I don’t know what you are, but you scare me. And even considering that you’re an ambidextrous frog that can juggle apples with their own fusion reactor inside, even as they phase into another dimension, just scares me more. I’ll stick with Apple Jacks. Their font is more inspired, after all.
Perfect! Just what I’ve always needed. Now if I can only find my motorized package opener with the cardboard removal accessory …
Now that is a lot of utility work. There are four trucks in one spot. You never see that outside of a natural disaster.
From my Saturday evening ride. There’s a stretch out beyond nowhere that, when you hit it at the right time of day, feels like a portal to another place. If nine dead guys came out of those trees and asked if this was heaven or Iowa I would have had to tell them no, and also, there’s no baseball field for miles.
Here are a few clips of video from the Storybook Farm visit yesterday. One of them was just too fun to have simply disappear. This will take precisely 31 seconds:
Another day of fun and joy, and concerted attempts to maximize my time in the air conditioning. Not sure why, the heat index only made it up to 94 today. That’s a break around here at this time of year.
In a related story: It is August in the Deep South.
So I read and cleaned out inboxes and things like that. Took a trip to the local bike shop where The Yankee had to buy a new tire and tubes. I had to buy new tubes. Your paranoia grows incrementally with each additional ride you take without a spare.
Later in the day I stuffed my little bike bag full of the all-important things, CO2 cartridges, the extra tubes and so on, and hit the road for a brisk ride. It was the evening, it looked overcast and I was chasing the daylight. I got in 20 miles, dodging and weaving around traffic that has suddenly become a lot more dense (the college kids are back) and less accepting of cyclists (the college kids are back?). This could turn into a long lament about traffic and space and all of that, but it is a tired argument. I’m just going to make a custom jersey that says something like “You should move” and have an arrow pointing to the left.
Learned the power of the head shake this evening, though. I was stuck at an intersection and as the light was about to change I tried to clip back into my pedals. Just as I did this, leaning to the left, a car decided being behind me wasn’t as good as being beside me. I glanced back just far enough to see the hood and shook my head as I pedaled in front of him for the next 300 yards. Felt very European. That’ll show him!
I did some research, but it is far from over, meaning there are a lot of open tabs and windows on my computer.
I did this for fun. The Daily Show had a good run at class warfare tonight,
So I looked up some stats. I picked 1980 at (almost) random. The percentage of U.S. households with:
Clothes washer: 73
Dishwasher: 38
Refrigerator: ~100;
Black and white television: 43
Color television: 88
That was in 1980. I picked the year since some insist on comparing President Obama with President Carter. Also, because of Lou Gannon‘s biography on President Reagan. In it, he noted that 4,414 individual tax returns with adjusted gross income of more than $1,000,000. In 1987 there were 34,944 such returns. During that time, Cannon observed, there was a huge increase in the purchase of small appliances and durable goods.
Critics of the new prosperity managed to remain unimpressed by the longest sustained economic recovery since World War II and the steady advance of American living standards. They viewed the Reagan years as an enshrinement of American avarice, epitomized by the “greed is healthy” speech of convicted Wall Street financier Ivan Boesky. Throughout most of the Reagan presidency the complaints of these critics were drowned out by the clamor of the marketplace.
A quarter of a century later, in 2005, these were the same categories, in percentages:
Clothes washer: 82.6, up nine percent
Dishwasher: 58.3, up 20 percent
Refrigerator: ~100, steady
Television: 99.8 percent
Cable TV: 79.1 percent, black and white is no longer listed
More than two TVs:at 42.9 percent
That’s U.S. Department of Energy data, used in a Heritage Foundation report, which also points out that 88.7 percent of American homes have a microwave and 84 percent have air conditioning?
What does it mean? You can decide that on your own. Should it reshape my position? Probably not. It should, however, make one realize that wealth, poverty, success, comfort and pain are relative. After all, the U.S. poverty line for a family of one is defined at $10,890. That income would put you in the 86th percentile on a global comparison according to Global Rich List. It is also longitudinal, and dovetails with class expectations: a very basic middle class lifestyle today would make you look like a king in your great-grandparents era.
Possessions aint everything*, as the poet William Payne wrote, which brings us back to money for groceries and bills and pills. And that circular argument is where we’ve been politically for years. It’s almost enough to make the unassuming sort wonder why right-thinking people would ever get in that business**.
* Air conditioning, I maintain, is pretty stinkin’ vital.
Why journalism remains a good major, as argued by a department chair and a third-generation journo:
If anything, (Chico State’s Susan Brockus Wiesinger) says, the skills the journalism program teaches—multiplatform writing and storytelling chief among them—are more in demand than ever before, and job opportunities abound.
Yes, she tells students, corporate daily newspapers are suffering mass layoffs, but the nation’s thousands of community newspapers are doing well, as are magazines. And the need for clearly and cleanly written content in other arenas—on the web, in business, on cable or broadcast television, in the public-relations field, and in many other areas—is growing rapidly.
When students ask her where they can find jobs, she has a one-word reply: “Everywhere.”
There are some generalities in those anecdotes, but I’d agree with the overall sentiment. I also appreciate this part of her argument:
When Wiesinger talks to incoming freshmen journalism students, she likes to ask them bluntly: “Why are you here?” She wants to learn whether they have passion for the profession—because of its importance to democracy, because of the teamwork required to practice it well, because reporting and writing vivid, meaningful stories is fun and exciting and never boring.
And she wants to encourage them, to make sure they know that by majoring in journalism they are going to learn skills that are invaluable in almost any profession and that will make them attractive to recruiters.
Chico State is a writing program, because they fear sending unprepared multimedia types out into the world. That’s the case with several of the more traditional programs. There’s no reason a department can’t prepare students with both the soft and the hard skills, and maybe even send them to computer science for a minor that will arm them for the future. That was the basis of a panel discussion we recently held at AEJMC.
But I digress.
Non-breaking non-news from Poynter, who reports that Cleveland.com (Disclosure: I once worked for a sister site) is accepting anonymous comments with open arms. (They’ve been doing this for a long time.) But the perspective is worth repeating as more and more newsrooms grow weary of dealing with the vitriole that can hide in anonymity.
“I think you miss out on the full extent of the [online] medium if you block out what readers have to say,” Cleveland.com Editor In Chief Denise Polverine told NetNewsCheck. “Some news organizations feel their voice is the final voice on a subject, and that’s not the case at Cleveland.com.” That’s not to say the comments are untouched. Moderators remove offensive ones, and on sensitive stories comments may be disabled entirely. A community manager writes a note about commenters when they attain “featured user” status and quotes something they’ve posted recently.
Does an “extraordinary situation” permit you to use someone else’s work without permission? The BBC seems to think so:
Social media editor Chris Hamilton clarifies that the organization’s policy is to “make every effort to contact people who’ve taken photos we want to use in our coverage and ask for their permission before doing so.” However, Hamilton noted, “where there is a strong public interest and often time constraints,” a senior editor may decide to “use a photo before we’ve cleared it.”
I’m sure the BBC bristles when this happens in the other direction, however. That’s essentially the argument that people like Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen and others take about the news, that the paper (or other outlet) doesn’t “own” content, and that when it is out there, it is out there. Information, public domain and all of that.
And now that the shoe is on the other foot — even the BBC can’t be everywhere, so there’s the pro-am journalist solution — it will be interesting to see how this is accepted over time.
We’ve all had this kind of interview:
Ten social network settings you should check right away. These platforms don’t always default in the direction you’d like. Double-check your settings, just to be sure you’re showing and hiding what you’d like. I had to move a few settings over myself, here.
Cyberloafing is good for you:
“Employees who browse the web more end up being more engaged at work, so why fight that if it’s in moderation?” says Don J.Q. Chen, a researcher at the National University of Singapore and a co-author of the new report, presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management.
[…]
Chen says the web surfing provided the workers with “an instantaneous recovery.” “When you’re stressed at work and feel frustrated, go cyberloaf. Go on the net. After your break, you come back to work refreshed.”
I think the best part about this story is how Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan are relatable to audiences worldwide:
Armstrong was joined (in Afghanistan) by 83-year-old Jim Lovell, who famously commanded and rescued the botched Apollo 13 mission in 1970, and Gene Cernan, 77, who was the last man to set foot on the moon.
For Afghan trainee Lieutenant Khan Agha Ghaznavi, meeting “these great men who have actually been to the moon and could answer my questions directly… it’s overwhelming”.
That’s appeal.
When I was young, and at a summer day camp, I heard a speaker talk about his time drifting in the Pacific ocean. I don’t remember all of the details about his story, other than that he and his shipmates were in the sea for days, that their buddies were being picked off by the sharks and that they’d learned, through — trial and fatal error — the best way to stay afloat without attracting the attention of the predators.
For five days they struggled to survive. Some 900 men went into the water. Just 317 were rescued.
I remembered the name of the ship when I heard the story years later and after I’d become interested in the history of that era. It was during a re-watching of Jaws, where the ship captain tells the same tale. This fictional character and the real man we heard as children were both on the USS Indianapolis. They’d delivered the first atomic bomb to the Army Air Corps and were later hit by two Japanese torpedoes.
As dramatic stories go, they don’t become any more intense than this one. From start to finish — when the shipment began in 1945, to the court martial the captain face (he was the only U.S. captain that lost a boat in the war put on trial for it), to his being restored to active duty and his eventual 1949 retirement or even to the Japanese sub commander who said in 2000 “”I had a feeling it was contrived from the beginning” or to his Congressional exoneration later that same year — this is a sad and epic tale.
And now it will be a movie. Hope they play it straight up.
Maples turn early, the most skittish of the green leaves. But they don’t have to go this fast. Mid-August? This far south?
I enjoy the fall, but I also enjoy my summer, and so the transition is sometimes more welcome than others. This year, I’d be fine with more summer, really. In another six or seven weeks the rest of that leaf’s pals will start to yellow just a tinge. And then they’ll start to fall somewhere late in October. By November I’ll be raking and waiting for spring, which comes in for an early, sporadic start in February. And that’s not so bad; summer will be around again shortly thereafter. But that’s next summer. And I’d be happy for this summer to last a while. There’s more swimming to do, more sleeping to enjoy, more summer sunsets to appreciate. All those long summer evenings will fade away faster than I’d like.
But this is nothing to be melancholy about. Except for the raking. I hate the raking. If I typed about it more the inside of my thumb would develop a blister just out of habit.
I have delicate thumbs.
Fine day today. Twenty miles on the bike, painful as ever. I’ve developed this unwelcome system of getting my legs back and then skipping town for several days or being otherwise occupied for a week and thus whatever tiny gains I’ve made have all disappeared. So the 20 miles today, which felt barely like a ride in June, can sap me today. It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
And by better I mean the temperature. We had two days a while back that were unseasonably cool and it felt like you could ride forever. August temperature has something to do with the rest of this, and while I’ll miss the summer, I won’t miss the constant 115-degree heat index days.
Changed a lot about my dissertation today. A lot. We’ve been mulling this over for a while and today I finally shifted directions, which I’d been dreading, but after the fact it feels like the right choice. So, while I’m trying to not be tedious about it here, this move feels very positive.
And if you are actually interested in that, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time to be tedious about it later.
(W)e’re going to need to see that video a few dozen more times.
Despite everything else that swirled around the season, the narrative of those guys in blue is one of our best tales. It would have been compelling if it were just another team, but the entire story was so gratifying to think of Kodi Burns becoming the archetype of an Auburn man in a jersey, Cameron Newton discovering his redemption and an unsung defense living up to their potential. An undefeated season is always a great story, but the chilling story behind Zac Etheridge’s comeback, Wes Byrum being his implacable self and Mike Dyer taking Bo’s torch to threaten the entire conference lives on.
We could discuss each player and how their contributions and subplots filled such a tremendous narrative. But to put it simply, this team is a joy to watch.
Nothing earth-shattering about it. That’s just a great production and it is worth seeing again. Got a lot of nice comments at the bottom of the piece. It also earned a reply from the people that run the thing. Now we’ll have to see if they take my advice. (I give them unsolicited advice. I am batting .500 with them.)
So, if you’re in Auburn during the fall, I have a new Sunday tradition. “Several students, fans, and alumni have volunteered to help with the clean up.”
I’ve rolled the corner plenty of times, and haven’t done it in several years, though I always take guests who come to town for the games. For a long time it has felt more like a family and college kid event, but given the strain the trees have faced — the stupid fires, the intelligence-challenged drunk driver and, now, the guy who’s going to jail — I’ve been content to have had my share. I threw a roll after the SEC championship last year, when it just seemed so unbelievable that no one noticed the cold. And I threw a roll after the BCS win last January, when it seemed so cold that it was unbelievable those guys above had won a championship in the desert:
That’s enough. That’s more than I could ask for.
The city and the university have contracted out the cleaning to a firm from Montgomery. And the university, in questioning if the trees will last the year, has taken what is being interpreted as a “roll ’em if you got ’em” approach. The experts’ belief is that the toilet paper isn’t the problem, but the trees are more susceptible to the cleanup. That used to be done by a high water pressure system, but now it will be done by hand.
And this needs to be the next great tradition. So several of the locals have been plotting this out. We figure a Sunday-after-church cleanup could be as good as a pre-game tailgate. So we’ll see you at Toomer’s on Saturdays and Sundays.
Two more weeks until the opening game of the season. That’s not a bad part of fall, either. So maybe I don’t mind that maple leaf so much after all.
