Today seemed to last forever. I looked up, it was 11 a.m. I looked again, it was 1 p.m. The next time I glanced at the time it was 2 p.m. For the next 46 consecutive hours it was 2 p.m. Not sure how that happens. None of the rhythms or chores of the day were different than a normal day. Nothing to make it stretch or compress. It was just two. Two. Twoooooooooooooo.
Also, I had four hours of sleep last night. And change. Four hours and change. Really, though, when the hours of sleep starts with four, the extra minutes seem a trifling detail. There was a time, mind you, when I got by on much less. But I started making a conscientious effort to sleep more and now I can’t sleep less.
So it was that I came in this evening, sat down with a cat and dozed off. Only to be woken up when my lovely bride came through the front door. And I dozed off again. Only to be woken up when she came upstairs. And then I was awake, until it was time for dinner.
We had cheeseburgers this evening, which let me use, and use up, my first bottle of Gustard.
This was a Christmas gift a few years ago. My god-sisters-in-law (go with it) got it for me because we all like the band Guster, I’m impossible to shop for and some people like a challenge. It turns out Guster partnered with this company in Vermont and they makes a good mustard.
I don’t even like mustard. Or, I didn’t.
This year’s Christmas gift included more Gustard. Because we flew back from Christmas some of our presents were shipped after us. The box, including my new Gustard, arrived today. So, tonight, I could finish this bottle. Life has its grand moments of small serendipities of timing.
Or maybe it wasn’t timing. Maybe I just stayed in the period between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. for six weeks and the box had plenty of time to USPS its way here.
A new semester began today. A new semester is underway. I am counting them on the access panel in my office. Each trident marks a semester. There’s a lot of memories and successful students in each. I wonder what sort of successes we’ll pack in the newest addition.
That’s a lot of semesters!
Had a nice bike ride on Saturday. One of our friends joined us on Zwift and that made us fast. Somehow I had 13 mile splits averaging 28+ mph. That’s just silly.
And while I was working hard trying to keep up, I had this idea …
Now I can capture videos of my virtual rides! Aren’t you thrilled?
Anyway, I got in 36 miles on Saturday. I didn’t ride yesterday, but I should have, so I did a quick 20 miles immediately after work, today.
More importantly, it is time for the most popular feature on the site. It’s time to check in with the kitties. (They had a busy day napping and cuddling yesterday, by the way.)
Here’s Phoebe, beating up one of her toys. Grab it in your front paws and kick it into submission by your back paws. Excellent strategy, for the most part. And it looks cute, but those little feet and claws will give you a beating!
It was a poor substitute for her favorite spring, which has been lost for a few days. I found it last night. She chased it around and under a chair. I rescued it for her. We started talking about mimicking it with other springs, maybe it has the right number of loops or something. While we wondering about that, she promptly lost it again. No idea where it is, as of this writing.
I know where it isn’t. Poseidon is, very helpfully, looking for it as well. He tells us it isn’t in the dryer.
Every day I open a thing — a closet, a cabinet, the refrigerator or some other appliance — and then close it. Then I open it and close it again, just to make sure that guy didn’t sneak in while I blinked.
It isn’t that I blink slow, but he moves fast.
I’m trying a new thing. I’m closing tabs. (I know! Crazy, right? Next you’ll find me cleaning out under sinks and vacuuming beneath bookcases … )
Anyway, there are a lot of tabs open in my browser(s). I bet you might have a similar problem. Some of them have been open for ages, and ages. Rather than lose them altogether, I am bookmarking some and closing them. (Novel!) And others should be shared, and then closed. So here we are. Today’s contenders.
“We believe we see the world as it is,” she writes. “We don’t. We see the world as we need to see it to make our existence possible.”
The same goes for fish. Only the top layers of the oceans are illuminated. The “sunlight zone” extends down about seven hundred feet, the “twilight zone” down another twenty-six hundred feet. Below that — in the “midnight zone,” the “abyssal zone,” and the “hadal zone” — there’s only blackness, and the light created by life itself. In this vast darkness, so many species have mastered the art of bioluminescence that Widder estimates they constitute a “majority of the creatures on the planet.” The first time she descended into the deep in an armored diving suit called a wasp, she was overwhelmed by the display. “This was a light extravaganza unlike anything I could have imagined,” she writes. “Afterwards, when asked to describe what I had seen, I blurted, ‘It’s like the Fourth of July down there!'”
Bioluminescent creatures produce light via chemical reaction. They synthesize luciferins, compounds that, in the presence of certain enzymes, known as luciferases, oxidize and give off photons. The trick is useful enough that bioluminescence has evolved independently some fifty times. Eyes, too, have evolved independently about fifty times, in creatures as diverse as flies, flatworms, and frogs. But, Widder points out, “there is one remarkable distinction.” All animals’ eyes employ the same basic strategy to convert light to sensation, using proteins called opsins. In the case of bioluminescence, different groups of organisms produce very different luciferins, meaning that each has invented its own way to shine.
[…]
Scales, like Widder, worries that the bottom of the ocean will be wrecked before many of the most marvelous creatures living there are even identified. “The frontier story has always been one of destruction and loss,” she writes. “It is naïve to assume that the process would play out any differently in the deep.” Indeed, she argues, the depths are particularly ill-suited to disturbance because, owing to a scarcity of food, creatures tend to grow and reproduce extremely slowly. “Vital habitat is created by corals and sponges that live for millennia,” she writes.
And if we’re going to learn anything — we’re not, but if we were gonna — it ought to be that there’s an interconnectedness to all of this that is fragile, and important. Even among all of those different zones.
Unlike some services (looking at you, iCloud), Gmail is pretty lenient with its free tier. You get 15GB of storage between Gmail and Google Drive, and for many people, it’s good enough. But a lot of people have been using Gmail for a decade or more now, and it’s not hard to accumulate 15GB of data over that kind of timespan.
Once you do hit the 15GB cap, you won’t be able to add files to Google Drive, and eventually, emails won’t hit your Gmail inbox. If you’ve been finding it harder and harder to avoid paying Google for more storage, here are some of the best ways to quickly free up space.
It is a slide show, but it is one of the more useful slideshows, if you’re in a space saving mode.
There. One of my phone browsers is now down to 43 tabs. It is good to make progress.
And we continue making progress in the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my CDs in my car. In order, that is. Not all at once. That’d be … noisy.
But some of it would sound good! That’s why I’m listening to them individually and, here, I’m just writing a few notes. These aren’t reviews, but just for fun and filler, he said 1,075 words into this post. Anyway, this installment is a greatest hits, and it seems weird, somehow, to go on and on about a record that was full of charting hits.
So let’s get to it quickly, then. Greatest Hits and their massive success aside, some of these Tears for Fears tracks were juuuuust a tiny bit before my time, initially. Oh, the big ones I know well, and you do too! But there was a sense of achievement in discovering new-to-me and thoughtful and quality Tears for Fears songs. “Woman in Chains” peaked at 36 on the Billboard Hot 100. Lovely song.
“Mad World” was not a hit in the 1980s, which was why I listened to it for the first time in 1996-or-so, but it did get some spins in 2004, reaching number 30 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart and topped the Adult Alternative Songs chart. Then it landed in a video game commercial, was the subject of a few successful covers and appeared on a game show. It’s become something of a standard filler, I guess?
“Laid So Low” was the single off the actual greatest hits. And, sure, it was released in 1992, but this is quintessential 1980s. It was a top 20 Euro hit, settled in the top 40 in Canada and elsewhere. The song was a top 20 hit in the UK, France, Italy and Poland; a top 40 hit in Canada, Germany and the Netherlands; and reached the top 10 on the US Modern Rock Tracks chart.
Curt Smith wasn’t in the band at the time, so that song was a Roland Orzabal special. He kept the band name active during the rest of the 1990s, but 30 million unit sales means you get back together, eventually. After nine years of silence, they started talking, playing and writing together again.
“The Tipping Point” was a project that took seven years to produce, but it came out to good reviews in 2001 and made the top 10 in a lot of national charts, including the U.S. It also hit number one on the US Billboard’s Top Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Album Sales charts.
Not bad for two guys climbing into their 60s, he said, hopefully, from halfway through his 40s.
cycling / Friday / memories / photo — Comments Off on My Bob Barker line was my third-funniest joke of the day06 Jan 23
At the end of the day, as I was walking out of the office, I ran into the guy who locks the doors. He’s a fine fellow and we always have a good laugh. He was doing his last task of the day, slamming that bolt home, as I was leaving the building.
Did you just lock me in?
“Yep, you’re stuck.”
I will take that personally, then, for two days.
He laughed, and I instructed him to have a good weekend. Just, you know, in case that was somehow helpful, as if the man hadn’t yet thought of that possibility.
But the best part, aside from sending him home with a chuckle, was that I got to use the sincere expression, Have a good weekend, pal.
I once had a friend who used that pal to great effect. Sometimes I use it, and it makes me smile, thinking of him. You never heard the comma, because you were so busy being touched by the sincerity that came with that “pal.” He is a park ranger these days. I bet he’s great at that.
Anyway, there was a lot of bright sunlight to enjoy today. I am cold, but happy.
This was the second time this week I’d seen the actual sunlight and blue skies. It did not disappoint. I will accept the cold — this being January and all — but I will need some sun in exchange. That’s not asking too much. Otherwise it is just the usual, relentless, gray.
As if I needed to see it again, and from another perspective, to verify it, here’s the mid-afternoon view up through the giant skylight in the commons.
It’s gray 165 days a year here, and we have this giant window set up. This time of year I’m always amazed people don’t just sit there and stare up in wonder when the skies are blue.
Part of that is because there’s no one here right now. No students, anyway. Some of the professional types were in the office, getting ready. Classes start on Monday. This, then, is the last deep breath in. The normal rhythms will return. And, sometime in mid- or late-April, spring will finally show up. May it get here soon.
Got back on the bike this evening, and had a nice 27.7 mile ride. Should have gone longer, but there are dinner considerations to consider.
I considered I normally like dinner.
But, after the semi-impressive bonk on Wednesday, sitting up after 80 minutes and feeling as if I could ride all night was an encouraging sign.
Also, I was underwater at one point. Look to the left of that graphic. Biggest ray I’ve ever seen.
So I made a spreadsheet to chart my bike riding progress this year. I wanted to create a graphic that would illustrate how I did against specific daily averages over the year. One line will represent improving last year’s totals by 21 percent. The other will be a line that, if I can keep up with it, would mean a 42 percent increase over my record-setting 2022.
It’s ambitious, but it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. Right now, at least, I am well ahead of the blue and green trend lines, as you can see by that purple line. I’m wondering if/when the more ambitious goal will slip away from me.
Oh look, this mountain has its own weather system.
I’ve probably shared a version of that before, but it amuses me, which is the point.
Don’t worry, though, I won’t share that chart again for quite some time.
Feeling better today, thanks. Dinner, sleep, a light snack for breakfast and some lunch made it everything better. Still a bit fatigued, for some reason I can’t explain, but that’s made the decision for me. Taking it easy today, going to bed early.
The highlight, then, was … laundry. Wow. Can someone punch that up in re-write? (No. — ed.)
We haven’t looked at an old newspaper in a while. (OK, it has been almost a month.) Let’s go back to campus and read the alma mater’s classic rag.
This is from 94 years ago, January, 6, 1929. (I wrote for this same publication many decades later.) These guys have no ideas what’s coming for them the next fall, and I don’t mean the 1929 football season, which would prove dreadful in its own right.
The lead story is to the right, and it goes with this art, though you wouldn’t know it to look at the page, “Thousands greet opening new radio station WAPI.”
I worked at WAPI after college. I was proud to be on that air. It is the direct descendant of WMAV, which is the fourth oldest radio station in Alabama. (Alabama Power launched it, when they got out of the entertainment business, well, that time, they donated the gear to Auburn, which was Alabama Polytechnic Institute, hence WAPI. When it went back up to Birmingham in 1929 the station was co-owned by Auburn, the University of Alabama and the Alabama College for Women — now the University of Alabama. New owners bought it in the 1930s, and they launched the state’s first television station, the modern NBC affiliate in Birmingham, in 1949. Soon after, the company that owns the newspaper, another company I worked for, purchased the broadcast properties.) Today, WAPI is still the most powerful transmitter in that state, and it started right here.
Auburn’s new, powerful radio station WAPI went on the air New Year’s Eve from the studios in Birmingham with its formal opening program, which was heard by thousands of listeners throughout Alabama and the nation. Telegrams and telephone calls from 21 states began to pour in immediately after the new station took the air at eight o’clock, with a magnificent program lasting until four o’clock the next morning. The number of calls and messages amounted to over 900 before the station’s second program was presented.
Promptly at 7:55 KVOO at Tulsa, the station with which WAPI divides time on the same wave length, made an announcement that the air was being turned over to WAPI, and promptly at 8 p. m. the Boy’s Industrial Band of Birmingham opened the program with bugle calls and “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Addresses were made by Gov. Bibb Graves, J. M. Jones, president of the Birmingham city commission; President Bradford Knapp; Dr. L. N. Duncan, director of the extension service, Victor H. Hanson, publisher of the Birmingham News and Age-Herald; Sam F. Claxbaugh, president of the Protective Life Insurance Company; P. O. Davis, director Department of Public Information, and H. C. Smith of the Department of Agriculture at Montgomery.
Three guest radio announcers assisted Walter N. Campbell, manager, and W .A. “Bill” Young, assistant manager, in staging the huge opening program. The visiting announcers were George Dewey Hay, “the solemn old judge” from WSM, of Nashville; G. C. Arnoux, “the man with the musical voice,” of KTHS, Hot Springs, Ark.; Luke Lee Roberts, of WLAC, Nashville, and J. C. “Dud” Connelly of WBRC, Birmingham.
Through the new station, which is among the most powerful of any in the South, Auburn’s influence and instruction may be carried to thousands upon thousands of homes in every section of the State and the South. Reception reports from programs already broadcast indicate that WAPI may be heard clearly in every portion of Alabama. No college in the land has more desirable facilities.
With the abundance of talent available in the city of Birmingham, programs of the highest type will be given over WAPI.
The installation job complete is said to be one of the best and most modern. The power is 5,000 watts. With recent improvements in broadcasting apparatus the actual signal strength is said to be at least ten times as powerful as the old 1,000-watt station at Auburn which was discontinued and sold.
The new station occupies the entire 14th floor of the Protective Life Insurance Company building. Three studios, a control room, reception room, and office space are included. The outlay is ideal and up-to-date for radio purposes.
The transmitter—or broadcasting apparatus—is located seven miles from the downtown district of Birmingham. It is on a mountain overlooking the village of Sandusky, which is on the Bankhead highway between Birmingham and Jasper. A building 32 by 48 feet houses the transmitter and other apparatus. Only the input equipment is located at the studios in the Protective Life Building. At an early date regular broadcasting from Montgomery and Auburn will begin. It will be done by remote control. Modern studios and modern input equipment, are being installed at the state capital in Montgomery. It is in the building occupied by the department of agricultural industries. At Auburn the old studio in Comer Hall will be used.
Comer Hall, home of the College of Agriculture, was one of my main buildings in undergrad. I was on WAPI’s air for about a year, and later worked for the newspaper company that (from 1953 to 1981) owned the station. One of the hosts on the debut programming was from WBRC, which is where The Yankee worked when we met. I’ve been on the air in all of the other markets mentioned here, I think. Broadcasting is full of small world callbacks.
If you look at that photo again, the round microphones were an innovation just a year or so before. The shape and the innards did a lot to remove vocal disruption and clean up the transmitted signal. It looks old to us, of course, but this stuff was top-end.
Similarly, this little story puts the lie to the black-and-white images we sometimes get of history. Or maybe that’s just me.
Blakey was from Birmingham, he was senior, studying architecture. Marty was a junior, and he was also studying architecture. Renneker would become a named partner in an architectural firm, and there’s a scholarship in his name today.
Bill Streit lettered in three sports in college. Made sense that he’d work in athletics professionally, and he made a great career of it.
Streit also officiated track and field meets, managed the U.S. Olympic track team in Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1928), Los Angeles (1932) and Berlin (1936). In ’24 he was also the chairman U.S. Olympic wrestling committee — they won four golds. He also did a bunch of other big time things, maybe the Rose Bowl was just for fun. He became a member of the Executive Committee of the U.S. Olympics from 1948 to 1952. He’s a 1971 inductee into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.
Here’s that Rose Bowl, which is famous for a guy returning a fumble the wrong direction. Streit is in here, somewhere.
And in the 1950s, Streit was the subject of a nice little speech in Congress.
Back on campus, there had been another flu endemic. The local government briefly shut things down as a precautionary measure.
After that small stretch, when the numbers seemed to be easing up, life got back to 1929 normal.
There was this column inside the paper, filled with some prosaic advice. But the remarkable thing is the tone. It is written so matter-of-factly: wash your hands; well, obviously masks work; oh, and stay away from others if you are sick. They knew this back then. Why is some of it contentious for their great-great-great grandchildren?
I know the answer, and you do, too.
Again, 1929. People seeing the first talkie had a better grasp of common understandings of medicine than some of our peers do today. Weird.
Back then, the college kids had to drive across the state line, to Columbus, to see this picture. You can watch it, right now, on your computer or phone.
So glad they resolved all of this in 1929, so it wouldn’t crop up every few years as a silly political debate. This saved us so much time and energy, when you think about it.
No idea what becomes of Benjamin Provost. I halfway suspect it is a nom de plume.
This cartoon is supposed to be funny. Maybe the joke gets lost down through the generations.
I get to the “dog with the plush ears” line and get distracted, thinking of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s dogs playing poker (1894) painting.
One more radio tidbit. If you look at that WAPI copy again, you see where the station was sharing 1140 on the AM dial with KVOO. (That persisted until 1942.) Both sets of call letters are on the FM dial today. WAPI is talk. KVOO, the Tulsa, Oklahoma station, is today a country heritage format. And their morning show is co-hosted by Tige Daniel. I did a morning show with him in college.
It is remarkable to me how light things get when it is time to go back to work. It seems having a normal schedule prevents me from finding and doing fun things to tell you about here. The nerve of the real world, no?
So this is my day, today, be it ever so humble.
I did 16 miles in about 45 minutes and then quit. Everything was wrong. It was just immediately fast and hard and not at all what I was hoping for, which was a ride that would have lasted about twice as long. Instead, I had a bit of mild-to-medium nausea, there was no more energy, and I was threatening to overheat.
I bonked. Bonked like a rookie who knows nothing about nutrition, and did it in under an hour. Very weird. But, I guess, lunch had been some time back and maybe there hadn’t been enough carbs. There certainly wasn’t enough glycogen.
I felt a bit better after dinner, at least. But by then I was just … tired. So the rest of this isn’t terribly substantial, sorry.
But, hey, I set five PRs on Strava segments. And I finished 8th out of 460 on one of the sprints. I did the math and I managed to hold 30 mph through that segment with no virtual draft, or even a real awareness that I was about to enter a sprint. (Also, I am in no way a sprinter. Or anything else, really.)
Here’s a quick update to the Re-Listening project. I know, I just put two pieces in this same space yesterday. But those were to get caught up from before the holidays. Since I drove to two places in town yesterday to run errands I spent more time in the car. It’s an odd thing about temporal mechanics around here, but it takes 27 minutes to drive nine miles. Between that and waiting in line at the car wash, I managed to listen all the way through another CD.
I actually skipped one CD yesterday, because life is too short to listen to awful music. A record promoter gave me this disc, and I couldn’t get out of it. I should have tried harder, I know. I knew it then, too, when he compared the lead singer to “an off-key Kurt Cobain.” This was, mind you, a silly one-off conversation 26 years ago and I remember that comment. How out of place. How weird. How wrong. But at least the guy got to drop a name, I guess.
Anyway, the guy singing on that CD wasn’t Kurt Cobain, but closer to Chris Cornell. He didn’t have all of the tricks, and he sounds simultaneously bored and impressed with himself. The guitarist is noodling around, seemingly aware of the limitations by his chord structure or what he had to play around, gamely looking for something new and different. But there’s not much variation, and life is too short for awful music.
I wanted, here, to do the thing where I look all of those guys up and say they all went on to be successful restauranteur, fire fighters or boat charter captains. All four guys have incredibly common names, though. So one of them could be a judge. Another might be an auctioneer. One is probably just really good at D&D. The guy that did the cover photos has had a good run as a photojournalist. Seems to be in Florida now.
Anyway, after that came my 1996 cassettee-to-CD upgrade for the Hootie and the Blowfish debut. Probably you’ve heard of it. It finished seventh on Billboard’s 1990s pop list. Only Alanis Morissette, Whitney Houston, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, the Titanic soundtrack and Celine Dion, respectively, fared better. They won a Grammy and were certified platinum 21 times in the United States. So, yeah, I needed to get an updated copy, I guess. Because you never heard this stuff on the radio.
(Aside: Lilly Haydn was, is, and likely always will be, incredible.)
Anyway, I really dug the band (last August their second album, Fairweather Johnson appeared on the Re-Listening project)
and I still do. Something about the Carolina yelling appeals to me.
Oh, there was a 25th anniversary edition released in 2019? Guess I should pick up a copy of that.
But, first, I’m going to sleep off the bleh feeling.
