Kidnappers are dumb. Seems to be a universal thing, as Japanese reporter Kosuke Tsuneoka can attest:
A Japanese journalist held hostage in Afghanistan for five months managed to send out a message via Twitter that he was alive when his captors asked him how to use a cell phone.
Just days before he was freed, Kosuke Tsuneoka said one of the militants brought him his new cell phone and asked the prisoner to set it up.
The younger militants were more interested in accessing Al-Jazeera on the phone, but Tsuneoka managed to shift their attention to Twitter, successfully getting them to ask him to demonstrate how it worked.
“That’s how I got the message out,” Tsuneoka told a news conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, a day after he arrived safely back in Japan. “I’m sure they never thought they were tricked.”
Then you must also question the sanity of some reporters, as well. Tsuneoka was also kidnapped in Georgia (the country) in 2001.
Oh we all want to be war reporters, but you don’t think about the possibility of being kidnapped or the even more attractive things like dysentery and getting shot at. War reporting sounds like so much fun.
Taught 90 minutes on grammar today. I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing the lecture yesterday. It isn’t the most fun class the students have, but it is necessary. They were patient, though, and laughed at all the right places. Next week I’ll change things up and we’ll discuss … punctuation!
Meanwhile, the editorial staff was spending the night putting together their first newspaper of the new school year. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow. I looked over their shoulders a bit. It should be a nice start for an almost entirely new staff.
If they can ever get finished. This is usually a late-night-early-morning process. The beginning of the year even more so since there are the inevitable software struggles and design difficulties.
It’s a long day, but a rewarding.
I wrote something on Auburn’s season opener for al.com today. (They didn’t link to me, unfortunately, so I’m not going to waste a lot of time on it.)
My inbox has been full of the comments that came in under that contribution, though. Most of it from Alabama fans. Using the prevailing logic they must be very concerned about Cameron Newton. I don’t blame them. The guy is terrifying.
Tomorrow, newspaper, meetings, studying, the 1939 World’s Fair and probably more.
