As I write this we have something like two-and-a-half or almost three inches of snow on the ground. It is supposed to continue off and on. There are just a few flurries here and there now. Earlier there was an urgent rate of snowfall. The clouds had a date, and there was much brushing of the shoulders.
I heard someone say to a friend “You’re wearing Chacos!”
The friend said “I didn’t know the snow would be this cold!”
And I wept for the future. And the tears froze on my face, because it is cold.
Actually, we’ve hovered just above freezing for hours. That could make the overnight interesting.
This morning everything else had closed up, but our campus held out until the mid-afternoon. They were hoping against hope, but you just knew the feeling was in the air. Then, after lunch, came the word.
My afternoon class was canceled. The weather has closed the campus for four business days in the first three weeks of school. It has been a crazy semester, but a pretty, wet, snow. At least the roads have been passable.
We talked about critiquing news articles and television packages in class today. There are many great examples of quality work. There are also a staggeringly large amount of poor examples. They are all useful, but the one is often more fun than the other.
We watched a fire package several times. We closely considered the standard pre-winter weather milk and bread story. We read about a BASE jumper who died, and a restaurant owner shooting at his customers.
And, of course, the package that launched a thousand Antoine Dodsons:
On the one hand, that’s now four years old and I’m impressed by how many students are aware of it. On the other hand, I’m amused that there are people who don’t know it.
The Internet is a magical, large place. It makes you wonder what you’re missing, almost every day.
…
I just read Dodson’s Wikipedia page, and his website, and some link that the Internet gave me where he’s selling customized phone messages. He has had a few songs, and a clothing line, and another random thing here or there.
That guy sure was able to capitalize on the alleged sexual assault of his sister. Turned his family’s lifestyle around, at least for a time. To my knowledge no suspect was ever named. The culture surely has turned, hasn’t it?
The original remix won a handful of video of the year awards and tons of covers and parodies itself, the meta-parody writ large. And then college marching bands took a run at the tune:
I wonder how I can work this back into the class on Wednesday.
Ran a brisk 5K tonight. Felt good, being now about 12 or 15 miles into the new shoes. I’m now in a 4 mm drop running shoe, which doesn’t mean much to me. The old shoes were no longer capable of running. And I’ve had to transition into these. The heel-toe angle is different, and that takes an adjustment.
Also they are incredibly vibrant colors, which I guess might help make me visible on the side of the road, but they are never anything I’d choose for myself. They were on sale and there aren’t many options in my size. So my feet are fancy, and they still move slow.
I do not know what is happening.
Things to read … because there’s so much to learn about.
Trying to sell young adults on the idea of health insurance before an upcoming deadline, Illinois officials announced Monday they are launching an ad campaign with the satirical online newspaper The Onion.
Banner ads on The Onion website will depict a toy action figure with the words: “Man without health insurance is forced to sell action figures to pay medical bills.” The ads say: “Get Covered. Don’t sell your action figures.”
Oy.
Professor Reynolds knows not enough people care that they are being spied on. He makes good points here, but they won’t spur anyone to action, either. NSA spying undermines separation of powers: Column:
Most of the worry about the National Security Agency’s bulk interception of telephone calls, e-mail and the like has centered around threats to privacy. And, in fact, the evidence suggests that if you’ve got a particularly steamy phone- or Skype-sex session going on, it just might wind up being shared by voyeuristic NSA analysts.
But most Americans figure, probably rightly, that the NSA isn’t likely to be interested in their stuff. (Anyone who hacks my e-mail is automatically punished, by having to read it.) There is, however, a class of people who can’t take that disinterest for granted: members of Congress and the judiciary. What they have to say is likely to be pretty interesting to anyone with a political ax to grind. And the ability of the executive branch to snoop on the phone calls of people in the other branches isn’t just a threat to privacy, but a threat to the separation of powers and the Constitution.
How much does your school spend on snow removal? Good question. I know Samford spread 35,000 pounds of sand and 4,000 pounds of ice melt. Staff spent 506 hours clearing roads and sidewalks and dozens and dozens of staff members worked for three and four days, straight.
But at least the bookstore sold 428 pieces of clothing — a lot of sweatpants — on that day the campus was closed two weeks ago.
The campus closed early on Friday, last week, as well. And there is more weather coming this week. This is a strange winter for Alabama. The cost of lost time in the classroom has likely been the biggest toll. I’m still trying to get a class caught up. Maybe on Wednesday, if winter allows the class to meet.
One of the most frightening Muppets, to me, was Grouch. Doesn’t ask me why. I think it was his appearance, home and his voice, which vaguely reminded me of one of my uncles. That’s what I’m going with. I bring this up because the other one that disturbed me is at the bottom of the post.
At lunch today I dropped a plate, basically right in the lap of a young lady who’d made the unfortunate decision to sit between my Point A and Point B. The plate was, thankfully, empty. And it did not break. But this is mortifying. There are eight young women sitting there talking about their studies or their sorority or boys or who knows, and then I happen.
Some distance away I could hear the slow clap starting. That hasn’t happened since high school. My innocent victim noted, as she picked up my plate and I apologized profusely, that at least her table didn’t chime in, an observation I’d already made, and a decision for which I was grateful. But no one else did, either, and the slow clap quickly died. It was probably only three people.
“Frat boys,” one of the students said.
I’m pretty sure they started clapping reflexively, but then stopped when they realized this was an old guy. Maybe one of them was a student of mine. Maybe it just isn’t funny if it isn’t your peers.
For example, the state troopers now say there were more than 700 snow and ice-related car crashes last week, not counting whatever the locals worked. That’s unfortunate for those people, to be sure. Nine people died in crashes. And in this vein some people are making their wacky “Haha, Southerners can’t drive in snow” jokes.
But, hey, we opened our windows and sat around in shorts last weekend.
Here’s another video, a short film featuring Ms. Alice Herz-Sommer. She is believed to be the oldest living Holocaust survivor, and, perhaps, the world’s oldest piano player:
Things to read … because your parents warned you about watching all of those videos.
A historically high number of people will be locked out of the workforce by 2021, according to a report by the Congressional Budget Office released Tuesday.
President Barack Obama’s signature health-care law will contribute to this phenomenon, the CBO said, citing new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger-than-expected reduction in working hours—eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021.
The answers were not long, and bad enough that they should have taken a few more minutes to think up something not so insulting.
With the expansion of insurance coverage, the budget office predicted, more people will choose not to work, and others will choose to work fewer hours than they might have otherwise to obtain employer-provided insurance. The cumulative reduction of hours is large: the equivalent of 2.5 million fewer full-time positions by 2024, the budget office said.
The report “rightfully says that people shouldn’t have job lock,” said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader. “We live in a country where we should be free agents. People can do what they want.”
“Now you won’t have to work!” doesn’t sound like an especially compelling argument, really, Senator. But have at it.
The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
[…]
The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., said Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time.
[…]
To some, the Metcalf incident has lifted the discussion of serious U.S. grid attacks beyond the theoretical. “The breadth and depth of the attack was unprecedented” in the U.S., said Rich Lordan, senior technical executive for the Electric Power Research Institute. The motivation, he said, “appears to be preparation for an act of war.”
The past two decades have seen a revolution in every aspect of the media industry – technological change has enabled consumers to develop sophisticated and subtle patterns of behaviour, constantly being updated from a variety of sources. Cable news established the 24-hour news habit, but today social media and mobile phones fulfill the instant news needs of consumers better than any TV channel can.
Yet around the world hundreds of millions of dollars continue to be invested each year in news networks. Is this money well spent? Or has the time come to rethink the TV news business? Were live channels simply the product of the satellite age which is now all but over?
[…]
News channels prize being first – a race that they can’t win, and nobody else cares about. “Did we beat CNN?” is a phrase often heard in a newsroom. But in the digital age social media will always win the race to be first (if not always the race to be right). And who, other than the inhabitants of newsrooms, is watching enough news channels simultaneously to know who was first anyway? Those 30 seconds might be important for commodity traders – but for news audiences?
In today’s media environment any broadcaster is first for minutes at most – by which time Twitter or the competition will have caught up. Being first – the primary criterion for 24-hour news channels – is increasingly the least interesting and effective value they offer.
What wasn’t included, but should be: The Weather Channel.
Had a meeting canceled this morning. Samford closed at 11 a.m. Everything else closed simultaneously. And then the snow descended. And people panicked, because it is white.
Here’s the real problem with snow in the South. It isn’t that we’re Southern. The snow doesn’t send us into a tizzy. It stuns us. And the snow, which is more wet than anything, then quickly turns into ice. And then the in-tizzification begins.
So people are stranded all over and that’s dangerous and unfortunate and miserable. Can’t wait to see who we blame this time.
The road that runs across the front of Samford’s campus is a high-traffick artery. That road is gridlocked, so we brought a lot of people up from their cars into the relative comfort of the university. The athletics department is loaning space and towels. Mattresses came from somewhere. Every shower is being put to use. If you didn’t get out between 11 and 11:05 odds are that you were stuck on the road for a long time. A colleague wrote that she normally has a 15 minute commute, but it turned into four hours and 15 minutes today. And she was on the fortunate side.
It is the ice. See? It is always the humidity.
Campus is holding up nicely. The facilities staff and the grounds crew have worked tirelessly. They were blowing snow and spreading for ice even as it came down. They didn’t stop until late in the night. We have power — and that’s the biggest, understated victory of this storm, the power outages everywhere seem to be comparatively minor — and we have food and everything is peachy keen.
The place is usually full of good spirits, perhaps even more so today.
