Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Would you like to plug away at work for me?

Last night we went to a township meeting. A family friend was being installed to office as a supervisor. In my mind’s eye, I was picturing a giant metropolis. Big marble stairs, doric columns, a lot of media in period inauthentic wardrobe. Big, ridiculous flash bulb cameras. It was, in fact, a small place. The township is the sort that has a part time police chief. Where the supervisor meetings are held has a grand table, long enough to seat five people tasked with the important duties of the community.

Sometimes the room hosts potlucks.

There were 40 people in the audience, and that just about filled the room. Six or seven people were holding up their phones to record the historic moments of their friends and loved ones being sworn in.

There stood a judge at the front of the room. She is married, I learned later, to one of the administrators. In her full regalia, she swore in five new people, three township supervisors, an auditor and a tax collector. She enunciated carefully. “UniTED,” and “FIdelity.”

Even the tax collector got a round of applause, which probably doesn’t happen again during his tenure.

With the positions filled, the supervisors held their regular meeting, a tight series of procedural votes to start the new year. Partnerships with other cities, the formal hiring of a few new police officers, a resolution or two. It took 21 minutes.

If you need a shot of democracy, go take part in your local government. That’s where the real and immediate work that impacts you and your community is conducted. They need you, your voice, your thoughts, your energy. (Plus it is sometimes unintentionally entertaining.)

The thing about this form of government is that it only works if the people take part.

Just to round out today’s post, before I get back to work. This isn’t a story — it is a list of photos and brief bios — but that is a dynamite headline. Finally got the framing right. Who’s who at X, the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter

Meanwhile, over in the UK … Government demands Musk’s X deals with ‘appalling’ Grok AI deepfakes:

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall has called on Elon Musk’s X to urgently deal with its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok being used to create non-consensual sexualised images of women and girls.

The BBC has seen multiple examples on X of people asking the bot to digitally undress people to make them appear in bikinis without their consent, as well as putting them in sexual situations.

Kendall said the situation was “absolutely appalling”, adding “we cannot and will not allow the proliferation of these degrading images.”

In sports media news, NBC is set for Olympic spots.NBCU breaks Winter Olympic ad sales record with sellout:

Today, amid CES, NBCUniversal announced it had sold out of its Winter Olympics ad inventory, with a month still to go before the games. In the process, the company set a new Winter Olympics ad sales record, with the highest linear and digital revenue it’s ever recorded. Plus, the company scored a record number of advertisers. With the news, NBCU has sold out inventory for the Winter Olympics, the NBA All-Star Game, and the Super Bowl, which make up what the company calls its “Legendary February” programming.

[…]

Among other highlights, the Winter Olympics is adding more than 100 new advertisers for the upcoming Games. Of its total advertisers, 85% of brand partners are investing in Milan Cortina digitally, and advertiser adoption of Peacock’s ad innovations has grown 31% from Paris 2024 to Milan Cortina 2026, according to the company.

Plus, the company said nearly 60 advertisers are using unique marketing elements, up more than 174% from Beijing 2022.

That’s a lot of new advertisers. I wonder what we’re going to see. I wonder what they’ll say about us.

memories / Monday / overwriting / photo — No comments
05
Jan 26

You’ve got two thumbs for a reason

I did what I always do after we invade the airspace of another country and perform some as-yet-ill-described snatch and grab of the sovereign power of state, I went shopping.

Why do you ask?

I recall, through the fog of now almost 25 years and the haze of long hours and weird schedules and watching, with empathy, the people that were in real fear post 9/11. I recall when President Bush said the necessary things, “our financial institutions remain strong” and the American economy was still “open for business.” I remember he told you to get on that plan. Go to Disney World. Help the airlines. Vice President Dick Cheney, long before he was shooting his friend in the face, said we should stick our thumb in the eye of the terrorists. That’s how we win, for it’s our freedoms they feared, and our BOGO sales they wanted. And it seemed silly, then, too, on a micro level. If the health of the nation depends on me showing my fierce Americaness at Best Buy, we’ve got a problem. It’d be months, after all, before Toby Keith delivered a soundtrack for the moment.

I think of that, from time to time. Not the song. It’s a level of saccharine that hasn’t aged all that well, even Keith had something to say about that later. I think about the urge to push people out. It was about confidence and normalcy and distraction in the face of fear and trauma. And, of course, keeping the gears of this machine churning.

Today, we’d be told to jump right back into Meta! Open that ChatGPT window and ask it some foolish question and earnestly accept its reply. We’d have to buy all of our American flags direct from Amazon. We’re all Prime members today. Your flags, made abroad, would arrive in 25 minutes or less, or the DoorDash guy picks up the bill himself.

It will, of course, be the gig guy that takes it in the teeth.

And if he’s not available, we’ve got these robots with 360-degree panoptic sight and sound monitors, to make sure you aren’t watching the Venezuela episode of Parks and Recreation in anything that’s not a suitably detached, ironic fashion.

Well, bub, I’m from Generation X. Watch me work.

Anyway, I went shopping. I needed to get out of the house. I’ve been a bit under the weather. That’s overstating it. The weather was above me. No, that’s not quite right, either. I have had the sinus whatever it is that I get. This version has had two defining characteristics. First, it has been the lightest version of this I can ever recall experiencing. Second, it is persistent. Will not go away.

So I figured, why not experience some of what life has to offer on a gray winter day? This was my Saturday thought. I had only work ambitions today. Saturday I visited an antique mall.

No place, I’m pretty sure, was built to be an antique mall. It is fun to figure out what this gussied up and semi-permanent flea market by another name might have housed in a previous life. The place I went to, I think, was a furniture store. It felt, in fact, like it was still a bit of both of those things. Also, it was clean. It was nice. Nothing terribly old. Nothing terribly interesting. Most distressingly, I did not feel as if I needed a shower when I left the building.

That’s the mark of a true antique market experience, the American experience, if you will.

So I went to another, in the opposite direction. This place is built into a big barn-looking building. And that was built into a hill. And that hill marks a secondary, but important intersection in its town. Across the street is the fire department. At the top of the fire department, inside, but visible from the street, they display the old fire house bell. This is an antique mall, then, that sits opposite people that respect what was.

Inside the red barn shaped building, sharing a wall with the antique mall is a restaurant. It may be the same people. The restaurant does three things. They make a lot of food. They hired the best food photographer in three counties to shoot it. (Food photographers get my ultimate respect. That’s not always the easiest subject matter to shoot.) And they try to tell me that a pulled pork sandwich should cost $20.99.

And, for me, it absolutely will not.

But the antique mall, now here’s a place you could prowl around. Here is a place where the floor creaks beneath you and you wonder if it was your holiday diet, or 100 years of termites. Here is a place where you wonder, How is< that shelf standing upright with a lean like that? Here is a place where you overlook the Star Wars plastic junk for maybe something interesting. Here is a place where you feel like you need to rinse off after your time inside is done.

I wasn’t looking for anything. I just enjoy the experience. Oh, if the right sort of thing jumped out at me, maybe I would be anxious about it for a moment before I moved on, but mostly I was proud to walk around somewhere and not think about work — or, ya know, the state of things — for a couple of hours.

I saw a bunch of hand planes and spokeshaves and other old hand tools I don’t have a need for or a place for. But I have watched people restore them on YouTube and it’s a satisfying transition. At least in a 12 minute video, maybe not the entire process.

Remember, if you don’t watch a good restoration video now and again, the terrorists win. Stick your thumb right in their eye, so they can’t see to click away at the good spots. Stick a thumb in your eye, so you can’t see to skip the pre-roll ads, because commerce!

I got buzzed on the way home.

I drove responsibly. And only had the chance to get a quick shot through the time of the windshield, which has that extra bit of tint, explaining the colors of the sky.

And that was Saturday afternoon.

Friday — No comments
02
Jan 26

Between now and three weeks from now, and also May

Before this all turns into a big block of class prep, and it will, I am just doing a few hours here and there. It helps the focus, or so I tell myself, at least. As I’ve probably said, this semester’s prep will be a bit different — and doesn’t that make for an exciting January blog post?!?!

I only have one new class to prepare. (Compared to last semester’s three new preps.) The difference is time. The general rule of thumb is that you spend about an hour on each class you’ve delivered before, and you spend about two hours on each new class. So, then, I should get somewhere between a third and a half of my free time back from last term. One class will be a breeze prep-wise, another should easily fit in that window many days. And then there’s the new class, which will all the time I can give it, and more, I think.

This class might be singular. Communicating Rituals and Traditions in Sports doesn’t seem to have a direct comparison out there. There’s a fine religion and sports class at Penn, a lot of places have a sport and culture course. Notre Dam has an interesting anthropology of sport class, and reading about that has been delightful, you’ll find a lot of history of sports and a sociology of sport class here and there, but I’ve stumbled into a new niche. It all started because I always wonder what makes a tradition a thing we do, as fans or players. How did they all start? That’s really my question. The class will extend further. Why do they persist? There’s so much fan identity to explore there. And that’s a big part of the class. Last semester I invited the athletic department to take part in this class, and they are on board.

So we will study rituals and traditions, distinguishing between them in the first week or so. We will discuss why we watch sports. We will meet members of the athletic department’s membership team. They are always looking for ways to engage their primary fan base, and I think I can incorporate that into the class. We will develop a campus survey from that meeting, and the class will circulate that accordingly. At the same time we’ll talk about some of the events going on around us. There’s the Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, and then March Madness and the World Cup is coming and so on. We’ll discuss fan identity, game day rituals for players and fans. We’ll discuss the atmosphere of game day experiences, I’ll have them dig up some interesting-to-them traditions from around college sports, and so on. At the same time, they’ll be in these groups, with those survey responses in hand, they’ll be working through that information, the general student experience and the stuff we’re learning in class and they’ll come up with proposals that they’ll suggest to the athletic department. Maybe one or two or more of the things they come up with help them. Maybe these students will see something they proposed in place next year. Maybe they’ll come back for homecoming one day, and see how it has grown.

There will be some other stuff in the class, too, but this is the general direction we’re going. I just need to pull in a few more readings, figure out an assessment structure, and then make the lectures. Fortunately, I have the next two weeks for that.

He said, the bracing fear of panic beginning to course through him.

Also, two other classes. One I’ve taught twice before, the online version of Digital Media Processes. This class is about the structure of social media. And the other class is the Criticism in Sports Media course which I debuted last term. I’m changing about a quarter of that, and offering up some new material. But I think I’ll have that one under control by early next week. I’ve probably said all this before (Ed. update — More than once!) but that’s just an indication of how these things stick in your head and float around in there. Or, float around in my head, at least. Even when I’m deliberately not working on something, I find myself working on one of these classes. This thing I’m reading, that video I’m watching, I might be able to shoehorn it in somewhere to make a point. As for the time, the online class takes care of itself, except for the hours of feedback I try to offer it. The Criticism class meets for two-and-a-half hours per week, and I’ll spend about two hours per week on that. Then everything else on the Rituals and Traditions class. And the five presentations I have this semester at two different conferences. And my many committee assignments. And then there’s running a search for, and hiring, a new social media manager. Oh, and the 24 pieces I want to write for another project. And, not at all important, the 900 hours I’ll devote to my contract packet this semester. I will have so much free time!

I admire people who can turn it off and live a different life when they aren’t working. To do that, I have to consciously go do something else. It’s a bike ride or an off-topic book (I’m reading about Franklin Roosevelt’s use of the media right now) or puttering about the house. Fortunately, there is plenty of all of that to do. Unfortunately, there will be little time to do it. See above.

I made the mistake of printing out a calendar and writing out the words “Classes begin” on a date just 18 days away. And this silly calendar is sitting right beside my computer. For the next few days I’ll do things in increments. A couple hours here on this, a couple hours the next day on that. At some point next week the 970 words I wrote about it, here, gets theme music. Terrifying, paralyzing, theme music.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
01
Jan 26

Happy New Year

Poseidon, a cat of action, is ready for 2026. He’s been helping us put things away, like the Christmas dishes, which have been used since Thanksgiving, back in their place of honor in the heirloom china cabinet.

Phoebe, she’s more of a thinker, and she’s not at all sure about 2026.

We are now launching a campaign to try to convince them both that nothing of substance will change this year. They’ll get cuddles throughout the day. They’ll still be fed in the evenings. The squirrels and the birds and the rabbits will all be outside, just beyond their reach.

I wonder what their resolutions would be, if they made them.

Mine …

Patience | Thoughtfulness | Kindness | Productivity | Personal Peace | Happy Pursuits

Mine will be ridiculously challenging.

Rowan / Wednesday — Comments Off
31
Dec 25

My class prep begins to shudder back to life

Doing work was a bad idea. It made my head hurt.

The first two times I wrote the previous sentence I wrote “It made my hurt.” It took three tries to get “head” into the thing. You know, the critical part … both of me, and the point I was trying to make.

Anyway.

Maybe, for the new year, I’ll re-name the blog “Anyway.”

Anyway, I wrote my old English teacher. Or the woman my keen world wide web research skills convinced me was her. Maybe we’ll find out one of these days. By the way, nothing takes you right back to grade school quite like writing someone who used to meticulously assessed your grammar. I spent some time on that letter, is what I’m saying. It was probably too light and breezy by the time I was done. Also, it was edited to within an inch of it’s life. Usually those two things are at odds with my process. I’ve no idea what this means. Maybe my former teacher can explain it to me. I wrote a few other people, too.

Then I did some more work. I did some more wrangling of my inboxes. This, I’ve learned, is best done in doses. Otherwise I just might delete everything in a fit of delight. Some things need to be kept. Some things need to be filed. I tend to use the inbox itself as a To Do list, so I try to keep it under 30 items. Somewhere between 20 and 30 is where my mind switches from “Can do!” to paralysis by volume. And that’s a good speed for an academic, otherwise you might get ideas.

Currently my work inbox has 30 emails, but eight of them are from me, and one other one will be dealt with on Monday. That’s a good number, for now. I’d like to keep my personal inbox, also a To Do list, under 20, but it is presently sitting at 33. There are a lot of articles in there to read. This, too, will be done in stages.

I also opened, I dunno, roughly 30 new tabs for a side project I’m considering. I am considering too many side projects. But I’ll have a lot of time for them when the semester begins! (I will never learn.)

I had a look at my course evaluations from the fall. Generally quite good. One student complained about their commute. If that’s as bad as it gets, I had a good term. Here are a few thoughtful answers. We request the feedback, I do not insist it is all positive.

“I really loved taking this class and learned so much from Professor Smith. He uplifted me in moments where I didn’t know I needed it. Professor Smith gave me academic advice on numerous occasions and was very gracious with our entire class. Overall, this class was a 12/10!”

“Professor Smith is one of the best professors I’ve have had at Rowan University. He is a great professor, and I will be taking more of his classes next semester.”

“This class was always one I was excited to attend due to the fact of Professor Smith’s way of communicating to his students.”

“I could not have imagined any other professor for this class. I will be taking one of his classes next semester, and the only reason I decided to take it is because he is the one teaching. I’m looking forward to having another class where he is the man in charge.”

“He’s legitimately a once in a lifetime professor take this man’s class whenever he offers.”

“Professor Smith made it a very comfortable setting that has allowed me to thrive. It is clear he cares for this subject matter, and cares about his students more. He is a vital part of this program.”

Maybe some of these classes are pretty good. I can tell in the evaluations which comment comes from which class, but I can’t tell which person. One of the two classes represented here, Criticism in Sport Media, will be taught again in the spring. The other, Organizational Communication in Sport, I’ll teach again next fall.

I made calendars for the spring term. I started scribbling on the new calendars. This will be handy for about three weeks. Most importantly, I managed to lay out roughly half of the new Rituals and Traditions course in outline form today. There’s a lot of prepping to be done beneath that, but I know what half the units will be like, and when. I’ll give it a few days and then come back and look it over, for quality control.

So it was a solid afternoon. Let’s see what this builds into.

One work day down. I’ll take off tomorrow to watch too much football. And then, on Friday, I’ll set a timer to see how much I can do before I throw my hands up in disgust.