Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

journalism / photo / Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Jan 25

First day of class

The first installment of the new class, International Media, went … OK. It’s syllabus day, which is an easy day, but also tedious. You just talk about the class in a meta way, and little is conveyed in terms of knowledge or thoughts challenged. But don’t you know they know where the various policies are in this 10 page document. They know what they’re getting into, at least.

And what they are getting into is a newly designed course. And my first class that will be taught in 75 minute sessions. The last two years I’ve been online, or leading three-hour classes. I have to figure out what 75 minutes feels like. I apologized preemptively for these sorts of rough spots.

At least there’s a clock in the back of the room. Except I realized, that’s not a clock. It’s a timer. (For public speaking classes, I guess.) I noticed that at the last moment, and managed to get everyone out with a moment or two to spare. So it’s a new class for me. A brand new course design. It’s being held in a time block with which I must get reacquainted. And it takes place in a room I’d never even seen until I walked into the room after the previous class filed out.

We made it out together.

Now we’ll see how many of them come back on Monday!

I stuck around the office for a few hours to do some work, and then set out for the drug store on the way home. I shopped for, not drugs, but vitamins. And I saw this sunset on the last chilly leg of the drive.

My suit got a compliment today, so at least I did that part right. Now I just have to iron for the twice-weekly meetings between now and May.

So as not to dive too deeply into the minutiae, The Washington Post is dying of a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. They begged off running endorsements before the election. Some of their stellar newsroom members have left in protest of that, and some other things. The tenor is really changing in that venerable old newsroom. And no less than a 40-year veteran of the place, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was publicly critical of a recent editorial they published. These are all the by products of choices they’ve made, either at the hand of the new boss or the insistence of the owner, one of the oligarchs presently prostrating himself before the president.

Funnily, Jeff Bezos came up in passing after class today. It was one of those questions a student asked on the way out the door. It was a simple answer, one the student didn’t know, and that’s perfectly fine. Not everyone knows the things you know. But in that class they’ll learn a few of them. And we’ll probably wind up talking about Bezos and the Post. I’ll try to pretend not to be disappointed in the venerable old rag when we do.

But, then, I saw this ad as an interstitial ad on one of their stories. And, friends, I can tell you a whole table full of their sales and marketing people sat down together and wrote this nonsense.

Right after that I saw the first mentions of the indefinite pauses to the NIH process. This is important, important stuff. It’s difficult to state how vital the NIH grants become to local economies, to the fields they fund, and to the scholarship they help create. And we just … stopped them today. Even if you wanted to start the panels back up next week, even if you did it without change — and you know that won’t be the case — we’ll have done some real damage to the whole system. A system which is, in fact, one of those things we run better than just about anyone else in the world.

This isn’t just some small nonsense we’re talking about. Some colleague(s) at my current employer are working with some NIH grants on various small business grants. I don’t know the details, but it’s likely some scientific entrepreneurial enterprises. I looked up the grants at one of my alma maters. These are the departments that benefited from NIH money in fiscal year 2025 at UAB.

For FY 2024 UAB received $334,417,936 from 612 awards. This is critical money as states continue to cut back on university funding and administrators and scholars are forced to find their financial support elsewhere, as in these previous reliable grants. You wonder, now, how rickety the whole higher educational system is.

Not that that medical research is a worthwhile reason to maintain a sense of urgency or continuity. Not that there are patients around the country desperately trying newly developed techniques or therapies or medicines that might stem from those grants. Not that people around the world benefit from them daily. If you’d like to approach this from a strict dollars and cents perspective, by all means. NIH reports that for each dollar they dole out, it turns into almost $2.50 in terms of economic activity support. That chart also represents a few hundred jobs from highly skilled experts. Who knows if it is too early to worry about a brain drain, but hamstringing specialists and experts is certainly a dangerous strategy.

The largest beneficiary of NIH grants in FY 2024 was the famed Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, which earned 1,512 grants that totaled $857,947,550. Most of that, $821 million or so, goes into all of the amazing research they do there. You know, cutting edge Johns Hopkins.

What could possibly go wrong?

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Jan 25

My neck! My back! My neck and my back! (are fine)

I showed you a little snow video featuring a cat, but we didn’t do the regular weekly cat installment. Let’s do that now. It is, after all, the site’s most popular regular feature, and I am contractually obligated to talk about them a lot.

Here’s Phoebe playing with one of her Christmas presents. The white poof balls were a big hit this year.

And Poseidon would you like you to know he has perfected his “How could you not love a face as charming as this one?” look. It is a good look.

I tell him all the time: it is a good thing you’re so charming!

We still have snow. It’ll be around for a while, because we’re staying at or below freezing until the weekend. This is over on the northeast corner of the house and situated in such a way that it doesn’t get a lot of sunlight. (We are, at least, enjoying a lot of sunny skies!)

On the opposite side of the house, the green stuff is poking up through the white stuff already because we’ve had a lot of unobstructed afternoon sunlight.

I’m recovering from yesterday’s slip on the ice. I have just a tiny bit of soreness in my hips and low back. The worst part is my neck. Specifically, the muscles in the front of my neck. Apparently we use the muscles on either side of the trachea when we’re getting into and out of bed. That’s not fun right now, but it’ll be better in a day or two. I looked it up, and apparently that’s a possible symptom of whiplash. When you lose your feet and flatten out on your back and head, the neck probably moves a little more violently than you’d like. Go figure.

What’s odd, is that we apparently only use those muscles to hold up up the head in those two moments, laying down and getting up. It doesn’t hurt at all, otherwise.

So I fell on the thinnest possible layer of ice, and I hurt myself in the most minor way possible. Lesson learned! Walk in the grass next time.

Tomorrow is the first meeting of my in-person class. I have done all of the preparing I can do for now. I’ve done all of the typical things, rehearsed the day two or three times. I do that knowing that some of the things I’ve said to myself I’ll forget to say to a room full of students. And, somehow, it’ll take longer tomorrow than it has in my practice rounds. Somewhere between now and then I’ll come to doubt everything I’ve prepared, everything I’ve liked in the last several weeks. Too late now, though. The class is the class. It starts tomorrow!

cycling / Monday / video — Comments Off
20
Jan 25

No one saw that

We stayed indoors all weekend, because it was cold all weekend. That bitter, real winter sort of cold. It snowed Sunday evening, beginning a little later than expected and ended right on time. The cats were very much interested in the snow this time and I said, fine. Let me put on a jacket and some shoes.

They were not impressed with it for very long.

Ours are strictly indoor cats. Occasionally, one of them will time a door right and run outside, only to hide under a nearby bush. The other doesn’t try to sneak out a lot, but when she does, she’s off like a shot. So they know, basically, the front porch and one corner of the back of the house. Poseidon went that way, his favorite way around the back, and didn’t even make it to his rose bushes. Phoebe went the opposite way, to the right. I don’t know if either of them have ever gone that way. And you could see that she wanted to go back inside. The door should be over here, somewhere. But I think, all of it being unfamiliar and ridiculously cold besides, she lost track of where the door was. So I stopped recording and took her in. Poe was happy to see the door open, too.

These professional cuddlers and cover stealers are no match for mother nature.

When the snow ended the expert indicated we should go out and shovel, because it was the wet kind of snow and it would otherwise be trouble tomorrow. So there we were, 8 p.m. last night, hoping the neighbor’s little boy wasn’t already asleep so we wouldn’t disturb him with the “shhhhh shhhhhk shhhh shhhhhhk” sounds of winter.

But the driveway got cleared. Once again, enough to shovel, not enough to try the snowblower, which is doing it’s job of keeping real snowfalls far, far away from our driveway.

Today, the Canada geese flew over. I caught the tale end of the flock.

After which, I noticed there was a patch of snow right there on the road at the foot of our drive. Wouldn’t want anyone to have a problem with that as they passed by. So I set out to take care of that. Parka, because it’s cold. Hat, because same. Sunglasses, because of the reflective snow. Boots, because I have them. And three-quarters of the way down the drive I slipped on the ice. The shovel went to the left and back. My glasses went to the right and back, after scratching my nose and eyebrow. My body went back, and so did my head, right on the cement. Ker-ploof. Because my head no longer makes kerthunk noises.

So I was sprawled on the driveway for about six seconds, and then I said aloud, “Get up.” I rolled to my right, on a knee, and sat like that for a few moments to make sure I was ready and prepared. To stand up. On the ice. The micron-thin layer of which I’d just fallen on. The part that my lovely bride shoveled last night.

My part of the driveway was perfectly fine, by the way. And so was I. Once I got up I had to carefully navigate retrieving the shovel and glasses, but eventually I had them both in hand. At the street, I saw the snow was a hard-packed layer thinner than your favorite frosting on your favorite treat. It wasn’t going anywhere. And neither was my headache.

I kid. I’m fine. I’ll feel this tomorrow. But I was fine enough to have a 32-mile bike ride this evening. I did a course which just lapped me around one big hill over and over. Ten laps. I grew to hate that hill. It started with a sprint, and then a slight ramp, before nice little incline, which flatted out, turned left, and then gave you the real thing. And before you got into the downhill you were going back up again. Finally, you floated into the decent, to the left, and then the right, and the right, and the right some more. And then that sprint again.

Ten times.

On my last lap, though, I set three PRs. One for the lap itself. One for the climb, by just one-tenth of a second. And then I trimmed down the sprint by three seconds to end the thing.

If you think doing anything in laps is tedious, try it on a video game, in your basement, in the dead of winter.

cycling / Friday / site — Comments Off
17
Jan 25

I finally left Meta behind

My god-sister-in-law (just go with it) has a friend who is in a two-man band and they played a restaurant nearby this evening. So we braved the chill night air and drove to see them play. Gen X covers. They do a nice job. They can fade into the background or grab the room’s attention. Whatever is required at the moment. Good music! Very average cheeseburger!

Before that, I did this. It felt good.

I also changed up the buttons on the front page and the top of this page. No reason to have links to things I don’t use anymore.

I don’t want to say it was cathartic, or even a big decision. I ignored Threads almost immediately because it was terrible from the start. I never got a lot of traction on Instagram, because I’m not especially popular, I guess. Facebook never appealed to me all that much. So these things were easy for me. They’ll be less easy for some, I realize that. And I know that some people will be fine with the direction Zuckerberg is going.

I could thunder away at that for a few thousand words. The content moderation, dismissing the very notion of fact checking, the filters, the misinformation, the changes to their standards which will have continued negative effect on users. People you know are going to be brought further into risk by Zuckerberg’s decisions to cozy up, or read the moment, or try to be relevant — whatever the true motivation is. And whatever that motivation is, users barely figure into it. That’s not a new thing at 1 Hacker Way. Cambridge Analytica should have been the wooden stake in the heart. What they did to news media, their legendary pivot to video nonsense, how they’ve data mined you and gleefully put their thumb on the scale of distribution, the surveillance, any one of these should have all had them tossed with the bathwater. But here we are. They think they’ve got you, because you allowed for all of that. And now, at this moment, we are at a place where none of what’s going to occur is worth whatever you think you get in return.

That’s a personal decision for everyone, but even before they make it, people have got to know about it. The chronically online are the first to see what’s happening. The rest will figure it out for themselves later. (Maybe. Depending on what media environment they’ve cultivated for themselves.) If it does bubble into their consciousness, people will make their own decisions based on toleration and habits and needs.

Thing is, we don’t really need any of these things for much. We certainly don’t have to tolerate the coarseness and continued enshittification. There are better alternatives when it comes to how one spends their time, keeps in touch, or what have you. Some of them are much better.

So I didn’t have great habits in Meta’s walled garden. I don’t need them. This was an easy choice. Moreover, it’s the right one.

Wish I’d done it much, much, sooner.

I said yesterday’s bike ride was perfectly uninspired. Today’s was even more ho-hum, if that’s possible. Just 20 miles. Nothing of interest to report. Some days you’re just keeping the legs turning, and that was today.

But I did go by the best fake storefront in the fake Zwift world.

I blame the weather. We’re due some snow this weekend and then a week of bitter, bitter cold. That’s no way to begin a new semester, which starts on Tuesday.

cycling / movies / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Jan 25

One Short Day

Because everything is lining up, and because it was cold and all of the little people are back in school we went to the movies and caught a matinee. I’ll give you one guess what we saw.

We saw the play, in London in 2015. It was one of those things where we had an afternoon, and were probably ready for an evening that moved at a regular pace, and so we walked over to the ticket booth where you can get late tickets inexpensively. One of the options was Wicked, and so we enjoyed that on the West End. This was the curtain.

The movie, part one, is what movies should be: a lot of fun. Most of what you saw were practical effects. The tulips were plentiful. The costumes were fantastic. They were, perhaps, the element most to the original, with just enough modern post-dystopian steampunk flare to pop in high definition.

Apparently the singing was done live. Sometimes that seemed obvious, not in a bad way. And other times it seemed incredibly impractical. Ga-linda is terrible. Ariana Grande is great in the role, but the character is terrible. Cynthia Erivo is so wonderful it’s difficult, even knowing the play, to imagine how they turn her from protagonist to antagonist in the second movie.

Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, who originated the protagonist and deuteragonist on stage, have small parts. I said it’s a shame that no one is still left from the Wizard of Oz that they could drop in somewhere. But I said that in the car, without looking this up. According to People, there were three surviving cast members still with us late last year, 84 years later!

My one problem — aside from the standard musical issue that at least one song is weaker than the rest — is that someone brings into a classroom this new invention, they call it a “cage” and, in it, the animals will be kept, so they can be held in their natural condition. Which is to say, without a voice. (A lot of that element of the movie seems pointed and modern.) But here are people with bicycles, electricity, the most over-engineered train in the world and the coolest library ever, but they’ve only just invented cages?

I suppose the order of development means a lot in a fictional society, too.

Anyway, it’s a fine movie. Watch Wizard of Oz again before you see Wicked. You’ll find more of the Easter eggs that way.

It was snowing when we left the theater.

That’s just beginning of a week-and-a-half of actual winter. I bet they never have to deal with that in Emerald City. The wizard probably takes care of it.

I had a perfectly uninspiring 38-mile bike ride this evening. I averaged about 20 miles an hour, and near the end I thought, I should grab an image. Just then I was riding here.

And that fit. That’s how impressive the ride was. You might think my little Zwift avatar is riding through a cave there, but no. No, he is riding to his death. Death by asphyxiation, for he is riding through the heart of a volcano. And, surely, while holding a 24 mile per hour pace through the thing my avatar would be breathing hard, and pulling in more sulfur than anything.

Volcanoes vary, but the gases they produce are primarily water vapor, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide (SO2), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), nitrogen, argon, helium, neon, methane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

No way my guy lives through that, right?

He’s probably got a better shot at being safely whisked away to Oz.