It was the kind of day that should last forever and not change at all. Only you’d get bored of it. Sunny, breezy and 79? Again?
Maybe you’d get bored of it. Not me.
And if you don’t believe me, here:
Look at that sky, check out those clouds, ignore the guy pretending he knows how to ride a bike.
Rode 30 miles today, my first time on the bike since Tuesday. I was just beginning to convince myself that I was figuring something out about my bike or my legs or … something … earlier in the week because everything felt great. And then I got sick, and then it rained and now here we are. I’m on some precipice where three days off feels like a long time for whatever I have that passes for conditioning. I thought that today might be feel like I’d taking a slide backward.
But it felt a lot better than I thought it might. My legs were fairly strong. On the particular route I took today, one third was familiar and the rest was new. It didn’t include the most daunting hills around, but I was moving up rollers and slight hills with ease. I’d look down and realize I hadn’t even changed from my smallest gear.
Not sure what to make of that.
Baseball: Auburn beat LSU 3-2 in another game where the outcome was in doubt until the last pitch.
Here are the highlights:
That’s eighth ranked LSU. Auburn has won five in a row and is tied for the division lead in the young season. And this is a young team, picked to finished closed to last, still learning to put it all together, still stranding almost 10 runners on base per game.
The future looks bright. Maybe all of the days will be as pleasant as this one.
It was one of those days that you thought it would rain all day. When it finally started raining, which seemed delayed somehow. But then it did rain and, even though it didn’t rain hard, you thought it might take over the entire day. Except for when it wasn’t raining, which was beautiful.
My meteorological skills may be a bit off.
But there was the rain, so it was an indoors morning, which suited me just fine. We had our weekly Barbecue House breakfast today — one of my favorite parts of the week and not even because of the hash browns — where we did not see any local celebrities for a change. We also did not see anyone pulled over nearby for a change.
We had a quiet breakfast, a biscuit for The Yankee and a sandwich for me. The food is all delicious and they know us by name and the place is busy, but quiet. You could probably get a splinter by rubbing your hand on the wall. The restaurant is the same age as I am, so I’m trying not to make the details of the joint autobiographical, but I wonder about the splinters.
It rained in the afternoon. I don’t ride in the rain if I don’t have too — one day I’ll change my mind about that — so I stayed on the computer.
Things cleared away late in the afternoon, just in time for baseball. Only as time for the game drew close there was an allegation of a lightning bolt. So they kept the field covered. The sky was beautiful, but the radar showed a blob, and this is a day that seemed like it could rain at any time. The fans were impatient for baseball:
Here was sunset over Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum (click to embiggen):
Finally they played removed the tarp:
And finally they played, the young Auburn squad trying to figure out where they should sit on the spectrum of SEC baseball this year, and the eighth ranked LSU team. It was a terrific game of back and forth momentum. It was tied at two after six innings. Auburn scored in the seventh. LSU answered in the eighth frame to tie things at three. In the bottom of the eighth Zach Alvord doubled. He moved to third on a sacrifice and then Ryan Tella brought his hot bat to the plate:
That swing gave Auburn a 4-3 lead. LSU would manufacture a double in the ninth. They put in a pinch runner. Auburn collected two outs. And Auburn baseball announcer Rod Bramblett takes it over from there (this video is helpfully queued to the last play of the game):
There’s a certain way you can look at the framing of that shot that might give you the inclination to say that umpire’s call was a bit of home cooking. LSU certainly seemed to think so, but they lost 4-3. It was a great game.
cycling / video / weekend — Comments Off on On curation and heat in the sun 17 Mar 12
Not a lot today. Hey, it is Saturday, and this week that is enough.
But I stumbled across this video via Twitter, and it is something I think and talk about on campus a fair amount. Thought I’d share it here, too.
Pedaled around the city bypass today. It was only 17 miles, I wanted a lot more, but my legs just weren’t there.
Also it was very warm. This might be the year that I become a wilted flower. I’ve felt this coming for the last few years. Septembers have started to get to me as I’ve found myself fundamentally opposed to triple digit heat that late in the year.
And now, on the other end of the seasonal spectrum, mid-80s in March seem a little unbecoming of technically-late-winter.
You don’t notice it when you’re riding. You do notice it when you have to stop for a red light in an intersection with no shade. You wonder about a lot of things just then.
Like why you’ll do it again tomorrow.
Then you get off the bike. You cool down a bit and clean up. And then you remember why.
Watch the entire video if you like, but here’s the backstory. Samford student Ryan Penney spent a day on Lake Martin with his girlfriend and her family. At Chimney Rock — where thousands of us have jumped and dived for decades — there was a terrible accident. Ryan found himself talking with doctors who were telling the theatre major he should consider another line of work, because he’d never walk again. And then:
Afrikaner Blood: “Kommandokorps in South Africa organizes camps during school holidays for young white Afrikaner teenagers, teaching them self-defense and how to combat a perceived black enemy. The group’s leader, self-proclaimed ‘Colonel’ Franz Jooste, served with the South African Defense Force under the old apartheid regime and eschews the vision of a multicultural nation.”
Half-lives: The Chernobyl workers now: “Slavutych in Northern Ukraine was set up by the Soviet government shortly after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster to accommodate people evacuated from the proximity of the nuclear plant. The city was designed to provide the inhabitants with modern amenities and a comfortable life. First people moved in their new homes in 1988.”
America’s Dead Sea: “Salton Sea in the Colorado Desert of Southern California is a former tourist destination that has turned into an environmental disaster. Born by accident 100 years ago when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal, the lake soon became a popular resort. Yet with no outflow, and with agricultural runoff serving as its only inflow, the lake’s waters grew increasingly toxic. Though the resort towns were soon abandoned, the skeletons of these structures are still there; ghost towns encrusted in salt.”
The cycling story you probably don’t care about: One of the little pieces of cycling etiquette we have here is very dangerous. It involves a simple wave off to people pedaling the other direction. I’ve reduced this to a minimal movement, the raising of a flat hand so I don’t have to alter my “form.”
Form in cycling is important. I have none.
So this evening I rode out my three warmup miles. I sailed down the hill, through the neighborhood, made a beautiful turn toward the exit of the subdivision, through the roundabout and up the little incline that is the first minor piece of work of the ride. Only it felt great, the rhythm was there, the incline felt as mild as it ever has, my legs were crisp.
I coasted the last few feet, unclipped from my pedals, to the stop sign. I let the traffic from either side go by. Finally the only other person was another cyclist. And so I pedaled out across his oncoming path, clipping into the pedals, standing out of the saddle, making the long slow turn. Head on, I gave him the flat wave. My bike wobbled badly. I barely saved it. How, I’m not sure, but I stayed upright. In the two seconds of trying to not fall I sliced my pinkie finger on an exposed, sharp point of the bike.
So that hurt. By the time I had everything under control and could look down I was already bleeding off my hand from the meaty part of the inside of my metacarpus. Also, it hurt.
So I returned home, cleaned the cut, which was happily superficial and clotting. Suitably bandaged I went back out. About 22 miles in I forgot about my hand, began gripping the handlebars properly and pulled the bandaid away and reopening the wound. So it bled awhile but there was nowhere to stop. Look at me! A suffering cyclist!
My favorite meme of all time has become a campus group’s poster:
That, of course, is Joseph Ducreux, who was a French portrait painter at the court of Louis XVI and after the French Revolution. He liked physiognomy, assessing one’s personality by their facial expressions, hence his unorthodox portraiture, like this self-portait and, of course, the very famous Internet joke. You can’t even find the original set anymore, so buried are they amongst everyone’scontribution.
Two students showed this video in class today during a demonstration about advertising. The gasps from the rest of the class were great. See if you can figure out where this is going:
Happy birthday to The Birmingham News, which turned 124 today. This is the June 20, 1900, front page:
So the paper was 12 years old at the time. I haven’t seen any of the first volume’s front pages.
Advertising executives -– both marketers and their agency representatives -– continue to increase their optimism toward digital media options, and are beginning to swing toward it as more of a “branding” than a performance “option,” but there are some significant disconnects between the way they look at various digital media silos. While agency executives tend to be far more bullish on the overall use of digital media, marketers are much more optimistic about budgeting for social media.
The findings, which are part of new, detailed analysis coming out of Advertiser Perceptions’ Fall 2011 survey on ad executive attitudes and optimism about media, show the overall index for digital -– including online display, search and video advertising –- trending upward, but the sentiment appears to be driven primarily by agencies. That insight is interesting, because the bottom line of big agencies appears to be benefitting from their continuing shift toward a greater reliance on digital media, according to a Pivotal Research analysis released Monday (OMD, March 13).
“But there is a discrepancy in the way marketers and agencies are seeing it,” says Randy Cohen, a partner in AP — which produces an ongoing series of ad industry tracking studies under its Advertiser Intelligence Reports banner, including this one. “It’s a disconnect,” he says, adding, “But agencies tend to do what marketers want them to.”
If that’s the case, social media should be the primary beneficiary, according to Cohen, because marketer sentiment is building much more favorably toward social networks versus the rest of the digital mix.
