Here’s a bit of my bike ride to the office this morning. It was gray and not overly warm and somehow that made everything seem a bit slower and quiet. Maybe just knowing the quiet is coming to an end, and that far too quickly, made it seem like a quieter morning.
Classes start the week after next. This is the last big, deep breath before the regular routine returns.
I rode my bike back the same way this afternoon. For just a brief moment, one of those idle lower brain thoughts that makes it to the surface around the filters, I thought the same people I saw this morning might be there this afternoon. How neat to see them all again.
They weren’t, of course. Because they are elsewhere in the Truman Show.
When they get around to remaking that, they should go the real psychological thriller route. And if that’s somehow informed by Groundhog Day, and grounded in really normally inscrutable things, more the better, and more unnerving.
Time for our daily check on the Poplars Building. Built in the 1960s as an off-campus dormitory, but failed in that role and as a sorority house. Also as a hotel. And a “research and conference center.” It’s last duty was as administrative offices for the university. (The pool was filled in and became Human Resources.) Some 400 people could work in Poplars.
This month it is being scraped to death.
They made some good progress today. If you use the window rows as metrics, they’re getting one or two of those each day. Given the way it was built you have to think they can hold that pace pretty consistently. What we can’t see are the lowest parts, obscured here by the parking deck.
It is interesting, but I’m not terribly interested in walking over there and breathing in that stuff knowing, as we do now, about old building materials in the air.
Anyway, the deck is staying, but also being rehabbed. They waited until this summer to do that, rather than anytime in the preceding two years when almost no one was parking there. But, now, of a sudden, the parking lots are full, and the deck is closed “until the fall,” we’re told.
Anyway, the Poplars Building is going to be a green space for a time, until such time as someone has the time to figure out a better thing for the space.
I’m sure that fellow wasn’t on the path this evening because he was catching up on The Daily Show. He looked like a Daily Show guy, didn’t he? In that brief glimpse you saw of him? Daily Show guy, definitely, right?
There’s a needle to thread in comedy like this. Probably two or three needles to be threaded, each with smaller eyes. But The Daily Show had 10 good minutes.
I’m guessing the comic work will be better this week than in subsequent weeks. Legal processes just aren’t that funny. But this is pretty good, as is Trevor Noah’s impression of the former president’s stage style is informative.
Seems so obvious now, right? It was in the photos and everything. And if you looked up the Roosevelt story, or tried to figure out that tree joke, you would have figured it out, or given up, in short order.
We were in Milwaukee for the USA Triathlon National Championships. The Yankee raced twice. On Saturday she competed in the Olympic distance triathlon, a 1,500-meter swim, a 25-mile bike ride and a 6.2-mile run. Here are a few quick clips, where she is rocking the bright kit of her sponsor, Team Zoot:
This was her third national championship event, and she finished just barely outside the top 100. Pretty great at a national championship level. (She was 33rd in the swim and 79th on the bike. In the nation!)
That was on Saturday. On Sunday, she competed in the sprint distance national triathlon, her fourth national championship event. This particular national championship was abbreviated a bit because of approaching weather. That just made it faster and more fun. A few more clips, and you’ll see her in her coach’s team kit, Dream Big.
In Sunday’s super-sprint she finished inside the top 100, and in her individual legs she was 34 in the water, 69th on the bike and 99th in the run. And she doesn’t even like the run.
Also, she had those surgeries, and these are second and third races she’s had while still recovering from those. (She just finished the official physical therapy about 45 minutes ago.) So, it was a successful weekend of racing. Quite impressive. A lot of fun. And it was all in Milwaukee.
Here are some photographs.
This is the pier at Discovery World where they started the race. On Saturday they did a mass start by age group. So if you were a male 25-29, you started at the same time as all the other guys in that bunch. On Sunday, because of the weather and the logistics, they did a self-seeded time trial start. Four people went in at a time based on their self-reported swim times. It is in no way official or make-or-break, but it has the benefit of being slower, which spreads out the field, particularly on the bike course. This was important on Sunday because they shrank that route in a concession to the weather, but they didn’t have fewer athletes. It’s all about spreading things out. And, theoretically, the staggered time trial start does that. Also you just watched people jump in the water for hours. Discovery World sounds pretty awesome. And the front of the building will be a banner here, soon.
Here, The Yankee is coming out of the water in the Saturday race. Barely off the ramp and already making muscle poses.
And her finish on Saturday.
Here’s a big from Sunday, where she is showing off one of the medals she won.
This is really cool. This is Madonna Buder, who is known in the sport as the Iron Nun. (Yep, she was a nun, and last year she crashed on a training ride and fractured her shoulder, collarbone, and got four fractures in a rib. Nun means the one thing, but the iron part of her nickname has several meanings.) She has opened six age groups for triathlons – meaning she was the oldest in the field each of those times, starting with 50 and over. She’s also the world’s oldest female Ironman finisher, a record she’s held since she was … 82! She’s done some 45 Ironman races.
Buder was smiling all weekend, constantly. She’s a celebrity. Everyone knows it, and they all think they know her. She’s probably met all the long timers. She did her first triathlon at 55. Yep, she has been doing this for 37 years, including those 45 full triathlons and some 350 more at shorter distances. This weekend, now a fresh 92 years young, she was doing the sprint at the national championships. She’s getting a little help up the ramp and hill from the swim, which an awful lot of people did. I also saw her heading out on the bike, and she was in perfect control.
You’re intrigued now, so here are some of videos.
She was in a Nike commercial a few years ago. One of the best Nike commercials of all time. Just watch it.
Here’s a brief interview she did in 2020.
And here’s a longform piece on her, from 2019.
Sunday, she ran, ran, across the finish line.
books / history / photo / video — Comments Off on There’s nonsense, a great book and a terrific video here 3 Aug 22
It was a lovely day. Fine blue skies, no ceiling to be found. It is a standout day, standing out. Gray yesterday. Grayer tomorrow. Sometimes it is difficult to enjoy the one for thinking of the other.
But that’s not a problem today. It’s too bright and blue for that. And warm. Hot, even. The heat index flirted with 105 today. A good day to enjoy the sun from the shade, or indoors.
==]=]\]\=\[-=[=-
Sorry, I was cleaning some schmutz from my keyboard. The near symmetry almost suggests a meaning. Almost as much as any other meaning here. Perhaps more! Maybe I should really highlight it.
==]=]\]\=\[-=[=-
You’re right. That’s too much.
Anyway, nothing to it. Welcomed a new person to the office. Watched construction work beginning outside of the building. Ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch. With pretzel bites!
Probably explains the schmutz.
I also brought two more books to the office. One of them is a volume on First Amendment research, rounding out my collection. The other is the famous Communication of Innovations book, Everett Rogers’ second edition from 1971. He made an entire career on this, and its supporting work, and it’s brilliant. But I might be biased. I had one of his students as a professor in graduate school, and his work comes up all the time because of how it resonates in these fast-moving times.
“An important factor affecting the adoption rate of any innovation is its compatibility with the cultural beliefs of the social system.”
This is a line from the fifth page, explaining why a two-year public health campaign failed in one particular Peruvian village. The effort focused on installing pit latrines, burning garbage, controlling insects and boiling drinking water. In most villages, the public health workers got 15 to 20 percent of the housewives to boil water. Rogers notes that, in Los Molinos, a village of about 200 families, only five percent made the innovation.
In Los Molinos, tradition links hot food with illness. Boiling water was appropriate only for the sick, and a person who is not ill wouldn’t drink the water because of the cultural norms. And Rogers further breaks it down, as a sociologist should.
Two pages later, he dives into social change as “the process by which alteration occurs in the structure and function of a social system.” And, in four more pages, as a footnote, he describes development as “a type of social change in which new ideas are introduced into a social system in order to produce higher per capita incomes and levels of living through more modern production methods and improved social organization. Development is modernization at the social system level.”
Soon after, he gets into innovation, “an idea, practice, or object perceived as new by an individual. It matters little, so far as human behavior is concerned, whether or not an idea is ‘objectively’ new as measured by the lapse of time since its first use or discovery. It is the perceived or subjective newness of the idea for the individual that determines his reaction to it. If the idea seems new to the individual, it is an innovation … The ‘newness’ aspect of an innovation may be expressed in knowledge, in attitude, or regarding a decision to use it.”
In the fifth chapter, “Adopter Categories,” we get the famous graphic.
Nobody ever made a better bell curve.
Classroom flashbacks are a lovely thing.
And if that’s not your speed, there’s this great package from Vice. Dexter Thomas went on a ride with Erick Cedeño as he follows in the pedal strokes of the Buffalo Soldiers, the 25th Infantry Regiment Bicycle Corps who took a 1,900-mile journey from Montana to Missouri in 1897.
It took them 41 days, going over mountains and through forests and deserts and rivers. They pedaled and pushed their bikes across dirt trails, and railroad tracks, covering about 50 miles a day through all sorts of weather. The iron riders, as they came to be known, crossed five states and the Continental Divide, making national headlines. This was no small effort, and it came with a lot of baggage — in both senses. Thomas and Cedeño talk about all of that. It’s a really nice package over an incredible effort, in a unique moment in American history.
I did this some time back as a change of pace, and figured it might be time to do it again. But this time, these four years later, I figured I would write a little something about some of it. Who knows how this will work out, where it lead, how extensive we’ll get or even when I’ll just forget about this on one end or the other. The general idea is that I am working through all of my CDs in chronological order.
Yes, I know the order in which I bought all of these things. Somehow that impresses people. I know it, more or less, anyway. There’s a brief period of time where it’s just a guess, but none of that matters. Not that any of this matters. The collection crosses genres and periods in a haphazard way and there’s no real large theme. There’s too much from the popular catalog for that anyway. It’s not an evolution or path of discovery, it is whimsy.
So let’s be whimsical and listen to old music.
The first CD I bought — and this one is obviously important because it was really considered … not just another record, but an entire format change, and I had a lot of important-to-me cassettes to replace! — was late to the format. And it meant adding hardware. So I bought one of those tape-to-CD chunks of plastic. Plug the tape into my car stereo, run the little cable out of the tape converter to the little lap player. Even then these were growing more scarce.
This was the spring of 1996. It was Tracy Chapman’s newest record, which came out in November of 1995. I bought it that next spring, because the person I was dating owned it and I heard the whole thing and I liked it, and I liked her, and I had always enjoyed Chapman’s music, and so the decision was made.
Chapman won a Grammy, her fourth, off this, an award given for Best Rock Song to “Give Me One Reason,” an incredible popular blues song. She, and that record, were nominated for four other Grammy Awards (her 13th nomination). All told, she shipped north of five million copies domestically, a few more globally, and who knows how many digital plays she’s counted. “New Beginning” was a great record.
None of this is a review, and we won’t be spending a lot of time unpacking philosophy or chord changes, but you should go buy this, if you somehow don’t have it already.
Here’s the title track, number two if you’re playing along. I didn’t know until just now that she plays the didgeridoo here, and that this was controversial for some. The use of a didgeridoo by women, Wikipedia tells me, is taboo in many aboriginal nations. To me, in this song, it just wrapped all of us together for the message. And it really accentuated the rhythm section.
The third track is “Smoke and Ashes,” and it is still one of my favorite Chapman songs, and still feels so sonically perfect. I concentrate on the backing vocals of Adam Levy, Andy Stoller, Glenys Rogers and Rock Deadrick. All these years and spins later, the shift through to the bridge is so gentle and severe and evocative I can’t help but marvel at it. “Only smoke and ashes babe, baby” kills me every time.
The fifth track lays it out, right from the title, “At This Point In My Life.” Chapman was 31 when she produced this. I wonder how it feels to her now.
On “The Promise” the strings almost get lost in the lyrics. Or the lyrics get supplanted by the strings. I can never say. It is such a character-driven song, and it’s gift is that it lets you put the particulars of the character in place yourself.
Here’s the big hit from the record. Again, the vocal work that Chapman can bring are so rich, and so perfectly complemented here. Also, there’s one little moment that always sends me back to the Gulf Coast and a little circular dance of the hand that I re-enact each time I hear this song. It’s a delight of memory and the blues.
“I’m Ready,” is the last named track on the record. Plenty of songs are laments. I’m not sure how many of them are better than this. It gets more potent with each play.
And most crucially to me, the hidden track. Plenty of writers can wax on about music and anyone that knows more about music than I do can do it at great length, with greatly envied success. That’s not what any of this simple exercise, here on my personal site is about. All of this is to just enjoy some of the things I enjoy, and share them with people who might also enjoy them, and to tell you this remains one of the most powerful 100 seconds of audio ever produced.
You get the sense Tracy Chapman just wanted to be a singer-songwriter, maybe in a cafe or whatever, and then that famous Nelson Mandela show that launched her into the stratosphere happened, and then she had some monstrous hits, and maybe, hopefully, she’s just enjoying the regular day-to-day life. She released eight studio records, her last in 2008, and released a greatest hits collection in 2015. She toured through the oughts, at least. She’s been involved in a variety of causes* important to her for probably her whole life, and generally, you would think, just values her privacy.
I don’t think she’s online much, so she’ll never see this. But if she does, or we ever have seats next to one another on a plane, I promise to not make a deal about it. I would absolutely pull out a notebook and ask her for advice on a line or two. It is a big treat to say this verb was suggested by someone whose work you admire.
*My first job was working for one of my teachers. The teacher was moonlighting in the summer doing some landscaping. I was the extra pair of hands. One day she was telling me at great length about how Chapman’s first record, the eponymously named debut album, the one with “Fast Car” on it. Everyone listening to a radio or watching a television in 1988 knew “Fast Car” and “Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution” and “Baby Can I Hold You.” And something in there, she said inspired her and her friends to join the Peace Corps. But we’ll get to all of that, and that duet with Luciano Pavarotti, eventually. We have a lot of other records to get through first. Up next, something you’ve never heard of — unless you live, or go to a lot of live shows, in Georgia.
cycling / Friday / video — Comments Off on Play the Open the Road video 29 Jul 22
Episode Two of the Open the Road series explores the inevitability of change as it relates to the past, present, and future of women’s cycling. The Women’s Tour de France returns after 33 years of absence. While the men’s side of the sport has grown seeing teams spend more money and use more resources than ever before in the pursuit of performance and winning the women’s side of the sport has not kept pace. With the addition of the women’s World Tour, the women’s Paris Roubaix, and now the return of the women’s Tour de France the momentum appears to be in favor and the demand for women’s racing is at an all-time high. Change and progress are inevitable. Whether it be the changing of the seasons or technological advances that push humanity forward “change is meaningless unless we see it through.” It is the responsibility of each rider, race organizer, and the fans to see the change through, to play their part in the progress and growth of the sport we are all passionate about.
This weekend we’ll wrap up a month of amazing bike racing from France. There are two stages, in the mountains, to go for the Tour de France Femmes this weekend, and they’ll be historic and historic.
No idea what we’ll do with ourselves next week.
The first episode in that web series is here, if you are so inclined.
