I'm Willys

Friday hike #California #GoWest (at Palo Alto Foothills Park)

Fri, 03 May 2013 18:01:52 -0700

Friday hike #California #GoWest (at Palo Alto Foothills Park)

Movie’s over (at Stanford Theatre)

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:20:39 -0800

Movie’s over (at Stanford Theatre)

The Basketball Hoop, but Taller

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:09:25 -0800

The Basketball Hoop, but Taller:

54 years ago, an NBA game was played on 12-foot hoops.

Those St. Louis cardinals are really...

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 12:57:33 -0700

Those St. Louis cardinals are really big.

oldtimefamilybaseball:

St. Louis Cardinals Logos with Proportionally Correct Birds and Bats

Craig Robinson is a British artist living in Mexico City. He has written and illustrated four books, the latest, “Flip Flop Fly Ball” published by Bloomsbury in 2011. www.flipflopflyball.com

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Doctors Without Borders is an international medical organization that provides independent, impartial assistance in more than 60 countries to people whose survival has been threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. Please help us reach our goal of $2,000 by donating here.

Solemn statues

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 18:00:43 -0700

Solemn statues

Phanaticizing (Taken with Instagram at Citizens Bank Park)

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 14:06:30 -0700

Phanaticizing (Taken with Instagram at Citizens Bank Park)

Outsmarting squirrels

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 13:44:26 -0700

Outsmarting squirrels

siphotos: Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jerry West of the...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:15:30 -0700

siphotos:

Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers pose before a Oct. 1970 practice. (Darryl Norenberg/WireImage)

GALLERY: Iconic Photos of the Los Angeles Lakers | Rare Wilt Chamberlain Photos

gettyimages: Oscar: Oscar Pistorius of South Africa competes in...

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 11:30:01 -0700

gettyimages:

Oscar:

Oscar Pistorius of South Africa competes in the Men’s 400m Round 1 Heats on Day 8 of the London 2012 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on August 4, 2012 in London, England.

Photo by: Paul Gilham/Getty Images

The best story of the 2012 Games

The craftsman

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 21:40:05 -0700

The craftsman

Full platform, 10:30pm

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:42:20 -0700

Full platform, 10:30pm

Nike’s least Nike-ish ad. Love this Olympic spot.

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 12:58:00 -0700

Nike’s least Nike-ish ad. Love this Olympic spot.

My next move

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:15:00 -0700

Two years ago, I started up The Daily Axe to cover Stanford sports. Today, I wrote my last post for the site. I don’t need to discuss my decision to stop developing and writing for DA, since you can read about it in my goodbye post. But I do want to talk about—and hopefully get people excited about—where I’m going next.

I’m starting something new, and something that is unapologetically an experiment. It’s called Forgotten Poem. The zeitgeist is in the motto: a home for writing. Basically, I’m asking all of the good writers and thinkers and talkers and internet miners I know to contribute whatever they want to the site. Long form wins the day; there are very few distracting sidebar widgets, no advertisements, and nothing that intends to distract your attention from the words in each piece. There will be sports, politics, personal essays, gems that we found in dusty library books or old websites with low traffic… it’s a hodgepodge. It’s more a dynamic anthology than a magazine-style website, and it’s going to have material other sites wouldn’t publish.

Forgotten Poem launches on September 4, but you can navigate over to ForgottenPoem.com right now. You can sign up for email updates and check out the site’s social media accounts. I think you should check it out, because it’s going to be interesting.

That’s my next move.

Lessons from 2 years of sports blogging

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 08:11:19 -0700

I wrote my final post for The Daily Axe this week and realized how much the site has been a part of my college life and how much I’ve learned from doing it. I also know that there are a lot of young people like me, who love sports and love writing and have very little interest in writing for the school newspaper.

So here are 5 bullet points to help you if you’re one of those people. I’m not an expert in the field, but I have done this enough to have learned something in the course of writing enough words to easily fill a novel. These absolutely aren’t rules—those don’t really exist—but I think they’re true and I think they’re helpful.

There are lots of mean internet users. You should read all of your site’s mentions on Twitter, and every backlink, and every comment, and every bulletin board post about your writing that you can find, at least in the beginning. It shouldn’t change your writing, and it shouldn’t discourage you. But it should toughen you up. It’s often painful, especially for us members of the supposedly pampered generation. But you grow a lot as a writer, and your writing gets a whole lot better when you’ve taken your hits and are liberated from the self-imposed tyranny of caring what jerks on the internet think about your work.
Be nice, be earnest. This one is harder than it sounds. It’s really easy to be mean. It’s really easy to be snarky and “ironic.” There are entire sites—very popular ones—that thrive on meanness or snark or both. But snark is cheap if used without judicious moderation. In writing in general, but often especially in sports, the people you’re discussing are doing something they love with some of their best friends, often making substantial sacrifices just to play a game. It’s so easy to mock them from behind a screen. It’s so easy to approach the game as if it’s a video game. I have a friend who described sport as a subtle human drama that we all get to watch unfolding in front of us. That’s the best description of sports I’ve ever heard. I’m imperfect in this regard, as are most writers, so do as I say and not as I do. But if you can approach your writing as a hybrid between a commentator and a fiction writer—who cares about characters despite their shortcomings and quirks—you might find a sweet spot and approach the people you write about with due respect.
Be weird. Don’t be gimmicky, but if you’re working for yourself on your own site, you have a portentous privilege to try things out. Make a stupid uniform bracket (it might bring in your site’s highest traffic ever). But make it because you love sports uniforms, not because you think it will cheaply draw in clicks. There are a million writers who write the same way, put it up online and call it a day. That’s not without merit. But your site will probably cost you money and in return you’ll get the pleasure of interacting with readers, building something from scratch and maybe getting some cool experiences out of it. Above all, though, you’re your own boss. Take that opportunity to be weird.
Be obsessive. A lot of bloggers post more often than I did. A lot tweet more. But very few are as meticulous about their posts as I am. Reread your posts several times. Don’t ever publish typos, and fix them when misspellings and weird syntax slip through. Create as beautiful a site as you can. Aesthetics and design really matter. People judge you and your site right away, so make it as good-looking and professional as you can with your time, talent and the money in your wallet. Delve into the business side of publishing as much as you can, but make sure that it doesn’t compromise the integrity of your content.
Contact me. Anyone. I’d be happy to talk to you about pretty much anything. My email is here (just solve the CAPTCHA code to prove you’re not a bot), but I’m also on Twitter at @WillysDeVoll.

The John Cheever car on Metro-North

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:13:11 -0700

The John Cheever car on Metro-North

Monday night at The House that Derek Built

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:10:39 -0700

Monday night at The House that Derek Built

The lights of Grand Central #NYC

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 21:09:02 -0700

The lights of Grand Central #NYC

theatlantic: Is London Really Going to Erase Banksy’s New...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 08:20:55 -0700

theatlantic:

Is London Really Going to Erase Banksy’s New Olympics Art?

In cleaning up London’s graffiti for the Olympics city authorities threaten to squelch the work one of its biggest celebrities, the street artist Banksy, but on Monday the secretive graffiti artist showed he wouldn’t be deterred from creating Olympics-related art while the whole world is watching. The new pieces that appeared on Banksy’s website put police, who’ve threatened to remove any graffiti they find, in the position of having to power-wash valuable artwork.

Read more. [Images: Banksy]

Sunday’s (7/22/2012) edition of “The Strip” by...

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 20:08:36 -0700

Sunday’s (7/22/2012) edition of “The Strip” by Brian McFadden

ckck: Alfred Hitchcock directing the MGM lion, circa...

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 14:15:01 -0700

ckck:

Alfred Hitchcock directing the MGM lion, circa 1958.

Photograph by Sinclair Bull.

Hitchcock & Lion