It will take some doing, but the next week and a half will be busy and productive. There’s a lot of grading and class prep and things of that sort to get to. It started yesterday, with the grading of midterm exams. That was a full afternoon. But it does not end there, no.
This is the week where I found two mistakes in my planning of the semester. Every class has something due this week, meaning I have to grade … everything. It’s a real first world problem, yes, I know. It is also the second time I’ve had this problem this term.
The issue becomes one of pacing. The goal is to get all of this week’s assignments completed this week. The challenge is to give myself time to do all of that, but also to let each little piece breathe. Read and critique and evaluate a handful of stories, take a break to clear the mind, and then come at it a new.
If I pace it right, I’ll get through everything Friday night. Maybe Saturday.
And next time I plan out a semester calendar, this will definitely be top of mind.
Let’s go back to California! Here’s a nice meditative video from the Pacific Coast. Enjoy a minute on me.
Relax. Enjoy. Repeat.
Here’s another slow motion video from Spooner’s Cove, as well.
Maybe I’m the only one amused by the slow motion waves, but there’s only nine more of them to go.
Time for this week’s installment of We Learn Wednesdays. This is our 30th installment and the 51st marker in the effort. The effort is riding my bike around the county to find the historical markers. I shot this last December in a stockpiling effort in the hopes of being able to stretch them out until I could ride outside again in the spring — which will surely happen just any day now …
(It’s been 48-52 and damp and gray for days and that meteorological condition is no longer novel.)
Over in Salem, they mark the old Star Hall Corner.
Site of Star Hall, demolished in 1898 for the building of City National Bank. Legend has it—if you step on the star, you will always come back to Salem. Rededicated Aug. 24, 1996
Founded in 1888, City National Bank was swallowed up in a merger in 1984. It’s just one bank, but I wonder how that paralleled the fortunes of the town. Today that bank looks empty, and there’s no sign giving hints of what may have been recently happening inside. You can still see an ATM in a side foyer, though.
It’s an important intersection in the town. In earlier, lively days, this was a choice corner, Jones Corner. There was a clothing store there and around it there were stores, warehouses, tailor shops, shoe shops and more. A man named Ashton ran the clothes shop, he had a big star as part of his outdoor signage. The star became iconic, and, overtime, Jones Corner became Star Corner. You can see it here.
A floor or two above the street was the social club, Star Hall. Dances and parties abounded. See and be seen. But social connections gave way to bigger financial opportunities, of course. Apparently, the City Council and the bank developer agreed to take the star from that sign and marked the spot.
The commemoration has been there longer than the club existed, I suppose. The rededicated marker, too. Anyway, here’s the star.
Just before I saw Star Corner a panhandler wandered over to ask for five bucks. I told her I did not have the money. Didn’t even have my wallet, as I was dressed in cycling clothes that day. She went on about her way and I thought, Five bucks? Street-level inflation!
It’s a struggling area. Across the street are a pair of century-old buildings that were rehabbed a decade ago as apartments. The hope was that they would help re-energize the historic district. It’s close. You can tell. Part of being close is that it’s also close to falling back on harder times again.
I wonder if anyone has considered adding a social club.
Next week’s marker will take us to a beautiful church building. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.
Just kidding about the weekend being laid back. My lovely bride and I and my two god sisters in-law (just go with it) all drove down to Baltimore Saturday night.
(Baltimore. I know. Our streak continues. We weren’t even very far from that bridge and the horrible scene unfolding there.)
(And if you are about to say “Nothing bad has happened to central California, and you were just there. Give it a bit of time.)
Anyway, we crossed over another bridge, went downtown, had a sandwich at a conveniently located Shake Shack (because it is milkshake season) and then ran into this guy.
That’s Ryan Miller of Texas, Massachusetts (Tufts) and Vermont. And also of Guster. It just so happened that we were there to see Guster play. And he was out wandering around, looking for all the world panicked about where he should be before his stage call.
“Cutting it a little close,” he said to us.
They’re not starting without you, so it’ll be fine, I said.
We asked to take a photo with him. He said sure, but only if we did it in the crosswalk. Because it was him, you see, that was cutting it close.
I was just glad I got my phone back before he dashed off. So this is our crosswalk shot.
It’s like Abbey Road, but it is President Street.
It’s a good reference since I’ve been saying, since it was released in 2019, that Guster’s most recent record, Look Alive, is a Beatles album. If the Beatles were making music in the 21st century, it wouldn’t be far off that.
And Guster has a new album due out this May. So they’re on tour, and we saw them Saturday. Here are some clips.
I’ve seen Guster now in four or five states over three decades. It is still a lot of fun. I am lobbying to catch one more show later this year.
Here’s some more video from California. We have weeks of this. This is a slow motion wave crashing video from Spooner’s Cove in Los Osos. We’d climbed up the big rock that sits in the middle of the cove, we must have been 15-20 feet off the ground. My lovely bride had very patiently waited to capture a big wave in the slow motion style. Took a while. I got this one on my first try. She was not jealous or anything.
What aggravated her was that, as I stood there, I got good wave after good wave for slow motion video purposes. I’ll share those as we go along these next few days, too.
For now, here’s the day’s peaceful shot of sand and sea.
Relax. Enjoy. Repeat.
And come back tomorrow. There’ll be more videos to share then, too.
How was your weekend? It was a laid back few days around here, which was perfect. Every weekend between now and the end of time is booked up, so I took the restful days and counted myself lucky for the opportunity. And then something came up and one of our upcoming weekend plans change, and I’m lucky for some of that, too.
This week is laid out. There’s a lot to do, but it is all manageable. Most of my time will be devoted to … dramatic pause … grading. Tonight, in fact, one class is taking a midterm. I’ll score those tomorrow. Other classes have written assignments to work through. They take longer. But, by Friday, it’ll all be under control because the week is just long enough to accomplish these goals. And when I get done on Friday, I’ll have just enough time to prepare a lecture for Monday, and start grading additional assignments. It’s a cycle, like laundry.
But it is great! The thing that’s fun about grading subjective work, like written assignments, is that, I can offer some constructive feedback. It’ll help the students, if they read it. That’s always an open question, though. Have I convinced you of the value to read the 600 words I’ve written about your 500-word assignment?
We haven’t checked in on the cats in a few weeks. It’s the site’s most popular weekly feature, and I’ve been negligent. And don’t think Phoebe hasn’t noticed, because she has noticed.
Poseidon does not care. He just wants some attention. Everything else is fine if you’ll pet him or let him sit with you, or allow him to go through a door he’s not allowed beyond. Everything else is just fine if you’ll only notice him constantly.
The kitties, as you can tell, are doing well. The birds are working their way back to the feeder strategically placed near one of their cat trees, and so interest has picked back up on the window views. Phoebe gets milk and Poe gets attention, and so everything is just great with the cats.
Just beyond the bird feeder, that camellia I recently discovered is looking great.
You wouldn’t believe how many flowers this thing will produce.
There are several different varieties of camellias, and I have yet to figure out which one this is. But, an important part of the fun of this place is the discovery.
I showed you another video from this same place on Friday, but there’s still plenty to discover at Spooner’s Cove, a part of Montana de Oro State Park, near Los Osos, California.
I figure I have something like two dozen more California videos to share, so we’ll get a good two or three weeks out of it. Vacations should just be drawn out like that, we’d all be lucky for that, too.
We will return you to your regularly scheduled Friday post next week, perhaps. Right now, I am ahead, busy and behind in all of the most unusual ways. As it relates most to the Friday material, I don’t have anything in the queue. Shame on me for only scanning three weeks worth at a time, when, clearly, there should be six weeks prepared at any given moment.
The lamentations will continue at another time, and quietly, but, for now, this is a quicker way to work through a few Friday things.
The forsythia looks beautiful. We have several in the backyard, like this one here.
And there’s one proud and well shaped one that stands on one of the front corners of the property.
These, I wish, stayed just like this all year. They are gorgeous from any distance, any time of day.
Welcome back to California, where we enjoyed this spot a little over a week ago. This is Spooner’s Cove, a part of Montana de Oro State Park, near Los Osos, California.
Spooner’s Cove is where Islay Creek empties into the Pacific Ocean. It’s a beautiful spot, in California’s lifetime undergoing the long, patient process of turning from a rugged and dramatic place where land meets the sea into a beautiful and calm beach. All of California feels like it is in that process. The human impression and human memory seems so long, but it is so fleeting to the waves and the winds and the rocks. We think we understand, we’ve only begun to realize what we don’t know.
Anyway, the cove has a pebbly beach, tide pools, caves, and unique rock formations to climb around on especially at lower tides. (There was an arch, so typical of the central California coast, but it collapsed from the weather and erosion just a few years ago.)
Oh, and if you want to see something wonderful, take an adult who grew up around tide pools back to tide pools. A remarkable thing happens.
I often tell journalism students that the difference between them and nursing students and engineering students is a simple one. Nurses work on anatomical models to learn their craft. Engineering majors will use popsicle sticks and other materials and some complex software before they’re ever allowed to touch plans that will lead to a bridge or a dam. We learn our craft in public. And here’s further proof.
Student journalists from the Daily Iowan, a non-profit paper, have purchased two local newspapers saving them from shutting down. Students from the University of Iowa will help both papers cover their communities. Iowa student journalists buy two local papers saving them from closure
What will kill cable television, and severely hurt the business of the regular networks in terms of revenues? The diminution of sports on regular TV. Do NFL Sign-ups Stick Around?
While some may assume a majority of users who sign-up around tentpole events (like big NFL games) will quickly cancel, this isn’t borne out in the data. In the case of Peacock, by the end of February, nearly seven weeks after the AFC Wild Card Weekend, Antenna observed 29% of the AFC Wild Card sign-up cohort had canceled their subscription, meaning 71% remained subscribed. Peacock’s one month survival rate across all 2023 sign-ups was 78%.
For Paramount+, Antenna observed that at the end of February 65% of the Super Bowl LVIII sign up cohort either remained subscribed to their paid subscription or had converted their free trial to paid. Antenna’s initial Paramount+ estimate does not include iTunes distribution, which Antenna estimates was 21% of the Paramount sign-ups.
I hope everyone is paying attention, and programming and planning accordingly.
We’ve come to the part of the week where I wonder if I could be doing more, right now, to help future me. Future me is the me of next week. And the answer is, no, I can’t do a lot more next week. I could do more. We all could, but where’s the fun in that. But for the version of me that will be task oriented and checking things off lists next week, I can’t help that guy yet. The To Do must still be formulated. The lists are just big piles of things to grade.
And so I wait. And rest. Next week, there will be around 100-140 things to grade. That is not an exaggeration. Seventeen of them will be easy to work through. Another 40 or so can be evaluated rather painlessly. But there will be 40 or so items that will require time and care and repetition. And that’s three days, easy.
There is a valuable lesson in this for me. The next time I build a multi-class semester, there will be flow charts, fact sheets, multiphasic slide decks and calendar overlays, just so that I can make sure key assignments are staggered for everyone.
And by everyone I, of course, mean me.
But you can’t do the work on Thursday that will be turned in Saturday through Monday. And so earlier this week I felt like the carefree grasshopper. By tomorrow, it could be the neurotic ant who is waiting for the other boot to land on his exoskeleton.
That’s probably one of my best remembered fable from Aesop. That and the boy who cried wolf and the lesser known The Writer and Public Domain.
Why hasn’t someone reworked these for a cynical, metal audience? Do you mean to tell me that the world isn’t ready for a version of The Crab and the Fox where the crab wanders into that meadow and doesn’t get eaten by the fox because, I dunno, global warming hardened her shell, or she’s got crrrrrrab power or is about to persuade the fox to leave her alone, big, stupid fox, thereby subverting the patriarchal paradigm of knowing one’s role and overcoming caste systems inherent and explicit while on the way across that meadow and into Red Lobster for a crowd pleasing plate of cheese biscuits, which signifies our consumerist society and a heavy dose of postmodern irony through a crustaceanist lens?
We could churn these out in a few days, get a clever artist to illustrate the thing and be on the late night talk shows by next week, is what I’m saying.
But I’ve got all of that grading to do. Good point.
It turns out we have not two, but four pear trees on our property. Two are well apart from one another. And this one, and its twin, were carefully planted close by one another.
Pear trees need to be in proximity to bear fruit. And, also, they need to be the right sort. Unfortunately, these aren’t the right sort.
Fruit-bearing pear trees would be awesome.
Never mind. I just looked it up and it takes three to five years for a tree to begin producing fruit, and there is an impressive amount of work in between. So while I can’t do next week me any favors today, I just did the me of 2025-2030 a huge solid.
I’ll just go buy pears from a produce store every once in a while.
I am enjoying the blooms on these trees, though. More trees and shrubs should be perpetually in bloom. It’s a cheery thing, really. Particularly right now.
We saw quite a few elephant seals in California last week. Here are some of them now. Hunted to the brink of extinction for oil by the end of the 19th century, their numbers have since recovered.
This beach does look like a nice place to nap. If your seal friends will leave you alone long enough.
These are northern elephant seals, and they grow large. Mature males weighing more than 8,000 pounds!
What do you suppose the largest one in that video weighs?
These guys spend their lives across North America’s Pacific coast. They breed annually and are seemingly habitual. Some of the older ones here have been visiting this beach for a while.
More advertisers are trying to tie their ads to so-called “business outcomes,” such as making a purchase, visiting a website or showroom, or asking for information to be sent about the product or service being pitched. The thinking on Madison Avenue is that knowing how many people watched an ad just isn’t enough; it’s better to understand how many people took an action that brought them closer to an actual sale. Interest has grown as the size of TV audiences has been cut down by the rise of streaming.
Creativity beats fascism.
To simplify, the Allies used signal counterintelligence, inflatable tanks, audio, and a bluff with Gen. George Patton to convince the Nazis that the 1,1000 members of the 23rd HQ Special Troops were actually two divisions, 30,000 men, massing to attack elsewhere. In more than a dozen engagements in 1944-1945, they feinted, disguised and distracted from actual assaults, tying down enemy units and, it is estimated, saved thousands of lives among Allied ranks in the process.After decades of secrecy, the ‘Ghost Army’ is honored for saving U.S. lives in WWII:
Present at Thursday’s event were: 100-year-old Bernard Bluestein, who joined the visual deception unit from the Cleveland Institute of Art and went on to pursue a career in industrial design; 99-year-old John Christman, who served as a demolition specialist and 100-year-old Seymour Nussenbaum, an avid stamp collector who joined the Army from the Pratt Institute. He helped make the counterfeit patches worn by the unit, and worked in package design for many years after the war.
[…]
“The Ghost Army’s tactics were meant to be invisible, but today their constructions will no longer remain unseen in the shadows,” said Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., one of the bill’s two Senate sponsors. “Their weapons were unconventional, but their patriotism was unquestionable.”
[…]
While the Ghost Army helped liberate Europe and end the war, it wasn’t publicly given credit for another half a century.
“Following the war, the unit’s soldiers were sworn to secrecy, records were classified and equipment packed away,” says the National WWII Museum.
Wormuth said Thursday that immediately after the war, Ghost Army soldiers received a letter of thanks from then-Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, with a memorable P.S.: “If you tell anyone, I’ll see that you hang.”
Beyer told WUNC before the ceremony that the mission had been so deeply classified that the “Army basically lost it.”
“It kind of forgot about it until the late 80s, when they suddenly rediscovered this and started bringing Ghost Army soldiers to the Pentagon for briefings,” he explained.
I shared an obituary yesterday, and i have one more today, simply because this story should be told over and over and over and over again.
(Amnon) Weinstein was the founder of Violins of Hope, an organization that provides the violins he restored to orchestras for concerts and educational programs commemorating the Holocaust.
[…]
“Violins of Hope, it’s like a huge forest of sounds,” he said in a 2016 PBS documentary. “Each sound is standing for a boy, a girl and men and women that will never talk again. But the violins, when they are played on, will speak for them.”
There are more than 60 Holocaust-era violins in his collection.
Some belonged to Jews who carried them in suitcases to concentration camps, and who were then forced to play them in orchestras as prisoners marched to the gas chambers. Others were played to pass the time in Jewish ghettos. One was tossed from a train to a railway worker by a man who knew his fate.
“In the place where I now go, I don’t need a violin,” the man told the worker, in Mr. Weinstein’s telling. “Here, take my violin so it may live.”
[…]
One afternoon in the 1980s, a man with a prisoner identification tattoo on his arm arrived with a beaten up violin that had, like him, survived Auschwitz.
“The top of the violin was damaged from having been played in the rain and snow,” Mr. Grymes wrote in “Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust — Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind’s Darkest Hour” (2014). “When Amnon took the instrument apart, he discovered ashes inside that he could only assume to be fallout from the crematoria at Auschwitz.”
[…]
During a radio interview, he asked listeners to bring him instruments connected to the Holocaust. Soon, families began showing up at his workshop with violins that had been stored away in attics and cellars, each with its own haunting story.
Mr. Weinstein was especially shaken by those recovered from concentration camps after the Allied invasion of Germany in 1945.
“This was the last human sound that all of those people heard, the violin,” he said in a 2016 radio interview on WKSU in Ohio. “You cannot use the name beauty. But this was the beauty of this time, these violins.”
A previous interview with the famed luthier.
And the concert in Cleveland where the Violins of Hope sang out again. They played Beethoven.
