Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

errands / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Jul 26

Skin, I have it

I had a dermatology checkup today. The short version: I have skin. The slightly longer version: I have skin and it is in good condition and there’s nothing to be alarmed about.

I am alarmed. The guy that called my name in the waiting room and escorted me to an exam room asked me, I am sure, the basic array of triage questions. I was going to give him two more questions before I asked him how old he was and what time his mom was picking up today.

But it is a dermatology office, maybe he just knows how to take care of his skin.

Then the doctor came in with his two PAs in tow. We shook hands. I made the acquaintance of his PA-in-training and was trying, for some reason, to make sure she felt seen. The dermatologist interrupted me with all of the dermatology questions.

We discussed my poison ivy, which has cleared up right on schedule. Apparently they’re seeing a lot of that this year. Makes you wonder about the down years. Are there years when urushiol oil is in short supply? How does this never make the news? What does that mean for issues beyond the local ecological environment? People are going to tell you it is good for animals and insects. People are also going to tell you that climate change promotes more poison ivy and, thus urushiol oil. Don’t believe Big Poison Ivy. This is what you need to remember:

When the oil gets into your skin, your immune system’s sensor cells recognize urushiol as foreign to your body. These sensor cells then call in protector cells to the area, warning them of the invasion. The protector cells defend your body against the intruder by attacking the urushiol in the skin. Unfortunately, some of your body’s normal skin cells are casualties of this war, which is what leads to the itchiness and swelling of a poison ivy rash.

I think that the PA-in-training needs to both know these things (and I’m sure she does) but also how to deal with people who bring this sort of information with them. And what she learned from that experience, from her mentor, was “Keep the patient on task.”

We’ve all got roles to play, and that’s the one I played there today.

Anyway, an exam was taken. I passed for another year.

I was given a shopping list by my lovely bride. I volunteered to take the grocery shopping off her schedule if she gave me a list and some aisle direction, and she did. I don’t mind the store. I dislike aimlessly wandering from aisle to aisle, squinting at signs, dodging people and peering on every shelf for that One Weird Thing that will make my skin as young and as fresh as that 14-year-old I just met. So she give me a list and gave me some directions for some of the slightly more obscure things.

And then — confident that I’d saved her virtually no time while I happily texted away at her, aisle-by-aisle — as I approached the checkout, I got a message for additional things. Oh, these are for dessert. Which is the only reason I went back into the fray — also because checkout was a bit of a mess itself at the moment, but dessert. If it had been, say, brussels sprouts, I would have said, Nope. Not on the list. Not on the contract. Can’t have it.

Instead, I got an additional request for these things … entirely off-setting all of the healthy things I’d picked up. But, I also picked up something else. A mystery. What kind of dessert is this?

I guess we’ll find out in a few days.

Also, hon, they were out of brussels sprouts. So sorry. Couldn’t be helped. They’re selling like … well, whatever undesirable vegetables sell like.

And now the storms are rolling in, anyway. Can’t cook brussels sprouts in bad weather. That’s like a rule, or something. Might effect the flavor. I’m sure that’s one of those old wives tales that’s true.

bluesky / books / history / Monday — Comments Off
20
Jul 26

Evidence of our natural environments

Guess what I did this weekend …

I sat next to that leaf, and read. But more on that below.

Today was even more fun. The kitties received some mail from my mother. She bought a cheap little cat tunnel years ago, and I mentioned that it was showing some wear and she immediately leapt into action, seeing to it that the cats will want for nothing. (I had to talk her down off other presents because, truly, these cats want for nothing. But this came with the mail.

And though they were quick to inspect it, I had to help open the packaging. Thumbs and all that.

They were, of course, intrigued by this new addition to their environment. But I guess you don’t recognize a tunnel until it is in its tunnel form.

This will mostly be a Poseidon thing. Phoebe will sit in the tunnel some, but he uses it a lot. It is a hiding place, a napping place, a play place, a place where he can, somehow, approach the speed of sound as he runs through it. And he usually takes over spaces.

But now we have two tunnels, so maybe that dynamic will change. Tunnels for every cat! But, first, I wanted to see what he thought about a giant tunnel. He was pleased with my innovation, as if I had, finally, achieved my purpose in his life.

Both tunnels are sitting in the living room, but I think I’ll move them around, for variety’s sake. It could be a long-term experiment, studying where they like them the most. I promise to not report every little tunnel move and finding here, only the interesting ones.

I’ve finished Diane McWhorter’s incredible Carry Me Home. My last notes on Bluesky:

I have a great respect for Diane McWhorter’s work, but this is a reach. Standards of good and right and wrong and evil of the 20th century weren’t so different that we should see them as a kind. We, they, have the same problems: a willingness to confront actions and what is supported or opposed.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 17, 2026 at 3:40 PM

She proves the point with 2010’s HB 56, paranoid and nasty immigration legislation — most of which was overturned in court.

People were either ignoring him or telling tales out of school about the former AG, who was upfront about what he was.

That second highlight? Classic B’ham finger pointing.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 17, 2026 at 3:57 PM

One footnote:

Thousands of Birmingham News photos from the era were rediscovered in 2004. They’d been marked "Do Not Sell.” The editor, Vincent Townsend, it is said, didn’t want them to sully the city’s good name. Later, a selection was published to @al.com. Today, however, …

(Note the URL.)

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 19, 2026 at 11:58 AM

I’m sure that’s just general content migration and site rot, rather than something nefarious, but it is both sad and illuminating.

Finally, Diane McWhorter, who lived the moment, though as a child and over the mountain (which is to say, for out-of-towners, at some remove), spent two decades working on this book (which is incredible) and won a Pulitzer for it, deserves the last word.

I’ll just say, read “Carry Me Home.”

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 19, 2026 at 12:02 PM

And now I’ve started reading Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. A few years ago my mother-in-law gifted me the first, The British Are Coming, which was everything I’ve come to expect from an Atkinson book. Last year I asked her for this second book, which is one of four presents I can recall having ever requested in my adult life. It’s just been sitting here, on a bookshelf, staring at me staring at it. It is astoundingly good already.

A hallmark of Atkinson’s work is how he synthesizes so, so much source material, while maintaining his journalism sensibilities, letting the original language speak for itself. This is about the American general, Arthur St. Clair, mulling over certain fate in staying at Fort Ticonderoga or ignominy in retreat. St. Clair’s quartermaster wrote “He faced an agonizing decision, as his deputy quartermaster later recounted: ‘If he remained there he would save his character and lose the army. If he went off, he would save the army and lose his character.’

St. Clair ultimately decided to retreat from Fort Ticonderoga, where his supplies were running low and he was outmanned something like 3:1 by the British Canadian army. He would be later be court-martialed and vindicated. He was retained by George Washington for staff work, served as the president of the Continental Congress, presided over the Northwest Ordinance, later led a lot of people to their doom in Ohio, and then served as a governor … St. Clair is a complete character in American history that all too often gets overlooked.

The scale and the scope of Atkinson’s work in this trilogy is such that a lot of these people that are introduced to provide the rich texture of the moment only come and go — indeed, what we know of some of them may be well limited to the letters from them or about them — but I want to look into a lot of these people. Atkinson can’t answer every one of those questions, in this format, but I like to look up people and see what became of them. Did they survive the revolution? What became of them?

Sir Francis Carr Clerke wrote a friend back home in England that, “The British bayonet will ever make its way.” Clerke was a secretary to the Canadian Army’s general, John Burgoyne. You give a quote like that, I’m going to look you up. Clerke would die at Saratoga just a few weeks after that letter.

On the very same page you meet Seth Warner, an American officer in the Green Mountain Boy. He’d been at Bunker Hill, invaded Canada and fought pretty much everywhere up north, it seems. He was highly regarded by his contemporaries, but got edged out of Vermont politics. Also, he had some financial issues and died at 41 in 1784.

I wonder which new-to-me noteworthy person will be introduced next.

You’ll have to read the book, and this space, to find out.

Friday — Comments Off
17
Jul 26

Grosser still

These are stay-inside days, if you like things like breathing. And, it must be said, there a lot of places with worse air.

That we’ve let it come to this.

adventures / bluesky / books / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Jul 26

The air is gross

However hot it was yesterday, and the heat index reached 110 degrees, it felt much the same today. The heat index reached 108 today. I am of the opinion that anything over 106 is just pain, anyway. The rest is semantics.

Except for this, those poor electricians were back at it today, running wires and cables and connections this way and that, all so that we might one day have a generator operational. They sweated and melted and crusted over and sweated again. They had to turn the power off today, which they did one minute after their projected time. They predicted we would be without power for four or five hours. And after five-some hours they restored power. We stayed in the house, stayed still and read. For most of the time it was fine; the ambient temperature inside served us well as the sun baked us. I was still handing out water, checking on my guys, trying to stay positive and encouraging them to come inside from time to time. They never really would, but they did enjoy working in the basement the best.

We hired these guys, and their company needs to make money and they need to make money, and we’d booked this however far in advance, but sending these fellows out this week, during another intense heatwave, seemed rude.

I poured them water, scooped them ice, offered every little solution I could think of. When it felt like inside of the house was getting too warm I thought to go check in with them again for the fourth or fifth time. When I came back in, the house, which had felt warm a few moments ago, felt absolutely delightful. And that, friends, is relativity.

Still a third man, a gas man, came to the house this afternoon, too. His job was to run a bit of gas line from the new gas meter to the new generator. I think we’ve exhausted the electricians with the conditions and the demands of the job. They will come back again in a week or so to finish up the work. And then the final connections will be made. And then some municipal inspections of their work must be done. And then we will have a generator. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we lost power sometime between now and then?

Anyway, near the end of the month, sometime in the very early part of next month, we should be set. One less thing to worry about, which we don’t worry about.

But, you know, different people have told us how many of our neighbors have gotten generators around here. Apparently it’s been a big acquisition since 2020. Indeed, as we stood outside looking at the latest work today you could see two of them sitting patiently next to neighboring houses. And, soon, we’ll be set up just so, too.

May we never need them. And may those guys get re-hydrated this evening.

Speaking of books, I finished Carry Me Home. I’ve been putting my observations on Bluesky, for some reason. Here’s the first batch. And so here’s most of the rest of them. I have one or two more that I’ll put here tomorrow.

That footnote, though.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 8, 2026 at 12:20 PM

One of the things that people told themselves, and one of the things McWhorter repeats now and again, is that the real problem was one of peer pressure. People didn’t want to be ostracized from their class and people because they treated others with kindness or decency or fairness.

Which …

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 8, 2026 at 12:20 PM

We turn, now, to the Children’s Crusade.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 9, 2026 at 12:43 PM

We should remember that a 12-year-old in this story is 75 years old today.

Living memory.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 9, 2026 at 12:45 PM

Beyond even the nuance in this incredible well-told story, the occasional human insight, the glimmers of social realization, things that read like an actual spiritual conversion, is fascinating. It doesn’t happen to everyone, and certainly not at the same times, but there are these moments …

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 9, 2026 at 12:50 PM

Minimal experience, but quick to violence, loved confrontation, so, of course, qualified. An “addled racist” said NYTimes’ Howell Raines.

Crying scapegoat, Lingo ran for sheriff of Jefferson County (where much of this story is focused). He lost. He died of “a heart ailment” in 1969.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 10, 2026 at 1:22 PM

These Wallace anecdotes exist within a few dozen pages of one another. In retrospect they can read almost as an explanation, an excuse, “We’d no idea, ” a “It’s out of our hands,” which is common. But that’s the compression of time. People understood — for good, bad, or worse — what he was.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 14, 2026 at 12:23 PM

After the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls, Chuck Morgan gave a speech so moving, so powerful it got national attention, and ultimately pushed him out of town, to Atlanta.

digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/coll…

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 14, 2026 at 12:23 PM

The period in which my peer group grew up … and why so much of this book is a revelation…

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 15, 2026 at 2:34 PM

Quick aside, the Civil Rights Institute is a fantastic visit.

The book ends with this, “America’s city in a valley, but out of the depths rose a city upon a hill. Beauty from destruction. There is magic in that."

But there are multiple epilogues, because of timing and cosmic inquiry.

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 15, 2026 at 2:37 PM

After “Carry Me Home” was published came a new round of trials. I covered the Blanton trial. (I don’t think I used the “closure” framing.)

Asides: Rudolph, not involved, but in common, was captured, tried and sentenced. US attorney Doug Jones later became senator and is now running for governor.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 15, 2026 at 2:46 PM

There are, functionally, four epilogues in this book. Some of them necessary due to timing, others due to contemporaneous events that have echos of the past. McWhorter spent 20 years putting this together and so it doesn’t seem indulgent at all. Here is her summary of the book’s thesis.

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— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 16, 2026 at 12:43 PM

I have one or two more that I’ll embed in this space tomorrow. And, of course, we’re on to the next book, which is also a great read indeed.

memories / music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
15
Jul 26

Red and black antennae

I get the summers to myself. Oh, to be sure, we went to two conferences this summer, but we were fortunate to attach a vacation to them. Otherwise, aside from some email, there’s some time to decompress, to sleep, and to try to forget about work while simultaneously also thinking about the next semester.

And, look, before I get into this let me say two things. First, the time off is great, and I’m fortunate, and I know it. Second, the work isn’t hard or bad, it’s rather enjoyable, generally, but each semester is so immersive that the break feels necessary somehow. Third, see points one and two.

With that in mind my complaint is There’s always something, right? It’s not worth going into, and none of it is a real worry on a large scale, let alone a grand or cosmic scale. But the worrywart can always worry, I suppose. Part of it has to do with the next semester, and my utter inability to make myself totally mentally absent. It’s just funny is all.

But then, today, I think I have hit the mental midpoint of the summer. Probably I’m close to the calendar midpoint, too, but I’m not looking that up, that’d be too upsetting to contemplate, and, anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that I was sitting there, reading, and it occurred to me that I should go look through my coins. I have a dime jar and a nickel jar and I don’t even know why anymore. It isn’t like I get a lot of change, or have money. Anyway, I found myself remembering that we used to look at the dates on nickles for some reason. When I was a kid we kept nickels that were older than 1964 for reasons I forget. So I went through probably 15 bucks of nickels, because I could.

This was the oldest one I found in that collection. I looked it up. According to the web, a 1957 nickel could be worth a few thousand bucks, or about five or 10 cents. Guess which one I’ve got. They’re all worth a nickel, unless you find a sucker.

Jefferson’s war nickels, the ones produced between 1942-1945 can be worth a bit, depending on the specifics. Because of war rationing they were minted with 35 percent silver. When was the last time you saw a coin from the mid-40s? And are you prepared to say mid-nineteenforties? Guess we’ll be doing that soon.

I began to wonder if you can solder coins. Some of these could be some sort of art. (Turns out you can solder coins.) It’s not as if they are doing anything else, sitting in these little glass containers.

I was doing this because I had the time, I guess. My chief task for the day was keeping two electricians hydrated. These two guys came out today to do some electrical work, obviously. We are having a generator installed. The unit itself was brought in today and put on a little slab on the southwestern corner of the house, because that’s where the gas meter is. The electric comes in on the northeastern corner.

The problems are there are some tight spaces, some old DIYesque wiring, the solar panel configuration, incredibly hot temperatures, and horrible air quality. These poor guys, we invited them inside to cool off several times.

I kept them in ice water all day. I offered them giant umbrellas for shade. There’s no need to suffer, but theirs is outdoor work. Mostly, anyway. I think they’ve been taking refuge in the basement, where it is nice and cool, and where everything will be connected, gas to electric.

They’ll be back out to continue their work tomorrow. It’ll be just as hot or worse. They’ll have to disconnect the power for a while to finish their work.

Also the air quality will be poor. Also, they might not finish tomorrow. These poor depleted guys.

We saw the Dave Matthews Band Saturday night. Third summer in a row. I think this is the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen them over the years. We go to this show because my godsisters’-in-law (just go with it) do a DMB pilgrimage every summer. They invite us to the show closest to us. They tailgate with their old school buddies and friends and we get to tag along.

At some point the joke became that I don’t like Dave Matthews and I must have reacted just right, because that joke persisted. Later, I came up with a brilliant reply. I’ve been waiting for someone to ask me my favorite Dave Matthews song, so I can say “I like that Ants Running song.” As a joke it’ll work on several levels. I have the name wrong, and some of the longtime fans are over it, including one of my godsisters-in-law.

This isn’t that, but rather a bit of a meandering horn section, just for fun.

They played Ants Marching. I turned to my godsister-in-law at the end and said, “I like that song. They should put that on the radio. That’s got pep!”

She was not amused with my joke, but she had a great time at the concert, and so did all of the fans, even me. I like the band just fine.