Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

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04
Apr 23

There’s a nice, easy recipe here — goes well with jazz

I attacked the morning with zeal. Zeal, I say. That was what the morning was attacked with, zeal. And urgency, and enthusiasm. The first alarm went off and I got up and put on the bike riding clothes and I went downstairs and rode on Zwift for 96 minutes, putting 36 more miles under my shoes.

One of the routes I did today included Neokyo All-Nighter, the fever dream of some poor game designer. What even is that thing floating in front of me?

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 95 routes down, 34 to go.

Later in the morning, I found myself reading copy aloud so a student could master the teleprompter. My voice was still thin in that way that’s difficult to control after a big workout. The was just coming from the back of my throat. There was no projection, no commanding news voice, no soothing tones, just a bleating, busted reed of a sound. Didn’t sound like me at all, especially to me. Even though I know it happens with a big workout, and in an hour or two I’ll sound more like myself, it’s always a tiny bit unnerving. What if it takes too long? What if this is the way I sound now?

But it was only a practice, for someone else. For some reason it got a polite bit of applause.

“Huzzah! He’s literate!”

That happened to me in a newsroom once, too. New job, second day there. The news director was the anchor, he pitched to me for my first story and I glanced over at him just in time to see a wide-eyed, stunned look on his face. “He can do that?”

And I thought, If you’re surprised, why did you hire me?

I googled this tonight, why my voice does that, not the former news director. (He’s in sales now.) It apparently has something to do with exertion and the way the muscles get used. But people seem to have different responses to this. Some people’s voices get deeper after a big workout, for example. This was a medium workout for me, though, and when I found that different people have different reactions, I knew it was time to close the tab.

Speaking of which …

While I closed that one to avoid diagnosing myself via Dr. Duck Duck Go, I am closing these tabs because … I don’t need this many open browsers in my life. The information could be useful, so I’m keeping the notes here for me, and sharing them with you, just in case.

I did an overdue phone upgrade late last year and, surely, there’s something useful to do with the old one. 10 ways to reuse your old iPhone in 2023:

Recently upgrade to a newer iPhone? We bet you have your old one stuffed in a drawer left to gather dust because you can’t figure out what to do with your old iPhone. But, lucky for you, we’ve got some fantastic ideas to reuse your old iPhone.

It is sitting on my desk, waiting.

I wanted a light and bright pasta one night the last time I had a bachelor weekend. I started pulling things out of the cabinet and then though, No, I’m hungry, not feeling experimental … and found this recipe, which was almost exactly what I was imagining. Light & easy garlic lemon pasta for two:

Ingredients
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
juice of 1 lemon
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
handful of fresh basil leaves, chopped
enough cooked angel hair pasta for 2
salt & pepper, to taste

I ate that two nights in a row.

This came up right after the first balloon craze last month. When China shot down five U-2 spy planes at the height of the Cold War:

The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.

Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected — and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.

Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.

And, after closing these three, I am down to just 34 tabs on my phone.

I am still catching up on the Re-Listening project — playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car. These aren’t reviews, but mostly just an excuse to share good music and write about whatever comes to mind about it, the time, or whatnot. And right now we are somewhere in early 1998, I think, when I was adding a bit of jazz to the collection. Most assuredly I was trying to bring some class to my collection.

So today we’re listening to Charles Fambrough’s 1992 The Charmer. This is the second album from the late, great bassist and composer. This still plays as a great easy jazz listen.

I don’t have the education or jazz vocabulary to appreciate the composition — or the talented interplay between the musicians — as I should, but reading comments online I have come to understand it was apparently under-appreciated in it’s time.

To me, this is perfect for ambience — say you’re making a nice lemon pasta — or as something quiet in the office, or simple and unobstrusive for the car. Which sells Fambrough short. He appears as a contributor on 17 other records, plus releasing nine records of his own between 1991 and 2003. He died, at just 60, in 2011. One of his obituaries called this record the high point of the CTI label’s 1990s output. It also used two exclamation points and the word “splendiferously” in the same paragraph. This was, one presumes, written by someone with a much better sense of musical appreciation than I have.

And so, for your musical appreciation, here is the complete Charles Fambrough album, The Charmer.

I attacked the deal with zeal; I will end the evening with the jazz.

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03
Apr 23

New old books, new old music, and much more

Today was the first of four, no, perhaps, five late days in a row. It’ll be a long week. But it won’t feel like it, until it does, which will probably be … Wednesday.

I walked outside twice today. Once, in the middle of the day for a reason I’ve already forgotten. And then, in the evening at about 7:45. (As I said, long week.) This was the first day of the year I’ve been surprised by how warm it was when I took that step across the threshold. And then I wondered why I couldn’t conduct today’s meetings, and emails and all of the rest, outdoors, under a tree.

Tomorrow it will be a mind-boggling sunny and 82 degrees. Wednesday, rainy and 72. Then the 50s and 60s into next week.

Spring officially begins in 16 days.

Time to return to the most popular feature on the site, the weekly check with the kitties.

Phoebe has re-discovered the guest room, and a great place to hide from me before I head out in the morning.

What doesn’t make so much sense is how habitual she is. This is the time of morning when she should be sunning herself in a window — she will wait in our bedroom until we open the heavy curtains, because she knows where the sun is — but this room, the guest room, faces the west.

Poseidon was cold this weekend. And shy.

He also was able to wriggle his way into forcing me out of that chair, which was an impressive feat for a 10-pound cat.

I finished the Willie Morris memoir this weekend. He took a plane from New York back to Texas, to speak at his alma mater, and then drove over to his home in Mississippi. His little boy in tow, seeing the old places with his mother and grandmother, and then, the next morning, he caught a plane back to New York. An altogether unsatisfying ending, but that’s a memoir at 31, for you.

Still, some 36 pages before the end, this is the part that has stuck with me.

So I started, yesterday, a journal by the poet May Sarton. A local author I know quoted her last summer on the anniversary of her death. “Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.” I did a little research and bought four of her books, her journals, just on the basis of that quote. I’m now on the second of those four books, a year of dear diary of a woman trying to figure out life, herself, her poetry and her gardening. But around all of that she will make you sit up and re-read a passage now and again, like this one.

I figure I should read a month at a time, and in two weeks I’ll need another book.

Another book to go with Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, which I also started this weekend. This is a 2000 Pulitzer Prize winner, and I am reading it on my Kindle, where I have a collection of dozens of books waiting for me.

I need to read more books, and so I will.

Believe it or not, we are still playing catch up on the Re-Listening project. I am playing all of my CDs, in order, in the car, and I am woefully behind in writing about them here. These aren’t reviews, just for fun and, sometimes, memories. And, at this point in 1997, we are entering a jazz phase.

And there’s some really good jazz in here. Up first, is a 1993 record from Jay Thomas, a multi-instrumentalist, with, now, 50 years of music on the books. Even back then, he’d been at it for a long time. You can hear him playing trumpet or flugelhorn or alto, tenor, or soprano, or flutes on more than 100 records. He’s fronted almost two dozen of his own. And you may not know his work, if you, like me, aren’t deep into jazz, but you’ve heard it. He shows up in commercials and movie scores quite a bit, too.

That’s the title track Blues for McVoughty. I wish I could say I had a good ear for jazz as a young guy, but I picked this up by chance off the giveaway table.

Somehow, sadly, most of this record hasn’t been uploaded to YouTube, but if you need an entry point to jazz, or easy atmosphere, or need to know what all the cool jazz aficionados were listening to in the 1990s, this is a fine place to start.

I am sure I picked this up to add something more sophisticated and mature to my collection. Can’t imagine why, though. And we’ll have two more jazz records back-to-back in our next installment(s) of the Re-Listening project.

For now, enjoy some of this nice weather, before it grows stormy again mid-week.

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31
Mar 23

Marked safe from the weather

The wind has been whipping through. The storms that have bruised and battered and, I fear, destroyed and killed through the Midwest and the South are coming through here as well. This is weather that we’ve been watching for for a week. In some ways, that makes it worse. But at least it isn’t the stuff that pops up, unannounced, in the middle of the night. We don’t get that hear, but it is something I am accustomed to. Certain times of the year, you pay close attention to the barometer and the low pressure fronts.

Here, I have charged the phones, prepared the cat carriers, set out bike helmets and brought the weather radio downstairs for the evening — so I wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs to hear the many announcements. But there was only one. We stayed in a tornado watch from the early evening and into the night. Late in the night, just a few moments ago, the bigger line of storms pushed through the region. Two cells that were surely scaring people in Illinois came this way.

We were under a tornado warning, then, but it was north of us. The radar overhead looked fine. The local broadcast meteorologists looked befuddled, as they often do, with severe weather. The cell passed north of town, and north of us, by about 16 or 18 miles. We listened to the wind whip and whirl, hearing the screens on the windows flex, and wondered how it is that siding stays on the side of a house. Surely, when the breeze turns into a considerable 40 or 50 mile per hour gust, wind could get underneath a few lines of siding and start moving it around, but it thankfully never does. And everything on the deck and the porch stayed where it was, too. The power never flickered, it didn’t even rain overmuch. We were quite fortunate, indeed. Hopefully, because this storm was in the forecast for most of the week, people have paid attention and are prepared.

Before all of that, I got in 20 miles on the bike. Just enough to get the heart rate up. The 2,200 feet of simulated elevation gain does it every time. Look! Here I am! On top of a mountain!

This was the Epic KOM climb, and I set a new Strava PR, absurdly improving on my previous best by 10-plus minutes.

When I got to the top of that climb there popped up a graphic for “Bonus Climb.” I don’t know how laid this out, but there was no bonus about that, or any extra climb. The HUD shows you how long the climb is, and this one is 5.9 miles. That last half mile, then, was all about dose energy.. And then they gave this slow, extra hill. It was almost demoralizing.

Anyway, since it is the end of the month, let’s check on the mileage chart. The purple line is what I’ve done.

That horizontal part marks the two weeks A.) we were out of town, and B.) I was fighting off a cold. So a light March — despite five consecutive days of pedaling — but I’m still ahead of all of my humble little projections.

This isn’t a lot of mileage, not really, but it’s a lot to me.

Tomorrow, a rest day, probably.

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30
Mar 23

The day as INDICATED

Had a nice 25-mile ride this evening, a get home and quickly change clothes and hope on the bike sort of thing. You have to pedal fast so dinner isn’t super late. Look at me, setting a new PR and stuff.

That’s four days in a row on the bike, and 13 Strava PR segments in that time. I’m going fast(er, for me that is) right now. I wonder how long it’ll last? Hopefully through the weekend.

Which doesn’t leave us a lot to talk about. The daffodils have reached their peak bloom. The sun was high, but often obscured by fast moving clouds. The wind is picking up, a seasonal expectation, and storms will soon be moving through.

Bob Costas was on campus. He spoke to some classes, and it was a popular event, despite not being advertised in any way. Apparently he has a family member in school here, he’s in town visiting and has been very generous with his time the last two days. Today he did a Q&A, and he told stories and gave a little advice. It’s always nice to hear from a master of their craft, though I’m always struck by the disconnect. Almost none of us are going to be a Costas. And we’re not doing it in the mid-1970s. The professional ecosystem is different, for one thing. Plus, you know, he is insanely talented.

There’s something to learn from all of that, and there’s always something more to be learned, always another way he could tie an anecdote into a life lesson, an applicable life lesson for the non-Costas 20-year-old set.

I liked, best, how he talked about how he stepped away; how NBC of course wanted him to stick around. Costas, though, knew it was time. It’s a great moment in broadcasting, a business where people can hang on for far too long. He could have done more Olympics, more of the highest profile events in sports, plus whatever else that piqued him, but he pulled back from that. Having that caliber of talent and that cachet, and calling it a day at 64 might be the most remarkable thing in his remarkable career.

These days you can still see him calling baseball on TBS and the MLB Network and, for whatever reason, doing commentary on CNN. So he’s not entirely out of the game, but still. To decline more Olympics, more Super Bowls, it’s impressive, and it gave Mike Tirico the stage, which isn’t a bad thing.

He pointed out that Tirico was the first Costas scholarship recipient at Syracuse, which is a nice bit of broadcast trivia. Maybe one of the people in the room to hear him speak today will be a huge star and sponsor a scholarship of her or his own in the future.

If only there were something of national and historical significance, something unprecedented, going on that we could talk about.

Well, there’s always tomorrow.

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29
Mar 23

People I know earn well-deserved awards

Here’s a little something I put on LinkedIn, which I basically use to occasionally brag on people I know. For whatever reason, I get more “engagement” on LinkedIn than any of the social media platforms. Which is great, since I just brag on people I know. Anyway, time to highlight on the award-winning IUSTV folks once again.

I counted and this year’s batch makes 73 IU student awards and honors that I’ve had the privilege to work with. We’re quickly running out of wall space for plaques ~~mostly because we refuse to give any of the individual awards to the individuals~~ because of the terrific talent I am fortunate to work with from time-to-time.

And because the days are (thankfully) getting longer I was able to catch a bit of the sunset after watching the award-winning sports division produce two shows tonight.

We’re in the Almost Spring now, a welcome arrival after — I guess I can say it now — a mild winter. Spring finally arrives in 22 days.

I believe I am still five CDs behind in writing about the Re-Listening project. But, today, we’re going to quickly get two discs closer to catching up. It’s a car experience, playing the discs in the order in which I acquired them, and then writing a bit about them here. Since I’m behind, it’s a scant bit. Which actually works out for this particular stretch of music.

Take this one, for example, one of the dozen or so Marvin Gaye greatest hits records. This one was released on the Motown label in 1976 on LP and then in 1987 on CD. I picked this up in 1997, because everyone needs a little Marvin Gaye in as many formats as possible. As true a statement then, as it is today.

It is as perfect as you would imagine. The first eight songs make the best part of the argument of why there are so many compilation releases:

Let’s Get It On
I Want You
How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
What’s Going On
After the Dance
Can I Get a Witness

I’m barely equipped to go on at length about Marvin Gaye, and there’s not a lot of new things to be said about a musical genius at this point, anyway. But, as I listened to this disc I found myself wondering, a lot, about how even the greats can transcend time. Marvin Gaye died young, of course, and he died while I was young. Generationally, I came about his music almost secondhand. Today, it’s been almost four decades since he was killed. What do young people today know about Marvin Gaye? You look at the first eight songs there and think some of those are just downloaded into the brain naturally, surely as oxygen or evolution. Which brings us to the ninth track.

“Trouble Man” was in the MCU, you say. Surely it was.

A decade ago now. Time marches on, but the music of the masters really ought to be immortal.

This is the last track on the CD. An argument could be made that this is the greatest live recording ever. I would not dismiss the argument.

I don’t know, yet, what the consensus best live recording is, but that’s on the list. It’s a 1974 recording in Oakland and that crowd made the thing work in some special ways.

The other CD we’re featuring in the Re-Listening project today marks the beginning of jazz albums in my collection. (I’d reached the point where I realized I needed some jazz. What of it?) I have no recollection of how or why I picked up the Holly Cole Trio in particular, but listening through this thing in the last few days, I do wonder why. And, also, why are we ruining The Jungle Book, right off the bat?

Lyle Lovett wrote this song. Sounds like a soundtrack tune.

I’m glad I didn’t give up entirely on this one, though. This song has some sass, at least. Which, hey, it’s a Fats Waller classic.

I thought, at first, I was being trolled on the last track.

And this, I think, is why I don’t have any memories associated with this CD. I decided, early on, I wasn’t going to listen to this one a lot.

I did 16 slow miles this morning. Felt slow, anyway.

But, still, three new Strava segment PRs, including two on climbs. (I am not a climber.) I took 3:24 off my best time on one of the little climbs today. Good legs, even if it felt slow.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 88 routes down, 41 to go.