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I had very little time but quite a bit of fun writing this mini-feature on people at WSU who were born on Feb. 29. President Floyd was really surprised we knew about him technically being a leap day baby, and quite honestly I don’t remember when it came up or how we knew. It made me smug anyway.
This brings up another point, which is that I never proof-read my stories on days as busy as this one. I usually don’t read them until a few days after they’re published because I have a weird anxiety about it. I did just read this one over, and it reminded me that I don’t do it because then I see a dozen little things with wording or arrangement that I wish I could change.
I should have anticipated this, but it was still a first for me: a wrong-number text message.
THEM (7:48 p.m.): Lost in room 458, tell bob and whoever else
ME (7:51 p.m.): ?
THEM (7:52 p.m.): Did you still want to get together to watch lost?
ME (7:54 p.m.): I think this is the wrong number, I’m sorry!
THEM (7:54 p.m.): Lol sorry!
It was a 509 number, so I suspect it’s someone I know peripherally. They wouldn’t get my number out of nowhere.
Photo by Tyler Tjomsland/Daily Evergreen
Here’s the story. I purposely overwrote it because the whole thing was so silly, and it needed a different tone to compete with an ever-popular fraternity-in-trouble story.
This is just an annotated roundup of ridiculous things I helped bring into existence. I will accept limited credit/blame:
With Dan eating all orange food this week and Victor eating green, red and white, I suggested there were lots of food items they could effectively share.
Victor was telling me a funny story one day that led to a conversation about the internet’s effect on English, and I told him he should turn it into a column. (And that’s me quoted in the top left house ad on this page.)
Nick came up with the first and second venue videos on his own (though encouraged by my amusement). But then last Thursday he was talking about going to Beasley two hours before the game and I suggested he make a third installment.
I’ve also been a fan of Jacob’s absurdly dull videos ever since the storm in Ireland. When in Aberdeen we drove near the courthouse where he spends many hours and I facetiously told him he should make a video about it. My theory that Jacob is trying to outdo himself in mundaneness surely motivated this most recent video.
Last night Nick was like, “I can’t think of what else to put on my blog.” I was like, “Just put up more random stuff like the rest of us.” Later he was telling me how one of his fellow sportwriters used to work at the Evergreen, and it was a nice little anecdote so I said he should post it.
I coined the term “rogue quotes” last semester when our InDesign template somehow started putting in the wrong type of quotation marks. So I was pleased when I realized tonight that people in the newsroom now use that as a standard designing term.
There are more, but that is plenty for now. I just needed a break from the rest of everything.
Today I’m writing a story about how Pullman Police are going around giving warnings to houses on College Hill with “accumulated party trash.” For being a fairly dull premise, it’s turning out to be an interesting story. We met one fellow who answered the door in his girlfriend’s pink bathrobe last Sunday. He re-enacted the scene for me and photographer Tyler Tjomsland.
Later I asked Sgt. Sam Sorem about it.
“I guess I didn’t think it was a blazing pink,” Sorem said. “I would consider it more of a shade of red.”
I just finished taking a rather unconventional exam for J475 that required me to do minor audio editing, make an online press release, put together a little poll for a bonus, and post it all online. I put it up on my old blog to avoid muddling this one, and just look at me writing about it anyway.
Just to follow up from yesterday, this over-the-top Doug Clark column (is that redundant?) in the Spokesman-Review today didn’t remind me of yesterday’s rage. I would have laughed aloud at this point if it weren’t such a tired and gratuitous joke:
“This mind-numbing isolation of Pullman drives some students to act out in socially inappropriate ways such as drinking, fighting and signing up for throwaway courses like journalism.”
The title basically says it all. I didn’t really think about it, but I had a few pieces of broccoli while I was packing up this morning. On the walk to campus, which is my typical time for most productive thinking, I thought about how few people worldwide ate broccoli and nothing else for breakfast. I also thought about how, even with all the varied eating habits I’ve had, eating broccoli for breakfast is something I’d never done before.
This is a conflict-of-interest confession. I feel really dumb for never seriously thinking about this before. I am the Daily Evergreen cops reporter. Nick Eaton is the Spokesman-Review Cougar sports reporter. When WSU athletes get in trouble with the law, our beats have unfortunate overlap.
Normally this could be avoided with a little bit of thinking ahead. Unfortunately this is not always a luxury provided in the news industry, so after asking Pullman Police Cmdr. Chris Tennant about the arrest of a WSU football player as part of the weekend mayhem I ended up writing the brief when our Sports editor decided late in the day that we did in fact want something on it. In between, I’d mentioned the arrest to Nick and he’d made the calls and written a brief for the Spokesman.
The whole thing made me very squeamish. We made our own calls, wrote our own briefs, worked with separate editors – and still it’s uncomfortable.
Making it into a colorful circle chart scribbled into my budget notebook assuaged my unease. I didn’t even know I had tiny colored pencils in my bag. I made this circle chart first, then realized Nick and I do actually have lives outside our beats. That’s the whole problem.
I was, yes, looking at my own blog this morning when I noticed the little pop-up link window for Christina’s Special K diet gave an interesting perspective. That’s on the left, with the website that actually shows up from the link on the right. Sometimes the internet is smarter than I like to think.
As for me, Day 2 gave me license to be a bit snippy at the other editors, since I am quite hungry. My heart rate is higher than usual, but that may have more to do with this Spokesman-Review article that inexplicably got full-front treatment. I’ve been following those same issues and numbers, and there will be a large story in the Evergreen next week addressing similar questions of whether violence is rising on College Hill.
Which makes my life that much more complicated this week. I’m also writing stories for Thursday and Friday, taking two exams, and trying to finish a number of smaller tasks. There’s also the looming citadel that is my thesis.
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