Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Photos I forgot to share

Rather than spend this time discussing today’s committee meeting — we looked at some material we’ll distribute on campus next year — or the rest of the day spent staring at words on a screen, I thought I would try to once again impress you with some photographs. These were things I shot earlier this week and, as the title says above, I forgot to share them here.

This was, I believe, from Sunday night. If you hold the phone just right you can tilt the lines whichever way you want them to go, of course, but this was the true representation relative to my position on the ground, no adjustments necessary.

And while that was in the nighttime this is fully in the afternoon, Monday specifically, when I had a little race with my sheep herding friend. He was pretty fast that day.

Here is my shadow selfie, as he is cruising through a little town. I set a PR on that segment, despite sitting up for a few photographs.

I like this one for all of the colors, one season’s palette is giving way to the next. And, also, it looks like some forgotten frozen plain. Except it isn’t forgotten — I’m here. And it isn’t frozen. Yet.

And then just up the road, this spot is only slightly evocative of an African savanna. But it’s only the colors on the ground and those couple of trees poking, and the bright appearance of the moon that bring that to mind.

In fact, the moon was watching over the neighborhood. These trees are much more familiar trees. I see them every time I come in and out.

For appearances sake, I hope they’ll hold on to their leaves just a bit longer. Until the first week of March, let’s say.

Anyway, this is the weekend when I will catch up on some things. I have been behind on some work for a few days too many, and concerted efforts will be made to get back up to level. And then Monday will come and we’ll start this again. And then I will catch up on next week and I will start in on some other projects where I am woefully behind.

But, first, I must go deal with some leaves myself.

adventures / football / Philadelphia / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — No comments
06
Nov 25

It’s a high pitched honking sound, which trills up at the end

A breezy, chilly day. And, later, downright coolish. That’s the season, and that’s a point we must concede. This comes with this season.

In today’s Criticism in Sport Media, we watched “It’s Time.” Here’s a little clip where Billy Brewer talks about how Chucky Mullins got to Ole Miss.

The problem was that I was able to find nine minutes of the doc to skip, but we just couldn’t cut out anything else out and keep the story together. So it ran the whole class. But this will be an interesting experiment. What will the class say when we talk about it on Tuesday?

In my org comm class we talked about different types of conflict, the way behaviorists used to see it, the way we view it today, the structural and contextual factors that create it, and why it is sometimes good.

And then we played a bit of the prisoner’s dilemma. I broke the class into two groups and sent one of them outside. This group played as the Las Vegas Raiders. The other group played as the Los Angeles Chargers. I told them each the circumstance. Last game of the season, if you win, you make it to the NFL playoffs and the other team goes home. If the two teams tie you both make it to the playoffs. What do you do?

I made the groups argue this out separately amongst themselves. I brought them back together to reveal the choices they’d made. This scenario actually happened a few years ago, and some of them actually remembered it, which made the internal conflict a little more interesting. Ultimately, though, both sides decided to play for the win.

This is how it played out in real life.

So one group won, basically. One student rightly noticed that if both groups had been left in the room they could have figured this out. But that’s the prisoner’s dilemma for you.

It’s an applied approach to understanding people and groups, this class, you see.

I took a grad school class with a guy who literally wrote the book on game theory. (There are about 6,000 books on game theory, to be sure.) He talked about it for an entire semester. And so, today, I was laughing to myself about his many ridiculous stories.

After class we went over the river. Had dinner at McGillins the oldest Irish pub in the city. The food was not the best I’ve had at an Irish pub, but the experience was fine. It was just up the street from the venue where we saw.

He does laugh funny.

It’s all one-liners and bawdy dark comedy. He does a lot of good crowd work. And he laughs funny.

Then every now and again he’ll do something very thoughtful, almost philosophical, which gives away the other nonsense. The problem with one-liners, though, is that they’re almost immediately forgotten. But the laughs remain! Even the funny ones.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — No comments
05
Nov 25

It was pleasant, I said

Grading this afternoon. Class prep this afternoon. A bike ride this afternoon. We are getting down to that time of year where any of these rides could be the last nice ride of the year. I hate this feeling.

There will be a few weeks of colder riding. I have some nice long pants and I’ll put plastic bags on my socks to keep out the wind. I have full-finger gloves and a ~~parachute~~ windbreaker. All of that buys me about 20 degrees of toleration. Also, it slows me down considerably. I’m not sure which of those two things is what ultimately drives me inside. Maybe we’ll find out this year! (Sigh.)

But not today. Today was beautiful, and I had a pleasant 30-miler. Here are some of the sights.

I wonder what this building is for:

Whatever it is, those water spigots seem pretty important in the design.

What’s really fun here is that when you get to this spot you’ve been going up a fast false flat, but right at the top, the little hill actually challenges you just a bit, unless you’re really turning over the pedals. And then you see this power station. And then it flattens out and points down just a tiny bit. Free power!

This is work on a 160-year-old steeple. It started this week. The church thinks it’ll be complete before the weekend. There are maybe 400 people in that community, I wonder what it was like in the 1860s. More horses and carriages, I’d guess.

And now a story about the wind. On my last road, headed home, I had a notable right-to-left crosswind. Coming up was a side road that is a .82 mile segment on Strava. So I turned right and rode into the headwind, so I could turn around at the other end and race down it with a tailwind. On the way up, I was riding into the sun, and saw this tree.

At the other end of the road I turned right, just to add on another mile or so, and see some more sights. Like this combine.

And that same combine in profile.

As I turned around and headed for that segment, that wind, which I’d ridden in for about 80 minutes, absolutely disappeared. So I was about 15 seconds off my best time on that segment, which was recorded 53 weeks ago. But, hey, I’m still supposed to be taking it easy. (Until Friday.)

Back at home, a lovely sunset was underway.

Click to embiggen.

This evening, more class prep, and other class stuff. Tomorrow, class!

adventures / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — No comments
04
Nov 25

Election Day

If you’re here for the Catober bonus pics, this is the day for them. I have six photos here, the ones recently captured, too late to include, too delightful to ignore. These photos are our thanks — mine and Phoebe and Poseidon’s — for taking part in Catober all of last month. And if you didn’t — the very nerve! — you can click that link and see them in reverse chronological order.

These bonus photos are in no particular order, but the last one is from my lovely bride, it’s just about the cutest thing you’ve ever seen and is my all-time favorite Phoebe pose. (And she has a lot of great poses.) Please enjoy these, and thank you again for being a part of Catober. (More words are below.)

We had a governor’s race, and plenty of other things lower down the ballot. So, for the last several weeks I’ve been giving all sorts of info to my classes. Registration tips and deadlines. And then early voting links and, finally, the Election Day and the last big push. Make your voice heard! You are a part of one of our largest voting blocks! Politics, friends, is definitely interested in you! And, finally, if you’re in line when the polls close, stay in line and vote.

And then, like me, you can wonder how the local TV stations and YouTube will get by for ad revenue after today.

I, a person who studied political campaigns in grad school and covered (in some way or another) every campaign between 1996 and 2020, have never wanted a campaign cycle as badly as I wanted this one to end. On teevee, there’s a guy who looks like he can barely complete a sentence. And he’s running ads of his opponent doing the same. Her ads are all about a helicopter. Apparently she is a rotary aircraft enthusiast. On YouTube, it’s my local state lawmaker and there really should be a button that allows me to say “I know you. We’ve met. I like you. I’m going to vote for you. Please, please spend your advertising budget courting other people, because you’re wearing me out, to the point where I’m questioning my preferences.”

That’d be a big button, sure, but it would be worth it.

We drove over to the polling place, where I thought about that button while I pushed other buttons. We have electronic voting booths here. (I do prefer the old fill-in-a-bubble style, myself.) It took us a while to get there because there was some significant car accident that required two detours to get around. The voting was done in a municipal garage. It had the smell of grease, industry, and democracy — long may we have all three.

There were four folding folding tables set up. Two for each district, and then divided by names. Lacking any real originality, I went into the line that held the S names. I told the lady my name, and tried to sound convincing doing it. She asked for one other bit of information, as a verbal challenge to cross-reference the legitimacy of my being there, and I concentrated really hard to not stumble through it. She took a blood sample, a bit of hair and a retinal scan to complete the interview. Meanwhile, her colleague, a gentleman even older than she, pushed forward a paper pad. I had to sign here and print there. I’d just signed the digital screen, poorly as it turned out. Before she could take it back I was able to see my official signature under the new one. I’m surprised they let me vote at all, given the discrepancy. I worked really hard on the paper version, because someone will flip through that in a library or archive one day, and you’d like to be legible for that. (No one is ever going to scroll through digital signatures, let’s be serious about this. When all of this was done, and I explained to them the first 16-layers of my family tree, I was given a little key card. Put it in the slot arrow first, and leave it there until you see the green check mark.

Wave it in front of the screen and don’t leave until you see purple stars, got it.

We make these systems as simple as can be, and for good reason. People don’t see all the details, get in a hurry, get forgetful, they’ve never used a device like this before or, at best, once every few years. And some of these ballot selections require two votes. And what if your finger shakes?

Anyway, I voted. I took my little key card back. I thanked them both again, just as I had when I signed in. The enthusiasm of polling place volunteers is absolutely unmatched — Long may they come back and do this important work.

Now, we’ll just wait to see who wins these things.

(Update:Just an hour-and-a-half after the polls closed, a gubernatorial winner was declared. And the loser is now a three-time loser. After this drubbing, and it was a drubbing, it is safe to say the state has rejected the notion of him as a political leader.)

In my criticism class we discussed this story, NHL player Brad Marchand misses practice to fill in for junior hockey team after coach’s family tragedy:

Florida Panthers left winger Brad Marchand is missing time on the ice with his teammates to help out a friend.

Marchand, 37, offered his hockey expertise to the March & Mill Co. Hunters team on Wednesday, Oct. 29, by filling in as the team’s coach. The team’s usual coach, JP MacCallum, took time off after his 10-year-old daughter, Selah, died of cancer, per Marchand’s Instagram post.

Marchand missed the Panthers’ 3-2 Tuesday, Oct. 28, loss to the Anaheim Ducks after taking a leave of absence from team to attend Saleh’s funeral, according to NHL.com.

It was a simple curated piece, as you can already tell. I don’t think the class picked up on that as a whole, but we should notice these things, particularly as we undertake media criticism. What are the strengths of that style of writing? What are the weaknesses? Why isn’t this guy’s whole outlandish career (because he was that guy in his early days) also not included here. Was it a rehab piece? No. Was it a profile? Nope. Nowhere near complete enough for that. But it was something worth seeing and talking about for a few minutes.

This piece is a bit older, but the guy in it just retired, and it was a nice contrast to the hockey item, so why not? Malcolm Brogdon knows his impact can extend well beyond the hardwood:

After the 2014 season, during which Brogdon averaged a team-leading 12.7 points, 5.4 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 1.2 steals in 31.4 minutes a game, he and his brothers joined their mother on a trip to Brazil. Adams had been working on an international science training program there and decided to bring the boys along for a family trip where they could all experience another country together as adults.

There’s a joke among the Brogdon boys that Malcolm has no personality. Mostly, it’s a result of John’s and Gino’s strong personalities swelling over Malcolm’s, but it’s also a result of Malcolm’s intense focus on his goals.

“Sometimes I sound like Allen Iverson when I’m trying to get him to go out with us at nights,” Gino says. “I’m like, you’re talking about not going out because of practice. Not a game, but practice. But we did manage to get him to go out with us a couple times in Brazil.”

When Brogdon saw the poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro right next to hotels that he knew would make hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the Olympics and World Cup in the following years, it solidified in his mind what he wanted to do after basketball—start a non-profit or NGO (non-governmental organization). “After basketball is over, I want all my energy to go to that,” Brogdon says. “That’s my true passion. I want to transform people’s lives in third-world countries—give them clean water and food.”

This piece was more in the mold of a traditional profile. We also have the added benefit here of looking back, 10 years on. He seems as impressive a guy now as he did then, already devoting his post-basketball life to clean water initiatives had when he was running up and down the court.

In org comm we had a casual sort of day. The best part of it was an elaborate teamwork exercise. I broke the class into three groups and put them all on a deserted island. They were able to salvage a few things from their vessel before it sank. There was a huge list to choose from, and I gave them a very small amount of time to figure out what they would take. They encountered a deranged person, driven mad by solitude on the island, who was going to escape, and they had to bribe him with one of their salvaged items so that he would tell others where they were. They had to figure out how to feed themselves, how to treat their wounded, and so on. And then a big storm came along and they lost more of their items. Finally, weak and hungry and everything else, they had to use their remaining items to signal a passing plane for rescue.

They all made it off their respective islands. And this was my entrance into the next several days of class, which are about conflict and negotiation. For purposes of the story I’d told them that the crazed person they met was a prominent campus figure, putting the publicity shot on the screen. I said the fate of that deranged individual remained unresolved, and he was never seen again, that got an odd reaction. Tough room, I guess.

Think I’ll stay off boats and islands for a while, just in case.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
03
Nov 25

Stealing daylight

Did you enjoy Catober? I have a great time with that daily feature. A cat a day really makes the month go by faster, content-wise. Somehow. You might think it puts a lot of pressure on the process. A photo a day of cats doing cute things! You’d be wrong. The only hard part is catching them in various places among their routines. And then keeping all of that straight. Capturing the moments is the easy part. Choosing which ones to use, that’s the impossible part. There are only 31 days in Catober, after all.

It started like this.

And it ended like this.

You can see the full collection on the Catober, just scroll back to see the whole month.

Except it hasn’t ended yet. I still have some great shots to share, and I’ll put them up tomorrow.

But today there are other photos. We, too, are experiencing the time change, which means a lot of seasonal changes. Which means the sun went down at 4:52 yesterday. Which means that, for the next few months, it will really feel like we’re stealing daylight.

That’s what yesterday’s bike ride was like. Soft colors and blurry textures and stealing daylight. And also reed grass.

Quite a bit of reed grass. That just comes with being a little close to the water, I guess.

The cover crops in this field are shockingly green just now. I’m used to seeing corn in there, but the season has, of course passed.

And in its place things are turning a delightful series of yellows and browns. Oh, it is nice for a time. Even the vibrance and vigor of that soon will fade. It’s just around the corner, or the curve, if you will.

Now it may look like it is getting dark here, but that’s just the trees. Besides, I still have about 14 miles to go from here. I didn’t know that at the time.

At the time I was just starting to figure out where I was going to go from here. First up the king’s highway, then Main Street, and then the old road, back into town. From there, it was a four-and-a-half-mile tempo ride home. No longer stealing daylight, but racing it.

Stupid seasonal change. Why can’t it be light until 8 or 9 p.m.? And also warmer. Not much, just five or 10 degrees, for outdoor purposes.

It was a productive night. Watched a football game. Got most of Tuesday’s class prep done, got some things graded and so on. And it continued on into today. I wrote some things that needed to be written, including a job ad for a student employee role. And I was on a roll. My big to do list for the week is already down to just four things.

Two or three more days like this will feel like momentum.

That’s the opposite of what I had on the bike today. I set out to ride my 40 km time trial, but I simultaneously realized that I didn’t have the legs I wanted for that, or the time I needed for that. So I changed my route, mid-route to make it back before dark. Instead, I did 35 km.

I could have totally made it.

And, then after dinner I finished up tomorrow’s work. We’ll see how that goes.