Tuesdays are full days spent in the office, pecking away at emails or this and that and then an evening spent in the studio watching students do their thing.
Our two anchors on the news show tonight, Lauren and Amelia:
It was Amelia’s first time on the desk. She did a fine job. You could hear her improving in each story, which was pretty cool.
On the pop entertainment show, they had on a special guest. Alex, on the left here, is talking with Brooke:
Brooke graduated from IU last semester and now has her own soap making business, 12 Months Soaps, which has a goal of celebrating black history throughout the year — so a good February interview. And Alex is a good interviewer.
Also, the soap smells great. Shame you can’t get that across on television.
After I parked this morning I walked by this tree on the way into the office this morning:
At lunch time, I saw this tree:
Different trees, of course. Different species, even. But they’re just a block away. That was pretty much the day, outside.
The sun was shining, probably for about 15 minutes altogether, this morning on my way into the office. At least I had those bright, pretty skies for the brief time I could spend outside this morning. It was gray later. I didn’t look for other tree fruits on my way out. We’d progressed to a full on misting event as day turned into evening. It rained tonight, so we ran the gamut.
Gamut is an old English word, stemming from medieval Latin. It originally had to do with a musical note, but turned into an expression that discusses the entire musical scale.
On my way to the car I was also thinking about this song:
That’s a cover on an album of covers that won a grammy for folk album of the year in the early 1990s. The song was written by Janis Ian. Janis Ian is still playing, some 50 years into her career. And she seems like a pretty hilarious grandmother on Twitter, too. She had 34 dates in 2015 and has four booked for this summer, according to her website. And, look, here they are, Ian and Griffith together, in 1993:
Anyway, that song, for 20-some years, has seemed to me like every flatland piece of America in the 20th century.
Here’s something from the 19th century, December 11, 1889 in The New York Times:
That was the “then,” portion of the story. Which brings us to the turn of the century, William McKinley’s America:
“Thus a heterogeneous mass of people poured into this part of the Northwest Territory, good and bad being pretty evenly mixed. The Southerners were sound material, yet the bad among them were very bad indeed.”
Let’s discuss them!
“Today their descendants — many of them, at least — are the typical Hoosiers that one hears of in the newspapers. They carefully elude the refining touch of education and even as far as possible the census taker.”
If they’d just talk to the poor downtrodden census taker, we mean, he’s just some geek we found in Ohio, then everything else would be better off for those people in Indiana. Poor buggers.
“Down in some of the State’s southern counties they are at their worst.”
Ain’t that always the way, dear reader?
“In Brown County, an almost impenetrable section of hills, they are in their glory.”
Less than one percent of the state lives there today. But the county only reports a poverty rate of 11.4 percent, with 22 percent having at least one college degree. The arts and being outdoors getaway destination are the chief industries there these days.
“They would be as much at home in the mountains of Tennessee and Alabama as in the Hoosier hill ranges.”
Come again?
“They are indifferent farmers, and have no interest in the world beyond the hog quotations in the St. Louis or Cincinnati market.”
I could go plow that field, but whatever. ‘Didja you hear ’bout what Mertle’s sow said in Missourah ‘other day?
“But, as if to mark the difference, the adjoining county of Bartholomew contains a different people.”
Now, Bartholomew is about the same size, and a full 28 percent of them have college degrees and there’s an 11.9 percent poverty rate. Cummins Diesel is based there. Chuck Taylor, the sneaker guy, was from there, just like Vice President Mike Pence and NASCAR champ Tony Stewart. A popular cartoonist, a software CEO and the former president of thee National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues all call Bartholomew County home. In the 1900 census, taken in the months just after this article, Bartholomew was the mean population center of the U.S. Except that was probably incorrect because of those lyin’, census avoidin’ Hoosiers.
“They, too, are among the Southerners who came to Indiana, but they have kept pace with time’s advance, and are thrifty farmers or active tradespeople.”
Not at all like their slovenly cousins in Brown County.
“Similar contrasts might be pointed out in other sections.”
You go elsewhere the differences are the same. We suppose. We can’t be sure, so we’re speaking in generalities. Not like we have the Internet, yet.
“Even in going south from Indianapolis for a ride of an hour on the railroad one encounters the original Hoosier in his worst aspect.”
You get out of the city, God be with you. We’ve seen it. Have you ever been to Pennsylvania?
Hard to imagine exactly who The Times liked back then. Odd that so many people still think they have such a narrow view of things.
I got in at about 10 p.m. last night, just in time for frozen pizza and then bed. Woke up a half hour earlier than usual this morning. I grabbed a bit of breakfast on the way into the office and, when I got there, I loaded up a cart worth of stuff to send to the surplus store.
If you need a handful of old standard definition television cameras or other outdated gear, I know where you can get it.
After that, the morning show:
The two ladies on the right are national champion cheerleaders. They told me it gets harder every year. They’d know. One has two championships, the other has three. Their team has won five of the last six titles. Harder every year. But, for one, her cheer career is almost over. She wants to work in that business, perhaps as a coach. The other is planning to go to medical school.
So this was the second episode of the new morning show. It looks promising and you’ll see it here when they upload it.
I pretty much lived in the studio today. After the morning show there was anchor training and then some other folks came in and used the room for some interviews. We did critiques of the news shows and then I went back to the studio for more of those interviews and a series of pesky emails and so on.
When the day was over I headed to the grocery store. On the way I found a local country station, a 3,800 watt shop with a liner that says “Fox News is coming up next, after this country classic!”
And then Elvis played. “Devil in Disguise.” Even in 1963, with his powers not yet fading, saw that song go top ten on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B charts. That was no country song. Neither was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” but it showed up a few songs later. There was also Linda Ronstadt and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and there was nothing wrong with any of that. But Elvis? Or, that Elvis?
He had 54 hits on the country charts, including 11 number ones. Altogether, he stayed on the country chart for almost 12 years. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of contradiction on the individual song data online, but this was Elvis’ most successful country song:
Thirty-nine weeks on the country charts. It was written by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers wrote it, two more Mississippi boys. It was covered by everyone so it is basically a standard. Should have heard that on the radio.
Oh, which reminds me, I met Elvis once:
Barbecue restaurant, out in the pine tree woods of Georgia, like you do.
Working at IU, I have a free subscription to the New York Times and other publications. I could read all of the time and not read it all. And that’s just in today’s world. I also have access to the Times Machine which is more than a century and a half of old news, and a reasonably decent search engine.
So I searched. And one of the first things I found was the supposed origin of the word hoosier.
This is one of the stories that gets around. Truth is, no one really knows where the word comes from. There are some scholars still working on trying to figure it out.
Everyone is trying to figure something out, though, I suppose.
We were figuring out a sports show tonight:
And I watched this documentary on the history of music in Memphis. And if you like music, the history of music, or the South, or just watching joyous people do things they enjoy …
That is a film worth your time.
IU / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on An assortment of Wednesday things 1 Feb 17
Do you ever wonder where the days go? They start off bright, or dark, or overcast, as they do. And then you sit down to do some task, and then stand up to take care of an errand, or go over to handle a chore, and then the day is almost over.
Sometimes I am aware of the passage of time only because I realize how quickly it seems to be going. I need more windows in my life, I guess.
And, perhaps, naps.
I did a thing. IUS does a sports show and from that they’ve created a talk show, The Toss Up, which is usually pretty darn smart. And after they tape that show we sit around and talk about it, and a lot of great subtopics appear. One night I said, we should do an after-party. Just a live stream where you fill out the rest of the conversation. A more casual and funny thing. Now we only need a name.
And someone said, “The show is The Toss Up. At the end you say “Toss it up, see if we can catch it.”
Which led to The Catch:
That was the first one. Also, I threw the wadded up paper back into the shot at the end.
I also took a selfie in the reflection of the lens of the jib camera:
And after we were done with recording the show, and the after-show, we had some studio time left, so I grabbed a few people and we had a little anchor practice:
Before you know it, they’ll be off doing cool work. But for now, I stand there thinking “How cool is this, that you can do this? And how cool is it that, at 8:45 on a Wednesday night, you want to?”
This is a 1979 SI cover. Or an illustration on a poster. I found the real one online, I might have to pick it up:
And now, because it is 10 p.m. and I feel these things these days, I’ll probably go read myself to sleep.
