I know, I know, I haven’t shown off the kitties yet this week. Let’s fix that right away! I know! I know! Some of you come here specifically for that.
Phoebe has been enjoying some extra blanket time in the chilly weather.
But Poseidon found some sunshine and contented himself with catching some rays.
He is not happy with my work schedule. Far too much time in the office, not enough time petting him.
And Phoebe says I should stop working at home.
They might be on to something, I don’t know.
One of those not-sure-how-it-got-away-from-you days, but there it was, full and complete and long and mildly interesting. After the day of editing and emails and meetings and Zooms, it was time for a night in the studio. Tonight was a sports night.
They recorded a nice little chat on @iustvsports’ Toss Up about Black athletes — historic figures, current legacies, the future and more.
Those two shows will be up tomorrow. I’ll share them here then, of course. But, right now, I can show you the shows the news division did last night. Here’s the regular news show. It’s a nice, short, tight newscast with tons of information, well packed and delivered.
And here’s the magazine style show.
More tomorrow. Until then, did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account. And keep up with me on Twitter, but don’t forget my Instagram. There are also some very interesting On Topic with IU podcasts for you, as well.
It is about time I thought on my walk from the car to the building this morning, to see a fake signal. And as I walked by one of the little patches of soil that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk, I saw it. Right on time, just like every other year we’ve been here, trying to trick me.
Even though I misinterpret it (“Spring!”) I will not be tricked. We have more cold and some snow flurries and ice this week and who knows what else in the next … six or eight weeks.
He said with the world’s most predictable sigh.
But, hey, the days are getting longer. The coats are getting lighter. And the cold is, for now, a bit milder.
This was the sun on our walk yesterday. I was only wearing a medium-weight coat.
And here are two more pictures from that walk, because I am fascinated by the idea that so many things look better in real life than they do in photographs. For instance, this sycamore is really popping in the late-day sun. And, yet …
Same with this tree, which I think is just dead. The sun is playful, the limbs are colorful, but the photographic result leaves something to be desired.
You know what else leaves something to be desired? My ability to keep things up-to-date. This show is from Wednesday night and went online Thursday and I forgot to post it here. Shame on me.
And here’s the talk show, where they focused on baseball and softball.
Which brings us to today, and here are the shows the entertainment division released today. And it seems like the late night show was evicted after a troublesome conclusion to their last episode.
That show continues to evolve in the most fascinating ways. One day they’re going to invent their own genre, I’m pretty sure.
And here’s the morning show, a production which I missed entirely, unfortunately.
I walked in from a meeting just as the students were breaking down the studio. And I am lesser for it. Watch it now, and you will be justly enriched.
I tried a new Zwift route on Saturday. I quickly regretted it. But at least I got a nice shot of my avatar in an aerotuck.
It was one of the fictional routes, and required a lot of climbing which I am clearly not good at or prepared for. But at the end of it all there’s a map. This is always amusing to me. It’s a fictional route. This is a real island in the South Pacific.
Two islands, actually. I mentioned one of them, Teanu, which is the bulk of the route you see in the graphic above, last Monday. But that part where it dips south, is Vanikoro. Apparently about 1,300 people live there, two distinct groups, in different villages, but you can’t see much from Google Maps.
Google Reviews, though … someone wrote “There is no TV 3 stars.”
Another full day today. Meetings in the morning, studio in the evening, writing and editing and social media in between. Your standard-issue 21st century media expert type day. More on some of that in a moment.
Let’s visit with the cats, since I neglected this site’s most popular feature yesterday. (If you’re new, this is obvious, right? Cats, the web, etc.)
Phoebe is hard at work.
You have never seen a cat relax as hard as she does. There’s a certain intensity to her lazing about, and her stretches, and her naps.
Poseidon found a bird. He will not let us hear the end of it.
I need some things to drown out the cat, basically. Fortunately, I have some video for you. Here’s a Valentine’s Day dating show some of the students shot last Friday.
I’m not sure if that one was rigged or not. But, as ever, I hope for a followup piece, just to find out how the date experience went. (If I read, in 20 years, how this show made for lifelong friends or started a family or something, I don’t want it to be a total surprise, you know?)
We’re all about trying new things and putting everybody to work, and that means a lot of new shows. This is the third new sports show of the year.
And if I can remember correctly, that’s 11 new shows I’ve helped or watched the students launch over the years. At least seven of them are still running. That’s a nice success record, and the success is entirely to the students’ credit.
Tonight, the news division was in the studio to shoot two shows — two of the three oldest continually running shows they produce. We have a freshman delivering the weather.
How cool is that?
We’ve had three primary atmospheric science students delivering weather forecasts for the last several years. All three of them had landed meteorology jobs before they graduated. One had her job waiting for her after her junior year! Another is working now as a broadcast meteorologist. And, maybe, in three or four years we’ll be saying similar things about the new crop of atmosphere scientists. And, to think, that weather segment started as an experiment, too.
Speaking of freshmen, this guy is too. I’ve done this long enough to see people who could work at this craft and turn it into a career. I’ve watched people who give it a try because they were curious, people who do this stuff because it’s fun, or people that find they don’t like this type of work after all (an incredibly valuable learning experience). I’ve also done this long enough to know that, every so often, you can see a person who you know is going to be great. This young man is closer to that last group than any of the others.
What you do in those instances is you try to take credit for all of their success.
I finished The Women Who Wrote The War last night. Nancy Caldwell Sorel published this in 1999, and from this distance it somehow seems a bit older, still.
But this is a fine book woven full of individual anecdotes. Sorel pulled from primary sources and she interviewed correspondents decades after the war. There are some great gems in here. These reporters were bold, and sometimes felt they had to be even more than their male colleagues. In a war zone, that would heighten the danger, right? Some of these names you may know. It’s hard to be interested in journalism and not be familiar with Martha Gellhorn, but a lot of her contemporaries are due to be lost to history, which is a shame.
Take this woman. Ten million people read her in almost 200 papers across the country. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and was one of the few women news commentators on radio during the 1930s. Her work made her influential. Her stances and her influence sometimes made her a controversial figure. For a time she was called “the First Lady of American Journalism.” Have you ever heard of Dorothy Thompson?
To say that she could write is almost cheapening the power of words.
Have you ever heard of Lee Miller? This book introduces you to her. She was a New York fashion model in the 1920s. She became a photographer in Paris and, during World War2 she shot for Vogue, covering the London Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. Also, at the end of the war, she used Hitler’s bathtub.
I am mostly struck by how modern that room looks, or how little they’ve changed in the last 75 years.
I could tell you more tales, but Sorel will do it better. If you like those two little stories, scroll back up and buy the book.
And now the hard part is deciding what book to start next. I have an entire book case of Books To Be Read. It is stuffed to overflowing and there’s a small stack growing next to it. There are also about four dozen books on my Kindle app. I want to read them all, but which one first?
I was thinking about a passage from Romans, because I recently heard the expression “speaking things into existence.” I’m all for visualization, but the idea behind the saying is at odds with that one part of Romans, chapter four.
And so it was that I was in a meeting with students this morning who were tired and quiet and I thought to myself, “Are we already in spring break mode?” And then I grimaced inwardly a bit. What if you just thought that into existence?
Spring Break is four weeks away. And when that mindset hits, well, everyone is counting the days.
Left that meeting to go to the studio. They were shooting their own version of The Dating Game for Valentine’s Day. Left the studio to go into another studio. Someone is doing an interview and that requires a podcast and that requires a crash course running a mixing board.
And I made it back to the first studio in time to watch this interview. They’re highlighting a short film.
And I learned her film was given an honorable mention at Cannes. Student projects recognized at Cannes! It is easy to be impressed around here.
The two shows they shot today will be out sometime next week. Until then, hang out with the sports gang. This is the highlight show they produced Wednesday, Hoosier Sports Nite.
And here’s the Superb Owl show they did. It’s get amusing.
I like when they have this much fun. It makes it me think we’re doing more than one thing right.
I keep forgetting to share this here. It’s days old now. A little over a week, in fact, but it is still timely and topical. It’s about how we come to know and trust experts and their science. Someone here is conducting studies on that. Pretty cool, if you ask me. Also, Young Frankenstein shows up.
My morning was spent working on a few quixotic projects. Two of them involve depending on other people, and I can do little more than hope they come through. Some of them do, and you make do with the rest.
I’m also working on three Snapchat commercials. And there’s a sentence that would have made perfect sense to me 25 years ago when I decided to be an under-the-radar multimedia person. Except for the Snapchat part. No one would have had any appreciation of what that could be in 1997. Will anyone make any sense of it in 25 more?
Who knows! But we recruit people there, and so there is a cause to make 15 second commercials. Of course, in the shorter spots you’re asked to deliver the most. And do it in an age of widescreen everything, but on a medium that’s strictly a phone using a 9:16 aspect ratio.
Explain all of that to your 1997-self and your 1997-self would think they were dealing with someone who looked eerily like them, but older and with a blood sugar problem.
I took this picture just after noon.
And worked on this the rest of the day. There are six (SIX!) Pulitzer Prizes on this stage. I stopped counting the Peabody and Murrow and Emmy awards. It’s an embarrassment of riches.
There were two breaks between the three different segments of that symposium, and I cranked out social media, prepared for a Friday morning meeting and arranged an engineer for a future television production.
Left the office and did some followup work on it here at the house.
It was 10 hours, not counting the editing I did in my living room. Have you ever looked up the definition of “living room”? I haven’t, until just now. Here are two definitions.
So here we are, each typing on computers. Living room. Sounds about right.
Anyway, two simultaneous meetings and two studio sessions all taking place simultaneously, starting at 9 a.m. tomorrow. This silly week is going out in style.
