We were in the studio tonight. Look! Here’s proof!
Meredith will graduate this year, and then she’ll start her path to taking over roughly everything. She’s teaching herself the jib in that photo. She learns everything. She does everything. She’s going to take over roughly everything one day.
This was during auditions for a next semesters talk shows. We shot two full shows tonight and then ran three test segments and it was one of those times when everything felt like a smoothly-running machine. It’s really great when that happens.
It rained most of the day, and we’ve needed it. Felt unusual to reach for the umbrella. I had to remember which stick on the side of the steering wheel held the windshield wiper controls. It’s been a while.
And with that in mind we talked candy seemingly all day.
This seeding is questionable, at best, but it works out like this.
(It works out differently if you don't put like vs like in the FIRST ROUND.)
And I’ve now added candy to the list of things people will fight over with no provocation. Mind you, this isn’t about possession of the last treat, just your preferences. People have different tastes or favorites in some parts of life, but not in everything, which is weird. You have a favorite restaurant in town, and I don’t like it? That’s fine. Ask two different people familiar with the place where you should go on your next visit to New Orleans. It will devolve to name calling. You want to talk about plumbers or house contractors, any one will seemingly do. People really vie for selling you on their car mechanic though. Differing choices in candy? Fighting words.
This is me: you can like candy corn or you can hate candy corn. Do you have a strong, loud, vociferous defense about your candy corn preferences? You should reconsider your stance.
Also me: whoever created that seeding doesn’t understand how tournament seeding was intended to work.
Finally, one of my friends is covering this over in Ohio today.
Hey, America.
You're inundated. I get it. It's nasty.
Don't let people hoping to scare you with voting tactics ever try to tell you what we are. You look around and you'll see the best of us everyday.
I am judging high school and junior high news programs this week. There are some really talented young people out there. But we could always say that. Golly gee, kids these days!
Also, I have about 60 of these to work through, so I could say the same thing for the next few days.
Other kids these days:
Someone put a note in their calendar to look up this young man in 25-30 years and let's find out what awesome thing he's doing.
After work I stopped in at the library to pick up a book I had on hold. It’s just two blocks from the office. I walked in, strolled through the alphabetized hold shelves until I found the S area, considering the sign that said “Respect other users privacy, no browsing” until I found my name. And, being careful to not notice anyone else’s titles, I picked up my hardcover book. Oh, the joys of reading fiction. I don’t a lot, but I will over the next few days. Well, once I’m satisfied there are no cooties on the dust jacket.
There’s a self checkout. You scan your library card and input your password on the touchscreen three times. Because the first time you mess it up so convincingly you wonder if your password is, in fact, something else. Once you get that right, you just hold the book under the scanner. There’s no barcode, it just knows what book you have based on some RFID tag or a near field communication trick.
So now I’m done. Two minutes, maybe three. I did nod to someone, but didn’t have to speak to a soul. I left via the nearest door. I was on a different floor from the one where I entered. I knew that, because there was a stairwell at the beginning of this adventure. I exited on a different side of the building than where I entered. Spatially, I was aware that I would be facing a different direction from where I went in, because I’d traversed most of the place and turned left to leave. So walked around the building was no surprise, but I was, of course, still on the ground, even after that long staircase when I entered. That amused me.
Architects must delight in confusing people who aren’t paying perfect attention.
Got home, cleaned off the day, and had a nice long chat with my mom. She’s fine. Everyone’s fine. (If the extended family would take this more seriously, that would be better, but I can’t convince people of the obvious.)
We’re talking about how we can do Christmas, because Thanksgiving is basically off. Maybe we’ll Zoom over turkey leftovers. We’re going to concentrate on the small joys. Visiting is a gift, and everyone is fine and healthy.
So much Covid data to report on our campus. The weekly numbers came out today, and they ticked up ever so slightly, but they remain impressively low, especially considering the county, and particularly in comparison to the state, which is surging ahead with no headlights, brakes or seatbelts.
Also, you’ll learn in the A-block there about how IU’s testing labs are now open. They’re going to be doing something like 8,500 tests a week here now. It’s an extensive, impressive undertaking. The university has really pulled out all of the stops to look after its campus communities and help the cities they all live in. Remember, this is 100,000 students in nine campuses across the state. And while, ultimately, this is not the fall or spring semester any student — or anyone else wanted — the lengths the university is going to during a pandemic are commendable.
They did a costume feature on the pop culture show and I can’t get over how awesome minimalist M&Ms are.
If you didn’t watch that, you should. They did blindfolds and had to guess what their reporters were dressed up as. So now you’ve got gloved, masked, blindfolded hosts. It was pretty silly.
Do you ever do that thing where you start a project on your website and work on it for a while and collect all the parts the project will need and continue to work on it and then think you’re finished with it? And then come back three years later and realize you weren’t finished?
Oh, that’s just me, huh?
Well OK, then.
Guess why this building is important:
It is important because it means we must return to the historic markers section of the site. This is where I where my bicycle all over the county to find the historic signs and take pictures of them, and the place they’re highlighting. I did this one years ago, but realized only this evening, while I was cleaning some old photos from my phone, that I’d never published them.
So go check out The Gables, which is a building that now holds a restaurant, and has some important local history in it. Also, the guy that owns it is a joy, and his food is pretty good, too. It’s just up the street from my office.
Hoagy Carmichael, who is the focus of this particular historic marker, has a statue on campus, and if I had a statue project on the site it would be one of the feature attractions, because it’s an amazing statue.
And the really good news is that we can get four or five more days worth of content out of old pictures and places I’d already thought I’d addressed! So look for another historic marker update next week.
More tomorrow. Until then, did you know that Phoebe and Poseidon have an Instagram account? Phoebe and Poe have an Instagram account. And don’t forget my Instagram. Also, keep up with me on Twitter.
Catober / photo — Comments Off on Catober, Day 2828 Oct 20
Have you ever had part of a day just vanish from memory? You know you did things, but you can’t really recall, precisely or vaguely, what those things were, even on the same day?
Welcome to my Tuesday!
I know I got up and puttered around the house and caught up on all the things I read in the news cycle and then at some point went to the office and did office things. I even held an office hour! Virtually! No one showed up.
I watched some videos and pounded out the emails and … anything else I could type about it would just be guessing at the routine. But it was there. Maybe that’s what it was fluorescent light-guided routine.
It’s a studio night for me, which reminds me to update you on some of the recent productions. And here they are now:
The spooky late night comedy show:
By the way, we learned this weekend that Not Too Late, which is the show above, earned an Honorable Mention in the national College Media Association’s Pinnacle Awards. A fine recognition, indeed. It’s a fun little program they’re building over there in Studio 5.
Meanwhile, and elsewhere … notably in Studio 7 …
Big Ten football is back and the subject of this longform talk show.
More sports! Now it feels like fall on campus:
And if you’re more of a morning person than a scary late night person, well I’m sorry we aren’t compatible in this respect, but, nevertheless, there’s a show for you as well:
And that has us all caught up on the last few days of television. I think. They also produce remote programs and social media and something like five different podcasts this semester. There’s a lot going on, is the point, even in this semester where there is, necessarily, less going on.
Forgot to mention: I updated the front page recently. Go check it out. It looks like this:
I have a several new photos I’m going to work through there. I’d like to have some random script do it, like the banners on this page. Around here, we are big fans of visual variety, as you might have noted. And the more you can automate that, the better.
Why not just use the same code?
Aren’t you a clever reader, you clever reader.
I’m tinkering with that. Maybe it’ll work. I might have to try something else to avoid breaking too many other rules on the site.
Why don’t you use javascript?
No thanks.
But —
Look, we’re trying to get away from that around here.
It’s something of an industry standard and —
Oh, believe me, construct I created just to have this conversation with myself, I know. But there’s some bloat and loading and security and some mobile-user issues and I’d just rather have a CSS and a PHP style solution, if you please.
Well, when you put it that way … why not just use the same code as this page?!?
