line. This was good! The man’s scanner was barely working, which meant that every third passenger or so he had to walk over and borrow the woman’s gear. The woman, for her part, left her duty station three times. The time was ticking. And I missed the boarding window.

Fortunately, my flight crew was stuck in the nightmare outside, as well. And that was the only way I made that plane. When the first part of security theater had been satisfied and my ID was finally checked, an older woman came to the front of the line, asking if she could go ahead. Her flight was leaving in eight minutes and so on and so forth. Everyone was in this boat, I was sure of it. The TSA agent said she’d have to ask permission of everyone in front of her to cut the line. I knew my flight crew was still trying to fight their way in, so I invited her to break in line in front of me. With one authoritatively dismissive tone, I convinced the dismissive ID experts that she was with me.

At the take walk-around-in-your-socks portion of the security, the old woman said she’d lived here for 40 years and she’d never seen it like this. She said she, too, ran from the road. She said she was 75 years old.

She had time to tell me all of these things because the scanner image specialist left his duty station twice.

“Safety,” one of them tiredly said over and over, “is my priority.”

Somehow that explains why people kept leaving their posts.

Anyway, we made the plane, but I only made it because the flight crew had trouble getting in.

The flight was fine. Long, but short. Seemed to take an entire day, especially with jumping three time zones. On the other hand, we flew across the entire nation. Lunch was airport food on the plane, chewing quickly, hoping to avoid cooties. Dinner was from a rest stop Shake Shack at 11:30 p.m. But, hey, it’s milkshake season.

It was a great trip. Our only problem over the whole trip, as it turned out, had to do with getting home.

I have a lot of video from the trip, and that’ll be something I dole out over the next however long that takes. But I’ll give you a hint.

  

Come back, or better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed for many, many more videos from the Pacific Coast.

I shot, I dunno, maybe 15 or 20 videos that will just be Peacefully Enjoy The Moment videos. I suppose that speaks most of all to how pleasant the trip was. But I haven’t counted how many videos I have, so I’ve no idea how many and how long we’ll enjoy from that trip.

For example, I’m still adding video from our New Year’s diving trip. This one just has a lot of fish, and then a barracuda with great camera sense.

  

I’ve probably got a few more videos from that trip, and then maybe I’ll just pull out some single shots for posterity’s sake. Video runs never really end here, but this post must. I must finish my prep for this evening’s class.


5
Mar 24

Charging …

A damp and gray and glum day. It was a great day to sit inside and do not much of anything. A day to think of all of the things I have to do tomorrow, and Thursday, and Friday. It was a never do today what you can put off until tomorrow sort of day. An “I’ve had three phone calls and washed clothes and was doing housework well after midnight last night anyway,” sort of day.

Some Tuesdays are just going to be like that, right? And better it happen on a Tuesday than a Saturday or Sunday, or a Monday.

Yesterday was Monday, and that was a bit draggy early in the day. There was class prep and writing other classes and so on and so forth. I laid out the timing just precisely right for the day. Had anything come up, I would have put us behind schedule for the evening, which was still ahead of my regular schedule.

My lovely bride went to campus with me this evening. She had to address a class and also watched part of a lecture series that’s offered to students. The guest tonight was Dan Baker, the man who does PA for the Phillies, and formerly the in-stadium voice for the Eagles. He’s a Rowan grad. And they had him use his stadium voice to announce some prestigious internship appointments this evening. That was probably a thrill for the students who heard him call their name.

In my much less exciting class — how do you compete with that, really? — we talked about identity, specifically through Eugenia Siepera’s “New Media and Identity.” The class liked this one, which discusses identity and the self, Michel Foucault’s tecnologies of the self, gender and gendered technologies, ethnic and religious identities in the modern landscape.

I think this one works because the current student sees it and feels a lot of this intuitively. Also, it’s a fair amount more sophisticated than what I was taught in their shoes a few decades ago. How could it not be?

Moving from the University College of Dublin we moved to The New School in New York, with a short piece that Kate Eichhorn wrote as a lay supplement to her brilliant work about the online media environment.

My research suggests that these users aren’t outliers but part of a growing demographic of tweens and teens who are actively curating their professional identities. But should 13- or 15-year-olds feel compelled to list their after-school activities, academic honors, and test scores on professional networking sites, with photos of themselves decked out in corporate attire? And will college admissions officers and job recruiters start to dig even further back when assessing applicants—perhaps as far back as middle school? The risk is that this will produce generations of increasingly cautious individuals—people too worried about what others might find or think to ever engage in productive risks or innovative thinking.

The second potential danger is more troubling: in a world where the past haunts the present, young people may calcify their identities, perspectives, and political positions at an increasingly young age.

I got the impression that this one is something that many in my class already begun to internalize at an individual level. Getting beyond that, considering the broad, general and societal impact(s) is, perhaps, something you can only touch on until you see demonstrable examples.

That let us wrap up with Derek Thompson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, which is just brilliant.

And so what? one might reasonably ask. Aloneness is not loneliness. Not only that, one might point out, the texture of aloneness has changed. Solitude is less solitary than ever. With all the calling, texting, emailing, work chatting, DMing, and posting, we are producing unprecedented terabytes of interpersonal communication. If Americans were happy—about themselves, about their friends, about their country—then whining about parties of one would feel silly.

But for Americans in the 2020s, solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans, and especially young Americans, have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country. Teenage depression and hopelessness are setting new annual records every year. The share of young people who say they have a close friend has plummeted. Americans have been so depressed about the state of the nation for so many consecutive years that by 2023, NBC pollsters said, “We have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”

I don’t think hanging out more will solve every problem. But I do think every social crisis in the U.S. could be helped somewhat if people spent a little more time with other people and a little less time gazing into digital content that’s designed to make us anxious and despondent about the world. This young century, Americans have collectively submitted to a national experiment to deprive ourselves of camaraderie in the world of flesh and steel, choosing instead to grow (and grow and grow) the time we spend by ourselves, gazing into screens, wherein actors and influencers often engage in the very acts of physical proximity that we deny ourselves. It’s been a weird experiment. And the results haven’t been pretty.

It was interesting to watch what happened in the conversation here. People gravitated to the aloneness versus loneliness part, which is only a part of what Thompson is getting at. And, as young people living in this world, they seem to appreciate what he’s saying about the physical isolation, but the room would split and go back and forth about the value of online interactions. This is great because in the last few weeks one of the things we’ve been talking about is how that technology has removed geographic considerations. How you can find like-minded people wherever, not just on your street, in your class or at your gym. But when they read this they could also see the other side of it — and so many people are emerging with this healthy realization that there’s good and bad, too much and and too little, pros and cons. It feels like a broad thought in a sequence of semi-critical analyses. If that’s one of the four things they get out of this class this semester, I will call it a success. One of the other things is that I was, last night, able to talk about the difference between correlation and causation. What Thompson writes about is, presently, just correlative. Someone asked how much correlation does one need to see something as causal. This gave us the opportunity to briefly revisit the scientific method, and I hoped that some of this might bounce around in their ears until it can latch on to a semi-permanent memory.

If it did, that’d be a great second thing to take from the class.

The other two things are software and production-driven, and they have grades involved with those and they will work themselves out naturally.

These were just the next few video clips off my camera from our recent dive trip, but they line up and feel like a best of collection. There’s some great sponge, your standard issue reef fish, a nice long overhead view of a ray, a regrettably wide shot of a small sea turtle, a close up of the always hypnotic anemone and a closeup with a shark.

It’s amazing to watch a fish or a shark swim along and, when someone gets to close, they put a stop to that. And, in the case of that shark, it was just one big whip of that powerful body to create the distance.

We didn’t check in on the cats yesterday which, despite the many awesome SCUBA photos and videos, remains the most popular feature on the site. We should do that now.

Phoebe just wants your attention. She will jump on any surface and reach out to grab you, if necessary. Unfortunately, that silly portrait feature was highlighted when this happened.

How could you not want to pet her at every opportunity? Look at this face.

Poseidon, not to be outdone, is also a paper bag model.

But if there’s no bag available, he’ll just find some blankets and make himself cozy.

No idea why he, a strictly indoor cat, thinks he wants to go outside all the time, when he needs to be warmer inside the house constantly.

As you can see, the cats are doing just fine. We’re all just waiting for the sun to return, but everyone here is having a great time on the inner coastal plain — where the heavy land and the green sands meet.


4
Mar 24

An important story of diving strength and grace and power

We held our first backyard activity of the new year this weekend. We put a fire in the fire pit.

As ever, the order is tender, kindling, firewood.

  

It took a while, because someone put wet wood — and not the kindling and firewood I’ve been storing out of the elements for just this purpose — in the firepit, but pine straw is eager to burn and when I got enough of that in there you could hear the water sizzling away until, finally, we got those relaxing looking coals to stare at.

It was a good way to mark the weekend, a great way to start the outdoor season, which should run right up until December if last year was any indication. March to December? I’d take that, happily. It was sunny again today, but rainy or damp, and cool, for the rest of the week. We’re just waiting for the mercury to climb a few degrees higher.

OK, here’s the last photo from our recent trip to Cozumel. I’ve rationed these out for two months, and that’s better than I expected. (Don’t worry, we’re going to be able to stretch out the remaining videos for a good long while, too.)

This is the photo where I once again thank our trip planner and my dive buddy. Dive buddies serve a lot of roles. They point out stuff you might have overlooked. They help verify the stories you come back with. These days, of course, they help document the adventure. And they also help ensure your safety. (Or whatever.)

And I want to tell you a story about my dive buddy. In Cozumel, you do a lot of drift diving. You drop off the boat, go to the depth of the dive profile and just let the current take you … that way. The boat above follows your bubbles and picks up in another place. When you do it right, this is peaceful, easy, diving. It is one day diving. You learn quickly that, even on a light current day that the water is in control. And so you make your peace with it. You’re going this direction. You’ll see some great things. You’ll miss some things. C’est la plongée. Or, I guess, eso es bucear.

You don’t swim against the current.

So we’re going along on this one dive. The six divers and the dive master, Max, an Italian who has worked and dove all over the world. We’re all stretched out in a line, lingering here, drifting there. I’m about the fourth one back. My lovely bride is one or two people ahead of me.

Coming the other direction is a beautiful eagle ray, which migrates through that region in January and February. You see it, you admire it, you swim on. My dive buddy turns around and swims after it to capture video footage. Max and the other four divers are impressed. She’s swimming against the current, probably 100 yards, closing the distance on a creature designed for this environment.

Max this worldly, long professional, very cool ciao Italian man, looks at me his eyes as wide as his mask. The expression for “What?” works in any language, in any part of the world, under any body of water. I shrugged and nodded.

A little while later, we happen upon a turtle, and that tortuga is also swimming opposite us. The Yankee again turns, closes the distance, passes the turtle, and gets in front of it for another photo or video opportunity. We’re at the front of the group this time, and so she swims upstream past the other five people, who are in disbelief. When she finally turned to join us once more, they were still watching. I gestured to her to show the muscles. Everybody else needed to see the gun show.

And, look, she wasn’t even breathing hard.

After the dive, Max and I are the last ones in the water, waiting to climb on the boat. He said to me that he’d never seen anyone do that, and certainly not twice. I guess he’d never been diving with a varsity athlete, a three-time Ironman, a five-time USA National Championship triathlete and a FINA world championship swimmer.

It was, without a doubt, impressive, but not surprising. Not to me. I’ve been surprised by all of it before. And I need all of the air in my tank just to keep up with her.

We’re still working on her fire-building skills.