I don’t often have the Mondays. I have a secret and proprietary strategy for warding them off and it works.
Mostly.
But today was one of the Mondays that people complain about. The dragon coaster, and the craftmanship involved in it were one of the better parts of the day. Soon after this I found myself behind two wrecks.
On the other hand, had I not allowed myself the opportunity to be passed by this truck and his tools of the fairground, I would have been much closer to those wrecks.
Buck Belue quarterbacked Georgia to a national championship in 1980. He’s a legend for all of that, but this was really what makes people remember him more than 30 years later:
He also played baseball at Georgia, batting .356 which, as we learned in Bull Durham, is a career in any league. He played in the Expos organization for three years and that’s how he finds himself in broadcasting in Atlanta today, trading on his considerable name power and sports knowledge to make a fine career.
One of his side projects is to call a bit of college baseball on television, as he did today. Auburn was busy losing to Georgia, and Belue was making fun of the Tigers, but also pointing out every questionable call questionable umpires were making. Those guys haven’t had a weekend. (That sentence applies to both Auburn and the umpires.)
So I poked fun at Buck Belue on Twitter for making fun of the umpires. He said “Dude blew the call.”
And the dude did. It was a call that should have gone in favor for Georgia — a swipe tag at second that happened right in front of the properly positioned umpire — but I calls ’em likes I sees ’em. This umpire …
… sometimes he doesn’t see ’em.
(Sorry … it’s just … those glasses … )
Auburn lost Friday night in a game which featured good starting pitching for Auburn and no bats — Georgia’s starting pitcher had a great game. Then there was an unfortunate sixth inning which saw four Auburn pitchers allow two hits, four walks, a hit batsman and four runs in a 5-2 loss.
Tonight’s game saw errors three spread across 11 innings, in a 6-5 Auburn loss that featured more bad calls from the same umpire crew. The guy above was behind the plate last night and he blew a call that would have scored a key run for Auburn. He’s had a tough weekend.
Sometimes I wish I knew something about music, just on the off chance that I’d get to be a part of something musically moving. Like this, for example. At the end of their U.S. tour, Bruce Springsteen took a request from the crowd and the E Street Band played one for Levon:
I posted some Levon Helm videos the day before he died. You can see them all here.
In more sobering news, Birmingham Business Journal reports that Alabama lost 36,100 private sector jobs in the last decade. There are less than 1.5 million private sector jobs in the state these days.
There are 4.8 million people in the state. How can there be that few private sector jobs?
The Census says 37.5 percent of the state is younger than 18 and 7.6 percent are older than 65. So that’s 45 percent young and old. And if you trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which is increasingly becoming a funny thing to say these days — there is 7.6 percent unemployment in the state, so that gets us up to 52 percent of the state.
And here’s a list of government populations by city, which is eye-opening. According to that list 135 of the state’s 512 cities are above the U.S. median for percent of government employees. Not sure how that list accounts for residents in unincorporated areas, which are prominent in rural states.
(G)rowth of mobile video usage is increasing dramatically. 108 billion videos were watched on mobile phones in 2011, almost trebling to 280 billion in 2012. However, unlike apps, this isn’t translating into symbiotic revenue levels. Despite a 23.8% revenue growth, Video is likely to account for a mere 2.4% ($3.6 billion) of total mobile media revenues in 2012.
Food as art, history and sociology. I don’t think about these things this way on my own, but this is a wonderful read:
Q. Shouldn’t we all be more in touch with our food heritage? How can we go about doing that?
A. When you follow a family recipe, you have an opportunity to bring life to your family story. What sustained your ancestors and your parents? It becomes exciting because you can say, “This is what my so-and-so ate to celebrate the end of World War II.”
Michael Twitty, the A above, is taking a tour of the South — he’s calling it the “Southern Discomfort Tour” — a journey to follow his ancestral path across the region, covering almost 4,500 miles.
And how to embarrass yourself on air in one easy step. I’d embed the video, but that television station hasn’t discovered that autoplay is evil. So I’ll link to it.
I’ll be showing that in class. If you can watch it more than once, I applaud you. But go watch some more Bruce instead.
music / video — Comments Off on The best 12:30 of your Internet day 3 May 12
One shot. A steadicam, a dolly, a helicopter and a whole bunch of awesome:
There’s so much going on here you’re going to need to watch it two or three times. I saw a news package on this last night and, honestly, the video is far better than the television piece would have suggested.
You might not be a journalist, Niemanlab says, but you play one on Twitter. True enough. There’s a lots of journalism being reported there. And a fair amount being poorly reported, as critics like to point out. Others might note, in response, that there’s a great deal of things underreported elsewhere that get attention on Twitter.
I prefer Twitter as an aggregation tool. I’ve talked with disbelieving journalism professors and working journalists and television producers about the quality of Twitter — they’re all using the tool these days, by the way — about that. I learn a great deal from Twitter that I wouldn’t get elsewhere.
Just today for example, a friend in Montgomery pointed out this story:
Alabama lawmakers gave final approval today to a watered-down version of legislation aimed at getting more insurance coverage for autism treatment.
The House of Representatives voted 96-0 for the bill, sending it to the governor for his signature.
The legislation requires insurance companies to offer coverage for the treatment of autism, including for a costly behavioral therapy that now is rarely covered. Businesses could choose whether to offer the coverage as part of their insurance options for employees.
A friend in Atlanta passed along this terrific Der Spiegel feature on East Berlin, before and after the Iron Curtain was pulled down.
Found this on Twitter today too, from a colleague in Arizona. Media Storm, which is journalism juggernaut that doesn’t work as a traditional newsroom, won three awards from the National Press Photographers Association.
And finally, we roast ourselves for mistakenly running a previously published editorial about Pearl Harbor Day in this space in Tuesday’s newspaper. Dec. 7, 1941, is a day that President Franklin D. Roosevelt aptly called “A day of infamy.” While our mistake pales in comparison, May 1, 2012, will go down as a dark hour in this newsroom.
Not to be pedantic, but The Lufkin Daily News is playing a bit fast and loose with the quote, too. That Texas paper is putting a paywall on their website next month. We wish them well.
And, if you’re thinking “Someone that says “Not to be pedantic means to, in fact, be pedantic” you are absolutely correct.
Rain, on my drive home:
There’s nothing spectacular about that video, but I do enjoy the sound.
