football / journalism / links / podcast / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on Links of the day
21
Jul 21

Links of the day

I was looking at the categories I use on this humble little blog — and thank you, once more, for visiting it — and I realized I haven’t done a simple link post in a good long while. So let’s do that. Here are a few items that have been in my browser(s) today.

This story has been making the rounds today. And I bet it will for a few more days. A former co-worker of mine wrote it. The piece is inspired by this medical professional’s Facebook post. It’s one part sad and one part resigned and manages to suggest you take care of yourself, without sounding at all saying “cluck-cluck-cluck.” You can pretty much imagine from there. But if you can’t:

“A few days later when I call time of death,” continued Cobia on Facebook, “I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to do the same.”

“They cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”

More than 11,400 Alabamians have died of COVID so far, but midway through 2021, caring for COVID patients is a different story than it was in the beginning. Cobia said it’s different mentally and emotionally to care for someone who could have prevented their disease but chose not to.

“You kind of go into it thinking, ‘Okay, I’m not going to feel bad for this person, because they make their own choice,'” Cobia said. “But then you actually see them, you see them face to face, and it really changes your whole perspective, because they’re still just a person that thinks that they made the best decision that they could with the information that they have, and all the misinformation that’s out there.”

All of those that allowed a global health crisis to be politicized, will have this as an everlasting shame. That we could not curtail, could not educate against and could not overcome disinformation, will be the shame that belongs to the rest of us.

Here’s a story out of Mississippi where Deion Jackson is cultivating his hard-nosed coach with a heart of gold identity. They’re doing media days at Jackson State and the second year man made waves insisting the media call him coach. And … there was another story, but it got drowned out by the nomenclature kerfuffle. This one almost did, too:

A Clarion Ledger reporter was barred from covering the Jackson State football team at Southwestern Athletic Conference Media Day on Tuesday, one day after his story was published on a domestic violence charge against the highest-ranked high school recruit in program history.

Rashad Milligan was blocked by two JSU officials from covering coach Deion Sanders’ program in Birmingham, Alabama.

Sanders did not want Milligan interviewing JSU players and coaches, JSU director of internal football operations LaToya Williams told Milligan.

The incident occurred one day after Milligan reported on a July 1 court filing stating that Quaydarius Davis, an incoming four-star wide receiver from Dallas, was expected to plead guilty on a charge of “assault causes bodily injury family violence,” a misdemeanor in Texas, stemming from an incident in March.

[…]

“A Clarion Ledger reporter was punished for simply doing his job,” Clarion Ledger Executive Editor Marlon A. Walker said. “The decision to interfere with a working journalist not only is disappointing but also intolerable.”

Walker is correct, but fighting uphill and, I suspect, he’s well aware of that.

I’ve been saying for more than a decade now, in newsrooms and classrooms and at academic conferences, that sports reporters are in a precarious position because athletic programs now understand how they control the information flow. A coach will defend a player, or coaching staff, or their own decisions. And if a beat reporter asks a question that’s too adversarial, the reporter just might get kicked out of practice, frozen out from interviews or outright banned.

Urban Meyer did it in 2010 at Florida, targeting a reporter who wrote copy about some players and the coach didn’t care for that. My alma mater, Auburn, did it as a direct fan appeal in response to some truly bad copy. Kentucky’s athletic department, famously blocked media for approaching athletes directly. (This is essentially an industry standard now among collegiate athletes. You go through the SIDs to talk to players.) Steve Spurrier did it, too, in 2011 at South Carolina, kicking out a reporter who questioned his general program tactics. Another time Spurrier gave grief to reporters who didn’t rise to the defense of their colleagues in the Meyer dispute.

All of these instances have some reasonable explanation. Spurrier, like Mike Gundy’s “I’m a man! I’m 40!” speech is a wag-the-dog moment. (Today that rant is almost 14 years old, by the way.) Do something outlandish enough and you can reset the agenda. Focus everyone on the coach, rather than a specific player. The Auburn instance I mention was to attempt to bat down some stories that were, let’s say, calculated. They were poorly sourced and badly executed hit pieces is what I’m saying. That particular writer limped away in disgrace. Meyer, meanwhile, was just being Meyer.

The thing they all have in common is the timing. These, and many other instances like them from across the sports landscape, took place just as programs were starting to realize they could leverage their own equipment, their own production values, their own corner of the Internet, their own social media and, crucially, their own fanbase, to tell their story. Why do you even need a sports media middle man?

Auburn is a wonderful exemplar. As media outlets began contracting, the university started hiring the sports beat reporters that used to cover them. Now you’ve got talented writers with both institutional history and, for fans, names with a bit of gravitas. Perhaps others have done the same.

Meantime, whatever beat reporters that get sent over to the sports media availability have to consider if what they wrote yesterday, what they’ve been working on for the last few weeks, or what they are planning on asking about today, gets them voted off the island. At some point, they have to file by deadline. It’s a symbiotic relationship, right up until the point that, say, a reporter files a story about a player’s past that doesn’t set well with a coach or, an athletic director. Now that reporter is no longer welcome. Now it’s a problem. But only for the reporter and his or her news outlet. Not the team. They’ve got cameras and writers and their fans know where to go to get their fandom.

Curiously, fans generally only want to read the good stuff about their program anyway. Anything else, to fans, is a feeble attempt at distraction or a story with an obvious agenda or bias. The only exception to that is when the fans are ready for a new coach. Then the troubling stories fit into satisfying layer of confirmation bias. “I always knew he was dirty, incompetent, morally uncouth and didn’t like his neighbor’s dogs.”

The programs control their own story because they have succeeded in controlling the access and the tools and fans and all of the rest came along to let them do something useful with it. It’s such an obvious concern that many people, even some sports scholars I’ve talked with about it, don’t really see it.

Of course, you could say, it’s just sports. Let the team play and let me cheer and tell me the final score. All well and true. Except, it isn’t always just sports, is it? Not always:

The highest-rated football commitment out of high school in Jackson State football history has a court hearing scheduled for Tuesday to charges that he hit a woman in March, according to documents obtained by the Clarion Ledger.

Quaydarius Davis, 18, is charged with “assault causes bodily injury family violence,” a misdemeanor in Texas, according to court filings.

[…]

A few months ago, Davis was headed to Kansas.

Then, on March 24, a friend of the woman made a now-deleted social media post with two photos of a woman in a hospital gown with a cut on her lip where one of her eyes appeared to be swollen shut, according to the Dallas Morning News.

On March 26, Kansas cut ties with Davis nearly a month after he signed his National Letter of Intent to play for the Jayhawks, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

“Based on the information we were able to gather KU football has terminated the recruitment of this individual and communicated to him that he will no longer be recruited to play football at the University of Kansas,” the spokesperson wrote, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. “While we do not know the full details of what occurred in this instance, we were able to learn enough information and decide that it is in the best interest of Kansas football that we separate from this individual. We condemn violence of any kind against women.

This is the part where a person that follows college sports a little bit says … “Kansas didn’t want him?”

It isn’t always about sports. But if you’re a beat writer and you know the coach you cover might be a vindictive sort, that gives you a bit of pause. It shouldn’t, and every good reporter worth their salt would tell you this would make them press a bit harder, but how do you do that without access?

The older I get the more I find it is actually less and less about the sport itself. There’s a poem in there somewhere.

Here’s some stuff I pulled together on the work podcast. Go listen to really smart people tell me about educating little people:

Be sure to come back tomorrow. There will be something of value here. And I have until tomorrow to figure out what that will be.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on A very green post
20
Jul 21

A very green post

A little campus beauty shot from the hip. Come morning, come lovely atmosphere. I put it on Twitter and some of the right accounts passed it along. Oh, look at the pretty picture!

And 22,000 something people saw it. Not bad for just walking in from the car.

I trimmed the shrubs around the air conditioner this evening. I know, I know. And I agree. You’re not wrong, faithful reader. This is a lot of excitement in just one day. But I also pulled some weeds. In one flower bed some of the weeds hadn’t been there just the night before. And I disposed of some other pulled undesirable plants that had previously been displaced and left to brown. In one of those small piles a truly huge jimsonweed had joined the pile. I’d never seen one with such large seed pods. No idea from where it had emerged.

To review: weeds are growing almost knee-high overnight on one side of the house, and, on the other side, they just appear, pulled from the ground by the root, and added to a pile of already pulled weeds.

That would demoralize a normal gardener, but I don’t spend that much time in the flowerbeds.

I also had to straighten up some things in the garage, where I do a little as I go. Very, very little. I met this little guy on the garbage can.

So if anyone needs a green stink bug, or some jimsonweed seeds, well, re-evaluate whatever it is that you are doing. But if either of those items are still on your list, let me know.

Act fast, as they say. You don’t want to miss an offer like this. The supplies won’t last forever — but the weeds might.

cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on I made a Latin joke
19
Jul 21

I made a Latin joke

I had a 27-mile ride on Saturday. It was not my best bike ride, he said for about 60th time this year, but it was a fine ride otherwise. This one, meanwhile, is cruising along in fine form. I think she’s lapping me here.

We celebrated with the traditional Saturday Chick-fil-A takeout and then had a chat with friends. We also watched the final two stages of the Tour de France, completing the race as we do every year, singing Joe Dassin’s Les Champs-Elysees.

I also went for a run. Nice and slow. Any slower and I’d be walking. Somehow, I’m told, being slow makes me faster. Which might be the case if you were running slowly deliberately. At the moment I’m running slowly as a matter of function. It’s the status slow, you might say.

It’s Monday, and that means it is time to check on the cats! It’s the week’s most anticipated and widely viewed feature, and don’t think I haven’t noticed.

Phoebe would like you to know she was framed.

Framed!

No one has ever caught her doing anything she isn’t supposed to do, because Phoebe is a good girl. No one has ever caught her out on the ledge where she doesn’t belong …

It does look cozy out there. I always wonder why it was carpeted. Every day I wonder.

Poseidon is hanging out in his tunnel and is playing up his big ham tendencies.

It takes a lot out of him, being a ham. Here he is asleep. Under a blanket. On a pillow.

That cat. Et quod ad somnum.

adventures / Alabama / family / Friday / history / London / maps / memories — Comments Off on Rocks and washing machines
16
Jul 21

Rocks and washing machines

I was gripped, a few years ago, by an article that made the case for the washing machine as the most important invention of the 20th century. Sure, you say, there’s also the refrigerator and the computer and/or the microchip. Penicillin, a discovery rather than an invention, doesn’t count.

The argument has been spelled out in many other newspaper opinion columns, in historical research and even in one of the 20th century’s oddest inventions, TED Talks. Simply put, doing the laundry was once an all day exercise. It was hard, backbreaking labor. It was almost exclusively ‘a woman’s job.’ And when the first powered washing machines came along, they freed up people, almost all of them women, to do other things. Probably it helped with their hand care, too.

I asked my grandmother about this article at some point. She always called it The Wash. If you heard her say it, you heard the capital T and capital W. The Wash. Do you remember, I said, a time before you had a washer and dryer?

“Of course,” she said, in that not-dismissive-but-entirely-obvious way that your elders can use on you.

I asked her when she got her first washer. It was when they’d built and moved into that very house, the only one I’d ever known my grandparents in. It was the 1950s. She was a young woman still starting a new family. The washer and dryer lived on the covered back porch. (Where the laundry connections are is almost a tell. Back porch, that’s hedging your bets on this technology at best, an afterthought at worst. In the two houses I grew up in the connections were in the basement. Out of the way, but inherently inconvenient. In our house today the laundry is upstairs, very near the bedrooms.)

I asked how she did The Wash before she had a washer and dryer. She took it down to the creek. Soap, boards, stones, the old antiquated thing. That’s just what you did. This is the middle of the 20th century.

Which is where my story gets a little foggy. My grandparents’ house was surrounded by a creek. It’s just a small bit of water that breaks off a larger waterway which is itself a slough of a tributary of the Tennessee River — and we talked about that yesterday. If you saw it on a map, my grandparents’ road and the creek almost make a four-way intersection. I started wandering through their woods at a young and early age, when some of those creeks looked like wild, untamable testaments of God and nature. And to my young mind that water was everywhere.

The water was nice. It was always cool, and it always looked clean. But it was never the water that interested me the most, it was the rocks.

Where I grew up was far enough away from my grandparents that the soil was, in places, noticeably different. All of my family lived in this area, a place around a massive river, where the water was a dominant element of everyday life. Having different topographical features where I grew up meant I spent a lot of time playing in the little streams and on the rocky shores.

On a physiographic map this is on something called the Highland Rim, the southernmost section of the Interior Low Plateaus of the Appalachian Highlands Region. By name and almost everything else, it’s a series of contradictions. It’s messy and beautiful.

How the underlying rocks erode in different ways define the area. The rocks formed during the Mississippian period (353 to 323 million ago. Explain that to a kid taken in by the many colors and the smooth polished feel that ages in the water have created.

I lived in a different physiographic region, a bit to the south, in the Valley and Ridge province. Our soil was exclusively clay and, to me, the rocks didn’t have the same sort of interesting character. Has to be that river, I always thought when I was young. I told you yesterday, the river figures into everything, so why not the rocks?

It actually has to do with the mountains.

Kaiser Science tells us:

The mountains of the British Isles and Scandinavia turn out to be made of the same kind of rock, and formed in the same historical era.

Evidence shows that in the past all of these were one mountain system, torn by the moving of the tectonic plates – continental drift.

Put another way, if you like the hypothesis of continental drift, you look at this as a broken mountain range, making these mountains older than the Atlantic Ocean.

A few years ago, longer after the Atlantic Ocean was formed, we visited London and caught a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace.

There’s a lot of standing around and waiting and jockeying for position and wondering who you’ll see and what the bands will play. It’s good fun if you are patient, and you don’t mind crowds.

We walked to the palace, from wherever we’d been before, through Green Park, and we returned that same way. At one point there in the park I looked down and picked up this rock. It looked familiar. Looked like home.

I brought it back with me, and later took it to my grandmother.

The queen has the same rocks you do!

As ever, my enthusiasm was what amused her most.

If you look at that map, you can see it. The rocks you saw when you were doing chores are the same sort of rocks the queen of the United Kingdom was used to. Their rocks, your rocks, same kinds of rocks.

I wonder when the queen got her first washing machine.

Alabama / family / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on This post was a century in the making
15
Jul 21

This post was a century in the making

Water is the predominant geographical feature of the area where all of my family live. I didn’t grow up there, but I understand the story of the Tennessee River. It dips down into the northern part of Alabama, creating a topography that has defined generations and generations of people that lived there. The Tennessee River forms near Knoxville, Tennessee and flows to the southwest, into Alabama, before looping back up, helping form the Alabama-Mississippi-Tennessee borders and then heading on up to Kentucky.

The Yuchi tribe, the Alibamu and the Coushatta, and maybe some other members of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy lived their lives on it. They called it the Singing River. White people moved in and, a little over two hundred years ago, Alabama became a territory, in 1817, and then a state in 1819. Some of my ancestors were among the first white people into the area, some even before the Native Americans were forcibly displaced. They became hardscrabble dirt farmers, for the most part. Agriculture and water transit came to define this era, but even then the shipping was difficult. The Muscle Shoals were the problem. It was shallow and swift and turbulent. It typified the area for generations. Predominant geographical features figure into everything.

Then the Great War came.

There was a worry that the Imperial German Navy would cut off shipments of nitrates from South America. Nitrates make explosives. Things that go boom are important for the military. So the National Defense Act of 1916 called for nitrate plants. Hydroelectric power would run them and the U.S. could produce its own nitrates. Muscle Shoals was understood to have the greatest hydroelectric potential east of the Rockies.

So in 1918 they started building a dam.

We’ve driven over it, jogged over it, fished underneath it, taken photographs of it, watched the ships pass through the locks and dined above it. During the build it became it’s own city, employing thousands, and had a school, barbershops, a hospital and more than a hundred miles of sewage lines. But the war ended before the construction did. And the soon-to-be named Wilson Dam didn’t contribute to the war effort.

It wasn’t finished until 1924 and began generating power in 1925. The promise of that hydroelectric power is what we’re looking at today, and, indeed, in 1921, it was full of potential. So we go to a now century old edition of The Florence Herald.

The Herald began publishing in the 1880s and ran at least until the mid-1960s. In fact that Spillway graphic above is from a 1950s edition of the paper. It was a regular feature of the weekly paper, because predominant geographical features figure into everything. And people from far away take notice, as we shall see.

Henry Ford, yep, that one, wanted to buy in. He was interested in hydroelectric power, too, and dreamed of buying up the area and building factories for his own empire. It was the big news in mid-July, 1921.

But Ford wasn’t the only suitor.

“The publication this morning of the effort of Mr. Ford to acquire Muscle Shoals, followed by the development that several other individuals or corporations would likewise acquire the property, is taken to mean by Alabamians in Congress that Muscle Shoals, instead of being a corpse, is indeed a very live proposition.”

Because the news was coming in so fast the local weekly was having difficulty agreeing with itself, but inside there’s a several-days-old story that gives us more context, and a none-too-subtle bit of cheerleading. Excuse the hasty redesign I’ve made here. Long newspaper columns aren’t always conducive to the web.

There are little unsigned blurbs and letters like this all over this edition of the paper.

And that was the prevailing opinion of the day. That’s the story I always heard. The area was going to be a little Detroit. Roads were laid out and named to mimic the Motor City. Even the advertisements were cheering for Henry Ford.

But a U.S. senator from Nebraska, George Norris, had other plans. He thought the half-finished dam should stay under public management. The debate ran as the river flowed, for about a decade. The dam was completed and Henry Ford bowed out in 1924. The debate continued until the Depression, FDR, and until the TVA was born and took over. Predominant political structures figure into a great deal, too.

Even today you can drive through areas where there are rough old roads named after streets in Detroit, laid out in anticipation of the failed Ford deal. Nothing has ever been built on them.

Speaking of advertisements, here are a few more from that issue of The Herald. “We can’t be particular and so the little girl was smart to shop here, where we can’t be particular about our candy.”

Benjamin Luna was a longtime merchant in the area. He died at his home in 1956.

His wife, Adele Luna, shows up in the paper well into the 1960s. Quite the social figure, her name often appears under that Spillway graphic. She passed away in 1982. They had two daughters and a son. One of the daughters died just last year having lived just shy of 101 years. It was a full life, some 80-years of it right there in the Shoals.

I wonder what she thought about the lamb.

Hard to imagine ads explaining how your phone works, isn’t it?

But easy to imagine the phone companies would like you to spend some long-distance money with them. At least we have this advertisement here to explain long distance rates to younger readers.

This is the last advertisement in the June 15, 1921 Florence Herald. W.I. Swain started his business over in Mississippi in 1910. He was still touring at least through 1931.

Stand where he set up his tents for this show, you could see the river. Predominant geographical features figure into everything.

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