Posted on

Rainy day tales from a pissed-off semi-retired journalist

Ann Coulter, the attention-seeking missile, has managed to finagle her way into the American conversation once again with her rant against soccer and the World Cup. Pttttewwwie. That is my spelling of a spit that comes from me. I know that spit is not good for my computer so I will just spell it, and not spit it. What I will not do is give that, well, I can’t use the word I would like, but I will not give her any more of my attention.

So it’s a rainy Friday afternoon. CNN is on my screen but the volume is not engaged. Wolf Blitzer is on TV talking to a Republican House Ways and Means Committee member about some missing IRS emails. “GOP outrage at missing e-mails,” is the “Developing Story” headline. This, in these days where every little happenstance is a “Breaking News” story.  Boy, they set the bar so low.

I once received a corporation-wide monetary award that I shared with another reporter. Both of us are gone from the paper and in the government sector. Well, I’m just part-time. Here is what happened:

I wasn’t Cops reporter anymore but I got to the paper an hour early so I could, usually, leave an hour early. I was the only one in the newsroom. I heard a call on the police scanner, a sheriff’s department dispatcher said there had been a helicopter crash. I called the sheriff’s department and got what information I could. An Army Black Hawk, on a foggy morning, crashed into a TV tower out in the countryside. It turned out bad, all seven on board including a brigadier general were killed.

The editor came in pretty soon and I told him what was going on. Best I can recall, he sent the other reporter at the scene and told me to “rewrite.” The latter term is now sort of a dinosaur. In the olden days — before I was even a reporter — a newspaper would have reporters in the field calling in their stories or pieces of story by land-line phones and the rewrite men (and women) would craft the story together. I only did it a couple of times and both times I just saw what was happening and took off from there, figuratively speaking, after a few seconds of direction from the editor. The other story was about a fatal charter bus crash out on the interstate. We had three or four reporters on that.

This rewriting of breaking news, or deadline reporting as it is called in the business, was not something I really trained for but rather something I seemed to take on instinctively. I knew about the award before I left the paper — I don’t know if my confidential agreement is still in effect, maybe some day I may tell the story, there isn’t much to tell anyway — I collected my share after I began freelancing. I think maybe it was only $50. That is more than the average newspaper award.

You’ve no doubt heard the term “award-winning journalists.” Well, in some ways, journalism awards can be a dime a dozen. There is something really wrong with you if you haven’t won awards. I had collected, jeez, I don’t know how many awards from regional and one state press association in my first two years as a journalist. And I pretty much learned about running a small weekly on my own.

Awards are nice to have. I won a couple of Texas Associated Press Managing Editors Assn. awards, first places for my size of daily newspaper, which was below a major metro. I won environmental writer of the year from the statewide Sierra Club. I did okay in my job, in other words. The latter and the company award meant more to me personally. Regional and state press clubs are, while nice to have personally (like on a resume), more a bigger deal to the newspapers and its managers.

Back to Vulfenzblitzer, as I like to call him, I detest CNN making every other story “Breaking News.” Technically, they are correct but it cheapens the really big stories that reporters write or broadcast every day in different cities around the world. A Facebook friend of mine, a network radio reporter, is traveling around the East with Secretary of State John Kerry.  She and I met covering the court-martial of former Army Spc. Charles Graner, the alleged “ringleader” of the Abu Ghraib saga. Those are real stories and, of course, I have my Gee Dubya stories from interviewing him alone by ourselves when he was campaigning for his “Poppy” to I don’t know how many press conferences as governor and a few as president.

Really, I am not bragging as there really isn’t much to brag about. I just spent some incredible years as a journalist who was just doing his job, and then some as a freelancer. CNN’s repeated versions of “Breaking News” kind of cheapens my personal history. And I don’t like it very much, see?

Oh, “Breaking News” now about the VA. The Department of Veterans Affairs? I’ve written about it for years. I’ll save that for another day.

–30–

Posted on

Tea Party patriots in Mississippi whine in the end

I keep telling you, my Republican friends, you are about to end up Whigged.

Here is another example that the Grand Old Party needs to recruit some real members. The little chicken-shit Tea Party candidate who was most embodied by a supporter sneaking in an old folks home to take a picture of the wife of Republican establishment candidate Thad Cochran of Mississippi can’t even handle defeat like a man.

Too bad. Maybe when Senator Cochran reaches 100 those folks like Chris McDaniel and his supporters will have grown up a little bit.

Posted on

Your money and your clothes and everything else that’s fit to print

With things which have transpired in my life since the new year — injury, loss of a brother, illness of another brother, a longtime friend who has been hospitalized for two months after a serious stroke, and not to mention work — I have strayed from writing this blog here and other tasks elsewhere. It isn’t as if I have stopped, rather I have taken days off and just let something that I enjoy to slide.

Now that we’re in the midst of hurricane season I need to make some plans regarding whether to go or to stay should a hurricane come knocking on my door. I must also figure out whether I should pursue freelance opportunities should such a weather story appear.

Likewise, I need to get inside the blog and see what requires some tinkering. I have already tinkered a bit with my links, a.k.a. “blogroll.” The great site that first appeared shortly before I began blogging and was one with a great many more viewers than mine, In The Pink Texas, has suspended operations. The wonderfully clever and entertaining Eileen Smith of Austin has pursued an equally daunting and demanding task: motherhood. Smith and her husband adopted a baby earlier this year. Just recently Eileen wrote that she was shutting what was once one of my favorite mid-afternoon pick-me-ups although I wouldn’be surprised to see her return someday with a bigger and better literary platform.

It is time for me to also thin the herd even more of blogrolls that either no longer produce for one reason or the other, or else to place on hiatus until I discover where the link will fit in my reading pattern. I will likewise add more sites to pass on to those who stop by this inner-web space. I also am more than ever eager to start my book, but I still have no idea what it will be about or in what genre it shall exist.

That sounds like some big ambition, to me at least, especially now, during which time I am about as energetic as a bear during hibernation. But one must start before a task can officially makes its way. That’s the way it goes, I am told, first your money, then your clothes.

Posted on

Is it true: That you’re never too big for jury duty?

Just now I have filled out a jury summons for Monday, June 30. I have pinned the summons back on my bulletin board.

The summons says I am to report for a “petit jury.” The word “petit” comes from the French word for “small.” I have never attempted to avoid jury duty but I always wondered if I did, whether I might try the “large” card? In other words, I am almost 6 feet tall. That’s not gigantic when you think of people like a pro basketball player, but it is still above average height.

At some point in time, one summoned for jury duty is asked: “Do you have any reason why that you should be excused from jury duty?

Me: “I do.”

Clerk: “What is the reason you should be excused?”

Me: “Is this the petit jury?:”

Clerk: “Yes sir. It is.”

Me: “Then do you have a jury for one that is ‘petit-plus?'”

Clerk: “I beg your pardon, sir?”

Me: “Well, it is my understanding that the word ‘petit’ comes from the French word for “small.” I mean, I’m not LeBron James, but I am 6-feet-tall and weigh 280 pounds.”

Clerk: “And your point, sir?”

And so it goes. There is little, pardon the pun, potential that a juror may say short of: “Um, I shot the sheriff. But I didn’t shoot the deputy. Oh, and I smoke a little ganja too.”

There you go, off the jury and take a little drink (or a little smoke) and you land in jail.

But why would you not want to make the jury? I say “make” because it seems like the less you would want to serve on a jury, the less chance you have.

I served on one jury in my life. It was a worker’s compensation case. I don’t really remember the details or what verdict we delivered. I just remembered the food. You see, I was unemployed, broke, impoverished. I had no money to buy food or feed my monster Doberman-great Dane. I couldn’t buy gas. I had to hitchhike from the farm house I lived in to town, about 15 miles to the courthouse. I was summoned for two days. The second day there wasn’t a trial as we sat around all day while the parties bargained.

The first day of jury duty, I put on my only suit — three pieces — and walked up the road next to the house to hitchhike to town. A family in my minivan gave me a ride and a guy from the jury who lived on down the road gave me a ride home. Not much trouble hitchhiking when you wear a three-piece suit. I mean, maybe it should be. Let’s say if you were a mobile killer. Oh well, I brought home some scraps from dinner for the dog.

The second day, I don’t remember. I do remember both days we had doughnuts and coffee for breakfast. Man, those doughnuts rocked. We had dinner that evening because we were deliberating. It was from Shepherd’s Restaurant, it used to be a great downtown restaurant. It was also where the inmates had their food made. I suppose that’s why the place had such a recidivism rate back then. Just kidding.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the courtroom. Most of it as a journalist. I miss it, come to think of it. I don’t miss sitting all day, waiting for this or that. But I miss the drama. I miss reporting and writing on interesting tales. Like I’ve said, I’ve only been on one jury, but I’d be happy to do it again. It’s a great responsibility we are afforded in our country to assist the judging of our peers. Plus, you can always likely find a doughnut and a hot cup of coffee. There’s a lot to be said for that.

Posted on

Win or lose, Texas soccer great Dempsey got story

Soccer is game that I know next to nothing about other than to watch a ball get kicked or head-butted up and down the field for, 90 or more minutes. The game has become, how shall I say this, one which “soccer moms (or dads),” allow their kids to play because you can lose an arm or leg playing football. And, yes, I speak of American football. Is that to say a boy who plays soccer is a “sissy boy?” Well, not if he is a girl. Okay. Let me start over.

All of what I say is bullshit, of course. Maybe some of it isn’t. Perhaps some moms won’t let their young soccer star in his unsoiled shorts and socks watch the World Cup because it is too brutal. Well, there is something to be said for that, in that it can be brutal. Which gets me to the object of all this. Deuce.

The Deuce is loose. Clint Dempsey, self-published via Creative Commons.
The Deuce is loose. Clint Dempsey, self-published via Creative Commons.

Deuce is kind of an alias and alter ego for a white boy rapper who was raised in the trailer park south of Nacogdoches, Texas. Most of Deuce, permit me to forgo the possessive, friends were the Mexican niños of chicken factory and construction workers. “Don’t Tread” is a rap video Deuce made for Nike during the 2006 World Cup. Oh, did I say Deuce also plays soccer?

Clint “Deuce” Dempsey is probably the best United States soccer player. That is unless you want to count Landon Donovan. The Los Angeles Galaxy and past U.S. national team star is sitting out this World Cup as an ESPN analyst. His sabbatical is not entirely of his own doing and many people much, much more knowledgeable about the sport known as fútbol  than I will argue — perhaps some violently — that Donovan is the best.

But Donovan is in the broadcast booth during this World Cup. Deuce is on the field.

Sometimes though, Dempsey isn’t standing upright on the field, as was the case for a moment yesterday when a player for the Ghana team made an incredibly high kick that left Dempsey on the ground. In perhaps the best lead concerning the 2-1 U.S. win Monday, so far, the Sporting News Mike DeCourcy delivered this wonderful sports injury diagnosis:

 “There was no need for a medical degree in order to diagnose Clint Dempsey’s injury. Heck, a tree surgeon could have gotten it right from 5,000 miles away. Anyone watching in high definition could have told you that nose was broken.”

I didn’t even need high definition. Oh, I suppose I should have said: “Soccer moms with queasy tummies, turn your little darlings’ heads away.”

I may not know much about soccer. But I know a story when I see one. And, by God, Clint Dempsey has a story. And now he is captain of the U.S. World Cup team and has a broken nose after scoring one of the sixth or seventh quickest goals in World Cup history. Rookie Defender John Brooks, 21, made the winning goal at minute 87 of the match after Ghana had tied the game somewhere back there as time was running out. Brooks now is a story in his own right. This story I linked yesterday is probably the best that tells the early Clint Dempsey tale. If you’ve not read it, please do so.

But back to Clint Dempsey, Deuce, the boy who played soccer with his little Mexican friends and later with not too friendly Mexican men on the fields under the North Street overpass in Naco-Nowhere. Well, like all young men are likely to discover, the old hometown isn’t always nowhere.

Nacogdoches was my second hometown. How can you have a second hometown? I don’t know. I have a third and maybe even a fourth. Nac is no doubt mine though. I lived there for about 15 years during three different stints. Some say the third time is a charm. Hell, I said the third time is a charm. But I don’t know. I no longer am never saying never when it comes to moving back to Nacogdoches for good. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.

I know from what I read that Dempsey likes going home to see his folks and to go bass fishing. There’s nothing wrong with that. The Deuce can do what he likes, of course. Whether he leads his team on to an unlikely World Cup championship, or even just one more game, I must say that young man — Dempsey is now 31 — has got a hell of a game. And a story.