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.
As I got out of the car we were in the process of temperatures dropping from the low 60s into the low 30s. It isn’t usually as noticeably dramatic as all that, but I can say that after class I went from my office to the gym and from the gym to my car and it was dramatic.
And by the time I made it from the car to the restaurant it was cold. In the restaurant the staff was quoting Coming to America.
So I quoted it with them, which they found amusing. And then a lady asked me if I knew the name of the elephant in the movie. Like everyone knows the name of an elephant in a quarter-century old movie. I said as much online, where I soon learned that everyone knows the name of the elephant.
First day of class today. I had notes and had practiced the syllabus speech and all of the opening day material, as I always do. It never plays out in the classroom the way it does in my mind. So maybe I should just develop the syllabus and wing it from there.
It is a fun class, though. We take field trips. I always enjoy this one.
It is really cold now. The weather moves in tomorrow. Are you ready?
So maybe you saw the Kick Bama Kick video. Perhaps you saw the one that emerged last week, of the Auburn University Marching Band. That floated back to the surface of the social media streams today and so I watched it again. Love that video. It is great fun watching some of those people lose their minds, but then watching them recover and do their job. (Not that you could hear the band in the stadium just then. We didn’t.)
I decided to synch the videos. Watch the drum major in the center. She was great, calling for the fight song just before Chris Davis scored. That’s attention to her craft.
Happy accident, they’re all looking at the giant HD screen in the end zone, but it looks like they are watching the insert box I’ve dropped in the shot. But watch how they all wig out and then get their job down. Just awesome. As is Rod Bramblett, my friend and former boss, who has the immortal radio call.
We bought our first Girl Scout cookies of the year. Our friend Jeremy’s daughter is a Girl Scout. This is her first year. So he called and asked if they could drive over. This is good timing because we are usually visited by the most entrepreneurial young lady in the troop. She goes around selling to restaurants and dessert places.
Sadie, Jeremy’s daughter, beat her to us. We’d also promised to buy from another girl. So we’re buying a lot of cookies, but this is a good experience for the kids. Plus, cookies.
I turned on the exterior lights. A bit later Sadie rang the doorbell. Jeremy has stayed in his car. We discuss the cookies. It was in the 30s, so I invited her in, because we are friends. Sadie, who has the most ironic sense of humor you’ve ever seen on a child her age, says “Let me go ask my dad. For ‘safety.'”
She made the air quotes, which made my day.
So I filled out the forms. We had a good chat about why I invited her inside, why people shouldn’t invite her in, why she should stay at the door and why asking her dad was a very good thing. I’m sure they discuss that when they hand out the Girl Scout sashes, but you can never hear the safety lectures from too many different people.
We sent her across the way to sell cookies. Since they had cookies in the back of their car we collected ours and then removed the rest. They almost drove off without their supplies, until mock guilt at our pretend theft got the better of us.
But we were thiiiis close to establishing a black market for cookies.
Tonight we watchedan episode of the seventh season of the Cosby Show. It guest starred Red Buttons, a comedian and composer. Buttons played the local hardware store owner. He was all worked up about a traffic accident that happened a decade prior. Turns out Buttons’ daughter wanted to marry the son of the other guy in that old car wreck, whom Buttons’ character is still mad at. That role was played by the great E.G. Marshall. If you let that scene play out, below, it is rather touching, with Cosby just sitting back watching two old masters work.
Buttons first movie was in 1944. He was still on TV in 2005, before dying in 2009. Marshall got his start in 1945 and worked until his death in 1998.
They first worked on the same project in 1947. This episode of the Cosby Show was shot in 1991. Fifty-four years in between. Of course, almost 23 years have passed since this episode aired …
The fate of the animated, neon placekicker who welcomed generations of Anniston residents to Goal Post Bar-B-Q had been uncertain since the place closed in September. But this week the Calhoun County icon found a new home — just 2 miles down Quintard Avenue — with the family that established the famed restaurant in the 1960s.
If you like iconic neon, this story is great news. It is quite a shame that the old barbecue joint shut down, but at least the sign will live on.
Tornadoes in 2013 had a minimal impact in north Alabama and for the second straight year, there were no deaths attributed to tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service office in Huntsville.
The weather service today released its 2013 statistical review of tornadoes, which reflected that north Alabama saw its second-fewest number of twisters since 2007.
It was, the story notes, the second year in a row that the area had only two of what are considered “strong” tornadoes.
The program code named “Dishfire” collects data, including communications from people not suspected of illegal activity, and conducts an automated analysis. Among the data collected: Missed call alerts, details of border crossings derived from network roaming alerts, names and images from electronic business cards, financial transactions and travel details.
And, finally, something more amusing than all of that from across the Atlantic, bad British football commentary:
No doubt this will be a hit at Alabama, where they think their team might probably should be in the Super Bowl.
Overcast this morning. Clear in the afternoon. The high was in the mid 40s. It was the kind of day that suggested a feeling that implied what flirting with spring might, one day, be like.
The forecasts call for another cold snap in a few days, making it our second of the year, meaning we’ll have an extra one that no one ordered. We’ll convince ourselves that, somehow, this means we’re going to have an incredibly nice spring.
Hit the pool, swam a mile. That makes three times in a week. Suddenly, I feel like I can breath in the pool again. That’s always a nice comfort-level skill to have. I’m a very bad lap swimmer, but I only kicked the lane lines twice today, so there’s that, too.
Appropos of nothing I came home the other night from somewhere and The Yankee was watching City of Angels. I remember seeing this in the theater, it was probably the perfect late-90s date movie, after all.
So we ended up watching the whole thing, because she likes the movie, and I can make Nick Cage jokes. And then, toward the end, at the climactic scene:
She yells at the television screen, “Wear a helmet!”
It has just become a reflexive thing, at this point.
Things to read … no helmet required.
The New New Newsweek.com: “it seems like every time you turn around there’s a new Newsweek.com.”
I remember when I first subscribed to Newsweek. It was the 7th grade. It was a class assignment. I was never that big of a nerd. We had the same English teacher four times in junior and high school and she gave us writing assignments out of the old magazines. Those were my first, real, writing assignments, summarizing news copy each week, every week, for four years. It was a decent start on learning the craft of writing. I remember when I finally dropped Newsweek, when they were running wildly divergent covers for different parts of the world. What you saw from one to the next was so different as to be insulting. And if that wasn’t insulting the American copy got the job done. I doubt I’ll be subscribing again anytime soon, despite new editors and a third round of new owners and so on, but having more publications out there is never a bad thing.
A vast majority of top congressional aides say in a new survey that they are concerned about the effects of Obamacare on their staff, ticking off worries about changes to their benefits, higher costs and whether they’ll have access to local health care providers.
Ninety percent of staffers surveyed for a report released Monday by the Congressional Management Foundation said they are concerned about benefit changes under the health care law, while 86 percent are anxious about the financial hit and 79 percent cited worries to access.
[…]
“The elimination of staff’s traditional health care has been a complete disaster,” one aide said in the survey. “If you wanted a legislative branch run by K Street lobbyists and 25-year-old staffers, mission accomplished.”
Guess you should have had your bosses read the bill before they passed it, huh?
Fan Zhang, the owner of Happy Child, a trendy Asian restaurant in downtown Toronto, knows that 170 of his customers went clubbing in November. He knows that 250 went to the gym that month, and that 216 came in from Yorkville, an upscale neighborhood.
Businesses are tracking their customers and building profiles of their daily habits using a network of startups that have placed sensors in restaurants, yoga studios and other sites. Chris Gilpin, founder of one such site, Turnstyle, joins the News Hub.
And he gleans this information without his customers’ knowledge, or ever asking them a single question.
Mr. Zhang is a client of Turnstyle Solutions Inc., a year-old local company that has placed sensors in about 200 businesses within a 0.7 mile radius in downtown Toronto to track shoppers as they move in the city.
The sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards, follow signals emitted from Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones.
Whenever I talk in class about how we’re going to be leveraging technology in the near future — which is here, now — this is the one that always makes the students squirmy. You can see why.
This is the best story of the day. I have a feeling no one will mess with Jeanna Harris anymore, except maybe reporters, to whom she gives great quotes. Woman with shotgun chases away burglar:
Jeanna Harris, of Decatur, said the man she woke up early Tuesday to find rifling through her bedroom belongings is welcome to come back and try to steal from her again.
“He better be glad I had my nightgown on. The Lord’s hand was on him,” said Harris, 43, who armed herself with a 20-gauge shotgun and chased the intruder from her home. “I’m waiting on him, and I will not have on my Victoria Secret nightgown. I will have on my running shoes. It didn’t scare me; it made me mad.”
[…]
Harris said she’s glad she didn’t fire, partly because “it could have been a very dirty mess to clean up.
A suspect was arrested. And, Decatur, where this happened, puts mugshots on Facebook. People comment. “They” would do that without booking information being published online, but fewer people would hear about it. In some circumstances that could be a good thing.
