Let’s make it a good one

That’s the spirit

Thanks to Twitter I know that Amherst won its big game against Williams yesterday.

Thanks to Twitter, I got caught up in the game for the first time in at least 20 years.

And I learned that the football team, far from being so-so as last I recalled, was undefeated this season. I didn’t think I still cared, but I guess I do. Ah, those memories of revelry in the stands with my classmates.

Score another one for social media — and the Lord Jeffs.

Photo via Flickr

Now more than ever, 10 years later

September 2001, the Twin Towers fell 3,000 miles away.

My Dad, also 3,000 miles away, told me and my brothers that he had cancer.

And that it was terminal.

Two months later, I quit my job.

There was so much talk then of living in the moment, of seizing the day, of how, “now more than ever,” this or that seemed more important. But my clarity came from a far more personal crisis than the terrorist attacks.

Funny how I forgot that wrenching confluence amid the 10th anniversary remembrance.

So much easier to recall details about the actual day and subsequent attempts to wrench meaning out of the tragedy. I vowed I would not too caught up in anniversary coverage, but could not help but read some of the stories of those affected personally by the tragedy and cried anew.

Now more than ever.

1st day, new class

Sunset, Labor Day weekend

Do hyper-local sites have to be boosterish to succeed?

Patch sure thinks so.

Sigh.

Tick tock

One way to feel old: Go see the Butthole Surfers at the Echoplex.

Marvel at how unkempt fans are. Wrack brains to remember what crowd looked like at last Butthole concert attended some 10 years earlier at Universal Amphitheater.

Definitely better groomed then. Kids these days or the location?

Two: Read L.A. Weekly review of last weekend’s concert.

Seriously, why did they make him do it?

I live near the water so I’m used to occasional foam on the beach.

The anchors at the Fox D.C. affiliate? Apparently not so much.

Over the weekend, at the height of Hurricane Irene, they kept marveling at the foam covering poor Tucker Barnes in Ocean City, Md., asking him question after question about its composition.

Barnes answered the best he could, but he clearly did not know that much more than they did. Later, a TV website asserted that the foam was “probably the remnants of raw sewage.” Which, ew, but maybe it wasn’t. (The report wasn’t all that conclusive.)

My bigger question: Why did they make him keep giving reports while foam of uncertain composition was spewing all over him? I do my best to avoid the stuff while I’m running barefoot on the sand.

You don’t have to read water quality reports to know that there are plenty of toxins in our waters under the best of circumstances, let alone raging hurricanes. (And trust me, if you have read those reports, you’ll really be squeamish about wading in during a storm, when runoff makes water quality especially dubious.)

My Wrap story on hurricane coverage, complete with video of Tucker and a streaker in Virginia Beach, is here.

Messing around

Aw, they were so cute then: The giddy early days of DVD

Truly yesterday’s news: Hollywood’s giddy excitement about DVD as a replacement technology. I came across this old L.A. Times story while sorting through my archives and was reminded of those heady days at the turn of the century. Gotta love the enthusiasm of studio execs about the format: Craig Kornblau of Universal noted that “clearly this is not going to trickle out like laser,” while then-Warner homevid chieftain Warren Lieberfarb crowed, “this is a homerun.”

It’s bittersweet to read these words now, after years of decimating DVD sales declines, but for a while there, home entertainment divisions really soared. Complete story can be found here.