The Archives

In this picture my sister is standing up on something and pretending she’s taller than Mom. She’s actually short like me. They visited to bring my car from Minnesota and see family, and also do fun trip things like drinking coffee and getting new books and snacks. They will be departing by train late tonight.

That’s not really my car, but it’s the one I’ve always driven at home and also last summer in Indianapolis. They named it Carly on the drive over, which seems rather uninspired considering they had all of North Dakota and eastern Montana to think about it. However, christening our van back home RuthAnn* is brilliantly appropriate.

*I had to ask them how they would spell it, and that’s what they decided after talking it out a bit. Though they said they hate capitalized letters in the middle of names and would never do that if it wasn’t just a van. As my mom said, “Whenever we take her into the auto shop they’re going to say ‘How do you spell that again?’”

I walked the block to the library on my lunch break today to read something interesting. I ended up sitting at a desk (you know, those pod-desks they have at libraries) next to an oldish man who smelled faintly of chewing tobabbo and alcohol. It was a Christina-like awkward situation because I when I came in all the pods had exactly one person sitting at each except one. So I went to that one and noticed one desk had a book and an almost-empty beverage container. It was a gamble: Sit there and assume the person had left, or sit at another pod and look weird for sitting near someone when there was an empty pod?

Anyway it wasn’t that weird except for this other guy who kept running over to the older guy asking to borrow his cell phone. He had knee-length cutoff denim shorts, glasses, a baseball hat and a ponytail out the back. He was calling to see if “she” was coming downtown now that they were off work. One of the several times he walked off with the phone, the older guy muttered, “I’m letting an idiot use my phone.”

I read a book about how the story of the toothpick demonstrates global concepts of culture and technology. I read about 15 pages and could have read more. Read on for awesome toothpick facts.

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In the collection of favorite books I’ve dragged around during college, one is a tattered paperback copy of “Beyond Jennifer and Jason.” I used to read baby name books when I was a kid (seriously) and this was the first book that introduced me to the fascinating world of name trends, fashions and poor choices. It was first published in 1994 and became a baby-naming classic. The authors have since done updates, and been outdone by blogs that keep a timelier watch over new trends.

It’s been a while, and now I see more parents than babies named Jennifer and Jason when I do birth announcements for the paper. Both those names sustained enormous popularity in the late ’70s and early ’80s, inspiring the name of that book and leading to a baby boom of Jennifer and Jason spawn in recent years.

So what are the Jennifers and Jasons naming their kids? There were three couples named Jennifer and Jason in the database I maintain so far this year, and this is what they named their children:

• Dawson (boy)
• Conner (boy)
• Jersey (girl)

Taking the question more broadly (mother=Jennifer OR father=Jason), here’s a Venn diagram of 2008 data so far. Consider it a cross between a longitudinal cohort study and a meditative art installation.

Today I did a nice thing and sent magnifier sheets to a few old people who’ve written to the newspaper sad because they can’t read the tiny print of the crossword puzzle anymore. I had Nick demonstrate the awesome magnifying power before I tucked the sheets into envelopes and sent them off.

I was quite frankly impressed with how well they worked for flimsy little plastic things.

UPDATE (June 11): One of women called to say she received the magnifier and appreciates it very much.

The New York Times would make chocolate chip cookies ridiculously complicated. I, on the other hand, have managed to simplify the recipe from the General Mills Alpha-Bakery Children’s Cookbook. It doesn’t even have fractions. It’s taken me years of experimentation to get it just right, and now I’m going to share it.

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I have nothing against advisers in college newsrooms, except that so often advising is just a front for interfering.

This story about the St. Louis University student paper (via Romenesko) made me cringe.

Basically, the administration might ban the old adviser from the newsroom because he keeps showing up even on production nights even though the adminisration hired a new full-time adviser as part of process to “rewrite the newspaper’s charter.”

“We think it serves everybody to have one voice as an adviser,” [university spokesman Jeff] Fowler said. “You shouldn’t have two people with different ideas causing confusion.”

Mindwash the baby watchdogs, that’s bold. If you can prevent journalists from growing up as critical thinkers, you’ve got a pretty effective censorship tool. Ugh, the cringe-count is astronomical. The sad part is this kind of interfering from all sides probably isn’t that rare. I’d like to think student editors would better rise to the challenge if they weren’t coddled or threatened all the time.

Thank goodness for smart student editors willing to train a new guard, independent budgeting, an administration that wouldn’t dare censor, and Al Donnelly. The memory of free reign might make the rest of our careers harder, but thank goodness for the Evergreen, where our mistakes and our triumphs were always our own.

Today this photo caption struck me as odd:

“An avid smoker, 24-year-old singer Amy Winehouse is already showing signs of emphysema.”

It was in the Spokesman with an L.A. Times story about how Amy Winehouse shows that even young people are susceptible to emphysema. So it wasn’t the content that caught my attention, but the use of “avid.” It just seems like a word predominantly associated with positive activities, usually hobbies: an avid snowboarder, an avid gardener, an avid bicyclist, an avid pheasant hunter.

I looked it up and “avid” has two main definitions:
1) having a keen interest or enthusiasm for something
2) having an eager and even greedy desire for something

So it technically works, I guess. It seems like there are a number of alternatives, like heavy smoker, habitual smoker, relentless smoker, notorious smoker and so forth.

It’s a really picky semantic matter, but that’s the fun of it. We don’t describe alcoholics as “avid drinkers.” You would never see a criminal described as an “avid car thief” regardless of the dedication and enthusiasm evident on his rap sheet.

Maybe I’ve somehow connected “avid” with “aficionado” in my head. It would strike me as very odd and even glib to describe Winehouse as a cigarette aficionado.

And to end on a complete tangent, “aficionado” first meant fans of bullfighting and wasn’t popularized in English until Ernest Hemingway introduced it in “The Sun Also Rises.” Which I happened to pick up at the library today because there’s a part I’ve been trying to remember. I also got two drink recipe books because I’m tired of Nick always running to the internet when he wants to make a drink. It was like themed summer reading without even trying.

This is a little belated, but I had a good American Fourth of July evening at the ballpark. Nick had to cover the Spokane Indians game, so we made the best of it, and they really put on quite a good show.

The photo is from before the game when a group from Fairchild Air Force Base unfurled an enormous American flag in the outfield for the national anthem and a helicopter flyover. It doesn’t look so giant in the picture, but look at how many people were needed to hold it up. It made me wonder where they keep flags that big. What’s the largest size of American flag that the military owns?

The fireworks were lit manually, which was pretty cool. You could see the technicians’ shadows scurrying around out in the lot beyond the stadium wall. Some of the fireworks were a little low and from the press box you could see burning bits of fireworks hitting the ground and sitting there emitting blue or red sparks until they burned out.

The best part of fireworks was when they played the song that’s in “Sandlot” during the Fourth of July scene.

This is a just a follow-up from last week’s pie chart of the types of calls I took last week, updated for this week with a different format just for fun. I made sure to dutifully mark all calls this week, but again it’s not too many because there were only four days.

Here’s a pie chart similar to last week’s for easier comparison. The biggest change is the addition of the “Me” category for calls I answer from people actually trying to reach me. They had to do with ordering supplies and birth announcements, but still.

Today is a great Fourth of July because I am getting paid to not work. I’m not sure who came up with this idea of paid holidays, but they should get a lot of credit. Even if it was Europeans.

Maybe I’m just too good an American, but it does seem kind of strange to get paid for not going to work. A whole week of paid vacation seems absurd, which is good since it’s a while before I get any.