The post where photos, and the occasional video, finally find a home. And we call this Sunday, and Catching up. On with it then.
The bride and groom had a string quartet just off to the side. We offered them cash to insert a new song into their playlist. This didn’t cost as much as you’d think:
This was one of those weddings where the guys in tuxes looked underdressed:
We had a great time at the reception:
At the after-party:
Since I forgot the media card for my DSLR I shot everything this weekend on my phone. Most of them were bad. But, anyway, meet our new friend, Dru.
The OK Cafe, in Atlanta. Haven’t eaten here in several years. It is named after a restaurant in To Kill a Mockingbird.
There is nothing wrong with anything on this plate:
Sometimes the day gets away from you. Sometimes you get away from the day. Others, one supposes, are pleasantly predictable, moving at just the right pace, each thing approaching as you expected, addressed, completed and reflected upon. In between there are days that have some combination of all of those attributes.
Today was none of those things. Which is not bad, or good, just a thing.
The students at the Crimson went strong until about 3 or 3:30 this morning. That is imprecise, but chronometer precision isn’t a necessary function of my world at that time of day. The late hour, being an early hour, also informs the day.
That’s what I’m getting at here. It was late. Today was early. Things moved accordingly.
That little boy has a disease that has only been diagnosed about 100 times worldwide, and he’s already endured a host of surgeries. Now he’s got a new team on his side:
Had a fun critique meeting today. The silliness overwhelmed us, but work was done. A little more levity in the middle of the week never hurt anyone, and don’t you think that cutline needs better punctuation?
Ran into a former student this evening. She’s graduated. She completed a high profile internship in D.C. She now has a distinguished sounding title at her new job. Charming young lady and talented, with a great future ahead of her. I wonder how many times I say that a year.
Things to read that I thought you’d enjoy. Here’s your daily dose of silly. I remain of the opinion we’re going about this all wrong, but, this story got to use “‘Gestapo’ tactics” in an American headline, so there’s that unfortunate development:
Vaillancourt was one of thousands of people who found themselves in a national park as the federal government shutdown went into effect on Oct. 1. For many hours her tour group, which included senior citizen visitors from Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, were locked in a Yellowstone National Park hotel under armed guard.
The tourists were treated harshly by armed park employees, she said, so much so that some of the foreign tourists with limited English skills thought they were under arrest.
[…]
The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.
“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.
The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.
The longer this goes on the more absurd the stories will get, it seems.
This young woman is studying to be a classical soprano in Scotland. She started following my campus blog today. I’ve been listening to some of her performances. It isn’t every day you meet talented singers. She fulfills the requirement. That link takes you to her performance as Eponine.
Parenthood, like war, is a state in which it’s impossible to be moral. Worse, the moral weakness of parents is always on display, for children bear witness to their incessant ethical hairsplitting. It may be delicious fun to tut-tut over the corrupt child-rearing customs (and to pity the progeny) of the aggressively rising class: the mother who, according to Urban Baby legend, slept with the admissions officer (with her husband’s consent!) to get her child into the Ivy League, or the one who sued an Upper East Side preschool for insufficiently preparing her 4-year-old for a private-school test. But such Schadenfreude elides a more difficult existential truth, which is that ever since Noah installed his own three sons upon the ark and left the rest of the world to drown, protecting and privileging one’s own kids at the expense of other people has been the name of the game. It’s what parents do.
Your child constantly puts you in quandaries, but everyone is right there, so ignore the lice, do their homework, hold your kid back, game the system. Everyone is doing it!
Not being a parent, I can only pretend to understand. Surely I’d want the best, and to see my child was well prepared for this and that as possible. But I’m also fairly certain that, on the off chance I did not have a perfect child, I’d want them to learn from any struggles and imperfections, so that they could, maybe, appreciate the things that come easier to them and see those less ideal moments for what they really are.
But, then, I have probably fewer answers than the author of that piece, I know. I’m only trying to be a member of her “aggressively rising class” a frame through which she portrays the most condescending examples of life you’d find in almost any other magazine, but just feel so delightfully tacky here.
Most parents don’t think of themselves as the kind of people who prize winning above all. Most hope to teach their kids what used to be called “good values,” which a previous generation learned in scouts or church: kindness and compassion, respect and responsibility, to “do unto others” and be grateful for small things.
Society now looks back and down upon solid values as quaint relics of a past age, because moral equivalence has diminished even the Golden Rule.
And then: “All the data show a generation far less ethical than their parents.” Soon after we’re learning of “a hazy space where right and wrong seem porous” which is just a logical excuse to allow for more modern superiority through the ill-defined virtues of a mantra that says no one is wrong, unless their righter or wronger than me: “There’s lots of room to wiggle here. Especially when the transgressions get you where you want to be.”
So we suggest that parents do all for their kids yet haven’t transferred a moral foundation which just makes things somewhat foggy and non-descript, but, hey, it’s for the children and so then all bets are off.
This is an article indulging our judgmental lapses. So you think I don’t raise my children according to what I read in New York Magazine, thank heavens. And you read the wide-ranging examples offered by this mother of a 9-year-old and you wonder about the ethics of others. It is, as she says, tough out there. You get the feeling it is the most difficult when she intervenes, though.
Finally, a few things from the multimedia blog that I forgot to mention yesterday:
In the morning I read, in the afternoon I worked in the library, in the evening I was in the pool and tonight I’m with the student-journalists who are putting their newspaper together.
Which, in the scheme of things, makes this a pretty great day. Dinner could have been healthier, but I promised myself a Milo’s burger if I swam a lot. So it was that I caught up on the morning’s news. I sat in a deep leather chair and watched the reflection of the world in the dark corners of my computer screen poring in from the window behind me.
It was a beautiful day. I had a conversation about it while I was trying to make this panorama. A colleague and I decided we shouldn’t be inside, but rather on the quad:
Photosynth, showing me the errors in my panoramas, but only after I uploaded the thing, ever since I got the app. However, if you are in a picturesque place, that’s a pretty good free app.
I made it to the pool just in time to spend that sunlight-twilight-dusk-darkness period carefully avoiding drowning.
I swam 1.5 miles tonight. I’ve been told by the best swimmer in my house — and probably the best swimmer on our side of town — that I should note these measurements in a different unit. So I swam 2,700 yards.
I do not know what is happening.
Every third lap I did freestyle, so 900 free. And remember, I couldn’t do half a length of any pool like that this summer on account of my shoulder and collarbone.
The last 200 yards or so were even more ragged than usual. I am slow, and it isn’t pretty, but I am pleased.
Then a burger and fries. Finally back to the office for a night enjoying the editors put their paper together. It’ll be done sometime after midnight. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow. I’m sure it’ll be another strong edition.
The marriage took place among friends and family who were encouraged to “blow kisses to the world” after she exchanged rings with her “inner groom”, My Fox Phoenix reports.
“I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous … I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability,” Nadien Schweigert told Anderson Cooper.
So long as you now feel accountable to yourself and, one presumes, for yourself.
Collins said she feels lucky to have a job and supervisors who will allow her to take paid time off to take care of her son’s return. For those who aren’t as fortunate, the death gratuity may be critical to their survival and sense of closure.
“While that benefit may not be urgent for me, it’s urgent for somebody. There’s somebody who needs to fly their family home. There’s somebody who needs to have expenses covered, or be able to take off work to handle the affairs of their loved one,” she said. “And to know that the government shutting down will delay their ability to handle their business, some people just won’t be able to do it.
While, financially,she is able to address her son’s return, Collins said she still could use help in paying for his funeral.
“I don’t necessarily have $10,000 to bury my son,” she said. While she is working with the funeral home to make arrangements, she wondered: “Am I going to be on a payment plan for the rest of my life so that my son can have the services that he deserves?”
You also have this feeling that this particular cruelty will be remedied right quickly now that Congress sees it played out in the media. And that should tell you everything you need to know about how the government works.
Jorge has lived with amputated limbs since he underwent a life-saving procedure at the age of 14 months because of an infection — most likely meningococcal meningitis, Dyksen said. “His skin was just rotting away,” she said. Today, he’s healthy.
It’s not only on the soccer field that Jorge has looked past his physical constraints. He’s also a member of the school bowling team, using both arms to roll a ball without holes. And he’s also prolific at text-messaging, family friend Carla Nash said, hitting away at keys without his prosthetic right hand. In the classroom, he holds a pencil between both arms.
[…]
He said he hopes to be a motivational speaker as an adult. “Because I know there’s people out there that really need motivation and everyone says I always motivate other people,” he said. “I help them get happy in their lives. I’m always smiling and I just feel like that’s the right thing for me.”
Good for Jorge.
You want video? They’ve got video.
“Nothing is impossible,” his teammates say. Special young man, there.
It was an evening kickoff, which meant an afternoon spent sitting in the tailgating tent, sorta-watching other games.
People coming and going in the tent make for good conversation, but seldom do they let you dissect the intricacies of a cover-two defense. Not that I’d prefer to do that over the former.
The thing you’d prefer to do is watch the game on CBS, but apparently they and Dish are having another spat, and that means we couldn’t get the Georgia at Tennessee game today. It only went to overtime, so thanks CBS and Dish.
Not that we would have seen the end. We would have been inside the stadium watching the Tigers play, which is precisely what we did.
Nova flew this evening:
So did these planes:
I do not know why people wave their shakers at planes, but they do.
Anyway, it was military appreciation night, so all of those themes were added to your usual Saturday night pageantry. And Nick Marshall might have earned his own appreciation night.
The quarterback ran for 140 yards and two scores and threw for 93 yards in a gameplan designed to show off his feet.
Tre Mason showed his off, too:
He gained 77 yards on the ground, 62 receiving yards and the game’s first touchdown.
The game almost got out of hand when Robenson Therezie managed an impressive interception and returned it 78 yards for the score. The best part are the crestfallen looks on the faces of the visiting Rebels fans in the background. I love the background atmosphere shots, the accidental documentary snapshot:
Auburn couldn’t put Ole Miss away, though, and the Rebels would fight back. All the while, Marshall just kept running.
Ole Miss churned up yards, and they eventually turned a three score deficit into a five-point affair. And despite allowing 464 yards, it felt like a game for the Auburn defense. At the end, when it counted, the defensive line came up huge. The Tigers beat Ole Miss 30-22, the first ranked opponent they’ve defeated since 2011, to go 4-1 on the season.
Here are the video highlights, edited to make the game look terribly lopsided. I assure you it was not:
Today we learned that yesterday’s problems with my bike were all about the index shifting, and almost entirely human error. That last part is not surprising, but it allowed me to receive a free education today, and probably, when I left the bike shop, they talked for an hour about how they could sucker me into any deal at this point.
So I got to ride around a bit on one of what will surely be the last really warm days of the year. Tomorrow will be splendid, and rain will come in over the weekend, even if Karen is breaking up in the gulf. That’s fine. No big storms necessary, just the rain. And behind that some drier, cooler air. Soon after will be the time the maple leaves will abandon ship, pushing aside the women and the children to fall from their sturdy branches, only to look up and realize they could have stayed around three or four more weeks.
I’m of mixed emotions about the whole thing this year.
But it was sunny and warm and I saw one other person on a bike late this afternoon. That was a kid on the side of the road, straddling his 26er with his right foot propped up on the curb and looking back behind him. I asked if he was OK, he nodded, and I dodged more traffic at the light. From the bike store I decided to find out where this side road, Longleaf, goes — because neither asking nor consulting a map will do. And about halfway down the road I remembered where I’d once before noticed this street name: on some other hilly road I’d rather not think about. Curiously I recalled that just as I got to the one big hill on Longleaf.
Then back into civilization, carefully denoted by the Shell station in the middle of nowhere, then a trailer park and then a few odd and end service businesses. Back up to campus, past the vet school where people walk across the four lane road without a care in the world these days, and then beyond the frat houses and through the athletics side of the campus.
Now I’m in a weird part of the day where to be in the shade is to be in a spot too dark for sunglasses, but it is still fairly bright when there are no trees, so I had a lot of one-hand eye practice today. There was a small, slow climb, I discovered another road on which it isn’t the last roller, but the next-to-last one that really hurts. Finally, back down toward home, through the growing intersection, into the neighborhood and so on. It was an easy and quick 20 miles, except for that one hill.
The Yankee said she saw me. She was going to the grocery store from somewhere just as I passed through that area. Said I looked good. Didn’t want to honk at me. Everyone else does. Usually it is the “You’re going too slow!” variety.
Otherwise there was school work, reading papers, grading things, dreaming up class possibilities, following the news, and so on.
Speaking of which …
Things to read, which I found interesting today …
A year after daily publication ceased in Alabama and New Orleans, media market is ‘fractured’ is about Advance’s moves in New Orleans, Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile and Pascagoula, Miss. New Orleans has seen a Baton Rouge paper move in to give some competition and a daily publication outlet, so that dynamic market is interesting in different ways. Along the I-65 corridor …
The past year has been “a black hole for news in this city,” says Doug Jones, a Birmingham attorney who rose to national prominence for reopening and successfully prosecuting the infamous 1963 16th Street Church bombing case while serving as U.S. Attorney for the Northern Alabama district.
Jones said he and his wife are contemplating dropping their Birmingham News subscription in favor of the still-daily Tuscaloosa News, based some 60 miles south, which is testing the competitive waters by offering subscriptions in some Birmingham neighborhoods.
[…]
Combined average Sunday circulation at Advance’s three Alabama newspapers declined about 8 percent during the same period, with then-nascent digital edition circulation having little effect there.
[…]
“What I’ve seen, at least in this first year, is because of the reduction in resources committed to local reporting, we’ve experienced a dramatic decrease in quality news available to the community,” said Jim Aucoin, professor and chair of the Communications Department at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. “Investigative and enterprise coverage just isn’t there anymore.”
Birmingham lawyer Jones specifically criticized al.com and what he characterized as its generally superficial coverage. “You go online and there are all these teasers, but when you click on them, there are just two or three paragraphs,” he said. “And there’s no decent national coverage. Hell, we can’t even get good coverage of University of Alabama football anymore.”
I’ve never known Doug Jones to lie to me, but that as an absolute twist, stretch and tearing of the truth. As they say, ‘Bama gonna Bama.’
If they don’t say that, they should. Anyway, one more blurb:
Readers in highly technologically savvy Huntsville may be less troubled. “I think al.com has responded reasonably well to the increased [digital] demand by providing convenient and free online access to the state’s major newspapers,” said Eletra Gilchrist-Petty, associate professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “Overall, there do appear to be more strengths than limitations associated with al.com.”
Disclosure: I used to work for Advance. It is a private company, so the financial figures quoted in the Poynter piece are more of a learned guess from industry analysts. I can say this, which is relevant to my time there which ended with my return to academia several years ago, Advance’s al.com property is an impressive financial performer — largely on behalf of all of that Alabama football coverage. They know their audience, even when they should know better. So the point about looking at last year’s move by Advance as “not something that was done for an immediate payoff” is a good one.
I have faith in their numbers and in their revenue stream. I’m concerned, as others noted in the excerpts above, the link in the previous paragraph and some other material that has previously landed in this space about some of the content quality. I hope, and suspect, that will get worked it in the near future.
In our state Birmingham, Huntsville and Mobile, the three cities most directly effected by the shift last year, are the three biggest metros, boasting about half the state’s population. Clearly, there are a lot of people impacted by the daily miracle. (More than just the ones who read it, I’d argue.) Birmingham, if I recall correctly, is now the nation’s largest city without a daily newspaper. I’m not at all concerned about the medium. I’d rather we focused on the journalism. The more investigations and deep reporting, the better. The more people asking pointed questions of politicians, the better. The less time spent analyzing the quarterback and his girlfriend, the better. That’s not so much about the viability of the company as the company’s role in many communities.
The Alabama is one of the great success stories of Birmingham. It is a beautiful and historic facility that went from near demolition to once again becoming an event destination. You can’t see enough movies or concerts there. The last one I watched was The Godfather, which was the first time a digital print was ever played in that now almost 90-year-old theater. Also, the famous marquee was once a background of my blog:
And if that isn’t something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.
He was charged with aggravated assault, resisting arrest, terroristic threats and disorderly conduct because someone got alarmed, called the police and then, according to police, got a little belligerent. (His lawyer says the cops have it wrong and went to the First Amendment in his public airing of grievances.) He was also suspended from campus. He’s due in court later this month. It should be an interesting one to watch.
And now, YouTube Cover Theater the sometimes occasional Friday feature which allows people using their cameras, computers and their musical instruments as a demonstration of how much talent is hiding out there in the world. We do this by picking one original artist and finding a small handful of people covering the (usually) popular tunes.
This week’s featured performers are Hall and Oates. I selected them because I saw this video, one of the van sessions, from Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers. What’s a van session? You’ll see. Press play:
Also, there is a kazoo. A kazoo, people.
They sound so nice, don’t you agree? That band is touring, which stretches the purposes of YouTube Cover Theater, but there’s something intriguingly hypnotic about watching a full band play in a moving van.
Here are the Miller Brothers, who could be playing in a Ramada Inn Airport near you with that sound:
Take two young guys, a Korg and some bad hairpieces and … well, these guys just need more views. Help ’em out:
Apparently they recorded that for Hall-Oates-Ween last year. Fitting.
You know that frame YouTube displays before you play the video? The one on this video doesn’t do the performance justice:
Hall and Oates are still out there rocking in America, this performance was from this spring:
And now you can feel old: She’s Gone was on an album released 40 years ago next month.
