Friday / journalism / links / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Winter snow on Friday
31
Jan 20

Winter snow on Friday

Just three short-long months ago I stood outside and shivered while pumping gas and watching the snow. It was notable because it was Halloween and three long-short months ago. And now, today …

To be fair and just, which we always are on the Internet, it has been a mild winter so far. You shouldn’t say things like that, because even with the qualifier “so far” you imply that it is over. It is not over. If you used the “… so far” formulation that’d look ominous, like you were going for drama or fright night. Which might be appropriate, or overwrought. It’s weather, so it is difficult to tell. And if there’s one thing that we know is not allowed on the Internet, it is the inappropriate jumping to conclusions or an overwrought and emotional reaction.

We’re going to have sunny skies (for a change) and the low 60s on Sunday. Winter will, no doubt, return in short order.

Anyway, cold, slow day today. I suppose the two might be correlated. Probably not, but it’s an easy connection to make, and that’s really what the Internet is for.

The following things aren’t related, but they are two signs of these times. Not all of the times, but, indeed some of them.

Somehow, I thought there’d be more of a ceremony, or at least done after hours. Anything to keep it from looking this pitiful.

Locally, the newspaper, which has been a part of two corporate transactions under recent moons, is losing it’s local printing operation.

This is how it continues. We’re well past how it begins. The printing will take place up in Indianapolis. It isn’t far, but it’ll mean a few professionals will lose their jobs locally. And this local paper will be put in a queue with the bigger Indianapolis Star, whatever other papers and contract jobs must be done. Then the design of the actual papers will be moved out. You’ll see, or perhaps you are already seeing where you are, formulaic layouts done by specialists who are trying to crank out two more front pages before their lunch break. It consolidates jobs, and the technology helps, but it compresses the work. We see papers that fall into formulas and a lot, a lot, gets lost along the way. A bit of institutional knowledge here, local history and importance there.

Perhaps it matters less these days. Newspapers, sad to say, have a reduced importance because they have a reduced readership. This isn’t pure nostalgia. Part of it is, sure, but there’s a lot to be said about the function that a truly healthy newspaper can provide to its community. I believe in that more fervently than I do in a newspaper. I’ve always been married more to the ideal of the service, the function, the role, than the medium. It just so happens that well-attended newspapers are, or were, the best medium we had for that. This isn’t chicken-or-the-egg stuff, but it feels like it. The economics of the industry are such that closing presses is the next step in trying to keep something solvent, for a time, before the inevitable selloffs take place. When Warren Buffett is getting out …

This is how it continues.

IU / music / television / Thursday / video — Comments Off on ‘Am I sitting in a tin can’
30
Jan 20

‘Am I sitting in a tin can’

Standing in the back of the control room this evening, talking with the engineer, the young man running the teleprompter and the reporter who was casually sitting at the lighting position. We work in a dark control, as you should, and on the light panel there is a small gooseneck lamp so you can see the many buttons and potentiometers.

The reporter, says to no one in particular, that she thought it was a microphone, until she saw the little beam of light coming out of the bottom.

So I started singing “Ground control to Major Miya,” which she took up. And then she asked me what my favorite Davie Bowie song is. Which was a mistake on her part.

I’m not a Bowie fan, really. I know the hits, and I appreciate his place in the scheme of things, culturally, and his artistic image. He’s just not for me. But, I said to the young woman who may know Bowie’s entire catalog or just has a tenuous grasp on her parent’s appreciation of Bowie’s music, I’m going to say his duet with Bing Crosby.

I could write an essay, I said, on how Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy allowed for the post-postmodern remix culture we all live in. This was where I looked at everybody listening, to make sure they were still with me, and the two college students and engineer, who is about my age, all agreed.

Some music executives, I said, sat in a boardroom with a lot of drugs and said what if we put Bowie and Mr. Crosby together. And there were a lot of drugs in that boardroom to come up with that idea. But then you take a look at the conceit of the special, Bing is house-sitting for his distant relative, Sir Percival Crosby, and along comes Percival’s neighbor, David Bowie. He comes over to borrow a cup of sugar or his piano or something, a conversation develops and then they sing this song.

Bowie hated Drummer Boy. The show writers had to add in the Peace On Earth bridge to get him to go along with it. He only did the special, Crosby’s last, since his mother was a fan of the crooner. And so this unlikely thing was born.

I’m riffing on this singularly odd musical moment, we’re out of ideas, we can only mash things up, and the continued success of this bizarre collaboration has made every pop culture thing possible in the last 40 years. Everyone is really going along with the argument. (Remember, this Christmas special, where the gag is Crosby staying at a relative’s house, which turns out to be the former home of Charles Dickens, is older than everyone listening to me.)

Sometimes I wonder if my best role here is just in saying random things like this that makes people think. But right about then another student walks up. He’d been sitting at the camera position, as far away as possible in the room.

“I heard you say Bing Crosby’s name. I have a Bing Crosby story. Well, my family does.”

And if there’s one thing that life tells you, when people come from across a room to interject themselves into the conversation with an anecdote, it’s worth hearing out. They don’t always pay off. But this one did, in a big way.

Sadly, it isn’t my story to tell. But if you see a studious young man with an intensity about old crooners behind his eyes, ask to hear the story. He’ll happily tell you about it. And it is worth hearing.

Anyway, that all happened between these two shows. Miya, interviewed the baseball coach in this show. She’s doing a nice job with it, but everyone here is doing some good work. Even the freshman, who’s apparently taking over everything:

And they talked, what else, basketball in the talk show. It is, of late, not the happiest of topics. But, hey, angry talk is sometimes successful talk?

(It’s actually easier, and better, to do happy sports talk. That’s why they’re putting smiles on their faces.)

Anyway, let’s all put smiles on our faces. Tomorrow’s Friday, and then the weekend will, happily, be upon us.

Wednesday — Comments Off on Cough and sniffle
29
Jan 20

Cough and sniffle

The answer to yesterday’s question, of course, is neither new or original. But it is highly specific, and the reiteration of it here is, in of itself, an indictment. That answer is: we’ve run out of ideas.

Why, yes, there was an idea factory in St. Louis once upon a time, but a downturn in the economy wiped out all the big thinkers. Well, the ones with experience, anyway. You can always hire younger, less wisened and hardboiled thinkers. And so they did. Once those people got settled into their offices — by which we mean new, open floor plan with first-come, first-sat bean bags — they put their heads together and came up with this.

“Let’s just talk about what celebrities are saying on their Instagram stories!”

And, thus, all of the good ideas were gone. Like the clean water, and many people’s pensions and their faith in institutions.

I’ll try to come up with another answer about this later in the week, too. Maybe I’ll have an idea.

Anyway, another gray day has passed. Or so I’m told. I spent it all under the cold and caring embrace of fluorescent bulbs. The high, the weather sites tell me, was 34. The condition, I’ve been assured, was cloudy throughout.

I don’t know if you make prop bets on anything, but I — a person with no interest in gambling about anything — have recently learned of their existence. A radio show was talking about the over/under on the Super Bowl’s national anthem and someone mentioned this phrase, “prop bets” and so, of course, I had to google it. And now I feel much like a veteran bookie. Anyway, if you’re into prop bets, just bet that it will always be cloudy here, until about, April. You’ll win far more than you’ll lose, and the numbers will work out for you in the end, if you can get someone to take the action.

The forecasters are teasing us with unseasonably warm temperatures and possibly a glimpse of stellar fusion over the weekend. They’re also promising ice crystal precipitation before then.

My especially good cheer has to do with trying to avoid another cold. I had three or four days at the beginning of the year wishing for an end or change of symptoms. Things got better, and several days later the cough and lingering head cold side effects snuck away. Now, they are coming back. It starts with the itching throat — so if I’m not saying much, that’s why — and, after several days of being tired and yet unable to sleep well, it will end with me taking a lot of zinc and vitamin C and feebly conceding which symptoms I would keep, if I could just breath or not cough or whatever is vexing me the most. It isn’t the flu, but it isn’t fun.

We’ll have some more fun, tomorrow, though.

Indiana / journalism / television / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Show – show – show, here we go!
28
Jan 20

Show – show – show, here we go!

First night back in the studio since … a really long time ago. About six weeks, I guess. And of course one of the shows invited a bunch of kids into the studio. Because nothing says clock efficiency and good television like a dozen little kids on camera!

They were great. Except I’m thinking the scratchy throat I’m developing — Again? Again. — came from one of the cute little germ factories. Can it happen that fast? We’re talking hours. Of course it can happen fast.

I once boarded a plane feeling fine, caught the whole bug during the two hour flight and was the full spectrum of pitiful by the time I left the airport. Stayed in bed for two days.

I’m not doing that this week.

Here’s the other show the crew produced last tonight.

It was a good start back after a long break. And so we are off and running again. There are 35 more studio shoots on the schedule for this semester, plus whatever else comes our way. Something else always comes our way.

Take that, Koala Kai:

Martin Kove’s brilliant turn must be in an alternate universe:

There’s only two ways to explain it. He appears in the Cobra Kai series on YouTube, so Koala Kai is in another universe. Or, we have reached peak post-neo-postmodernism long before the singularity suggested we would, as we are now remixing the remixes (which have already been remixed twice, some version of which is now headed to the stage).

I suppose there could be a third explanation. Nostalgia is a bad trip. I’ll let you figure out which is at play here.

books / Monday / photo / running / video — Comments Off on Hello, everybody
27
Jan 20

Hello, everybody

How are you? Did you miss me? I would understand if you didn’t. There’s a lot of stuff out there to see and read and watch and hear and do. And if it isn’t in our faces all of the time, we might not even be aware of it’s absence. We are consumerists of the moment. It has probably always been this way, since society reached beyond some arbitrary critical mass of saturation, but let’s blame it on the Internet.

Shame on you, Internet. There’s just so much of you. So much so, that people won’t even notice me. Or, most critically, notice if I’ve taken the day, or many, off.

Which is what I’ve done. It was a nice idea and I’m pleased with having done it. I haven’t written anything here, or on social media, though I have kept up a little. I’ve just done the other things in life. And, I suppose, that means I’ve had a little extra time. So I have accomplished more stuff! Well, yes and no. Mostly no, but also yes, in a pleasing enough manner. I read four books. Two of them were essay collections edited by Edwin Grosvenor, one on The Civil War and one on World War I. These were both good. It was, I said to a friend, like reading well-written longform Wikipedia posts on specific subjects. I also read Al Roker’s story about the 1900 hurricane in Galveston. It was a book that tried to walk a line between people who want to know about weather and, yet, no know nothing about weather. It is a great and tragic and amazing tale, one somehow lost in the modern zeitgeist. But the book could have done with another editing pass or two. Also, I finished a book about the archeology of the battle of the Culloden battlefield. We visited there a few years ago, and the interpretation is well done for casual visitors. Most battlefields are difficult, for me anyway, to visualize and understand. Not so, Culloden. Part of that is because of the work that’s been done to return the hallowed ground to what it looked like in 1746. And that’s because of thoughtful scholarship like that found in this book.

Things that have happened since we spoke last…

I got sick! There were about six days of feeling rough, eight days of eating zinc and vitamin supplements and cough drops like candy, and three of those days where I was laid quite low. After that, another week of idle coughing and throat clearing. But I’m fine now. It was, as you might expect, a fine way to bring in the new year. But, with that out of the way, I’m good to go and be virus-free until about 2026 or so.

I returned to work after the holidays, of course. (As did you! Was your office different? Mine was exactly the same.)

The beginning of a semester brings its own odd pace. Two or three weeks in, as we are now, the rush of the start is over and we slip into the rhythm of the term. But, in addition to that early semester rush, we’ve also been working toward a project that just wrapped last Friday. CBS Sports was here, producing an episode of We Need To Talk. They used our studio, some of our students and talked to and about a lot of the local sports world. This is the only clip they’ve put online so far:

It was a good show, a good experience for the people who took advantage of it. And, most importantly, we can move on to other things.

Let’s catch up on everything else with photographs.

Poseidon is still getting into everything. We try to keep him out of the laundry room, but he’s fast. And he knows precisely what he’s going for, the bag randomly sitting between the dryer and the ironing board:

We’ve had gray skies:

A lot of gray skies:

It’s just positively charming in its perpetual dreariness. (It’s not.)

We’re averaging one day of blue sky a week. But on one particular blue sky day we had a nice sunset:

It should just happen more often, is all.

I’ve been running, of course. Even as I was trying to get over my head cold. And I have had the opportunity to use the running light that The Yankee got me for Christmas:

It casts a giant arc of light. Probably looks weird coming at you, but you don’t miss things on the sidewalk or path or road. And it inadvertently spotlights deer. Now we both have one of these ONE80 lights, and we’re big fans. If you run, or work outside at night, or need something that’s ridiculously bright and long-lasting and hands free, this is the one you want.

Also, it has been cold, of course. But happily, so far this year, it has been an unseasonably mild winter. Even still, cold enough.

Only a few days this month have been really bitter. And that’s plenty for the year, thanks.

I got to run with Venus, which you can see in the twilight here:

The Canada geese are just moving back and forth from one pond to another around here.

They think, this is south enough, I guess. They are mistaken.

There is a running path behind our house. It has little tendrils that extend out to the road in front of us, but otherwise, it just exists unto itself, ending in a fallow field on one end and almost seven-tenths of a mile away it ends in woods. It is one of many paths around the city, and we’ve been told that they’ll one day all be connected, which would be a great feature, if you think about it. The realization of that goal may well be long after we can be bothered to care, or live here. But there is a bit of progress on our local stretch of pedestrian asphalt. The path behind us has been extended a bit, recently. Now it goes back and behind the newer developments on the road. Meanwhile, one of the other paths (which joins the larger network on one end and just … stops … on the other end) is growing toward our little path. One problem: the creek in between. Well, that problem has been solved:

Now those two paths just have to link up.

Also, the ponds recently froze:

Definitely the kind of weather I want to be outside in. Fortunately they haven’t been frozen solid. Here’s a shot of a larger pond, just a day or three later. And if you squint at the fuzzy background in the distance it almost looks like that’s some sort of alpine village, which would be an upgrade.

It has been cold enough for the cats to cuddle:

Phoebe is also doing just fine:

And now we’ll try to get back into some normal routine around here, too.

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