Author Archives: Kevin Walsh

About Kevin Walsh

Kevin began MyMediaDiary.com in 2013 as an experiment that was as simple as "What's a blog?" and ended up becoming a forum for fellow writers. He's been a high school teacher for 28 years and worked as an administrator and instructor in colleges for 10 years since then. Contact him at: kevin@mymediadiary.com He is also the producer of the web-series and blog, www.DiggingDetroit, founder and producer for MMD Productions at www.mmdphotovideo.com which offers quick, professional photography, video and multimedia solutions for individuals, organizations and businesses. His high school media production text, "Video Direct," has been used in 40 states--and he occasionally still sells a few. He is the current president of the non-profit DAFT (Digital Arts Film and Television) which sponsors the Michigan Student Film Festival. He lives in Royal Oak, Michigan, is married to Patrice and is tolerated by his two kids Aidan and Abby who have all graciously allowed him to write about them on occasion.

Don Draper & Tony Soprano: Smoking Alpha-Males at Mid-Life Crisis

By | |
Comments Off on Don Draper & Tony Soprano: Smoking Alpha-Males at Mid-Life Crisis

dondraper

The pilot episode of Mad Men tracked the 1960 day-in-the-life of the smoking, charming, Don Draper at mid-climb up the slippery advertising ladders of Manhattan.  He’s confident, women roll out of bed with him and greasy-haired society boys wish they could be him; what’s not to like?  Then, in the episode’s final scene, he pulls into the driveway of his domestic life in the suburbs.  And to boot, his wife is a model and his kids are cute.

It’s a great “reveal” that sets the tone for the rest of the double-life that is “draped” from the rest of … Read More… →

Tragedy and Media: Safety in Numbers

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Tragedy and Media: Safety in Numbers

Start

Times Square on New Year’s Eve has always seemed a bit too claustrophobic for me. How can anyone enjoy themselves in such a giant crowd?  What’s the attraction?  The image of 26,000 runners heading off together seemed similar–like pedestrian rush-hour. I can’t even shop at the mall at Christmas time.

One of the pivotal scenes in Gone with the Wind follows Rhett Butler’s ominous words, “In a town called Gettysburg.”  The scene shifts to a giant crowd gathering at the Atlanta railroad station’s telegraph office to get the long casualty lists arriving from Pennsylvania.  

Read More… →

Perhaps the “F” and “Y” stand for something else…

By | | , ,
11 Comments

FYE_Number-blurred

I might as well have said, “The crow flies at midnight.”

It felt that cloak-and-dagger.

“Can I help you, sir?” asked the manager.

“Hi.  I just want to cancel my membership.”

She frowned, nodded, walked behind the counter, grabbed a coupon and wrote on the back of it, handed it to me and immediately walked away.

I looked in my hand and there it was.  The first step on my long journey out of The Stupid Tax.

Financial expert Dave Ramsey has some great stories of how we’ve all made some silly decisions that end up costing us lots and … Read More… →

Lawn Kayaking: Distractions and Default-Settings

By | | ,
1 Comment

KayakKids 

We were at Aunt Cathy and Uncle Steve’s house in 1999.  The kids and their cousins were enjoying a kayak ride through the lawn, courtesy of their Aunt Claudia, who always shared in the unique moments of her nieces and nephews.

We always laugh that the perfect gift for a baby shower would be an abandoned car.  Just stick it in the backyard and you’ll never need to assemble that expensive play-structure or worry about broken necks on a trampoline.

Some children’s barbers actually give their victims a giant ball of masking tape and by the time the kid … Read More… →

The Sissy Factor: Pitino’s Duck-and-Cover & NFL in Court

By | | , ,
1 Comment

Pitino

There was an interesting moment during Rick Pitino’s obligatory handshake-walk at the end of Monday’s exciting NCAA championship game.  As the pyrotechnics began with a bang, Pitino did what I also did 12 hours away.  It was the instinctive “duck and cover” move that probably sent us up a tree a million years ago and kept our species alive long before we developed 30-round magazines for our rifles.

Of course, the next day on talk radio, a significant percentage of calls were comparing Pitino’s Barney Fife to John Beilein’s Dirty Harry-stroll-through-the-chaos.

Read More… →

Tiger Stadium: What Makes a Ballpark

By | | , , ,
13 Comments

 

TigerStadium_ext

I’ve often wondered about the emotional hitching post that is a ballpark.  And when anyone says “ballpark” we all know that it’s not referring to any other sports field besides baseball.

I only live a few miles from five little league fields that I spent five summers of my childhood praying that the ball wouldn’t be hit to me in right field.  (That, of course, was in the final two innings, when the coach decided it was safe to take me off the scorebook.)  After a brief try at second base where I smoothly fielded a grounder and sent it … Read More… →

The Bobber: A Life of Crime Diverted

By | | ,
4 Comments

BobberAndChain

It was a great fishing hole only a few blocks from our house in a suburb of Cincinnati.   My dad was transferred by Ford from Detroit and we were all still getting used to having so much nature around.  Crayfish and creeks were scarce in Detroit, but “craw-dads” were numerous in the “cricks” just down the street.

Crick

There was a reservoir and a public park that offered a ledge where we took … Read More… →

“The Call” for Better Hollywood Scripts

By | |
1 Comment

TheCall

Going to the movies is a major investment.  You’re out cash, time and usually patience if the person behind you is kicking your chair so much that you can’t read the Facebook posts of the guy in front of you.  So when Hollywood actually lures us from our giant HD screens rather than having us wait a month to see it on the shelves at Target in 30 days, it had better be worth it.

I’d already heard the reviews that The Call was disappointing, but sometimes it’s fun to escape and I had already surrendered enough credibility with shows like … Read More… →

Opening Day: A Benchmark or 1/162 of a Season?

By | |
Comments Off on Opening Day: A Benchmark or 1/162 of a Season?

OpeningDay

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…”

–T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I always liked that mileage marker that Eliot used.  For many of us in education, we measure our lives in years teaching–or perhaps by an unforgettable group of students (good or bad!).  My sister Katie, a managing editor of weekly magazines for over 20 years observed that teachers at least had closure, that there is time to take a step back and assess what’s been done.  When Katie was finishing one magazine for print, the following two weeks’ magazines were well under-way.

And … Read More… →

“Want to help me hide the eggs?” Farewell to the Easter Bunny…and Childhood

By | | ,
2 Comments

Please excuse this rerun from 2013, in honor of Easter today…

Easter_Cincinnati_EggHunt_Backyard

It was already a big night.  I was able to stay up a little later than my three younger sisters.  I was a cocky 8 year-old sitting on the vinyl couch in the lower floor of our tri-level watching “The Ten Commandments.”  Of all the scenes, I’m not sure why Edward G. Robinson’s unlikely casting stays with me even to this day, but it was this scene…

The door-wall slid open, and my dad’s face appeared, “Want to help me hide the eggs?”

It took a moment for … Read More… →

You Can Take the Teacher Out of Service, But You Can’t Take the Service Out of the Teacher

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on You Can Take the Teacher Out of Service, But You Can’t Take the Service Out of the Teacher

Rich

One of the greatest gifts of teaching is spending the day with other teachers.  But even in the department-store enormity of a high school, we all close our doors at the bell and, in essence, work alone.  We meet in meetings that no one wants to attend, by the copy machine that no one wants to un-jam or by the mailboxes, that no one wants to look into–all of these situations aren’t the most positive climates for collegiality.

I was fortunate to begin working in the late 1980’s, when Michigan teacher-strikes were winding down and school funding was healthy. … Read More… →

My Dad’s Tribute Video: Someday I’ll watch this and not lose it…

By | | , ,
Comments Off on My Dad’s Tribute Video: Someday I’ll watch this and not lose it…

MomDadWalshDance

It had taken me five years to gather the courage to put this thing together.  I lied to myself and thought I was ready.  I’d converted the wedding video, hauled thirty VHS tapes to school and scanned through all of the footage.  I’d loaded up each segment of my father’s life into pretty little categories:  Dad, Grandpa, Family, Friends.  Each with its own neat chapter on the DVD menu partitioning his life.

Jim Walsh died suddenly in 1997 at the age of 57.  And I’d “been the soldier,” to quote my dad’s Uncle Jerry when I called him with the news.  After … Read More… →

Amazon, My Guilty Conscience and the Decline of Detroit Shopping

By | | , , ,
1 Comment
travolta

I was waiting for some photos to get developed at Meijer–a Michigan-based store where I had done my shopping since they opened in 1977, a short bike ride from my house. It was an enormous place–“Thrifty Acres” they called themselves.

Even now, when I walk through the produce area, I remember where the record and 8-track department was. I can still see the “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease” cardboard mobiles hanging from the drop ceiling. My favorite memory is the foot-long plastic containers that encased the 8-tracks to discourage shallow-pocketed shoplifters.

Meijer also carried darkroom chemicals in their … Read More… →

“Cobbler and the Cowboy” — My Grandma’s Poetry

By | | , , , ,
3 Comments

 CobblerAndCowboy

66 years ago, this poem was proudly cut from the newspaper and placed in a scrapbook.  My grandmother, Melanie Vier McAleer died just two and a half years ago at the age of 94–an accomplished woman by any standard, winning a national doubles championship in tennis for women over 70.

But her greater love, one that stayed with her through her entire life, was poetry.  She was a regularly featured writer in Detroit papers throughout my mom’s childhood in the 1940s and 50s.  Her whimsical style and clever insight into the human condition was spot-on.  I remember being flattered … Read More… →

Getting Rid of Old Photos: Confessions of a Packrat

By | | ,
Comments Off on Getting Rid of Old Photos: Confessions of a Packrat

PhotoPile2

Logic has to end somewhere.  Sure it all worked in theory.  Representing the years from our marriage in 1992 and our purchase of a nice digital camera in 2005 we somehow stopped creating nice photo albums–perhaps the same reason we took all those pictures–two kids.  It’s not often you hear parents of a four and two year old say, “Wow, they’re finally asleep.  Let’s scrapbook!”

But we kept snapping those pictures and getting the film developed.  We’d pick up the envelopes and negatives, look through them, mail a few off to relatives and put the envelope promptly in a … Read More… →

Willy Wonka, Shirking Responsibility and a Great Night Out!

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on Willy Wonka, Shirking Responsibility and a Great Night Out!

 OompaLoompas

Tonight in Detroit you can once again blame your parents.  The punchline for the Oompa Loompa’s many songs dealing with Charlie and his competing four brats for the keys to the fabled chocolate factor is “The mother and the father.”  

I was only six years old when this classic film premiered and I remember nodding my head in the theater thinking, “Yeah, the little creepy orange guys are right.  Those kids are spoiled rotten.”  Perhaps it was some kind of smugness that I would later have a stuffy professor explain to me as the same joy that the … Read More… →

Oz: And You Thought the Munchkins Were a Tough Crowd

By | |
Comments Off on Oz: And You Thought the Munchkins Were a Tough Crowd

Oz-doll

(With all the amazing effects and strong actors, this scene was one of my favorites.)  

I got my first gig as a film-reviewer two nights ago and got to review Oz the Great and Powerful for our local Royal Oak online newspaper,   It addresses the challenges of not just tackling one legend–but two, with Wicked’s fan-base.

A local-link:  my kids’ principal was Sam Raimi’s teacher.

royaloak.patch.com/articles/oz-the-great-and-powerful-lions-and-tigers-and-principals-oh-my

Deja-Viewing: Jennifer Lawrence, Zombies and the Book of Job

By | | , ,
Comments Off on Deja-Viewing: Jennifer Lawrence, Zombies and the Book of Job

jennifer-lawrence-oscars-fall-2013

Watching Jennifer Lawrence win her deserved Oscar last Sunday night–and better yet, seeing her respond so humanly to tripping on her crazy dress heading up the slippery stairs, I felt that she was someone that would be pretty great to know.  While she accepted her award, I suddenly flashed-back to another favorite of mine who won in 1989, Geena Davis, for The Accidental Tourist.  She too played a quirky, pushy character who knocks a self-pitying guy out of his funk.  In both cases, you’re siding with her over the guy, yelling at the screen for him, to quote Moonstruck, “Snap out … Read More… →

Oscar Rubber-Necking: Some Favorite Head-Shakers (with New Podcast)

By | | ,
1 Comment

GuySmiley_RedCarpet

We ran this post last year, but it still holds true today–unfortunately.  Take a listen to a 2014 Podcast with Oscar expert and contributor, Sheri Horwitz.

[powerpress url=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/mymediadiary/MyMediaDiary_Oscars_Predictions_with_Sheri_Horwitz_Feb26_2014.mp3″ length=”10220734″ type=”audio/mpeg” /]

It’s like a family reunion, where the drunk uncle always shows up and upsets everyone’s big plans.  You all look forward to the event, then drive home wondering what happened.  

And somehow, you can’t imagine having a reunion without that drunk uncle. Here’s my list of favorite Oscar night annoyances.

1. Red Carpet Silly Questions:  Beyond the usual “Who are you wearing?” this slow train-wreck involving screaming bleachers and limousines moving at 3 miles per week is spear-headed by pretty people who seem so … Read More… →

The Netflix Workout

By | | , , , ,
1 Comment

NFlixWorkout

It’s like a dream-come-true.  For $7.99 per month I can catch up on the 47 TV series I’ve missed and “not-ready-for-HBO” movies–the films that didn’t make a ton of money but they’re what I might have seen at the theater at a matinee or if someone else offered to pay.

I was a typical Netflix customer when it arrived on the scene.  I was too lazy to get in the car to drive to Blockbuster so I’d order a DVD, wait three days for it to arrive and then promptly set the little white sleeve on my TV for two or three weeks, hoping to get … Read More… →