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A podcast, a video and 11 photos in between

There’s a lot here, owing to catching up from a full weekend. And it doesn’t at all get into the three-hour tin whistle concert we performed on Saturday. There’s a lot here.

We’re all from somewhere is the general theme of the show we produced today. It’s about a reporter who is using public records to look up the immigration histories of people who are lately very much anti-immigration. But most of us have family that started somewhere else. My old friend and former co-worker Justin Thurman of the USA Today Network told us about the story:

What’s funny is that Justin and his wife, when they tell me stories about their families, they sound exactly like my family. Just good old fashioned country folks, salt of the earth types. So much so that I have made a joke with them that we will one day find out we are related. And then as I learned more about my family history, it turns out that at one point my family was just a town or two over from theirs.

My family has some English and some Dutch and a few other things. One branch can be traced back to the War of the Roses, another apparently back to the Mayflower and still another group seems to know its way back to the 16th century. We’re all from somewhere.

Here are some photos I took of a walk we took yesterday.

A duck out at a frozen Monroe Lake:

Ice on scrubby brush:

I like photos of people at a distance, in silhouette. Sometimes the angles are such that you can’t see what they are doing, and so I wonder. I wonder what they are thinking, where they were before they got there, and where they might be heading after this. And I wonder about my wondering from a distance:

You don’t often see fog hang around until afternoon on a sunny day:

And then the sun turns the frost to droplets:

I think the birds like that a bit better. Warmer feet:

Here’s a picture of a vine holding a stick:

And a video I made:

A bit of the day's adventures at #Monroe Lake, #Bloomington, #Indiana, with @lmrsmith.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Jan 28, 2018 at 2:35pm PST

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Instagram / Monday / photo / podcast / Twitter / video — Comments Off
22
Jan 18

Our fingers walk somewhere else

This is new from earlier today. Indianapolis Star sports writer Zach Osterman joined me to talk about soccer, the nature of sports dynasties and a bit about how The New York Times is covering sports in Spain.

I don’t think I put this here last week. Here it is now:

‪Allie's snow video. #FamousOnTheInternet‬ #TheBlackCat

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on Jan 15, 2018 at 9:33am PST

This arrived today:

It has a lot of numbers, and a lot of information. It could use a few coupons. And I guess the time for spunky defiance has passed. The upper righthand corner is a sad concession to the times.

We didn’t get one last year. I’m not sure why we received one today, but I feel like I should hold on to it. One day the art inside will be humorous, at least. And we’ll be able to look back, in 30 or so years, at a few more industries that have disappeared. But maybe the phone book will make a comeback by then. Maybe

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Someone is going to have to index our social and biomedia pages.

photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
9
Jan 18

Still flowering

The flowers I picked up last Friday? They still looked great this morning:

Which, I don’t know how you’re supposed to estimate the value of a bouquet, but I turned down the options at the first grocery store I went to that day because the flowers in their stand were running for $8. There was nothing wrong with the flowers, but they don’t have any actual floral department there, or anyone pretending to be a florist. Someone just ships in the finished bouquet. And that’s fine, but it makes you wonder how long they’ve been there. Plus, I figured, since I was going to the other, larger store too, and since they have an actual floral department staffed with people at least pretending to be florists — and perhaps some legitimate florists, too — I would find better options and maybe some fresher cuts. It is a bigger store, you see.

And at that store I had options aplenty. There was this cooler and that wall, and this bundle bin thing in between and in that bin there were bunches of flowers of one variety and several, all wrapped up in that crinkly, premium cellophane that feels substantial and let’s you, as the consumer, think you’re getting a great deal. And you were! Almost all of the flowers were less than the $8 at the other store. But you have to be careful, because not all of these bundles are the same price. And this wasn’t for a special day, but a Friday, so there was no need to go crazy here.

So I spent about five or six bucks on those things and they’ve been sitting on the bar in the kitchen since Friday evening and aren’t showing any real signs of giving up yet. So I guess I got a good deal on those.

And of course I know how to estimate the value of a bouquet. The Yankee saw them and smiled and thanked me and gave me a hug and a kiss and those flowers were a steal, and I should go back and thank the florists at the great big, ridiculous grocery store.

Like I’m going in there again anytime soon.

Here, watch this. It is rather amusing:

Now that makes the second time Forrest Gump has come up in conversation today. And somewhere along the way I wondered, Has anyone turned that into a horror movie yet?

Once again, the web provides.

Friday / IU / photo / television / video — Comments Off
8
Dec 17

Last show of the semester

My group, IUSTV, the student television station, has been in the studio some 56 times this semester. Not that I’d count that sort of thing. This morning was the last show of the term, and we wrapped production on a two-season run of a morning show. Here’s the producer, one of the hosts and a guest:

There’s been good, there’s been some really good. There have been a few weird things, and a lot of of people working pretty hard and, hopefully, having a little fun, too. You can see this last show, here:

Sometimes the best camera is the one you don’t have

These photos are just a reminder to me to carry and use my real camera more.

Oh sure, my phone is a fantastic piece of technology. It does many interesting and useful and cool things. Plus it is a phone! And has games! But if I had been carrying my DSLR when I left the building for a chilly lunchtime hour I wouldn’t have had to fake the depth of field here:

And I could have taken a proper macro. And the picture, despite my having to pull out the media card and plug it into a reader and plug that into the computer, would look better.

…

Excuse me. I got distracted. You see, being the first of the month, that means I had to create a new subdirectory on the site for these photos. And that reminded me that I needed to do the monthly cleaning of the desktop of my laptop. And that takes some time. There’s the unstacking, the reminiscing, the categorizing, filing and trashing. It takes a while.

What? You don’t clean your desktop regularly? Or are you saying monthly is too long to go in-between?

Yes, I always clean mine at the beginning of the month. And then, a few days from now, I’ll do the routine, monthly backing up of my phone. Unless I forget again, for something like the fourth time in a row.

I recently discovered the Chris Gethard show. And I was so glad to see Tig Notaro, who is absolutely brilliant, appear on this episode:

Here’s a cool backgrounder on that show:

And from there you can go down the rabbit hole at your leisure. But before you do … I was sitting on the sofa this evening, having one of those moments where the feeling is just right. This was that moment that you want to hang on to because the memory is the kind you’d like to retrieve from time to time, when you need to remember that you can find contentment in nothing.

The Yankee was doing something in the kitchen and listening to Pandora and Jay Farrar was singing and it reminded me of May 1, 1998.

Twenty-ish years ago @AmyRay came on stage at Midtown, having just watched @sonvoltmusic. "God bless those guys," she said.

Tonight, @JayFarrarMusic is drifting in from the other room.

She was right then, she's right now.

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) November 1, 2017

I had to look it up, that was May 1, 1998. Tonight’s moment was a moment populated by the memory of one sentence, said as an aside, into a microphone 19-and-a-half years ago, to the day.