Florence Green, a member of Britain’s Royal Air Force who was afraid of flying, died in England on Saturday, two weeks shy of her 111th birthday. She was believed to have been the war’s last living veteran — the last anywhere of the tens of millions who served.
Mrs. Green, who joined the R.A.F. as a teenager shortly before war’s end, worked in an officer’s mess on the home front. Her service was officially recognized only in 2010, after a researcher unearthed her records in Britain’s National Archives.
The story talks about how she’d go on dates with the pilots, who would offer to woo her in the sky. She was not interested. After the war she married a man with a sensible ground job. He was a railway porter.
Class today, where we learned a valuable lesson about the computer lab printer. It had been disconnected for a while. When it was plugged in three days of reading material was spat from its innards. It made for fascinating reading, I’m sure.
Some other things happened today, I’d bet. A meeting here, a joke there, a crisis averted in a third place. Run of the mill type things. It seemed a busy and full day. But a good day! Almost the best, even.
Some of the awards floating around in the Crimson office. We have another room in another building with quite a few awards. A lot of these honors go home with students. Even still, there’s an end table sitting here with these things, waiting to be joined by others. Every now and then I move them around, putting the ones in the back to the front. It is a good excuse to wipe a little dust away from them.
These are a bit older, so the names of the kids that won them are unrecognizable to the student-journalists working here now. One day I’ll look them all up and see what they’re doing now. These were people who were students before I came to Samford, so odds are I might have heard a name or two, but haven’t met them.
It is not unlike one of the drawers in my desk. A student signed it in the early 1990s, along with a note urging future people that sat there to save it because “it will be worth something some day.” He’s out in California and he has been at MySpace (at the right time) and at Netflix, so maybe he was on to something. There’s another name written in permanent marker within that desk drawer. It is his wife’s name.
I have a large stack of archived newspapers sitting next to my desk. One of my chairs was handed down from Maxwell Air Force Base — it still has their ID tag on the bottom — and I’ve learned a fair amount about the history of this place and a great deal about the sometimes colorful history of our department. But those two autographs in the desk are my favorite details.
And they graduated a several years before those awards were won, so really, between the autographs, the see-through trophies and today’s students we’re talking about four or five generations of students. Time does flit about prodigiously.
That picture was taking with my iPhone, which is indispensable as a snapshot tool. Of course this weekend, I’ll take a picture with my DSLR and be amazed at how much better that lens is. It should be, of course, but in tech you think of recency, and my phone is a few years old. The primary lens on my DSLR is a little more than a decade old, just a bit older than those awards. (I bought it as a replacement for one I dropped in a creek in Tennessee.) Maybe prodigious isn’t an expressive enough word.
Anyway, that picture is on the iPhone, filtered through Trey Ratcliff’s brilliant 100 Cameras app. I think the screen filter was called “When I was dirty and you laughed.” It gave the picture a certain level of cool color to an already monotone composition. I liked it, I posted it because I never use that app. Shame.
I have three folders of photography apps on my phone. I should never miss an important moment.
I did not talk about phones in class today. The “we’re all reporters now” speech will come up a bit later this semester. We did talk about Joe Paterno and the unverified night of mistaken news. I walked the class through the details and showed off the Storify I made that night to demonstrate how rapidly all of this unfolded. Looking back, only this far removed, the errors in minutes seem staggering. The lesson, friends, is verification. So we talked about that. The class was very much interested in the Onward State’s apology and resignation from the managing editor.
It is a great way to give the “We practice our craft in the public eye” speech again. I give that one a lot, it seems.
We also set up WordPress sites today. I have my tutorial on that down pat, now. “Let’s say I want to do this … but that only gives me a link and I wanted to embed the video.” In two clicks I’ve demonstrated that mistakes are possible, correctable and given students a better way of presenting information.
I’d like to thank WordPress for cooperating entirely in that effort.
It has been an adventurous day. In short order I was almost sideswiped by a car hauler, a dump truck and an 18-wheeler. It seems my car has that new invisible paint we’ve all heard so much about.
The tradeoff was hearing the DJ crack his microphone between songs and say “Monday in America in the middle of winter.” Then Etta Jones began to sing Trav’lin’ Light. Surprisingly her version, a superior take in my opinion, of the now 70-year-old Johnny Mercer song doesn’t seem to exist on the Internet.
The song played and I found myself stuck in the DJ’s aperitif. He had this husky, breathy, beatnik tone. And I thought what a remarkably obvious and obviously unremarkable series of things to say together.
Monday — we feel it
America — oh that’s where I am
Middle of winter — the trees are bare
The song wears on though, this delicate, unfolding and Etta Jones just sighs “No one to see I’m free as the breeze No one but me
And my memories.” And you think, yeah, OK, Monday, America, Winter. I see what he means. Look at that sky.
And then a song later he does it again. “February. Pitchers and catchers report in … 10 days” and a song. I’m unfamiliar with this particular DJ’s work, but I wonder if he can carry this all year long. I bet late July and August he becomes desperate for things to say. There isn’t a lot to say between the fireworks and Labor Day.
“Hot today. How’s that pool? Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Four more weeks before the kids are back in school.”
“Hot dogs. On the grill again. Try it with some relish this time,” and then you hear Thelonious Monk.
So while there is no Etta Jones version on the Internet, there are plenty of Ella Fitzgerald renditions as you might imagine. This one is from 1964. The song was 18 years old. She’d been singing for three decades already:
Anita Day, in her prime, did it in 1963 in Tokyo, where there was apparently a big demand for big band/jazz.
But we’re skipping over that because of course there’s Billie Holiday:
And now you have your Valentine’s Day music. Push play on that album in the kitchen, or in the hallway. Louis Armstrong’s trumpet works in unexpected places.
Anyway. No one can see my car. Tonight I was in the left lane of a two-lane, one way street. Sitting at the red light waiting for the change of the signal and a woman from the side street turns right, which is almost into me. She bites the corner instead, dragging her exhaust probably saying a few things under her breath about the problem. Several, I am sure, were aimed at me. But then again I was in the right lane, which in this case was the left lane.
Do they make blaze orange vests for cars? It might be the season.
Instead of pictures as we usually have in this space on Sunday I’m embedding my favorite commercials from the game. Tonight’s winner: ad agencies. Tonight’s loser: other ad agencies.
In reverse order of my personal favorites, and because I needed a sixth:
I’ve mentioned here before my love of nostalgic commercials — and if you didn’t read that specifically you might have guessed it by other context clues — and there were a few nostalgia spots. This one was the best, because it was produced by people that understand their product and know the place where it belongs. (Budweiser missed on their nostalgia pieces. Toyota’s was fine, but it was more of a personal nostalgia than a historic one.) So this one wins:
I do enjoy the irony that the last thing you see before “making the next century safer” is the attempted horse collar tackle, which is one of your more dangerous and banned parts of the game.
The local ad, supposedly shot with Hyundai’s employees in Montgomery, with Mary stealing the show:
And since we now need to cleanse our mind of Gonna Fly Now, I give you the best song in, perhaps, the worst commercial of the night. They lost all of America with “It’s got a pen? This is awesome.” They redeemed themselves mightily when the bizarrely unforgettable Justin Hawkins is found standing on a San Francisco street corner, being his over-the-top self and somehow warping the continent to be in four cities at once:
That song made it to nine on the Billboard, the album climbed to 33. It was top of the charts in the UK. They may never do anything that gets popular attention — a new albums is forthcoming, Wikipedia says — but The Darkness will always have one of the great pop tunes to their credit.
After the game Chevrolet teased this video. I surfed over, found the page down — the television audience visited en mass, perhaps. When the servers found their footing again there was the newest OK Go video which is, naturally, incredible. Stick with it through the end:
That’s one of the most involved musical performance art acts of all time, a foley artist in desperate need for an award or possibly both.
My favorite ad actually aired just before the game. And it was apparently released last fall. But it is real and emotional and does not feel the need to be outlandish to be outstanding:
What were your favorite ads? What did I miss? (I missed most of the second quarter.) Tell me in the comments.
About 30 employees of the former New York Times Regional Media Group were notified Friday that their new employer, Halifax Media Group, has decided to lay them off and offer severance packages. The other 20 were offered positions, but only if they relocated to Daytona Beach, Fla., where Halifax is headquartered.
A letter accompanying documents distributed Friday said Halifax “has reviewed the company’s Tampa operations to see where additional efficiencies can be achieved by eliminating or consolidating certain job functions and operations.”
Employees “who were offered a package were told that they wouldn’t be given severance if they speak to the media or publicly discuss the situation,” said one source. A second source confirmed the confidentiality clause …
There are more cuts on the way:
Those local news organizations also have their own journalism and sales staffs, who can expect to hear more lay off news over the next month or so.
By the terms of the sale, Halifax could only lay off a maximum 10 percent of the 2,000-person staff, but that requirement applied only to layoffs that occurred at the time of closing.
Selling those properties to Halifax only did so much good for the New York Times. While their paywall has been somewhat successful GigaOM says it doesn’t come close to closing the gap. “Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.”
And now that I’ve found three stories to slow down your Saturday, here’s this reason I love the Internet: Jedi Betty White.
I watch Golden Girls from time to time, I’ll admit it. I can’t stand the theme song, but if I can jump into an episode after that I’ll be hooked for the duration. White’s character is really the only one I never especially liked, but watching the actress is a different thing. Estelle Getty’s character has always been my favorite. Rue McClanahan was always on the periphery to me, Betty White played the comic relief. Bea Arthur held it all together, and sometimes tore up the room. Here’s the end of a great speech at the end of the fifth season premiere. She’d been blown off by her doctor and then saw him out at a fancy restaurant where she confronted him:
It is the sort of thing you think about when someone you care about talks about their doctor and whether they like him or her. The camera pulls and Dorothy goes back to her table and there’s Dorothy setting up the comic relief, and Sophia stealing the show, as she often did.
I’m certain that clip has made its way around to restaurant managers, however. You might need to find your own solution when you get stuck in that spot.
Visited the local bike shop today, which I do believe is about two steps down from going to a coffee house. A few less chairs, a few more expensive products, but everything else is the same.
The Yankee is two-thirds of the way through a bike fitting — centimeters matter, particularly when you’re talking about long rides and various stresses and strains on the body. This is a multi-step gets the process, a by-feel mixture of what the bike expert thinks looks right, and then several rides where you go back and tell him what this infernal device is doing to your back or your shoulders or what have you. Once you get things well fit you can feel like a rocket. Until then you’re just tinkering and trying to find something that doesn’t make you miserable.
I did mine myself last summer. She said my knees were spread out all over the place so I moved the seat post about eight microns over the course of a weekend until I found just the right height. When I found a place that didn’t strain my knees or over-burden my upper body I wanted to launch fireworks and mark that spot in a paint that the world’s worst CSI agent couldn’t miss: Place Seat Here. Mine probably isn’t perfect — my bike is a little small for my build, after all — but nothing especially hurts.
And, as I told the owner of the bike shop today, lately it feels like I’m not riding my bike so much as going along for the ride. I’m holding on more than propelling the thing. It is a nice feeling, silly as the explanation sounds. Bill Strickland calls it the flow:
a discussion of the merits of such a route will ensue, incorporating concepts such as traffic, slope, wind, sun, gravel and the ever-ethereal and thus impregnable defense of “flow.”
I’m the “flow” guy, by the way.
This is inane behavior, I know. But it is important in the way that things that are absolutely without importance are important.
I think Strickland and I are on the same page, at least. If you find Strickland’s flow — which sounds like a submariner’s geographic map notation — maybe you can get to what Jean Bobet called la volupte:
The divine surprise comes when you discover that beyond enjoyment lies the thrill of la volupte. The voluptuous pleasure you get from cycling is something else. It does exist, because I have experienced it. Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity. It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions. At the risk of raising eyebrows, I would maintain that the delight of cycling is not to be found in the arena of competition. In racing the threat of failure or the excitement of success generates euphoria at best, which seems vulgar in comparison with la volupte.
The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.
I wonder if the guys in the local bike shop have read all the great French philosophy on cycling and — oh, he’s going to answer my question now.
I had two, actually. One about chain maintenance, to which he whipped out a tool from the sky above and told me how to build a clock that runs on bike chains. You can’t help but like this guy. He’s just so passionate and giving with everything he knows, and he knows plenty. My other question was also about the chain and how mine seems to have a “Shift, Dummy” signal. He pulls that tool out again, a silver boomerang shaped thing that is not unlike a dipstick and shows me another function. He tells me what I’m describing could be one of three things, or just me being in the wrong gear.
I’m not a very good cyclist, I keep telling you this.
The Yankee, meanwhile, has her bike attached to a trainer. The back wheel is slightly elevated so that she can pedal and work the gears and the front wheel is in a giant plastic contraption designed to keep her in one place rather than crashing through a handsome wall of ultimately vital, expensive brand name accessories.
They adjust, tinker, reset, and we’re all just chatting away about geometry and ergonomics and you’d not believe how many different terms they bring into cycling just to mystify the casual listener, or how many ways I will analogize the things he is saying just to make sure I have it all right in my head.
We talk about warm ups and routes and races. He races. He has more than one pair of cycling shoes. I do too, they are called the tennis shoes I ride in and the the tennis shoes I learned very early hurt my feet when I try to ride in them. (Those are now simply my gym shoes.) The Yankee builds a good pace and pronounces the fit worth trying. She picks up a few accessories. Her bike is now once again fancier than mine.
Back at home, as the day is beginning the long slow sigh into evening, we decide to go for a short ride. We have about an hour of daylight and she wants to try her new clipless pedals. We do a few laps on the empty street in our neighborhood. We pass the little boy who lives next to us, intently focused under his Incredible Hulk helmet and pounding away on his training wheels. I cruise by him quickly, hoping he likes speed, and chuckling that it might concern his mother.
The Yankee and I decide we will ride our bikes through the neighborhood and back up one of the more popular routes in town to the local grocery store. We need charcoal. If we both go one person can stay outside and watch the bikes. I pull out one of those ridiculous drawstring backpacks that we picked up as a promotional gift at a swim meet figuring it might hold the charcoal on the way home. One day those backpacks might hold extra water if I find myself making a really long ride in the summer. A quick visit to the store will be a good test.
We head through the neighborhood, down the hill, through the stop sign and out through the entire subdivision, two people on bicycles laughing like crazed people on bicycles. We can’t do this ride leisurely, because The Yankee has new equipment and wants to test it. Also, we are competitive.
Around the part where all of the old ladies live, the ones you can unfortunately startle if you pass by their house when they’re out to get the mail, we’re streaking along at what is, for us, a good pace. Sprints are relative, dear reader. She has an extra gear in her bike, and perhaps an extra something else when it comes to short distances. I do well to stay on her wheel. But when the hills come — we have moderately sloping hills, nothing massive at all — I can create some distance between us.
I settle in at a nice pace and beat her to the grocery store, but I know I won’t for long. Her new equipment, the bike shop guy said, is going to give her another mile per hour on her average. The gear is a great equalizer. (I, suddenly, need new gear.)
She stays with the bikes. I go inside and find a seven-pound bag of charcoal. I think the 12-pounder might fight this drawstring backpack, but let’s work up to that. I pay. I’m in my full cycling kit and no one at the store even blinks.
“Can I bag this for you?” one of the employees asks.
“Can you put it in this one?” I pull off the blaze orange backpack and he doesn’t hesitate. What do you have to do to give these people pause?
We head back home. In this direction that popular road is more like a drag strip, which is why it is so popular in that part of town. I put my mass forward, which is now even greater with seven pounds of briquettes strapped on my shoulders and cruise down the road. This is a straight path, the first feature being the turn back into the intersection, a 90-degree right-hander that is never a problem.
Unless you’ve changed your weight distribution. What I can normally do from my bike lane into the right-hand car lane now takes up every inch of asphalt. There was no diving into that corner. It was more like watching a big glop of something sliding down the back of a spoon. Not especially viscous, not in any way pretty. Then more sprinting, the last of it really, for soon the remaining route turns into an uphill push back home, which sits up higher than everything else in the ZIP code, apparently. At least it feels that way on my bike.
Just before the bottom of that last sprint is a roundabout, which offers the most technical aspect of this particular ride. You have to swing to the right to get into it, even from the bike lane, but then swing back to the left to avoid someone’s well manicured lawn. But you can’t do that too early, because there are potholes and bent bike wheels waiting for you if you do. Also, I have charcoal on my back. It doesn’t interfere with my riding — I didn’t even notice it on inclines — but it is certainly impacting my swooping.
And I like swooping.
I make it home with no more difficulties and feeling confident I can carry a small amount of dead weight on my back while riding. The Yankee rides up soon after. I note the times on our computers, just in case it is the last time I get back before she does. I’ll want to remember this moment, because it was a great day.
How great? I didn’t even mention the morning yard work, which could not diminish it, with all of its attendant scratches and scrapes and cuts from the flower bed. That’s how great.
As you might have heard, there were deadly tornadoes across the South on Sunday. At least two people in Alabama were killed. As always, the tragedy could have been much more costly, despite the devastation of property. There were, experts now say, at least six twisters in Alabama. The fatalities were low because of the excellent and hard work of the National Weather Service and the local meteorologists.
Only ABC did not get that memo:
ABC 33/40 meteorologist James Spann — the best in the business and there’s no discussion on this — took his national network to task. He suggested Diane Sawyer “get a clue” and challenged her to a debate on the issue. His audience were also indignant, writing first on the local site and then at the ABC homesite, where the chastising grew even louder. Those comments are worth a read.
We live in a dangerous area when it comes to spring weather. December and January are dangerous here too. Storms fall out of the sky. Tornadoes flare up and destroy property and sometimes take lives, but the technology and science now allow meteorologists to give days worth of advance warning. Forecasting that was not available a generation ago saves untold numbers of lives every year.
And so Spann took umbrage. His colleagues at KATV in Arkansas, where other tornadoes touched down, did too.
After today’s social media uproar ABC News decided to interview Spann today. It was scheduled and then canceled and rescheduled. Somewhere in there ABC had to stoop to spinning their own newscast:
“The report that aired Monday was referring to the fact that many families were surprised because they were asleep when the tornado hit in the middle of the night,” an ABC spokesperson says. “‘World News’ will cover the latest on the aftermath of the tornadoes tonight and will clarify the warning and advance forecasts given.”
Not even especially good spin, but there it was all the same.
Their newscast this evening?
Spann wrote on his site that he was grateful for the interview and that the important message about the outdoor sirens was shared, but …
There was no apology, or mention of the botched story yesterday when Diane Sawyer said the pre-dawn tornadoes Monday were a “surprise” with “no warning”. A little odd how you just go from that one day, to a story on how good the warning process was the next day. But, I am not a journalist and maybe that is just the way you do it. Seems strange. I would imagine Diane actually didn’t write that copy, but she will probably think twice about fact checking on lead story intros.
[…]
My frustration with the situation yesterday is shared by ALL of those hard working people involved in the warning process. The National Weather Service, the EM community (emergency managers), and broadcast meteorologists. I felt that these people were devalued and insulted yesterday.
It has been an interesting day in local-national media.
The storms missed us entirely, all going far north. We had some much needed rain and that’s all. We’ll get some more later this week, hopefully without the storms. I’m sure ABC hopes that’s the case.
Beautiful day today. I got in a 26 mile ride at a nice, even 15 mile per hour pace. Now let’s see if I can do that again tomorrow.
Got a lot of work done otherwise, and made a handful of phone calls. More work tomorrow, more emails and reading and some time on the bike. We’re expecting 72-degrees tomorrow for the first time this year. Of course I’ll be riding …
