Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

It was July of 2002, maybe August

I was taking the garbage out last night, because that’s one of the things I do on Sunday evening. My mind wandered back, because that’s one of the things that it does on most any day, to a conversation I had in the summer of 2002.

I was talking with my news director about this and that and he said to me, “You have to look after yourself, because no one else will do it as much or as well.”

It was one of those things that made sense at the time, and felt more right the more I thought about it. This was what it was to be accidentally deep. Two weeks later, I walked back to his office and offered him my resignation. Not because he was right, but because I was already on my way out the door. And, also, he was right, of course. Since I think far too much about work, I’ve always thought of that as professional advice. Maybe that’s the way that he meant it.

But there I was, standing in the drive, in the dark, and just as I walked under the motion sensor and the flood lights clicked on I thought, What if he was talking about everything in your life? The fun stuff too? The rewarding stuff? The valuable stuff? What are the things we’re all looking to fill our days with to have a day well spent? What is that thing?

It’s a part of a long-running puzzle. Some passive part of my brain has been working on that for, I don’t know, seven, eight years. And I did not figure it out tonight, standing there in the driveway. It’s too cold for all of that.

But, yes of course a conversation from almost a quarter of a century ago came to mind. You don’t do that? I remember precisely where I was standing when it happened. Right where this dot is.

Every now and then, over my many years working with students and young journalists, I’ve found a way to work that same advice into conversation. Most of them are well equipped to realize that already, but it is worth repeating. That guy, my former news director, is working in Nashville now. He’s been there … for more than a decade, which is a substantial amount of time in one spot in his line of work. He seems very happy there, but he’s one of those relentlessly happy sorts.

What do those guys know, anyway? Aside from occasionally stumbling into good greeting card caliber advice, I mean.

Let’s have a look at the kitties, who are insisting that I get back on the schedule. They make a good point. They’re the most popular feature on the site, and Monday is traditionally theirs. Why mess with what works?

So here’s Phoebe, getting in the holiday spirit.

And here she is, getting all cuddly and cozy under a blanket. What a cute little face.

Poseidon, meanwhile, is ready for his closeup.

But, also, his pink nose is cold.

When they sleep like that it just kills me.

Maybe I should ask them about living right. They know how to spend a day.

Friday / photo — Comments Off
05
Dec 25

It’s all fun and games, until the geese answer back

We were standing outside, doing some outdoors chore, or talking about it. We were in the backyard, near the kitchen corner of the house. I’m sure we were pointing or looking or otherwise considering a plan of action. This is what I do. I work in the home office for a few hours, and then I go find something else productive to do for a while. Then it is back to work. Study breaks and work breaks are both useful. And this particular one involved being outside in the cold for a few minutes. That’s when I heard it.

honk.

Honk.

HONK HONK.

HONKHONKHONKHONKHONK!!!

I looked up, putting my eyes where my ears told me to go, toward the east. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and trained it on the sky, waiting for the geese to fly through the frame.

“QUITTERS!” I yelled, so as to be heard over their honking.

OK, I muttered it to myself. We have neighbors, after all.

Somehow the geese heard me anyway.

“We’re not quiting,” they said between honks. “We’re just going over to a field a few miles west of here. You know that. We’ve seen you over that way.”

Of course geese have recall and distinguish between humans.

Also, please note the skies.

It was 3:16 p.m.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
04
Dec 25

Penultimate day of classes

I would not be so bold as to say I am the best teacher in the world. Nor would I be so self deprecating (yeah, I don’t know what’s going on with this sentence either) to suggest that I’m the worst teacher in the world. I’m probably somewhere right in the middle of the top tier or near the bottom of the “also receiving votes” bunch, depending on the material.

But no matter what, I can read a room. And today’s vibe, in two classes, was “Enough with this semester already.”

Just one more day of putting up with me after this, guys. You can do it.

We watched the highly compelling 30 for 30 documentary, “June 17, 1994.” No one has uploaded a trailer equal to the thing, but this is from Netflix.

It follows a unique day in sports history. The Rangers had won the Stanley Cup and there was a ticker tape parade in New York. Arnold Palmer was wrapping up his legendary PGA career with one last round. The Knicks and Rockets were fighting in the NBA playoffs. The World Cup was opened in the U.S. by President Bill Clinton. Ken Griffey Jr. had a day, and also, there was one other bit of news that evening.

This is the view from the sixth floor, and apparently the sun broke through just in time for the sunset.

O.J. Simpson in Al Cowlings’ white Bronco.

The documentary is different because it is told in original found, and archival footage. There’s no contemporary narration or interviews. It’s just editing selections, juxtaposition, musical score, and those video clips. It’s a nice 51 minute piece, which you can find on ESPN and, as of this writing, Netflix.

In org comm we talked some more about scandal and image repair. They’ll wrap up with image repair on Tuesday. And everyone will be into finals mode.

Even the sunset is sort of over the day, I think. Here’s the view from the sixth floor.

Two more classes to plan, six more course notes to send, and about 108 things to grade.

I counted them up on the drive home, in the pitch black of night.

It was 5:15.

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03
Dec 25

Flowers don’t wilt like they used to

The weekend before last we went to a year-end party for the tri club that my lovely bride is a member and captain of. It was a nice affair, private rooms at a local restaurant. Big tables. Fixed menus. Only one small speech. An entertaining slide show. Good company. I met a guy who was car shopping. Big NFL guy. There was another gentleman at our table who has worked the chain gang for local college football games for decades. He retired from the job, which he did for free all of those years, but he was so good they brought him back this year. There was a couple who had one daughter in college and another on a travel cheer team. And these are the people you just want to ask what they do for a living, because it all sounds outrageously expensive. There was another couple I’ve met before at our table too. Anyway, it was all delightful.

At the end of the night, we took home one of the small bouquets of flowers from one of the tables. It sat, for a few days, on the bookcases in the library. And then Poseidon, who is the reason we can’t have nice things, found them.

I moved them, when he wasn’t paying attention, to an even higher spot. He found them immediately.

So now we’re playing keep away from the ruiner of iron and the ruster of stone.

They’re doing amazing things with cut flowers these days. This is now, what … 11 days or so since we took them. Still in fine shape.

I’m planning on keeping them around for a while. Changing flowers fit a certain melancholy mood, but I find the way the colors change, and don’t, to be fascinating.

Now we just have to keep the cat distracted.

Anyway, back to work. I have to finish a final tonight. It’ll be available to students tomorrow. My online class is rushing in toward their final group projects, and that means a lot of back-end of the semester work is flooding in. And we’re going to wrap up some talk about scandals in org comm tomorrow. But, in criticism, we’re watching a documentary. It will center on a fair amount of scandal, too, as timing would have it. Should be a lot of fun!

friends / journalism / links / Rowan / site / Tuesday — Comments Off
02
Dec 25

New look to the front page, btw

For fun, I made some certificates for colleagues. They’re all inside jokes for conference friends. Polite, smart, funny, kind-hearted people. One of them was about one guy picking on another guy. That second guy got one for being up for anything. Another certificate for was for someone running the circus. A third was for another guy, “and he knows why.”

He does not know why. But, you know, I don’t know why either. He’s just about the sweetest, most decent guy you could meet. If he’s ever done anything out of line no one knows about it and he’s buried it deeply in his subconscious. I could go on and on, but, really, we’re just lucky he’s a good friend.

Anyway, we all attend this one conference. And we’ve all held various leadership positions there over the years. We’re trying really hard to become the cool club within the club. Or just to amuse ourselves. One year, my lovely bride won the junior scholar award and at the conference and got a nice plaque. The next year, she won a top paper award and got a plaque. The year after that, I got a top paper award there. (I got nothing.) She also has some certificates from when she ran different divisions of that conference. I’ve run the same ones. (I got nothing.) In our text chat, the rest of the group realized they have been similarly shortchanged. So I made certificates.

Her certificate recognized her many conference achievements. So meta.

And so as to inoculate myself from a return joke, I made one for me.

That’s one of the two or three semi-notorious things I’ve said at that conference over the years. We were participating on a panel on the social constructs of this or that and I held up my phone and said something like, “We are all roaming little balls of hate with hate rectangles in our hands.”

Actually, I said exactly that. The quote was immortalized by someone who got a certificate today.

I get to see them in April, and I’m excited for it.

This evening I updated the images on the front page of the site. They look similar to the most recent version, but different. They look like this.

They are photos from a particular tree-covered road that I shot in October. And here I am, finally getting around to uploading them. This being one of my core hobbies, and being about five weeks behind on getting them here says a lot about my time management lately.

Maybe I’ll get better at it later this month, when the term is over, and the grades have been submitted.

At which time I’ll take three, maybe four deep breaths, and start planning for the spring term.

The good news is I only have one new class prep in the spring! (Three this semester was … a lot.) One class I have will be unchanged. The one will be new. And I’ll make some small adjustments to the criticism class. I’ll refine the details for that in a few days.

Yes, I have carved out two 15-minutes blocks of time, Thursday and next Tuesday, to figure that all out.

In today’s installment of the criticism class, we discussed this story. I chose it because it is a different sort of piece than anything we’ve read all fall. And I wanted the class to see the mechanics of how the writer wrote about the mechanics of deaf soccer. I played when I was a kid, and when I first saw this story last summer I thought, “How do they do that?” Soccer is basically played, and communicated, from behind you. But if no one can hear …

Soccer — and life — through the eyes of the U.S. deaf women’s national team

The first thing to know about deaf soccer is that it is soccer, and a match looks the same as at any level of the sport.

Instead of a loud, profanity-laced pregame speech from the most extroverted leader on the team, players gather in a circle and execute a synchronized movement of quick fist bumps and back-of-hand slaps. During the game, the center official raises a flag in addition to blowing their whistle for fouls and stoppages of play, and games are typically quieter than the average match that features more verbal communication.

From a technical standpoint, players must have hearing loss of at least 55 decibels in their “better ear” to qualify to play deaf soccer and, crucially, hearing aids are not allowed in games, ensuring all players are on a level playing field.

On a hearing team, communication often comes from the back. The goalkeeper and defenders see everything in front of them and can direct their teammates accordingly — and verbally.

“For us, that’s not possible, that’s not realistic,” Andrews says.

The process is more about inherent understanding and movement as a team. If a forward pushes high to chase a ball, everyone behind her must follow. Halftime or injury breaks become more important, Andrews says, because they represent rare opportunities to look at each other as a group.

One guy, at the bginning of class, wondered the same question. How does that work? I said, “You should read the story. It gets explained about 20 percent the way through the story, and it’s a good one, and you’d like it if you read it.”

He just smiled an embarrassed smile and put his head down for a while. We carried on.

We also read and discussed this story, How the Texans and a spa enabled Deshaun Watson’s troubling behavior, mostly for the troubling headline, so I could make some important points about headlines. But the copy is worth reading, too, if you can stomach it.

The accusations have been frequent and startling: more than two dozen women have said the football star Deshaun Watson harassed or assaulted them during massage appointments that Watson and his lawyers insist were innocuous.

Two grand juries in Texas this year declined to charge him criminally and, while the N.F.L. considers whether to discipline him, he has gotten another job, signing a five-year, $230 million fully guaranteed contract to play quarterback for the Cleveland Browns this coming season.

It is time, Watson and his representatives say, for everyone to move on.

Yet a New York Times examination of records, including depositions and evidence for the civil lawsuits as well as interviews of some of the women, showed that Watson engaged in more questionable behavior than previously known.

The Times’s review also showed that Watson’s conduct was enabled, knowingly or not, by the team he played for at the time, the Houston Texans, which provided the venue Watson used for some of the appointments. A team representative also furnished him with a nondisclosure agreement after a woman who is now suing him threatened online to expose his behavior.

In org comm we talked about crisis and conflict. Specifically, what are the differences between crises and scandals. This is one of those classes where you get to use popular instances of players the class knows and try to understand why things transpired as they did. For us, it is all building to next week’s work. And toward the final, but they don’t know that yet.