Are you ready for football? This is week two of the high school season. Drove by this one this evening as the team was warming up. I’ll try to get to a high school game this fall, the school I covered many years ago is doing very well, but we are especially excited about college football. That, of course, begins tomorrow.
Reading and class prep today. And resting. Strained my back at the gym this morning. Did squats and everything was fine. Did what I think of as the jail break exercise — the move started years ago by some anonymous person is slowly digging through the corner of the cinderblock wall — and everything was fine. Did a curl and dropped down a weight. Did another curl and my back tightened up. Wisely, I put the weight down.
A comfy chair and a heating pad this evening have helped. I’m fine, just moving a little gingerly. Tomorrow I’ll be good as new.
Pie Day tonight at Mama Q’s. We had the chicken tonight, which was delicious. The dutch apple pie, we decided is a consistent winner. Give them a visit.
We checked out the soccer game tonight. The fans got a great show.
(I downloaded a pseudo tilt shift application for my iPhone — two of them, actually, but I think one is a bust — and I’m playing around with it a bit. Now I have to figure out which subjects look best in the tilt shift style. My apologies in advance.)
Florida State was controlling things with a disciplined effort on the ground. They snuck in a goal in the 28th minute and Auburn struggled against the fifth ranked Seminoles through the middle portion of the game.
In the 73rd minute Auburn’s Lydia Townsend found a glaring hole in the center of the FSU defense. She chipped in the ball over the goalkeeper on a breakaway.
Florida State scored on a header in the 83rd minute and Auburn answered with a goal in the 87th minute to force overtime. In college they play two sudden death periods of 10 minutes each. After that you just settle for a draw. With two minutes remaining in the second overtime, so in the 107th minute, Katy Frierson picked up a loose ball outside the 18 off of a corner kick and struck the ball home.
Here’s Frierson earlier in the game:
And here the Tigers celebrate the game winning goal:
They are celebrating Auburn’s first win over the Seminoles since 1995 and the first win over a top-five team since 2004.
I’ll have more pictures in the photo gallery early next week.
Which leaves us with the last installment of the evening, YouTube Cover Theater, where we turn the place over to people pouring their talents and odes and ambitions or fears out there for our consumption. Tonight’s featured coveree is Duncan Sheik. We’ll start out with an incredible rendition of She Runs Away:
And now, for your listening pleasure, we have a nice run at That Says It All:
Sheik, apparently, has written a musical. Here’s one of his fans’ playing his favorite tune:
And, finally, we’ll hear from the original artist himself as Duncan Sheik covers … Radiohead?
Who doesn’t enjoy a good cover?
Who doesn’t enjoy football? Are you ready? Tomorrow Auburn has Arkansas State. Look for us. We’ll be the ones in blue.
Poor soundbites from the president and indistinct ends aside, we’re now in the new post-modern when it comes to the United States in Iraq. There is a bit of dissembling and, of course, best-foot-possible posturing going into the spin, but the fighting isn’t over. There will still be combat and sacrifice and families separated from loved ones in this, the fourth chapter of the Iraq War.
I covered the launch of the war while in Washington D.C. Like many others I know friends or family who served there. Fortunately they’ve all come safely home. Here’s hoping the rest get back safe, too.
Random journalism observations of the day: Nice to see Chris Fowler can keep his journalistic distance and not shill for Nike. That sort of thing stopped mattering a long time ago, but still.
Check this out, I’m still working my way through the high school workshop circuit and I just found a school where every teacher has, and uses, a blog for classroom purposes. So every student is required to visit it, which means we now have the four R’s: reading, riting, ‘rithmetic and RSS.
Journalist, entrepreneur, philosopher, pundit Alan Mutter muses about a return to the Tampa Model, tying a newspaper and a television station into one newsroom to share coverage, merge manpower and effect cost savings. For a while the idea was thought of as the future of the news industry, but as Mutter notes, the joint Tampa Tribune and WFLA enterprise has not been without it’s difficulties. Others in the comments note a few other aborted examples.
At the macro level the problems are abundantly cultural. What newspapers are after and what television needs are different. The language the two newsrooms use are different. The skill sets, obviously have more than a little variation. Television staffers write differently than newspaper folk. Print reporters don’t always function in the visual medium as well as they might like. The presently natural place to put together a combined print and video product is on the web, but most traditional print and TV organizations aren’t exactly comfortable with that.
So, in a merger, the problems that Tampa model has exhibited for the last 10 years become apparent. Perhaps the problem is in the merger. Maybe the way to proceed would be with a creation of an entirely new news operation.
We’re working to converge our newsrooms at Samford and I’m hoping we can make great strides to do even more of that this year. In many ways these transitions have to happen slowly and, I think, culturally. The people doing the work have to see the need and the value, and that can only happen over time.
A new generation of students who are using the Internet as a matter of course in every classroom are already learning the values of accessibility, utility and multimedia.
On the site I’ve started a new September feature. I shot lot of pictures of Allie the other day, so I figure I’ll add a new cat picture every day. Because if the Internet isn’t powered by cat photographs yet some IT guy somewhere is working on making that happen.
Also I’ve split up some recent posts, pulling out the regular features from the daily entries. I’d been on the fence about it for some time, but figured if I was going to do it now was the time. Better to pull out a handful now than a few more handfuls in the future. This presumes I’ll decide to separate them in the future, of course. I separated them in the present because … let’s say a phone booth landed in the front yard with a future version of me and told me I came to that decision.
A phone booth? I hate to pick on Bill and Ted Excellent Adventure for the film’s otherwise excellent authenticity, but they really whiffed on the phone booth, didn’t they? The goofs on IMDB, they are priceless:
There is a heinous number of most egregious factual errors in the depiction of the famous historical dudes, their lives, their works, their time periods and the state of their hearing.
Someone, upon having that idea, was very happy to find that no one had written any notes for the movie on IMDB.
I forgot to mention that I made the front page of al.com yesterday. I could say that in some way or another every day once upon a time. The sports producer wrote me a few weeks ago to ask if I’d participate in a roundtable discussion throughout the football season. Here’s a segment of my first installment, the topic Auburn’s chief worry:
Break them down: QBs, wideouts (to a smaller extent) and every individual grouping on defense. These are the ones you have to look at. All of those guys have different numbers on the jersey, but the name on the back may as well be John Q. Potential. There’s loads of it, but it now simply has to develop. Stars no longer matter. Recruiting class rankings are now ancient window dressing. The feel good quotes from teammates and coaches must now be tested — and not against the Arkansas States of the world. At this point we must all just see who pans out and how.
[…]
Even if one of the other elements can’t reach it’s potential, though, the regression to the mean seems an improvement over last year’s baseline. And you can worry less because there is no way humanly possible that each unit finds itself in that situation. Overall, Auburn finds everything looking shinier than this time last year.
Special teams, I concluded, is on the clock.
We’re grilling hamburgers tonight. I’m getting my act together for class tomorrow and, soon, uploading the newest additions to the 1939 World’s Fair section. Come back to see those, and more, soon.
First class of the semester. For the professor in me, at least. Samford gets the benefit of a later start. Classes began yesterday, mine kicked off this afternoon. I’m teaching editing to a class full of eager young student journalists. I’ve had some of these students in previous classes.
We did the standard fare introductory stuff and then I gave a quiz. Now I’m that professor.
I showed them this video:
The point of the video being to speak and write with conviction and purpose. Seemed appropriate for an editing class. Took them a while, but they got into it by the end.
Should be a good class, if the professor does a good job with his part.
Had a meeting with the boss. Had a meeting with our new sales manager. We brain stormed ideas and then a few more and then one or two more besides. Now she just has to go out and spread the good word. Had a third meeting.
And then I read a lot.
That’s for class on Thursday.
The black and whites will be up shortly, but that’s it for the day. Tomorrow will be more workshop stuff, more studying, more work. More more more. (And another new, September long feature.)
I’m going to wonder this for years — perhaps long after the chore is no longer mine, perhaps long after I’m in a different place in life entirely — but how does the organizing of a one day workshop take up so much time? My task these last few days, and for the next several days, will be to call teachers.
Do you know when the best time to catch teachers at work is? During the day.
Do you happen to also know what they typical spend their day doing?
Aren’t you surprised some office assistant somewhere in America hasn’t gone crazy and hacked up phone lines? After all, this is only the 6,428th time it has been said this school year, “She’s in class!”
So that was the morning. Emails and phone calls and searching for Email addresses and the proper person for whom to leave a message.
The afternoon I spent putting the final polish on the syllabus I’ll hand out tomorrow. I’m teaching an editing class this term. I’m giving spelling tests, among other things.
I don’t remember how this was received when I was in a similar class way back then, but I’m sure we thought the idea of a spelling test was a novel idea. And then we took those tests, carefully calculated to find the most challenging words in English or other languages that might one day be used by an American journalist. Having come full circle I’ve included some of those words on my list.
Tomorrow, on the first day of the class, I might also give a quiz. Set the tone. Or, as the hip kids say “Be THAT professor.”
I’m going to show a video, though, so I can also be THAT professor. And I’ll talk about typos in banners and semi-permanent paintings and … well, there is always this example if you really need one:
It was supposed to say “hopefuls,” but “when we’re typing and the computers freeze, sometimes it takes so long to unfreeze that we completely forget what we were trying to do when it froze,” explains the editor.
I’ve no doubt that was simply a horrible mistake. The Alligator is a fine paper. And the explanation strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The excuse could use a little more punching up. “We forget” might not satisfy the aggrieved parties.
We grilled out tonight and I reminded myself of a painful less. When lighting fire to the grill, be careful you don’t catch an ember in your eye.
I’d never forgotten that one, actually, it is always good to say out loud, however.
What I did forget was the exact inventory of what was going on the grill. Two pork chops, I thought, I can be economical with the briquettes. But I’d forgotten the corn until The Yankee came home and reminded me that I’d requested roasted corn. So there was an attempt to cook everything over the small mass of charcoal. That proved unsatisfactory. So I spread a few more of the magical black rocks that give fire on the other side of the grill. And now I have a flame discrepancy. So I let it burn and then covered the grill thinking I’d starve the fire. Which I did, right out.
So now nothing was grilling at the proper pace and, really, this is the worst part of my day. Life is so good.
The pork chops were good. The Yankee has this nice seasoning that we must now order online. Stores stopped stocking it, so messengers from Jakarta now deliver it to our door. It goes great with pork and is the sort of thing that makes you think it should stand well on any dish. But, then, if you put it on fish the salmon would stand up and say “Keep it on the swine, friend.”
The corn was a little under-done, but 45 extra seconds on a grill for a fresh ear of corn is not a catastrophe.
Last thing for the night is a fun new iPhone app I discovered. Storyrobe is a free app that let’s you make slideshows (as mp4s) from your photos. You record narration, control when the image flips and can share your project via Email or YouTube.
The finished product is a bit small, but this could be a useful app for a journalist on the go, or to share events with friends and family. Or even storyboarding jokes. We’ve been doing that tonight too. You’d have a hard time finding something free that can make you laugh for as long as this has done.
You have to know all of the ways you can use the tools you download. Knowing the silly ways are important, too.
It wasn’t my first thought of the day, but it didn’t take long after waking up to realize that, this time next week, we’ll be watching football. This makes me very happy.
I watched, over the course of three installments, It Might Get Loud, a documentary where producers took three guitarists and put them in a room to see what happens when they stop being polite, and start talking about chord changes:
The Edge describes himself as an architect, which makes perfect sense when you hear his explanation. Jack White has this artistic struggling “I think I’m a little more important than I really am” vibe. Jimmy Page is Jimmy Page. They’re all great in their own ways, though Page of course transcends by virtue of his longevity and the genetic condition known as Being Jimmy Page.
If the producers are looking for a follow up project, I’ve just given them a title.
It is a good documentary. I’m no musician, of course, but I enjoy hearing the discussion of how these works came about. A lot of times you get the sense that there is this Thing and they wanted to Express It and eventually it made it to a recording studio, became a hit or important piece and now they have to Explain It. Trying to verbally explain this Thing which has become Transcendent must be an interesting exercise.
I watched this over Netflix. We signed up for the free trial last night. The Yankee downloaded a few things from the instant viewing feature. She’s watching television episodes on the television. I watched Full Metal Jacket — which has not aged well — on my phone. That was R. Lee Ermey’s third role, but the one that made us all aware of him. He’s done more than you realize, since.
Also, he might be the star in a sentence featuring the best ever use of the word refused.
R. Lee Ermey was involved in a jeep accident during the making of the movie. At 1:00 a.m. one night he skidded off the road, breaking all the ribs on his left side. He refused to pass out, and kept flashing his car lights until a motorist stopped. In some scenes you’ll notice that he does not move his left arm at all.
“I am in a great deal of pain, indeed old boy. But I shan’t to acknowledge it. I will not acquiesce to the sweet morphine that is mental surrender. So be a good chum, ribs, and stand fast while I flag a motorist.”
For some reason, in that story Ermey turns into a very proper Englishman in my mind.
Where was I? Oh, yes. It Might Get Loud. I had to watch it in three installments because I decided to replace the shower head. I made this command decision about 15 seconds after I broke the older shower head.
We have a slight dripping leak and I thought if I turned the plastic shower nozzle a bit tighter … SNAP.
So we visited Bed, Bath and Beyond. The Yankee walked us directly to the shower fixtures, which was a bit disturbing considering we’ve never been in this particular store. She mulled over the options.
Buying a shower head that would match the one in the guest bathroom was out of the question. The store no longer carries them. But you can get one online for 25 bucks. Of course, at the store, your options range from 29 to 99 dollars. I’m tempering my instinct to put my foot down with my guilt about breaking the shower head to start with. She buys a sensibly priced one. I suppose.
It is made by a company that calls itself Oxygenics. If you break it down, that means oxygen-born. More than air should fall from this device. The literature assures me that this might be the last shower head I’ll ever purchase. And it better be, if there’s anything that makes you feel more stupid than reading language on a shower head’s packaging I don’t know what it is.
Consider:
“The storm is coming … prepare to be drenched.”
Do you know what I do when a storm comes? I go inside. Out of the rain. So, already, we’re a little counter-intuitive in the marketing.
“A powerful, pressurized monsoon of water will envelope and sweep you away to a wonderous place.”
Again with the imagery. But doesn’t all of this sound wasteful? Oh no.
“… while saving 23% water and energy compared to industry leading brands.”
I’d like to suggest to the good people at Oxygenics that they add the word “other” to that phrase. Right now they just look like a trailing brand.
It has “1 drenching spray, 54 anti-glog spray nozzles” and is “guaranteed not to clog.” No pressure there, nozzles.
Here’s the best part, the 9 inch adjustable shower arm — mentioned by a sticker-like logo on the package, as if they weren’t sure when they designed the thing how big they could get that little rod — has two joints. From which water will spray. When you add the wall attachment and the shower head attachment itself that means there are four potential places from which water can escape.
Oh, but it has a monsoon, you see.
We visited the grocery store for a few staples. At the cash register two young men were there to help us. One was the bar code digital transfer engineer, the other the product package and dispersal supervisor. Whenever we make it to check out I try to find ways to entertain them. Who knows how long they’ve been working. It is new and clean and so happy with itself, and most of the customers are in the pleasure-zone known as Publix shopping, but you never know if the guy just had to deal with the guy that really ruined his Saturday.
So the patter today was about how we forgot our ecological shopping bags. Not to worry! I just bought a new shower head which will save 30 percent on energy. I am, as the cool kids say, offset. We hate the earth. The hemp woven, hand stitched, biodegradable hues of those items were left safely in the laundry room, where they are doing us a great service by hanging from something, so that we won’t forget them should we venture to the grocery store.
We live a mile-and-a-half away. One day the person will ask paper or plastic, I’ll remember I left the bags and ask him to hold everything for three minutes while I fetch my own.
He suggests we leave them in the passenger seat. But where would the passenger sit, my good man?
I point out that we usually keep them in the trunk, where they are also often forgotten. And then the conversation turned into one of those “A-ha! You’re my witnesses moments” that you just live for.
If we ever see those two guys up front at the grocery store again I’m going to have the world’s best follow up joke, brought to you by items on the condiment aisle, just to see if they remember.
We grilled steak. We baked potatoes and enjoyed okra. That’s a win. And next week we’ll be watching football.
