baseball / Delaware / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on The greatest minor league baseball game ever
17
Apr 26

The greatest minor league baseball game ever

It started out as a joke, I guess. My godsisters-in-law (just go with it) have five highly active children between them and everyone works and travels and lives full lives and so they are calendar fiends. We get calendar invites for things to which we are invited. And we started getting calendar invites to things which are obvious jokes. Some family things aren’t meant for me, but they’re legendary, and so you’re always welcome, thanks but no thanks. You know the sort. Also, I don’t partake in handbag bingo.

But I do enjoy a good game of bingo. Maybe I should go to that.

Anyway, sometime just before last Christmas I got a calendar invite to one of the kid’s concert performance at the minor league ball park. He was taking part in an orchestra and of course we were going to that. THat was tonight.

So we got to the venue and got seat just behind home plate and our guy and his viola and a bunch of his classmates and students from other schools, apparently, all flood the field and they play their song. It was great. It was cute. Parents were proud.
Everyone had a nice time.

I met the mascot, who took a selfie with my phone.

After the performance was the game, of course. It’s high A, and the starting pitcher has been at this level since 2021. In the first inning he hit the leadoff pitcher, got the second guy to ground into a double play, walked the third batter on four straight. The next batter drove that guy in, but was thrown out at third. It was a chaotic top of the first inning.

I looked at both rosters, the oldest guy on either team was born in May of 1999. Only four of the guys in either dugout are 20th century kids.

At one point, a right fielder lost a ball in the sun. The ball was on the ground at the time.

High A ball is great fun!

Eventually the godnephews and godniece (just go with it) came and sat with us. The visiting pitcher was throwing a no-hitter through five. His team was out ahead. A reliever came in and the wheels flew off.

This is how you know the wheels flew off. The alternate mascot makes his way onto the field. Mr. Celery happened by accident. He has no mythological backstory. They’re a bit sketchy on the actual backstory. The prevailing version goes that there was some health food initiative in years past, and whoever was putting that on left a few mascots behind. The team found it in storage, and then decided, for no reason at all, to put an intern in that outfit. And every time the home team scores Mr. Celery comes out and runs around a bit.

And, tonight, he ran around a lot.

That reliever recorded one inning pitched, and the loss. He allowed five runs on three hits, two walks, and two strikeouts. He now has a 30.86 ERA.

Sitting behind us was a fraternity from one of the local universities. They were there supporting one of the kids who was involved in the pregame festivities. They were loud and funny and pleasant. They started the wave. They invented a new cheer.

Our godnephews were completely taken with them and the frat boys welcomed them into their night. Those guys were great. They were very kind and generous to the kids, and they didn’t necessarily have to be. They indulged their enthusiasms, so there was the 2nd grader, coaching the fraternity into doing the wave, and, thus, the entire stadium. He and his brother started picking spots for the new cheer, “Get your rocks up!” which involved throwing your two fists into the air and making a lot of noise. They were giving the boys high fives and posed for photos and you would have thought they hung the actual moon.

At one point, I looked at my godbrother-in-law-in-law (just go with it) and said of his son, “I believe he’s found his tribe.”

Indeed, I think the 2nd grader now knows the secret handshake.

Somehow he got a foul ball. He got one of the field crew to sign his ball for him. All the kids got to high five the mascots. They did just about everything but launch the fireworks.

I’m making shirts for the next game.

We’ll be back.

cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Sing a little sunshine song
16
Apr 26

Sing a little sunshine song

We made it up to 89 degrees today. In a highly variable spring, this feels like the signal day, the one that convinces you that spring is actually, ya know, going to stick this time. It could be the sweat, on the small of your back. It could be that the sweat is telling you that this will probably turn right into summer. You’d like a nice long mild spring. You probably won’t get it. You’d definitely like this to happen before the second half of April.

That also means we’re in the final month of the semester, and boy, it feels like it. A nice warm, sunny, day like this, and we’re all ready to be outside already.

But first there was class. Today in Rituals and Traditions we talked about unhealthy ones. There’s a thing in Pittsburgh where people are stealing traffic cones and taking them into baseball games. It’s silly and probably fun, but also potentially dangerous and certainly theft. We also talked about sports where diet and weight issues create unhealthy rituals and problems for athletes, and some of the people that emulate them. We discussed the running of the bulls in Pamplona. I discussed the old Aggie bonfire and a whole host of things at the University of Mississippi.

We touched on hazing, binge drinking, and the Indians, Braves, Chiefs, and Redskins. We discussed the Seminoles earlier in the semester, and someone brought them up as a sort of contradiction today, which was great. Florida State makes a great effort to work with the local Seminole tribe and treat their imagery and representation with authenticity and honor. But not all of the Seminole approve. You’ll never get universal acceptance, and this is an important consideration. And so is your thinking and your receptivity to different stakeholders, and what you need to be mindful of, prepared for, and what it means to work through perceptions and circumstances that aren’t good for your team, your fans, or your league.

In Criticism we watched Slaying the Badger. This is a documentary about the 1989 Tour De France, one of the greatest editions of the modern race. I picked this because we have recently watched a football documentary and a basketball documentary, and there’s a lot to learn about watching something in a sport you don’t know very well. It says something about what we perceive, what we lose, and how we learn. Plus, it’s just a great story full of real and human drama.

This documentary lets you talk about multiple perspectives and different sides of stories, who’s here and who is not, and the effect of time, memory, and recollection. Also, it is a great film.

I’m buying the book and reading it this summer, finally.

I’m going to do a lot of reading this summer. That’s what I’ve decided this spring. First I have to finish catching up on everything. Or catch up on finishing everything. And also keep up on everything. And do the other things. It’s a lot to think about.

Which is what I thought about on the bike today. Good thing, too, since this was this week’s Worst Ride Ever™️. I didn’t know it when I started out, standing there staring at the wild almond.

I didn’t know it here, at the dogwood.

I was starting to figure it out around this tractor, though.

Here’s my shadow selfie. I think my shadow knew all along.

Same tractor, on the way back in.

And then the last little bit of road on the way back in.

This week’s Worst Ride Ever™️ was still (a very slow) 73 minutes on the bike.

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’s from our brief stop at Trah Dhumha Goirt.

cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Rowan / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Finally, a normal change of pace
15
Apr 26

Finally, a normal change of pace

Today was the first day since February 23rd that I haven’t had a bunch of stuff on my calendar. I have been running five calendars since about that same time, and I checked them all, in disbelief, to make sure there was nothing doing today.

This meant that I spent a few hours grading, a few more hours working on a brand new lecture, and a little more time watching a documentary. I have, this week, been answering the last 48 questions poised in my online class. Across the semester they are tasked with reading various articles and chapters. In these six assignments they must make annotations. There’s a certain formula we employ. One element of the formula is to ask a question that the reading has inspired. I figure, since I’ve instructed them to ask I should try to answer the questions. This is a lot of fun. For one thing, you see the wide range of ways that students are thinking about the reading. For another thing, you can challenge yourself to write interesting and creative things. For still a third thing, you can try to predict questions that will come up a lot, and thus create some form answers. The downside to this, and it’s not really a downside, is that it is time intensive.

The good news is, this was the sixth and final annotation of the semester. This also means that the big project is boring down upon us. Feedback there matters a great deal, over the stage process, and that is certainly time intensive.

I have been working on a lecture today about unhealthy traditions. The challenge here is going to be in trying to sound neither obvious, nor a hallway monitor.

And tomorrow I’m screening a documentary that’s a little too long, so I have to find parts to cut out of it, for time. It’s not as easy as skipping the beginning or cutting the end. You have to make some deliberate choices, hopefully, without losing too much context.

And that is what I did on the first day when I didn’t have anything to do.

Also, I went for a bike ride. It’s still early enough in the outdoor part of the year that this feels hole-in-corner. And my lovely bride is out of town at a conference, so I was riding on my own, which felt even sneakier, somehow.

That’s how it felt, for a little over an hour. And down this road I flew.

It was tee-hee sneaky version of the feeling. The “I can’t believe I’m getting away with this” style.

If it somehow makes it feel appropriate, I didn’t go out until after hours. And I only got above 30 mph three times.

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?

https://www.kennysmith.org/wordpress/blog/2026/03/17/cuan-na-haisleime-and-keem-bay/”>This is Keem Bay.

Instagram / Ireland / journalism / memories / photo / Rowan / sports / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Ewe always want more time
14
Apr 26

Ewe always want more time

A bright and warm and sunny spring day. The sort of day you should have. The sort of spring day you definitely want. The kind of day that, darn it, you deserve after a long hard winter. The things growing outside know it. They know it best of all. I just stood in the window and looked at the snow, this thing was under it for weeks.

So my only problem here is that I feel this blooming beauty deserves a lot more admiration, and a lot more time, than I can afford to give it at the moment. Blooming things should capture our imagination and attention. They certainly shouldn’t be a mere backdrop, a brief bit of mother nature’s colorful palette ignored for the moment, dismissed for the day, unappreciated because we’re busy.

There’s a lot to do during the blooming period, a clumsy scheduling error that occurs every year, and that’s a first world problem.

Which sounds like I want to do a lot of horticulture; I just want to look at the flowers.

If you start at the URL logo in the bottom corner and let your eyes move up the image you’ll see an airliner flying over. Hear it, fetch the phone, open the camera app, find it in the sky, talk about it here. A lovely way to spend a moment outdoors …

… when you’re not admiring the flowers.

In Rits and Trads we talked about youth sports today. Sportsing: what’s the point? Students are always interested in talking about youth sports, because most of them played something, and because travel ball is ludicrous, but kids are great.

Youth sports, we say, helps teach interpersonal skills, helps us learn how to follow rules, participate with others, respect teammates and opponents, and so on. I like to talk about my favorite coach, who wasn’t the best coach, but was determined to teach us more about those things than the game. Since most of us have a very finite window as athletes, that just seems like a good idea. Teach me how to be a better me.

And that let me talk about social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and constructivism learning theory (Piaget, 1964) (and others) and social learning theory, (Bandura, 1977).

Sometimes we are what we see, and social learning theory talks about that.

Of course I put in a cycling video. Paris-Roubaix was just Sunday, it was an all-timer, and someone is out there reproducing the race with their kids. This is remarkably faithful to the actual race.

And we talked a bit about representation. It seemed pertinent since we get that conversation most around the Olympics and thisw was an Olympic year. This video, then, was a cute no brainer.

I showed other videos, too. A friend of mine coaches youth soccer and he has the parents of the two teams form a tunnel and the two teams run through it at the end of the game. He says that by the end of that the kids can’t even remember the score of the game. They’re just having a good time. I showed several things like that. And then we talked about the rituals and traditions in youth sports. The one that no one thought of was senior night.

In Criticism we talked about this story, LeBron James, Cooper Flagg Make History as Fans React to Near Triple-Doubles in Lakers’ Loss to Mavs, which allowed us to talk about curating and context.

Former umps watch their brethren deal with ABS and feel sympathy, pain:

What is a strike?

The answer to that question has traditionally been easy for MLB umpires: A strike is whatever I say it is.

However, amid the introduction of the automated ball-strike challenge system, highly experienced former MLB umps are critical of baseball’s newest technology.

Citing their own observations and conversations with those currently still in the job, the consistent criticism has been simple: What’s a ball and what’s a strike has changed, and they don’t know how, exactly, to call it.

That allowed us to talk, among other things, about who is included in a story, who is not, and why those things might happen.

After class I beat it back home, and to the bike shop. We’d checked our bikes in for an annual tune-up. Mine was about three years overdue. Tune-ups aren’t expensive, but add-ons are. My lovely bride needed new tires and instead of just ordering them and replacing them myself, our friend the bike guy mechanic did it for us. He slapped on the most expensive tires on the market. These things are interwoven with cash money, they have to be.

I told him I’m probably going to go on the market for a new bike this summer. He told me where to shop. A lot of the smaller shops, like his, have been cut out of the roadie market. It’s a square-footage vs. manufacturer demands vs. ROI issue. He has a small shop. The big four bike manufacturers want you to buy a certain number of machines from them (basically on spec) and then sell them. But bikes don’t constantly fly off the shelves, so the store might have to buy 15 or 20 bikes and hope they can sell them. And that’s all a huge risk, or maybe untenable. Here is a sport built on local culture and the source of the equipment is flirting with driving the locals entirely out of business. My guy said I should go over to this other bike shop and get in some test rides, because I want to try different things out. The guy told me to go to his competitor. I suppose, considering how the industry is changing under his feet, that other store isn’t his competition anymore. And this is how manufacturers are marginalizing and creating vulnerabilities in the best ambassadors their industry has.

So I suppose, this June, I’ll be doing that. Maybe, if I do it right, I can be gripped by paralysis by analysis and not buy a new bike at all.

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 this close encounter with the roadside sheep with me, won’t you?

Ya know, we have some neighbors that have two small sheep herds. They don’t let them roam around, and we’re all the lesser for it.

adventures / bluesky / Monday / photo / scholarship / video — Comments Off on Wrapping up my last conference of the spring
13
Apr 26

Wrapping up my last conference of the spring

On Saturday I took part in two panels at the conference. The first was the now traditional roundtable discussion of issues in the upcoming midterms. We decided there was not a thing at all going on, the republic is safe, the economy is great, we are at peace and universally beloved, our style of representative democracy is health, and no one need pay attention.

That last sentence is in code. The key to breaking the code is in realizing that the opposite of everything listed there is true.

In the afternoon I also participated in a more structured panel. I believe I pitched the idea for this one, in face. The premise was that modern media has changed the format of the foundation and persuasion components of political campaigning. Basically, comparatively inexpensive equipment and online platforms are changing the messaging we’re seeing. (To say nothing of AI.)

I talked about how Jerri Green, who is one of the seven prominent candidates running for governor in Tennessee. The Memphis City Councilor is introducing herself with an extensive bio video.

There are strengths and weaknesses to the spot.

I talked about Fred Wellman, who is his socials (and some genAI that is both clever and weird) to show his family’s military heritage (dating back to the French and Indian War) and his time as an Army aviator to explain how his career of service began.

He’s one of nine people (and no incumbents) running for the 2nd Missouri seat. The primary is in August.

I explained the social media efforts of Zach Wahls, who introduced himself as an Eagle Scout, and then a state senator, and then a sixth-generation Iowan. And then a new generation of Democrat. He’s campaigning for the U.S. Senate.

There’s a lot clever production techniques in each of these. They’re professionally done, but not overbearingly so. In each of them you see longer stories you can’t get in a pricey 30-second spot.

I also mentioned Andrew Cuomo’s published an AI-generated negative ad while running for mayor of New York. It might be the worst spot I’ve seen in my life. It’s certainly the most grotesque attack ad.

Andrew Cuomo’s campaign just posted — and quickly deleted — this AI-generated ad depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani.”

Features a Black man in a keffiyeh shoplifting, an abuser, a trespasser, a trafficker, a drug dealer, and a drunk driver all declaring support for Mamdani.

[image or embed]

— Prem Thakker ツ (@premthakker.bsky.social) October 22, 2025 at 8:08 PM

Depicting “criminals for Zohran Mamdani” highlighting shoplifters, domestic abusers, pimps, drunk drivers, drug dealers, speaking directly to camera it finally ended with an entire city block on fire. It was quickly, and quietly, deleted. Here’s some coverage of this from last October. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/23/cuomo-zohran-mamdani-ai-ad”>Cuomo condemned over racist AI ad depicting ‘criminals for Zohran Mamdani’:

This video follows a trend from the Cuomo campaign, who have published a handful of AI-generated videos in the lead up to 4 November. In one early October video, Cuomo was seen performing various jobs around New York City including driving a subway car, trading on the New York stock exchange and washing high-rise windows.

In response, Mamdani posted on Instagram: “In a city of world-class artists and production crew hunting for the next gig, Andrew Cuomo made a TV ad the same way he wrote his housing policy: with AI. Then again, maybe a fake Cuomo is better than the real one?”

Just this week, Cuomo shared a video featuring an AI-generated Bill de Blasio and, again, Mamdani. That video attempted to paint Mamdani as a “mini” De Blasio and emphasize a moment from the first debate where Cuomo compared the former mayor to the mayoral hopeful.

Cuomo, of course, lost convincingly.

I touched on the Hell Cats, four female veterans of the American armed forces now running for Congress in New Jersey, New Hampshire, New York, Arizona. Their introductory ad was a 68-second montage piece featuring all four of these accomplished women leaning into their service, and the proud history of the Hell Cats name (the first all-female Marine unit, dating back to WWI). I also mentioned Doug Jones’ stumbles out of the media gate in his gubernatorial bid in Alabama (Update: he won his primary and will be trounced in the general) and the Mr. Rogers-esque feeling of some of Brad Landers’ congressional content in New York (they primary in June).

It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of campaign messaging in these last few cycles. The notion of what is effective is changing on every media front, and is different, in subtle ways, from platform to platform and format to format. I could talk on the finer points of that, the evolution, the concerns, the consultants, and the grassroots feel of authenticity in politics all day. We could also talk about the use of AI in this messaging.

But what you really missed were the campaign efforts that others discussed. Derek Dooley — famous for being his father’s son and an underwhelming football coach — stepped into the senate race in Georgia. And this is how you introduced himself.

The Georgia Democrats, a few days later, ended Dooley’s political career and any hopes he might have of returning to big time football, in a 95 second spot without saying an actual word.

The Georgia Democrats didn't just destroy Derek Dooley they buried him 100 feet under the earth.

[image or embed]

— Dan Weiner (@danweiner.bsky.social) February 4, 2026 at 8:14 AM

(Update: Dooley finished second in his primary.)

And you’ll absolutely want to read up on Aaron Spencer, who is running for sheriff in Arkansas … in the same county where he’s facing second degree murder charges. It’s a real Walking Tall story. He handily won the Republican primary, and is currently in pre-trial motions for his murder charges.

Things I saw before the conference ended … this delicious noodle bowl.

I want some more, please and thank you.

This colorful tunnel.

This cup of M&Ms. One of our colleagues found a giant jar, produced a huge plastic bag and took his fill. We just borrowed this little cup from the juice and coffee stand.

This awesome mural. The only not-awesome thing about this is that someone has places crowd control ropes right up next to the wall, crowding the whole mural. This is awesome. Fred should just be reaching out of the wall, all fierce and kind.

The problem with this conference ending is the idea that we won’t see some of our dear friends until next year’s conference. This is an unfortunate and unacceptable annual realization.

Back to it tomorrow. Back to classes, back to whatever else comes to mind, and back to those great Irish videos. (We’ve only just begun to recollect.)

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