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Look at that whip around coverage. All the places that Hoosier fans need to see, the sports guys took them there. This is fine coverage.
And check out 25 minutes of conversation about collegiate tennis, information you didn’t know you needed it, until it was given to you.
Mostly, I like the jib work. Big fan.
Bought gas this morning. Watched the rain turn to snow and marveled at how gross the parking lot looked, which is to say, a lot like a wet parking lot in semi-dark conditions. It’s the most central European experience I can offer you today. Brown turns gray and it’s too cold to qualify as dank. And it was almost the first thing in the morning. But at least the price at the pump was good:
So thank you, Kroger fuel points for the discount.
Forgot my lunch today. I guess I was just too excited about fueling up. So I had to get a sandwich at the nearby sandwich place, which meant chips. Which meant choices and new packaging and …
Cool design, I guess, so they’ve increased the cool, but perhaps not the ranch. The look suggests a chip went subatomic and left only the excess seasoning. There is a little extra seasoning. I’m not sure it required new packaging. You could give me the new chips in the old bag and I would have thought there was a new man on the special spice machine last week. The new guy is always more interested in the customer experience than the corporate bottom line, after all. But that soon passes when the veteran first shift crew talks him into toeing the line.
At which point the new guy becomes just one of the guys, on his way to being the old guy. It happens overnight. Literally. Before he knows it he’s working a double on the third shift because that guy is the manager’s brother-in-law. Everyone knows he’s the weak link, the third shift brother-in-law. No way he’d be working that schedule if the manager liked him. But you know how it goes. And so the formerly-new-guy bitterly starts thinning out the spices.
And that’s when the new design on the chip bag is outdated.
But will you even notice? There’s so much going on, if you’re not leaving big, smeary, fingerprints on everything, how could you notice it all?
There isn’t enough extra cool ranch for big, smeary, fingerprints.
I took a picture of some of the wood stain in the garage, because I needed to make a note of it for my current project. I’m going to start sanding soon. I think. I hope. So here are some stain cans.
And so now I’m spending the rest of my Wednesday evening enjoying getting to go home with some of the day still left in it. Working late on Tuesdays and then having a regular schedule on Wednesday is an unusual thing. Challenging on the at the beginning, but the back end, this is a nice feeling: free time.
Makes getting gas first thing this morning worth it, I guess.
News! News! It was a night for the news! Campus news, anyway. It was a television night, as Tuesdays are all fall and winter terms. (It doesn’t seem right to call this a spring term, since we’re going to have snow tomorrow. But, by that metric a substantial portion of the fall term would also be a winter term.)
Oh good, he’s talking about the weather. Again.
Yes, it is a light day, and that is what I am allowed to complain about in late February, the weather. Plus, in four or five more weeks I won’t have that.
We all agree, that can’t happen soon enough around here.
You’ve no idea, gentle reader.
Anyway, to the studio! (Because the other seven-plus hours of my day were in a featureless office!)
They brought in a campus improv group for their second show. That episode should be out tomorrow. But here’s the gist of it. The woman in white left the room and the performers solicited a person, place and activity from the crew. When she came back in, the other member of the troupe had to guess all of that. She was a therapist, you see, and all of Sarah’s inner-characters were trying to give her clues. It was amusing.
Also, the studio audio will be better than my phone’s microphone from 12 feet away. That’s because they were wearing microphones.
Also, this is interesting:
I'd like to talk about the compression of time.
At what point in this brilliant @PMJofficial video did you think "That's not exactly representative of that decade" or "They could have tried _______ for that one"?https://t.co/JYsOfX4QYq
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) February 25, 2020
Last night Phoebe yawned at all the wrong times. And, otherwise, couldn’t be bothered to cooperate. That blanket is cozy. So cozy that this is how she wants to be cuddled.
I wonder how that will work in the spring and summer after they are accustomed to a long winter. She can’t be bothered to worry about that in between her naps though.
But dig those two little freckles on her nose.
We went to Chipotle for lunch today — this is a problem with it being a block-and-a-half away. You visit a lot. Gerald is still causing havoc:
So the last four times we’ve been there — again, a block-and-a-half away — something has been out of order here. Got my order wrong, too. Gerald’s attention to detail is catching. At least they had forks this time?
Believe me, if I knew this Gerald character was going to become a real and so blatantly reoccurring thing I would have created a full backstory for him.
He has one, of course, he’s the third shift leader in charge of drinks at the local Chipotle. The rest is going to write itself. But I should have started detailing that aloud. If this keeps up I’m going to have to, aren’t I?
Television tonight. In addition to the two shows, they had a comedy troupe do a bit of improv. So the gimmick here is that everyone is in on the bit except for the woman in white. She left the studio while the improvisational bunch got a person, place and activity and she had to figure it out based on the context clues of Sarah’s inner characters.
To see the whole thing, which should be online soon, is to get the whole joke. It’s pretty clever, really. But, mostly, I’m impressed that the show that invited them in is now doing different little things every day. Last week they had the furry exotic animals, the week before they had musicians and they did a food feature the episode before that. It’s always nice to see the student shows feeling empowered to spread their wings, and to keep doing it. Better than doing the same thing over and over.
Chili tonight. And a lot of shouting on TV. Only some of it the debate.
We’d been having a conversation, as television people, about how you might obscure the other candidate from scoring points. Because, as we know, the real impact of a debate isn’t about the night of, but about the replay, the day after. Or, these days, the social media clips and the next day’s television replays. If you’re a producer, you’re looking for glib and pithy lines that fit in an appropriate length. You want clear audio. Not a lot of crosstalk.
So, really, if you’re getting whupped on the campaign station, turn it into a continual shouting match. And the closer we get to votes that are sincerely impactful the substance of the “debates” becomes less and less substantive. Sounds like the country of late, really.
Friday night we saw Bert Kreischer, who is as clever and frat-tastic as ever. He played two shows at Butler, and we stood outside in about 20 degree weather until almost the published curtain time, which meant the actual start was, of course, later. Someone said he started the first show late, and that it went long. So the rest stood to reason. That meant we were going to get extra comedy, but first we had to move seats. Because I sat in the wrong row. Joke’s on me!
Anyway, the show was terrific. If you like bawdy material it works. He can put the whole room in his hand and give them whatever he wants. The crowd control of it all might be the most interesting thing. They’re just stories. Stories he’s spiced up for maximum impact, and often even the tangents are deliberate, but how he can hold a room for 90 minutes just telling tales is interesting.
Near the end he basically took requests, because he’s reaching some interactive iconic level of comedy now. I assume that’s owing one part to his talent, but another to the times in which we live, how there are bits online everywhere, and how he has embraced the intimate part of fandom that social media creates as a bit of his act.
And of course he has to tell The Machine story because, as he said Friday night, a Facebook version of that story changed his life and put him where he is today, which is selling out shows across the country and about to premiere his third Netflix special.
The Facebook version of The Machine story works, he said, because the Facebook algorithm put a key, but unnamed player in the actual story as a top commenter and she verified the whole thing. You can look the whole story up on YouTube. It’s 10 minutes or so long, and if you like bawdy, over-the-top humor, you’d find it amusing.
If that’s not, however, your thing … errrmmmm … here are two quick cycling videos!
The Yankee got her tri bike. And this weekend she braved some cool temps and finally gave it a try. (It’s a cruel thing to buy yourself a bike in February and wait.) The fit isn’t there yet, but she looks pretty pro, don’t you think:
If that one is a little blurry I blame my upload connection and her speed.
But watch this one, she’s coming right out of the screen!
I’ll never be able to keep up with her on that thing.
Also, it is my turn to buy a bike. Hmmmm …
I should mention this:
Yesterday we had sun for a record-breaking fifth day in a row. I don’t remember the last time we saw the sunshine for five consecutive days. Maybe November, for sure in October, if I had to pick a definitive time. Certainly it has never happened here in February. Yesterday, even, we got all the way up to 56 degrees — making for an excellent afternoon for a run. Maybe this sort of weather will happen some more.
It rained all day today. We’re due for snow on Wednesday.
