Friday, April 22, 2011

Late Night Calls, Ch. 2

This one’s weird. For the last several days, I’ve been getting messages I’m not sure are human. They sound like an old radio transmission when I pick up the phone. Kinda sounds like somebody’s saying something, but barely. Scratchy, from past Pluto. Can’t make out a single word. Lucky lottery numbers and stock tips, probably.

Late Night Calls, Ch. 1


How's Godwin's law go? Wait I'll wiki it. "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”


O.K., well, so maybe not totally applicable (since I’m not talking about anything online), but I still think “grammar Nazis” are aptly named.


They usually call late, when they think you’re not at your desk. They try to sneak a message onto your phone. Sometimes they e-mail you. You’ve seen them in discussion forums, of course – maybe, if you’re lucky, they’ve given you some unsolicited advice.


As reporters, we hear from them a lot more than you do. Trust me. They’re usually very old, you can tell, and polite enough that you probably shouldn’t call them Nazis to their faces. Probably.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Let off some steam

When you write leads like this every week…

“Firemen pulled the beaten, bloody body of Henry Hickman’s wife from under a flaming mattress.”

… you tend to need something to help you let off some steam. That’s not even the worst one, believe me. The worst one was about two Wisconsin grave robbers who tried to dig up a body and have sex with it, because the obit photo looked cute.  The lead was about “stopping at a WalMart to buy condoms,” before all that other stuff. But I digress.

… you tend to NEED something to help you let off some steam.

Being the closet geek that i am, I like to watch English commentaries of Korean Starcraft matches. If you don't know what that is then... well, honestly, it's probably exactly what it sounds like. Think chess on crack. Very relaxing late at night.

One of my compatriots across the phone lines, our night watch commander, is addicted to Dancing with the Stars. So that's how she deals with things. I'm not that far gone yet. Life still has meaning. She's starting to insist I watch too, which takes the reporter-source relationship to a level I'm not really all that comfortable with. I told her I hoped Bristol didn't win, and that seemed to placate her.

The room they sit in doesn't have any windows.