After I did the monthly cleaning of the computer — updating some spreadsheets and other documents, deleting stuff from the desktop and the downloads folder, and so on — I returned to the equally exciting task of packing for this afternoon’s road trip.
But before we left I got a stern talking to. Poseidon pointed out I was behind on the site’s most popular weekly feature, the check-in on the kitties. And he was also upset that, last week, Phoebe got a closeup and he did not.
They are jealous cats. So here you go, Poe, a recent closeup, to keep things equal between the two of you.
Phoebe also noticed we were two days behind. She was gearing up to tell me all about it, you can tell.
Next week he’ll probably want a photo in a bag or box, too. They are very jealous of one another. Him more so, but only because they haven’t yet realized that jealous is a thing they can compete for, too.
And, so you see, the are doing just great. Now they’re hanging out with a sitter, because we are just under five hours away, in beautiful and scenic Norfolk. Here’s a blurry shot from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel route. See if you can guess which this part is, bridge or tunnel.
We’re in Norfolk for the 95th convention of the Southern States Communication Association. This is our 10th time to this conference, and then second time we’ve attended it in Norfolk. The first time, my lovely bride won an award there. We’ve won two others, too. These days, we go back to point that out a little, but mostly to see our friends.
This is our first time at SSCA since 2017, though, because of other obligations, travel budget reasons and Covid.
Most everyone got in in time for dinner tonight, so we had some catching up today. We had blueberry french toast at this restaurant near the hotel.
And it was great, but seeing our friends was even better. You can text people and have group chats and do all of that, but when youget to see them in person you realize keenly what’s been lacking. These are sweet, sassy, incredibly smart people, people we have worked with and presented with and laughed with and so on since grad school. We get to spend a long weekend hanging out with them, and call it work.
On Sunday, I took my lovely bride across the river, to charming Wilmington.
It was a Christmas present delivered in March. I got tickets to see Colin Mochrie and Brad Sherwood doing their improve show. We sat right up front. Right up front. At one point I thought Colin was going to step off the stage, and I had a plan to try to break his fall.
The two of them have been doing this traveling improv show for more than a decade now. Every show different, some of the games familiar, if you know the Whose Line Is It Anyway? format. They did the game where people in the audience had to move them around, and another where people had to make the sound effects. A mother and her young teen daughter made the sound effects, and in that we learned that not every teen knows The Beatles. They played another game where a man and a woman had to play Siri and Alexa.
Finally, they closed a show with their own improvised Broadway tune. The setup was there was a musical titled “Wilmington!” and this was going to be the go home number in the show. So they sought out, from the crowd, the iconic things about the city. It was a short list, and it devolved quickly to “bodies in the river” and “condos with a view.”
We saw another improv show in 2019, with Greg Proops, Jeff Davis, Joel Murray and Dave Foley. I was able to get a line into that show, “She’s from Canada. You don’t know her.” No such luck this time, but it was a good show, if a little overly reliant on audience participation. That’s the high wire part of the show, though, and those guys are great at it. Catch them if you can.
I could tell you about my bike ride … let me tell you about my bike ride. This was the third ride with my new helmet, and the first of those three where I remembered my sunglasses, so the look was complete. But the ride was delayed, because I had a flat on my rear wheel.
It was further delayed when I ruined a second tube trying to fix the problem. But when you don’t rush, and do a thing a second time, you get it ride, and so off I went, content to pedal myself into the evening.
And 4.5 miles later that tube was flat, too. Joke’s on me!
So I gave up. Three in one day is plenty. And I’m buying new tires. It was about time, anyway.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get ready for a weekend trip.
We went to Washington D.C. on Saturday. It was a warm spring day, the sort that promises a lot of mugginess in the capital. It was peak cherry blossom season. Everyone knew it. So crowded.
This was the first time I’d been to D.C. since this monument was installed. It has a commanding view. And as you walk around the sculpture, it seemed the expression changed.
It’s also much taller than I’d imagined. But that’s as it should be.
Once you’d elbowed people out of the way, you got some nice views.
I kid, of course. Everyone was having a lovely time. Snippets of conversation floated through the air, like the kites flying everywhere, and the blossoms as they fell to the ground. I picked up sticks, because you never know when you’ll need a bit of cherry wood.
We walked down to the mall. The monument in the background, and perhaps the one place the capitol building doesn’t demand your attention.
We met my god-sister-in-law (just go with it) and her brother for dinner. We were all in town for a concert. Usually, I put up a lot of these, but I put up a lot of these. This was the really touching moment. A show that’s being discontinued — because of its themes of inclusiveness, perish the thought — got two nights of attention, in the Friday show and the Saturday show, and they sang with Guster and the National Symphony Orchestra.
Artists, man.
But that was only part of the weekend! More tomorrow!
It’s another day of playing a bit of catch up. Mostly because the day was spent working on stuff sitting at the computer. Dear Diary, today was more grading. That’s not terribly exciting. There’s always something more exciting than that, if you’re willing to look on the bookshelves everywhere around me, or the big stacks of music that are everywhere else.
This weekend I read “The Day The World Came to Town.” I picked it off the Kindle via a random number generator. It was released in 2003, I bought it on a big sale in 2021, and it’s sat there, waiting. And, when I opened it, I didn’t have high expectations.
This is a book about September 11th, and the days that followed, in Gander, Newfoundland.
You’ll recall that one of the things the U.S. did after the planes hit the World Trade Center was to close down American airspace. Every plane had to land at the nearest available, accommodating airport. No mean feat, logistically. This applied to international flights coming over, too. No one knew it at the time, because no one knew much in those first terrible hours, but the military was preparing to shoot down any planes that didn’t comply.
Up there in Newfoundland was a great big airport. They’d had an aeronautical boom during and after World War II. The biggest positive were the very long runways that could allow the biggest planes to takeoff and land. When jets, and their greater range, became the kings of the sky, it became more-or-less obsolete. A small place with no real reason for people to visit.
Then, 38 planes landed there, putting 6,595 people on the ground in a town where fewer than 10,000 people lived. And this book is that story.
And, as I said, I didn’t expect a lot from this book. But this book was good, and really quite charming. It details the people of that community, Gander, and some of the people who couldn’t have found it on a map before September 11th. These people, the Newfies, are really something. For instance:
The biggest problem facing officials was transportation. How do you move almost 7,000 people to shelters, some of which were almost fifty miles outside of town? The logical answer was to use school buses. On September 11, however, Gander was in the midst of a nasty strike by the area’s school-bus drivers.
Amazingly, as soon as the drivers realized was was happening, they laid down their picket signs, setting their own interests aside, and volunteered en masse to work around the clock carrying the passengers wherever they needed to go.
And the whole book is full of this, a parade of regular folks doing the small things that were huge things in such a traumatic moment.
In most cases, the passengers didn’t have their actual prescriptions with them. In each case, O’Brien and the other pharmacists had to call the hometown doctor or pharmacists so they would know the exact medication and dosage, and had a new prescription sent. During one stretch, O’Brien and his wife, Rhonda, worked forty-two hours straight, making calls to a dozen different countries.
Surprisingly, there isn’t one universal standard for identifying drugs. A drug such as Atenol, commonly prescribed to patients with high blood pressure, can go by different names in different countries. A pharmacist for more than twenty years, O’Brien spent hours on the Internet, and worked with the local hospital and Canadian health officials, to sort through the maze of prescriptions and find the right drugs for each passenger. In the first twenty-four hours, pharmacists in Gander filled more than a thousand prescriptions. All at no cost to the passengers.
Canadian Tire was giving products away. The local cable company made sure every place that was housing refugees had a connection for news. The phone people set up banks of phone lines and fax machines. And on and on and on it goes. People welcomed strangers into their homes. They made herculean efforts to get messages back and forth. The locals tried to distract a woman who was worrying over her firefighter son, and finding ways to let teenagers be teenagers.
One of the stories is about Gary Vey, who was the president and CEO of the Gander International Airport Authority. He wasn’t in Gander, but in Montreal at a big airport conference. He couldn’t fly back to work at his airport, so he rented a car, drove more than 600 miles, caught a six-hour boat ride, and then drove eight more hours to his hometown, going straight to the airport, arriving in the afternoon. He worked for about 12 hours, after all of that, and headed home in the predawn hours.
Not wanting to wake his wife, he quietly showered in the hallway bathroom and decided to sleep in their guest bedroom. The room was dark as he dropped his towl and climbed into bed, wearing nothing more than wet hair and a weary expression on his face.
And that’s when he realized he wasn’t alone. He was in bed with a seventy-year-old woman from Fort Worth, Texas, whom Vey’s wife, Patsy, had befriended at one of the shelters and decided to take home. Remarkably, the woman was still asleep. Vey gingerly stood up, covered himself with his towel, and retreated to his own bedroom.
“We’ve got company, I see,” he told his wife when they both awake the next morning.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s a lovely lady from one of the flights.”
She told her husband she couldn’t stand the thought of this old woman spending a night sleeping on the floor of a classroom at Gander Academy. So she’d brought her home and tried to show her a good time. Well, he said with a laugh, he almost showed her more than that.
It was a great weekend read.
Since we had so much fun with the Re-Listening project yesterday, let’s jump back in today. I’m still about 10 or 14 discs behind, after all. And next on the list is a great little 1998 record that no one purchased, but me. Seven Mary Three’s fourth studio record peaked at 121 on the Billboard 200, and it’s easy to forget, but even easier to enjoy.
It’s a rock album, but it’s also introspective, more than you would expect, in a rock album sort of way.
There’s also the visceral, which is perhaps what that band is best remembered for. Just roll down the windows, press a little deeper into the accelerator and sing aloud sorta stuff.
And that’s Seven Mary Three to me. My college roommate and I saw them on their second record’s tour. We played that one a lot in his place, and in his truck. And so this band, to me, is about Chuck — I didn’t see him much when this album came out. I wonder if he ever heard it. — about that whole driving into a song thing, and oddly, a band I listened to a lot while mowing the lawn.
I have four of their albums. Maybe I should buy the other three to round out their catalog.
Also, the rhythm section of this band never gets its due.
The band hasn’t played since 2012, and doesn’t look to anytime soon, apparently. I’d probably go see them again. We caught them at Five Points South, a now defunct club that hosted a lot of great music over the years. That’s also the place where I saw Edwin McCain for the first time. And his second album, “Misguided Roses” is up next in the Re-Listening project.
It is a perfectly acceptable effort. The album peaked at 73 on the US Billboard 200.
The single you remember, of course, is “I’ll Be,” which was on radio everywhere, and at most every wedding since then. It went all the way to the second spot on the US Heatseekers Albums chart, blocked from the top spot there only by the band, Fuel. And then it really took off, which disqualified it from the odd rules of the old Heatseekers chart, but it lodged itself into the top 10 of six other Billboard charts. I wasn’t even aware it could have been eligible for six of them, or why some of them even exist.
The rest of the album is stuck in amber which, for pop music, is probably an OK thing. One of the songs still stands out. (Though, I must say, they all sound better on every format that’s not “YouTube.”)
I probably saw McCain and his band three or four times right around that period, usually opening up for one of his buddies. He took some time away from music, restoring boats, apparently had a TV show about that in the middle of the teens. He’s released two records since then, 12 studio albums in a solid 20-year career. He’s touring this summer.
And that’s enough for now. That’s plenty. We’ve got a beautiful, busy spring weekend ahead of us. How about you? Big plans?
We have plenty to catch up on, and we must do it before I forget all about it. It’s easy to do that when there’s constantly so much to add. Constantly so much. You can’t even imagine how many things have accumulated since I began typing this.
From time-to-time I have to remind myself to read things for fun. And there’s just … so much. The work material, which is interesting. Daily news, when it isn’t doomscrolling. And some of that turns into work stuff, in a variety of ways. Every day, it seems, there’s a new thing that will be an example in one class or another. And then there are the, no kidding, 200+ books sitting here waiting for me. (I just counted. I should be reading.)
So, let us make the smallest of dents. A few days ago, as we traveled to and from Chicago, I read The Great Rescue. It’s about the USS Leviathan, seized from its German master when the U.S. joined World War I, the liner turned into a transport shipping, moving doughboys back and forth from New York to the U.K. The book was released to coincide with the American centennial anniversary of the war. I bought a digital copy of it in 2020, and finally opened the thing.
This vessel was a luxury liner sailing under the Germany flag, christened as SS Vaterland. She was opulent, massive and fast. She first sailed in 1914, a three-funnel beauty built as the largest passenger ship in the world, meant to move 4,050 passengers, and some of them in the grandest style. The Vaterland had only made a few trips before her fate was forever changed. It was docked on the Hudson when the United States declared war. After a time, it was taken over and repurposed. As the Leviathan, the vessel made 10 round trips, carrying over 119,000 people over there, before the armistice in 1918. Nine westward crossings in the year after the war ended brought the survivors home.
Is there video of this legendary boat? Of course! It’s only 100 years old.
It was also crowded as a troop ship. And the passengers needed to eat.
As for the book itself, it’s a popular history read, and it moves well. Reading about World War I from this distance is interesting distance because, on one hand, we have things like those videos, but not a lot of the popular histories always want to go too deep on the human subjects. The Great War was so broad in scope that the best histories are observed at the division level. This one, despite the distance and the large sample size, we get a little bit of time with the captains, men named Joseph W. Oman, Henry F. Bryan, who commanded seven of the voyages, and William W. Phelps, who was in command when the armistice was signed. (She was in Liverpool at the time.) But not Edward H. Durrell. He was the last military captain of the Leviathan. He shows up in the index, but not in the text. John Pershing and his staff went over on an early voyage.
You can’t tell the American story of World War I without mentioning him, so the book veers away from the vessel now and again to talk about him, his war, and meeting the woman who would eventually become his wife. Douglas MacArthur came home on the Leviathan after the war ended, American readers know that name, so some of his combat exploits are included.
We meet Royal Johnson, who was a young congressman and briefly a soldier before he was wounded and knocked out of the war. You meet Freddie Stowers. He gets a nice treatment, but there’s apparently a fair amount we don’t know about his early life. Only in the epilogue do you learn that he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. You meet the writer Irvin Cobb, who covered the war and probably had his exploits downplayed. And you also met Elizabeth Weaver, a nurse that went over to Europe and returned on the Leviathan. She plays a minimal role in the book, but it’s a second woman, one supposes.
Reading about World War I from this distance is also interesting distance because, on the other hand, it is so often short on those individual tales. And this is the case here, too. The book moves swiftly, and it probably does well to have the cutaways from the voyages to the short vignettes of these people’s stories. What’s the alternative? Writing about yet another day at sea? More smelly, cramped holds? A possible periscope sighting, again?
The other big character in the book was the influenza outbreak, and it comes up, but it feels like maybe it was tacked on as an afterthought, or cut down for some reason or another.
“The curtain was coming down on the wartime career of the Leviathan. It happened quietly, with none of the fanfare and news flashes that had accompanied the seizure of the ship in April 1917. The last entries in the log were made on October 29 as the vessel was tied to her moorings at Pier 4. Totally ignoring or missing the quiet end to her naval career, the New York papers devoted their front pages that day to the ongoing Senate fight over the peace treaty, a looming national coal strike, and how the prohibition amendment would be enforced when it went into effect in January. There was no mention of the Leviathan.”
The ship was decommissioned that day, a day the ship’s final log noted was “clear, slightly hazy, light SW airs.” It sat in New Jersey for a few years. By then, there were more ships than anyone needed. It was overhauled and refurbished and in 1923 United States Lines landed a deal to take five trans-Atlantic voyages a year, but it was expensive and it was Prohibition. In a decade as a post-war cruise liner it never turned a profit. And then came the Depression. The Leviathan was retired in 1936, sold, and scrapped in the 1940s.
Since we’re catching up, let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I’m probably 17 albums behind. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, I figured that since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” and I’ve only come to regret that it has taken forever, because I have a lot of music, and I don’t do this regularly. The idea was that I could pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.
So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998, because I got the CD books out of order. And, today, we’re in a bit of a greatest hits phase. First up, “Words & Music: John Mellencamp’s Greatest Hits,” a two-disc retrospective featuring at least one song from each of his studio albums released between 1978 and 2003, some 17 records.
These aren’t music reviews. They certainly aren’t music reviews of 21-year-old greatest hits, so this will be brief because I don’t have any good recollections attached to this. Besides, everyone has the same John Mellencamp memories, anyway, and that’s not a bad thing.
So, quickly. This is the first track on the first disc. It was an unreleased song, and it immediately tells you your favorite pop artist has entered a comfortable phase. It’s the strings, and the rhythm.
There was another new song on the second disc. And it reinforces the notion you got from the first one.
That’s probably a little cynical. I’m sympathetic to a problem had later in the 1980s Mellencamp. Everyone wanted him to make Jack and Diane over and over. No one wanted to see the guy grow or change as an artist or musician. I’m neither of those things, but I understood his complaint.
So let me share my favorite song from Johnny Cougar, from 1987.
Mellencamp had a bit of a reputation in Bloomington. And I almost met him once, just before we left. He was donating his papers to the university, and they had a big ceremony in our building. It was all very locked down for someone selling a man-of-the-people gimmick. Hilariously, while all the old university people were thrilled, none of the students even knew who he was.
Entertainment is a tough business like that.
Anyway, here’s your new favorite John Mellencamp song. Someone there played it for me, probably one of the family members or handlers was within earshot at the time.
He doesn’t have any tour dates on his site for this year, just now, but Mellencamp did more than two dozen shows last year. He still paints. He does VO work. Not bad for a guy in his early 70s.
If you like Mellencamp, and you can find it, there’s a good documentary-concert that was released about 15 years ago titled “John Mellencamp: Plain Spoken Live from The Chicago Theatre.” It’s worth checking out.
The next disc up was another greatest hits effort, and it’s not even their first compilation, but it was a good one for me. Def Leppard’s “Vault” covers the 1980-1995 range, and somewhere there in the 1980s was when I started finding my own music. MTV, don’t you know. They were there, I was there, it was bound to happen.
“Vault” was eventually certified five-times platinum in the U.S. It went platinum in four other countries and gold in four more. And that’s why you release greatest hits. Sometimes you make easy money on music already produced.
Which is not exactly fair. There was one new track.
It was a post-grunge era power ballad. There was a lot of that in 1995.
To promote the record, the band did shows on three continents in one day in Morocco, London and Vancouver. This put them in the Guinness Book of World Records, under the larger category of Things That Don’t Need To Be Records.
The rest of the tracks are off “Pyromania,” “Hysteria,” or “Adrenalize.” They all figure into the Re-Listening project, and this is already very long.
I’ve never seen Def Leppard live, and I’m surprisingly OK with that. They’re still touring, some 48 years into the band’s life now. I guess they’re the Stones, but with more intricate instrumentation. They’re playing all over North America this year.
Tomorrow, another book (I know!) and probably some more music.
