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As has been pointed out by my father, my last blog entry is already out-of-date. For the sake of keeping people informed, here is a link to the developing Facebook album of photos of our reporting trip to Hawaii. There are further updates from the class on the J460 blog page. Enjoy!

The USS Arizona memorial stands over the remains of the battleship and its men, all lost in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. (Alex Farris)

As I make this entry, I'm on a Delta Airlines flight to Hawaii. I'll be reporting with J360 International Reporting as replacement for our cancelled trip to Japan. Before I start putting photos from Honolulu on the blog, I thought I would post something about what I've done between Victor Oladipo's performance and graduation this Saturday. Here's a mini-tour.

(click on full entry for image slider, i.e. all the interactivity.)

Every Tuesday at 11 a.m. (or sometimes Wednesday at 10:30, if it rained on Tuesday), I went to the roof of the West Tower of the Wells Library to take a photo at the same spot on the wall. I was hoping to make a time lapse of photos as the Indiana University Arboretum transitioned from winter to spring to near-summer, but as previously mentioned, I lost a lot of those photos. Fortunately, I didn't lose the wintry ones, so I combined the first photo with the last one, taken May 4, and made a JavaScript slider out of it. Enjoy the interactivity. (Alex Farris | Indiana Daily Student)

I don't like covering non-game athletic events. Nearly every banquet, media challenge and discussion the IU athletic department puts on doesn't seem real to me at all. (The media challenge, to be fair, was fun to cover, especially since I could watch other reporters work themselves to exhaustion.) I know it's the department's goal to be more visible and get people to look at their programs, but I get irked about the thought of doing some p.r. for them by giving them coverage. I don't want to be their publicist. (At least not while working with a newspaper. If I worked for them, that'd be just fine.)

I'll let this event slip by, though. The Spirit of Indiana Showcase ended with freshman basketball player Victor Oladipo singing Usher's "U Got It Bad." It's hard to beat a singing basketball player, even if he was singing with the recording in the background. (He was good, but I could tell he was no Usher.) Plus, with all the awards the department gave out and how well dressed all the athletes were, I thought back to those banquets in high school, and I felt better about everything.

Freshman Indiana University guard Victor Oladipo sings "U Got It Bad" by Usher at the end of the Spirit of Indiana Showcase on Apr. 25, 2011, at the IU Auditorium in Bloomington, Ind. The banquet, which honored academic and athletic achievement, was interspersed with poetry, stand-up comedy and singing by the athletes. (Alex Farris | Indiana Daily Student)