Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday / Ireland / memories / photo / video — Comments Off
27
Mar 26

Not every idea is marketable

I didn’t step outside, or even poke my head up from the computer, until the sun was going down. Meetings and emails and work and such. Here’s the view from the front porch. We face the west, but we turn wherever the best views are to be found.

A home on a lazy Susan. There’s an idea. I imagine one person standing out at the corner, squatting low, putting their back into it, slowly spinning the house. It’d be like a pushing a dead car, difficult at first, but you’d build a little momentum. The trick would be stopping at the right time. You wouldn’t want to overshoot the sunset or whatever you were aiming at.

The next trick would be managing the electrical connections. There are a lot of wires and pipes and things.

OK, so we build in some flexibility. Use that silly straw technology.

We’d need giant ball bearings. I suppose we’d need a giant ball bearing plant. The plant, itself, would need to be rather large. We’ve also got to figure out a way to transport those. That’s certainly doable, but would be costly. And replacing those, when the time comes, would be a chore.

Then you’ve got to keep leaves out of way of the things. This is starting to become a rather involved idea.

But only a few steps after we’ve invented a giant ball bearing plant.

This million dollar idea might need a little more work.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

This was one of the windier places you’ll be that doesn’t involve a storm. I left in the nat sound to prove it.

That is the view from Sky Road.

Ireland / memories / Rowan / video — Comments Off
26
Mar 26

Sports and sheep

We discussed sport consumption as a ritualized practice today in Rituals and Traditions.

It is a focus on entertainment value, collective group influence, and self-enhancement, but we overlook the ritual aspects, which potentially offer individuals a chance to maintain and to celebrate cultural meanings embedded in the consumption. There is a formalism to all of this, and also symbolic performance. For example, what do you do at tailgates? We also talked about the social interactions.

Ritual, I reminded them, is a means through which individuals embody the power, authority, and value of society. And we talked about research that shows that consumers cherish ritual experiences because securing cultural sense from mass-marketed consumer goods is not straightforward. Ritual makes it real for us, basically.

We talked about “ritual specialists” which is a concept I love. These are the elders, cheerleaders, band, media, supporter groups that have socially recognized authority to judge the importance of ritual and the performance’s correctness. These are the people who can legitimize the social importance of the ritual and give us the correct way of performing it. Then I got to use one of my favorite lines. “Because this is a communication studies class I have to occasionally sneak a theory in on you.” And I talked about disposition theory — basically our enjoyment is driven by our evaluations of the characters involved. This is part of why you think the traditions you like are good and important and the stuff that other people do is dumb. (You’ve evaluated them and found them wanting.)

In Criticism we watched It’s Time. For my money, it’s one of the best bits of storytelling you can get in a sport documentary. It’s also quite intense.

The only problem with it is that the runtime takes the whole class and we’ll have to wait until next Tuesday to discuss it. That’s a long time to wait, even for such a gripping and emotional story.

We won’t talk just about the emotion, though, but also the media aesthetics, like the music and some of the shot selections, and a few of the quotes from the people that were there.

I miss the roadside sheep already.

Ireland / memories / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
25
Mar 26

New book alert

Phoebe would like to let you know about a book that you should add to your bookcase. Look carefully at the authors.

It’s nice living with an expert. Her consultation fees, however, are rather steep.

It was cute how she played this off. I told her she’d gotten a delivery today. “Oh? Hmmm. What’s in that box? I don’t recall ordering anything. Oh! This came out! And ahead of schedule!”

How do you think I should play it, when I read this book? Should I pretend like I found a typo? Take issue with some key point inside? Say they spelled her name wrong somewhere inside? Carry it door to door? Talk about it in every class next semester? So many choices.

Trá an Dóilín.

Ireland / memories / photo / Rowan / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
24
Mar 26

Back to campus

Back to school today. Last week was spring break for the students and we’re all now trying to figure out how much enthusiasm everyone still has for the rest of the term. There’s a bit of rah-rah involved in that, but the weather is warming up, sporadically, and the days are getting longer and summer is calling.

Today in Rituals and Traditions we talked about sport as spectacle. This would be the aural expressions, the songs and chants, the visual displays, the stadium choreography and performances. This is about how seating works, fireworks, the music that’s played for us, the fancy digital court that we’re seeing in some college basketball tournaments, and so on.

In Criticism we talked about MLB labor: How fight over salary cap will shape negotiations:

There was something about the four-year, $72 million contract given to left-hander Tanner Scott in January that infuriated fan bases in every market outside of Los Angeles — even the only one that dwarfs it.

“It’s difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kinds of things they’re doing,” New York Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner told the YES Network a week after the Scott deal.

That the Yankees — the most valuable franchise in baseball, the game’s foremost revenue machine, owners of the highest payroll each of the first 14 years this century — had joined the chorus typically reserved for smaller-market teams questioning the game’s fairness was no accident. Even if formal discussions about Major League Baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement are half a year away, the campaign to capture the hearts and minds of the paying consumers has already begun.

And also this story, Watershed moment as Russia’s sporting exile ends. These are both explainers, the latter is like a richly done FAQ, and so it worked out well that the class picked these two stories to discuss this week. Sometimes the stars lineup, where we can discuss complimentary themes.

At home, the sun is coming in through the back door. It’s just a plastic cat toy, but I like that we have enough attention to detail to see it casting a shadow.

Poseidon is fascinated by light, shimmering and reflecting light. If I ever need to move him in the evening a shadow puppet always does the trick. But they never notice long shadows in those parts of the day.

This was from Silverstrand Beach.

adventures / Ireland / Monday / photo — Comments Off
23
Mar 26

We made it back

We are back in the United States. What you’ve missed since last I wrote. I drove us the 180 or so miles from Malin Head, the northernmost point in Ireland, back to Dublin, which is situated in the southwestern part of the country. Our GPS sent us through Northern Ireland, which was fine but for the detour, the rush hour gridlock and the slower speed zones. When we finally got back into the countryside the roads opened up, and so did the speed limits. Somehow I kept losing time to the GPS, and I’m still not sure how that was happening, but there I was, driving that rental like I stole it, in the dark, in a car I don’t know all that well, on roads I knew not at all, and driving on the left. I drove that car hard because we had a deadline for returning the car.

We just made it to the airport hotel in time, but had difficulty getting there and getting in. We dumped the luggage and then had to get the car to the airport. The Irishman talking about American politics in the elevator thought I was getting agitated with him, but I was twitchy because of the clock. And if the parking lot in the hotel was tough, the drop off at the airport was worse. We were 15 minutes late. It was nothing.

We took an Uber back to hotel, had dinner at the closing restaurant off the lobby and then went upstairs for the evening. I had the sleep that didn’t feel like it, and then it was a shuttle to the airport. The Dublin airport is large, but the process works efficiently there — which is more than you can say in some American airports at the moment.

A funny thing happened at the airport, though. Just as I passed through security I tore a great big hole in my jeans. Just moments before I had submitted all of my clothes in my checked bag. So now I have two planes, three airports and the best part of a full day in three different countries trying to not cause a scene, shall we say.

We flew into the Amsterdam airport, which is the size of a medium city. Some 71 million passengers go through Schiphol a year. They say 67,000 people work there. Almost 500 alone work on snow clearing in the wintertime. We dined in an underwhelming, but crowded, lounge. We walked and shuttled several miles to our next plane and flew back to New York. And there’s nothing that just moans “Welcome to the USA” like the JFK airport. And nothing says “Get out of here!” like the inherent structural inability to physically get out of there. This was complicated by our pickup driver’s complete inability to find us. So we walked to two or three different spots, dodging the cars and the rain and the hundreds or thousands of people also desperate to be there no longer. Finally we linked up with the old man, who was kind and courtesy and apologetic and praising God for every little thing, and driving like he was intent on meeting him that night. Getting out of that car, at my in-laws an hour later was a great relief that is difficult to describe.

Look who was excited to see us.

We have a little bed at my in-laws, and the kitties were intent on dominating it. And here they are, doing the same thing, freaking me out.

We drove home today. Classes tomorrow. Back to the grind, making up time and picking up speed in the back half of the semester. It’ll be a hugely busy two-plus months.

Despite having published 178 photos and a handful of video montages from the trip there’s still a lot to show off. So I’ll be doing that here for the next however long. I’ll put them at the end of the posts, with the Wild Atlantic Way logo. It’ll be a lot of fun. Here’s a panorama, the ninth one I shot. This is from Malin Head, where we looked north of Ireland. If you could somehow see just 700 miles into the distance you could look into the Arctic Circle.

But if you can’t do that, just click to open the image in another browser window. And keep coming back for more of the scenic videos.