This is one of the cats we saw at dinner last night. We dined with a friend who owns two cats, that dines on her porch and tells stories that begin with “When I was living in Paris … ”
She made a delightful meal, I hope we were decent company. Another friend brought cookies. They were also delightful. The cats were cats, moody and hiding and staring at one another. We wondered, What if cats are telepathic? What are they saying to one another right now?
Most assuredly, it was a plot against us. They are cats.
Mobile County school officials announced Saturday that the system’s safety contract has been discontinued.
The action came in the wake of widespread media reports about a kindergartner at E.R. Dickson Elementary School who was asked to sign a safety contract after allegedly drawing a picture of a gun.
The child’s mother said the kindergartner was asked to sign the contract without her consent, and was also given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts. The mother also said that after the incident, her daughter asked her what the word “suicide” meant.
So a little national exposure brings about some semblance of common sense. Go figure.
I don’t know if you have heard about The Snappening yet, where thousands of Snapchat user accounts hacked or otherwise violated, but this could be a big story. And that led to, perhaps, the most insightful thing I said today:
Who really needs to invest greatly in PR, preventative and crisis comm: Anyone working in cloud storage.
Not to make this a culinary thing, but after several Fridays of bad examples, I am disappointed to have to say that the new cafeteria vendor has ruined fried chicken. It seemed to me that they deserved a few weeks under the Benefit of the Doubt accords, and I gave them that. There are a lot of carbs on a daily basis, and the basic foodstuffs seem to rotate on something close to a monthly schedule theme — so we’ve heard. But, and this is important, Friday is fried chicken day. And they’ve missed on all of them so far, in my humble and hungry opinion. Today I noticed the menu and knew it would be no better.
Protip: There is no other fried chicken. Any attempt at making fried chicken in any way not like a grandparent does is an abject failure and poultry abuse.
I apologize for that outburst.
OK, one more food related note, Five Dairy Queen locations in Alabama fall victim to data breach. Thankfully I am not impacted. Hopefully it doesn’t effect you. I couldn’t even tell you the last time I dined at Dairy Queen. I recall the last time I ate at a restaurant that used to be a Dairy Queen. It is a barbecue place now, most remarkable for the way they cut their fries.
That former Dairy Queen is the same place where once, many years ago now, the young lady working said that they had no ice cream for their blizzards. This was in the middle of a hot summer afternoon. I always thought she should have locked the door and called it a day. No one is going for the chicken fingers in July, right?
Back to the point, with every passing data breach story I read I am more and more convinced we’ll be returning to a more cash-based exchange, soon. Customers assume a lot of risk, and they assume those retailers have their networks under control, and, sadly, that isn’t hasn’t always proved to be the case.
Sorry for all of this food talk. In a few minutes we are going to a dinner party. I’m taking my appetite.
Things to read … to whet your appetite.
Couldn’t hurt, but it isn’t a 100 percent requirement, Should all journalists be on Twitter? Think of it this way: there are plenty of community papers out there with a minimal online component, if that. They still cover their market. They are still journalists. Now, you’ll find that some topics demand Twitter or other online tools, of course. Others, the online tools could serve as a great compliment. This is the point the piece tries to dance around in a snarky fashion.
Have you ever wondered which buildings near you are listed on the National Register of Historic Places? If you’ve ever tried to look this up, you probably had trouble finding what you were looking for because until the summer of 2014, there really was no user-friendly way to browse map-integrated National Register listings. Now, thanks to the Wikipedia Summer of Monuments campaign, there is a free, simple, and interactive map that shows all places listed on the National Register.
An Alaska couple knocked on the door of their son’s long-time girlfriend Thursday, intending to inform her that he’d been killed in a car accident.
Karen and Jay Priest instead were stunned when the son, 29-year-old Justin Priest, answered the door. They had mistakenly been told by Juneau police that he’d been killed in the crash.
Karen Priest said her husband started sobbing, and she was in shock.
“They told me she drew something that resembled a gun,” said Rebecca. “According to them she pointed a crayon at another student and said, ‘pew pew,” said Rebecca.
She said her child was given a questionnaire to evaluate her for suicidal thoughts.
“[They] Asked her if she was depressed now,” said Rebecca.
Without her permission, Rebecca said her child was given the Mobile County Public School Safety Contract to sign stating she wouldn’t kill herself or others.
“While I was in the lobby waiting they had my 5-year-old sign a contract about suicide and homicide,” said Rebecca.
It takes a village. And that’s part of the problem, wouldn’t you agree?
Honestly, this is just about the stupidest thing you could conceive. And it is happening here, which is mind-boggling.
It was a good run, but common sense appears to be losing out.
This was on the dessert stand in the cafeteria at lunch:
I did not eat any of them, nor did I even try to use my standard rationale: I ran five miles this morning. I can eat a cake. I think it was something about the message. Why does one eat love? How does one eat faith? You could go the metaphorical route, aim for the biblical teaching or, like me, just be a little weirded out by pink icing.
If you stare at those for a second you realize someone wrote all of those out by hand. That’s another thing. How do you expect me to eat that? You wrote faith on a cake square and now I devour it in two bites?
And what of the hope? 1 Corinthians is hardly complete without it.
Man, this is a great diet plan I’ve discovered, huh?
So, yeah, five miles. I can do six miles, no problem. (I do not know what is happening … ) I once knocked out eight miles around the neighborhood, with a fair bit of walking in it. But, still, eight miles. Here’s the problem: I need something to ward off the boredom. Around mile six I’m just ready to move on. Any tips?
Things to read … because you can always find helpful tips if you read enough.
I’m a big fan of making sure students never ask a rhetorical question in their copy. There are times it works. Too often, though, it leads to things like this non sequitur, “Are you a Red Bull Drinker? Do you want to be?” Red Bull Settlement: How to claim your piece of $13 million
Wright, who wore clothes he borrowed from Leonard, pleaded with the court to spare his son, who is facing the death penalty for fatally shooting three people and wounding three others during a party at the former University Heights apartment complex on June 9, 2012.
The dad is in and out of prison, he tells the judge and jury he was never really in his son’s life. He’s actually been hauled to this hearing from his prison sentence. And he’s had to borrow his son’s clothes. The reporter told me he’d noticed that the tie was familiar. He’d seen the defendant, and now his father, wear it. That’s the sort of reporting you can’t get over the phone or in a rewrite. Message: Go to the place you’re writing about.
We need to reshape how markets and financial stories are told to better reflect how they are consumed. What do I mean by that? Like most news sites, MarketWatch still leans too heavily on the 750-word story — a legacy of print newspapers that has outlived its usefulness. We want to go shorter – and longer.
The majority of our stories will soon be under 400 words — breaking everything down into short bursts of news and insight that cut straight to what is most important to readers, without all the empty calories and filler journalists love to stuff in the sausage . We will also do longer, deep dives on important stories that warrant such treatment. This is the way the digital news is going: tall and venti, no more grande.
Now that mobile traffic is at or near 50% at many newspapers, editors and publishers need to put ever more of their thinking – and resources – into optimizing products, content and advertising for not only smartphones and tablets but also for such emerging devices as smart watches, smart televisions and whatever smart stuff comes next. As discussed below, mobile publishing is as distinct from web publishing as web publishing is from web printing.
And it is happening fast, too, as expected. (For a few years now I’ve noted that the mobile move was one thing that was outpacing the web’s legendary rapid adaptability.)
Sometimes you spend all day in your office, doing office things. Sometimes you do office things and it doesn’t even seem like you’ve done office things. But, then, sometimes, you spend all day doing office things, questioning your progress on doing those things and then walk outside at just the right time.
And that, as they say, is its own reward.
My other reward was veggies.
Things to read … because reading makes us big and strong.
(That’s what you’ve been told your entire life, anyway.)
Dalton, diagnosed with Down syndrome at birth, had just realized a long-time dream — playing football for his beloved Bears. Dalton had been hoping to dress with the team all season. Finally approved to participate, assistant Bears coach J.T. Lawrence and the other coaches had an idea.
“We thought it would be a great experience for Dalton and for the rest of our kids if he could get into a game and score,” Lawrence said. There was one problem. Dalton did not need to have any physical contact.
Lawrence talked to Prattville Christian athletic director Sam Peak and asked if his school would allow Dalton to go into the game and score a 2-point conversion if Billingsley scored a touchdown.
“That was an easy answer,” Peak said. “We coach our kids to be thankful for each opportunity to touch someone else’s life. This was an opportunity for us to do something good.”
At ONA, anxiety about Facebook’s increasing control over our traffic revealed itself in lots of questions: If I have 250,000 fans of my page, why don’t they all see everything I post? Why does my journalism seem to reach fewer people than it used to? Is Facebook trying to pressure my news organization to spend money to boost my posts or take out ads?
But there are more existential fears behind this conversation, too: If Facebook isn’t interested in exposing users to content that might be important but won’t result in high engagement like softer news and quizzes do, what will happen to news literacy? What will happen to civic engagement? What happens to The News That Matters, if only Facebook gets to decide what matters?
If you’re from anywhere near where I’m from, this sounds a bit like home:
The sounds are the same, but those North Carolinians have their own unique vocabulary. You get the sense that even that language is falling away. Some of those words were things a parent said, some of them took some recollection. Good that it has been recorded in documentary form — and I want to see the full thing. How else would we have seemingly random blog post titles?
A passing thought this morning, as I walked from here to there: I am not sure if I’ve ever been on the Samford campus when the power went out. All of the lines here are buried and the service has always been excellent. The things we take for granted, no?
So late this afternoon the power blinked. And it blinked again and then once more. After a few minutes, wherein students in the newsroom were confessing their fears of the dark and people and clowns and four-leaf clovers and who knows what else, the power blinked one more time.
We noticed the hardwired connection first.
The wireless was down as well. There’s a router right outside the window. Turns out that continual green ring of light means something. You never notice it until it is a pale red, which means you don’t have an Internet connection, so you have the opportunity to notice the telltales on routers:
Telnet was beginning the march.
All of our phones and Internet are tied together in a VOIP, so they didn’t work. Some of the locks on campus are tied into that network, so those doors didn’t work.
I raided my emergency peanut butter stash.
Also, the printer died, because today was a Tuesday:
I’ve renamed that machine the Lazarus. It keeps coming back, though we’ve been worried about it for almost four years now.
Somehow, the cash registers in the cafeteria and food court were online. So the crisis was merely humanitarian rather than truly dire. And the IT people here know their stuff. In perhaps an hour or two — who can tell the passage of time without the web? — things began returning to normal.
But all of that let me hear this:
Student 1: “What did we do before the Internet?”
Student 2: “We were prepared for it.”
For a group of people who grew up with the Internet always at their beck and call, this is an interesting point. There’s a story in this. I wonder if anyone will write it.
Things to read … because people went to the trouble to write it.
Mike Lutzenkirchen, standing before the James Clemens High School football team in its weight room Tuesday afternoon, called out Logan Stenberg, the Jets’ offensive tackle, and had him leave the room so that Lutzenkirchen could illustrate a point.
After Stenberg obliged, Lutzenkirchen said, “He just stood right there in the flesh. Now he’s not here. A teammate. That’s how quickly it can happen. That’s how quickly you can lose somebody.”
His son, the former Auburn star Philip Lutzenkirchen, one of the Tigers’ most popular players in recent seasons, was killed in a car wreck in Troup County, near LaGrange, Ga. He was 23 years old.
Mike Lutzenkirchen, who also spoke to the Huntsville High football team Tuesday evening, shared an array of statistics about his son’s sensational career. There was one stat he saved until the last, the one that is most staggering and devastating.
“Listen to this closely: Point three seven seven,” Lutzenkirchen said. “That was Philip’s blood alcohol content.”
“The officers, they did a great job,” said Davis, otherwise known as Operator 8061. “They did a good job in responding and getting me notified so that I could make my notifications.”
Davis, an 18-year BPD dispatch veteran, said she was just one of many dispatchers who sprang into action when the first call from the UPS customer center on Inglenook Lane came into the radio room at 9:21 a.m.
“Had it not been for my coworkers helping me, it would not have gone as smooth as it did,” she said. “It wasn’t just me. It was a team effort. I was proud to be a Birmingham Police Department dispatcher that day.”
The challenge of that day isn’t unusual. Dispatchers and officers deal with a crisis of some sort almost each and every day, though not usually to that extent.
About 10 calls came in to the radio room almost simultaneously after the shots erupted in the UPS warehouse. Those nearly dozen calls accounted for one dispatch, one of 11,663 dispatches handled by BPD last week alone.
