How Jared Fared

From time to time, I check in on the blog of Jared Richardson. I met Jared at a No Fluff, Just Stuff traveling tour about a year and a half ago. Jared has written a book on what it takes to "ship it", the phrase software developers utter when they're ready to ship their product (often to comic effect, far before it's ready to go).

Apparently, Jared was tagged and not in the usual Flickr way, but in something akin, it seems, to spinning the bottle. One must reveal five facts that few people know. It seems Jared spent sometime out in K-town, or Knoxville as everyone else calls it. Now, I spent most of my formative years (basically the years before college) in Oak Ridge, which is a stone's throw from Knoxville. Both were mentioned in a Simpson's episode where the gang (Bart, Nelson, Milhouse, and Martin) decides to head to Knoxville to attend the World's Fair. In the meanwhile, Lisa spends time with her dad, and then has to figure out how to get Bart back to good old Springfield.

Having grown up near Knoxville, I would say I was completely sheltered from the town. I didn't have a car growing up, didn't have friends who thought about visiting Knoxville much, and didn't know much of its history. My brother has, since then, figured out a little more, and we've visited some parts of the "old town".

Knoxville's fame, outside of the World's Fair, probably comes from U.T. which, in Volunteer country, is University of Tennessee, not University of Texas. Neyland Stadium competes with the stadium at the University of Michigan for how many people it can hold (a little over 100,000 last I heard).

Despite the wild success of women's basketball, Knoxville has always been about college football. Only recently has Nashville become the home of the Titans (and Vince Young) has the state seen professional sports (oh yeah, I guess there is the NBA Memphis Grizzlies).

Quentin Tarantino was born in Knoxville, though his family left when he was quite young. And yes, Johnny Knoxville was also born in Knoxville, though Knoxville, as you might guess, wasn't his birth name.

What's fascinating about nearly any place you go is that many other people are living there too, living out their lives, with experiences that may or may not mirror your own. I would occasionally think, when I was in college, about how many other lives are passing by as the same time, but at some other displaced location on the campus, or in hundreds of other campuses across the country, and then also back in time, the sum of experiences that have walked the hallowed grounds that I have walked (well, hallowed blacktop, anyway).

College, especially, try to create a sense of place, typically through athletics, but even other means (say, through arts) to draw people together, even as the experiences may be completely divergent.

So even if Jared and I share a common place, it may not be all that common, and certainly I wouldn't have thought of it had I not met Jared, and had he not had a blog, and had he not been tagged, and had he not dredged this memory of life in Knoxville up.

How has Jared fared? Pretty well, it seems.