Wednesday

history / IU / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Today was a lesson in knowing things
12
Apr 17

Today was a lesson in knowing things

One of those days that you don’t look out of the window until it is almost too late:

Isn’t that some kind of problem to have, not looking because you don’t know better — especially when you know better. Life teaches you so many things, and some of them you are just determined to learn over and over again. Until you finally do. Know better, that is.

Anyway, that’s the side of the newly christened Frances Morgan Swain Student Building as seen from the Media School. Swain became the wife of the ninth president of the university. She was also a math student, a suffragist and an advocate for more prominent roles and facilities for women on campus, including that one. She seems like an impressive woman.

In the next building over then, our building, tonight:

Sometimes, I have the chance to say something that I know to be true. In those rare moments, like one tonight, I realize I have learned basic things, earnest and true and important things. And sometimes you get to share those things, as advice, because you see the chance. Occasionally you do know.

It is a sports night:

We have less than 10 tapings left on the term. Time moves faster. You’d think it might ought to slow down, with the rest of us. But you know better.

memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Quick notes on the road
5
Apr 17

Quick notes on the road

Out the door this afternoon and headed for the road. A usual song, but one I sing less these days, of course. Anyway, loaded up the car, opened the door, looked down:

Perhaps this is the week, then. Maybe it happened so gradually and suddenly that no one really noticed:

You know the “Remove all the pegs but one” game. The triangle shape of wood with 13 holes and the 12 tees. You take the tees off the board one by one, jumping to empty spots, jumping over tees as you would in checkers. The goal is to leave just one.

I have had a copy of this game for years, a long ago Christmas gift from my grandparents. As a kid, of course, I developed a sequence to leave one peg. I worked a good while on that. And it turns out that being able to do that took all of the fun out of the game. But I was the kid that figured out how to open safety gates rather than climb over them. I understood when Egon said, in Ghostbusters 2, that he had a Slinky once, but he straightened it. So, anyway, I have to try to remember to forget those steps to the peg game.

There’s another, unconventional, goal to the game. In this version you try to leave a tee in each corner. I don’t know if I’ve ever achieved that, mostly because by the time I had heard someone mentioned it I had learned not to create a series for it. I only play the game when it is on the table at a restaurant, anyway, which it was tonight. When I did this:

Leave five and you’re an “egg-no-ra-moose.” Leave six and you’re just no count, I suppose.

Tomorrow: Our actual drive, and other stuff.

Indiana / podcast / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on And this is just the good stuff
29
Mar 17

And this is just the good stuff

Today was a 11-hour day, the sort of day where I had dinner after 10 p.m., the sort of day where you do a lot of little things that don’t show your work, but builds toward bigger things. Or that’s what I’m telling myself.

Here are some shows the IUS students have rolled out today and yesterday:

And the late show, which features two sets of guests, including the morning show hosts:

I’m told they’ll also be on the front page of the paper tomorrow, too.

One of the graphics used in a television studio:

Remember, yesterday, when I mentioned Roger Cohen? Here’s a podcast we recorded with him:

Tomorrow, another 10-hour-plus day!

IU / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on Nothing special, except what is
22
Mar 17

Nothing special, except what is

As a shutterbug, and nothing more, I take a few thousand photographs a year. Not a lot compared to photographers, but enough to have a little volume to it. Put another way, enough to make it impressive that I remember the circumstances or least the location of many of them, but not so many photographs that knowing any background is a lost cause. And I’ve done this for … a lot of years now. Sometimes you take more, sometimes you take less, of course. Sometimes you’re holding a real camera, sometimes it is just your phone. Sometimes you’re studying the moment trying to get it just so. Other times, you’re just shooting from the hip, as it were. Nothing special.

Sort of like this:

I was walking from here to there in Franklin Hall, walking south I suppose because this is the late afternoon and that’s the sun beaming in from Presidents Hall, which must be to the west, relative to my position here, of course. And if there is anything I’ve learned in the thousands of photos I take every year over the course of many years now I’ve learned that I seem to like shots of repetition and that I like those dramatic times when the sun breaks through into the moment. Also, I’ve learned that that moment is fleeting. I took five shots of the above, for example, and two of them gave me that big burst of sun. There’s nothing special about that.

Well, there’s a big ball of fusion out there and we are at a happy and safe distance that allows for the magic to happen here on earth so that animals could grow and then other things could happen and our ancestors discovered tools and ate the right things and then languages were formed and more, better tools were built and then storytelling became a thing which led to larger aspirations which meant exploration and experimentation and then domesticated plants and animals and societies and boats and the new world and electricity and this building and you, and me, here, today. So that part is spectacular, sure. But of this picture itself, there’s not much special, really.

But it did remind me of a similar picture I took in another school building about 20 years ago. Looking west, sun exploding in, overwhelming the settings and the sensor and throwing everything in silhouette. I wonder how far in my giant box of old print photographs I’ve have to dig to find that. It is a giant box, organized in no particular fashion. But as soon as I rounded the corner and saw the sun coming through the Franklin Hall windows and then through the glass in the doors of Presidents Hall I thought of that other photograph. Probably hadn’t in years. But it was right there, in my mind, another empty hall, another silly reason to take a photograph, another thing to file away. Nothing special to it.

You wonder what becomes of all of the things you file away in your mind, but then they sometimes comes right back. Maybe that’s the most special thing of all.

Shooting a talk show tonight:

The topic was helicopter parents of student-athletes. They should have brought in specialists and experts.

journalism / memories / photo / things to read / Wednesday — Comments Off on Alone in the woods, with sunglasses and soup
15
Mar 17

Alone in the woods, with sunglasses and soup

Each day I make use of at least one weather app, the smart thermostat which is still patiently trying to convenience me it somehow knows what is going on outside and a variety of windows which display both front and back yards. I do all of this at night and again in the morning, before I put a single thing in my pockets to leave. And then I put the things I carry in my pockets, so many things. And then I go to the garage, because that is where I park my car.

I open the garage door, because that is easier than driving through it and replacing it every week. And then I settle into my car, crank it and undertake the normal procedures one uses. I put my foot on the brake, select reverse and then throw my arm over the other seat and look backward because that’s how everyone did it when I was growing up and that’s still the coolest move in a car. I snicker at the idea of a backup camera. No, seriously, every day, that makes me chuckle. And then I move the car, each time I am amazed by my good fortune of avoiding hitting things with the passenger-side mirror. And then I am in the driveway, and I back up about 15 more feet and I’m in the road.

Only, today, I was confronted by this thing that I knew from both ancient DNA and my own dim, distant memory.

That’s actually overselling it. Of course it was the sun. I was pleased to see the sun. “This is,” I thought to myself, “a sign of things to come.” That thought was immediately followed by “My, but that’s bright!”

Don’t I own some device that was designed to aid in the filtering of the bright and magical UV rays which are now descending on me for the first time since, oh, November? However long ago it was I had to really struggle to remember — and this part is legitimate — where I store my sunglasses in my car. But I used them today. So pleased was I that, in the parking lot at work I had to find a sunny spot for this picture:

I used to use this article in writing classes. It is about a man who stayed a true hermit, in the woods of Maine, for 27 years before police picked him up on a series of cabin break-ins. One reporter, the author of that piece, was the only person the guy talked to. (Turns out, I just learned, that story has become one of GQ’s most-read pieces ever. I’d give students that article on a Monday and would ask them to discuss it the following Monday. The few that would actually talk about it thought it creepy. At 20 pages of intriguing brilliance, most just thought it too long and admitted they gave up on it. Their loss.)

Anyway, the story appears again, by the same talented reporter, Michael Finkel, who has now written about it in The Guardian. And now he’s got a book on the story, released earlier this month. Read the GQ version, it is worth the time.

Tonight I learned that Allie likes minestrone:

She likes it a lot. Licked the bowl clean. Worked hard at getting the edges. I’ll have to leave her a bit of the broth next time.

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