Esbee Weighs In on the Local Newspaper Thing

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Esbee approaches the local newspaper issue from her own angle.  Essentially she wants to return to the days when newspapers wrote more of their own stuff (i.e. relied less on wire stories) and actually used language that didn’t prompt slumber. I’d love to see the paper provide more stories like Esbee’s take on crime reporting.  To wit:

Winston-Salem police say that a
heavy-set villain robbed the Wachovia bank branch on Martin Luther King
Jr. Drive about 11 a.m. Monday.

A
surveillance-camera image shows the villain looking up menacingly as he
looms over the bank’s security guardian. The villain gestured
threateningly with an instrument of death to force the guardian to lie
down, police Capt. David Clayton said.

The
villain is described as black, in his 30s, 6 feet tall, about 350
pounds, with a thin mustache and goatee. He wore a gray, hooded
sweatshirt with blue sleeves and a thick white stripe on the side and
on the sleeves. He left in a blue Cadillac. He may or may not have the
power to shapeshift.

Any citizen with information that could foil this villain should call Crime Stoppers at 727-2800!

Esbee’s commenters then provide even more, suggesting "corpulent bandit" to which Esbee replies with "El Bandito Gordito."  Any time you can weave a description that suggests a role for Jack Black into a story you’re doing something right. 

links for 2008-04-03

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Laughter

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We, my family, were eating in a sports bar/restaurant a couple of days ago and something tickled our funny bones and we ended up laughing hysterically for a few minutes.  In the midst of our mirth I noticed people at surrounding tables staring at us.  Staring like you stare at someone with a large growth in the middle of their forehead.  I wondered if we were being too loud and then thought "How can you be too loud in a sports bar?"  No, there were definitely people being as loud as we were so that wasn’t the issue.  Then I wondered, "Is it really so rare to see people laughing, hard, in a public place?" Unfortunately the answer was yes.

I consider it one of the great fortunes of my life that we have teenagers and yet we still have our moments of absolute joy and between those there’s lots of "regular" laughter.  I’m knocking on wood as I type this.

Newspapers

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I rarely indulge myself with a purchase of the Sunday NY Times, but yesterday was an exception. I’m still reading the thing today and as I wade through page 85 of the business section (okay I’m exaggerating just a little) it occurs to me that there is more original staff written content in one section of the Times than in the entire Winston-Salem Journal. Heck, there’s probably more original content than the Journal and the Greensboro News & Record combined.

I don’t point this out to slam either of those local papers per se, rather I think it highlights how lean those local operations are running these days and how much they rely on wire services.

Of course the Gray Lady isn’t what she used to be either and one could argue that her quantity does not make up for her supposedly declining quality, but it is still somewhat bothersome to realize how slim and homogenized our local rags have become. 

It’s easy enough to lay the blame on market dynamics but I also think that the folks at the local level could get a lot more aggressive in mining local talent for content. They’ll probably never be able to hire and pay the number of reporters and writers to produce even a percentage of the original content that they’d like to, but they could definitely do more to open their walled gardens and work with independent writers, photographers, essayists, videographers, etc.

I mean if the Journal can get three or four book reviews written by local, independent reviewers for each Sunday paper then why not do something similar in other areas?

Hopefully Mine Will Be Appropriately Offensive

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Esbee lists some euphemisms for "died" that were used in today’s obituaries in the Winston-Salem Journal.  Most involve God which is no surprise for this town, but when I’m ready to chew dirt I hope those responsible for my obituary come up with something quirky, odd and downright offensive.  I was thinking I could mandate it in my will, but that requires the kind of planning everyone knows I’m incapable of so I’ll just leave it to my dearly un-departed.

Watching Bush’s War

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I’m a huge fan of PBS’s Frontline.  So much so that it’s my top ‘Season Pass’ on Tivo so that I’m sure no other show will preempt it for recording.  Last night PBS aired part 1 of Frontline’s Bush’s War which was duly recorded and I’ve now had the chance to watch about half of the 2 1/2 hour segment.  The quality of the show surpasses even Frontline’s excellent standards and I look forward to watching the rest of it at the earliest opportunity.

If you didn’t see it or get it recorded you can view it online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/

Fec points to a write up in Reuters about the show and excerpts a part that includes this paragraph:

In dozens of interviews and with meticulous fact-gathering, “Frontline”
makes a convincing case for two important aspects of the war. First, it
was primarily orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Bush was only “the decider” insofar as he
signed off on their plans, often paying no heed to Secretary of State
Colin Powell and others.

Fec also loaned me Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine which I’m about halfway through, and when you combine that book with this show you have pretty convincing evidence that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld bent us over and were none too gentle with us.

Commode Wrangling

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Longtime readers of this blog will know at least two things about me.  First, I have a tendency to get stuck dealing with all things turd-related in my house.  Floaters, pluggers and just strange s*** included.  Second, I’m the least handy person ever born.  I can take a thirty minute project and turn it into a two day docudrama.  And of course there’s the fact that everything about my house is all kinds of effed up.  Okay, that’s three things.

Last week we discovered that the toilet in our basement bathroom was leaking.  The leak seemed to be emanating from one of the bolts that secures the tank to the seat so I thought I had an easy fix.  On Sunday I made my way over to Lowe’s and purchased a neat little $4 kit that includes the two 5/16" bolts and all the nuts, seals and washers needed to secure any standard tank to any standard bowl.  Ah, but what was I thinking?  Nothing in my house is freakin’ standard so when I get home and start to put the bolts in I find that the holes in the tank are probably a millimeter too small, which explains why the previous owner had used 1/4" bolts and then put a bunch of green putty around the holes to seal them.  Dumbass.

So I headed back to Lowe’s to see if I could put together my own little DIY kit that ended up costing me about $9.  When I got back home I quickly discovered that my DIY kit would have been just as crappy as the previous owner’s so I took my preferred tack on any such endeavor and just muscled the 5/16" bolts through the holes using the biggest screw driver I could find.  Once I got them through I proudly re-mounted the tank, hooked everything back up, flushed the toilet and watched a fountain of water spew from the main hole that connects the tank to the seat.  Apparently I’d upset some sort of delicate balance between the seat and the tank because no matter what I did to re-seat the tank it continued to spew forth water.

Since I’d already been told by my boss/wife that we’d soon be replacing the toilet when we put a new floor in that bathroom I decided that Easter Sunday was as good a day as any to replace it.  We had friends coming over for dinner so I thought I’d head over to the store afterwards.  Celeste and I headed out after our guests went home and of course Lowe’s and Home Depot were already closed.  Perfect. This morning I arose early and headed off again to the store and purchased our new single-piece toilet. (I wasn’t going to risk another bad hookup experience between tank and seat).  When I got home I removed the old toilet from it’s seat above the poop-pipe…always a pleasant experience… and started to unpack our new toilet.  That’s when I discovered its base was broken.  Much cussing ensued as I re-packed the toilet, loaded it back in the van and headed back to the store.

The folks at Lowe’s were very nice and predictably unsurprised at my tale of woe with the broken poop pot and they efficiently processed my return.  I grabbed the one remaining toilet of the model that I desired and prayed that it was intact.  You see it was the only single piece toilet that didn’t cost as much as a semester of college so if it was broken I was faced with another two-piece assembly that I just wasn’t up to.

Thankfully the unit was indeed intact so I headed home, unpacked the toilet, put the wax seal on the base and then tried to put it on the poop-hole while getting the floor bolts to go through the bolt holes.  That’s when one of the bolts fell through some sort of gap in the floor and disappeared.  Much cussing ensued.  I grabbed one of the old bolts and re-used it and, voila, I had a new toilet installed.  Time elapsed from first effort at repair to final solution, not including breaks: Roughly eight hours.  Trips to home improvement stores to complete task: Four.

If my life was a home-improvement show and it had one of those little "This will take you x hours to complete" graphics it would show two numbers; X would represent the number of hours it would take an average person and X to the 10th power would represent how long it would take me.