Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

This covered more ground than anticipated

It was oppressively muggy — central Arkansas muggy — last night. Also it rained. Rained all night. Rained into the morning. Thunder was my alarm clock. The storm front blew away mid-morning. We’ve been in triple digits with the heat index into the early evening. I’ve sat here to sweat.

I spent several hours doing work stuff today. Don’t you want to know about it? I had to find the notebook that held the fall 2025 notes for a class I’m teaching again. I figured it was in one of three places, and I found it in the third place: a bookcase. Also, there were two notes books. So many notes I made for myself! I’d forgotten that.

When last this class met it was a twice-a-week class. This fall it will meet once a week. So the bulk of my day was in starting the reorganization process. Moving things around, renaming modules. Oh, and I updated this document I maintain with pages and pages of university resources. And I updated the syllabus for the course. It’s funny: some parts of working through all of those details can be easy, and some parts seem like a huge effort.

Apply that nonsensical observation for most of my days for the next five or six weeks.

Tomorrow I’m going to restructure the outline of that class. Hopefully that will be done by Wednesday. The rest of the week will be spent in making sure the work works right for both the style, and schedule, of this new version of the class. And I need to figure out how I’ll update the old slides in an efficient way.

That, I think, will be solved by some inspired bit of epiphany. Or I’ll just do it the long way 15 times in the next few months. Copying and pasting is such a bother, innit?

Also, I have to work on two other classes. I suspect I’ll begin one of those next week. The good news is that they aren’t starting from scratch. I’ll just agonize over them as if they are.

There’s a new look to the site, and if you go to the front page you can see it now. It starts like this, the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

Go ahead and look. That link will go to a new tab. Give it 60 seconds of zen. This page will be here when you’re ready.

The new idea for the front page is to update those images each month. If I don’t mess that up I have front page updates prepped to take us into next June. If I don’t mess it up.

I also updated the mobile version of the site. Just some easy text corrections and changing a few buttons that needed changing. Still not sure why it looks as intended on a phone, but broken in a computer browser. That’s an issue for another day. I wonder how many times I’ve said that about this issue.

And, of course, because the first of the month was this weekend I also did all of my regular monthly computer updates, changing various files, updating spreadsheets, cleaning up files, and so on. It’s not the most fun thing to write about, but this is is an old machine now, and it’s necessary. Fortunately these are easy chores.

Do you know that feeling when you learn something new and you just have to tell someone about it? I learned this yesterday and I have to tell people about it. Admittedly, I like this tale more than anyone else will, but I have that feeling, and so now you get to learn about this too. And for that we must return to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy.

When the Augusta’s ammunition and gunpowder burned off the explosion was heard more than 50 miles away. The vessel’s remains sat in the water for about 90 years, a sometimes navigational hazard. I found a great 2015 lecture that talks about the ship, recovering the vessel’s remains, a tourist attraction, scavengers, and then …

That appeals to me in more ways than one. I’d just like to make things and then point to them later and say “That came from …” and the rest of that sentence not be “the lumber yard.” You can see some better photos of the HMS Augusta furniture and paneling from the DAR themselves.

Here’s one other, unrelated, Revolutionary War note for the day. Just 250 years and one day ago, John Adams wrote to Richard Cranch, the colonial watchmaker, clockmaker, and repairman of Boston. He talks about the inoculations against smallpox and a few other events of the day. But also this.

You mention the Exultation at a Declaration of Independence. Is not the Change We have seen astonishing? Would any Man, two Years ago have believed it possible, to accomplish such an Alteration in the Prejudices, Passions, Sentiments, and Principles of these thirteen little States as to make every one of them completely republican, and to make them own it? Idolatry to Monarchs, and servility to Aristocratical Pride, was never so totally eradicated, from so many Minds in so short a Time.

I’ve rambled on a bit, as it turns out, a few times recently about the public moods of those heady, dangerous, uncertain days. It’s not as if they had a bunch of surveys in the field to gauge things on the home front, or beyond their own social circles. They just knew what they knew, heard, read, and felt as they did. But there’s the great John Adams, certain of a sea change all the same.

It’s a remarkable kind of public politics, really. A revolution of its own, perhaps. Gauging the public interest like that wouldn’t have mattered quite the same way to a monarch. And it matters, of course, more and more now. Also, we still find the pros guessing at it often as not.

Cranch and Adams had been friends for decades. It was the watchmaker that introduced Adams to his future wife, Abigail.

I guess you could say, at both points, Adams knew what time it was.

Cranch married Abigail’s sister, so they were all related. And while the couples remained close, John kept his friend at arm’s length over money-making schemes. Cranch was not lucky in business. But, he served in the Massachusetts legislature, and was a trial court judge for almost 30 years. He and his wife died within a day of one another. He was apparently a forgotten man until modern historians wrote about him in just the last few years. His son became a federal judge in D.C. Two of his grandchildren became a painter and a minister. One of Cranch’s great-grandchildren was a man named Henry Ware Eliot, who became president of a brick making operation in St. Louis. And this is how history never ceases to astonish me. This man, the great-grandson of a Revolutionary War era man, died in 1919. Henry Ware Eliot, by the way, was also the father of T.S. Eliot.

I didn’t see that coming, either.

I had a nice ride Saturday evening. My lovely bride was off having a girls’ day and by the time I set out I had most of the roads all to myself. It’s quite lovely to be out when most everyone is already where they need to be. I did the river ride, which is the second route we designed for ourselves when we moved here in 2023. We haven’t done it in a good long while because a bridge has been closed since July of last year and there’s a sad and spooky part after that, but the road is opened once again.

Just behind me in that photo is where that new asphalt begins. If they’d just paved down another 100 feet or so (and, again, this road was closed for a year, they had time) they could have repaired the biggest mess of potholes you can find in the county.

When you get to the bridge it has that new overpass smell.

New overpasses have smells. Turns out it is not a pleasant smell, but surely it will descend upon the highway below it.

On the other side of the overpass we regained a pleasant little downhill, and a stretch of land that gives you three or four houses on one side, and a cornfield on the other. There is an intersection soon after that, so it was only ever a closure effecting about 1.5 miles, but still, it’s nice to have that road back. This corn is a definite change of pace.

From there you go up a little hill, through more fields, past the famous local artist, respectfully cruise by a memorial, and sprint through a tree canopy so you can get to an access road that’s a half-mile, tree covered stretch of brand new asphalt. A car followed me down that road, but the driver stayed respectfully behind me while I tapped out something in the 20 mph range. After that, back off the access road, another overpass, more trees, watch out for deer, go as fast as you can by the house where the people always yell, and then into the wind.

If I go the way of our designed route I would eventually get to a four-way stop and go straight, but last year the county made a shambles of that stretch of road. If I turn to the right I can stretch this ride. The weather was nice, I was not pressed for time, and so I went that longer way, making my road selection as it suited my whim and wind direction.I stunk it up on the one real hill on the route, as usual. Twice, though, I broke 34 mph on a flat stretch. Haven’t done that recently.

Maybe I’ll do it again!

adventures / books / Friday / history / music / photo / video — No comments
31
Jul 26

Fastest July ever

Happy weekend! I’m making it a long one. There was work, a little, but then my lovely bride and I decided to sit down and read books. First we read inside. Later, we read in the backyard. We know how to party.

The electricians came back to finish the install of the generator. Took them part of a third day to get it done, but at least this time it wasn’t 108 degrees outside. They’ve completed their tasks. Nice guys, unfortunately their shop is a long way away, or I’d call them our local electricians. Maybe they still will be.

And so we have a generator. The local inspector has to come out and inspect all of the gas and the electrical work, and hopefully that will be painless. Our electricians seemed to know what they were doing. The various gas people who’d come out seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure it’ll all look good.

This is how it works. If the power goes out, the system realizes it, and the generator fires up 10 seconds later. When the power comes back on, the generator set up realizes that, and turns itself off. Our job is to keep the air vents cleared, schedule annual maintenance, and, if the generator has to run for long stretches of time, check the oil.

Since we’ve been in the house the power has gone out three times. Once for about three hours, once for slightly longer. The first time we weren’t home, so I don’t know those details. Always in the back of my mind, though, this is the first time in my life that I’ve not lived on a priority grid — near a hospital or nursing home — and it could take a while to have the power restored if there’s a widespread outage. The neighbors talk about a big storm that came through and famously left them without power for a week. And that’s why we, and the neighbors, both have generators now.

Also, we got a shutter fixed today. Somehow some wind got in behind one, bent it over from the top down, and pulled the two top screws out of the siding. It just dangled there for a few days. It’s too far to reach via ladder alone. Also that roof is steep. Also, once in a while I get the impression that I am not as young and as bulletproof as I used to be. Also, that angle.

Anyway, a guy shimmied up the ladder, pulled out the old one, put up our new one (both are plastic, and look roughly identical) and held up a pleasant conversation the whole time — like he’d done this all before.

I promised to catch him if he fell. He promised to not mess up the gutter. He held up my end of the bargain and decided it wasn’t worth testing whether I meant it. (I meant it.)

Thing is, those shutters, pretty standard aesthetic pieces, come in packages of two. So now we have one extra shutter. Hopefully we won’t need it anytime soon. I put it in the store-it-and-forget-it section.

At the concert last weekend, Train did a curious little medley, the theme of which, if any, escaped me. But the crowd enjoyed themselves an awful lot with it.

It’s a party band vibe. A lot of crowd pleasing things, and tons of those local references that make the crowd scream. A lot of energy throughout.

The demographics here make no sense, and that’s probably the best part about it. For every person my age we saw at the show there was one person much older, and three people in their 20s. Age is just a number at a rock ‘n’ roll show. Maybe the demographics never should have mattered.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Sometimes, even writers who have won two Pulitzer Prizers, and/or the editors who edit them, can get punchy.

This is, so far, the only Looney Tunes reference I’ve read.

Col. Donlop was killed at the Battle of Red Bank. It was a poorly conceived assault by the German officer and his British commanders. The Hessians were trying to avenge a previous slight. They thought they had the element of surprise. They did not have the proper tools for a fort siege. They never had the initiative and, ultimately, the battle becomes a big morale win for the Americans.

Some of our colleagues are working at that site even now. Just a few years ago archeologists found the remains of 15 Hessian soldiers there, and the project has become a public and educational dig. Dr. Janofsky is the real sort of archeologist you’d want to meet. The kind that can bring history to life for people who thought they were uninterested. I had the chance to see her speak earlier this year. She’s incredibly passionate about the work and of course steeped in the time she’s studying, but a part of a program that’s using the most modern techniques (isotopic testing of remains!) to further the research. Between the discovery in 2022 and 2024 the researchers have held a few “public dig days” and almost 400 community members have taken part.

Read Atkinson’s book. (If you know how to party like I know how to party, this will be a great start to August for you.

books / cycling / history / music / photo / Thursday — No comments
30
Jul 26

This is no time to ask for more time

I spent the day reading and playing with cats. These were excellent choices. If this day came around again, I would do much the same thing. I’d just also do other things. There are always a lot of things I could do, a lot of things I want to do. You just can’t fit them all into every day. I’m never sure how to remedy that, but I’d like to figure it out. I’d like to figure out how to do all of the things I want to do, to the degree and extent I’d like to do them, so that each day has all of those things, nothing was overlooked, and there’s nothing to regret.

Or, how do you put 10 pounds of your interests in just two hands?

Also, how have I not figured out the solution to this dilemma by this point?

At the show last weekend, they brought Ed Robertson back on the stage to do a medley. Train played their shockingly ancient breakthrough hit “Meet Virginia,” and Robertson has been coming out for a little “Country Roads” ad lib. I expect he’s been doing the Canadian bit throughout. But Pat Monahan has a topical lyric in here.

I can’t not hear Country Roads anymore without thinking that we need some profound exploration and explanation about why it has such a growing, lasting resonance.

That’s a weird thing to think about at a rock ‘n’ roll show.

My lovely bride went out for a run. I went for a ride. I did a part of what we call the marsh ride, turning left before you get to the marshes. So it’s the non-marsh ride. It was one of those rides where I set out just to move my legs a little bit, having gotten started too late in the day. When it came down to it, I was riding well on the flat portions. Every time I looked down at my bike computer I was impressed by the speedometer. I was riding fairly poorly on the little hills. No need to look down to realize that. Some things you sense in more ways than one, and you do not need an LCD screen to convince you.

Anyway, cut over from one road to the other on some quite side roads, which was my plan, and then spent the next four miles wondering if I had enough daylight to add on a few more miles. I did not. One must be near home before dark if one did not bring along headlights. And one must never be late for dinner. This was what I saw over my shoulder at 7:55 p.m.

It was a nice little 17 mile ride, just enough to make me feel like I’d had a nice little bike ride.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. This is one of those little supposed anecdotes that hits on all of the themes I’ve been thinking about the last few days.

The question is whether you believe that. The anecdote here feels as much like wartime propaganda as something that really happened. But let’s assume that Moses Dunbar’s dad made that offer. He was the second of 16 children. His dad, John III, had fought for the British in the French and Indian war, but was supplying rebel forces during the revolution. They disagreed on politics, but also religion. As a young adult, and freshly married, Moses joined the Church of England. This was a problem for John, a strict Congregationalist. And of course that little passage omits other details. Moses had been arrested once before, and released. He’d thought about fleeing. He enlisted. He was captured, escaped, and was re-captured. The emotions of those times were running high. Connecticut’s Nathan Hale, a 21-year-old Continental officer was hanged just six months prior in New York, and people in Connecticut were surely thinking of that.

Moses Dunbar was eventually hanged in front of a large crowd of onlookers. He was apparently the only person to be convicted as a traitor and executed in Connecticut. Rumors were that his remains were later moved by his family, and there is another marker in another cemetery, but apparently this is still something of a mystery. He was buried, initially at least, at the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford, where the founder of the Nutmeg State, one congressman and four governors are also interred. You can read a bit more about Moses, including his last letter to his children, here.

You should also read Atkinson’s book. It offers some great insights into the times.

books / history / memories / music / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Jul 26

I had to log into Canvas today, and more fun things

Today I started doing some back end coursework. Building Canvas shells and preparing the reorganization of things. I started some light reading. The usual, and terribly exciting stuff. But, ya know, it has to get done. And done it gets. So much so that I may do less tomorrow. Is day three too early to take a break? It’s probably too early to take a break.

I’m taking a break.

I shot this photograph, which is nothing special, while doing the weekly garbage can chore, and promptly forgot about it. I remembered it. I edited, uploaded it, and promptly forgot about it again. So here it is, a nothing special snapshot from the wee hours of Monday morning.

The clouds had more patience than me and waited me out. Then nothing happened and I went inside, which is why it is nothing special, and probably why I forgot it, twice. But it’s here, I’m here, the site is here, you’re here, and so on.

The headliner at the weekend concert was Train, which is doing one of those “celebrating 25 years of a hit” tours. So many people are doing these now it no longer seems novel. It seems impractical. It seems a problem. The problem is that so many acts I like are doing them.

Anyway, at one point they launched into a planned bit of spontaneity and played Jack and Diane. Matt Nathanson came out for the back half of the song.

And, now, allow me to point you to something that will change your opinion about that song, and give you, finally, the correct opinion about Mellencamp. It was funny, when this happened, listening to the people who knew him, his father, his sons, and their opinions of him from first-hand experience, and watching all the right people fawn and fan over the whole event, and watching the students saying, “Who?”

I have two more concert clips to round out the week. Tomorrow’s video is something you’ve never heard before, guaranteed. Friday’s video is something I’ve, somehow, never seen live before.

I had a nice little ride this evening. I set out for my time trial 25-mile loop, but it was slow. I didn’t really know that when I passed the sheep, but that’s only because I see them in the first five miles or so.

Soon after, though, the numbers looked low, so I decided to do a bit extra. On the long straight road that usually gives me a good tailwind before the final segment I had a crosswind, and instead of turning for the last seven miles home I went down to the next turn, 1.5 miles down the road, hooked a right at the little white house on the corner and then pushed on through some woods, a few warehouses, over some railroad tracks, a few more warehouses, and then finally took another right, to pass by some other warehouses, and finally the bridge over the water at a place where you sit five feet below sea level, and then into a four-stop sign town that dates back to the 17th century.

Turning left at one of those stop signs sends me through one final neighborhood and then four miles of pastureland, and then home. It was a lovely evening for a ride, a lovely ride, felt good and, yet it was somehow slower than I expected. Who knows why these things are the way they are.

We continue on with Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. Terrific book and today I am again marveling at his source material.

This was just prior to the Battle of Brandywine. The 45th Foot returned to England the following year, 1778, its strength barely 100 officers and men by the time they got home. We know Lt. William Hale survived Brandywine, participated in the occupation of Philadelphia and beyond. By August 1778 he knew he was going home, his regiment in tatters. Less than 100 officers and men from their muster rolls survived their battles and the subsequent trip home. A 1914 text gives us the context clues that he survived until at least 1780. The author of that history, a Captain W. H. Wilkin of the same regiment, writes that Hale “was not a man of note,” and that his letters home “describe the war from the point of view of a British subaltern.” Wilkin, nevertheless, gives Hale’s correspondence a full chapter which is rich in context and granular reporting of some of the battles in which he participated. Hale was 22 and fighting in America, retired from the service a captain in 1781, married in
1783, and died in Devonshire in 1789. There are other Hales, contemporaneous American soldiers, the lieutenant’s father, an admiral in the British navy, and a few other Williams in subsequent generations. So that might be all I can dig up about the grenadier today.

Hale’s line about his esprit de corps has, of course, been used in still other books as well. How could it not? While I’ve not read those others, I can say that Atkinson is delivering another great work. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Catch up and read along!

books / history / music / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
28
Jul 26

Back to work, a little, sorta

I made the mistake of thinking ahead today, and now my head hurts. But sometimes you must do that — thinking ahead, I mean, not self-induced cephalgia — so that’s what I did today. I printed out calendars, September through December. I did this three times. And this is the start of my fall semester. The work begins anew, with a smile, and no pay until September, etc. This work will continue until mid-December, which will roll immediately into the spring term. The second thing I did was to look at all of the academic calendars. Classes begin this day, Thanksgiving is that day, finals will occur on those days. The next five months are defined.

I accidentally glanced at the spring calendar, then quickly distracted myself by figuring out my weekly schedule and office hours for the term. That took three Post-it notes. Now they’re just hanging on the corner of my monitor. Taunting me.

There’s a lot of preparation to do in the next month. But not as much as in some other semesters. One class I must convert from an online class to an in-person format. That’s going to be a task, with some things coming out, some things need to go in the newly vacant spaces, plus there’s the simple trick of doing a class twice a week as opposed to via email.

To build momentum, I’ll start somewhere else. Two classes must be converted from twice-a-week to once-a-week. One of them is get an structural overhaul. The other, just needs to be redone to accommodate the new term. Maybe some more theories. Seemed light last semester. That means more studying on my part, which is fine, great even.

And this, friends, is how I will fill a month-and-change of work. Hence the headache. But I’ll be pacing myself. There’s time for that.

The feature act we saw this weekend was Barenaked Ladies. I hadn’t realized it, but we’ve now established a little tradition of seeing them every summer. We went from my lovely bride, a few years ago, having never seen them to now having an annual appointment. I think this is her fifth time seeing them. And that means she has seen five of Jim Creeggan’s upright bass solos. Here’s one now.

Ed Robertson did a freestyle rap. They did the medley that started with “Pink Pony Club” and ended with “Highway to Hell” and included stuff like “Texas Hold ‘Em,” “The Gambler,” and “Hot to Go” in between. They played the hits. I still miss Steve Page. I suppose I forever will.

When BNL are the headliner I still think, Maybe this is the tour, maybe this is the night they bring it all back together.

I try not to think about how he’s been out of the band for longer than I knew him in the band.

It’s been, what, eight years now since they had the Hall of Fame reunion?

Time really has sped up. If the full band ever has the appetite to get back together I hope it slows down so I can see several of those shows. I would go to see several of those shows.

We’re glancing at Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy, which I am enjoying reading a great deal. If you like history of the period and you’ve somehow missed this best seller, go get it. Or get the first book, then this one. Atkinson is aces, as ever.

This is something I’ve always wondered about, ever since some history or social studies class began to teach us about the American Revolution in whatever grade that really began, I’ve always had questions about how one group of people came to find themselves in a position to upset the paradigm (I knew big words as a kid) and the ability to explain their will to others, and win the day. While doing all that, of course, you have to build resources, prepare and fight elements of the best army and navy in the world, and so on.

Representation got them into meetings, and local “committees,” general hooliganism, brute force, and some policy that they managed to institutionalize led to enforcing the new rules of the road (before they were laws of the land). If you were on the fence you got persuaded, or you went to Canada, the islands, or back to Europe. Persuasion came in many forms, not all of it terribly polite. But that’s revolution for you.

Which is, I guess, to say that I would have been terrible in the moment.

Who gave you the right? What are the rights? What are your rights? What are my rights? Who said you could speak for all of us? What if we don’t agree? No king, sure, but there’s a lot of you and you suddenly have a lot of rules and I could see a time, in another 250 years, when it is truly burdensome and sure they’ll have powers baked in by representation and precedent but, you, here, now, who gave you the right?

They might only thought up the idea of tarring and feathering people when they came across someone like that.

Here’s James Allen’s diary that Atkinson is quoting. And therein is yet another way for us to realize and recall that people had their positions for unique and, sometimes, changing reasons. The Allens were a prominent Pennsylvania family. They were loyalists but, as James Allen said once when talking his way out of a bit of trouble, didn’t actively work against it. At various moments people on both sides took a for-us-or-against-us approach, the most basic history can do that, too, but that didn’t always apply to everyone in those years, for all sorts of reasons like laws and history and fear and risk and religion and class and a feeling of what is just or what is at stake and on and on. We never think on that enough. Hard is the fate, indeed.