In my class today I invited in a guest speaker today. And I also invited in another class to hear from him.
Nathan Troost is a Samford graduate. Within about two years of leaving he started his own film production company and now travels the world producing video packages for non-profit organizations. He showed us some of his stirring work.
“Sports media will complement the department’s exceptional print journalism, broadcast journalism, public relations and advertising tracks. We want to show our support for Samford athletics and prepare our students for the rapidly expanding employment opportunities in the sports-media field. The hands-on experience students will get in the Athletics Department will be invaluable.”
The new partnership is announced as Samford JMC students and faculty complete work on the pilot episode for a reality television series that follows nine athletes from various sports as they navigate life at Samford. “The Student Athlete” is expected to be complete in May.
It takes 113 steps for 8-year-old Jian Jackson to walk from the hallway of her school outside to her mother’s car. She made that walk Monday afternoon, something she couldn’t do for the first 7 years of her life in China.
“That’s been the goal from the beginning,” said Stacie Jackson, Jian’s adoptive mother. “We’ve been working on that everyday.”
When she was 5 months old, Jian developed a high fever that lasted for four days. Afterward, the orphanage workers noticed she could no longer move her legs. Doctors in the United States believe Jian was stricken with polio at the time. It was assumed she would never walk.
Last June, a woman set herself on fire about every three days in Herat, Afghanistan. That’s an improvement – in June 2012, the city’s main hospital received a self-immolator about every two days, and in 2010, Afghanistan’s presidential advisor on health affairs estimated that 2,400 women were burning themselves alive nationwide, every year. The cause, he said, was depression.
The Islamist killers of Drummer Lee Rigby erupted into violence in an Old Bailey courtroom as they were sentenced for murder.
Michael Adebolajo, 29, and Michael Adebowale, 22, had to be manhandled out of court by security guards after being told by Mr Justice Sweeney that their crime was a “betrayal of Islam”.
Adebolajo screamed at the judge as he was manhandled down the dock stairs in the historic Court No 2 but, in scenes lasting several minutes, his co-defendant was held to the floor and cuffed before being carried downstairs head first.
Relatives of Drummer Rigby, who were sitting just three feet away from the dock, stood up and cowered away from the violence.
Mr. Justice Sweeney. That’s way to use a title. And justice was almost done.
Guest speaker in class today, which means I was able to sit toward the back of the class for most of the day and enjoy. She talked about resumes and that sort of thing.
Now the students have to start crafting their own resumes. No one likes building resumes as a class assignment, I think. But we all need ’em.
Otherwise I’ve been preparing for the rest of the week, which will be hectic with travel and adventure.
I did make it to the pool this evening, where I enjoyed a much more mild temperature than on Monday. Tonight, I swam 2,000 yards, all freestyle. I do not know what is happening.
What should a news organization do when an unauthorized copy of video they produced is going viral on YouTube?
That’s the question Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA faced when a commentary by its veteran sportscaster Dale Hansen about gay football player Michael Sam, started to spread like wildfire on social media. In case you haven’t seen it:
[…]
One problem: That wasn’t an official WFAA video that was spreading. That was someone else’s rip of WFAA’s video — specifically, someone who runs a YouTube channel named MyDailyWorldNews.
Promote the amplifiers as well as your original upload. Why would you, a well-branded television station, do anything else?
Just flat silly:
"At only 23 years old, he has the lifestyle of an adult" http://t.co/kMebLJhyjg
Our culture is doomed.
The author has been out of school since 2010. He’s also an adult, whether he realizes that is an open question.
The author here discusses the coach of the Russian hockey team, and the upcoming Brazilian World Cup team. And then … When Sports Matter Too Much:
We like to think we’re more cultured and sophisticated on American soil, a place where sporting events are kept in perspective. Of course, this isn’t always the case. Some NFL stadiums and some post-game parking lots have become violent, hazardous places.
Let’s just hope we never get to the next level, where the outcome of a game brings super—sized outrage, where the Cardinals would be deemed a civic embarrassment for not winning a Super Bowl staged in Glendale.
Pretty sure he’s never been down to Alabama to watch football fans.
Beautiful day. Just a lovely experience outside. Hope you took a few minutes to wander around in it in wonder. It is almost as if this wasn’t happening just a few days ago:
That was on the Daily Mountain Eagle Twitter account, which is a parody of a rural community in the name of a legitimate newspaper. And that video is, as you might have noticed, hypnotic.
Pulling magazines, I gave myself a massive paper cut on the tip of my index finger. I have now legitimately bled for print media. I don’t even work on that magazine.
Things to read … because people have occasionally bled for the things they produce for us. Not always, thankfully, but it has happened.
A photographer for WFSB-TV in Hartford, Conn., filed a suit against the Hartford Police Department in U.S. District Court Tuesday, claiming a police officer demanded his employer discipline him after he flew a drone over an accident scene.
In his suit, Pedro Rivera says he was off work on Feb. 1 when he heard about an accident. Once he got to the scene, he flew a drone over it to “record visual images,” the suit says. Police “surrounded the plaintiff, demanded his identification card, and asked him questions about what he was doing,” the suit says. “The plaintiff did not feel as though he were free to leave during the course of this questioning.”
A police sergeant who wrote a report of the incident “expressed concern that flying a drone over the scene might compromise the integrity of the scene and the ‘privacy of the victim’s body.’”
Every single moment of the Sochi Olympics is documented in minute detail. Here’s how the AP and Getty Images, two of the biggest photo agencies on the scene, get their incredible photos from the Olympics to the United States, faster than you can microwave a bag of popcorn.
This past Tuesday in Sochi, American snowboarder and defending gold medalist Shaun White attempted a double cork as his third trick during his run in the men’s halfpipe final, a last-ditch to improve his score. He bungled it, landing on the edge of the pipe, and nearly taking a massive fall.
White came in fourth and walked away without a medal in his best event. But the moment led to one of the most memorable shots of the Olympics so far. Some of the best sports photographers in the world captured the violence and drama of the split-second impact better than any video could. White’s board, looking like it might snap in half. The American flag bandana startled out of place. White’s mouth agape at the shock from the impact. This is what it looks like when you fail to defend your gold medal.
NBC Sports released a statement to several news outlets, saying, “Our intent was to convey the emotion that Bode Miller was feeling after winning his bronze medal. We understand how some viewers thought the line of questioning went too far, but it was our judgment that his answers were a necessary part of the story. We’re gratified that Bode has been publicly supportive of Christin Cooper and the overall interview.”
In an interview with Matt Lauer Monday on Today, Miller reiterated his support of Cooper.
“I’ve known Christin a long time. She’s a sweetheart of a person. I know she didn’t mean to push,” he said. “I don’t blame her at all.”
It wasn’t too much. It was awkward. And it was unnecessarily long. Remember, that interview, like almost everything else in these Games, was canned.
Hilburn, an 18-year-old free safety, went to the shopping center on President’s Day with his brother and father to buy a new suit. As they got out of the car, they spotted a man running through the parking lot carrying a purse. It wasn’t hard to tell something was amiss.
“My dad said, ‘Nicholas, go get him,”’ he said. He didn’t have to tell his son twice.
“I kind of thought about it for a second and looked at his hands to make sure he didn’t have a knife,” Hilburn said. “After that, I didn’t think much about it. I ran and I tackled him. I put a knee in his neck and his face in the ground.”
Only one thought really went through is head, Hilburn said. “When I got him in the air- I kinda body slammed him- and I thought he was a lot lighter than a Hoover running back.”
Wonder how that played with the rest of the family when they heard what the father said.
Purdue University agronomist, Bruce Erickson, says even with all the precision technology, there’s a lot of trial and error on the farm right now. The answers would be clearer if farmers pooled their results.
“We mine the information from farmers’ fields sort of like Google mines information from our mouse clicks and Walmart mines from when we purchase certain products,” Erickson said.
That would be a treasure trove for seed companies. It could help speed up research and establish a track record for new seed varieties.
“People are thinking whole farms could be our research plot versus doing a specific study in a corner of a farm,” Erickson said.
[…]
But that’s where the Information Age gets bogged down in the nitty-gritty.
If their data is sold, will farmers get a cut? What if there’s a security breach like at Target? Those concerns are enough for many farmers to keep their data between themselves and close advisors.
Even the farm is turning into an IBM commercial. Interesting times.
A day in a chair. There was Olympics. There was sunshine. There was reading and, best of all, the fine company of a lovely lady. It was a day with not too much, but a day you’d do again.
There was this:
If I did business with Liberty Mutual I would strongly consider altering the transaction. I don’t know if anyone at the ad agency has ever been in life-changing environments, but the insurance agency has people that have been there. Everyone understands the urge to compare the Olympics with Your Product, whatever Your Product is. But letting a goal slip by against the Russians is hardly like losing everything in a house fire, is it? Missing the landing on your vault isn’t so traumatic as finding the place where you live and play and love so devastated by the weather that you can’t recognize landmarks, because there aren’t any anymore.
When I was in college this happened in the next little town from where I grew up. A huge tornado roared through in the darkness. When the sun rose everything was unrecognizable. The fire department had to go around spraying house numbers on shards of wood and jamming them into the sodden earth, as you would a mailbox, so they’d have a frame of reference in their life saving work.
Hardly a Kerri Strug moment.
And yet I feel for Kerri Strug and the Miracle on Ice guys, because they, of course, couldn’t know what would become of their legacy: a bad insurance commercial. I’d feel bad for Herb Brooks, but he’s dead. I don’t feel bad for Bela Karolyi. He should never have put Strug there. Also, there’s charming reading in the Bela Karolyi controversy section of Wikipedia.
Speaking of the Olympics. NBC gets a lot right. Visually they’ve really shown their A-game. But my word, do they get a lot of easy things wrong.
Other fine sports notes: I mentioned Tim Alexander here late last year. He’s got a rich and compelling tale, the kind of guy you can’t help pulling for. Well. He’s showing up again today. His UAB football team was running stadiums today. And then the new strength and conditioning coach decided Alexander, who is in a wheelchair, needs to be with his team. So he hoisted him on his shoulders and carried him. And then the team joined in.
The story does not mention how many walls they ran through after that.
The image folks from Westboro are after Michael Sam. Mizzou students solved the problem. That is a terrific school and was an inspired addition to the SEC, but I’m just starting to like them more and more now.
African migrants on the shore of Djibouti city at night, raising their phones in an attempt to capture an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad. Djibouti is a common stop-off point for migrants in transit from such countries as Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, seeking a better life in Europe and the Middle East.
Things to read … because this hasn’t yet been enough.
Public records request service MuckRock asked for the document in late December. Last week a lieutenant in the department’s records unit denied the request, calling the guide “privileged as an attorney-client communication.”
Huntsville may be welcoming a major Remington Outdoors Co. gun manufacturing and development plant and possibly 2,000 jobs, AL.com reported today.
But would the city really welcome it?
It seems so, judging from an abundance of positive, pro-gun comments posted to the AL.com story this morning.
The author of that piece is from Atlanta. She attended school in Alabama. And she is surprised by the pro-gun, pro-job stance of her neighbors. This perplexes me entirely.
So now I have to read every story on the subject, just to see what other disbelief we can work into this story. Because gun factories are scary, I guess.
I’m not raising children today. I’m part of the “support troops.” I’m in the capital funding division. But if I were, I would be giving my children every chance to know about God.
If I were raising children today…I would be having fewer frantic activities and make more careful and deliberate choices. I wouldn’t buy them whatever they ask for—that’s for grandparents to do. I would be more present when they’re trying to talk to me.
I wouldn’t lecture as much and I would listen a little more. I wouldn’t worry so much about being their friend and more about keeping their respect as well as their love. I think I would listen for signs of God in their life and, like trying to start a fire, do everything I could to blow on it, but not too hard.
I would make sure they were around all ages of people, not just peers. I would pray for them with all my heart, and take most of my criticisms there. I would provide consistent discipline and accept that they will not always like me and know that the world won’t end if they’re mad.
It goes on and on, a suggested instruction manual from someone who thought, perhaps, about what they did right and did wrong. To do it all again, and this time from the cheaper seats, what an interesting idea from which to learn.
links / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off on I cut a lot from this post, but clearly not enough 13 Feb 14
Well. We certainly showed that snow what for. It was all gone by the end of the day, a product of temperatures leaping back into the 50s or low 60s, as winter here was intended to be.
Last night, as it snowed, I heard a woman say a friend “You’re wearing Chacos!” The Chacos wearing friend said, and I’m not making this up, “I didn’t know the snow would be this cold!” So, for that dear child, bring on spring.
I have a long window that stretches almost the entire length of one wall in my office. If you peer through the giant blinds you can see a dorm up the hill. Below that is a grass lawn that has been converted into a parking lot. (When I started here, six years ago, it was a construction equipment parking lot. Now it is overflow parking as they begin work on a new business building.) If I had the ability to open this window and step outside I’d walk onto the second-floor roof of this same building. Beneath me are various administrative offices. Over their heads was a great deal of snow. And I stared at it today, watching how it melted in stages while the sun moved from one horizon to the other, all of it disappearing, slowly from the ledge, and then rapidly from the pebbles. It all went away, except for the zealous stuff holding off the inevitable in the shade, thinking, Now bring on spring.
He said, like he’s been in Canada or some place with a real winter for the last four weeks.
There’s nothing like going from snow to short sleeves and no socks in the span of afternoon. And after you’ve done it a few times you start thinking that this time, really, it will last.
I noticed that the earliest blooming bush in our front yard was starting to give off its bright yellow signal. Let us call it now: another winter is behind us. This is, of course, an entirely mental exercise. There is barely a winter where I live and work and play. We get a few days of cold and trees pointing their sticks into the air for too long, but that’s not a winter. Even still, you’re always ready to see it off.
Saw this ad tonight:
Cadillac is hitting on something here, a nod to a bygone era, with an actor who, really, belongs in another era. Neal McDonough just asking, “Why?” For this? Stuff?
McDonough’s biggest early break came 11 years after his first TV appearance. He was in eight episodes of Band of Brothers, which, for most people promoted him from “That Guy” to, “Hey, Neal McDonough.” He was playing Buck Compton who earned a Silver Star on D-Day. After the war he turned down baseball to go to law school. He became a police officer and an assistant district attorney. Compton put away Sirhan Sirhan, became a judge and retired. Just for grins he taught himself the real estate game, got licensed and was a realtor on weekends.
McDonough has said a lot of nice things about Compton. He wrote the epilogue to Compton’s autobiography and it starts “I would do anything in the world for Buck Compton.” So I’m thinking about the old judge, who died just two years ago, when McDonough says “Why aren’t you like that?”
This commercial is so strange from there. The question outside, the answer inside. The “crazy-driven hardworking believers, that’s why.” He points to his daughter, or the double helix. And then the other kid gets the high-five exclamation point. And now I will name-drop. Wright Brothers. Bill Gates. Les Paul. Ali.
Muhammad Ali had his run-ins with the federal government. The U.S. called Microsoft a monopoly. They almost shut down Gibson, who made Les Paul’s guitars. Where is this spot going?
“Where we nuts when we pointed to the moon?” That isn’t McDonough’s wife, but there is a resemblance. But we’re nuts about the moon. Where we got … bored. And littered. We put a car on blocks on the moon because we’re going back up there.
Said the guy in a polo and yellow shorts.
But now we’re getting serious, because the suit is on and the digression is over — a digression for a kinder, post-Dennis Leary world, I might ad — and now we finally come to it.
Cadillac.
An electric Cadillac.
“You work hard. Create your own luck and you gotta believe anything is possible.”
Unless, of course, you mean seeing a return on all of that taxpayer money sunk into GM.
Which brings us back to “stuff.” That we’ve paid for, so you can sell it to us. You didn’t build that. Period.
I’d have put the ad here anyway, because I like McDonough, and in 60 seconds it gets about four or five slices of what the guy can do. That you don’t know what the ad is, indeed, that you realize it is a paean to a generally bygone ideal before you even know what the ad is for, makes it that much more incredible.
But here’s the truly amazing thing about this ad. It prompted cogent comments on YouTube. Here are a few:
Wonder how many bailouts it took to design this car?
In regards to taking August off, keep in mind that the GM UAW contact gives UAW workers up to 5 weeks off per year, plus 15 holidays per year (5 more than the standard number of holidays), for a total of 8 weeks of time off per year.
If GM and the UAW actually believed the message in this ad (which is true by the way), then why do they take so much time off? They are most assuredly NOT crazy, hard-working, driven believers, as the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars they swallowed up shows and the tax payers lost because what the UAW and GM management actually believe in is buying politicians.
I hope GM fails miserably and every single UAW member loses their jobs. They deserve it for their laziness, sense of entitlement and sloth. Because of their sense of entitlement they actually think they deserved taxpayers’ hard earned money because AMERICA! The problem is that America doesn’t stand for “taking from others to give to me using the state”. America stands for the actual crazy, hard working, driven believers that the UAW hate because the UAW is made to look bad always when compared to real working Americans.
A lot of commenters have all ready pointed out the rank hypocrisy of GM’s laziness, sense of entitlement, and sloth from having their hand in the government till for decades, then making the above ad. The message in the ad is still true, even though the messenger is an excellent representative of exactly the type of laziness, sense of entitlement, and sloth welfare yields.
Bummer for Caddy. This ad would have KILLED in 2000-2008. Happily, we’ve all grown up. ‘MERICA! Seriously, I thought it was satire until it wasn’t. So sad.
We’re going back to the moon??? With what budget? Oh and the same government that killed the shuttle program bailed out GM so they could keep making average cars and keep the UAW happy
The savings of the European Union’s 500 million citizens could be used to fund long-term investments to boost the economy and help plug the gap left by banks since the financial crisis, an EU document says.
The EU is looking for ways to wean the 28-country bloc from its heavy reliance on bank financing and find other means of funding small companies, infrastructure projects and other investment.
Senate Democrats facing tough elections this year want the Internal Revenue Service to play a more aggressive role in regulating outside groups expected to spend millions of dollars on their races.
In the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, the Democrats are publicly prodding the agency instead of lobbying them directly.
That’s a fairly even-handed story The Hill has, but it doesn’t take much to imagine the entire approach there spinning in some perverse direction.
I just cut three paragraphs that sounded too preachy about another story. I was casting allusions to the early 19th century and the Hoover administration. And that’s always how you know when to stop.
(T)he Pew Research survey asked college graduates whether, while still in school, they could have better prepared for the type of job they wanted by gaining more work experience, studying harder or beginning their job search earlier.
About three-quarters of all college graduates say taking at least one of those four steps would have enhanced their chances to land their ideal job. Leading the should-have-done list: getting more work experience while still in
school. Half say taking this step would have put them in a better position to get the kind of job they wanted. About four-in-ten (38%) regret not studying harder, while three-in-ten say they should have started looking for a job sooner (30%) or picked a different major (29%)
I’m using that in class next week.
Finally, Step Sing Step Sing Step Sing! (It takes over our campus, but it’ll be a pleasant memory by the end of the weekend.
