Letter to the editor

So I'm not sure if you've all heard that I am singlehandedly "trying to destroy West High athletics." That's right. I moved across the country from the Boston Globe to the Tracy Press with one goal in mind: the demise of Merrill West High School's sports program. Now, in my first week as interim sports editor, we got the following letter to the editor:

Why is your newspaper so bias with Tracy High School over West High.
Is seems Tracy High always gets top billing. Three or four days ago West
wins the a basketball game in the tourney and Tracy looses, but Tracy High
get FRONT page cover and West is in small print on page 3. Almost every
sporting news, Tracy high gets front page cover. Just like today with the
Wrestling team. The city of Tracy has two high schools and both should get
the same respect being equal!!!

Yup. Not only do I hate all those West people, I decided to put a story last week in smaller print because of how much I hate them. The fun thing (well, the fun thing besides Tracy's "loosing" and the fact that "is seems Tracy High always gets top billing") is if Tracy was on the cover whatever day he's talking about, that means West was on the cover the day before, because we alternated days last week. Boy are we jerks.

Faceoff... kittens... yeah

I had a dream last night in which I peeled my face off and couldn't get it to stay when I tried to put it back on. Then there were kittens running around everywhere, and every time I opened a closet there was another kitten.

I know people always say you can interpret your dreams and that they represent something, but I think this may be one situation in which that is not at all true. Unless anyone has another idea...

Holidays and cats

In the mail yesterday I received a postcard reminder from the vet about getting a distemper shot for Fiver. This comes about two months after giving him up to that teacher-lady who seems to think his name is 'Jimmy' but is, by every other marker, a very good pet-owner. She's already splurged on a very expensive bed for him, which is a good sign, and I would expect he will soon receive more presents as tomorrow is the first night of Hanukkah (and I would hope that she knows he's a Jewish cat). For my cats for Hanukkah, I got them a very big bag of cat litter and some food, but everyone else at Petco today was racking up triple-digit credit-card receipts with bags of fancy treats fastened by red bows and strange toys that their pets probably have no interest in.

But I digress. The point is that even though it's felt like one of those really bad breakups (which I've never had, but I'm assuming here), I think I'm finally over Fiver. I'm also posting a picture of him at his new home (the lady sent this one about a month ago). I just wish he would explain to her that his name is not Jimmy.

"Technical" language

So today I wrote a little 250-word story for the news section, just since I'm such a nice guy. Anyway while the city editor was over there reading/editing it, I heard him typing, which I thought was very strange, given that there was clearly nothing at all wrong with my story. So I asked what he was typing, given that there was clearly nothing wrong with my story, and he said he was "tightening" it up and taking out the "technical language." His version of taking out the technical language?
1) Adding the word 'levied,' because we all know that an article without 'levied' is an article not written for the common man to understand.
2) Adding the word 'earmarked,' because, again, no one can understand a sentence like, "Measure Y, which was placed on the ballot in 2000, would have provided $5.45 million in bond funds to renovate Tracy High, but wouldn’t have addressed completing West’s facilities" if it doesn't have the word 'earmarked' inserted in a random place.
He also almost insisted on taking out the word 'tentative,' even though I explained that my source said, "I can't stress enough that this list is TENTATIVE."
I had to threaten to kick him so he wouldn't take it out. Editors are pretty great.

One more reason I have to get out of Tracy...

Tumbleweeds.