Monthly Archives: March 2012

Remembering Columbine

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Apparently they’re considering making a miniseries about Columbine on Lifetime. This has been quite controversial, as many of the survivors of the horrific school shooting that occurred there don’t want the miniseries to be made.

This particular article on the issue seems to point the finger at “the media” for not letting the story die. The Columbine tragedy wasn’t, after all, that unusual–school massacres have happened before, and they will happen again, unfortunately.

This is undoubtedly true. However, Columbine was a bit different than some of the other school shootings. One, the shooters were students. This isn’t always the case. Two, they seemed fairly normal. That’s not always the case either. Three, no one could quite figure out what their motives really were. Even they might not have known.

The death toll at Columbine was 15, if you include the two gunmen who died at their own hands. I wrote about some of my thoughts on the matter earlier here. Others had their own ideas.

Hardly anybody remembers an earlier school tragedy that claimed the lives of 45 people in Michigan. Many of the slain were students, but not all of them. In this particular case, the murderer deliberately drew emergency workers to another location (beating his wife to death and then blowing up his farm) before blowing up the school. Then, after people came to help, he set off another explosion (killing himself in the process).

As it turned out, the perpetrator, Andrew Kehoe, had been buying explosives and putting them in the school for months.

It was May 18, 1927.

Exploding Manure, Insidious Weeds and a Geek in Power

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Here are a few things you might find to be of general interest:

Thoughts on the Runnin O’ the Green

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(John Steiner/Jamestown Sun)

I talked to too many people at the Runnin O’ the Green.

Yes, it actually is possible to do that, when you’re a reporter. I found there were at least four or five people extra interviews I ended up not using in my article, which clocked in at 38.18 inches.

For those of you who don’t speak newspaperese, let me translate for you: 38.18 inches=pretty dang long.

So even though the article was a leetle too long, it didn’t include everything I had.

It also didn’t include my own thoughts on the Runnin.

I have to admit, before the event, I was a little concerned. I was afraid the whole thing would turn out to be nothing but an excuse to drink, and for a few people, maybe it was.

However, of the dozen or so people that I talked to who were participating in the Runnin O’ the Green, many of them mentioned, unprompted, that it was all “for a good cause,” and then they’d talk about the way money from the event goes to Elks Camp Grassick and local people with cancer.

A few times they didn’t mention the causes, so I would say in passing, “It’s for a good cause, right?” and then they usually brightened and said “Yeah, Camp Grassick!” or “Yeah, cancer patients!”

I thought that was cool.

The Perils and Pains of Moving

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Moving is painful and in the hopes of feeling like I’ve accomplished something in the past two weeks, I will detail the stages of moving here for your amusement. Feel free to laugh at me rather than with me; I don’t have the energy left over from moving for anything but a meaningful look at this point.

1. Packing. I didn’t have to do a lot of this, because most of my things were still packed from my earlier move. That’s a good thing, because I’m pretty much awful at it, having approximately the spatial awareness capability of a turnip.

I pretty much just threw as much stuff as I could into bags and then shoved it into my car. Since the new place is only across town from the old place, this actually worked and nothing was crushed into tiny little pieces.

2. Moving. This involves actually picking things up in one place and putting them down somewhere else. I moved the small stuff myself, causing an incredible array of aches and bruises, but for my anvil collection and my prized set of giant boulders, I had the assistance of coworkers Brian and John, both of whom have trucks, and more importantly, muscles that do not consist of 98% Grade A flab, like mine.

John is also gifted with some sort of moving superpower–he can fit way more stuff into one trailer than should be possible. It was like a clowncar, only instead of clowns coming out of the trailer, it was furniture. (Thank goodness. I mean, clowns. Brrrr.)

3. Cleaning. I haven’t even started on this, but I will have the invaluable help of my mother. She’s extremely persnickety about cleaning, and whoever gets my apartment after me will probably be able to eat off of any surface in it, up to and including the ceiling.

4. Unpacking. … do I have to? Isn’t there some statute on the books that says you must keep at least one box packed after every move for at least ten years?

Well there should be.

Glorious Weather

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You know you’re a Minnesotan/North Dakotan when you roll your windows down ’cause it hit 35.

Of course, this weekend it was a great deal warmer than that, and pretty much everybody rolled their windows down, or wore short sleeves. Even those with thinner skin dispensed with their coats.

It’s been great weather for moving.

So naturally I slacked the whole weekend and moved a bare three carloads of stuff across town to my new apartment. On one hand, slow and steady wins the race, and I have generally ambled in the direction of moving more stuff over there. After the first trip with just one carload, my… well, my everything hurt.

And if I were keeping a swear jar, I’d probably have enough money to retire by now, between hitting various bits of my anatomy on various sharp and/or hard objects, dropping things, and dropping various sharp and/or hard objects on various bits of my anatomy.

But after four trips, spread across several days, I’m only a bit stiff.

This is an especially good thing because my wonderful coworker is going to help me move a couple of the larger objects this evening after work.

You know, the larger objects, like the table that weighs more than 17.3 Indian elephants, and the TV stand that I have about as much chance of moving with the power of positive thinking as I do with the power of my flabtastic arms. I think my end tables are made of rocks, or possibly anvils.

Plagiarism in North Dakota, Minnesota

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One of the biggest stories of the day is this sad tale of a 28-year journalism veteran who allegedly plagiarized most of the columns he wrote in North Dakota and Minnesota.

Jon Flatland even won an award for one of the columns he submitted to a statewide contest, which apparently turned out to have been written by someone else.

What on earth could make someone think that sort of thing is okay? There are certain gray areas in the profession, such as press releases, which in some newspapers are used in whole or in part without attribution because they’re given to you for that purpose. The people who send them want you to use them. Mostly, we edit those or trim them down to fit our style.

And then there’s the question of attribution for ideas. If I write about sexism in gaming, maybe I should really be linking not just the original sources, but add a little via at the end, to give credit to the people I found the source through (this is very often BoingBoing or Brainiac). I’m not taking words from them, but they did think of it first, or find it first. I’ll try to do a bit better at attribution in the future.

So yes, there are some grey areas.

But then there’s taking a whole column and slapping your own name on it. Who even does that? I can see why Blooming Prairie didn’t think to vet Flatland for plagiarism–he’d been working in journalism for 28 years, for heaven’s sakes. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to me that someone could go on grabbing other people’s writing for that long without getting caught.

Once I was asked by a nervous editor whether I had actually interviewed a source, because another media outlet had the same quote I had used. (I think the source had written down the comment and read it back to both of us.) I was a little confused. Of course I’d interviewed him. How else would I have gotten the quote?

Oh. I could have stolen it.

And now look at poor Blooming Prairie. (via Logan Adams) It’s apologized and made efforts to let people know what happened. Other papers Flatland worked for are doing the same thing.

Here’s Dave Fox’s story of the whole sordid business. Fox is the humor writer who discovered the alleged plagiarism in the first place.

Edit: Poynter has a bit on how Flatland learned the jig was up.

Defending Sexual Harassment

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I had no idea there were actually people who would defend sexual harassment.

Maybe I’m a little naive, but I really believe most people aren’t deliberately being sexist jerks when they make fun of a man for knitting, or a woman for working on an oil rig. There are these cultural norms, ya know? They get embedded in your head whether you want them to or not. You have to fight against your own sexism sometimes, and sometimes, you slip.

And while the gaming communities I’ve been a part of have been majority-male, they’ve been fair and decent.

By contrast, there’s this ugly incident in which a gamer actually defended sexual harassment and said it was “part of the culture.” Worse, this person was supposed to be coaching a team of gamers, one of whom was female. She was shouted down when she tried to protest, and she was told to “let the man speak.”

This incident, and how people reacted to it, goes well beyond the vague feeling that booth babes are creepy, or that the gaming community should be, in general, nicer and less sexist.

Yes, free speech in America means you can say just about anything you want. This person has every right to his opinion, and every right to state it.

And other people have every, every right to be horrified by his sexist, creepy behavior, call him out on it, and try to stop it through civilized means. That’s what real communities do, whether online or in meatspace.

Eight Hours of Sleep

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Looks like we can all stop feeling bad about not getting eight consecutive hours of sleep!

Apparently, the whole eight-hour-sleep thing is a recent invention, and prior to that, people were sleeping in two four-hour shifts, with a nice one to two hour break in between for reading or whatever. (via BoingBoing)

Last night I dreamed I lived behind an ice cream store and Kevin Spacey was my landlord. No, I don’t know where my subconscious gets these things either. He smiled a lot; it was worrying.

And here are some other random oddities:

  • The kerfluffle over Jeremy Lin is mostly over, but here’s a pretty good take on it from a newspaper sports editor’s point of view.