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journalism

Ewws of corn

My roommate in college was from the central part of the state. They grow a lot of citrus and peaches and watermelon in his part of the world. He came from a prominent farming family in a rural-agricultural area. He told stories about how he’d go help in the fields at harvest time. He recalled a day when INS showed up to pick up all the migrant workers and take them away for deportation.

He said the workers would be back in the fields, hauling watermelons, before the INS agents got back to town.

I thought of that story, people eager to work hard, long, thankless jobs for low pay, while reading about what’s happening in Georgia:

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

The entire AJC story is a good read. Closer to home, we’ll soon see something similar.

The law requires proof of legal residence on the job, at school and when obtaining state benefits.

It also allows police to arrest anyone on reasonable suspicion they are in the country illegally, requires courts to void contracts involving undocumented immigrants and requires employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check applicants’ legal status.

[…]

Alabama’s new law could have unintended consequences and be costly to enforce, said Gary Palmer, president of the Alabama Policy Institute, a conservative group that generally favors illegal immigration reform.

Some aspects such as the E-Verify requirement, are good, he said. But “it will be interesting to see” if native Alabamians will flock to lower-wage jobs now filled by immigrants, he said.

There are no easy answers.

I’ve read three stories on this today, though, and found 450+ comments between them. Some of them, surprisingly, have been worth reading.

So we’re making dinner tonight, where it has become my permanent job to remove the silk from fresh corn. We’d picked up a few ears from the farmers’ market last week and there was a corn earworm larvae in one of them. That didn’t go over well.

So we threw some of the corn out, as it had been damaged. Presumably the farmers we bought from had a bad streak of luck with moths or pesticides. Maybe they should do a lot of trap cropping.

Doesn’t really matter, The Yankee said, she wouldn’t buy corn from them anymore. Two ears did make it on the grill, and when we ate it with dinner she pronounced it the best corn she’d ever had. It was good stuff. Went well with the burgers, too.

But, still, I think she’ll buy from someone else at the farmers’ market tomorrow.

cycling / journalism / links / site / Thursday / video — Comments Off
16
Jun 11

A ride, a fisk and a video

Fifteen easy miles — I coasted on tired legs today — the last four racing home a thunderstorm. I was heading east, rounded a big 90-degree turn to face a big, dark, lightning belching cloud looming to the south. Which was great, because that was the way I needed to go.

So pedal harder, to a red light, onto a road with traffic, and then a long downhill into the light which shall not ever be green. And then back up the last hill to home. I was within sight of my road when the serious raindrops started, so I did just make it back in time.

And I did web site stuff for most of the rest of the day. First here and then on a site I’m doing for an organization and then also the LOMO blog. I’m mostly behind on everything, but I’ll catch up eventually, or it will somehow become prioritized and the least important things will be conveniently overlooked. That is the way of it sometimes.

What’s this?

CORDOVA, Ala. — Everybody in town heard about it.

Sounds juicy.

It was discussed openly and in whispers, over the phone and in the church pews. When it was brought up at school, the curious were quickly shushed. Eventually, the whole thing got pushed aside by other concerns, a bit of nastiness better forgotten, or judged never to have occurred at all.

So it is a rumor, then.

But Madison Phillips says it is true. He says that he and his mother, Annette Singleton, both black, were turned away from a church shelter by a white woman on the afternoon of April 27, the day of the tornadoes. And within hours, Ms. Singleton and two of Madison’s young friends, who had been huddling with him in his house within yards of that church, were dead.

That’s horrible.

There is little agreement about what happened, or whether it happened at all, and the full truth may never be known. Madison says he did not recognize the woman. The only other witness, an older man who is known around town for his frequent run-ins with the law and fondness for alcohol, is saying that he did not see the situation firsthand, but only talked to Madison’s mother as she was coming and going.

So, clearly, this is grounded in solid evidence, unimpeachable by the highest tribunal of fair men and women.

But Madison’s story has stayed consistent, prompting a nagging, uneasy question about what kinds of things are possible, still possible, in a small Southern town.

Assertion does not equal evidence. They’re unfamiliar with this notion in the newsroom, it seems. It goes on for a while, delving in stuff the author doesn’t really care about, but he finally gets back to the important part.

There is a nearly unanimous conviction among blacks here that the incident described by Madison Phillips not only could happen here, but did. Yet there is little vocal outrage.

The whole story goes on like this, trading in speculation, fully admitting that no one knows the answer, only that everyone in town might be racist. There’s a restaurant named Rebel Queen, after all.

One man has an alternative theory.

“Nobody hardly knew her,” said Theodore Branch, 74, who has been the city’s only black council member for 36 years. “If you live here and everybody knows you, it’s a different situation.”

So naturally you don’t hear from him again. What he’s talking about, though:

Ms. Singleton, who was 46, was relatively new to town. She went to church 45 minutes to the southeast in Birmingham. The two boys who died with her, Jonathan and Justin Doss, ages 12 and 10, were from a poor white family who lived in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Cordova, where Madison and his mother had lived until recently.

That’s the 18th paragraph in the story, where the race of the other two victims in a story evoking racism finally landed. Eighteenth. In the business we call that buried.

I leave you with Atticus Rominger, a former reporter with an award-winning pedigree. And, sadly, that’s about the only way you’ll see those storm stories in the media again.

Just for fun:

If I taught public speaking classes I would show this at the beginning of every semester. Somehow, he did not get the nomination.

journalism / links / memories / Tuesday — Comments Off
24
May 11

Popular media publication

Just discovered I had a piece run in the Smithsonian Magazine. Sure, it was a submit-your-own kind of thing, but that hardly matters, does it? But I’ll take it and stick it next to “Published by ESPN and “appeared in almost every major broadcast market” as small professional successes.

Stumbled into each one of them. The major market work happened because I was at the scene of something interesting — the first victims of the DC snipers (John Allen Muhammad was executed 18 months ago), bad storms, my good timing to be in D.C. when the Iraq War started, sports scandals (Chris Porter is in trouble again) and so on. Just bumped into Jim Caple at the ballpark, which turned into a nice little photo gallery for ESPN, piggybacked on a nice package I did on Rickwood for al.com. I wrote the Smithsonian thing when I should have been studying.

See, kids? Procrastination can be good. So is timing.

In other news: I’m still sore from where standing water beat me up this weekend. Sometimes I feel a little bit better, and then other times I am less than ideal. This will take some time, it seems.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I have been perfecting that story, though: Did I tell you about the time my wife beat me up? She’s strong.

Or: Did I tell you about the time I leapt from a plane, thwarted three ninjas mid-air, lost my chute and landed in a convenient lake, cartwheeling to a halt with a bruised up body? Those ninjas weren’t nearly as strong as my lovely bride. (Sometimes we must suffer for our art.)

If you see me moving a bit slowly the next few days, you’ll know why.

cycling / errands / football / iPhone / journalism / photo / Samford / Tuesday — Comments Off
17
May 11

Waiting for 4.0

That tree will haunt your dreams. I want to go back to Big Lots, buy it and bury it so it doesn’t frighten little children.

Would anyone like to hang it, instead? Or maybe put it in a lake as a fish reef?

Pedaled around the southern part of town today. Again it was very cool. The high today was 68 degrees. I set out down the hill of death and up the two hills of shame, took a right at the light and raced past the back of the subdivision. Turned right, passed a school, up two huge hills where I geared up as far as I could and still had to just put my head down, grit my teeth and make mind-deals. Just 20 more strokes and you’ll be there. OK, five more.

Crossed the interstate on the narrowest overpass in town, dodged traffic on the bypass and then cruised through one of the great old neighborhoods. When I made it to campus I turned around, cruised the neighborhood the other direction, got caught by a bunch of buses on the bypass and then made it home feeling strong.

Later I went back downtown to see about a watch. The crystal needs replacing, and the jeweler at Ware’s with whom I spoke could not see through the scuffs to read who made the watch.

It’s a Fossil.

“Oh,” she said shaking her head sadly. There’s bad news here. “Fossil doesn’t let us do any work on their watches. They have some sort of warranty deal, though.”

And then I asked the wrong question. Is that pretty much a standard thing? Would that be what the rest of the jewelers in town would say if I went asking?

“You could try Walmart, but we have some of the best jewelers in the state right here …”

Right. Well then.

She was happy to not help me, though, so there’s that.

So I went to the bike story, because I have this issue with gears and hoped someone would answer my question. But the answer was no better than what I’d read. Score one more for the Internet. Now if it would just get me up the hills a bit easier … (That’s web 4.0, I hear.)

Started watching The Pacific tonight. Made it through the first two discs, thanks to Netflix. We’ve seen Guadalcanal and Pavuvu. This was all promoted, when it debuted on HBO, as the Band of Brothers of the Pacific Theater. And the men that fought there have long had a legitimate claim that their stories have gone unnoticed through all the retellings of what happened in Europe.

The series, four episodes in, is fine. It is no Band of Brothers. I’ve seen that many more times and read Ambrose’s book that spawned the series and two memoirs (Dick Winters’ and Lynn Compton’s) around it. That story was much more about the camaraderie. I’ve only read one of the memoirs (Eugene Sledge’s) that was the source material for The Pacific, and will one day get around to Hugh Ambrose’s book. So far, this one is about the sun and palm trees and firefights at night and grim desperation in the daytime. But there are six more episodes to go, maybe it will get there.

The island hopping miseries are an interesting thing. Somehow you wonder if you’re getting the full story, but if you look around at enough perspectives you realize how this may have been a period of the deepest deprivations (from both sides) of man and maybe you don’t want to know every little terrible detail.

Finished an article I’ve been working on. The task was this: write a 2,000 catching-up-with profile. And the focal point gave me a lot of coachspeak and platitudes. Not that I blame him. The interview was fine — the coach is a very nice guy and has always been an accommodating gentleman — but coaches get in the habit of speaking like coaches. They’re always a little bit leary, because you never know who’ll read the thing. That just carries over, hopefully not at home, but whenever someone breaks out a recorder or a notepad.

So write 2,000 words on a series of humble “doing greats” and “we’re excited about the season” and “one game at a time” and “we see it as a business trip.” This took a bit of creativity.

I’d written about 2,200 words and then cut a few hundred, which just made the thing better. I wrote one ending, but decided against it, so it became the end of a section. And then, to finish the story, I wrote back to where the tale began.

Sent that off, it’ll be on shelves this summer, wrote this and now time for bed.

Oh, when I took out the garbage tonight I noticed I could see my breath. May in Alabama. It was 48 degrees.

iPhone / journalism / Samford / Thursday / video — Comments Off
14
Apr 11

The Timothy Sumner Robinson lecturer

Washington Post sports columnist — and former Redskins beat writer — Jason Reid was the Timothy Sumner Robinson lecturer at Samford University this spring. He spoke with many classes, the staff at the Samford Crimson, the radio station WVSU and more before delivering his Robinson lecture which focused on social media and sports reporting. Here’s a small sample of some of his advice to students early in the day.

The lecture series is named in honor of Timothy Sumner Robinson, a 1965 graduate of Samford University. He covered the Civil Rights demonstrations in Birmingham, the Johnson White House and, most famously, Watergate. Even amidst Woodward and Bernstein, Robinson wrote more front page stories for the Post than anyone.

Sumner would become a lecturer, an editor in Los Angeles (where he covered the Rodney King trial, the riots and the O.J. Simpson trial) and then Excite, Alta Vista, NBCi and AOL/Time Warner. He was a renaissance man before his time. His family, all charming people, put on this lecture each spring and it has become a highlight of the campus calendar.

(As an experiment: I took this audio via the open air microphone on my iPhone using the free Recorder & Editor app. I edited it in the app. I took the photograph with the iPhone’s camera and then put the two together in iMovie on my desktop machine. If I can move the file, as a wav, from the app to iTunes I could have produced the entire thing by phone. This process worked pretty well, otherwise, but the microphone picks up soft speakers best within two or four feet. A proper mic, or moving to the speaker, is desirable for good quality. Old radio guy that I am, I have a few other audio recording apps in line to try.)