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I caught myself today with this interesting blend of old and new media. There’s a totally reasonable explanation but it’s funnier if I don’t tell you.
If you ever find yourself having to design one of those psychology/scientific method experiments for class, I have a good idea. I’m sure I got assignments like that a dozen times during my education (ask me about the colored Kool-Aid some time), but since I don’t foresee having any others in my future I am happy to share this with you.
Hypothesis: If you order a coffee drink that doesn’t oppose the weather (hot during cold weather, iced during hot weather), you will often not get the drink you ordered.
Method: Go to Starbucks or another favorite coffee shop during unmistakably cold weather. Order your drink iced and see what happens. Repeat for a certain number of trials, at different shops or at least with different baristas. Then wait until the weather gets unmistakably hot (about half a year or so) and ask for your drink regular. For a control group, try it during wishy-washy weather (about 70 degrees) with both iced and hot.
There would probably be three categories of responses: getting it right, getting it wrong, or having an “Are you sure?” type of verbal exchange while ordering. There might also be a fourth for having an “Are you sure?” verbal exchange and still getting it wrong.
Now I’m curious, but not enough to order a huge number of unseasonable coffee drinks. We could all try it once or twice and compile the data. Any takers? No?
Another reason I like looking through old magazines is to collect illustrations from advertisements. They’re good for vectorizing and other use (like the Chinook yearbook scans in my blog header). I usually keep to the simple stuff, but this one caught my attention because the woman looks so sad.
Here’s the original photo (my camera has to do since I don’t own a scanner) from a 1941 Newsweek. I thought she could use a little more recognition, and I thought about giving her some sassy, Anne Taintor-like thought bubble: “I should be running this place” or “If he’d just stop ranting about Jones for one moment I’d remind him about Daylight Savings.”
But she just seemed too glum for that. She’s probably actually making a mental list of what’s in the freezer, trying to remember whether there’s enough chicken for dinner and whether there’s anything for dessert other than Jell-O, and wondering whether it would be better to do laundry tonight or tomorrow.
I made a last-minute decision to tag along to Pullman yesterday while Nick covered the football game. A change of scenery seemed like a good idea, and I spent a few hours at the library doing what I always did during college when I could convince myself I had nothing better to do for a while: perused old tomes of magazines.
I started with the ’30s because I figured I might find some potentially useful tips about weathering economic depressions, but mostly I just learned to hope there won’t be a drought (which I already knew). I also learned that practically all the unions rioted, college students were still staging generic protests against war, FDR’s mother looked just like him only with woman hair, and that a modern-day parody couldn’t possibly include more references to communists and Nazis than the news media already did back then. Also Mussolini’s kids were not especially cute.
But here are a few more factual tidbits I learned about:
It was last weekend, but what’s the rush? This is Lake Pend Oreille looking out toward Schweitzer.
I snapped this picture the other night while I was waiting for that damn stoplight between the parking garage and the Review Building. I like how you can tell the newsroom’s on the fourth floor. I worked the late shift this week and just finished my final night at the Spokesman.
Last week I wrote a story about this desert tortoise named Sadie who was found abandoned this summer at an Idaho rest stop far from her Mojave home. She’s been staying in Cusick, Wash., but the frost is already creeping in and she can’t stay through a northern winter. She had a new home lined up in Blythe, Calif., but needed a way to get there. I felt like I was writing a children’s book.
AP picked up my story and rewrote it somewhat poorly, and from there it got published everywhere from Seattle to Chicago to Boston to Denver. Apparently everyone in the whole world loves forlorn tortoises. The refuge center where she was staying got flooded with more than 500 calls from as far away as Paris, and Sadie was even mentioned on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Today I got to write a follow-up, because a family-run courier service out of Montana offered take her down south to her new home. They’re planning to arrive tomorrow, and Sadie will be given a celebrity’s welcome complete with police escort and chamber of commerce greeting. The weather forecast for Blythe is sunny and about 100 degrees. Perfect.
It’s pretty neat to see a happy ending, and to be a part of it in even a small way. I always worry so much about doing harm as a journalist, either exposing people too much or getting things wrong, but maybe you just have to realize you can’t avoid those things and try instead to balance them with good. It’s the kind of thought that won’t help me sleep any better the night before a big story is published, but maybe it will keep me in the industry a little longer.
A big pile of old creasote-coated railroad ties caught fire this evening just south of the fairgrounds. It made an ominous (and toxic) plume of smoke, but never threatened any structures and definitely not any lives. So it was cool, but not that cool. I did get to huddle around with the local TV media, so that was worth it.
I’m covering the evening shift again today and the rest of the week. Here’s something from yesterday that caused a big hullabaloo on the scanner but didn’t turn into anything newsworthy.
SPOKANE — A man with an outstanding warrant was deemed not worth arresting when police found him wheezing after a foot pursuit that may or may not have been aided by a Chihuahua.
Spokane County Sheriff’s deputies responded to an argument at an Airway Height mobile home park Monday afternoon, where they found a man arguing with a woman who wouldn’t give him the keys to his vehicle, Sgt. Dave Reagan said.
“For some reason an uninvolved third party decided to involve himself,” Reagan said.
This man refused to give his name when asked and then gave a fake name, Reagan said. When deputies found out his real name and that he had an outstanding escape warrant for violating probation, the man fled on foot.
Deputies chased 23-year-old Daniel B. Keller for about an hour until he was found, sweaty and severely nauseated from running, at APB Auto Parts in Airway Heights. He was transported to a local hospital and told to turn himself in afterward, Reagan said, because they didn’t think it was worth having taxpayer money go toward the medical bills of a nonviolent offender.
A Chihuahua named Taco helped track Keller as he ran, the dog’s owner, Jene Jones, told local media. Reagan said the dog’s contributions were dubious. KXLY promptly put the “dog hero” on the 10 p.m. news with Jones’ name spelled incorrectly.
I headed down to Pullman with Nick today for the Cougars’ first home game of the season. He was doing video for the game, and I was just along for the ride I guess. I watched part of the abysmal game from the library roof, a favorite old perch, though the schmancy new scoreboard does nothing for the view. I even saw the Cougars’ only field goal in the 66-3 embarrassment.
But somehow, even as an alumna and lifelong Cougar fan, I was not devastated. On the contrary, there was a certain amount of delight in witnessing the worst loss of all time in WSU football history. Which made me wonder about extremes, and what strange impulse gives us perverse delight in circumstances that are otherwise disastrous. Who doesn’t watch the mercury when it could be the coldest day ever for this time of year? Who isn’t disappointed to miss the only snow day in decades? When there’s a power outage, who doesn’t hope at least the tiniest bit that it will last for hours and hours until we all fear for the ice cream?
Nick and I were talking about whether it’s an American thing, something to do with our individualism and love of more, bigger, most and all things extreme. Or maybe it’s universal, some evolutionary thing that better prepares us for danger by making extremes interesting.
In any case, the game was so unprecedentedly bad that it doesn’t seem sour.
I hung out in the Murrow basement hallway for a while after the game, waiting to meet up with Christina for a traditional Sella’s meal. No one was there and it occurred to me that for all the hours I spent in that basement I had no clue what the men’s bathroom looked like. So I checked it out.
It still felt weird, even knowing no one was in the building. And it’s tiny! I bet bunches of us Evergreeners have used those bathrooms day after day without ever knowing the women’s bathroom is like three times bigger than the men’s bathroom, which only has one stall, one urinal and one sink. The women’s bathroom has three stalls and two sinks, though the left-side sink doesn’t work too well and the middle stall has a slanty seat. Huh. I never knew, and really I never even wondered until today. And though I can’t vouch for the men’s bathrooms anywhere else, I would say the women’s bathroom in the Holland book stacks is my favorite of all the ones around campus.
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