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movies / photo / podcast / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
22
Sep 15

You will never see John Cage Travolta the same again

Views from a ride I had this weekend:

It was one of those rides where you do a few things surprising, while not doing other things. This is not a disappointment. You huff a little, you sweat a little. You might think it is a bit late in the year for that sort of thing, but you see that sun sinking and you realize you notice that it is falling earlier. And that you noticed that is important, because you know you’ll soon wish for more days when it was warm like that, and you had scenes like this:

Here’s a good read. The Spiritual Path to Kona:

Lantz has raised more than $100,000 for charities over the course of his 13 IRONMAN races, but his focus isn’t just on the money. “I always pick a person who needs added inspiration in their life to go with me on the race,” he explains. He laminates a small picture of the person to carry with him on the course, proudly holds the picture up in his own finisher photo, and then gets a keepsake from the race to give to the person. “I want them to have something to remind them of their worth in the eyes of God, and my love for them,” says Lantz.

One such person was Josh Lucio, a boy with NF1 (neurofibromatosis Type 1) from Mesa, Ariz. “What Josh has had to endure is far more challenging than doing an IRONMAN,” says Lantz. “Despite his severe scoliosis and having tumors around his heart, he is a positive human being and a warrior. If I was able to play a small part in helping him stay focused and healthy, then I’ve used my IRONMAN journey to bless another.”

Lantz raced for Josh at IRONMAN Lake Tahoe, struggling to make it over the finish line before the 17-hour cutoff. “I had to finish for Josh at all costs,” Lantz recalls. “He watched me cross the line from his house.”

Allow me to make you rethink the entire second half of your 1997.

Face/Off came out in June of that year. And now I’m going to shake it all up. What if they were miscast? What if Travolta was originally Castor Troy and Cage was FBI agent Sean Archer, and they switched?

In the inevitable remake, I vote for Robert Pattinson versus Taylor Lautner.

Podcasts! Here are two of them. First, looking around the SEC.

And, second, trying to unwrap the Auburn enigma while looking at foreboding statistics:

Chadd there was my first radio mentor. Great guy. Learned a lot from him. Still do.

links / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
21
Sep 15

On design, tea and today’s quality of life

I have a friend who is a designer. Specifically an architecture, communicative environment, and product design specialist. Basically he creates things, and judges the rest of the things. I think that’s what he does. Interesting fellow. Full of explanations for how things work, why they work and, sometimes, how things ought to work.

He’s the sort that, when you talk to him enough, you start trying to imagine what he’d say about this handgrip or the size of that door knob or the spacing of those signs. It is the shared experience of understanding his experience, while having no qualifications whatsoever to match his experience.

if you’ve ever seen a photograph of a right angle sidewalk and the path worn in the grass cutting the corner labeled “Design” and “User experience” then you understand that. I felt like that today:

Tea

So I sent him that picture. And he simply wrote back “Like there’s need for such a thing as un-sweet tea.” Which I took to mean, “There’s no need to wax on about the employee addition of non-linear, open-manipulated, closed-environment design systems using upward communication for uncertainty avoidance. Let’s just say we only need one, you know, for the real tea.”

Which is a hard argument to overcome, as far as I can tell.

I will watch every one of these I see, because they are all amazing and unique and wonderful and provide the glimpse of young people that we all need from time to time. And this one is local:

I bet you didn’t know you needed a modular Nerf gun. You need a modular Nerf gun.

Not because of that, but … We’re Living Through the Greatest Period in World History:

The problem, the doctor said, is that these advances happen slowly over time, so you probably don’t hear about them. If cancer survival rates improve, say, 1% per year, any given year’s progress looks low, but over three decades, extraordinary progress is made.

Compare health-care improvements with the stuff that gets talked about in the news — NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell interrupted a Congresswoman last week to announce Justin Bieber’s arrest — and you can understand why Americans aren’t optimistic about the country’s direction. We ignore the really important news because it happens slowly, but we obsess over trivial news because it happens all day long.

Expanding on my belief that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, here are 50 facts that show we’re actually living through the greatest period in world history.

Unfortunate as it is when someone has to visit a doctor for a procedure, I’m always interested to hear about the latest thing and the faster recuperation or the newest therapy. Everything, as Louis C.K. says, is amazing:

movies / Thursday / video — Comments Off
10
Sep 15

I’m BFFs with a cult movie star

Yesterday Variety reported that Ronda Rousey is going to play Dalton in a re-make-imagining-production of Road House. I’m the kind of guy that finds Road House on television and has to watch it. I am firmly in the camp of people that love the film. I think it was all the roundhouse kicks.

Anyway, I said this is a great thing, if they keep the “Be Nice,” speech.

Marshall Teague, who played Jimmy, the antagonist’s big heavy, favorited my tweet. And then he played along for a series of three or four more tweets. He did an interview about the news, too. This is awesome:

Teague is staying busy. He’s been doing a lot of TV and has two movies, Road to the Well and Hardin this year. Next year he’ll appear in Oil Run and Divorce Texas Style. He’s got 115 credits to his name and somehow I’ve seen a half dozen of them.

football / Friday / podcast / video — Comments Off
4
Sep 15

Very quickly

Because this is the Friday before a three-day weekend. We’re not going to bog down such a thing like a three-day weekend with needless detail. So two quick things, and then off you go.

First, Samford opened their 2015 football season last night and debuted the Chris Hatcher era. The new coach had a big success. Here’s a video package the athletics department put together.

Not a bad start to their campaign.

My colleague Clay Carey and I recorded this podcast this morning. It is a good one, where Carey talks about two related stories from The Washington Post featuring small towns, data journalism and the importance of the in-person experience of journalism.

I’m going to make him a regular guest, I think.

Now, let’s all go have a great weekend.

I do not know what is happening. / links / podcast / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
2
Sep 15

All of our meanwhiles

Here is a podcast I recorded today with Trussville Tribune publisher Scott Buttram. He tells us about a sparsely attended secession rally in Montgomery. We wind up touching on whether things like this should be covered and the art of providing your audience with an even-handed report. It is a good conversation, check it out:

Meanwhile, I saw this video over lunch, and immediately identified with the kid:

Meanwhile, here’s your “educators” story of the day. New York School Wants to Block Student With Down Syndrome on 1st Day:

The president of the Westhampton Beach Board of Education did not responded to ABC News’ request for comment. But in a letter sent to The Southampton Press by school board member Suzanne M. Mensch and obtained by ABC News, Mensch wrote she was “extremely disheartened by the Killoran family’s repeated public efforts to bully the Westhampton Beach School District into developing an educational program for their son” and that “Westhampton Beach has not been a party to this discussion” regarding Aiden’s placement.

I think that stands all by itself. Mean ol’ family bullies.

Meanwhile, these stories about cutting-edge technology solving archeological problems keep cropping up. If it didn’t have some extremely expensive laboratory equipment involved you’d think they were just making things up as they go. Mostly because they are. And why not? Silver scans solve mystery of Jamestown graves:

The coffins were long gone, victims of decay, but the coffin nails remained. The scientists knew of the tradition of burying important people in the chancel—and two important clues clarified the mystery further.

One was a small, sealed silver box that had been placed on top of one of the coffins, as evidenced by wood fibers preserved on the bottom of the box. The other was silver thread found in one of the graves.

But the team from the Jamestown Rediscovery archaeological project was left with a conundrum: how to use these valuable clues to reveal the identities of the people in the graves without destroying the artifacts?

Meanwhile, from the Department of Things Change, Obviously: Millennial Travel Habits Force Tourism Bureaus to Shift Strategy:

Millennials at destination marketing organizations are pushing senior leadership to develop more innovative digital communications and more experiential sales efforts targeting both the leisure travel and meetings sectors.

Especially on the digital side, many of these younger professionals feel that their youth and social media expertise can be better leveraged to create more compelling social media and content marketing outreach for their organizations.

[…]

“I think it’s important for Millennials to point out to their senior leadership that the intent behind these campaigns is not just to do something fun,” says Spencer. “Of course, it was fun, but there was a strategy behind it and a lot of ROI. We wanted to get folks excited about Cleveland as a great place to visit, and we achieved that with a great outcome.”

Stack dimes.

After I’d had all the fun I could with class and podcasts and emails and reading and directing the typical traffic of a Wednesday I went for a run. I had a nice seven-mile jog, and I clocked my final mile at 8:26. That’s not fast, not even for me, but I’d like to stress, again, that it was mile seven.

I do not know what is happening.