Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

adventures / cycling / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
13
Mar 25

A day in sunny Chicago

Yes, we are in Chicago. Spring has arrived here with us. (It will snow here this weekend.) But today is beautiful, and if there’s one thing I learned in the Midwest, it is that you live for the day, because tomorrow could be an entirely different kind of problem.

But this trip is great, because we are with friends and colleagues, most of whom we haven’t seen in a year. Sadly, some aren’t here for international travel reasons, but maybe in a few years more reunions will be had.

We had lunch with friends from South Florida and UNC-Chapel Hill today. Lovely, lovely people. The sort you should see more than once a year. Two, maybe three times would be much better — and still keep me at low risk of being found out. We walked down to an Irish pub, where everyone working there was Irish, or at least had worked out a good accent. I had the shepherd’s pie, because I’m a sucker for the stuff. In the back of the joint, near the restroom, was this sign.

I glanced at that, thought, They oughta know and took a good picture.

Down the street was a bike shop. My lovely bride had a meeting and I had nothing to do, so I walked down there. Look! Bikes!

The application of that bike lane warning was hasty, and there’s probably an end-of-the-work-week story that isn’t that good, but I had a two block walk, which gave me plenty of time to invent a better story.

I went to the bike shop to look for helmets. I’m due a new helmet this year. Past due, in fact. And they have one I like. And since it’s not at my local store, and I had a few minutes I figured, why not? Except while this store had it on their website, they didn’t have it in the shop. Now, it’s a small enough place that everyone sees you come and go, and so I felt a bit silly about being in there and walking out without buying anything. I need new fingerless gloves, so I bought some. They made a sale, I didn’t leave empty handed, everyone was happy.

And I saw Didi the Devil! He’s a German superfan. A car mechanic by trade, holder of 17 world records for bike inventions and he’s been on the side of the road for all the big races in Europe for 30-some years now. The story goes that in German broadcasts, the old 1 km to go flag, a red triangle hanging above the race, was called “The devil’s flag,” and that inspired the costume. The riders say it’s good luck to see him in the race.

I’ll never see him in a race, of course, but I do see him when I watch the races. And since I’m talking about bikes tomorrow, maybe he’ll bring me some good luck.

The photo was taped to the customer-facing side of the receipt dispenser, so if I had not gotten new gloves I wouldn’t have seen him today. The guy that made the sale flipped that photo up and showed me another one taped beneath it. Double good luck to all their customers who know what they’re looking at.

After the day’s pre-conference work, we went out for dinner with a friend from St. Bonaventure. We headed to another pizza place, but it was a two hour wait for some mysterious reason. Looked dead, sounded quiet. No one wanted a wait like that, so we went to Billy Goat’s Tavern.

It was legendary before it became a bit on SNL.

The place is steeped in Chicago history. This is beneath the old newspapers, and so all of the reporters and the people that wanted to be seen came here. The walls are covered in the city’s history. The picture frames jammed next to one another like a wood and glass wallpaper.

We first visited in 2008, when we were there for another conference. We stopped by at lunch time, when the line wraps around the restaurant and the old man was doing his cheezborger shtick for his guests. That guy is, or was, the life of the party, and he knew it and reveled in it. He could also take one look at you and guess what you were eating. It doesn’t hurt that it was a relatively small menu, but he could just tell. It was great. Also, the borgers are pretty good burgers.

At the time of night we visited, it was quieter, the night crew didn’t need to do the gimmick. And there was plenty of room to sit and have a quiet meal. Also, the borgers are still pretty good burgers.

Now I’m going to go finish my presentation. I have to deliver a concise 12 minutes on this research tomorrow. It’d be better if they would allow me 14.

adventures / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Mar 25

The traveling academics

We are traveling. This required us to pack up suitcases, which we did last night. An old pro at this by now, it took me about 15 minutes, and only that long because I needed to be sure to leave room for an extra sports coat. We then drove to an airport. We went through the procedure required of you at the airport. I walked through a quick security line. Though the sign said you were five to seven minutes away from the front, it was more like two, and this is a pleasant bit of social engineering.

Through security, no problem. The hardest part was recombobulating.

Then to the plane, and on the plane and off. Here’s proof.

So where did we go. It was a domestic flight. It took a few hours. And when we got here we had chamber of commerce weather. That’s not much of a hint. This is a better hint.

Does everyone know now? Well, we walked around a bit today and I found one more fiendishly difficult hint I can share with you.

Needs more Ditka.

We are here for a conference. My lovely bride is presenting some of her Olympic research. I am presenting our recent cycling research. There will be rooms of sports scholars everywhere. The person that runs the conference is a person you might now.

When she’s not upside down in a swing, she’s the executive director of the only stand-alone association geared to communication researchers interested in exploring sport from diverse critical, methodological, theoretical, and multi-disciplinary perspectives.

And this is important, that swing had an age limit.

There were three of those swings, and they were all in use when I shot that. Not a single person was under the age limit. I bet that happens a lot.

Anyway, the conference starts tomorrow. She’ll have to climb out of that swing to present her research that morning. I’ll give another talk on Friday afternoon, and then I’ll run a session on Saturday. Great fun! Many pizzas!

(We had deep dish tonight. I’m not sure how many more I’ll want.)

cycling / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
11
Mar 25

First outdoor ride of the year

Yesterday, at the end of class, I gave my students my other bully pulpit lecture. I tell them at the beginning of the term that being at the front of the room allows me to give one or two brief speeches that have little or nothing to do with the class. And yesterday was the day, because today was the day.

That speech is the one about how to pass other road users safely when you’re driving. There are relatively new state laws. People don’t know them very well. I am updating people one room at a time. I have a whole patter about this, because I’ve been doing it for years. I used to do it much more intently.

The whole thing was about being careful to allow cyclists room to safely operate when you pass them. And I won’t tell you what I wear or what color my helmet or my bike is because I want you to be safe and attentive and considerate when you pass all of them them. Because one of them might be me. “And remember,” I used to say in the driest tone of humor I can muster, which is pretty considerable, “I have your grade, right here, in my hand.”

That’s what I used to do, and one semester a student said to me at the end of the term that I’d psyched her out and tensed her up whenever she saw a cyclist. That’s not the point. Nor is it the point to threatened anyone’s grade, of course. It’s a laugh line. After that, it seemed important to point out, “This is a laugh line. But, also, be careful.”

All of this was made much more relevant after my lovely bride’s pickup truck-caused accident in 2022. And it’s relevant since we’ve been doing research in this area the last few months. And it’s relevant because, today, the weather was beautiful and I took my bike off the trainer and put it on the road. (Twenty-two days earlier than last year!) Oh, happy day.

Also it was a momentous day, of sorts. I’ve been sneaking up on this little achievement for a while, and I certainly didn’t want to capture it indoors. So I have slacked off on the trainer, with that in mind. I didn’t really want to do it on a road I know very well, but that’s the risk you run when you are on your normal training roads. Not that it matters, nothing about this matters, but, somewhere, right in here, I reached a mileage equivalent to the earth’s equatorial circumference.

That’s 24,901 miles to you and me. I celebrated by dropping a gel, turning around, and picking it up.

The bullfrogs were cheering me, and summer, on.

In addition to being the first outdoor ride of the year, and the equatorial ride, it was also new bike computer day. New is a relative term. I bought this, used, at the end of last September and mounted it in the cockpit today. The computer I just retired, a Garmin 705 Edge, I bought used in 2020. It was a 2008 release. My new computer is the Garmin 520, which made its way into the wild in 2013, so I’m happily still behind the curve, but it is a half-decade leap forward for me.

And that’s an important five years because the new computer communications with this new light, the Garmin Varia. I got one for The Yankee for her birthday last year, she loves it, and so she got one for me for Christmas. This is no mere light. There’s a radar system here, and it detects approaching vehicles, and then signals the computer, which beeps, turns red on the edges, and displays dots meant to represent the traffic behind you.

It’s a cool little feature. Sometimes, in the right circumstances, you don’t always hear the oncoming vehicles, so it is a nice help. Though you mustn’t think of it as 100 percent accurate. It’s not too bad on false positives, but there seems to be one time of day, if you’re riding in front of a low-in-the-sun sky, that it isn’t perfect. It didn’t pick up the first two cars that passed me on this initial ride today, but I think it caught the rest of them. One extra layer of safety.

What’s nice is that sometimes the headset will beep, because the Varia picks up a vehicle before I hear it. I have developed a three-look technique that seems to help. I glance over my shoulder when the oncoming motorist is well back, when they’ve closed about half the distance and then just before they get to me. And this seems to help them realize that I’ve seen them too. Since I’ve started doing this late last summer, most of my passes have been much better.

But perhaps the best part of the Varia is this. It has different light settings, and I’ve watched this with great amusement while riding behind The Yankee. She leaves her light on a solid setting, but when a car or truck gets to a certain distance away from them, the light starts blinking. Every time, every time, you see the car decelerate and move over.

So if you wandered to this page thinking about bike radar, we’re still in the early days, but big fans of them so far.

Also, because why not, it was new jersey day.

I got a good sale at NeoPro. Full zip, three pockets, they do the job you ask a bike jersey to do, except make me faster and skinnier. They’re bike jerseys.

Now I need to find good sales on bib shorts.

And to go pack. So, if you’ll excuse me.

Monday / photo / Rowan / video — Comments Off
10
Mar 25

Giving you no mis, and certainly no dis

In class today we discussed disinformation and misinformation. There is a difference. Did you know the difference? I recently had a nice conversation with a colleague at Cambridge about this, and I showed one of his videos in class.

It gets down to motive, we decided, but motive isn’t always clearly perceived. And the conveyance of bad information is bad, either way. Happily, my students have a pretty decent handle on the social engineering often at play with disinformation. But there’s always something new to learn. The next time the class meets we’ll discuss some techniques on savvy consumption.

And then we get into the fun stuff!

About time the class sighed.

Just kidding, it’s all fun. It’s an international media class. Coming up after spring break we’ll talk about the Armed Forces Network and sports on the international stage, and advertising and social media. It has all been a great deal of fun.

Almost as fun as after office hours, when I went to a nearby JoAnn’s. They’re all closing, of course, and that’s unfortunate for the people that work for the company and it’s stores, but there’s something about store closings that is interesting to me.

And what was interesting today was how unusually crowded this JoAnn’s was, and how the shelves were already getting bare. But I walked around, saw all of the things that weren’t fabric, and then I bought some fabric. It seemed worth it for an early evening’s worth of entertainment. I’ll make some new pocket squares from them this summer.

It was probably the largest JoAnn’s I’ve ever seen, which is to say, bigger than two or three others I’ve ever noticed. Smaller than a late 20th century major retailer, much bigger than necessary for fabric. I wonder if the kitchen section was somehow part of their problem. Maybe it was the wood craft section. Or the enormous floral quadrant. It seems they’ve strayed, in their pursuit to pursue Hobby Lobby.

I also saw some of the reasons why JoAnn’s has struggled these last many years, the all too familiar considerations that have hit brick and mortar stores of all stripes. The apps on my phone were happy to tell me how much cheaper every comparable brand and product were elsewhere.

It’s a sad feeling, in a bad-laminate-floor-under-worse-neon-lighting way. But, still there were employees straightening things up, moving things around, offering good cheer, great theatrical performers that people are when working in retail. Retail was never easy, but the challenges they face today … it all felt typified by the last dying gasp of advertising that was plastered around the store. “New shipments arriving from our warehouses daily!”

The rapidly thinning shelves would suggest otherwise. Crafty customers of crafts had been busy picking the place clean; there aren’t many reasons to go back.

I know the reasons you come back here. The proof is in the analytics, and the analytics say the most popular feature on the site is our regular check-in with the kitties, which starts right now.

Poseidon has to follow you everywhere, especially when that place is behind a closed door. So when his honed feline senses tell him you’re heading to a door, he’s there. And in this case, he had to get into the bathroom so he could jump on this rickety MDF cabinet top and be taller than everyone.

He is very pleased with himself in that photo. Sometimes you try to keep a cat out of things, but other times, you’re just too tired, distracted, slow, or you remember that look they get when they’ve conquered the unconquerable.

For Phoebe, it is different. Her race is to find the coziest spot possible.

I respect her dedicate to her craft.

So, you can see, the cats are doing just fine. And so begins another week, one like any other, but different in every way.

What does that even mean? I’ve no idea, but we’ll find out together, in this space, this week.

Friday / memories / music / video — Comments Off
07
Mar 25

Re-Listening: One of these has a notorious Star Trek reference

Apropos of nothing, I just sneezed. Some sneezes you can feel coming from a long way away. Sometimes you can sense that a sneeze will be arrive tomorrow, at about 1:30. The lining of your nose gets that first tinge. “There’s something in here!” signals are sent to the brain. The brain fires off memos in triplicate to the body. “We’re going to do it!” Your eyes shut, the tongue moves to the roof of the mouth, and the muscles brace. Sometimes it happens in just a few seconds, or 25 minutes.

That’s not the sneeze I just experienced. This sneeze was a bit closer to the seeing-your-life-flash-before-your-eyes tinged with a bit of “What am I going to do after this, if my nose stays on my face and my organs stay in place?”

There’s no metaphor here. Just the one sneeze, come and gone. Sometimes the nose needs a reboot. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a low-brain reaction to a sternutation.

I’m about 14 CDs behind in the Re-Listening project, so let’s make a small dent in that deficit. If anyone can remember back that far, the Re-Listening project is something I’m doing in the car. 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.

I decided, since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” I thought, back when I did that sort of thing. “I can pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.” And I did that, until I kept forgetting to do it, at least, which is how I’m so far behind right now.

So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998. This was a record that wasn’t meant to be a success, but a 1996 single got a lot of airplay and a Grammy nomination. And then the record was certified gold the next summer. And that happened to Duncan Sheik who was used to playing small venues, and suddenly he was on much bigger stages, which was a surprise for everyone, especially the singer, who saw that one song stay on the charts for a year, after peaking at #16. It spent 55 weeks as a radio hit, which was one of the longer stays on the chart at the time.

But there was more to the debut record than just the one single. There were two other singles! And a lot of deep cuts. Probably I picked this up after the second single, “She Runs Away,” but I don’t recall for sure. It was almost 30 years ago … a sentence I find I am now saying a little too often.

Anyway, when I popped this into player, I was hooked by the second track. (It sounded great on big wooden speakers.)

Why did we ever move away from those large speakers, anyway? Everything sounded better. And nothing was re-compressed by an additional layer of digitization.

And, look, that first Sheik record was pure singer-songwriter pop. Except for the parts that weren’t. But he did like to incorporate his vocal range all over the place.

At various times, when I had to do such things, Sheik’s music was a good vocal warmup. Sing along on the way to the studio and all that.

There are 11 tracks on the record, I liked 10 of them, and eight of them still hold up. Sheik has released eight other studio albums and a live record, but none more commercially successful than his debut, which did hit number 80 on the Billboard 200. He’s probably OK with that. I got the impression from interviews that the unexpected success was a little overwhelming.

These days, he’s performing as a writer and composer on Broadway, where he’s won two Tony awards.

I’m sitting here looking at the next disc trying to decide how I have this false memory. The record was released in 1998, just another power pop, post-grunge alt record. And the overriding memory doesn’t fit that timeline. I went to high school, and once worked with a guy who was in a local band. I saw them play, just another group of kids who were inspired and he’d sing the big hit, but he did a cool vocal trick in one spot where he’d sing on top of the note in a key spot. It was just enough different that now, when I think of or hear the song, I hear it his way.

Only, I didn’t work at that place when the single was a single. I hadn’t worked there in probably two years. So how does that memory even work?

Beware of memories, I guess.

A few years later I got an out-of-the-blue email from a mutual friend and it turns out that that guy was going to go to jail for a while. He’d gotten drunk and climbed into his house through his bedroom window, only it wasn’t his window and it wasn’t his house. Extremely common name. No idea what became of him.

Anyway the band was Semisonic — and I mean that made the record, not the band of the guy I knew. “Closing Time” was the single everyone knew, of course, and it was a big hit, climbing to 11 on the US Radio Songs chart, four on the Pop chart, topped the Alternative Airplay chart, 13 on the Mainstream Airplay chart and so on.

But, and I realize I used this above, there was a lot more to “Feeling Strangely Fine” than the one single. The second single, from August of 1998, is a terrific little pop number which found its way into two top 40 charts. I always liked that it was a song about listening to a cassette. It was charming even to me, a slow music format adopter.

Then, as now, there was no way this piano — a keyboard, really — should pair up with that bass sound.

Whenever I picked this up, I don’t recall that either, I listened to it for a good long while. It got heavy rotation during the year of driving back and forth from Little Rock to Birmingham. This was a good late night, empty highway song.

I don’t know your feelings about this, obviously, but I think we all need a New Year’s Eve song. Here’s one now.

There’s one song another song on here that I’ve always liked, but I can’t listen to it, because the weird way the singer treats the chorus is too catchy. It’s just days and days of this, when you play it. You’ve been warned.

That was Semisonic’s second album. They produced two more studio records and a live album. And they’re still at it, touring the U.S. this summer with Toad the Wet Sprocket.

That’s enough for now. The weekend is here!