I found a new road while I was racing the last little bit of sunlight this evening. It was somewhere just after I pedaled my way past this field. I turned right on a road I’ve been on maybe three times, but it didn’t look familiar. Knowing it was already after 7 p.m., it didn’t seem like the right time to get lost. I’d left my headlight on the kitchen counter after all.
So I turned around, got back to where the two roads diverged, and instead of going right, which was correct, I went left, which was new to me. Also, it was a bit shorter, which probably worked out well. This is how much light I had two miles from home.
That’s fine, but there’s a little you have to go down, and immediately come back up the side, all of which is under a thick canopy. And the road is usually dodgy with gravel and grit. This you don’t want to ride in almost dark. It may as well be a guess. Today it was that guess, I guess, that narrowly avoided longer route, but for that turnaround, that kept me out of the dark.
The road less traveled was less interesting than the one I wanted, but it got me where I needed to go, and a few minutes and miles faster.
So that worked out.
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?
Or later. When it warms up and everything is working as it should.
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 is Sliabh Liag, one of those places you’d go back to again and again.
As a child, I got a bunch of these peg board games from my grandparents. They came as a set, but I guess they didn’t come with a way to store them, because I’ve always kept them in a cardboard King Edwards Imperial Tobacco box that my grandfather gave me. (Fitting them all into one box became a game itself.)
They’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet for a while, and I dug them out this weekend while looking for some class paperwork. (My filing system is a game of another sort.)
It seemed like a good time to not stare at a screen, so I pulled the games out and tried to figure out how they all worked. Most of them were a mystery to me, as a kid. Not that they’re overly complex, but I guess they were just beyond my patience at the time. There’s one game I knew well, because I’d been to a Cracker Barrel. I played a few rounds of that, trying to remember the pattern I devised to win. (I’d devised a pattern, which is a thing I would do, of course, but it’s been decades.)
All of which is to say, I’m telling myself it takes real talent to do this.
The good news is the other games now make sense. I need to play around with them a bit more to see which is the most entertaining.
Anyway, 144 more papers to read and grade. Two finals are due on Thursday. The rest come in next Monday. Suddenly peg board games seem like fun, don’t they?
In September of 2024 I devised a 25-mile time trial. It is a big circle with nine turns. Critically, eight of them are right turns. It involves going down the hill and back up past the haunted house, into town, by the park, through the sheep pastures, and then taking that left turn. Then you go a mile, turn onto a busy state highway, go 2.3 more miles and turn right, to get back into the countryside. Then you eventually get to the downhill that is always in the headwind, which makes the downhill feel like an uphill. You go by the crazy house and then into the woods, until the road ends. You turn right again onto another highway, one which you can absolutely fly on for four miles, before turning into another small town.
You go through three towns on this route. You pass many more warehouses. And I need to rename this. It’s not really a time trial if you’re just getting slower on the thing.
I am getting slower on the thing. Twice I’ve done it so far this year, and these are the slowest times in the series.
Much of that is about me, of course. But I can blame the weather, too. Today I had headwinds from three different directions!
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?
If you’d like to go there, ask around for directions to Tulan Strand.
We went back to campus today. The student athletes were doing a fund raiser. They were taking shifts, sitting in chairs, wearing plastic ponchos. Pretty soon they were wearing whipped cream pies.
That’s an All-American. She’s been in both of our classes. She’s a lovely human being and, somehow, that meant she got more pies to the face than any of her peers did during her half-hour shift. I don’t know how much money you raise doing a bit like that, but it was a lovely spring day and they’d set this up in a quiet little corner of campus and people came by in dribs and drabs for an hour or so. The overhead seemed to be a few ponchos, a couple of cans of whipped cream and some paper plates.
Knowledge is Power is inspired by a quote by Francis Bacon. In creating a visual representation of the verbal statement, Artist Zenos Frudakis thought a book would make an appropriate metaphor, as it has been the traditional form of preserving and transmitting knowledge through the ages.
Always interested in philosophy and the love of wisdom, Mr. Frudakis wanted this sculpture to embody those who are good examples of having powerful ideas. As a compositional element, he has faces and quotes organized around two central figures he considers two giants of thought. On the left page is Charles Darwin, and those around him are of an earlier period. On the right page is Albert Einstein, surrounded by more contemporary figures.
There’s a lot of art around campus, it turns out. I need to see more of it. Maybe something will rub off.
We had lunch at Chick-fil-A. For the first time in a good while, it seemed, we had lunch together and didn’t have to rush off somewhere. It was pleasant, it felt a bit like unwinding.
I’ve been developing and teaching a class we call Criticism in Sports Media for the last two semesters. Students are learning to consume and interpret media critically, place it within broader contexts, and examine the structure and meaning of the material. This, I say, gives one an appreciation of sport media’s role in contemporary life, because sports reflect the values of a culture.
It’s a good course, and helpful. Students know there’s a lot going on, and they’re trying to understand the media landscape that surrounds and inundates us all. They are coming to understand that there are some things they don’t understand, and they’d like to try to make some sense of it.
The class spends a lot of time on the printed word and on documentaries, and we discuss social media and, lately, AI content.
Now, at the end of the term, I wanted to leave them with a lasting impression about recognizing and addressing AI.
I’ve got a few more things I want to write soon. But, first, back to the grading. Just 144 papers and exams to go!
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?
That video is from Mullaghmore Head, where we both fell down, separately and hilariously. You’ll just have to read about it.
I mentioned, Tuesday, my new custom-made lapel pin. Today I wore the second one I made and ordered. This is what I say at the end of each class, and it’s the last thing I say in my last lecture, which I build to all semester long.
Thanks for coming today. See you next time. Until then …
If that’s the way people think of me in the final analysis, then it’s worth repeating it.
And so I did it twice today, for the last two times. Weird, I always feel like I’m just getting to know the students, and that we’re all starting to feel comfortable in the room, when it’s time for the semester to end.
But it ended in a big way! In Rituals and Traditions we were joined by a colleague, the assistant athletic director for compliance and academic support, and the deputy athletic director for strategic initiatives and external engagement. They heard from five groups who have been working all semester on proposals for things that our athletic department to build traditions, increase student and community buy-in and improve the gameday experience. Those people were not prepared for how well the students did. Everyone was impressed, even the other students. One person said, “I thought our project was pretty good, but I wasn’t expecting everyone else’s to be so great.” No disrespect to that project, but that was a fair read.
I was proud to see their work come to fruition, and excited to see all of this come together in the context of this class I conceived out of my own interests, and then found plenty of literature to draw from will designing and implementing this class which I invented from whole cloth.
The athletic department people learned a lot because of their work, and because of their hustle. We conducted a survey and got 252 responses on the thing. The instrument told our students a lot and they leveraged that well, today.
Perhaps some thing or things that were said today will provide an inspiration or an impetus to the athletic department. That’s the idea. For certain the people that came to visit were impressed by what they heard and saw, which is great. I’m doing this class again in the fall. I hope to make the class even better.
In Criticism we closed the term by watching the almost avant-garde June 17, 1994.
We had just enough time at the end to talk about a few elements of the doc, and I gave them the final lecture, and someone came in to proctor evaluations.
In both classes I asked them, one more time, to be safe and be kind.
Outside tonight I was looking up at the moon and the clouds thinking about how fortunate I am to get to say that to groups of young people, over and over, for three months.
It was 9:22 when I took that photo. And after that I started thinking about how fortunate I am to have, now, the next couple of weeks to wrap up the semester’s 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?
