Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Monday / music / photo / video — Comments Off
13
Jul 26

Tessera mihi est, ergo sum

Without hesitation I can say that the highlight of today was updating my university password. Passphrase, actually. This must be done every six months — if the system remembers it. (It doesn’t always seem to remember it.) But, without fail, in those times I must update it, I always find myself in a struggle. You log in to things several times a day and your fingers get into habits. And then, of course, it is time to update the password. Passphrase. Except I’ve noticed the last two times that the requirements have continued to grow expansive.

I use a sentence, and my now expired passphrase included a special character and a number. Now I have to make sure the new passphrase checks all of those boxes.

Hilariously, the form field where you input this does not show the characters you are typing, just the little privacy dots, as if my books or my cats are going to steal the new password. Passphrase. So you better get it right. Of course, it must be confirmed. And you better write this down. So I have it written down in a place where only I will find it. Because security.

We all remember the Instructure debacle of 2026, after all.

And now I will have to retrain my fingers to type this new phrase. Hopefully I’ll be in shape before I have to do this in front of students. Nothing builds confidence in the classroom like messing that up three times in a row.

Also, when you have completed the not-at-all challenging task of designing a new passphrase and making sure you’ve met all of the criteria now involved you are encouraged to update this in the places where it needs to be updated.

Because no one remembers the Instructure debacle of 2026, after all.

It’d be nice if every place where you had to login to something had committed to the same series of special character challenges, but that’s a lot to coordinate and keep straight, of course. And all of this is just another step toward my computer having a fingerprint pad on it, at which point I will retreat to Walden.

We saw another show Saturday night. I’ll give you four hints.

The second hint is that this act was at a different venue, a much larger venue. (Don’t worry, we won’t go through the naming origins this time. OK, fine, it is named after an 18th century British lawyer.)

The third hint is that this band is marking the 30th anniversary of their first Grammy, which is to say they’ve been around for a while. And, in that time, they’ve cultivated and maintained quite the following.

OK, final hint, if a bit in profile.

It was Dave Matthews Band, which we have seen a few years in a row now, attending with friends. All told, I think this marks the fifth or sixth time I’ve seen them over the course of their touring career. If you like them, they put on a good show. If you like jam bands, they put on a good show. If you’re just determined not to like them, you probably won’t like the show. I feel like I always come away from the show thinking the appreciation outpaced the expectation just a bit, whatever that means.

I think what it means is that I’ve seen several bands and singers more than a few times and I’ve decided there are only so many you need to see more than a few times. And, if I had to make a list, I wouldn’t put DMB on that list, but when I leave the show I find myself thinking, That was a good time. Because it is!

It isn’t that it is a surprise, but what is surprising is that they’ve built up this huge legion of concert followers over the many decades and they continue to put up shows with enough energy and fun that people keep coming back, dozens and dozens of times.

I wonder if Dave and his buddies thought about that way back when. I wonder if anyone does.

Take Guster, for example. We saw them Friday. Next year they’ll mark the 30th anniversary of the record that turned them into a regular airplay band. I know they’ll celebrate that because Friday night they mentioned that this is the 20th anniversary of a subsequent record. The threesome met in school, at Tufts. No way they sat around on campus in 1991 and said, “Man, I hope one day we’re filling stage banter with an ad lib about the region we’re touring in when we are 53 years old!”

Maybe that’s the dream. Do something you love with people you like and get to do it so long and so well that you can also pursue other things you are interested in, too. I’m certain that’s the dream, actually. But no one says that at 18. No 18-year-old has the foresight. (Shoot, I was 26 when I figured it out, and I’ve spent the years since wondering if I actually did.)

Existentialism is definitely going to be incorporated into my next password. Passphrase.

adventures / music / photo / video — Comments Off
10
Jul 26

They don’t all have a trumpet

Did you know there’s a place named Jim Thorpe? I didn’t. Now I know what you’re thinking, “Is that Mauch Chunk?” And if you’re thinking that, you are correct, and you also have Wikipedia opened in another tab. If you don’t: Mauch Chunk was a coal mining town, a company town. Jim Thorpe is buried there. He has no other affiliation with the thing. He was put in the ground there for money. His wife needed the cash, wanted to avoid the potter’s field and the town wanted a boon. And that was 1954. His grave sits on soil taken from Oklahoma, Thorpe’s home, and from the Stockholm Olympic Stadium, the site of Thorpe’s Olympic glory. From 2010 through 2015 the fate of his remains worked their way through the legal system. Family wanted him moved home, but he’s staying right there. And that’s what I learned from Wikipedia.

We were there for a show. There’s a venue in the middle of the woods on the top of a hill and it’s removed enough from everything else that the developers put a little restaurant on the side of the joint. It does a brisk business of perfectly forgettable food. You’re there for the show, anyway. And that was our purpose.

We saw Guster this evening. First time this year. The guy that sat next to me at the show was an old man. He said he has been listening to them since he was in college. So have I. But there’s no way I’m as old as that guy. He’d never seen the band before, though, he knew the first half of their catalog cold. I told him he was in for a great show. This was the seventh time in the last three years, I think. They never disappoint. He seemed to have a great time in his old man way.

Seriously, I am not as old as that man.

Concert photography is challenging. I am not a concert photographer; I’m also not a photographer, but I like these, each is pleasing for their own reasons. I like the rainbow light treatments, and how they silhouette Adam Gardner and Luke Reynolds.

Ryan is cropped off center, which is funny in a bunch of different ways, but in the full light as he stands over his keyboard.

And here’s the Thunder God himself, Brian Rosenworcel, warbling his way through the song of the summer.

(It was “Soak Up The Sun.” I thought maybe he’d reprise his Bonnie Tyler cover.)

From Easy Wonderful:

I’ve got a couple of others. I’ll share a few short clips next week.

Wikipedia also tells me Mauch Chunk is derived from the term Mawsch Unk, meaning Bear Place in Unami, the language of the native Lenape, possibly a reference to Bear Mountain, an extension of Mauch Chunk Ridge that resembled a sleeping bear.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
09
Jul 26

Meanwhile, over here in Purrtown

Time for the site’s most popular feature, and the one most in-demand in the house, too. This is where we show off the cats. And believe me when I tell you, they are insistent upon it. Every week or so — I don’t know how they know — they will march into the home office and stamp around until I correctly interpret their body language and intention.

There is, believe it or not, a lot of that going on around here. If I am not sitting just so when it it is time to hold a cat, there is a demonstration. If I am in the wrong position for a late night cuddle, woe unto me until I figure it out and make the right adjustment. And then the huff or sigh.

I know, I know, that sounds like something I’d make up, but that’s the way it works. OK, I don’t always get the huff. But otherwise, total truth.

Anyway, Phoebe is enjoying an afternoon snooze.

And, later, in almost the same spot, in an even cuter pose …

Poseidon, meanwhile, insists he can be cute and charming, too. He’s very vocal and insistent about these things.

Very vocal and insistent. Or he yawns a lot. Or both.

So, as you can see, the kitties are doing great. And now that you’ve admired them once more maybe they will retract their claws out of me for a little while.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
08
Jul 26

The round-and-round tale

This is a harmless little tale about estimating distances, and also impulsive and obligatory new discoveries. It is a story told by bike, and so it is the same as every story told by bike. You know a lot, but you don’t know much of anything. No matter how many times you take on that story it is always different.

I rode kinda hard-ish yesterday. That’s qualified, on account of it being me, and my being old and not perfectly fit and never fast to begin with. Hard-ish is also, then, a relative term. Perhaps especially so. With that, I decided that, today, I would take an easy ride. I had a route in mind and I find that when you start thinking about roads and turns like that, you should just go do the thing straightaway. If you don’t, your mind just keeps adding to the thing.

And, today, that route involved going the opposite way on the first part of one of the regular routes. For some reason that is always just intriguing enough. So I went this way instead of that. I went by the sheep and the park and then into town and over and around and then down a busy highway — one which has a nice healthy shoulder — until it dropped into a river that I know is there because of the way the terrain falls, and what a map tells me, but I have never, ever seen.

I turned left, knowing I could go down a bit and then turn right, making an elaborate second rectangle at a right angle to the first. I figured that’d give me about 15 miles and a casual hour outside on a nice day. The heat had broke and it was sunny and in the mid-80s.

As I was working my way into doing that, though, it occurred to me that instead of turning right here, I could go just a couple of miles farther down the road, and then turn, and enjoy one of my favorite roads around here.

It’s so quite out there that you can think of anything, stare at anything, get lost in any little moment, like, say, a drop of water on your shoe.

Then this other thing happened. I got to the road that would turn back home. It’s a standard intersection, two roads running into one another in the farmland. Stop signs beside you, a flashing yellow light above you. And as I rolled up to it I realized that this is not a T-intersection. The road I am on, in fact, continues straight through the stop sign. Today I should turn right and head home. Usually I am either turning to go down this road from whence I have just come, or passing from my right to my left. I had never noticed that road that was just now ahead of me.

It only takes a second to ask yourself the question, and less time to answer it.

Where does that go?

There’s only one way to know.

So instead of turning right to go home, which was my plan, or turn left and do a familiar route, I went on this newly discovered road. Because it is predominantly farmland, a lot of this is a sort of a long grid. I know where the roads on either side wind up headed this northwesterly direction, but not this particular road. Maybe it’ll be different!

Such is the imagination, and it is seldom unrewarded. And, look, if you are on a new road you see new things. And maybe you figure, seeing new things, you decide you might write about them. And maybe you’ll need to grab your phone and snap a quick photo or two. And if you do that enough you’re sure to fumble the thing. And you just might take photos without even realizing it.

Eventually, you’ll get one that is artistically minimalist.

Or is it minimally artistic? Either way.

Anyway, the road meandered for about 2.5 miles, eventually running into one of those other roads I know, at a place that was a little too busy for the day. So I turned around, which allowed me a second opportunity to photograph this little church.

It is a Methodist church and it gets five stars on Google and why are we reviewing churches again?

It was 7:49 p.m. when I took that photograph and I had 10 miles to get home, which I did, riding easily, and before dark. Gotta love those long summer days, which allow my estimated 15-mile ride to turn into a casual 30-mile experience with two spur-of-the-moment decisions which, ultimately, gave the whole ride its character.

On a bigger scale, this is the kind of riding I want to do.

Alabama / bluesky / books / history / Tuesday — Comments Off
07
Jul 26

A read to chew on

I bought this book online last summer and finally got around to reading it. By the time I finished the foreword I was already thinking of who I could get to read this with me. I got one taker. The rest, frankly, were missing out. Carry Me Home is a book about home, and every page is about a place I know. Sometimes it’s about a person I’ve heard about, or a person I reported on.

I’m learning all over the place. I think I also said that right from the beginning, and I’ve said it throughout. Also, I’m still reading.

Diane McWhorter grew up during the Civil Rights Movement era in Birmingham, which is to say she was a child and it was above her head at that moment in her life. She grew up over the mountain, which is to further say about six miles and a whole culture away. None of this is a criticism. We are from where we are from, and she would later spend 20 y ears on this book trying to understand her place, her people, and her father. Some of that she gets to better than others in this book, which won (and deservedly so) the Pulitzer Prize.

It’s a bit clunky sometimes, a bit dense sometimes, but it is a terrific and eye-opening read. I can’t recommend it enough.

Currently reading “Carry Me Home Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” by Diane McWhorter

www.simonandschuster.com/books/Carry-…

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 2, 2026 at 9:32 PM

McWhorter was thorough and unsparing.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 2, 2026 at 9:59 PM

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth is at the center of all of this, as he should be. A fascinating, critically important leader. He was assaulted, bombed, beaten and while creating a Movement.

He also had a saying,“If the Klan don’t get you, the police will; and if the police don’t get you, the courts will.”

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 2, 2026 at 9:59 PM

This tale is full of curious and odd and frustrating little circular ironies. That was by design, of course, even on an ad hoc basis.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 5, 2026 at 12:36 PM

This part fascinates. I had never heard of this audit. (I mean, why would you?)

But growing up and working there, I’d always heard people stewing in that outside perspective and wondering how to overcome it.

Smyer commissioned this, waited ages for it, and then fired the firm that sent this in.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 5, 2026 at 1:19 PM

If it feels familiar that’s because it has been used before. If it has been used before and used again that means it works.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 6, 2026 at 4:47 PM

John Temple Graves II considered himself “a professional southerner” which had a particular cheerleader meaning at the time.

time.com/archive/6604…

He was a regionally syndicated morning columnist for a while, but found his copy dated by the afternoon. The timing of his death was something.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 6, 2026 at 4:56 PM

Sometimes it’s just human and wryly funny.

[image or embed]

— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 7, 2026 at 1:12 PM

I’m coming to parts of the story that more regularly entered into the wider historical context. This has long since become a story that reminds readers that the compression of history necessarily leaves so much of the story on the sidelines. Soon, we’ll get to the parts that everyone remembers, the Children’s Crusade and the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, and so on. Almost with every page now I’m wondering if the next person that is introduced will be someone that I met or knew or covered. The last one, for certain, is going to happen.

It’s a great book. I’m learning all over the place.