Do you ever wonder where the days go? They start off bright, or dark, or overcast, as they do. And then you sit down to do some task, and then stand up to take care of an errand, or go over to handle a chore, and then the day is almost over.
Sometimes I am aware of the passage of time only because I realize how quickly it seems to be going. I need more windows in my life, I guess.
And, perhaps, naps.
I did a thing. IUS does a sports show and from that they’ve created a talk show, The Toss Up, which is usually pretty darn smart. And after they tape that show we sit around and talk about it, and a lot of great subtopics appear. One night I said, we should do an after-party. Just a live stream where you fill out the rest of the conversation. A more casual and funny thing. Now we only need a name.
And someone said, “The show is The Toss Up. At the end you say “Toss it up, see if we can catch it.”
Which led to The Catch:
That was the first one. Also, I threw the wadded up paper back into the shot at the end.
I also took a selfie in the reflection of the lens of the jib camera:
And after we were done with recording the show, and the after-show, we had some studio time left, so I grabbed a few people and we had a little anchor practice:
Before you know it, they’ll be off doing cool work. But for now, I stand there thinking “How cool is this, that you can do this? And how cool is it that, at 8:45 on a Wednesday night, you want to?”
This is a 1979 SI cover. Or an illustration on a poster. I found the real one online, I might have to pick it up:
And now, because it is 10 p.m. and I feel these things these days, I’ll probably go read myself to sleep.
Early night at the office tonight, so we jogged around campus. This was just a little more than three miles into the run.
We ran eight miles in all. I ran negative splits over the last three. The Yankee tells me this is good.
Must have been because the sun was down and it was 37 degrees by then.
So I’ve learned two things. First, training for a long run in the winter makes you faster. Second, if you have to train for a long run in the winter, don’t.
It was published in 1958 and seems to be aimed at giving a reasonable historical re-telling and description to teens. The chapters have great line art:
That’s a paratrooper, which was pretty much the moment I decided to take pictures to send to our friend Adam, who is a modern paratrooper, because I thought he’d appreciate the biplane:
But it was this one he really liked, and how could you not? Look at his left hand:
Just another day at the office, oh, and do remember your briefcase. Here’s an almost contemporaneous accounting of Captain Sergei Mienov:
He spent almost a year in the United States. On his way back to Russia he passed a few days in Paris. He was full of enthusiasm for what he had seen in the development of air technique. Although Russia was not yet officially recognized, Mienov had been courteously received. He had visited airplane factories, airdromes and training schools. He praised highly the quality of American parachutes and the instruction American pilots received in their use. He had made his first parachute jump here.
[…]
When Mienov submitted the report of his US observations to Air Chief Alksnis, he mentioned the wide interest which parachute jumping could arouse. He suggested that the interest of the Soviet population, and particularly the young, could be turned toward the development of air power by this type of propaganda. Alksnis passed the comment on to the Politburo. Stalin agreed that it was a good idea.
And so parachuting became wildly popular in the Soviet Union.
Until the purges. And then the Germans did it better and then the Americans did it more. And that’s the story of how one of the more crazy ideas a person could do as a spectator sport became one of the craziest things people would do in military service. How the book wound up where I found it remains a mystery.
Here’s Adam now, this is his jump into Ste. Mere-Eglise, Normandy, France, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day:
He took a miniature American flag on the jump with him and sent it to me as a keepsake, which super cool. That’s in my office now.
So is this stuff:
We are about to surplus a bunch of old equipment. The university has a surplus process for its eight campuses and some things of a certain value must be processed in a certain way and that’s where I am. More specifically, that picture is opposite of where I am, in my office, which is now filled.
Because it made more sense to bring this stuff out of storage, start (and hopefully complete) the paperwork process and then wait on the nice fellows from the Surplus store to come over and pick it up. So I have huge bundles of television cabling, a half dozen old cameras, a switcher, various accesorries and a chest-high stack of old engineering components in my office. If anyone wants to come push buttons, now is the time.
I was going to write more, but the day got away from me. The days all get away from us from time to time, even as we know the days are always going some way or another. That’s the thing about us, we can seize the day, occasionally, if we are so inclined. But we can never grab the day and hold onto it. Not for very long anyway. I assume this has something to do with how our brains perceive time. We’re flowing through it, or it is flowing around us or some thing or another and the net you are holding isn’t woven with small enough mesh. Or some such.
But, hey! I did entirely rework a page on the site you’ll never see! And I found two or three things there that I need to fix. It is an administrative thing and you don’t care at all. I might not, either, but I started it long ago for reasons that probably didn’t make much sense then and probably mean less now. But I have it under control. For a time.
Also, I have added new images to the top and bottoms of the blog, here. As you might have noticed those are rotating images, built with a bit of code that offers the viewer a random image based on numerical sequence. Presently there are 81 headers and 81 footers. They all have varying heights and they are all 900 pixels wide. So I’m staying with this format for a long time, I suppose. I’ve been with this format for a good long while, as well.
I’ve been watching HBO-produced biopics. There was an Lyndon Johnson movie based on a play and then a two-parter on Winston Churchill that I’ve started. They are both interesting and probably have some accurate anecdotes, and they compress years of civics lessons into two-hour capsules. But try as I might, I see Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella rather than Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Richard Russell. Bryan Cranston fills out LBJ pretty well.
But I don’t know that you can really portray LBJ’s in a PG environment. The trailer was really good, I felt, so I watched it. The movie was worth seeing if you like political pieces or period pieces. There were a few really quite powerful moments. I think it captured the best parts of the worst parts of a hard, challenging time.
Stephen Root was J. Edgar Hoover. He is great in everything and there’s one little moment he has that nods at all of the things the cinematic audience we’ve learned about Hoover in recent years. Which makes me think of this in much the same way as we do comic book universes. Except, of course, this was real life. The most fake thing was the makeup they put on poor Josh Lyman to try to turn him into Hubert Humphrey. Should have spent more time on that.
I was half-listening to the Churchill story (turns out this is a BBC-HBO co-produced project) when I heard Lena Headey. Nothing takes you out of the 1940s like an accidental Game of Thrones reference. The problem is that these sorts of films always come off as cartoonish, either in a harsh way or in a soft focus, after school special sort of way:
I’ve been running indoors. Someone left the door open and Canada is cooling all of outdoors so we’ve been at the track. The track is a fine three-lane affair. Eight laps to a mile, only slightly better paces. It is made from special grade painful cement designed to hurt old joints, I think. But it looks like this outside:
So it is a trade off. Eighteen miles in the last couple of days. And now it’ll be a few more days before I set off again. Hopefully outside, where my stride is sometimes better.
The nicest part about being inside, after avoiding hypothermia, I mean, is that my running app can’t cope. For the first three miles or so it things I’m running at a world class pace. I am not running at a world class pace. Also, it thinks this is my course:
That is not my course. My app is just going through a modern art phase. It takes no time at all to imagine that is an aggressive effort.
Back at the office, where things are slow, but productive. They’re moving around a few editing bays and I’m dealing with email and various administrative things like deadlines and deliveries and purchase orders and its all great fun.
My watch beeps and I have to walk around a bit. I discovered that someone brought their foosball table. Not sure who, or if there is an expectation that it will be played, but it is in a common area, and does make that particular room feel something like a startup:
Students will be back next week. I bet it sees some use.
I made this video as a quick experiment. I wanted to see which version looks better when it is embedded. There are three versions of the same below, but more words following that.
I think the last one has the best quality and look. What do you think?
It was 11 degrees outside, so we went to the gym. I joined the gym. Now I have to see what all they have. They do have a nice track, though:
Eight laps equals a mile. The place is newer, cleaner, brighter and has people on it, which is an improvement from the track I was running on last year. That was 10 laps per mile and about 55 years old and I’ve only just realized how drab and lonely that track was.
But indoor running anywhere beats 11 degrees outside. And laps, when you find a rhythm, go fast. I got in six miles tonight. Six miles before a salmon dinner. Salmon is good, but it fills me like an empty lecture. I’ll be snacking again in an hour, I bet.
