That doesn’t work with a tomato.
Monday, September 21st, 2020
Man, Ted Turner was able to get the best sponsors for the SuperStation.
Sunday sales begin at 12:30.
Sunday, September 20th, 2020
The way we live now. Early Sunday afternoon line at Green’s Liquor store on Ponce, everyone masked up and queued at something resembling six foot intervals.
Once you get up to the door, an employee squirts your hands with Green’s house brand sanitizer. It’s mandatory, and, amazingly, the sanitizer recipe is posted on the front door. And doubly amazingly, I didn’t photo it or write it down. I remember Aloe Vera and Peppermint and Everclear Alcohol. Don’t drink it!
The story ‘needs’ art.
Saturday, September 19th, 2020
The Archaeoƒacts grid of recent posts.
Back in the days where I was allowed within several security screening points of American newsrooms, I remember when curmudgeonly desk people would allow as this or that story would benefit from what was then a scarce resource: an illustration or photo. ‘Art’, as it was called.
Since then, I’ve become among the loudest grumps when I see NPR or UGA’s Red and Black or the AJC or whatever the hell the Virginia Highland Patch is constantly run some sort of quickly cobbled together, pointless stock art illustration along with pretty much every tweet they emit.
It’s for “the visual thinkers,” y’know. The people who have an aversion to words. Why, I humphed, aren’t words just fine?
Well. Recently, as a coding exercise (hey, you gotta keep up on your PHP), I came up with a specially-coded page on both Sammy’s and my sites (not generally “out there” but if you know the URL, you could call it up) that presents a grid of images with the post’s headline superimposed, one per daily post, covering the last 90 days or so. This works great on Sammy’s site, because as a rule, she always posts at least one (stunning) image. Me, I’ve been doing a lot of posts that are just lots and lots of words, and when you look at my grid, at least back a couple of weeks, it looks like it has a swiss-cheese pattern of black holes.
So the past couple of weeks, I’ve tried to make sure that including an image was part of my daily offering to you…even when, well, it seems like I was grasping for a visual even when I thought in the back of my head that the words were just fine on their own.
I’m surprised I haven’t grumpily tweeted a complaint to myself yet.
So I’ll have to think about what that means. I mean, I’m doing this site for, well, myself mostly (although THANKS for reading it.) I still think posts that are 100% words are just perfectly fine, maybe I just need a tasteful color fill as a placeholder for the grid page that won’t make it look quite as obvious that there’s no pic there. Ah, more coding!
Emptier tonight.
Friday, September 18th, 2020
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, March 15, 1933 — September 18, 2020.
Unexpect the expected.
Thursday, September 17th, 2020
So the print version of the New York Times goes with a headline that says “Unexpected Fury of Storm Pounds Coast of Florida.”
They quote Peter McDavid, who owns a reception venue in Pensacola (because that’s where you go for good weather information):
“We weren’t expecting it,” he said next to a marina in Pensacola, where a big blue sailboat had smashed into the railings of the deck and where water had invaded from flooded streets and a broken skylight.
Except, of course, literally any of the meteorologists and weather people on television, radio, and the internet gave this part of the Gulf Coast days of warning that Sally would be slow-moving and dump lots, lots, lots of rain. If Mr. McDavid read anything on his phone, he would be warned, so…”we weren’t expecting it?”
And in the same article:
Just as forecasters feared (italics mine), the storm maintained its dawdling speed as it crossed over land, leaving residents to hunker down while 105 m.p.h. winds ripped roofs from homes, snapped trees, deluged streets and left hundreds of thousands of people without power.
This was a mess, but it was in no way unexpected. Even the tone of the article that suggested that the hurricane would hit way over there in coastal Mississippi or Alabama, not Escambia County Florida…except, yes, Pensacola and Escambia County border on Alabama, and are a very very short drive from Mobile Bay and the Alabama/Mississippi coast. It’s all a continuum.
Yeesh. The storm did what they expected it to. People had warning. Using a quote like that to headline the top right story on page one of the New York Times is just sloppy.
Soggy bands.
Wednesday, September 16th, 2020
The composite radar via wunderground.com at 9:55 pm Eastern, Wednesday September 16th.
There’s every indication that tomorrow in metro Atlanta will be soggy, soggy, soggy thanks to the rain bands left by slow-moving Hurricane (now Tropical Storm again) Sally.
The folks down on the coast by far had the worst of it, with huge rainfall totals, but it looks like we’ll get quite a bit of rain in the next 48 hours or so. By early Friday it will have largely moved on to menace the Carolinas, but before then, we get rain. Some wind too, but mostly rain.
The good news? Cooler weather. A high of 73 Thursday.
Only 652.
Tuesday, September 15th, 2020
The past couple of years when we head south on I-75, having cleared the metro Toledo area, we encounter this sign. Hey, we’re only 652 miles from home!
Turns out there’s always an explanation, and I found it in The Toledo Blade.
Credit the geography lesson to Chris Waterfield, district traffic engineer at the Ohio Department of Transportation’s district office in Bowling Green, who decided to mix things up a bit — while complying with federal sign guidelines — when he designed new signs five years ago to be erected after I-75’s recent widening south of Perrysburg.
“This is my attempt at maybe trying to wake you up a little bit, and see something different. I don’t think you need to see the same thing every five miles. I want to make it interesting,” Mr. Waterfield said.
The three-line signs do not cost significantly more than the two-line standard ODOT signs used for mileage, he said.
I can kinda understand the “wake you up a little bit” part…the road from Toledo down to, say, Lima is indeed kinda straight and cornfield-lined and, dare I say, monotonous.
For some reason, having them stacked this way makes my brain try to do more math: okay, given these, how far from Cincinnati to Atlanta? (499 miles, no more, no less.)
And that 499 miles is, really, quite Ohio-free.
On-the-job sports training.
Monday, September 14th, 2020
WTCG Studio Control, image ©2020, John Christopher Burns
This is where I sat, in front of the Vidifont, that double keyboard in the foreground, the thing that put the words up on the screen, on long nights when we put the replay of that night’s Braves Baseball game on the air at the superstation. We had a full crew in the control room because we aired different commercials on the late night replay than on the live show. Braves Baseball! brought to you by Dante’s Down The Hatch, Slim Whitman, and the Ginzu Knife! This was in seasons in the late 1970s and early 1980s where the instances of the Braves actually winning or doing amazing things were few and far between.
This is where I was often smart enough to shut up and learn from Kris and Jan and Joan and Don and Ron and Bruce and Russ and Troll and Mike and Stan. Amazing education in television, in how baseball worked, in how to be a good member of a team, an education for which I was paid pretty much minimum wage.
Skyline, with cranes.
Sunday, September 13th, 2020
The view from our neighborhood, but a bit above the trees.
Our city, well into the year of the pandemic, looks at a distance a lot like it always does. Especially notable: lots of construction cranes. And faithful to a more unsettling Atlanta tradition, at the end of last week there have been a couple of construction accidents—concrete parking deck sections pancaking down under cranes—in Midtown, right where (I believe) Emory is building a large expansion of its Midtown hospital. Two sections, two different days.
I think their inspectors have to look way, way more closely at this structure this week.
I feel for the guys and gals who have to work under these stresses, and under reduced Federal inspection and oversight.
More pendentives, fewer squinches.
Saturday, September 12th, 2020
I’ve been squinching around in the muddy fields of grammar, annoyed with reports that the people at the Associated Press stylebook now are kinda “whatever” about the correct usage of “fewer” and “less.”
Just for the record: it’s not difficult. If you can discretely count the individual whatevers, you use fewer, and if it is an aggregated whatever, you use less.
- Fewer people attended the concert.
- Less electricity was available than last summer.
- Less tear gas hung in the air because fewer canisters were thrown.
This is what I worry about: when enough people start using what can (and should!) be precise usage in a fuzzy or sloppy way, then it’s easy to say “oh, usage has changed.” Like hell it has.
At any rate, while I was doing this Very Important Web Work, Sammy was examining the details of architecture in Spain several hundred years ago, and she said she came across a word new to her: pendentive. Huh! New to me as well. Turns out it’s fairly foundational—it relates to the ways builders of arches and domes connected their dome-y shapes to the squared-off support structure underneath.
I came across this article on Squinches and Pendentives in Architecture as I texted with her. It’s got a couple of great diagrams and photos that made things quite clear to me. Both those words have, to my extremely untrained ear, a certain “naah, that can’t be what you call it,” but indeed, it is.
I think I was especially suspicious of “squinches” because we’ve used it a lot around here onomatopoeically to describe the sound Sammy’s footwear made when she first installed the custom orthotic that is a lasting part of her life post-2017-foot injury. She’d be squinching around here like crazy until she found the correct powder to use.
Sensitive day.
Friday, September 11th, 2020
Before Trump, before the pandemic, September 11th was one of those days I turned away from broadcast media (and now, social media) because there are just so many people out there who want to focus on the tragedies in New York, DC, and Pennsylvania and how it (very possibly) changed their lives.
I really have no sense at this precise moment whether people will have those moments for, I dunno, all of 2020 and maybe beyond when they commemorate the pandemic and the brave health care workers’ response to it and our crisis of leadership from Washington.
I guess I should give history a couple of years to sort it all out.
For contrast, or just to steady my sense of being, this afternoon I watched the end of 2017’s The Post, a story that affirms what it means to be a journalist and to put what you have behind the strength of the First Amendment and do the right thing.
There’s a coda in the film where actress Carrie Coon, playing The Washington Post’s Meg Greenfield, is powerfully relaying the words of the concurring decision of Judge Black to the newsroom at large, which were, in part:
“The founding fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors.”
No prior restraint. An essential role. Get out there and do the honorable thing(s).
September 10th.
Thursday, September 10th, 2020
Four years ago on this very day we were at the Atlanta Botanical Garden and Piedmont Park. We had a nice walk through the park, the garden, the orchid rooms. Had a lovely lunch at Longleaf, the fine restaurant there.
Our ABG membership expired this spring sometime, and the folks at the Garden have very aggressively been pursuing our renewal (emails! print pieces! phone calls while we were in Michigan!) and we certainly want to get back to having a place to stroll through and just relax and let the stresses of the day drift away amidst the beauty of growing stuff…
But it just doesn’t seem like this is the right time yet. Not just yet. The folks at the Garden assure us they have all sorts of procedures in place, but to me, the stress level is still too…there.
I can only imagine what it’s like for folks who run the ABG to try and rebuild their membership base. And then I think about the folks who fork out big dollars for football, basketball, or soccer season tickets.
It’s gonna take a while.
Tuned.
Wednesday, September 9th, 2020
There are days that I play music that I first met on the jumbled shelves of a tiny radio station in Plainfield Vermont. WGDR! At the time, 10 big wobbly watts of FM broadcasting. Two turntables, no waiting. Serving East Montpelier, North Montpelier, but not Montpelier. On some nights, the line-of-sight frail signal skipped over mountain ranges and down to river valleys quite a ways away.
Today is one of those days.
Todd Rundgren, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Yes, Led Zeppelin, Donald Byrd, Eric Dolphy, and somewhat more anachronistically, Kathy Mattea, Tracy Chapman, and the haunting, fog-piercing weather theme from WOUB, Athens, Ohio, where they next allowed me to do a tiny bit of radio. Once, long ago.
That big old vertical picture above? Take a deep breath. I can smell this picture, always could. Vinyl and asbestos tiles and just a hint of residual marijuana.
Newsstand eyecatchers.
Tuesday, September 8th, 2020
After paging through decades of TV Guide covers, it only seems right to look at a few that don’t feature fictional characters that light up a glowing late 20th century content delivery box.
There was a time when the impact of a cover on the newsstand—all three of these publications were (are?) national weekly print publications—there was a time when a large, distinctive photo or illustration conveyed a sense of where the collective American mind was from one week to the next.
Now, we can go back to the same place on the internet and find that the powerful image—the “cover”, so to speak—has evaporated and been replaced in the big scroll by the next gripping image of the moment.
Trouble is, many of these images don’t quite live up to that esteemed billing. They’re crappy stock images, bad Photoshop retouchings, or simply mistakes—images that have nothing to do with the story but the desk was in a hurry to post and, well, it’ll evaporate soon anyway.
Guide to content.
Monday, September 7th, 2020
I spent some of today skimming through TV Guide’s online collection of their covers, nicely curated, evocative little snapshots of what came through into American living rooms when the conduit for content was much, much smaller.
We were presented with a much narrower view of a very diverse and complex country. One of the TVG headlines read “What Negroes Want From Television.” I’m guessing: to see themselves and their stories represented honestly and in abundance. Same thing we all want.
Meantime, I would have paid extra to have seen political coverage delivered by the floating disembodied heads of Brinkley, Cronkite, et al.
Happy Labor Day Eve.
Sunday, September 6th, 2020
Photo from Kheel Center at Cornell University via Flickr.
Support union labor and the fight for a living wage with marches, your purchases, your political choices, and yeah, sure, your social media emissions.
