Gangrey.com

Fun Q and A with Kerry Burke, a murder and mayhem reporter for the Daily News:

…

When you arrive at a crime scene, what’s generally happening? How do you go about reporting?

Very often it’s absolute chaos. But, you know, I’ve been doing this for a while, and I read scenes to figure out what’s happening when the world’s gone mad. I realize, okay, these detectives are the actual case detectives and those detectives aren’t. Okay, that’s family. Okay, the shots had to have come from over there. You figure out what happened just by looking at the lay of the land and everybody involved.

I see the pack of reporters, and I don’t follow the pack. I try to go off in a different direction. I keep an eye on them—I understand that playing defense is a part of every game – but I don’t just hang around waiting for the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information (DCPI), the press liaison on crime scenes, to give me handouts. Basically, what they give is cop version.

So a DCPI shows up at every crime scene?

No, they don’t. Very often they don’t show up at all. And very often when they do, they don’t talk. I respect what they do, but frankly that’s not where you get stories. If you’re just going to produce all the same stuff as everybody else, how good are you at your job?

(thanks, Doyle)

I’m in love. (h/t Craig)

Read this Q and A with Tom.

Tom Junod: The guys were coming over. That’s what Fred and Charlotte Thomas both called them — “the guys,” as though they were Fred’s poker buddies. Fred and Charlotte were both in their early seventies. They were retired. They were living in a place that was still new to them, and in some ways still foreign. They weren’t in the best health — Charlotte had pain in her legs, and Fred, just a month before, had endured having half a lung removed by doctors who had misdiagnosed him. They thought he had cancer, when in fact the growth was a fungus. Fred had lost half a lung by mistake, and now both Fred and Charlotte had trouble climbing the stairs in their tall, narrow house. It had been a tough year, and when Fred told her that the guys were coming over, she was just happy he had friends.

It was March 17, 2011, when they came over the first time. Saint Paddy’s Day. Charlotte and Fred had gotten some pizzas and beers so they would have something to eat. Then she went upstairs, to leave Fred alone. Or maybe she went out. She doesn’t remember. She didn’t know that many of the guys, anyway. Oh, she knew Dan — Fred’s friend Dan Roberts. The rest of them were new. There was a guy named Anthony, and another guy whose name she forgot. There was a guy named Joe, and then there was Joe’s son, also named Joe. The first Joe was much younger than both Fred and Dan — at least twenty years younger — and the second Joe was just twenty-five. Well, Fred and Charlotte were used to that. They were used to having younger friends.

Man, howI love this. I encourage you to find the time to listen to it rather than read it.

Eli Saslow: CONWAY, S.C. — He awoke to his alarm on Monday morning at 6, just like always, even though his handwritten schedule for the day read only: “Find something to do!” Steven Murdock, 39, poured himself a cup of coffee and rummaged through the defrosted Thanksgiving leftovers in an otherwise barren refrigerator. He grabbed the phone that bill collectors were threatening to turn off and made his first call of the day.

“I need some kind of odd job to help me get by,” he told a neighbor. “Know of anything?”

It was the beginning of another workweek in a town with too little work, and all around Murdock, the South Carolina economy of 2012 stirred to life. Forty people formed a line outside the downtown food bank, carrying empty plastic bags they hoped would be filled. Dozens more waited for sunrise at the unemployment office. A sign at the Department of Social Services directed all comers to an overflow parking lot, built to accommodate the 25 percent of Conway’s population that now survived primarily on government support.

(thanks, Mark)

Chris Rose, circa 2007: As is the fate of most self-styled inventors, pioneers and visionaries — those who toil in decades of anonymity, never realize their dreams and eventually die of broken hearts, or worse — J.T. Nesbitt and Andy Overslaugh’s grand scheme never really had a chance in hell.

Fortunately, they did not know that. Or, more likely, they were too stubborn, too determined and simply too beat down to accept it. After all, delusions of grandeur led to things such as Mount Rushmore and a rocket to the moon.

For this modern-day tandem of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, it wasn’t windmills they were fighting. It was much more personal than that. Much bigger than that.

(h/t, Barry Yeoman)

Please take a look at the work of Michael Graff, from N.C.’s Our State. (Thanks, Sarah)

The Oyster Way: Down in the mud in the North Carolina sounds,the oyster finds a home and sticks with it. It will never move, not even to do the one thing that makes just about any creature move — not even to mate. Each spring, when the water hits 68 degrees, and not a degree sooner, without even the slightest courtship effort, the male releases his sperm into the water, and the female releases her eggs, putting it all to chance that somewhere in the sea they will meet and make a new oyster. The offspring, larva so small that a million can fit in a cupped human hand, sways along the surface for a few weeks before realizing that floating just isn’t the oyster way. It dives down to the bottom to search for something solid to stick to forever — preferably another oyster shell — where it will stay and grow and never again have to worry about the wild uncertainties of locomotion.

From that fixed spot, anything that happens in the oyster’s life is the result of outside influence. Food falls to it. Predators nose around it. Storms wash its world away. A life of such permanence demands a hard shell. The oyster, for 520 million or so years, survived this way, growing one on top of the other on top of the other.

And then we came along.

And Where The Road Ends: In a town built on sand, past where the paved road ends, with million-dollar beach homes everywhere, a man points a gun at a horse. His name — the man’s — is Wesley Stallings. Her name — the horse’s — is Tzila. They are both parents, man and horse, of young girls. Stallings has a 6-year-old at home; they eat pizza on Fridays together. Tzila has a yearling here; they eat a lot of grass together.

Among their other common traits, the man and horse are resigned to the way things are out here. Cars drive on the beach. Homes are so big they have names. And people walk right up to horses and snap pictures as if it were the zoo.

That’s why Stallings has his gun pointed at Tzila. It’s not to hurt her, not at all.

(Soundtrack)

Martin Luther King Jr., in one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read:

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

This is awesome, start to finish.