And I was worried

I was sitting in the corner eating pasta salad with a coffee stirrer when the extent to which I didn't belong at the foster care event thing became comical yesterday.

It was the lunch break, and the other reporters there -- all of whom were based in the city and most of whom were big-name magazines, big-name TV stations or the Associated Press -- were all talking amongst themselves. They all knew each other, and I'd already gotten a what-the-hell-are-you-doing-here look from the Newsweek guy, so I'd given up on trying to join the conversation.

Then, to make everything that much more Fun, the only vegetarian option with lunch was pasta salad, and they'd forgotten forks. Hence, the coffee stirrer.

In other news:
Some Cincinnati pizza places are decorating their pizza boxes with photos of parents who are delinquent in child support payments.

My IQ is 24, just like your jersey number for the Knicks!

So I went to see Bill Bradley promote his new book, The New American Story, at the Princeton Barnes and Noble. He spoke for about 20 minutes, answered a formulaic question about the electoral college asked by your standard pretentious I-think-I'm-a-scholar man and then signed books.

I got to the front of the line for the book-signing and became your standard tard.

I believe I said something along the lines of, "Hello sir Mr. Bradley, Senator Bradley, er, former... Erica? E-R-I-C-A? With a C? Yes that's good. THANKS!"

In the midst of that jumble of nonsense, which I believe took me all of half a second to say, all he said was "With a K?"

Now what I'd meant to say was that I'd seen him speak about seven years ago at the YWCA in Santa Monica about Title IX, and that I really admired him.

Maybe he understood...

***

Anyway his talk was pretty interesting. He discussed the $1 gas tax concept (where it cancels itself out by going toward social security while social security is taxed less from your paycheck, combined with more stringent fuel-efficiency standards for cars.) He talked about combating gerrymandering with citizen committees to draw Congressional districts, and then having those districts either approved by a panel of judges or voted on by the general public. He also talked about funding campaigns with taxpayer money -- although I wasn't so sure about that one.

He discussed his theory on the social security crisis, saying it could be solved by raising the minimum age to receive benefits to 70 (phased in by one month every two years until 2099); making 2 percent of the 6.5-percent of social security tax apply to all income (right now social security only taxes income up to $94,200), bringing state and local government employees into the system (this would only apply to new employees and would be phased in over five years) and basing the cost-of-living increase on the chained consumer price index (I don't completely understand that part, but it's supposed to be more accurate than the straight-up cost-of-living index because it takes into considerations the substitutions people make based on price increases... but I'm sure Aviva will tell me if I'm completely wrong in my understanding of that one).

So that's my Bill Bradley experience.

Tomorrow's that foster care roundtable in New York... wish me luck...

Here's some fun...

The mayor of one of my towns filed a police report against one of her political rivals, prompting:
http://www.thnt.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070328/NEWS0102/703280403/1001

Help poor people for almost nothing!

Nicholas Kristof's column today was about www.kiva.org, a Web site that allows you to make small loans to small business owners in poor countries. It's a pretty cool idea called microfinancing, started by the dude who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Muhammad Yunus' loans were for an average of $200 each, but you can donate even less through Kiva and still help people.

You can donate as little as $25, and your donation will be combined with other people's donations to fund the person's whole project. You can browse through all the different people seeking loans and learn a little about the person and their project. Most of them are women, but the loan-seekers run the gamete from single mothers trying to open their own business to married people trying to expand or repair their business to displaced persons.

I lent $25 to a woman in Samoa who sells prepared food to people who need it for children or elderly parents. She needs $850 to buy a taro plant, coconuts and some other products and supplies for her stall in the open-air market. At the time of this post, people had contributed $500.

I lent $25 to another woman in Samoa who's seeking $875 to expand her plantation. She needs to buy fertilizer and chemicals to increase her plantation's output so she can afford to sent her four kids to school.

I'm sure Kiva is slammed with new visitors after Kristof's column, but you can still make a difference here, so that might not suck. Especially if you keep making donations after the excitement dies down from the column.

Just passing along the idea...

So red means... stop?

I went hiking at the Delaware Water Gap on Sunday with my friend Becky (not you), and as we approached the hiking area, we hit a stoplight. This was a strange stoplight in that there was no cross traffic and no potential for cross traffic. So after waiting for about 30 seconds, Becky decided it was clearly an irrelevant stoplight and preceded through it.

We were winding through a narrow one-way road flanked by a mountain wall on our right and a cliff on our left. About a minute into the journey, we figured out what that stoplight was for.

A line of cars came flying toward us from the opposite direction. Becky managed to find a small shoulder to pull onto, and the other people who had obeyed the law by waiting for the stoplight on their side were just barely able to squeeze by us -- although we got glared at by five consecutive very annoyed drivers.

The dude driving the lead car opened his window and explained to us that the purpose of that light was to manage the traffic so that cars could only go in one direction at a time, since the road was too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic.

Sure enough, as we were leaving we noticed the sign right next to the light we ran: "Long three-minute light to control one-way traffic".

Good thing we're so observant, being reporters and all...

Sad...

With two No. 1 seeds and two No. 2 seeds in the Final Four, this tournament is losing its za-zing.

From the New York Times:

Last year at this time, of the 3.1 million entries in ESPN.com’s bracket pool, only four chose the correct Final Four teams. This year, 161,869 of 3.3 million entries have the Gators, the Buckeyes, the Bruins and the Hoyas still alive.

What fun is that?

Just wake me up when it's over

I'd like to use this opportunity to *scold* the local CBS station for its horrendous balance of coverage in yesterday's late games. CBS has always been good about switching to the more interesting game, but last night they apparently decided they were going to show Ohio State-Tennessee instead of UCLA-Pitt, NO MATTER WHAT.

What ended up happening was Ohio State-Tennessee absolutely sucked for the first 20 minutes, until Ohio State remembered it was the much better team and started playing just well enough to overcome a 20-point deficit and edge the Vols (who I was ultimately rooting for even though I'd picked Ohio State in my bracket). But for those first horrendous 20 minutes, why weren't we watching UCLA-Pitt?

And even more, when UCLA-Pitt was a two-possession game with just over a minute to go, why weren't we watching that??

And to take it even further, why did CBS switch over to UCLA-Pitt for *five seconds* when there was about a minute remaining, and then say, "Now back to the Ohio State-Tennessee game. We'll bring you back to this game when yours is over." Even though there were seven and a half minutes left in "our game" and just one minute left in the UCLA game? Was the one minute going to last longer than the seven and a half? Has that happened in the history of basketball, ever?

My theory is that the people in charge of the broadcast were paying no attention whatsoever to anything going on. My theory is that everyone but the intern was sleeping and it was the intern's job to wake them all up at the end of the game. My theory is that they also had no concept of geography, or the fact that Pittsburgh is way closer to the market area than either Ohio State or Tennessee.

I officially hate CBS.

Well, you could just bathe the kid in bleach

A Long Island couple is suing a fertility clinic after an in vitro fertilization yielded a child much darker than either parent. A doctor at the clinic recommended artificially inseminating the wife with the husband's sperm, which they did, but fast-forward nine months and the kid was jet black. So the parents did three different DNA tests, all of which found that the dad was not actually the dad.

The doctor's response?
The child will "get lighter over time."

I mean, it happened to Michael Jackson...

Getting jobs, losing jobs

Turns out, the story I wrote about the nursing home workers being asked to take pay cuts or leave got someone a new job. He called the other day to tell me about it. Hooray!

In other news, I got a *very* angry, *very* grammatically incorrect e-mail from a dude I quoted in my look-at-all-the-people-watching-the-NCAA-Tournament-in-the-bar story. I quoted him saying that he was taking a half-day from work without his boss knowing, and apparently his boss reads the paper.

Oops...

So I agreed to go to a "roundtable discussion" on foster care at Hunter College in New York, thinking it might be a good opportunity to meet some interesting people and get some story ideas, etc.

Today, I came in to work to find a FedEx express envelope from the people sponsoring the event. There was a folder inside with a letter thanking me for my *participation* in the panel, and noting that this event "is a listening exercise for us -- an opportunity to hear your open and honest feedback on how the media covers foster care." (the italics are actually there)

I then turned the page to find the following...
We will be joined by representatives from these media outlets:
It preceded to list the Associated Press, New York Times, Nightline, NPR, People, The Early Show, Newsweek, Ladies' Home Journal, Nickelodeon, and, that's right -- the Home News Tribune.

At that point my deskmate started singing, "Which one of these is not like the other one" over and over again.

And I'm already planning my out...

Lookit the little girls, trying to play a man's sport... cute, huh?

For whatever reason, I was watching the late local news on CBS. Sports came on, and they talked about the men's NCAA tournament and the NBA before going to commercial break. Then they came back from commercial and said, "Who says there's no local teams dancing?" (Aviva, etc.: "dancing" is the term they use for what you do in the NCAA tournament)

Then the local New Jersey station proceeded to give 1.5 seconds to the Rutgers women, one of the top teams in the nation. The extent of the coverage was something along the lines of, "Rutgers beat VCU in the first round today."

And that was it.

Now I understand that the women's tournament isn't as insanely popular as the men's tournament. But, seriously? We're in New Jersey, this is the only team this entire state has in the tournament, Rutgers recently beat UConn, a No. 1 seed, and people actually do give half a shit about the Rutgers women. So you bury it at the end of the newscast and devote less time to that than the news side gives to lookit-the-cute-doggy stories? Seriously????

Randomness

It was more than 70 degrees today ... on Friday it's supposed to snow ... tomorrow I get to write a story about a bunch of people watching the NCAA Tournament at a bar. This makes me much happier than all the lookit-the-people-watching-the-Rutgers-football-game-at-the-bar stories, as I actually want to watch the NCAA Tournament. I'm trying to figure out how long I can stretch the reporting end of the story before it starts to look like I was just sitting at the bar watching the games for my own benefit ... I'm officially addicted to the Sims 2, and I haven't even finished building my house yet. ... that's about it. ... back to the Sims 2.

The trick is to hurl the chair *before* you kick the player -- otherwise the player has somewhere to land when he falls

In honor of March Madness, Sportscenter's top 10 Bobby Knight sound bytes. No. 2 is pretty great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ukj6Qi5W_k

Incidentally I'm aware this post alienates 50 percent of my readers, so, Aviva, Bobby Knight is the current Texas Tech / former Indiana basketball coach. And this 3 1/2-minute video is, like, totally worth your time.

Pure genius

The lede to my Saturday story this week was:
Something fishy was happening at the New Jersey Museum of Aquaculture on Saturday.

I just thought you should know.

Get a human

If you're one of those regulars and have an incredibly good memory and no life at all, you might recall that I once got myself transferred from a machine to a real person by screaming "Fuckers!" into the phone. In the time since then, I've found that solution apparently only works with the phone company in Modesto.

But I've learned there is another way.

It's called the gethuman 500 database, and it provides the strategy to bypassing automated systems for 500 different companies. Some are obvious (Press 0), but others are a bit more in-depth, like you're the member of a secret society and only you know the secret code to get in (Telecheck: Press 1, 3, * at prompts. Experian: Say "yes"; enter report #; enter social security #; say "yes"; say "agent" then "yes" to confirm at prompts thereafter. Suntrust: Press # rapidly and repeatedly. Sears delivery: Press 95111.)

So maybe it's not the next bugmenot, but it might make your day a little better, one day.

My Pissy Computer

When I try to go to a Web site that seems too difficult for my work computer to load, it makes a lot of noise and then simply closes every Internet Explorer window. It does this for whitepages.com, nj.com, and various other sites I try to visit. I think this has something to do with the circa-1995 levels of RAM and hard drive space. I also think my computer has his moods. That's right. I've determined it's male.

Random ranting

1) I hate when people say "backslash," when they really mean "forward slash." How did that start? Who told the general public that they should add the word "back" to "slash?"

2) Have you seen www.conservapedia.com? It takes directly from Wikipedia's open source and slants all its entries to the right, sometimes subtly but often to the point where you can't even see the middle anymore.

For example, the "abortion" entry has a picture of a well-developed fetus and includes subsections discussing "direct correlations" between abortion and breast cancer, abortion and miscarriages in later pregnancies, and general wrong-ness.

It's dependent on user entries, like Wikipedia, but threatens to block users who use BCE and CE instead of BC and AD, as well as users who use British spellings instead of American spellings.

The first subhead under the "Theory of evolution" entry reads: "Lack of Any Credible Transitional Forms," which goes on to say that there is no fossil evidence for evolution.

You get the idea...

3) Finally, if the mood strikes to donate your money to a good cause, check out www.scooterlibby.com, and give to his defense fund.

And don't worry about kittens dying or impoverished young people and immigrants. The money will be much better spent on Scooter's lawyers -- just don't try to take it off your taxes... it's not tax deductible, and keep in mind that you may face gift tax ramifications if you contribute too much.

It's already raised $4 million so far, according to a story in today's New York Times.

Kissinger

I saw Henry Kissinger speak at Columbia's graduate school of journalism today -- turns out Columbia gets better guest speakers than Emerson... go figure.

Didn't take notes or anything, so if the beginning of this post gave you the misconception that you were about to read an insightful few grafs about foreign policy... Well, sorry. I just wanted to brag.

Woo-hoo!

A woman from another local nursing home just e-mailed to find out how to get in touch with the workers who quit. She said they have openings and that they pay people based on experience, so they would get paid more than the nursing home I wrote about is offering.

This may be the first story I've written since I got here that may actually make a difference...

Remembering why I didn't ever post...

Turns out, I have absolutely nothing interesting to say. I have a cat in my lap, so that's cool. He's fuzzy and cute -- also cool. I went out drinking last night, got tired around 11 p.m. and went home, so that's definitely not cool. Tried to friend my first ever crush on MySpace the other day (who apparently became a professional Slamball player), but he ignored the request -- again not so cool. And now I'm watching 90210 on the Soap Network. Because I'm just that cool.

Well...

http://www.thnt.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070303/NEWS/703030423/1001

This better be worth it...

I'm getting up at 6 a.m. tomorrow to go cover a labor dispute at a nursing home. The workers, who are getting fucked over by the home's new owners, have agreed to talk to me all at once before they start work in the morning. This story better pan out.