Computers arrived today. Sixteen pallets of them. Ninety-six machines. We unloaded the pallets and took the individual computer boxes out of the larger ones. We put them in temporary storage, waiting for the holidays or some other slow time to install them in our building. (Slow time. The next slow time is scheduled to be three weeks spread out over next summer.) Also, we have 80-something more machines due in next week.
Computers are strenuous exercise around the office. We have six computer lab style classrooms and the giant computer lab.
I remember when the now old ones went in as new ones. It’s an experience that lives with you. How the guy in charge of all of those machines — and their software and the many updates — is able to keep it all straight in his head never ceases to amaze me.
Here’s the first sports show that they shot last night. It’s all the highlights fit to highlight.
The second show will be up on Friday or so.
And now I have to record an interview for the podcast. And then I’ll produce it. And I’ll share it with you, and the rest of the world, tomorrow.
(Update: It was a great subject, and an interesting interview. I think you’re going to like it.)
Tonight it was the sports group in the studio. The producers came to me and talked about a special program they were considering and they teased out all the necessary details. They wanted to walk about the health of women’s sports. They had topics, subtopics, timing, guests, all of it figured out. They wanted to break their normal routines and do something they felt was important. They took the initiative and those are the days that make the rest of the days worth it. One of the shows looked like this.
It was timely, topical and pointed conversation about where we are in women’s sports, and why, and where we should be. They were excited to do it, and excited afterward, as they should be. Every episode deserves this much gusto.
Also, since I have mentioned this show in this space in the last week, we can make one more historical note.
This weekend we were in beautiful, bucolic Selma, Indiana, a rural community just outside exotic Muncie, which is in Indiana. And so it was that they named the event Ironman Indiana. It’s a bit of a one-off from the Ironman company. A lot of races were shut down last year. A lot of events didn’t get the chance to make money; a lot of outstanding athletes didn’t get to do their thing. So, this year, they decided “Let’s run a half Ironman and a full Ironman on the same day in the middle of a pandemic!”
We drove up Friday evening, because The Yankee was in this race. She did her packet pickup in Muncie, indoors but there was no one around. We went to the hotel(s) — and more on that in a moment. Saturday morning she got up very early and started the race.
Here she is after the 2.4 mile swim, and the conclusion of her 112 mile bike ride. Still a great big smile …
This is just outside the transition area, so she’s slowed down enough to allow us a glimpse as she’s preparing for the run.
Again, a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile run, and then you wrap up a light day’s work with a 26.2 mile run, which she’s starting here.
At some point on the run it becomes a mental thing as much as a physical thing. You’ve been out there for hours. You’ve surpassed your longest workouts. It can be tedious or boring or painful or entertaining. And as this course was a series of out-and-backs, you only saw your personal cheering sections a few times. But at least the weather was nice and mild today, and downright cool after the last of the rain had passed through. Really, it was a bit of everything, and so much of this particular course is in such a delightfully rural area that the only people you would see for long stretches of time are other athletes and the occasional aid station. You spend a lot of time in your head. A lot of time.
And yet, having done half the run, 13.1 miles down and 13.1 to go, she’s still got that big smile.
Later in the evening, having slashed through the water and ground on the pedals and pounded the pavement, the finish line.
She finished, got her medal, took the publicity photos, grabbed a roast beef sandwich and sat on a bench to collect herself with her coach and his wife. And then we carried all of the tools of the Ironman trade to the car. Then she shivered as we drove back to the hotel.
We had two hotels this weekend. The first place had to put some rooms out of order, which we’re guessing, means they overbooked. But they were nice enough to reserve us a room in a much less nice hotel across town.
The sign out front inspires a lot of confidence.
But! We got a room with a king size bed, better than we were expecting in the first hotel. This place was undergoing renovations, however, and smelled funny. It probably always smells funny.
It was a smell that was even weirder through your mask.
So we settled in there Friday. On Saturday, the desk manager says to me “Checkout is at 11.”
“No sir, it is not. The other hotel booked us for two nights.”
He had our little note from the other hotel right there on the desk. He was waiting on me.
“It says here one night.”
“Yes it does,” I said. “And the attendant there assured me this was a typo on a form letter and that our visit with you was for two nights.”
“OK, let me call them.”
“Yes, please do call them. Call Chris, the manager. Call Chris at home.
He calls, asks for Chris. Chris isn’t there, because it is Saturday on one of the busiest weekends in their town. Why would the manager of a teaching hotel be on hand?
He asks for whoever was close by. He gets put on hold.
Then the desk manager gentleman turns to me and nicely says “I know this isn’t your fault.”
I said, “And I know this isn’t your fault. I also know I have two nights with you.”
At which point he hangs up and says “They were taking too long. I’m going to make them pay for it anyway.”
Which is where I say, “And when I come back tonight, my stuff is still going to be in the room, and not on the curb, and this key is going to still work, right?”
Which is a question I asked him two different ways, just to be sure we had an understanding. And we did.
You put that out of your head for the day, but after the triathlon it’s a half-hour ride back to the hotel and you’re wondering the whole way: Is our stuff still going to be in the room? Is this key still going to work? It’ll be a whole new shift of people working in the hotel this time of night. What if Robert didn’t pass along this information, and we’re tired and hungry and cold and it’s late and we’re also sweaty? No one wants a scene in their smelly, renovating hotel, in front of people putting “cigerettes” out in the flower pots.
But the key worked, our things were still in the room. The three-time Ironman had a nice soothing shower and a snack and I said, “Since we’re safely in the room I can tell you this story now … ” which she laughed at until she fell asleep.
And on Sunday, we left exotic Muncie, got a quick breakfast and drove back to Bloomington. Sunday was a low key day spent resting and cleaning. Today was a Monday; tomorrow will be a full Tuesday.
Friday / IU / television / Twitter / video — Comments Off on It is once more Friday, let us away to … the Institute! 1 Oct 21
Please enjoy social scientists talking about their work, and the opportunity that I have to share a bit of it with you, the casual viewer.
A sweeping survey examined people's emotions when they consider taking climate action. @IUMediaSchool's @nathanielgeiger says previous research has yielded inconclusive results.
How do video game characters get their defining characteristics? @IUMediaSchool alumna @jess_tompkins_ and Professor Nicole Martins took a deep, qualitative look.
Some 5,000 Americans at zoos, aquariums and parks were surveyed by @IUMediaSchool's @nathanielgeiger (et al.), for a project on bettering climate change communication.
And if that’s not enough video content with which to wind down your week, here’s more quality teevee programming the IUSTV crowd has recently produced that I haven’t yet shared here. This is the late night comedy- variety- experimental- awkward- affirmative- comedy- show. It’s a comedy.
“Always Be Recording. Always.”
Here’s the morning show. It’s their first episode of the season, and they have two brand new co-hosts. Still a good way to start your mid-morning, if you ask me.
This is a brand new show. They’re showing off video works of other students, and talking to the creators. It’s a pretty cool concept!
And that’s how we’ll get to the weekend. Have a lovely one!
Let us talk about sports shows. Here are two of them. First, this is your standard issue updates-from-the-desk, reports-from-the-field highlight show, Hoosier Sports Nite.
And this is The Toss Up, your standard issue sports talk show. Four people sitting and talking at great depth, and with some degree of fandom, about the upcoming Major League Baseball playoffs.
Now, The Toss Up dates to 2016, when I got here. It has, more or less, always been shot as a show in-sequence. They do little pitches to another person for a sidebar, or a package, and they will sometimes shoot those out of order, but, generally it just makes sense to shoot it in that straightforward way. It has always felt natural and done in realtime, over the course of the four regular hosts it has had in those six years.
The first show above, Hoosier Sports Nite, is 11 years (or so) old. It has always, at least in my experience, had elements produced out of sequence. This means that if the anchor “pitches” to a reporter in another part of the studio, it’s an editing trick. The reporter part was done earlier, or later, and they just put it together in post-production. There’s nothing wrong with this. It happens in the industry all the time on programs that aren’t live. (Sometimes, for example, the person doing the pitching is live and the person catching the pitch is on tape.) There are different ways and reasons for doing that. They’re all legitimate. From our perspective, it usually has a lot to do with practical reasons like time, or our experience and so on. (We’re all still learning in this shop, of course.)
So imagine my pride when, last night, they produced Toss Up as they normally do — timing segments and getting in and out in a logical way and leaving me only two or three constructive criticism points to make — and then they did Hoosier Sports Nite straight through, a show produced truly live-to-tape. They did two bits over to correct small errors, also not unusual, but it’s all there as one live show.
I stopped by their post-production meeting to tell them so. To thank them and congratulate them for their work. It’s no small thing, doing a live show, and they’ve been building to this for a while.
When they rolled out the first episode of The Toss Up, the talk show, this semester, I noticed they’d changed the last of the original bits of the show. I remember all the components well, as it was the first show* I helped IUSTV bring to life. Every year something would change on this particular show. The logo improved. They added lower thirds or sharper segments. The last thing to go was the music. And that got updated this year. The guy that really brought this show to life, Jacques, he’d be pleased with the program today. He specifically wanted to start this show and give it to the people that came after him and let them run with it. And they have! The music was really his thing. He’d probably like that his music stuck around the longest from the original show. But now, aside from the name of the show and one line at the very end, they’ve organically grown the premise of his project, just as he’d hoped.
When I was watching them shoot Sports Nite last night, and talking about it and congratulating them after that, I was thinking of the through line of that show. Jacques was the first sports director I knew here. He graduated and then came Ben. Ben produced and improved those shows, graduated, and is now a producer at ESPN. When he moved to Bristol there came Auston. He produced and improved those shows, graduated, and went into the local sports writing business. The next year Michael was the sports director. He ran the shows, had his senior year in the studio cut short by Covid closing campus, but they grew a ton nevertheless, and he’s now doing sports at his hometown TV station in Iowa. So Drew and Jackson moved into the sports director roles after Michael. Drew graduated and is doing news in Fort Wayne now. Another Michael came along to help Jackson out and he just graduated and is on the market. Jackson will soon be graduating. Each of those guys have always told me what they liked about what the previous sports director did, and what they wanted to do differently. And as I stood there, beaming with a little pride, I could see all of that distinctly running through the night’s work. Those sports directors, and all the women and men working on those shows, were a part of making that particular episode a special little effort.
The thing is, all of this hard work is foundational. And, sometimes, you necessarily have to wait to see the development. It just keep building, though. From here it’ll grow through a room full of talented young folks learning from today’s upperclassmen, because those sports directors I mentioned have always aspired to raise the bar. It’s all cumulative. If all those now-graduated people had a mysterious little chill, or felt the hairs stand up on the necks, last night, I suspect they’ll get a more profound sensation when we have our next big moment. The thing is, it won’t be long now.
*Since I’ve been their adviser — and helper and cheerleader and all the other things — we have created seven new shows from the very air. Five of them are still running.
