Norimitsu Onishi: GENERAL SANTOS, the Philippines — After a day of barbering, Rodolfo Gregorio went to his neighborhood karaoke bar still smelling of talcum powder. Putting aside his glass of Red Horse Extra Strong beer, he grasped a microphone with a habitué’s self-assuredness and briefly stilled the room with the Platters’ “My Prayer.”
Next, he belted out crowd-pleasers by Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck. But Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”
“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?
The anonymous poster on the "Gone" thread was looking for a list of the most nurturing newspapers when it comes to the kind of work we see on this board.
I'd be interested to see some nominations, especially in the smaller circulation categories.
Dan Koeppel in Popular Mechanics: You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?
You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.
Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.
Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.
Headed out of town for a few days. Gangrey is left to the masses.
Topic of discussion: Who do you read? When you need to get in the right head, who do you look up? Is there something you go to time and again? Do you browse? Do you meditate? Do you drink?
Always type out your interviews before you go to bed, so you remember the expressions.
And ...
Moses told people not to talk to me. So on a piece of paper I drew a series of concentric circles. In the center I put a dot. The dot was Robert Moses. The first circle was his family. The second was the people in his social realm. But as the circles grew outward, there were people who'd only met him once. He wasn't going to be able to get to all of them.
Excerpts from "A Free Shave," by Ernest Hemingway, from The Toronto Star Weekly, March 6, 1920:
If you want to save $5.60 a month on shaves and hair cuts go to the barber college, but take your courage with you.
For a visit to the barber college requires the cold, naked valor of the man who walks clear-eyed to death. If you don't believe it, go to the beginner's department of the barber's college and offer yourself for a free shave. I did....
...Just then I noticed that my barber had his left hand bandaged.
"How did you do that?" I asked.
"Darn near sliced my thumb off with the razor this morning," he replied amiably.
The shave wasn't so bad. Scientists say that hanging is really a very pleasant death. The pressure of the rope on the nerves and arteries of the neck produces a sort of anesthesia. It is waiting to be hanged that bothers a man...
...Free barbering is not the only free service to be obtained in Toronto...
...If you wish to secure free board, free room, and free medical attention, there is one infallible way of obtaining it. Walk up to the biggest policeman you can find and hit him in the face.
The length of your period of free board and room will depend on how Colonel [George Taylor] Denison [police magistrate] is feeling. And the amount of your free medical attention will depend on the size of the policeman.
Charles McGrath: J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91.
'a massive glacial lake containing more water than all the lakes on Earth today'
Gary Smith: Maybe, if you were lucky, you had one too. Maybe you had your own patch of earth where your legs and mind might roam and you could make a sport your own.
I once had such luck. It came in the unsightliest of forms, a crater bulldozed in a field of weeds where workers at the cemetery behind our house dumped the browning wreaths and flowers that had been left upon the graves. What else, to my 12-year-old eyes, but a baseball stadium?
The embankments created by the earthmover became my backstop, my bleachers, my outfield walls. The wreaths became my bases. I cleared away the stones and withered sorrow, burrowed a hollow in the dirt wall along the first base line and roofed it with scrap plywood: my dugout.
No parents or pressure ever approached my ballpark, no meddling or minivans, just me and a buddy and our imaginations.
What follows is the story of a family, someone else's, perhaps the most remarkable sporting clan in the United States.
Best thing out there. Charles Pierce: It's a wonder he didn't laugh out loud.
Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of man-cheese that make up the assembled political establishment, and beyond them to a spavined and impotent political culture that would embarrass any self-respecting monkey house, and beyond that to a country willing to abandon almost anything it once deemed important to the first huckster who turns up weeping on cable television, Barack Obama must have been sorely tempted to let out one final, mighty guffaw and close his first State of the Union address with the words, "And I am the only president of the United States in this room, motherfuckers," after which he would return to the White House and eat Mitch McConnell's gonads on toast.
N.R. Kleinfield (thanks, Scott): At the laundromat, irregular things happen. People square off over washers — mine; no, mine. They sit on the counters where you were planning to fold T-shirts. Women conveniently forget a negligee in a dryer so you’ll find it and marry them. Street people try to sell utterly unnecessary things. Pesky process servers visit bearing summonses. People stare without mercy.
Charles Johnson has a 10-second rule. Mr. Johnson is 44, an occasional personal trainer with loose hours, and was juggling three loads one Wednesday afternoon at the Clean Rite Center in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. He insists on doing the wash for his family (wife, two kids) “because I do it better, not because I have to.”
He does the cleaning too. In eight years, he said his wife has touched a mop perhaps twice. She cooks.
“In a laundromat you get a lot of eye drama,” he said. “That’s when someone may or may not like you and they look at you and you look at them and then you try not to look at them. So my rule is if you stare at me more than 10 seconds, I’ll talk to you and find out why you’re staring at me.”
Reid Forgrave: Walk into Donna Toombs' apartment on the ninth floor of Plymouth Place, a retirement community in Des Moines, and you can almost feel the ghost of Benjamin the Bunny around you.
The first thing inside Toombs' door is a framed photo of Benjamin, who died earlier this month. And that's only one of a fistful of photos scattered about her place. Dozens of rabbit statues and stuffed animals adorn the apartment. There's a rabbit head cover on a golf bag, plates decorated with rabbits, a stained-glass rabbit in the window, rabbit calendars, a rabbit table runner.
Lest there be any confusion over what this story is about, let Toombs and her friend, Kay Gerhart, explain:
Missed this way back when. Here's Chris Goffard: After the killings, the people on the river slept with their knives closer. They leashed guard dogs outside their tents and cardboard lean-tos. They listened for strangers' footsteps above the thrum of traffic on the bridges overhead. They got used to the sight of police stepping carefully along the big white rocks of the embankment. Below, in its concrete jacket, the dirty river crawled.
Violence is common and often unreported along the 51-mile Los Angeles River, daytime haunt of the occasional jogger and bird-watcher and in many parts a lawless no-man's-land populated by hard-core addicts, the mentally ill and uncountable others, broke or hiding. But what happened last November made an already fearful place feel more perilous still.
First, from Theola Labbé-DeBose and Wil Haygood (thanks, Mark): At 5:30 on the morning of Tuesday, Jan. 12, William Saint-Hilaire rose from his tiny Silver Spring basement apartment to get ready for work. By 2 o'clock, he had finished at his job installing sprinkler systems for a company in Bethesda and returned home for a bite. A short while later, he left for a 4:45 appointment at Montgomery County Community College to meet with an academic counselor about an English course he hoped to take.
"I was sitting there," he recalls, "talking to the counselor, and my cellphone started going off." He had the phone on vibrate. He did not want to be rude by answering it, so he let it go.
(Intersting stuff on how this story came together from the Post's Story Lab.)
The second is from Meg Laughlin: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti
For nearly a week, the road to find Daniel Thelusmar's brother was blocked by a nation of people desperate for help.
He left Tampa three days after the earthquake. He left his job at Humana, left his Creole radio show, his college coursework, and his church congregation in north Tampa. He promised to call his wife and his three young children — if he could — and he got on a plane. Born in Haiti and fluent in six languages, Thelusmar, 31, knew he could help with the relief effort. What he didn't know was whether his older brother, Fenel, was alive or among the estimated 200,000 who had perished in the quake. But from the moment he landed at the airport in the Dominican Republic, finding Fenel seemed to fall farther down the list of things he had to do.
An American rescue worker needed help getting his search dog through customs. Thelusmar translated and then accompanied him all the way to Port-au-Prince. "I was thinking of all the people trapped in buildings and I had to help him," he said. Hospitals needed translators for foreign doctors. Food and water distributors begged for someone to guide them through a nearly unnavigable city. Three more days passed. Wednesday, his mother called him. Please, she implored, stop what you are doing. Go find Fenel.
Thursday morning Thelusmar climbed into the front seat of an SUV he procured for the day and asked the driver to take him to Matissant, the neighborhood where he grew up and where he hoped to find his brother still alive.
Joe Mozingo (thanks, Raja): Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the balmy air.
This was the time for God and for spirits.
On a road next to the central cemetery, residents of a small slum were lying on mattresses and pieces of cardboard set out on the broken pavement. A woman started to hum a Christian song, and soon rallied a chorus, singing and dancing and clapping for rhythm.
"Kem kontan Jesus renmem, aleluya," they sang -- joyously, not mournfully. "I'm so happy Jesus loves me. Hallelujah."
Every 15 minutes the chiming bells of the Deeds Carillon mark time’s passage in Dayton. Their ever-repeating song reminds the city of its deep connection to the NCR Corporation, formerly known as National Cash Register, for generations known here as The Cash.
The carillon, a 151-foot tower of limestone and steel, was a gift from a former NCR chief executive and his wife. It sits beside a boulevard named after the eccentric man who founded NCR, not far from other NCR touchstones: an office building here, a former warehouse there, and acres and acres of land.
As those bells tolled one day last June, the company, which specializes in automated teller machines and other self-service devices, announced a “major investment in innovation and people,” though not the people of Dayton. NCR stunned the city of its birth with the news that it was moving its world headquarters to suburban Atlanta.