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“April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks ‘Go.'” — John Mistletoe
Busy day, so you’re only getting this photographic meditation on spring. We’ve reached that point where sticks in the trees are no longer the standard view, but where the finery decorations of nature are still a bit surprising after a few months without. You can’t beat the South in the springtime.
I took this picture in a parking lot the other night. The more I think of it the more troubled by the implications of the language. The video may be recorded? It may be recorded 24 hours? Which 24 hours? Are they in sequence? Are just the first 24 hours recorded? Are they pressing record at whim?
Is this a deterrent? Would the bad guys take a chance?
Turns out if you stand there in the parking lot considering this message the staff begins to eye you suspiciously.
Auburn friends will enjoy the best Twitter meme ever. Everyone else will probably find it stupid, even if they can relate to some of the experiences there. Even still, just the names and the shared parts of the culture made for some hysterical reading today.
MONTGOMERY, Alabama — Gov. Robert Bentley said today he would cut the state’s General Fund budget by 15 percent once the Legislature passes pending supplemental appropriations to several key agencies.
And Bentley said the condition of the $1.6 billion fund is so bad that he expects to have to prorate the 2012 budget that begins on Oct. 1 anywhere from 15 percent to 45 percent.
[…]
Bentley compared the state’s General Fund to a person who is addicted to OxyContin and is going through a withdrawal period.
“Some times you get DTs like an alcoholic and that’s what we’re going through in the state of Alabama now,” he said. “We going through DTs, but you know what? You’ve got a doctor in charge.”
That’s our new governor. He was a dermatologist in his previous career. These little jokes are going to get old, fast.
And on the local level, there is even more bad economic fun.
I finished Robert Remini’s The House: The History of the House of Representatives at lunch. Fine book, considering that it had to cover so much ground of what is sometimes a dry topic. Here’s the summary I put on Twitter:
The House was founded. It was good, then bad and then ominous. Then it was good again. Then there was Newt Gingrich, Clinton, 9-11. The End.
This evening I started reading Eugen Sledge’s With The Old Breed. Sledge was an Auburn man, from Mobile. He fought in two of the most brutal battles of the Pacific before he turned 21, enrolled at Auburn after the war and had a long and successful career as a professor at the University of Montevallo. The HBO miniseries, The Pacific, was based in part on his book. Just a few pages in, but it is a universally well-received book. I’ll let you know.
Best video of the day? Glad you asked.
Finally, where were you 30 years ago today? I don’t remember that as it happened, but you might. Watching the contemporary television coverage is fascinating.
A few people actually asked for this on Twitter — can you believe it? — and so I’ve compiled this list in Storify. It is found elsewhere on the site, but that just isn’t good enough. Your requested material should be everywhere. It started on Twitter, of course, but the biggest problem is that Twitter has a very temporary nature. Storify will, presumably, be more permanent. And I can edit it for later. So, then, here is the famous Twilight Twitter commentaries:
The Yankee tells me the next movie is set to underwhelm everyone 17-years-and-older this fall. I’m sure she’ll go. If so, I’ll go along to make fun of the thing on Twitter (I do it for you, Internet) and then put it there.
I’m beginning to like Storify. It makes sense, though I wish it would do a few more things, which would also make sense given what it is trying to be. But that’s the nature of things. I’ll take my mile now, you charming little free service.
Follow ups to things mentioned recently: The New York Times has have no interest in competing for digital-only dollars. Did I mention that in it’s present form the paywall is hardly daunting? I get my Times from Twitter, so it is free to me under this odd scheme. Meanwhile, USA Today is revamping. There’s promise and trouble there, I’d think. Their online presence will be the best part of their recently unveiled strategies.
About Libya. Scrambling, stumbling and fumbling. Oy.
The story here is that a guy stills a laptop from a young computer whiz. The guy then apparently recorded this video of himself and the victim tracked it all down through the power of cheese technology.
And finally, a guy I worked with in Little Rock years ago put this on Twitter today. Apparently that’s his great-uncle cutting Elvis’ hair. He says his grandfather swept it up. No word, yet, on whether anyone stashed it for the eventual creation of e-bay.
So, there, I have three degrees of separation from Elvis and my friend Grant Merrill has a really cool family story he’s probably heard all of his life. And Elvis hair, lots of Elvis hair. He’s just waiting until his daughter goes off to college, and then he’ll sell it off for tuition money. Grant’s a multimedia mogul now. Very impressive.
One day, when I need a loan, I’ll remind him of that time he crashed on my sofa.
This got me looking for an aircheck from the late, great Ray Lincoln who was simply one of the best people any of us ever worked with in radio. I only knew him at the end of his career when his health was failing, but his mind was razor sharp. In his prime he did a show where he performed two people, Ray and Ram, at once. And he did it well, I’ve heard snippets and the thing was amazing. Later I wrote a little copy for him and pitched to him as he did horse track picks. Lincoln was one of those guys who could do a lot of things well, and he was regarded as one of the best handicappers in the country. As was typical, he did that as a character, too. Sport Jackson was a no-nonsense personality and it was just inside the man. He was a method actor without a stage.
KTHV, when Lincoln died a few years back, did the best obit piece you’ve ever read, mostly because the man was one of those people you could imagine has existed anyway:
In January of 2000, deteriorating health forced Lincoln to quit full-time radio. His condition would worsen until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. “They cut me open and did six bypasses. They were gonna do five and I found out if they do six, you get the cell phone and the Internet and the dish.” His condition would deteriorate until he was forced to enter a Dallas hospital in 2003. He suffered six strokes which left him incapacitated and he was in dire need of a heart transplant. Lincoln was kept alive by a machine called an l-Vad. Eventually though, his family was faced with a decision. Lincoln explained in 2005, “It was not looking good. So, we had decided on Thursday, come Sunday, we’ll just turn this machine off.” Suddenly, there was a donor heart available that was a match for Lincoln. “This kid, his name was Dwayne Compton, 26 years old. He was killed in an automobile accident December 11th and the next day, I got his heart,” Lincoln says. “And his heart is in my chest right now.”
And they included quotes that probably are more in keeping with the character Ray Lincoln conveyed on air:
“The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench. A long, plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”
“Do I get credit for using those words? Look at my contract. I get a 50 cent bonus for large polysyllabic words that are obscure and seldom used except for people who are erudite and urbane.”
I didn’t know him especially well, but he was always a decent guy and a great talent. Sadly, there isn’t any audio of his to be found on the Internet. This is an oversight.
We’re going to Little Rock this weekend for a conference. I must resist the urge to try and remember stories to tell. I was only there for a year, after all. But I certainly met some characters.
If you left it to some media outlets you’d think the South was still living in the 1960s.
But no one talks much about Worcy Crawford, who died in July at age 90, leaving a graveyard of decaying buses behind his house on the outskirts of Birmingham.
His private coaches, all of them tended by Mr. Crawford almost until the day he died, do not have the panache of the city buses that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. refused to ride. But they have significance nonetheless.
With their cracked windows and rusting engines thick with brambles, they are remnants of something that was quite rare in the South: a bus company owned by an African-American.
Mr. Crawford’s work was simple. He kept a segregated population moving. Any Birmingham child who needed a ride to school, a football game or a Girl Scout outing during the Jim Crow era and beyond most likely rode one.
That’s a neat piece, don’t misunderstand. But let’s also be clear: the latest development in that particular story is Crawford’s death, last July. Everything else dates back two generations.
The reporter certainly has her share of accolades, but she’s from California and Alaska, so maybe that’s the problem. Every time you send another person South they have to gain some sort of institutional history and the Civil Rights Era is one place to start. Certainly this is a worthy era, but it discounts more than a little about what has happened in this region, you know, in more recent decades.
Just off the top of my head there’s biomedical research, medicine in general, automotive growth, the transition from heavy industry to service industry (which would be a nice follow up after the typical Civil Rights, five decades-old reporting), more corruption and governmental unscrupulousness than you can cram in a newshole and so on.
None of these things will ever be covered by that particular newsroom. Doesn’t fit the narrative.
One more journalism note. I foudn these three headlines grouped together. Google calls it an algorithm. Really, this is irony:
So I guess my one recent visit to HuffPo might be my last. We’ve seen AOL brand things before, and this is just going to get unfortunate, I’m afraid. Shame, too, they have been massing together a lot of resources and talent, but if the point is just to get the logo on my browser, I’m going to be less and less interested.
Meanwhile, from the Middle East, comes a fascinating insight into life in Syria:
Syria recently gained the unpalatable title of being the most restrictive Middle Eastern country for internet censorship, formally held by Tunisia. Syria blocked (and still blocks) a number of sites ranging from pornography to Kurdish websites. These restrictions however are not uniform and inconsistencies such as blocking Hotmail but not YahooMail are not uncommon.
More or less every internet cafe I visited (albeit these were in the more touristy areas) already had the settings changed so that a proxy computer, usually in Saudi Arabia, was used so the public were free to browse banned sites at their leisure. There were even computer programmes that people would pass around to find a new proxy number should one stop working. Sometimes I had to ask for the proxy to be put in which the staff would do without a bat of the eye.
[…]
Speaking to my friend recently he told me people are still frightened because although these sites are now allowed, the internet is still heavily monitored and the rules may change at any time. As there has been no official announcement of the ban being lifted, predicting the mood of the regime is difficult.
The full piece is definitely worth a quick read.
More baseball today as the Tigers looked for revenge against the visiting Arkansas Razorbacks. The bases were loaded, Kevin Patterson had been in a mini-slump, but he’d been hacking away like someone kicked his puppy. And then the pitcher grooved one which wound up behind him, about 385 feet in his bullpen. That grand slam helped the Tigers win 9-5.
Also, they had fireworks.
(That’s from last night, but they go better with a grand slam story than an extra-innings loss.) If you’ll watch the video there’s something a little different in the second half.
I made a video of our visit to the farmers market this morning. Enjoy.
The most important thing about this video is not that I shot it on my phone, but I edited it in the car on the ride home. After that the iMovie app offered an update. The description sounds promising. Can’t wait to see it in action.
I promised you two stories yesterday.
Here’s the first: My longtime friend and radio mentor, Chadd Scott, lost his job at an Atlanta sports talker this week. He was stuck in St. Louis, stranded by Delta and weather. He tweeted about it, Delta took offense and, being sponsors of his station, put a lot of pressure on his employer. So they fired him.
This is regrettable, but everyone in the business pretty much understands the tough spot the station was in. Less excusable was Delta’s overreaction. Here’s why. He tweeted about it on Tuesday and the power of the Internet took over.
He started that day with about 800 followers, and now has almost 1,200 as of this writing, but that’s not what is important. I collected his original tweets, minus one, which he deleted for his former employer, and the next nine hours of original tweets and posted them on Storify.
If you don’t read the entire thing, I ended with the important part. The last 50 tweets mentioning @chaddscott and thus, Delta, had (at that point) reached 19,113 potential airline customers, creating 22,711 impressions.
So this is unfortunate for Chadd, but he’s the kind of guy that lands on his feet. You don’t build the fastest growing syndicated show in the country as he did a few years ago or work at ESPN for two of their top shows as he has done without being the kind of talented person capable of landing on your feet. While no time is good to be out of a job, now especially so, Chadd’s going to move on to bigger things.
But poor thin-skinned, corporate Delta. The guy had a few jokes, sound observations, really, and a few people online saw it. Now he’s going on television, thousands and thousands and thousands of people saw this and, apparently, are making travel decisions around it. (And as soon as my already-booked next Delta trip is up, I’ll be sure to figure this into my personal calculus.) If they can’t figure out when to have deicer at which airport they might not be worth my money, either. Also, they did my friend wrong.
Here’s the second story: I went to a local bookstore last night, a Hastings. We don’t seem to have another one around (that isn’t attached to the university). I remember when this Hastings arrived, when I was in college. it was a novel thing, then, because they had books and music and movies. But only mildly novel. They had some of all of those things, but other places had more of any one given thing.
The writing was almost upon the wall then, but there’s no mistaking what it says now. These stores are dying, at least the ones that aren’t dead. It was like strolling through a video store — Can you still do that in your town? — the only thing you need is the preservative fluids.
Finally found the biography section. Two entire sets of shelves. Amazon has a few more selections.
Not much of a story, but Hastings, I learned, has used books. Then again, so does Amazon. I hope the place makes it. Towns need bookstores. College towns should have more than one. Several people work there and they have at least three chairs for sitting and reading. Also, they have free coffee, so if you need a fix, that might be a good place to try.
I don’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t say.
Worked on what will become a new section of the site. I’ll give you a hint:
Give up? That’s from an old 4th grade science book. It was published in 1940. It belonged to my grandfather. I have a few of his old books and I’m scanning the fun pictures for a small extra section of the site. Not in this book so much, but in one of his high school literature books, there are notes in the margins. I get the impression that he was a funny kid.
I’ll try and trot out part of that section next week.
