I periodically check in on journalist peers from past jobs and internships to see how they're doing. Some buy into a Little Caesar's franchise. Others become foreign service officers.
Others keep writing.
Slayings and suicide follow turbulent times, Chao Xiong, Star Tribune
Haugen was something of an enigma in Lewisville. Residents who can trace local family lineages back decades don't know where he came from, what he did for work or how he met Gronewold's stepdaughter Ashley Sullivan a tart-tongued cafe waitress and bartender who traded jabs with farmers and doted on her two sons.
Anarchy at the Mickey D's, Michael Miller, Toledo Free Press
According to the police report, Dushane pulled up to the McDonald’s at about 6:20 a.m. and ordered items including McNuggets. When she was told that the Main Street McDonald’s only served breakfast items after 2:30 a.m., Dushane had a number of options. One was to quickly peruse the breakfast menu to order something else, a McGriddle, maybe; another was to thank the voice coming out of the order box, drive home and return during McNugget hours.
Slain Playboy model, Francis X. Donnelly, The Detroit News
... friends also said the couple constantly fought, sometimes getting physical.
"It was oil and vinegar ... I don't know why they stayed together."
'Queen of Greektown' dies at 97, Doug Guthrie, The Detroit News
"She was just a lost soul out on the street. Sometimes she'd carry on and scream like hell, and I'd think it was because she'd gotten robbed again. But then, sometimes if you looked cross-eyed at her, she'd scream, too."
Detroit City Hall Insider, Joel Kurth, The Detroit News
Labels: Detroit News, friends, newspapers, Star Tribune, Toledo Free Press
Never mind the
coincidence; the fact that Tony and I work at newspapers in towns with similar names and compete with newspapers with the
same name. Oh, it's still there. Only this story just makes it a little freakier.
Listen: there's this wrestler, named Gordon Bierschenk. He graduated from Waynesville High School in 2003. In high school he was a mediocre wrestler at best but decided after graduation that he'd walk on at the University of Minnesota anyway, just for the hell of it.
So far, so good. He then went to Iraq after being a decent walk-on and came back with a new fire. Now he's the Big Ten Wrestler of the Week.
Now, here's the freaky part: I got scooped on his story. Not by the
Springfield News-Leader, or the
Pulaski County Daily. No. I got scooped by the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Never in a million years did I expect that to happen.
Now, this would admittedly be a lot freakier if Tony was still interning there. But still...who'd've thunk it? I've got national competition (*snicker*).
And you can read my version of the story
here (no e-link yet, but I just posted the pdf on my blog, that'll have to do for now). My version is a bit more in-depth, plus I was able to talk to his mom and high school coach. Mine comes out Saturday, and the Strib piece was on Wednesday...the bastard.
Labels: coincidence, Daily Guide, Missouri, ne, newspapers, Star Tribune, Wayne, work
EDIT: Don't read this post. Go to the nearest corner and read the print edition sports section of this week's Onion.
EDIT #2: Good examples which still can't capture the power of The Onion's "furniture text" items and sidebars.
#1:
And more recently, a 2006 decision in the case of Rodriguez v. The Fans of New York cemented the legal precedent established in the 1940 case of Williams v. The Fans of Boston, which made it clear that baseball fans are free to boo, no matter how nonsensical it may seem, players on their home team. Link
#2:
Alex Rodriguez entered a sports memorabilia store and flipped through a copy of Beckett Baseball Card Monthly ... "Upper Deck's got a high book of $40? Now that's just insulting. And Fleer — Fleer didn't even move at all? Goddamn Fleer." Link
***
I grabbed fresh copies of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal from the newsroom counter and walked toward my desk with the sense of urgency appropriate to an intern. No matter where I go, be it the bathroom on the next floor up (the best one), or across the room to a fellow intern's cube, I move like I mean it, even if I don't.
In this case, I was squirreling away the newspapers -- adding them to a stack which already included yesterday's NYT and WSJ, plus The Onion, Vita.mn, a folded-over Reason magazine, today's Star Tribune, and a nice snag from the communal book pile: "Sex, Lies, and Handwriting."
Silliman, Reddit, and BoingBoing -- in that order -- still loomed online.
But I couldn't read much until 10 p.m. because I spent my day interviewing a musical saw player, conducting an interview over Chipotle burritos, laughing over
this nice newsroom gesture, and talking journalism with a 17-year-old who hopes to enter the field and who thus far has made a single documentary: 17 minutes about his two friends who decided to box one another.
I got to bike home at about 9 p.m., burdened by no traffic.
When I did start reading, a missing serial comma spurred a silent mental rant. From A1 of the Strib:
A gee-whiz state lab, investigators dubbed "Team Diarrhea" and a unique approach to sleuthing illness contributed to the breakthrough.
That aside, I found so much worth reading that I even held off on watching the revolutionary new three-ball juggling video from Wes Peden and Jay Gilligan. Which all leads to this short list of links:
+ Skewering the mascots
WSJ article+ Indefinite article, definite anger (
a letter)
+ A child named
Yeah Detroit+ NYT:
Everything's Fine and
AbsarokaLabels: Chipotle, journalism, New York Times, reading, Star Tribune, Wall Street Journal
We live near one of the hundreds of "share the road" signs in Minneapolis at an address easily confused with its eight other versions (SE 8th Street, SE 8th Ave., 8th Ave. SE, S 8th Street, 8th Ave. NE, 8th Street S, N 8th Ave., 8th Ave. N).
Birds tweet and busses rumble down the street. A squirrel, surprised by our arrival at the front door, flipped over a stack of phone books, tried to climb the brick wall and the glass door and finally zipped, legs wide, into the freedom of the parking lot.
We jimmy the key to get into our apartment, which has too many chairs and not enough good art for the walls. But demo derbies, dinos and the Detroit News will suffice for now. We have a rolling chair, a wavy mirror, a futon, a lime green shelf, and a coat rack from our three trips to Ikea. They sell good 50-cent hot dogs there and we ate them once. Everything else we own came from Target. We didn't spend a cent at the Mall of America (but we window shopped at every store).
We've been here for six days and we're already bragging about
our library and
our radio station. We got our library cards, but our 89.3 The Current
shirts are on hold for lack of funds. We almost get to brag about seeing Barack Obama in St. Paul, but
this line deterred us (we drove up at 7 p.m., two hours before he spoke, but the line was more than a mile long already).
Music side note: When I visited the office today and met the music critic he asked what I liked. I told him indie rock, Tapes 'n Tapes, Wolf Parade, etc. So he handed me the new Wolf Parade album and offered me the chance to cover a concert in two weeks which features Andrew Bird and The New Pornographers (and I haven't even started working yet). Although I told Katie she would need to sit by the radio and phone to call and win tickets for the sold out show, it looks like we may land a pair as it is.
Katie and I started a budget in a GoogleSpreadsheet, then quickly broke the bank by choosing a recipe which calls for "about five handfuls" of basil. Today we braved a downpour for two tubs of ice cream. We're limiting ourselves to two restaurant meals per week and we're meeting that so far by making simple stuff at home. Basic pastas, salad, and old-fashioned oatmeal. Tonight we made roasted red pepper and leek soup with feta cheese "crostini" on the side. Katie busted out the housewarming champagne, but that bread I made really stole the show.
Music side note #2: Since arriving, Katie and I have really been digging 89.3, the NPR/MPR music station. They mix super new stuff with local music and old classics, for example, new Weezer, new Tapes 'n Tapes, classic Wilco, Ramones, Talking Heads, etc. New finds already: The M's, Sun Kill Moon, new LCD Soundsystem track.
Although Drew called us "purveyors of mass consumer culture" when we went to THE MALL, a few stores deftly avoid that label. First, we had a good time scoffing at poorly designed wedding invitations (while grabbing some good ideas) at Papyrus. Second, I got to see real live juggling equipment in a real-world store at Air Traffic. Third, (although maybe a gimmick or a consumer culture thing) we discovered "
the bean bag chair that becomes a bed." Fourth, we found out that Click & Clack put out more than one CD at the Lake Wobegone NPR store. Besides selling
The New Kings of of Nonfiction and This American Life CDs, it had a nice pop-up book and a shitton of Garrison Keillor garbage.
Before all this Minneapolis activity, we took a little roadtrip last week starting from Charleston, north through the mountains to Pittsburgh, over to
Zygote Press in Cleveland ( where Katie's letterpress professor had an exhibition), through Hillsdale, and eventually stopping off in good ole Lake Zurich for a few days. We took some photos along the way (
click here for bigs):
And we store my bike in the bathroom, Youch the Cactus on a frisbee by one of our our
three windows, and our monster microwave on the dining table (in front of where Katie sits).
There are plenty of functional bridges in town and it's been especially warm.
Labels: driving, frugality, Mall of America, Minneapolis, music, NPR, Obama, Star Tribune, This American Life
