Great Reason to Attend the Dash Game Friday Evening (July 8)

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If you happen to be awake from 5:30 – 7:00 tomorrow (Friday, July 8) morning you might want to tune in to watch WXII's morning show.  Yours truly will likely be at the Dash stadium with Bolt, some folks from the Dash and Second Harvest, and one of the WXII-ers to promote the 2nd Annual "Fill the Stands with Cans" which is part of Piedmont Triad Apartment Association's annual food drive to benefit Second Harvest.  Here are the details for those of you who may not be awake at that crazy hour:

  • We'll be set up outside Dash stadium before the game tomorrow night collecting food and cash donations for Second Harvest.
  • Anyone who brings a donation will get a free Dash hat.
  • If you can't make it to the game but want to make a donation you can visit any one of the drop off locations listed on the PTAA Food Drive website. 
  • We're doing the same thing Friday of next week (July 15) at the Greensboro Grasshoppers game.
  • I can't thank the Dash, the Grasshoppers, WXII and Lowes Foods enough for once again partnering with us to put on this great event for Second Harvest. And I'd be totally remiss if I didn't thank Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines and Greensboro Mayor Bill Knight for shooting the promos for us for the second straight year.  Thanks everyone!
  • Last, but definitely not least, thanks to all the PTAA-member communities that are participating in the Food Drive and all the PTAA Vendor Partners who have made it all possible.  You guys rock!

Hope to see you tomorrow night.  If you plan on attending the game please do stop by and say hello.

Sunlighting the Lobbyists

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The Sunlight Foundation and the National Journal are trying to crowdsource the identities of lobbyists:

On May 11, the Senate Judiciary Committee's Antitrust Subcommittee held a hearing on the proposed AT&T and T-Mobile merger. Titled "Is Humpty Dumpty Being Put Back Together Again?" the hearing was concerned with possible antitrust issues, questions of competition, access to wireless service, rising costs and the loss of jobs.

Of course, Washington lobbyists had their own concerns and not surprisingly, the room was packed. In concert with National Journal, we at Sunlight decided to turn the cameras around 180 degrees to see who was watching the hearing. Our hope is that you can help us identify D.C.'s power brokers and assorted lobbyists who have an interest in influencing the Senate's view on the proposed merger.

Something tells me that RayBans and hoodies are going to be popular at Hill meetings in the near future.

 

YardDawg’s Grilling

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YardDawg, aka Doug Grimes, is featured in a Winston-Salem Journal story about grilling:

Grimes, 61, grew up around Kinston. He remembers his grandfather and other male relatives barbecuing whole hogs. "I'd hang out with those guys and watch them — I was probably 4 or 5 years old the first time I saw that."

Later, he watched his father grill on the weekends. "Every Friday or Saturday night he was cooking something outside," Grimes said.

His father is now 88 and no longer grilling himself, but Grimes will cook for him on visits to Kinston on the grill that Grimes gave him as a present in 1971.

Grimes even grilled on the many days spent away from home as a tobacco buyer. "Even little towns inKentucky would have a motel, and we'd set up a little grill on the balcony," Grimes said. "It might be just hot dogs or hamburgers, but it was still better than McDonald's."

A beef lover, Grimes took two grills with him when he moved to Zimbabwe for three years to work as a tobacco export manager.

He's eaten grilled food in Mexico, Thailand, Argentina and other countries. "I've always been a fan of street food," he said. "When I was in Bangkok or wherever, I'd find the stall that had a line with like 20 people."

He has found that a love of grilled meat is universal.

"I've done it (grilling) just about everywhere I've ever been," he said. "We even had a pig pickin' in China, inYunnan province."

 

Reporting is Reporting

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A reporter-turned-blogger who won a journalism award in the blog category thinks that reporting is reporting no matter how you report.  She also divulges her secret to scooping her media competition:

Well I use a lot of tasers and threats – idle threats. Someone asked me this the other day, they say how do you get so many scoops? And I’m like, I work harder than you, I call more people, I follow up. I’m kind of relentless in terms of making calls, building sources, creating relationships. When I hear a small thing I follow it up. I think there’s no trick to great reporting, it’s just being curious, following things up, developing sources and not just putting up whatever idle rumor is around. We don’t do that. When we write something it’s going to happen. We spend a lot of time on accuracy, on credibility, on truthfulness, and on being right about what we say is going to happen.

I've long felt that the one competitive advantage that mainstream news outlets had after they had laid off their real competitive assets (their people) was that they were the "reliable source." Of course all it takes to lose that advantage is a couple of poorly researched stories that are publicly debunked by some nosy blogger, or heck, some well informed and well connected person who exposes the errors on Facebook.  It's like you tell your kids, one lie undoes all the trust you built with a thousand truths. Now I'm beginning to think that another way the traditional news outlets can lose their advantage is by having it taken by a reporter who's spent years building her reputation by doing great work and who is now swimming outside of the mainstream media, probably because she was downsized, and is now highly motivated to eat their proverbial lunch so she can continue to literally put her dinner on the table. 

So what's the over/under on when we'll stop referring to reporters as "main stream" or "bloggers" and just start referring to them as, well, reporters?  How about when we'll stop worrying/caring if the reporting comes to us in the form of paper, traditional television newscast, carrier pidgeon or electronically on the personal-digital-device-du jour?  I'm glad I'm not the one who has to figure that out.

I Think I Owe My Wife an Apology

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This piece at bookofjoe.com is about how husbands and wives who have been married a long time start to resemble each other. From the post:

More from Albergotti: "In a seminal 1987 study, Robert Zajonc, a psychologist, found that married couples began to look physically alike over time. Participants in the study were asked to look at individual photos of people and then match the photos of the ones who seemed to fit together. When shown photos of couples early in their relationships, the participants were unable to match them. But when they were shown photos of couples who had been together 25 years, they often matched the photos with the correct partner. Couples who reported being in happy relationships were matched more than unhappy couples."

This seems to be another case where the men defnitely make out better than their wives, and after reading the piece it I feel compelled to apologize to my wife if I've managed to bring her down to my level.

Jon’s Guaranteed Weight Loss Program

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If you want to lose, oh, six or seven pounds in about two hours I know one way to do it. Try transplanting a bunch of monkey grass from one side of your property to the other in 94 degree heat on July 4 in an effort to beat the predicted thunderstorms. If you sweat like a Lowder, which means you have to be the kind of person who breaks into a sweat when you walk a block in 65 degree weather you might even lose 10 pounds.

The bad news is you put a bunch of pounds right back on when you suck down four beers to celebrate your accomplishment. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Mean Drunks, Mean Commentors

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I have this theory that you really see the true stripes of someone when they're drunk.  If a person who's normally mild-mannered turns into a raving loon, AKA a mad drunk, then I think that when the chips are down and he's in a stressful position that's the guy that will blow a gasket.  To me that same theory holds true for people who comment on news stories online.  Even if they're normally civil in the real world their true personalities come through in the comments they drop all over the online world as they hide behind their computer screens.

What reminded me of this most recently were the comments left by multiple readers on the Winston-Salem Journal story about the latest census figures showing that only 45% of households in Forsyth County are headed by married couples.  The story also broke down the racial demographics and contained information like the following:

Among black residents, only 27 percent of households are headed by a husband and wife. About half of the black children in Forsyth County live in homes headed by only their mothers, with another 20 percent being raised by grandparents, fathers, and other relatives.

"I don't think it is a good trend," said Forsyth County Commissioner Walter Marshall, who is black. "I guess the new generation just does not believe in marriage. There are so many things involved."

Marshall said that black males too often find themselves "not marriageable," due to high incarceration rates, unemployment and lack of education.

"Young black ladies will tell you that they want to be married, but they don't want to marry at any cost,"Marshall said. "They don't marry much; they just stay together."

The 2010 census showed that 73 percent of white children were growing up in two-parent homes, and 57 percent of Hispanic children were doing so.

You can guess what kind of comments have been posted and I have to say that with every passing day I become less and less surprised at how petty and mean people can be, especially when they don't even have to have the balls to be mean to someone's face.  

BTW I'm also getting really frickin' tired of people equating marriage with some kind of magic silver bullet for lifelong happiness.  I'm fairly sure studies have shown that growing up in a stable two parent environment increases the chances that a child will grow up to lead a happy, stable life, but I'm quite sure that marriage isn't a prerequisite for having a stable two parent environment.  I'm also certain that there are more than a few households that are dens of misery and headed by married people, and that there are single parent households that are dens of happiness.  In short, marriage is a traditional form of cohabitation and household building that is declining in popularity and that has caused some people with traditional values to get their panties in a twist.  Personally I think we should worry less about the institution of marriage and more about helping people understand how to build a happy household and raise well adjusted members of society.  

For the record I'm happily married to a woman I can't believe has put of with me for as long as she has.  We're closing in on 20 years of marriage and 23 years of just plain digging each other, and I have no doubt I'd feel the same way about her if I was labeled her husband, her housemate or her biggest mistake. The latter is how many people think of me.

Pigs Flying in Frozen Over Hell

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If you live long enough you're bound to see the damndest things:

As part of a legal settlement, the N.C. Republican Party is offering a very public mea culpa to former Democratic Rep. Jimmy Love Sr…

Shortly before last year's election, the GOP mailed an attack ad in the home district of Love, a seven-term Democrat from Sanford.

The ad said Love owned a piece of land and suggested it was bought by the N.C. Department of Transportation in a "sweetheart deal." The text of the mailer called Love a "swindler," featured his photo and falsely quoted him as saying, "I Love Gettin' Rich Off The Taxpayers!"…

Now, House District 41 voters who were sent the ad last year are finding another message from the Republican Party in their mailboxes.

"The accusations made against Mr. Love in the mailer were unjustified and the facts stated in support of the accusations were false," the new mailer says. "Accordingly, the North Carolina Republican Party hereby retracts the statements made in the mailer, apologizes to Mr. Love, and expresses its sincere regret for any distress or embarrassment caused to Mr. Love, his family, or his supporters."