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The eclipse’s 1-year countdown
My view of the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, 2017, in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I have been counting down the days until the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse, which won’t be over me but it will be with a two-hour drive. Last weekend began the one-year countdown to the total solar eclipse that will be seen in a large part of the United States and Canada on April 8, 2024.
I can’t wait. You could say I’ve been waiting since the last one in the U.S., in August 2017. Because I have.
I’m an unabashed total solar eclipse geek. I’ve only seen one total eclipse, that one nearly six years ago now. But it was so spectacular that I wished I had spent my entire life up to that point going to remote parts of the world, chasing eclipses.
It was that incredible.
I had never been near a total solar eclipse before. I wasn’t even back in 2017. I drove about six hours from my home to go to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where my father and I experienced totality. It was only about a minute of totality, but it was enough to hook me.
“I can’t wait to do that again,” I told my father. He was game for the trip but didn’t really ever think about eclipses, was impressed.
Total solar eclipses only come around once every 18 months somewhere in the world, so they’re rare. With the Earth 2/3 water, living in the path of totality is even rarer.
The closest I’ve ever come was on May 10, 1994, when there was an annular solar eclipse in northern New York and northern New England. I had to work that day so I couldn’t travel — darn news biz — but my newsroom colleagues and I built pinhole cameras to safely observe the 85% obscurity above us in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
And I got to take my lunch half-hour at the maximum, shortly after 1:30 p.m. that day. I will never forget the otherworldly glow and shadows of the sun falling on downtown Bridgeport. But it in no way got dark.
It would be 23 years before I finally saw a total solar eclipse, and there was no comparison between 1994 and 2017. It was a hot day in Bowling Green, where my father and I had gone to a minor league baseball game. But gradually the sun dimmed and it got cooler, and then, around 2 p.m., the sky darkened to near twilight and the sun basically disappeared.
Looking up at that eclipse, seeing the small strands of sunlight up against the mountains of the Moon – called Baily’s Beads – I had no words. I just knew that I needed to see it again.
I’m lucky in 2024. Totality is about two hours either north or west of where I live, and I’m able to easily reach Cleveland or Columbus or Buffalo, and it will also go through where I used to live, Caribou, Maine, although that’s a much longer haul for me now.
I’ve been disappointed by a lot of astronomical events since I’ve lived in Pennsylvania, but I’m hoping the sun will be out on April 8. If not, I’ve got a few choices, although not many. It would be a drag to be so close and yet so far.
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My motto’s always been when it’s right, it’s right
True confession: I enjoyed the song “Afternoon Delight” in the summer of 1976 when I was nine years old, even if it took me until 1981 or so before I figured out what they were singing about.
And honestly watching them perform and the little snapshot of people watching in the video catapults me back to 1976. I have a lot good memories of the ‘70s. It was my first full decade!
I watched The Starland Vocal Band summer replacement show in 1977. This song gets mocked – and lovingly parodied like in “Anchorman” – but I think it’s a pretty good pop song and SVB were strong musicians, songwriters and singers. The married couple on the right wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and John Carroll, the 21-year-old on the left, has a fabulous career with Mary Chapin Carpenter and on his own.
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Best Years, Greatest Generation
“The Best Years of Our Lives,” a movie that deserves every bit of its fame, an unflinching story about what happened after WWII (and WHILE it was happening) and one that highlights the plight of people with the emotional and physical wounds of war. It’s a story for all time because these challenges still occur, every day, even after the grand scale of the challenges for the service members after 1945.
“Best Years” hit hard, knowing what the war and its aftermath did to my grandparents’ generation.
I didn’t know it at the time, but it mirrored own family with my paternal grandfather, whose typed memoirs of his own experience from D-Day to the Bulge (and the many deaths he witnessed he could never shake) shocked us when we found it nearly 80 years later and 42 years after he died.
He was the most stoic and reserved man, a trained and decorated soldier and officer, who saw combat from D-Day to the Bulge. He returned after the war to social work and his final rotation was at a hospital, working with wounded soldiers. We know now how much emotional weight he carried til the day he died. And “Best Years” helps understand it more.
Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Russell here in this clip – Russell, who had lost his hands in WWII and not a professional actor – but a cast at its very best: Myrna Loy, Frederic March, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews and a story by Mackinlay Kantor and a screenplay by Robert Sherwood, direction by William Wyler. An all-star team.
Best picture, best actor for March,best supporting actor – Russell is the only actor to win twice for the same role (it’s an interesting story) – and it packs a punch all these years later. Hard not to mist a bit knowing that this was real life, not just a movie.
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The threat to journalism and a lot of white-collar work
I have been thinking a lot about ChatGPT and other AI. I am both fascinated by what is and what can be, and I am also alarmed by the threat to journalism, writing and a lot of other white-collar work. If you aren’t thinking about this seriously, then you are missing something.
This article from Axios agrees.
It won’t be long before it takes a bite out of what many of us do. Just how much of a bite, and whether it’s fatal to our careers, I don’t know.
Case in point: Journalism is the top career that AI is supposed to kill. I think it will kill a lot of the low-value work, which is actually not necessarily a bad thing. Lord knows I could do without writing up basic stories. I think it’s a big leap to think that it will be able to do the kind of work that I do, when I am working to the the top of my license (as they say).
Yet. I would start thinking of what happens next, and what you can do about it. It’s that disruptive.
It does some things well. It wrote a poem for me and it wasn’t bad. The Python script it wrote for me in 10 seconds was faster and better than the ones I did in my sabermetrics class at Boston University a few years ago. About half the headlines I ask it to write on a story I have written are better than the ones I wrote on my own.
I asked it to write fictional stories, and they are garbage right now. I asked it to write a 1000 word story in Welsh and it wrote one, and I could understand it, although it was no better than an 8th grader’s work. I asked it to write a professional bio of me and it got a lot wrong.
None of these things are gonna to stay bad forever.
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Advice from ’90s music
“Of course you can’t become, if you only say what you would have done.” #advicefrom90smusic -
Wrecsam is special, in so many ways
https://theathletic.com/4295067/2023/03/25/wrexham-reynolds-mcelhenney-kerry-evans
Unlike most Americans, I did know exactly where Wrecsam was long before Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought the football club there.
Wrecsam – there’s no X in the Welsh language – is full of spirit and history, like all of Cymru, the land of my ancestors and a country that I’ve grown to know and love. And since I’ve studied the Welsh language over the past several years rather intensely, you’ll pardon if I cringe a bit when the city is spelled with an X. It’s not Wrexsam.
I’m more of a South Wales kind of person, although my ancestors come from both North and South Wales (Gogledd a De Cymru). I’ve been to Cardiff and the Glamorgan Valleys multiple times and I took many of my language courses from Merthyr Tydfil and Pontypridd. They were familiar to me long before I was there because the Valley reminds a great deal of where my mother’s family is from, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania.
Reynolds and McElhenney didn’t have the same kinds of connections to Wales, but they have done so much good in Wrecsam since they bought the team. It’s a great story, as this Athletic article points out.
And Wrecsam will also hold a special place for me: I took a Welsh-language creative writing class there. That blew my mind, stretched me and allowed me to make a major leap in Welsh. There’s nothing like trying to be creative in a whole other language than what you’re used to. IT was working without a net, it very nearly broke my brain.
And I loved it.
It’s also helped me in my native language, sparking more creativity in English.
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Why Comparing ‘Ted Lasso’ to real life misses the mark
I will say I am underwhelmed by the first episodes of “Ted Lasso” this season. I have been a big fan in the past. But the Vox article about how “Ted Lasso” seems different given the public breakup of star Jason Sudeikis and Olivia Wilde strikes me as the wrong take.
Comparing the show to the actor’s life is at best stretching it and to my mind, feels wrong. Sudeikis is an actor, doing a job and playing a role. I would say the same thing if it were written primarily about Olivia Wilde. We are all just trying to live our lives. Comparisons like this don’t help.
And this coming from someone who has gotten paid to dig up dirt for what 30 years now, has had to report without fear or favor, and whose occupational hazard is that I get lied to on a regular basis. Maybe even daily. I kept reading this and wondered why is this a story?
I am not making excuses for him but few of us live up to our potential or listen to the better angels of our nature 100% of the time. I can think of two people in my life who were close to those ideals. Both were constitutionally unable to judge anyone. They were focused on what you now would call servant leadership and radical acceptance, two things sorely missing in this world and we are poorer without them here on Earth. I know my life is poorer without them, and one in particular.
Which brings me back to this article. You could write that about a lot of people, in and out of Hollywood. But I wonder, does it matter? Does whatever happens in my private life hold any meaning over my work? And vice versa? The longer I go, the more I realize it doesn’t. There’s some I can be proud of in both, and some that I wish I could have done differently.
“Ted Lasso” is a TV show and a character. Let’s not conflate it with real life.
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Classic SNL
I am not That Guy who downs current “Saturday Night Live” in favor of classic “SNL.” Even if it’s mostly true because over the nearly 50 years of this show, it has been pretty darn funny and iconic.
There are some funny moments now.
But this ad, “Happy Fun Ball,” is so great, and makes me miss Phil Hartman all over again.
And remember: Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
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Cass the great
Great to see Cass Elliot getting some attention, 50 years after her death.
My 16-year-old asked me the other night whether I knew who Cass Elliot was. Apparently there’s been a meme.
I told her yes, that I liked her solo stuff and her tunes with the Mamas and the Papas. My mother, who came of age in the 1960s, introduced me to Cass Elliot’s music and I’ve been a fan ever since.
Thanks to YouTube, Elliot’s performances aren’t lost, either. Here’s Cass, the late, great Mary Travers (who became famous with Peter Paul and Mary) and Joni Mitchell, singing another classic. There wasn’t enough room in the studio for that much talent.
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An unwelcome run at banking
A lot of ink and pixels have been spilled over the last several days about bank woes following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.
I’m a business journalist and spend plenty of time in financial disclosures. But I have to admit to a bit of professional trepidation at the prospect of covering banking failures. It’s been a long time since I’ve covered banking in any meaningful way.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to, for various reasons. A good thing, too, because all I know about bank runs are from “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
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About Me
Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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