06
Oct 25

I hastily wrote some words I’m calling a poem

I can tell already, this is going to be one of those busy weeks. Next week, too, probably. Why not? Definitely this week. So it’ll be light here. Lighter than usual. And, already it’s so light you’d have to do a lot of reps to see any gains. But, hey, at least we have Catober — and that’s been wonderful. Click that link and you can see them all, and even scroll back through previous years.

Class prep today. We’re talking about … two stories in my criticism class. We’ll talk about storytelling in the org comm class. I know a thing or two about storytelling — or so I tell myself. The challenge is to distill something useful down into 75 minutes. Which is really about 50 minutes given the usual pace of things. But actually 40 or 45 once you put in videos. That’s one of the challenges, anyway.

I was thinking about news today, clearly.

A split screen shot tells the tale. One man’s words and a webcam in a two-box would win the nightly news.

If we still had value in the requisite things.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 4:49 PM

Another good idea might be a serial on local stories that don’t get broader traction (because 🤷‍♂️🌎🤷‍♂️) but still deserve your attention.

This could be a desk-reader sort of show, with some simple EGs and either the occasional local reporter or other topical expert for a bit of back and forth.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.bsky.social) October 6, 2025 at 7:31 PM

There’s a lot we can do in new ways that use successful older formulas. Perhaps not wholesale for reasons more than just IP and rights, but there’s a lot to be said about previous success stories. One of those things always has to do with what made them successful. It’s not always lighting in a bottle, but the lighting bolt of inspiration. What we already know works is pretty inspirational. Or it should be.

I went out to look at the fig tree. It produced no figs this year. No figs that I saw, anyway. So I guess we cut it back too far. I guess it is now just a tree. And a home to one happy little spider.

I wonder what that will look like by the time I get around to going back out there for my next inspection.

A few shots from a weekend evening bike ride.

On my way out, the sun was a golden clarion, a beautiful guide, a warning faster and more provocative than an hourglass. The sum was a lot of things on that ride.

In roughly the same spot, on the way back, a half-hour later, but on the other side of the road … the moon, which watched a blanketed horse chomp away at grass. We could write a poem about that.

Oh! Dear sweet friend of four legs,
many sugar cubes, and memories and years.

It will be chilled this evening, but your quilted blanket
eases my guilt when I am inside, and you are out.

The moon will keep you company,
and the fruit trees beside you will rustle.

The grass will be a sweat treat on your breath
when I come for your morning nuzzle.

I didn’t say it would be good poetry.

Just a bit up the road, there’s a lovely stand of corn. It’ll be plowed under soon, I’m sure. But there are still a few days left in which to avoid the rusted, brittle golden stalks and admire what’s left of the verdant shades of summer.

Fall, dear reader, is full of complexities. I’m lousy at dealing with them.

So, like I said, light week. But, here you still got four photos, a poem, and, of course, there’s Catober. You can get by with high reps. Just keep clicking that refresh button.


06
Oct 25

Catober, Day 6


05
Oct 25

Catober, Day 05


04
Oct 25

Catober, Day 04


03
Oct 25

You can wind the week down with a lot of work

After a day of committee meetings, and email, and grading, and a bit of class work, I realized that every Friday is like that. Most days are similar. Some days have classes. Not every day has committees.

For a while today was so full, though, that I wrote a To Do list for the afternoon. I’m not a big To Do list guy, but I find that, from time-to-time, it’s an actual productive way to do a bit of cognitive offloading. Plus there’s a little satisfaction of having it all laid out in front of you. Fridays have become a lot of that this semester too: just a big block of uninterrupted time to take on what needs taking on. And, finally, there’s the muted pleasure of scratching a thing off a list. I didn’t use check marks. Didn’t draw a line through an item. I scratched it out aggressively. I don’t know why that is.

Speaking of cognitive offloading, I do a thing in my classes now where I show an AI fail each day. Usually it is an image. I try to find the sports-related one since those are my classes. And I try not to make them all about Google’s AI, which is unrepentantly terrible. If I just showed that thing every day I’d look like I was piling on. Some of these are funny. And sometimes my students ignore them. It is either, I’m not as funny as I think I am — which is not true — or they feel like I’m shaming them about lousy technology that has been marketed to them and they’ve fallen for — which is true, for the most part.

Here’s my next example. The perils of letting AI plan your next trip:

Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.

“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”

What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”

People will trust the weirdest things.

This is lousy op sec, and of course silly on the face of it, and catty to boot. Great reporting from the Star Tribune.

After the day’s work was done, we hoped on our bikes and rode up the road for a miniature group ride with our neighbor. Here I am, out front. Or, rather, here is my view in the one moment when no one was in front of me.

I’m riding with two All-Americans here. One of them a rather recent All American. I’m just trying to stay close to the drafting lines.

Near the end of the ride, on a false flat, there was a tease of a sprint. And then there was a sprint. My lovely bride spun it up, and the many years and thousands of miles riding with her told me instantly what was happening. So I sat on our friend’s wheel. She went to the inside of the lane and tried to take on the three-time Ironman. I was right in her slipstream, waiting. I figured if she got over I was going to counter attack. It would be beautiful. And then she sat up. Our neighbor is pretty new at this, and probably a bit stronger than she realized, but the other person in that photo is pretty fierce.

So I finished third, which is a perfectly fine way to start the weekend.