Twenty miles on the bike this morning. So the decadent lunch I had was OK, right?
I had my doubts about the menu in the cafeteria, but they had the best tender pork shoulder ever. And there was dressing. (It isn’t nearly as good as the dressing made by the ladies in my family, but for mass-produced starch-based food you’ve ever had.) The man that dipped my choices said “That’s the soul food, there!”
Yes it was.
Grading in the afternoon. And that got me down to just three things left to grade for the semester. This is progress.
Another day in class, another two hour session with Dreamweaver. The students are building webpages and they are coming along nicely. The lab, though, is very warm. Too many iMacs makes the room a sauna, I suppose. And if that’s as bad as your day gets, you have it made friends.
(I do.)
In the evening there was email, and plenty of it, returning phone calls and reading. Always with the reading.
And since it is Thursday evening, where the energy of the week begins to escape me, I’ll let Conan bring it home. I agree wholeheartedly with his Cap’n Crunch argument, but for the real fun stick around to the 2:15 mark.
Tomorrow: road trip!
video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Briefly brief 20 Apr 11
We used Hannan in a few papers in support of our research. I’m presently re-watching the American version of Life on Mars. (Still waiting to find the BBC original … ) And his recent speech at the European Parliament sounds, sadly, right on.
The comments on that YouTube video, for a change, are largely very interesting. When you’ve captured quality comments on YouTube you’re just doing this Internet thing wrong, I think, but nonetheless, refreshing still.
It seems unnatural to have such pitch-perfect weather just a day after such deadly storms.
Seventeen dead were killed yesterday and last night across four states. Three of the deaths were near the scene of that picture, which is from ABC 33/40 meteorologist James Spann in Autauga County, Alabama this morning. Many more were hurt there. The church is destroyed. (But they are congregating in the morning at the local high school; the human spirit can be indomitable.) Four more people died in rural Washington County.
Tornadoes are curious, scary things. My elementary school was on the top of a hill. Back then, school districts didn’t shut down a day in advance of a storm. The siren howled and we all lined up in the hallways, even in the first or second grade wondering about the usefulness of the head-between-the-knees technique. During one spring storm they told us a tornado skipped up one side of the hill, ramped over the building and down the other side. I don’t recall seeing any damage, but remember that story vividly.
It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve had friends speak of destroyed front yards and pristine backyards. I’ve watched news reports of babies picked up and placed unharmed in dresser drawers far from home. I saw a report once of a farmer who got caught on his tractor in his field and couldn’t beat the storm back to the barn. He ran off for safety and came back to find his tractor OK, but the gas cap gone, presumably spun open by the swirling winds.
I’ve covered lots of tornadoes. Chased a few, from a safe distance, too. Having lived a great portion of my life in a volatile springtime area the closest we’ve come to being impacted is in donating to those in need. Thirteen years and two weeks ago, in 1998, we adopted an awesome little storm dog. Oak Grove, a community near my home, had been devastated by one of the largest tornadoes ever recorded. Thirty-two were killed. When they went in to clean up they couldn’t tell lot from lot in some places because there was just nothing left. Here’s a brief video from that storm:
The shrubs are trimmed. At least the ones in the front yard. You can’t see halfway down the side of the house or the lovely foliage in the backyard from the road, so they don’t exist. And, hence, they will be sheared to within an inch of their life on another evening.
But my, doesn’t the front look good. Except for the shrub right by the garage. It has an unruly spot. It has the bangs of a seven-year-old boy who wouldn’t sit still in the barber’s chair. And one along the side, where I sliced off the new growth to reveal … big odd holes in the shrubbery’s formation. It looks like the swamp scene from Flash Gordon. This terrified me as a child.
I think it was because Timothy Dalton is the antagonist.
The rest of that clip plays out after Flash tricks Barin into thinking he’d been poisoned by the evil creature with the hero climbing down the vines. Barin says to the fog “Oh thine chase is on! But I will use my resources poorly and pursue him myself, giving these fine green jump-suited fellows the early weekend.”
Then there’s more fog, some oddly pliant quicksand and then hawkmen. Just your average day in the yard, really.
That movie only made back about 80 percent of the original budget. They’ve probably made up the difference in licensing, syndication and DVD sales. Meanwhile, this is interesting: George Lucas had hoped to remake the original Flash Gordon (1936), but when he learned that Dino De Laurentiis had already bought the rights, he wrote Star Wars (1977) instead. Sam J. Jones, who played Flash, was last in front of the camera in 2007. Now he is the CEO of an international security company providing diplomatic and executive protection for high profile clients around the world.So I guess that worked out.
So, yes, half the shrubbery has been brought under control. The rest later this weekend. Brian showed up mid-afternoon. The storms followed soon after. And hail. We got hammered by frozen pellets of angry intention for about 90 seconds. It covered the yard.
It hurt my head. I’m just going to save that story and a few more pictures for Sunday.
Dinner with Brian and Shane, our realtor, and his Brian. We ran into two of The Yankee’s students at Niffer’s. We should really find a second place to eat.
We spent the evening staring at the radar. The Yankee knew what was coming: Brian would unveil his newest meteorological toys and have about 15 views between us. Everything missed us. Part of town lost their power, but nothing blinked at our blissful cottage. The bulk of the storm was well north, and then, late, some that hit to our west.
At midnight, as the threat of anything dangerous happening in our little corner the death toll was four ranging, from Oklahoma through Alabama. One small central Alabama town was digging itself out from a direct hit in the late hours and had several people missing. Tomorrow’s news already looks grim.
Washington Post sports columnist — and former Redskins beat writer — Jason Reid was the Timothy Sumner Robinson lecturer at Samford University this spring. He spoke with many classes, the staff at the Samford Crimson, the radio station WVSU and more before delivering his Robinson lecture which focused on social media and sports reporting. Here’s a small sample of some of his advice to students early in the day.
The lecture series is named in honor of Timothy Sumner Robinson, a 1965 graduate of Samford University. He covered the Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the Johnson White House and, most famously, Watergate. Even amidst Woodward and Bernstein, Robinson wrote more front page stories for the Post than anyone.
Sumner would become a lecturer, an editor in Los Angeles (where he covered the Rodney King trial, the riots and the O.J. Simpson trial) and then Excite, Alta Vista, NBCi and AOL/Time Warner. He was a renaissance man before his time. His family, all charming people, put on this lecture each spring and it has become a highlight of the campus calendar.
(As an experiment: I took this audio via the open air microphone on my iPhone using the free Recorder & Editor app. I edited it in the app. I took the photograph with the iPhone’s camera and then put the two together in iMovie on my desktop machine. If I can move the file, as a wav, from the app to iTunes I could have produced the entire thing by phone. This process worked pretty well, otherwise, but the microphone picks up soft speakers best within two or four feet. A proper mic, or moving to the speaker, is desirable for good quality. Old radio guy that I am, I have a few other audio recording apps in line to try.)
