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The New York Times’ TierneyLab is almost always fascinating, and today is especially intriguing about awful names.
“It wasn’t easy picking a winner from more than 1,000 entries. Besides Charman Toilette, an early favorite of the judges, there was Chastity Beltz, Wrigley Fields, Justin Credible, Tiny Bimbo, and a girl whose father was an auto mechanic but somehow didn’t realize he was effectively giving her the name of a tire: Michele Lynn. There were girls named Chaos and Tutu, and boys named Clever, Cowboy, Crash, Felony, Furious and Zero.”
There is so much here that is relevant to my interests. I love that they call it the “Boy Named Sue theory.” Then, that list includes Felony, which is one of the original names on my Words That Would Make Good Names If They Weren’t Already Words List (along with Machete, Rival, Soviet, Parole, Debris, etc.)
Ever since Hugo Chavez tried limiting names and I learned they have approved lists in Europe, I’ve been a full believer in naming libertarianism, if not anarchy. It’s your kid, you should be able to pick whatever stupid name you want. Tons of people don’t go by the name on their birth certificate anyway.
There’s a student here who just named her baby girl Bonanza Jellybean. I mean, that’s really stretching it, but I still think it’s neat. The child will learn to cope – in the newsroom we brainstormed nicknames like Nanza or Nanzie – and then it will be an interesting conversation piece later on. I mean, at least she has a built-in outlet for uniqueness if she ever wants it. Name a child Emily Ann and you’re just begging for her to dye her hair green or get illegal tattoos if she feels too ordinary at 15.
I’ve long been a proponent of giving children unusual first names with totally normal, classic middle names. A crazy middle name is just dumb – “Hehe, look at what goofy thing we’re getting away with!” – and if they don’t end up liking the unusual first name they can go with the really classy first initial-middle name construction, like F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The one that’s been giving me problems recently is Vendetta. It really ought to go on my WTWMGNITWAW List, but I just can’t let it go. It’s been months now. It could be Vetta for short.
Aside from that, names and name trends have always interested me. I wonder how you get into the celebrity name-consulting business, because that would be great. I found this site during the summer, and I think I immediately wasted like four hours looking at it. If you’re looking for names that are going to fit with the classy/upscale trends for the next few years without being overused, consider names like Garnet, Viola, Afton, Daisy or Beatrix (for girls) and Harlan, Burton, Roscoe or Cohen (for boys).
People who know me know I get pretty excited about my birthday. I don’t really like anything that special for the actual day, but I can’t help mentioning it when it’s coming up. Usually my birthday corresponds with distractions like Easter, the Murrow Symposium or, this year, production night for the annual monstrous Mom’s Weekend issue of Evergreen that I nicknamed the Leviathan last year. So I have to be excited for it ahead of time or there won’t be time to be excited at all.
This year I’ve been so busy I haven’t even though much about it. Maybe I’m getting old. It’s the last year I’ll be less than half my mom’s age. Also 22 just seems old. You’re no longer young enough to make stupid mistakes purely for the sake of youth. If you have any remaining chance of being maverick prodigy, you better already be well on the way. Plus it’s an ugly number. I hate even numbers, so turning 22 on 4/10/2008 is just awful.
Anyway, four days to go!
A new WSU Police chief candidate did his forum thing today, and everyone seems pretty hopeful. He’s a Pullman native who was around as a PPD officer during the riot, so that came up and he said he couldn’t believe how long it’s been because it feels like yesterday. I could say the same for the beginning of all this WSUPD business, because for as long as it’s taken to find a new chief, it doesn’t seem that long ago that Jacob was sketching out a timeline of events on the small conference room whiteboard while I asked questions from the other side of a table piled with documents.
A year later, I’m still writing about the aftermath.
I think it might be nearing an end. We’ve thought so before, along with the conspiracy guesses, but the administration seems fatigued with the whole thing and the candidate seems competent. The forum today was the highest attended so far, possibly because the candidate worked with both WSUPD and PPD in the past. When everyone around the table introduced themselves at the beginning of the forum, it was like seeing my source list come to life.
But along with this today, it’s been neat to see our work at the Evergreen matter. It’s an honor to be a part of it, though apparently that doesn’t keep me from making stupid mistakes. Keep reading for a confession and an inevitable fact.
The game has started. Derrick Low needs to start shooting better. Brian set up a projector in the newsroom to show to game on the white board.
But after waiting all day for the game, and really my whole life as a Cougar to have a team play in the Sweet 16, I don’t want it to be over. Until it’s over I can still imagine what it could be like if we won, and hope without expectations is a nice, warm feeling.
The snow from yesterday melted, and then more of it appeared. It’s quite icy and windy. At least it’s sunny. Here’s the view of going back to the newsroom after my ethics exam.
I chose the word “loyalty” in my thesis question because I liked it when it got brought up in ethics class. It just struck me as right for what I was trying to get at. My adviser Beth pointed me to Josiah Royce, because his philosophy on loyalty forms the base for its discussion in ethics. I just wanted to share his definition, because it is in fact what I meant in relation to journalism.
LOYALTY - The willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause. A man is loyal when, first, he has some cause to which he is loyal; when, secondly, he willingly and thoroughly devotes himself to this cause; and when, thirdly, he expresses his devotion in some sustained and practical way, by acting steadily in the service of his cause.
Obviously I had to work today, but my grandparents and aunt and uncle were nice enough to bring me Easter dinner at work, including Easter cake and Peeps that I shared with Victor.
So yes, here it is. No need to be condescending to my blog.
WHAT I LEARNED:
If the police come to your door, do not hide your drugs and paraphenelia in the toilet. Everyone does that.
If you get pulled over and the officer comes back with a clipboard, you aren’t necessarily getting a ticket.
Cops think the whole 400 block of Colorado deserves a search warrant for emanating the odor of marijuana. They jokingly wish they could check the whole place Fallujah-style – “Clear!”
Officer Heroff wrote 125 parking tickets one month last fall just to see if he could.
When a guy who’s “been through the system” says while he’s getting booked for a DUI that an officer is a good cop and tells the police interns they should “learn from this guy,” that’s a meaningful compliment.
The whole night was fun, though tiring. I might do it again, because Officer Bell said we could do a “Cops”-style video.
I’m doing a full day of thesis writing and research. A lot of this involved typing out passages I marked in books months ago. This one is from “Unreasonable Behaviour” by British photojournalist Don McCullin, from the time he was imprisoned in Uganda under the bloody reign of President Idi Amin.
I was taken to a hut in the yard to collect my shaving things. Inside I saw a mountain of shoes and pathetic little cases, some held together with string, others do more than bundles. I saw my own suitcase there, shiny new in this derelict heap.
“Leave it there,” the escort said.
I felt dismayed. I’ve been here before, I though with dread. And I had been there – in those photographs of Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps. The mountain of shaving brushes and the piles of spectacles, the sort of cases people took from the Warsaw ghetto. I was more stricken by the sight of that room than by people I had seen shot in front of me.
I never posted about going to the Holocaust Museum in D.C., primarily because I went on Thursday and didn’t have a lot of time afterward. I thought about it, though, and what I would have said was that there were two things that almost made me cry. One was the scent in a room full of piled shoes. The other was a display case with a pile of scissors – some clean, some mangled and rusty, all sizes.
I read this part from the book before I went to D.C., but it didn’t cross my mind when I was at the museum.
I wrote this down in my notebook when I was walking through the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C., about a week ago:
“We must be the greatest arsenal of democracy.”
The thing was, I didn’t think of the U.S. when I read the FDR quote on a granite wall, I thought of the press. And I wrote it down wrong. The quote actually goes, “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” But I guess if America’s going to be the great arsenal, the press better be the greatest. I’ll stick with my wording and interpretation.
Today I went to the Student Advisory Board meeting with student leaders and WSU President Floyd because Brian couldn’t make it. The only really remarkable thing was when President Floyd was talking about how most problems in the Greek system happen with live-outs, only he couldn’t think of the word and called them “outhouses” instead. We all laughed a lot.
He was also 15 minutes late (”I’m never late. Except today,” he said as he walked in) because he was getting a last-minute legal briefing. Tonight at the Evergreen we probably figured out what he was talking about, so that means more thesis-less days of phone calls for me.
This is what it looks like to watch the sun rise from Terminal A of the Washington-Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C.
I got up at 5 a.m. Eastern time yesterday to shower, pack and catch the Metro to the airport for a flight to Minneapolis. There was a baby in front of me that cried the entire way, but it didn’t really bother me or keep me from sleeping. I used to cry on planes a lot when I was little. It’s nice to know we all grow out of that.
I flew from Minneapolis to Spokane, where I met my cousins at the mall and went up and down the escalator with my cousin’s 2-year-old daughter for a while. Today I am home. The time in between involved hash brown casserole, improvised music about Disney movies, holding snakes, and more small children.
I went by the White House to say hello to George and Laura like my aunt asked me to. They were apparently too busy to return the greeting, but presidential dogs Barney and Miss Beazley came over to say hello. They were actually really close to the fence, like almost petting distance, but they’d already been called away to the lawn when I decided it was maybe picture-worthy after all.
Also I sat in the Senate chamber for a little less than an hour this evening as Jenna was finishing work and the Senate plowed through lots of budget bill amendments. I saw Sens. Obama and Clinton, along with the Washington and Montana senators and obviously a bunch of others. None from Minnesota, though, and McCain wasn’t around when I was. I heard he was present most of the day. Watching the roll-call vote was just like C-SPAN, only right there in front of me. They were easily close enough to throw something and hit them, but somehow I didn’t think Harry Reid would be as nice as Tony Bennett about telling people to stop tossing stuff.
After the Air and Space Museum, I headed over to the National Archives. The place already held a special place in my heart just because of its purpose and name. Think of all the documents!
Anyway, I was really impressed. The Rotunda was really special, of course, and I wonder how many people piling around the Constitution have actually read it. But the rest of the exhibit space was really impressive just because the presentation was superb. I’m not a great judge because I’d be fascinated no matter how it was arranged, but the displays were engaging and organized well.
Designing museum exhibits would be a really interesting job. D.C. has examples of great work and no-so-great work, and it combines the elements of print media design with architecture and planning how it will all work together with the words. I’ve been very sensitive to whether the typography works well with the display. I have no clue how you get a job doing that sort of thing.
Heading briefly back to yesterday, my first stop was the National Air and Space Museum. I decided that based on my affinity for shiny red things (cookware, electronics, accessories, etc.), I would want a Lockheed Vega like Amelia Earhart’s.
My other favorite plane was this sherbet-colored “Jenny.” The space stuff doesn’t have enough personality (i.e. colors!) for me to pick favorites.
It’s a cool museum, but everyone knows that. They had an odd amount of hammer-and-sickle imagery around to commemorate 50 years since Sputnik. The history bits reminded me how much I love those obligatory montages at the beginning of every school flight video ever showing goofy attempts with flying machines as vaudeville music bounces along in the background.
I also liked the display about whether I would be suitable flight attendant in the early ’50s. Being unmarried, 21, 5-foot-4 and white, I’d be a great candidate. I’m a little too heavy to be a perfect candidate, but nothing a month or two and a perky flight attendant attitude couldn’t fix. Being the ’50s, I’ll assume my dimples could boost me to the “just below Hollywood” appearance standard.
But I’d rather be a lady pilot (aviatrix?) in the the 1920s and ’30s, because they had great little pantaloon flying outfits. And I imagine they didn’t have to smile all day.
None of this fit that well in my other posts, so I’m just going to leave it all here without any forced transitions.
The actual “60 Minutes” stopwatch caught my attention in the “National Treasures” exhibit because it mentioned Don Hewitt, our Murrow Symposium guest this year.
I never got a good look at R2D2 or C-3PO because a swarm of adolescent boys was permanently fixated there, but I had plenty of gawking space all to myself at a display of two photographs. The first was “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange, and the other was a D-Day photo by Robert Capa. Probaly most people have either seen these photos plenty of times or don’t understand the significance. I didn’t know they were in the exhibit, so to see them and know they were actual prints from the actual negatives meant a lot to me.
Dorothy’s ruby slippers did not. I saw them in a traveling Smithsonian show in Minneapolis when I was in I think middle school, so that was nothing new.
I took this picture of little Harry Truman in the Archives for Christina, but now I can’t remember whether it’s Truman or Eisenhower she likes so much. Whatever, the picture is still adorable because he looks like a kid dressing up as President Truman for Halloween. He also looks a little like Harry Potter.
There’s a statue outside the Archives that’s all about symbolism and the value of history, but mostly I just like the way the baby looks. The baby’s distressed expression is absolutely realistic to how a baby would feel being held in that awkward position for so long.
“Yeh ain’t in liiiine, Mary, yeh cutted people.”
- a girl infuriated with her sister at the National Archives rotunda. I imagine I would sound just like that if I were 14 and from the South.
Jenna and I passed the new Newseum on the way to the National Portrait Gallery before dinner. It’s like looking at the front pages online, only in real life. We walked by like industry snobs, analyzing design and news judgment.
In the portrait gallery we mostly talked about profound things like whether the artist enhanced FDR’s eyelashes. (”They look pretty hearty,” Jenna said, comparing to a photograph.) Other observations: Millard Fillmore was not only totally useless as president, he was not hot. Not at all. … Thomas Jefferson, already one of my favorites, had attached earlobes.
I grabbed a bagel at Grand Central Station around noon after changing into jeans and sensible shoes, and emerged to see the National Postal Museum next door. I figured I may as well go in while I was there, and it was worth the 20 minutes I spent there. A lot of it was about newspapers, since the press and the post have a nice symbiotic relationship.
I had my notebook out, writing down a quote, and a black woman security guard walked by and said, “You takin’ notes?”
It was kind of confrontational, but I couldn’t see how they’d be upset with me taking notes, so I nodded.
“I do the same thing. I got my little book here,” she replied, patting her pocket and walking on.
This made me analyze my paradigms, though I’m still perplexed about how you’d really have that many new notes to take from the exhibit where you work every day. Maybe she rotates museums or something, that would be a pretty neat job.
Speaking of notes:
- “The mail and the press … are the nerves of the body politic.” John Calhoun, 1817
- The first “post offices” were just taverns, further establishing the bond between post, press and pint, I guess.
- Ben Franklin, as deputy postmaster, insisted on impartial, inexpensive delivery for all newspapers. Kind of interesting in the context of today’s threat to net neutrality.
- The first typeset copy of the Declaration of Independence (rather than handwritten) was printed by a woman, Mary Goddard. Her brother was a well-known printer and innovator. Apparently for most of history it was fortunate for women to have smart fathers and/or brothers, because then your chances of doing anything relevant went from zero to 1 in 50,000 or so.
Today I got up earlier than usual to go to breakfast with the Montana senators and then go on a tour of the Capitol. The breakfast was busier than usual, with a bunch of school groups and men wearing cowboy hats. Jenna put her journalism experience to use by accurately writing everyone’s names and hometowns on their nametags. She wrote Pullman, Wash., for me, thereby saving me from another state identity issue.
The tour was neat, though I gave the screw a full turn this morning by choosing to wear heels. Actually, it was good to make my feet hurt in a different way for a change. I went along with a group of eighth-graders from Bozeman, Mont., and a Finance Committee intern from Texas named Ben. Our tour was led by Elise, an intern in Sen. Baucus’ office and erstwhile rodeo queen. She is like 4-foot-10 and has everything in control. Ben and I were recruited to watch the back of the group, and he told me sidenotes through the tour about how he spends hours in the Senate chamber trying to not fall asleep. Apparently we got through the whole tour before he realized I wasn’t a teacher with the class. Someone else thought I was in the class. Neat.
The kids were actually a really good group, and I’m envious because they got to sneak-peak tour the Newseum this afternoon.
I started my day at the Supreme Court of the United States. It had a bunch more of the “Grecian stuff” that I now remember is termed “neoclassical.” I looked around awhile at portraits and busts of mostly wise, mostly dead, mostly white old men. They had another neat scale model. I should mention I’m a big fan of the Supreme Court. The whole thing is fascinating. Still, I didn’t sit in the chamber to listen to a lecture because I figure I’ve already spent enough hours in my 17 years of education listening about the Supreme Court.
I got into the security line to enter the building after a group of high school students. The last guy in line turned around and asked me if I was with Close Up. I said no.
“So you’re just here?” he asked. I said yes. He told me he was here with juniors and seniors from his school in New York for Close Up, a national program for high school students. They were pleased because they get to miss class for a few days. I told him I’m a senior in college here for spring break.
“So you’re a senior in college?” he asked. I said yes. He asked me where, and he was not impressed with the answer. He asked me what I’m majoring in, and was pleased with himself that he knew a good question to ask college people. I told him journalism and political science, and he said I must like writing. I said yes. He said he does not, he’s more a math person, which did not surprise me. I told him he’ll probably make a lot more money than I will. He said that was good to hear, but he’d heard writing wasn’t too bad.
“You could just be an author or something,” he said. I told him we’ll have to see how my luck holds up. Then he shook my hand and introduced himself as Kevin, and turned back around to go through security.
There’s quite a bit going on at the court this week, but nothing to see because it’s all preparation for next week. There’s a highly anticipated case coming up about gun laws in D.C.
(From left to right: Me outside the Supreme Court building, looking up at the neoclassical columns outside, me looking up the five-story spiral staircase that’s only supported by good engineering and gravity)
I was not too taken with the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden until I came across “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X.” In my opinion the most delightful sculptures are ordinary objects made really big, and this typewriter eraser is from the finest artists of this genre, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. The husband-and-wife duo has also made a giant trowel, clothespin and button, among other things. My affinity for all this might come from being greeted by Minneapolis’ Spoonbridge and Cherry every time we drove downtown when I was a kid. Returning from a kindergarten field trip at the sculpture garden is my earliest memory of one of those times when I have so much unchanneled manic energy I can’t even create anything.
Anyway, visiting the (less inspiring) sculpture garden today was a mere pit stop for another long day of walking, looking and learning. I’m working to post all of that soon.
I took the metro to Arlington National Cemetery in the afternoon. I got off a stop too soon on the first try (I couldn’t hear the station announcements and counted the stops wrong), but it worked out. I got there just after 4 p.m. and realized I might have missed the last changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I asked the information man, and he said there was a final one at 5 p.m. He had been chatting with a second information man, and that guy then asked me where I’m from. I’m not sure if I sounded funny, or maybe he was just curious. I said Minnesota, which is not what I usually say anymore, but that’s what came out first. He asked me if it was my first time in Washington, and then he said he hoped I had a good time.
I did. I love military cemeteries. It might seem counterintuitive, but they feel like peace to me. I like the smooth rows and white stones, the way they reach out and pull the landscape into it like long spines. I like looking for the ones who were babies, and I like looking for the fresh stones indicating a wife who died an old woman sometimes five decades after her husband was killed. I like reading the names – I’ve long thought that if I have a child I would go to a military cemetery to figure out its name, not necessarily getting it from a headstone but just to be surrounded by names other parents chose.
I get lost of time in military cemeteries the same as I do in libraries. I was wondering today if they would let you get married there, because it’s the only place I can think of that has the bright solemnity a church is supposed to have. (Don’t worry, I wouldn’t really pursue the idea.) Monuments are fine and emotional and I’m interested to see them, but if I have time to return to one place this week I’d pick Arlington National Cemetery, even if I like the Punchbowl in Hawaii and the one in San Diego more.
I gathered with a large number of other tourists to watch the final changing of the guard open to the public today. Before it began I moved a few feet so I wouldn’t be in the way for a man taking photographs, only then he adjusted his shot to keep me in it. Either I was wearing an intense expression he took for patriotism, or he was just creepy.
Taps was played from a nearby monument when the bells chimed 5 o’clock. The silence of the ceremony was punctured by the whirring, buzzing and clicking of several dozen cameras, everything from the abrasive film wheel of disposable cameras to the artificial shutter sound of cell phones. I thought about whether they were devaluing the memory in their need to preserve it, which is something I think about a lot when I’m taking pictures or notes. I don’t have any photos to post from the ceremony because I didn’t take any.
I stopped by a conservatory exhibit. It was almost like 15 minutes of spring break in Hawaii. 
They had this exhibit that mingled orchids with the alphabet.
Being a nerd, I was almost more interested in the typography than the flowers. 
Being an egoist, I only took pictures of my initials. (Except for the big picture, that’s a giant N.)
Christina will not appreciate me posting this photo, but it really sums up how exhausted and nervous we were by the time the Cougar men’s basketball team headed into the second overtime against the Huskies this evening. She commented that if someone were just looking at our expressions, they would think she and I were watching a zombie movie. At one point the Huskies’ Ryan Appleby made yet another 3-pointer and Christina yelled, “I hate Appleby!” with so much vitriol that the guy in front of us looked back with alarmed amusement.
The other picture is my brother in between yelling profanities at the court. He caught on with all the cheers quite well and could probably be a future ZZU CRU leader. I have to admit I found all the senior night pageantry kind of touching, and it was neat that so many students did wear ties. I had no clue so many college guys have gray ties.
In other notes, I was pleased to see both Free Throw Mom and Bald Guy up to their usual antics behind the basket. The crowd was pretty wild, and I was impressed by how many students showed up. All those who didn’t stay missed out.
Today my brother, Christina and I went to basketball practice. Nick was there, too, but that’s because it is his job as a Cougar sports reporter. And I was slightly jealous that he is on salary to do what was for me the most leisurely thing I’ve done all week. My brother and I got to talk to Coach Tony Bennett for a bit after practice ended, and he told Mark he ought to consider WSU. I admit I was pretty pleased and impressed.
It has been one of Christina’s lifelong goals (since earlier this season) to stand next to center Aron Baynes to see how tall he is. Today her dream came true, and the results were as comical as we had hoped. Coach Tony told Christina she’s no worse off than Muggsy Bogues.
I just finished my only Friday class, so I’m technically done until after spring break. I don’t really have any homework for the week except my thesis, which is nice. My last class was Logic, and we got a deal to get extra credit if we wrote a valid argument about why we should. Here’s mine:
Good people who go to class on the Friday before break deserve extra credit.
We are good people.
We are in class the Friday before break.
____________________________
Therefore, we deserve extra credit.
My little brother is in town. He has the day off from school tomorrow and we figured he ought to visit sometime while I’m still a student here, so we’ll entertain ourselves tomorrow and attend the basketball game Saturday and take the same flight back to Minneapolis on Sunday (I’ll be en route to D.C.)
Today we got ice cream at Ferdinand’s with our grandparents and then he observed the newsroom for a while. He’s a junior in high school and works at the paper there. He said he was most surprised about how much work actually goes on here.
“Hey did anybody win yet?”
- Victor at 7:01 p.m.
It did seem like a pretty slow evening. There was some lightsaber jousting and football throwing, but everyone except me and Christina was out of the newsroom by 11:11 p.m., and we’re on our way out.
More pictures later. And if you couldn’t tell from the photo, Scheller and Fry-Pierce won.
The scary thing is the errors can sneak up on you at any time. Maybe it’s Christina’s panicked face when you walk into the newsroom, or an angry e-mail, or Jacob casually chatting about the day before mentioning the news of your failure.
It’s like there’s a weight above your head, maybe, and you don’t know when it’s going to drop. You don’t even know if it’s there and you can’t look up. Even though it’s analogy, on days like this I walk a little stiffer, keep my eyes a bit narrower, hold my jaw more tensely. Bracing for something.
What I’m mostly referring to today is the 75-point headline and 75 inches of stories (1, 2, 3) we put together about violence in Pullman. Victor already did a wonderful job of explaining the whole thing, though my anxieties are a bit different. And no, I’m not entirely pleased with it, I wish we could change things, I wish we had more time. But that’s how newspapers are and I’ve gotten over that.
What Victor didn’t write about was the 2:07 a.m. text message he sent me last night. The first part was was his profanity-laced realization that we mixed up the colors on one of the charts. Then, the reassurance part about it not being the worst mistake we could make. And finally, more to the point: “At least this means i won’t have the dreams, since i know how we messed up.”
I still had The Dreams. He did, too.
But there’s something harder to identify, something more like anxiety and dread and doom, that carries into the day and makes me wonder whether I can actually do this for my life. Maybe it is the old perfectionism that I can’t quite throw, but I feel such a heavy obligation to get things right for the readers and the sources. It’s funny, too, because I don’t dread getting confronted by anyone after the fact and actually like talking to people who aren’t satisfied.
And you always just move on. That’s all you can do whether you want to or not.
But there’s never any resolution other than time. The accumulating ghosts aren’t visible, but they are so heavy.
Yesterday I caught the bus home from campus at 10 p.m. after interviewing bartenders and bouncers around the hill. Late-night weekend bus service rightfully gets called the “drunk bus,” but this was pretty outrageous. A group in garish ’80s garb sang from the stereotypical ’80s repertoire all the way to ’80s night at Valhalla, and I recorded them singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” for your listening, er, pleasure.
I can’t figure out how to embed it for now, so click here.
(Listen closely for when the one guy in mullet says, “F— the bars, let’s just ride the bus!”)
The bus driver was really amused. He said goodbye as the group disembarked: “Enjoy the ’80s. Listen to lots of Journey tonight.”
I’ve been identifying themes in my thesis research, and you’ll probably see posts on them in the next week: photograph as weapon, instinct, vultures, etc.
Meanwhile, this was just a throwaway sentence introducing a paragraph in the book “Truth Needs No Ally” that caught my attention:
“Photojournalism has not stopped wars, eliminated poverty or conquered disease, but neither has any other institution” (12).
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.
As promised, I got tired of the trouble Blogger was giving me. I started that blog for class and ended up using it for other projects pretty regularly, so I decided it was time to cut my losses and move on to something new.
Importing my old posts seemed to go pretty well, though I’ll be going through the formatting in the next few days to make sure it all loaded and looks right.
Jacob, Christina and I went to the beach Saturday. The weather was favoring us and the tide was low. We spent a few hours finding sand dollars, climbing on rocks and, as Jacob said, “playing chicken with the widest ocean in the world.”
We also took a lot of photos, and maybe I’ll post more of them later finally up and switch my blog to WordPress since I’m sick of this not uploading and displaying any of my photos properly.
I accidentally took someone else’s drink at Starbucks in Ellensburg.
It was her fault for ordering almost the same thing right after me, and Starbucks’ fault for putting hers out on the counter first, my fault for not immediately recognizing the difference between “tall” and “grande” due to my relatively limited experience ordering coffee-type drinks, and Christina’s fault for saying “yes” when I whispered “Is this one mine?”
So I did the right thing by apologizing and clearing up the confusion. I also got a bigger drink than I paid for.
And that was probably the worst thing that happened during the whole weekend trip to the Grays Harbor area, so Christina and I returned to the newsroom quite pleased with ourselves. Anyway, more on this later before I return to the typical thesis and history stuff.
First of all, Allison left us all lovely presents (pictured here), which I found when I came to print my paper at the last minute before ethics class. It was also a good day because someone had already used the printer so it didn’t take six minutes to warm up.
When I was walking to ethics, there was a guy on crutches and a girl walking in front of me. I’m not sure if they were a couple, but it makes the story better to think they were. They were parting outside the CUE and before she left, the girl stooped down to pick up an Evergreen for him from the box since the crutches made it hard for him.
This is what Christina said when I told her this: “Wait, that’s your Valentine’s Day story? I kept waiting for him to give her a present like out of his pocket or something.”
Nope. To anyone reading this, and especially to those who know why I’m wearing green today, have a lovely Valentine’s Day!
That last bit from the 1904 Chinook caught my attention. If the Evergreen held a place of distinction in “the college journalism of the West,” what did college journalism actually look like at that point?
Here’s a rundown of when the Pac-10 student newspapers joined the tradition:
1871 The Daily Californian (at Cal)
Remarkably, it’s had pretty much the same name ever since it began as one of the earliest college newspapers in the country and one of the first newspapers at all in the West.
1892 The Stanford Daily
Originally it was called The Daily Palo Alto.
1895 The Evergreen
1899 The Arizona Wildcat
It started with the stupid name Silver & Sage, later evolving to the Arizona Weekly Life and the University Life before getting a name that sounds marginally more like a real paper.
1900 The Oregon Emerald
It was the Oregon Weekly until 1909.
1906 The Daily Barometer (at Oregon State)
Its predecessor started in 1896 as a monthly literary magazine, then finally turned into a real weekly newspaper.
1906 The State Press (at Arizona State)
It started out as the Tempe Normal Student and then the Tempe Collegian. In 1890 they started a 1-page supplement to a professional local paper. It was called the Normal Echo.
1909 The Daily (at University of Washington)
UW technically had a paper called The Pacific Wave in 1891, but I’m not counting that because then they would be earlier than us.
1912 The Daily Trojan (at USC)
1919 The Daily Bruin
It didn’t get its name until 1926, after putting in a few years as the Cub Californian and the California Grizzly. They also had a paper of sorts called the Normal Outlook from 1910 to 1918.
Here’s a rosy view of the journalistic mission from the 1904 Chinook. It’s a bit dense.
“The most distinctive characteristic of present day college life is the college paper. Our fathers knew no college paper, and the only way that they knew of their fellows in other colleges was by word of mouth, and that word was usually steeped in the deepest venom before it reached its destination. We should feel glad, therefore, that the white light of truth and fairness shines down upon our educational world through the medium of the printed page.
The first attempt to found a college paper in the Washington Agricultural College was in the ‘Crib’ days of our college, when the ‘Record,’ a paper which would do credit to an old established college, was launched by Mr. Hull. The journalistic light shone fitfully, flickered and went out leaving our college without a medium of communication with the outside world. Our big brothers were not men who hid their light under a bushel and in 1894 the frail bark yclept ‘Evergreen’ was launched upon the sea of trouble with W.D. Todd at the helm. Although the angry sea has often threatened to crack the ribs of the frail craft, it has sailed steadily onward, never missing a number in the nine years of its existence, and it now occupies a distinct place, not only in our community, but in the college journalism of the West.”
Not a lot of regular work got done today after campus was shut down at 10 a.m., but there was still plenty of work to do. Really, a snow day is pretty much the happiest crisis to report about, but it still meant a few dozen hurried phone calls, a few frightening near-slips with camera gear, and a few hours of numb fingers and even colder feet.
In the course of all this, one question kept coming up: When was the WSU campus last closed due to snow?
As far as we could tell, no one really knew for certain. People remembered Mount St. Helens for sure in 1980, and there was something about closure in 1996 due to weather, but it wasn’t snow. I’ll be trying to track down the answer more definitively by Monday, but I was able to find out that the last confirmed snow days were Jan. 4 and 5, 1982. It was the beginning of spring semester and students weren’t able to travel back to Pullman. Those two days had to be made up the following two Saturdays, a plan that obviously didn’t earn many fans among the student body.
So that’s the history bit. But today was more about now, a little bit of community Zen as everyone dropped regular schedules and did whatever seemed fun. For us, fun meant documenting what everyone else was doing.
Fortunately, the university handed us a second chance. With Friday classes cancelled as well, the Evergreen staff will take a break from reporting (maybe) and enjoy the day more like normal people.
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