Auburn’s baseball team, simultaneously struggling and competing for a division championship, hosts Georgia for a three game series at Plainsman Park. The first game was tonight, an extra innings affair, where I tried out the Zapd app for the first time.
Zapd is intriguing, if a bit limited at the moment. There are no social media or embed options, so what you see below is simply captured in an iframe. (The hard link is here.) What the program does do, however, is create a blog on the fly, via your phone. You can’t import it, short of copying the source file, so it stays on the Zapd server, but this is just one more step in the push button blogging world. (And, again, this is all done via a free app.)
These are a few things I took pictures of and typed out during tonight’s game.
Tigers win! Also, the video was published as text for some reason. Here’s the actual clip:
After the game there were fireworks:
Thursday / video — Comments Off on Be a kid again 5 May 11
This cropped up on the this day in history feature. That wreck is almost as terrifying as the production values. Bobby would walk away and outlived his sons, Davey and Clifford, and his friend Neil Bonnett, who all lived and died in racing. The rest of the Alabama Gang are still around. Bobby is doing commercials, his brother Donnie is retired, Jimmy Means is a race car owner and Red Farmer was racing in the 21st century, into his 70s, a product of an era where he even he didn’t know how old he was.
But back to what’s important. Here’s the early race from Talladega this year. That’s television in 24 years.
You never really think of the late 1980s as being ancient for an art and technology like television, but there it is.
Cold today. It was 54 degrees this afternoon, this is odd being Alabama in May. It was warmer, by 15 degrees, at my in laws in New England than in the deep South.
Sitting in my office and shivering I discovered that a bit of a Jerry Lee Lewis song I recently taught myself is actually a Rabon Tarrant (or older) riff. Listen to this.
Hear that piano? Speed up Blues With A Feeling and you’ve got the Killer. A few weeks ago I pulled up a tutorial from YouTube and learned how to peck that out on the piano. Tarrant played in brass bands all over the country during Prohibition and switched to the blues and left orchestras somewhere around World War II and started playing the blues. He recorded a lot with Jack McVea and now, 64 years after Tarrant laid down Blues With A Feeling here we are.
Artists back then might not have given much thought to the longevity of their music. It was here, it was recorded, you played it in dank, smelly clubs and then the little checks came in. You had to write more tunes to keep the money rolling, to keep the car filled with gas so you could play more of those clubs. No one probably had any time to consider that the great-grandchildren of the people they were playing in front of might also discover their music.
Three-and-a-half hours in class (and extra time) with Dreamweaver this afternoon. This was the next to last day of the class, where most are rounding the corner from being perplexed or dismayed by the program to having something almost ready to show off. Most of their portfolio sites I’ve watched them build from the ground up, helping out a bit here or there with the tricky parts. There are a few that have big strides to make, but by this time next week everyone will have managed to shuffle themselves into pretty good shape.
Veteran meteorologists called it the storm of a lifetime. Just as well. No one that watched this thing would ever want to see its like again.
Over the course of the day tornadoes raked the state from border-to-border east-to-west, and hit or threatened towns stretching across more than half the state’s north-south axis. Cities like Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, towns like Cullman, suburbs like Pleasant Grove and small communities like Phil Campbell were hit hard.
(Update: A week later the death toll is still fluctuating a bit. There are still some persons unaccounted for. This is now considered the second-worst storm in U.S. history in terms of fatalities. The numbers are staggering, but how they aren’t higher given what we witnessed and what those people endured seems something of a tragic miracle.)
For me the sky turned from blue to gray to green to gray again. Finally, long after dark, the storms passed. The hard work of real heroes was underway. It will take some of those communities years to recover.
In the scope of all of that, this seems a bit silly. But I watched radar and news from across the state and curated it as well as I could through Twitter. For about two minutes late this afternoon my location was under a direct threat. Beyond that my extended family and I are extremely lucky.
Not surprisingly, given the destruction, a few of my colleagues at the University of Alabama lost their homes. All of those people, too, are safe.
