National Brotherhood Of Gangreyers
Labor Day Edition
* Wright Thompson following a prep star.
* Dan Barry.
* Chris Goffard with Father, son and holy rift (read this).
* And the first thing I thought when I read of 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin's unfortunate encourter with a sting ray? I can't wait to read Hank Stuever's essay.
** UPDATE: Well, it wasn't Stuever. Paul Fahri handles the so-long, Steve duties: Steve Irwin spent much of his life not just tempting fate but petting it, riding its back and swinging it by the tail. In the end, fate snapped back.
Irwin, television's "Crocodile Hunter," died yesterday at the age of 44 in his native Australia after being stung by a stingray while shooting a new TV series along the Great Barrier Reef. It was a freaky way to go -- stingrays are rarely lethal -- but perhaps morbidly fitting, since imminent death was the unbilled co-star of Irwin's fascinating and entertaining career.
You watched Irwin as you watched a high-wire performer, never hoping for a slip but fully aware of how awful (and interesting) one would be. In his showman's heart, Irwin knew that "Crocodile Hunter" would never be captivating television if the animals he touched, held and occasionally provoked couldn't take him out with one snap of the jaws.
So, in his trademark safari shirt, khaki shorts and hiking boots (did the man ever wear anything else?), Irwin bounded gleefully into the viper's pit and the scorpion's den. He traveled the world to show off new nasties -- pythons, Komodo dragons, monitor lizards, tarantulas and, of course, massive crocs -- all without a doctor or rescue team anywhere in sight, the herpetologist's equivalent of working without a net.
Posted by
ben on 09/04/06 at
12:30
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Writing About Golf
Of crooked sticks and dimpled balls
Damon Hack with Tiger Woods: A game marked by chance has become something else over the past two months, a treatise by Tiger Woods on what is possible with a crooked stick and a dimpled ball.
Before tens of thousands of New Englanders caught between anguish for baseball and hope for football, Woods rode in a convertible golf cart to the first tee of the T.P.C. of Boston on Monday, shook hands with Vijay Singh, and began the cold and systematic process of relieving Singh of his three-shot lead.
Posted by
Kruse on 09/05/06 at
17:30
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On The Frosty
The newest freelancer
Michael's brother Bjorn Kruse with a rant (it began as a brother-to-brother email) about the changing Frosty: Last week, out on an aimless drive, I stopped at a Wendy's franchise for a Frosty. When I ordered my large Frosty, the cashier asked me, "Vanilla or chocolate?"
I didn't know how to answer. I tried to respond, sputtered, tried again, let fly a few eye twitches and finally managed, "Not vanilla."
"So chocolate?"
Salt in the wound.
"I want a Frosty, the original. Not vanilla."
She nodded, turned to grab a large size cup and vanished for a while. She returned with what I wanted, though it was about three fingers short of full.
Posted by
ben on 09/06/06 at
10:12
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Lessons For Life
"Don't be scared ... I'm not gonna leave you."
Read Brady Dennis' story: The stares begin each time he approaches the stage, his hand searching for the familiar touch of the keyboard. He never knows how many pairs of eyes are focused on him, watching, waiting.
But he knows what the hushed audience sees - blind kid, dark sunglasses, the promise of a song - and he knows the introduction that will come, the one that always begins the same way.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the next Ray Charles!"
He's too shy and polite, maybe too proud, to tell them thanks-but-no-thanks, my name is Jamie, not Ray; I love country music and Wheel of Fortune and my mama; I want to be a DJ, a wrestler, a comedian. But a musical icon? Chill out. I'm a 13-year-old on summer break.
Posted by
ben on 09/07/06 at
09:39
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Old New Yorkers, New New Yorkers
Buildings, fire and the smell of burnt hair and coke cans
Michael Brick's story: Five years ago, on Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists crashed two airliners into the World Trade Center. Downtown smelled like Coke cans and hair on fire. It was televised live.
In New York City, 2,749 people were killed. About eight million remained. Since that day, the numbers have changed.
Posted by
ben on 09/08/06 at
08:58
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Sept. 11
Some good stuff
I'm going to keep a running list of the good stuff to come from this anniversary. Please drop your links if you see something we should read.
UPDATES: Wow. Wow. Wow. Read Gary Smith on Pat Tillman here.
* Read Deborah Sontag's six-month investigative narrative, Broken Ground.
* The best documentary video I've seen related to Sept. 11 came a few days later at Union Square Park. Watch the clip here. Click on the first video. It's only a few minutes, but it's something powerful.
* Dan Barry's story: A JAB, and then another, and another and another, almost like the riveting of bolts at a construction site. When the jabbing stopped an hour later, the two towers were soaring again from the Manhattan bedrock, their windows forever tinted red by the evening sun, their majesty forever set against a sky's lavender sighs.
This is how the World Trade Center always looked, at least from the dusky vantage point of a Starrett City rooftop in Brooklyn, at least in Jason Audiffred's memory. He would leave his family's sixth-floor apartment, ascend to the top of the building, and gaze west. Nothing like it, nothing in the world.
Now, at least, this special place had been restored, bolted with ink to Mr. Audiffred's beefy left bicep by an artist called Coney Island Vinny. The large and arresting tattoo, of course, means that the central catastrophe of our time is a part of him, always, in ways he can never escape.
* Ralph Blumenthal's story: The flag that covered his coffin lies boxed on the television set with shell casings from the salute fired in his honor. His medals shine from a display case, along with the grinning portrait that sat beside his empty combat boots, inverted rifle, helmet and dog tags the day his Army buddies in Iraq filed past to say goodbye.
Two and a half years after he was killed in an ambush in Baghdad, Specialist Scott Quentin Larson Jr. still fills the modest home of his parents, Scott and Mary Larson, and their three other children in the northwestern suburbs of Houston.
The city has suffered the greatest number of American deaths — 27 as of Sept. 7, according to icasualties.org, a Web site that tracks military casualties — in the two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that are consuming a newly terrorism-aware America.
Posted by
ben on 09/09/06 at
16:58
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Hey, Doyle
Wanna jump on this?
Northern Colorado backup punter arrested: The University of Northern Colorado's reserve punter was arrested Tuesday, accused of stabbing his rival in his kicking leg.
Mitch Cozad, a sophomore from Wheatland, Wyo., allegedly attacked starting punter Rafael Mendoza in a parking lot in Evans on Monday night, Evans police Lt. Gary Kessler said.
Posted by
Kruse on 09/13/06 at
09:39
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Big Jack Needs Help
Tom Hallman Jr. at a newsstand
Here's the story: The place is a hole in the wall, one of those newsstands where a blind guy peddles newspapers, coffee and pastries. The man behind the counter is "Big Jack," not Mr. Jackson or even Gary. No need for formalities or pretense here. The childhood nickname stuck for obvious reasons. Everything about the 45-year-old -- "I'm 6-feet-5 and, proud to say, 282" -- is larger than life.
Posted by
ben on 09/13/06 at
12:08
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More Than Big Bags Of Facts
What Does It MEAN?
Mike Wilson is the AME for newsfeatures here at the SPT. He did a brown bag session Thursday called What I Learned About Writing By Editing. The best thing he talked about: "closing the distance between fact and meaning."
"Too many of our stories are just big bags of facts," he said.
He says we can fix that by focusing on The Big Idea.
What does this story MEAN? To you? To us?
What is it ABOUT?
My take: You might call this a nut graf-PLUS. The BIG IDEA GRAF gives context -- like the traditional, almost always necessary nut graf -- but then it does more.
Some examples Mike gave:
John Barry on a bat mitzvah:
"A Jewish girl had her bat mitzvah on her 13th birthday Saturday a week ago. Her Jewish mother had never had one. Her Cuban Catholic father wanted to invent one. It followed tradition; it broke tradition. A congregation heard the Hebrew words of Moses; it heard a thunderous stripping of gears of a Ferrari 360 Spider. Orbits intersected and cultures collided. This is the way it is today: Collisions, and then new cultures on new orbits."
"That's not in your notebooks, guys," Mike said. "That's in your head."
Emily Nipps on Goths:
"They share a love for songs about bleakness and corrosion and bloody coffins, and they enjoy the enduring friendships and warm memories, the good times that happen when they?re trying to be sad."
Jeff Klinkenberg on a baseball memorabilia hound:
"For a baseball fan with gray hair or no hair or a sagging waistline, following baseball is all about romance and escape. It's a link to childhood, to the time when Mom and Dad were still alive, when the most exciting thing on television was the game-of-the-week broadcast by Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean. When you were immortal."
And, um, me on a fringe Senate candidate:
"And yet there is something universal and archetypal about a man straining for something that's not within his realistic reach, and fighting battles most folks would call impossible, and knowing that. And still going forward."
Posted by
Kruse on 09/14/06 at
08:52
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Another Day In The Cage
S.I. Rosenbaum with the last lion tamer
Read her story: He stood holding his lip. Blood was pouring out, but he kept his voice calm, level. "Good girl," he said to Rula. "Easy. Easy." The tiger listened to his voice, settling.
Then Lancelot Kollmann walked out of the training cage. He went into the house and looked in the mirror.
Where Rula had clawed him, it looked like he'd been hit with a hatchet.
His lower lip was split in two. On the side of his arm, the tiger had sliced down to bone.
That was Tuesday.
On Thursday, Kollmann, 37, walked back into the training cage with 25 stitches in his lip, five stitches and a drainage shunt in his arm, and 10 tigers.
Kollmann put them through their paces, calling each by name. They leaped between platforms and lay down at his feet at the tap of the whip. They snarled at him. He rubbed them under the chin.
Posted by
ben on 09/15/06 at
06:55
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Sunday Reading
St. Pete Times edition
Brady Dennis with Pain and patriotism, Adam Smith behind the scenes on some mud-slinging and Rob Farley on the guy taking on Scientology.
What are you reading today?
Posted by
ben on 09/17/06 at
12:56
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Nick Kristof Gives Blood
What would you have done?
Save my wife:
Prudence Lemokouno was lying motionless on a bed in the bleak hospital here, her stomach swelled with a fetus that had just died, her eyes occasionally flickering with fright but mostly dull and empty. Dr. Pascal Pipi, the lone doctor in the public hospital, said she had a few more hours to live, and then she would join the half-million women a year who die around the world in pregnancy and childbirth. Her husband, Alain Awona, was beside himself. ''Save my wife,'' he pleaded. ''My baby is dead. Save my wife.'' In the spring, I held a contest to choose a student to take with me on a reporting trip to Africa, and now I'm on that trip with the winner, Casey Parks of Mississippi. I had wanted to introduce Casey to the catastrophic problem of maternal mortality in the developing world, because it should be an international scandal that the number of women dying in pregnancy worldwide has been stuck at a half-million for a quarter-century. Indeed, here in Cameroon the maternal mortality rate has risen since 1998, and over all an African woman now has one chance in 20 of dying in pregnancy. In much of the world, the most dangerous thing a woman can do is to become pregnant. When we arrived on Friday at the hospital here in the remote southeastern corner of Cameroon, we found Prudence dying for the reason that usually accounts for maternal death -- a complicated childbirth with no emergency obstetric service available. Prudence, a 24-year-old who has three children, went into labor on Monday. A village midwife assisted her, and after three days she was hoisted onto the back of a motorcycle and carried to this hospital. And then nothing happened. The hospital demanded $100 worth of surgical supplies for a Caesarian section, and family members said they could raise only $20. I asked the chief nurse, Emilienne Mouassa, how often a woman dies in the hospital because the family can't pay. She hesitated. ''Not often,'' she replied. She said that when patients like Prudence are at death's door, the hospital sometimes prefers not to operate. It is easier to explain a pregnant woman who has not been treated at all and died than one who has undergone an emergency Caesarian and then died. Dr. Pipi, a bit embarrassed that a patient was dying in front of foreign journalists, said that he could find a way to operate without the money. But in addition Prudence had lost so much blood that she needed a transfusion. ''We don't have a blood bank here,'' he explained, ''so we sent someone off to bring in other relatives to see if they are compatible. But the village is far, 120 kilometers away, and it takes a long time to bring them here.'' A few more hours, he estimated, and she would be dead. These women die because they are poor and female and rural -- the most overlooked and disposable people throughout the developing world. Politics also complicates Western efforts to help. The United Nations Population Fund has helped lead the effort to reduce maternal deaths -- yet the Bush administration has cut off all U.S. funding for the agency because of (false) accusations that it supports abortions in China. We inquired what Prudence's blood type was. The nurse checked and reported that it was A positive. We looked at each other. I'm also A positive. Casey's blood did not seem to be compatible. But Naka Nathaniel, the Times multimedia maven who often travels with me, is O positive and thus compatible. Would Dr. Pipi really operate if he could obtain blood? He said he would. So Naka and I each gave blood, after a nurse went into town to find a plastic bag to put it in. It was promptly pumped into Prudence, and she began to look a bit better. Dr. Pipi promised to operate on her shortly. Her husband cried with joy, but begged us not to leave. ''If you go,'' he warned, ''Prudence will die.'' We waited, and six hours passed. The hospital began shaking down Prudence's family for more money before the surgery could begin. The husband had nothing, so we chipped in. Then when everything seemed to be ready, Dr. Pipi simply vanished. ''Oh, he's gone home,'' a nurse explained. ''He'll operate tomorrow.'' We cajoled, pleaded and threatened, but the hospital staff was unmoved. ''What if Prudence dies in the night?'' I asked. The nurse shrugged and said: ''That would be God's will.''
Posted by
Kruse on 09/18/06 at
19:48
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For Horse, Death Arrives Inelegantly
"She was called Juliet because everybody fell in love with her"
Read Corey Kilgannon's story: Juliet the carriage horse held forth for about two decades on the south end of Central Park taking tourists on slow romantic rides through the park. She was the cute white horse whose owner outfitted her head with the elegant white tassel that bobbed as she clip-clopped ahead of her carriage on loops from the Plaza Hotel to Tavern on the Green and other prominent spots.
But as elegant as Juliet was in life, she was undeniably inelegant in death on a rainy morning yesterday, lying flat on her back on the dungy concrete floor of a Hell’s Kitchen stable, her legs stiff in the air.
Posted by
ben on 09/19/06 at
06:56
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Changing Landscapes
A serial narrative about development
A friend up north pointed out an ongoing series by Bob Shaw at the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Shaw is documenting -- in narrative fashion -- the changing of a century-old farm into a yuppie subdivision.
The tagline: "This is part of an extended series about the development of a $1.5 billion suburban community. The stories began in 2004 with the final harvest on the historic Brandtjen Farm in Lakeville and will continue until the first residents move in."
Here's his latest installment: Kim Berge didn't think she was doing anything important.
All she did was walk up some steps, take off her shoes and shoo her family into a model home.
But in doing so, she became the first prospective buyer to tour the first three model homes at the $1.5 billion Spirit of Brandtjen Farm project in Lakeville.
To please people like her, the builders developed houses unique to the site. They struggled to follow design rules for a new type of house: the modern luxury farmhouse. They plotted newfangled neighborhoods designed to bring neighbors together and spent tens of millions on the effort.
If Kim Berge — and the thousands who follow during this month's Parade of Homes — liked the houses, then the trailblazing project would be a success. The designs would be reproduced hundreds of times at Spirit and copied widely elsewhere.
But if the models bombed, sales would stagnate. Builders would be forced to build more ordinary houses in more ordinary neighborhoods.
"This is a scary time," said Rob Wachholz, project manager for Brandtjen's developer, Tradition Development of Edina. "We are nervously patient."
Find more from the series in the paper's archives (registration required).
Pretty cool idea, no?
Posted by
ben on 09/20/06 at
08:36
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Hank Stuever
He Can Save Journalism
Lincoln's Colleen Kenney writes for Gangrey:
After a martini, two margaritas and half a beer last Friday night in Texas, I said this to some Florida journalists I met at a conference:
"Hank Stuever can save journalism."
I stand by it now, in the fluorescent light of my day. Stuever is like a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. He makes us laugh while telling us about ourselves and our nation, yet he's ... deep. Even if we don't like a Stuever story, we talk about it. He surprises us. He entertains us.
He gives us an experience.
We need all different types of writers. I'd like to think I'm in the "school of" Dan Barry or Lane DeGregory, not Stuever. We just need more writers to have the guts of Stuever, and we need them to be supported.
Mainly, we need more editors with guts. (I have one.)
I also said that night that I thought most editors are afraid of Stuever-esque writers so they squash them and don't mentor them and then they give up and move on to PR by the time they're 30.
"It's like we eat our young," I think I said the other night.
I can think of writers I've worked with who could have become almost as good, but they're doing bland crap now. These are people I worked with back at the college paper here years ago who made me cry I laughed so hard. How does this happen? Bland editors.
I remember a writer who may be as good as Stuever. I think he got fed up with the mediocrity of the editors at this large metro daily where we worked. Last I heard he was at an alt-weekly in Arizona kicking butt.
I loved it when I heard Tom French tell a Kelley Benham story at a National Writers Workshop, something like: Kelley was in a big editor's office early in her career, and the editor asked what her career plans were, and she said, "I want to write like a motherfucker." She can save journalism.
Tom French told a New York Times reporter at Nieman last year that he thought most of her paper's Page 1 was boring. He can save journalism.
"I'm not afraid," my editor, Peter Salter, told me one day not long after I began working here. I'd never heard anything like that from an editor. He lets us try funky stuff few editors would allow and makes it fun here. He can save journalism.
Who else?
Posted by
Kruse on 09/20/06 at
12:14
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Thursday Reading
Some new stuff
* Michael Brick on the sounds a train makes.
* Tom Lake on a gator.
* Gawker helps readers understand the NY Times' redesign.
* Jeb Phillips on a dead soldier. (The Army suited him, his friends said. He had a predisposition to neatness and order. He made people take off their shoes before getting in his Z28 Camaro so they wouldn't mess up the carpets, said Rob Wallace, his best friend since first grade. He scrubbed that car inside and out every weekend.)
* The Narrative Digest has been updated with 9/11 stuff, including this one by David Maraniss: A few minutes before 8, Tuesday morning. The day had broken clean and clear and sweet on the East Coast. Summer was over mentally, if not officially. It was time to get to work, and people were up and at it. The saddest and most relentlessly horrific day in modern American existence started in the most ordinary ways. (I have a working paper for this story that's pretty fantastic; I'll try to track it down.)
Posted by
ben on 09/21/06 at
07:10
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There's A Dog On The Tracks
Don't believe me? Read the paper
Ramsey Al-Rikabi says this made his day: The Q train announcement was, actually, decipherable. That’s not to say it was easy to comprehend.
“This train is being delayed. There is a dog on the tracks.”
That got the attention of the people in the front car yesterday. Cellphones popped open. Calls were made to work. Doubts were expressed as to whether the excuse would be accepted.
“There’s a dog on the tracks.”
Posted by
ben on 09/21/06 at
21:36
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Calming The Storm
Lane DeGregory with a man who hears voices
Read her story: The voices had been bad that morning, angry and insistent, screaming through Justin's head. He sat behind the reception desk at Vincent House, swiveling in the chair, trying to concentrate on the phone he was supposed to be answering.
But the phone didn't ring. The quiet was too loud.
The voices kept shouting.
Posted by
ben on 09/22/06 at
09:19
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On Description
crunched-up face, ax-blade nose, vulgar lips
I came across this piece of physical description in Stephen Hunter’s review of the movie, “All The King’s Men.” I’ve always had trouble with physical description of people. This one seems first rate.
“For me, Penn's Willie Stark is spot-on, but he's a subspecies of tyrant. He's the small-man tyrant. Penn is short and stubby with a kind of crunched-up face liberated to aggression by a giant ax blade of a nose and rubbery, vulgar lips; with short arms and short, pudgy fingers and a pile of Brylcreemed hair on his head over white sidewalls, veins throbbing like the letter Y under his pale skin. He looks like a fireplug of pure hunger and want, particularly when he lets fly his stemwinders from the stump utterly shorn of self-consciousness.”
Posted by
Mark Johnson on 09/22/06 at
09:25
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A Broken Girl And A Slow Trial
Brick in court
Read his story: The friendless death of Nixzmary Brown in Brooklyn last January demanded a reckoning. She was broken and starved, 7 years old, left in a den her brothers and sisters called “the dirty room.” Child welfare workers, teachers, the police and the parents all came under scrutiny.
In some quarters, consequences were swift. A week after Nixzmary was found, the child welfare agency suspended or reassigned six city workers. Soon hundreds of children were placed in foster care, the police commissioner was summoned before the City Council, and the mayor created and filled a new position for the protection of children.
But the case against the girl’s mother, Nixzaliz Santiago, and her stepfather, Cesar Rodriguez, has followed a different schedule.
Posted by
ben on 09/23/06 at
16:16
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Two From The Weekend
Cleaning Up
Michael Lewis with The Ballad Of Big Mike: As he drove into Memphis in March 2004, Tom Lemming thought that everything about Michael Oher, including his surname, was odd. He played for a small private school, the Briarcrest Christian School, with no history of generating Division I college football talent. The Briarcrest Christian School team didn’t have many black players either, and Michael Oher was black. But what made Michael Oher especially peculiar was that no one in Memphis had anything to say about him. Lemming had plenty of experience “discovering” great players. Each year he drove 50,000 to 60,000 miles and met, and grilled, between 1,500 and 2,000 high-school juniors while selecting All-American teams for ESPN and College Sports TV. He got inside their heads months before the college recruiters were allowed to shake their hands. Lemming had made some calls and found that the coaches in and around Memphis either didn’t know who Michael Oher was or didn’t think he was any good. He hadn’t made so much as the third-string all-city team. He hadn’t had his name or picture in any newspaper. Had Lemming Googled him, “Oher” would have yielded nothing on Michael. The only proof of his existence was a grainy videotape some coach had sent him out of the blue.
And Anne Hull with The Army vs. Spec. Richmond: Eddie Richmond's son got back from the war in June. He wanted nothing in the way of a homecoming, no yellow ribbons tied around trees, none of the piles of boiled crawfish that sent him off.
While other sons came home from Iraq with duffel bags that spilled sand from the desert, 22-year-old Edward Richmond Jr. carried release papers from an Army jail.
Posted by
Kruse on 09/25/06 at
13:52
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Good Monday
A Courageous Quarterback, A Phantom Room And A Woman's Unconditional Love
I defy you to find more good stuff inside the Monday edition of a regional newspaper anywhere in the country.
Sports columnist Gary Shelton makes eloquence seem effortless.
Read his ode to the courage of injured Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Chris Simms.
Michael Kruse made me roll on the floor laughing with this collection of overheard quotes from the streets of New York.
And then Erin Sullivan made me almost cry.
Enjoy.
Posted by
T. Lake on 09/25/06 at
20:12
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Bad Things At The Taco Bell
Ramsey Al-Rikabi details a not-so-good plan
Read his story: If you believe their confessions — and the accused say the signed statements cannot be believed — the $2,500 Taco Bell heist was staged, a piece of criminal theater with a simple motive: drugs.
It was hatched in the Taco Bell parking lot, when the night manager's friends convinced her that the cash from the night deposit could land them lots of Ecstasy pills.
Posted by
ben on 09/26/06 at
15:23
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Van locked? I've just the thing!
On a street in st. pete, a neglected pica pole finds its purpose
Gangrey exclusive from Alex Zesch:
It wasn’t a congratulations on your new baby visit.
The woman said something about her van and her dog was inside and her insurance company. I gathered she wanted to use the phone, although she never said that.
I handed her my cell phone and stayed nearby in the front yard, like the small, distressed woman with the massive knee brace was going to run off with it. As she got the runaround from 21st Century Insurance and I pretended to be picking up, we were both getting annoyed.
Did she want to walk back there? Yes.
She had a wire hanger stuck in the door, which wasn’t quite closed but locked all the same. I wiggled it back out then checked to see if any other doors were unlocked. As if she hadn’t.
As she grew more frustrated with her call, I tried to slide the hanger between the door and the window, like they do on TV.
She had stopped to get the morning papers because her friend had been shot over the weekend, she said.
Huh, I said.
She NEVER stopped to get the papers, she said.
The hanger was too thick. What’s long and flat and has some kind of hook?
I was trained in page design in my first job in Memphis. The girl who trained me gave me a pica pole. I never used it. It’s been in my tool box because it makes straight lines.
It’s long and flat and has some kind of hook. I went and got it. It slid right in between the window and the door. The small hook on the end found something to hook and I pulled. It slipped off. Then again. After four or five tries, something popped, and the door opened.
I gave her that look my friend Bjorn and I gave each other hundreds of times one night drinking until it became annoying, where you raise both eyebrows and do a quick nod.
Thanks.
You’re welcome.
She grabbed her Times and her Trib from the side mirror and climbed in.
Thanks so much. Have a nice day.
I looked at my pica pole and then at her van. That was awesome.
Posted by
ben on 09/27/06 at
13:51
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The Last Diver
Jeff Klinkenberg with a has-been
Read his story: The old man still dreams about the bottom of the sea. He dreams about sponges, about tiger sharks, about big-hearted men he figured would live forever but are now gone.
“It is hard getting old,’’ the old man said. Of course it is. You outlive your friends. Your body rebels. Your short-term memory fails. And yet you can’t forget.
Posted by
ben on 09/28/06 at
09:38
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Three For Thursday
Good, Good, Good
Jeffrey Gettleman in Mogadishu: They call her the “Black Hawk Down” lady.
And in the corner of her dirt yard, beneath rags drying in the sun and next to a bowl of filthy wash water, she keeps a chunk of history that most Americans would probably like to forget.
It is the battered nose of a Black Hawk helicopter, from one of the two that got shot down in Mogadishu on Oct. 3, 1993, in an infamous battle that killed 18 Americans, led to a major foreign policy shift and spawned a big movie.
The Black Hawk Down lady stands fiercely at her gate and charges admission to see it.
“You, you, you,” she said on a recent day, jabbing her finger at three visitors. “Pay, pay, pay.”
David Montgomery watches Barack Obama: It's one thing for Ben Cardin to joke about his charisma deficit. "Who says I'm not flashy?" he quips in a campaign commercial when a supporter suggests: "Ben's not flashy, but he never stops."
It's quite another for him to invite Mr. Democratic Charisma himself onstage for a rally yesterday in the Cardin quest to become U.S. senator from Maryland.
Barack Obama didn't even have to open his mouth to have a crowd of a few hundred under a powerful spell in a grassy outdoor amphitheater at the University of Maryland in College Park. The junior senator from Illinois -- part Kenyan, part Kansan -- stood tall and youthful and bronze in a black suit and a baby-blue tie, his eyes half-closed, studying the audience with a kind of seductive lassitude. His arrival sparked an ovation, and he shot a quick amiable wink to the many pols and hopefuls crammed behind him on the stage, mute witnesses to the magic.
Richard Fausset on ATMs for Jesus: Pastor Marty Baker preaches that the Bible is the eternal and inviolate word of God. On other church matters, he's willing to change with the times.
Jeans are welcome at Stevens Creek Community Church, the 1,100-member evangelical congregation Baker founded 19 years ago. Sermons are available as podcasts, and the electric house band has been known to cover Aerosmith's "Dream On." A recent men's fellowship breakfast was devoted to discussing the spiritual wages of lunching at Hooters.
It is a bid for relevance in a nation charmed by pop culture and consumerism, and it is not an uncommon one. But Baker has waded further into the 21st century than most fishers of American souls, as evidenced one Wednesday night when churchgoer Josh Marshall stepped up to a curious machine in the church lobby.
Posted by
Kruse on 09/28/06 at
10:00
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Saving Papers
Local, local, local
From USA Today: Newspapers grappling with declining circulation and profit margins can turn themselves around if they quickly develop publications and affiliated websites packed with local information, according to an eagerly awaited industry report Wednesday.
"The land rush to meet local information needs has barely begun," says Newspaper Next: The Transformation Project, based on a study of business models and practices sponsored by the American Press Institute.
For example, the report says that newspapers might assemble databases about parks, medical facilities and restaurants, information about schools, consumer-supplied ratings for restaurants, mechanics and contractors, as well as chat groups for parents and shoppers.
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ben on 09/28/06 at
14:43
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Gangrey In Fort Lauderdale
Getting Better On A Saturday
At these “writers’” conferences it’s almost always all about the reporting. This is important.
Today at the National Writers' Workshop here in hot, breezy South Florida, it came up a good bit.
Mirta Ojito, formerly of the Miami Herald, formerly of the New York Times, currently teaching at Columbia, gave the morning keynote on using “I” to tell stories. She said it was not only as important but MORE important to report the hell out off personal narratives, memoirs, things like that, because people are going to doubt those sorts of stories.
“I reported my own experiences,” she said.
She didn’t just say it was hot coming over from Cuba. She didn’t just say the waves were high and scary. She checked the Herald way-back microfiche for the weather that day.
Ken Wells from the Wall Street Journal dropped a word I’d never heard. A good one. He calls writing without reporting “flash dancing.”
“It’s the reporting, stupid,” he said. Then: “The penalty for flash-dancing at the Wall Street Journal is death.” You get fired.
Posted by
Kruse on 09/30/06 at
18:05
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