Wednesday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Wednesday

Downright magical

Here’s an almost-interesting piece about the future of how you watch sports. You work through the need for cable for your sports fix, baseball’s success with streaming, how other leagues follow what MLB does and the need for cable. Cable is always important:

ESPN might be the pied piper for a different kind of strategy, though. Rather than cutting cable and paying only for what you want (the “a la carte” model), you’d pay one price and get everything, everywhere. Yes, you need cable to get WatchESPN, but once you’ve logged in you’re effectively untethered from your TV. Your cable bill buys you access to all the things you want to watch, wherever you want to watch them, on whatever device you choose. And because it’s the company setting the restrictions for the leagues, ESPN’s platform doesn’t have weird local blackouts, or odd weekend restrictions — you just watch ESPN as you always have.

The Verge is also running a War for your TV series. Stock Gumshoe is using Television 2.0 and the new golden age, and really the The $2.2 trillion war for your living room. There are also the game consoles and emerging gadgets.

And it all sort of leads to this piece, which is worth reading in full and defies excerpting, really. But:

Because the percentage of households with a cable or satellite subscription is now declining for the first time in the history of television.

3 million Americans have already cut the cord, including 425,000 in the past 3 months alone.

And according to Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger, those “cord-cutters” are joined by a new group: the “cord-nevers.” A full 83.1% of new households are choosing to live without pay-TV.

[…]

Robert Johnson said about the shaky state of the cable industry last month at a conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

“In the next two or three years, something’s got to give. At some point, the consumer is going to say enough is enough.”

He’s one of the most powerful men in the pay-TV business, warning his fellow fat cats that their bloated, inefficient industry may collapse by 2014…

TV isn’t just the next great transformation of the Internet Age… it’s the BIGGEST one of all.

Since no one likes their cable service, let us say bring it on.

And, of course, it will change things for us in the classroom. Not everything, but quite a bit.

Newspaper critiques. Budget meetings. Award nominations. Well that’s different for a Wednesday. We submit news clippings from the Crimson to a couple of different contests every year.

The deadline for one of those contests is coming up. We’ve gotten about two dozen awards from this organization in the last three years, so we sat around late into the evening finding the best examples today. Next week I’ll have to send them to the judges.

OK, we sat around for part of the afternoon. The rest of it I think I just rambled on for a while, too. It happens.

If I ever ran for office I might be a micromanager. I visit rest stops in my travels — I have to take breaks to stretch my shoulder and back — and the photography is … dated. Not the best image to share with people visiting our fine state. It is probably 14 pages down on the list of priorities, but still, this could be easily fixed.

The one nearest our home has photographs of the football stadium without upper decks. That’s a 32 year old photograph, at least.

Here’s a photo from a rest area in almost the perfect center of the state. It is encouraging you to visit Orange Beach, a lovely place to be most any day, but on this day in 1981 … well, downright magical:

People see that picture and think “Now there’s a group of somebodies. What a great life.” But they don’t realize they haven’t talked in a lifetime.

She’s a new grandmother. He’s now a guy who is coming to question all these years in sales, but he’s been pretty good at it. They gave it a shot, but it just didn’t work out. They sent cards to each other on all the big days for the first few years after, she always loved the memories of that trip to the coast, he’s silently been kicking himself for drinking too much and remembering too little … but they somehow lost track in that way people do.

Sad, really. She stopped at that rest stop one day, her kids had to go potty. She walked right by that photo.

“I need to go to the beach,” she thought. But she didn’t make the connection.

Or they could be happily married. The new grandkid could be theirs. He might have been a terrible salesman, but really found his stride in retail.

We’ll never know what became of them. But that photograph might live on forever.

Visit me on Twitter. And a new picture on the Tumblr today, too.

journalism / links / Samford / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Nov 12

The election paper

They finally finished their paper somewhere in the 3 a.m. hour. Got two election stories on the inside. Got a tidbit on the lone Supreme Court race and the congressional district that is home to the campus. Proud of them:

Left a big typo in the cutline, though. And a little more planning would have meant they’d finished this before 3 a.m., but they did a fine job. Proud of them.

Check out the paper at samfordcrimson.com

links / memories / photo / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
31
Oct 12

New Jersey, with a dash of NYU

When they talk about the boardwalk in New Jersey they mean Seaside Heights:

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That’s amazing. I’ve been there, we visited a few years ago. Here’s one tiny sliver of the boardwalk:

I have other photos, of course. They are on the one SD card I can’t seem to find at a moment. But nevertheless, terrible scene in New Jersey, among many places. The Yankee spent part of her summers on that boardwalk. And, like Gov. Chris Christie said, it’s all gone or in the ocean.

What awesome might the ocean can throw at the shoreline. No one talks like that, but we all think it as more and more of these stories come out.

I like this kind of story from the New Yorker:

By late Monday, the conditions were frightening. The lights were out. There was no water. The toilets didn’t flush. There were power failures in the emergency room and the transplant unit. Medical personnel had to bring more than two hundred patients down the stairs and get them to other hospitals all over the city and beyond. Earlier, Virginia Rossano had been going through a seizure—just as planned. But now was no time for that, and she was given Ativan, a drug that relaxes the brain and relieves seizures.

Medical personnel (including one med student) put Virginia on a kind of sled and began moving her out of the building. “Three young men carried Virginia down twelve flights of stairs, so slowly, so methodically,” Cathy Rossano said. “They were phenomenal.”

The delicate process, repeated with hundreds of patients, took nearly a half hour, and, when they got to the street, the Rossanos encountered a line of ambulances, many of them with volunteers who had driven hundreds, even thousands, of miles to help. “There were people from California, Texas, from everywhere,” Cathy Rossano said. “Our guys were from somewhere in Illinois.”

I think I can use that as a good example of an anecdotal lead for the next year or so. It starts with a medical procedure called a craniotomy, which is not something you’ll ever forget once you hear it. It has great detail of getting patients out of a non-working hospital and has that everyone-came-together-and-made-it-out happy ending. Definitely worth your reading time.

Speaking of Chris Christie, and we were, here’s something else I read about the governor and his unrequited love for Bruce Springsteen. I feel like it gets some things wrong, but it gets so much right:

He is flushed and beaming. The song ends, and he releases his commissioners, who seem happy to bask in their governor’s attention and also happy that he did not crack their windpipes. We’re all feeling elation—if the E Street Band at full throttle doesn’t fill you with joy, you’re probably dead—and it strikes me that this is the moment to ask the governor a trick question: “Do you think Mitt Romney could relate to this? To a Bruce Springsteen show?”

He looks at me like I’m from France. “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!” he screams over the noise of the crowd, and then screams it again, to make sure I understand: “No one is beyond the reach of Bruce!”

What about Newt?

“He’s been married three times!,” Christie answers. “He’d get this. You know what I mean?”

Not really, but I accept the point: something about longing and sin and betrayal and the possibility of redemption.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Christie is a fairly usable thumbnail on the governor, so it isn’t just the Newt joke. There are a few other good lines worth remembering, too.

(Update: Aww, look, Springsteen whom Christie says “feels guilty that he has so much money, and he thinks it’s all a zero-sum game” actually complimented his governor in a Halloween show at Rochester. Probably made the guy’s day.)

books / history / iPhone / movies / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
24
Oct 12

Mussolini at Chick-fil-A

Had dinner at Chick-fil-A tonight. Took a piece of paper to give to one of the guys I often see working there. He always asks me what I’m reading. We’ve talked about the various things we enjoy. I read a lot of history. He said he reads a lot about the Revolutionary War period.

So I’d promised I’d bring him a list of things that I’ve read. I spent a few minutes in my library one day last week writing down names and titles. I pulled images from Amazon to put over the names of the books. I gave it to him tonight. He was happy, smiling, pleased, thanked me.

But then I wondered: Maybe he doesn’t really read about this period. Maybe he was just being nice. Now, maybe, he’s wondering why some guy brings him this piece of paper.

So I got my food, found a table and continued reading Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope — which is good, if you like Alter or Roosevelt. Alter is a fine writer, but he’s a Roosevelt apologist and, really, there’s been enough of that. But I did learn about Roosevelt’s role in contributing re-writes to Gabriel Over the White House, a movie meant to “prepare” the American constituency for a dictator who, ultimately, executes his enemies in the shadows of the Statue of Liberty. This was actually produced and put in theaters. There’s some of that about 62 minutes in and then you’ll see a Star Chamber immediately thereafter. Roosevelt wrote to William Randolph Hearst, who produced the film, that he thought it would be “helpful.”

You can watch the full movie here:

The Library of Congress says about the film, “The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.”

Happily we didn’t go down those roads, but then again, in 1933 with the Depression on, people in the U.S. thought a lot about Mussolini. Il Duce was in the midst of his successful years. He was winning people over as a dictator with public works, improved jobs, public transport and more. It’d be a few more years until everyone turned on the guy. In 1933 desperate people looked at him and thought, Why not?

So anyway, I’m sitting there, trying to wrap up this book so I can move on to the next thing, and these two ladies sitting nearby are discussing the music they’ll perform in their church choir’s Christmas performance.

They’re flipping through three-ring binders. As it often happens when music people discuss music things there was a bit of singing. The lady on the right was pointing out parts to the one on the left.

A guy comes up, a contractor of some sort based on his clothes, and he says “You sure make that beautiful song beautiful.”

She did have a nice voice.

photo / Samford / site / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Oct 12

“Would you mind if I take your picture?”

Woke up early. Went to sleep late. That probably explains the dozing off I did this evening.

But I had a nice workout this morning, moved some weight around, turned muscles this way and that. Rode the stationery bike for an hour or so to get a good sweat. I’m ready to ride my bike on roads again. I’m still trying to wait out my shoulder, though. This, he said for the 13th week in a row, is getting old.

Had a meeting with the boss. Did some work on our scholarship program. Had lunch. Critiqued two newspapers and challenged the editorial staff to make their work even bigger and better. Gave an interview to a freshman.

Ran around campus and took pictures. I wanted to take some shots to demonstrate what not to do. This is surprisingly easy for photographers like me. So here are a few of those. But look! The back of her head is in focus!

Ms. Debbie keeps our department running smoothly. She’s such a sweet lady. And now she’s pretending to do work with some of our students. The young lady you can’t say was a section editor at the Crimson last year. Her friend there is a student and a model. You should see the shots where he is mugging for the camera.

Too wide. Far too wide. No information, but it has some motion into the background!

Frisbee is a big part of the quad culture, so show it differently, I’ll say. I asked this guy and his friend if I could take a few shots. “We’re not very good,” they said. “Fine, I’ll just crouch in between you. Buzz me.”

You have to suffer for your art. Also, fill the frame. Motion, action, showing the face. No rule of thirds, though:

I can’t count all the things I did wrong with this picture. Now I have to point them out to my students:

Dogs! On campus! This can be exciting and cute. But not if you compose the shot like this:

Unusual and creative and illustrative compositions make for better photography. Dogs learn the world through their noses, so this one is slightly better:

I took that picture five years ago, in a different state. Looks like the same pooch, though.

So I walked all over campus looking for things to do right and wrong to show in class next week. Now I’m type the rest of the night away. Some kind of life I’m lucky to live.