video « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

video

Auburn / friends / video / weekend — Comments Off
29
Jan 11

Remember to check the lint filter

The day began with what might have been my first ever Honey Do item. I don’t keep track of such things, but this could be that mysterious piece of trivia that will become vitally important in 48 years.

The Yankee was out of town for a family trip and she asked me to make an appliance change while she was gone.

The dryer on one set is getting a bit sluggish and, in the interests of national security and energy bills, the list was handed down, “Would you mind swapping out the washer and dryer while my car is out of the way, giving you room to maneuver?” We have two sets. (Are you surprised? Don’t you have a backup?) But, really, this wasn’t merely an appliance change. This was a change of the set, because it wouldn’t do to have a cream washing machine operating next to a white dryer. There must be uniformity.

I did not mind, and so I did that. Up into the attic I went to retrieve the hand trucks. Cleaned everything out of the way in the laundry room. Disconnected the washer and carted it into the garage.

Disconnected the dryer, slid it over and then hauled it through the door into the garage. I made the baseball’s bullpen motion to no one in particular, touching right hand to left elbow and moved the boxes off the washer and dryer that were about to go into the game.

Then I carried them, one by one, into the laundry room thinking, Ha! Now I can correct the mistake I made the day we moved! I can put the washer on the left and the dryer on the right, like it is supposed to be!

And I did that, right up to the point where I realized that the washer had been on the right for a reason. Has to do with the exhaust hose for the dryer and a space issue that creates.

So the dryer went back into the garage, and now I’m just playing Tetris. The washing machine went to the right side, the dryer was inched into the space on the left. Hoses were connected. Things were fumbled. Water was dripped. I came to the stunning realization that hoping behind the washer in the narrowest of spaces with a wire shelf inches above your head is not a good idea.

There was a small leak in the washing machine’s supply hoses. I uttered oaths at the manager who called in this lefty. This guy was going to ruin everything!

When I’d tightened those things for all they were worth, I decided to then check to be sure that hot was connected to hot and cold was going to cold. Dodged a bullet there.

And then for the biggest test of all. The towel that has been collecting dust and water went into the machine and was washed in short order.

Stephen visited today. Haven’t spent that much time with him in several years. We had a burger for lunch, walked around campus enjoying the first beautiful spring-like day of the year. Ventured into Beard-Eaves and ran suicides on the old hardwood. (OK, we talked about doing it. As neither of us had gym shoes on, we found a convenient excuse.)

The baseball team was practicing across the road at Plainsman Park. We walked in and watched the last few innings of a scrimmage there.

And then we went back to my place and noticed that the TiVo had recorded the Auburn basketball game. That’s a not-good team, but we started watching it out of morbid curiosity. Before long the Tigers had a little lead over South Carolina and as the game progressed they kept that lead until it become possible that they might win. And then it looked probably and, finally, Auburn won an SEC basketball game for the first time this year. Some had predicted they wouldn’t pick up a conference victory.

Stephen left for dinner with his in-laws. I stayed in for barbecue chicken and to wrap up the Robin Hood series. One of the good guys, Allan A Dale, died, and the Sheriff, the main bad guy reappeared from the dead. The final fight featuring everyone that was still alive in the series began.

During that was the biggest problem. Robin, Much and Guy, two of our heroes, and one bad-guy-turned-decent-by-circumstance found themselves trapped in a room that became filled from above by Styrofoam pellets or aquarium rocks or Tribbles. It was hard to tell. They were finally rescued by their friends through a side door. Out spilled the unnamed nitrogen pellets of doom and the three victims.

The first thing Robin’s new love interest does?

Mouth-to-mouth? An 11th Century peasant beat science to the technique by about 800 years. I’d watched 38 of the 39 episodes of this show and almost stopped right there.

And then the final personal duels, a little more exposition and Robin got knifed in the neck. It was but a flesh wound, but the knife was spiked with medieval drugs. He wandered off and died. Roll credits!

Just checked on that towel. It dried in only one cycle. We’ve now made our home that much greener.

Friday / video / YouTube Cover Theater — Comments Off
28
Jan 11

YouTube Cover Theater

Nothing of import to share, just a day of Email and reading and phone numbers. So we’ll get right to the good stuff, the magnificent return of a weekly feature that proves the point there is plenty of art out there just waiting for a play to show off, like YouTube.

The premise is that a musician is picked and we display a small handful of non-professional musicians covering their work. The musician this week is actually a band, Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros. They started out with their initial success online, so who knows where the people you watch today will end up.

First off Eric Smalls offers up his take on a song called Janglin. You’ve probably heard the original in a commercial here and there. Smalls makes it a bit more mellow. His mother, if you read the comments, really likes it. You might too.

Andy Glover plays 40 Day Dream and he gives it a nice little sound.

This is the song for which most people know Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. There are predominantly more covers of this tune on YouTube than any of their other ones. And while I don’t generally like kids singing, because it is just novel or odd or both. (But not your kid. Your kid sounds great.)

This little girl is adorable and and will blow you away.

That video has 5.8 million views. And you can see their website here, which I think just got invented toward the end of that video.

As for the band, they have a really cool three-page website.

Here’s how they play Home, on Morning Becomes Eclectic, which has remained one of the best radio shows in America for decades.

Enjoy the next cover you hear. There’s usually a great deal of love behind them.

movies / Samford / Tumblr / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
26
Jan 11

“An expression and sentiment that has aged very well”

Spent the full day in the office staring at the computer. There’s this to work on, that to read, the other to write and so on.

I did make this and uploaded it to Tumblr at some point in a small break this afternoon. Spencer Hall ran across it and offered up the warmest bit of pop analysis that a blog can offer on a 40-year-old freelance postcard design.

The problem was that things have changed since 1969. So I made the additions in that family portrait gimmick. Now all of those stares seem to make a lot more sense. Interlopers.

I’m steaming ahead through Robin Hood, the BBC version, as it plays along in the background while I do other things. This series is perfect for that. You watch the first six minutes, get the gist and tune it out until the resolution. There’s the problem, the fighting, something is stolen from the rich and the capture of someone. Then comes a moralistic dilemma, the rescue, the “curses, you evildoers!” moment and then the laugh at the end. Add in a little more fighting when necessary, move a few of the elements around to keep it fresh and have a nice day.

You know it is serious when he’s aiming his bow at someone. The guards here are more predictable than red shirts. They get almost as much dialog and they seem to fight just enough to allow the good guys to get away or are far enough away to take the occasional arrow.

I’ll finish the series up this weekend. It ran for three seasons, which is not unusual in the UK, where television programs are built shorter. Many of your favorite shows here would have benefited from that decision, too.

I’m watching this on Netflix, which is another of man’s greatest recent inventions. No longer does one need to get emotionally invested in a television show. Just wait until it comes out and watch it all in a rush. Chew it up as pastiche, especially in Netflix’s streaming format, and move on. The biggest thing is the HBO problem. They’ll license their programming for discs, but not for streaming.

HBO Co-President Eric Kessler went on the record as saying “there is a value in exclusivity,” and that people would “pay a premium” for it.

Co-president? Is that why they’re seeking to make their customers pay for their programming twice? HBO has their own service, still trying to gain market penetration. It seems they’re having the same fight they had in the 70s and 80s.

I grew up with HBO. I mean HBO and I grew up together. When we first picked up the channel on our cable system the churn rate was still high and they were celebrating becoming a 24-hour channel. The movies were still awfully repetitive, though, but hey, it wasn’t the Big Three. There were no commercials. It was novel. They had the coolest pre-roll maybe ever.

That still makes me want to watch a movie right now.

At the end of my days in undergraduate, though, money got tight and I just dropped my cable altogether. When I could afford television again I just went the basic route. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve missed HBO. And, happily, those have been supplemented by the inevitable DVD releases of their (usually quite good) original programming.

Netflix, meanwhile, has 20 million subscribers, as of today. It is an experimental way to watch movies. For the small monthly fee we can see everything, which really removes the risk. I’ve watched some dreadful things on Netflix, at least the first few minutes of dreadful things. I’ve also watched guilty pleasures as background sound. The Philadelphia Experiment did not age well, friends.

So now I’m watching Robin Hood on a computer. I can also watch it on my television. Next week I’m going to sit on a spin bike and watch a movie on my phone. We live in the future.

journalism / Samford / Tuesday / video — 1 Comment
25
Jan 11

First day of classes

Busy day. The kind where I finally got around to lunch at almost 2 p.m.

Handful of meetings before that. Catching up with people, wrapping up old things, setting course for new projects and all of that.

And then there was class. Fourteen bright young minds sitting in a too-warm room hearing about what they’ve gotten themselves into for the next 13 weeks. It was fun. They’ll take field trips and write a lot and give some presentations. They’ll have to put up with me. But aside from that last part it is a good course. I’ll talk a lot about journalism, but it is an intro class, so there’s a great deal of public relations and advertising, too.

Otherwise, I’m just trying to get back into the swing of things. I love my holiday break, could use some more of it and yet am terribly, wonderfully spoiled by it. This week has not eased back into the routine, but just puts you squarely in it. Not violently. There’s been nothing brutish or shocking about it. Just work. Here it is. And here’s another thing or two. Do enjoy. And don’t forget those Emails and phone calls.

I broke my office phone today, somehow. I have an old touchtone job, one of those that immediately replaced the rotary phones. Suddenly the numbers don’t do anything. Very odd.

I began watching the BBC’s Robin Hood this evening. It has been well received and it is on Netflix, so why not. I watched one episode and realized “This is like Kevin Sorbo as Hercules, but only a third as cartoonish.”

Which was good, because it instantly became background sound, not requiring any real attention. Ascertain the plot, ignore the fight sequences. No one ever really gets hurt. Everyone always escapes captivity. Robin Hood is a terrific shot. We get it.

Here’s the opening sequence:

First of all, how did those guards and horses sneak up on the hunter? Second, the guards never have such an opportunity to share as much character or dialog as they do here. The guards turn into red shirts, willing to spar, easy to knock off. Now the Sheriff, the villian, is delightfully funny.

His heavy is the most cardboard character you’ve seen in a while, though.

The biggest things are the modern sensibilities, put I’m a fantasy character purist. Fiction should be just so. The 20th and 21st Century were deliberately shoehorned into a tale set in the 12th. Of course there is modern foreign policy symbolism for the BBC viewing audience. They are not very subtle about it, but you’ve trained yourself to excuse much of that, anyway. One character, who only appears for one episode (so far) was wearing modern camouflage. The clip you just saw shows one of the evil character demonstrating a remarkable alacrity for wigs and latex disguises. These sorts of things take me right out of it, but then Robin Hood shoots his bow and the music blares and we’re off on another easy adventure!

When they inevitably make the American version they need Paul Giamatti as Much.

books / history / Monday / Samford / video — Comments Off
24
Jan 11

The Monday mess

I mis-dated my last post and only just now caught it. No one else seemed to notice, but the knowing is the thing. There is one strip of paint that needs attention in our kitchen. No one else has noticed it yet, but I can’t walk by it without noticing. I’m fairly certain there’s a picture frame that I’ve put on the wall that isn’t level with the one next to it or another across the room.

And on Friday I re-alphabetized the DVDs. They sit in a closet and no one would ever know except The Yankee — and she makes fun of me — but I see the need to know precisely where My Blue Heaven is, but not have to scan through Sixteen Candles and Bulworth to find it.

Could be worse. Could be autobiographical.

“If I want to find the movie Labyrinth I have to remember that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1986 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”

“That sounds — “

“Comforting.”

Pounded a little pavement this morning. Ran into a friend this afternoon. Everything else was class preparation. Or preparing for class. The new semester starts tomorrow.

I haven’t taught this class before and I’ve been laboring to get the handouts down to something that doesn’t seem too intimidating. Right now, on the first day, the students are getting nine pages. These are younger students and I’d like them to come back for the second meeting.

The text for this class, which is a mass media introduction, is Media / Impact by Shirley Biagi. The front cover features the facade of the David Letterman studio, a cellist, advertising, newspapers, magazine collages, books, satellite trucks, storm troopers and an iPhone.

The first page of real text quotes Dr. Edward Hallowell. “What we’re seeing, we’ve never seen in human history before. It’s just the extraordinary availability and magnetism of electronic communication devices, whether it’s cell phones or Blackberries or the Internet. People tend to — without knowing it or meaning to — spend a lot of time doing what I call screen sucking.”

Try to get that image out of your head.

Hallowell is a psychiatrist who formerly sat on the faculty of Harvard Medical — I love that usage, imagine this man sitting on top of a bunch of professors — and wrote the book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!. The quote, as it is included in a later essay reprinted from The Boston Globe, relates to the idea that too much screen time is working to the detriment of interpersonal time at home.

The second page, and this is genius, manages to work 5,500 years of communication history onto one page.

My how far we’ve come, just in a century. Where do you think things will stand in another half-century, when this class’ students are retiring? (Happy coincidence: It doesn’t appear on that list, for reasons of simplicity, but it just happens that on this day in 1984 Apple’s Macintosh first went on sale.)

Well? Was it like “1984”?