Another reason to be happy
Plagiarizing one of my own lines, from about four years ago:

"Really, the best thing about my job is that, when I walk out the door every night, I'm in Florida."

Technical difficulties
The Boy, 4, unplugged the computer yesterday morning.

That was bad enough.

But then, he plugged it back in.

Oops.

Our cable modem is currently fried. Until we get the good folks at the cable company to bring us a new one (hopefully later today), we'll be out of service at this forum.

Smack talk
The Wife and I find ourselves occasionally sharing a bout of insomnia. We usually deal with this by staying up until absurd hours flipping through channels. Eventually we catch ourselves watching something we wouldn't ordinarily watch.

This is how we stumbled upon MTV the other night, which was running a follow-up on a documentary it did a few years ago on the run of heroin-related deaths in Plano, Texas. We found this interesting because we lived very near Plano -- and, in fact, the heroin story was enough to make us cross Plano from our real-estate list when we moved to the Very Large Metropolitan Area in 1999.

The documentary -- which was very well-done -- segued into the made-for-MTV movie Wasted, a horribly over-acted 2003 version of Reefer Madness. That said, I wonder if it shouldn't be required viewing for parents in Plastic White Suburbia who think their little darlings would never, ever do such a thing as black tar heroin. Nineteen sets of parents in Plano, Texas, certainly found out differently in the late '90s.

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, of course, and this story certainly wasn't.

Because this is what I do when I get very interested in a topic, I logged on and did some research to remind me what the story was all about. It led me to two observations:

I got a kick out of the generalizations the news media will make in order to make the story, shall we say, more compelling. Plano was often described as "an affluent suburb of almost 200,000 mostly white, upper-middle-class people." Well, that's true for the western part of the city. The part of the city in which most of the heroin deaths occurred, however, was the eastern side, which leans much more toward middle-middle class and, in a few isolated cases, lower-middle class. These weren't all bored rich kids. They fit more closely to the profile of the average drug user I recall from high school. Which, of course, is not nearly as interesting. I find it stunning that, if you believed everything you read, the only people who use drugs are minority kids from desperate situations or bored rich kids. My observation, which comes directly from the middle, indicates drug use cuts across all class and racial lines pretty much equally. Plano often was described as "a suburban oasis," which conveniently overlooks the fact that it's 15 miles north of the nation's eighth-largest city. It's not a far stretch to believe that drugs are fairly accessible in Dallas.

A subculture exists which tries very hard to maintain a straight face while defending drug use on intellectual or medical grounds. These are not people who say, "Man, it's cool to get high, dude; go ahead and try it." These are people who have spent considerable time doing research in an effort to criticize the United States government's war on drugs, while, as a sideline, suggesting that illicit drugs are perfectly safe when used as directed. According to the smack sympathizers, people actually very rarely die just from using heroin. It's only the idiots who drink alcohol or use other drugs while they use heroin. And, if heroin was legal and regulated, its purity would be controlled by outside forces, which would make it less dangerous. Oh, OK. All heroin needs is a warning label. Trust me on this one: An attack on the "War on Drugs" is perfectly legitimate. Don't undermine it by making the completely stupid suggestion that heroin is safe as aspirin.

As a young person, I experimented with this and that, but my friends and I drew the line at cocaine, heroin and LSD. I actually tried cocaine, once, with a co-worker, and it was so damn good I was convinced I should never, ever do that again. My friends -- most of whom never met a joint they didn't like -- were very quick, in their ways, to express their abject disapproval of my having crossed the line that one time. I took that to heart, too.

As a parent, of course, all this scares the hell out of me. I am pretty much of the belief that if you mess with heroin or acid, you deserve whatever you get, be it jail, rehab or untimely death. I have to apply that belief to my own children, too.

I knew drug users as a teenager and young adult. Only one of them I'd classify as somebody who had a serious problem. She's a story I'll save for another time. Another talked about it a lot, but I suspect he talked a lot more than he did.

To my knowledge, most of you have little or no experience with heavy drugs. Here's the thing that, as a parent, I'm genuinely interested to know: What kept you from it? Do you credit your parents? Did you have better things to do? Not enough money? For me, the deciding factor was, quite honestly, the reverse peer pressure thing described above, although that certainly wasn't the only reason.

And if you did go through a phase, I sure as hell won't pass judgment. What pulled you out of it?

Leave a comment, or send a private e-mail (which, you have my word, will remain private). I realize the only thing I can really do for my children is pay as much attention to them as possible and spend the next decade-plus tiptoeing that fine, fine line between keeping them from stuff and driving them to it. But I'll take all the help I can get.

Question which has nothing to do with anything
Why is Charlize Theron not a bigger star than she is?

I'm not ignoring you
On the contrary, I have much to say. I could give you the post about heroin; I could give you yet another damn story from 1989; I could give you the whine I give you every time my wife goes out of town and leaves three children to beat on me.

But for now, I'll spare you all of that. I hope instead that you're getting a chance to enjoy a long weekend with friends and/or family and/or the people and beverages of your choice. I'll let the deep thoughts ferment a little bit more and try again later.

Wonder what kind of warranty it has?
It's been a big week for Schadenfreude. First the Jayson Blair thing, then a sight one doesn't often see: As I was driving the minivan to the Large National Chain Hardware Store to buy something really mundane, I saw a guy having car trouble. He was outside his disabled vehicle, in the median, muttering at the car like you do when your car gives out on you, especially on a hot day on a really busy road where everybody can see you mutter.

The car was a bright yellow one of these.

It's hard to feel bad for a guy driving a quarter-million worth of Italian zoom-zoom, under any circumstances.

Kind of like finding $10 in the laundry
I found an album I didn't know I had. Buried in the depths of our stereo cabinet was an unmarked Maxell tape. I popped it in to the cassette player in my stereo, which probably hasn't been used in five years, and out came the sounds of the Black Crowes' Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. A friend had apparently made the copy about 10 or 11 years ago. I wonder if he wonders where it is. The Crowes' 1992 follow-up to Shake Your Moneymaker wasn't nearly as good, but it was still a strong rock 'n' blues album, the likes of which we haven't heard since. I have often contended that the Black Crowes were the last great rock 'n' roll band. I vaguely remember going to see them play at a musty old arena in Anytown in '91 or '92, and they were great, if slighly weed-addled. Basically, they were the last stand for rock before music went to crap in the mid-'90s.

More on this New York Times thing
I could link to more than 100 stories on the dumbass reporter for The New York Times who thought he could get away with just making stuff up in a paper read by more than 1 million people every day. But I won't. If you want to know more, I direct you to "The Industry" link at right.

(A quick aside: RER called him a "fuckchop." What a great word.)

I can tell you -- from personal experience -- a thing or two about young reporters and affirmative action and how to handle a sloppy reporter.

I was 20 years old, working part-time in the sports department at the Anytown Daily Bugle while sort of attending the Large Multi-Directional State University. I was something of a newsroom star, for whatever it's worth on that level. I had my first front-page tome at 19. It's not easy to crack the front page from the sports department. My supervisor's supervisors' supervisors knew who I was. I liked that, a lot.

When a full-time position came open in August 1988, I know of only one other candidate for the position. He was a black man, a little older than me, who had already graduated from college. To my knowledge, he would have been the first black employee in the sports department. In my unenlightened head, I had already written him off as a shoo-in and was prepared to transfer to Smaller Directional State Unversity, muttering all the way about the evils of diversity and affirmative action.

I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I only know he didn't get the job. I did.

My first step after that was to drop out of LMDSU. My next step was to become a little full of myself. About eight months and several hundred beers later, I was in full-suck mode. I was probably less than half-assing it -- why? because I thought I could -- by the time my boss sat me down and told me my job was in jeopardy, and not in a nice, nurturing way.

As I've stated earlier in this forum, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I didn't go off about how I was a star and was the best damn thing to happen to sports writing since Red Smith. I didn't whine and mope and plot revenge. (Well, OK, I did mope a bit.) I didn't go over his head for a verification of my greatness. I was moved to a job that was a better fit for me. I shaped up, drank less, focused more and started doing better work.

Since August 1988, I've never felt threatened by diversity, either as an employee or a manager. I think diversity for diversity's sake is wrong. I'd rather have a staff of 10 black Jewish lesbians who are dedicated and do good work than a really diverse staff of slackers. There's value in diversity, but only if it's backed up by talent.

I've accomplished what I've accomplished because of my own work. If somebody else gets promoted ahead of me -- no matter what color, race or gender -- I believe they got promoted because they did better work. That's the way I've seen it happen at the places I've been. I'm not naive enough to believe it happens like that everywhere. That's just been my experience.

This whole Jayson Blair thing is a gaping wound on American journalism. We'd have a better chance of recovering from it -- and not embedding in the public's head the idea that we're all a bunch of liars -- if we'd just shut up about it and get back to doing our work.

Now that I've said my piece, of course.

Virtual Sunday Drive

Travel back in time with me to a place I used to go.

The drive: Old Route 66 west from Springfield, Mo.
The car: A 1980 Chevrolet Citation X-11, silver (it looked something like this, only with a red stripe instead of black)
The music: Bob Seger's Like a Rock, or Boston's Don't Look Back, on a cassette tape copied from a friend's LP. The tape is playing in the aftermarket cassette deck, which sits sideways in the Citation dashboard.

Let's go.

The sun is behind you as you point the car west on Chestnut Expressway, a street lined on either side with junkyards, old tire shops and used car lots, where an occasional buyer walks among tired old heaps with "77 $700 COLD AIR RUNS GOOD" painted in white shoe polish on the windshields. Stop at the Vickers station for some 84-cent-a-gallon unleaded, go through the light at the West Bypass, and settle back in the seat. This is the forgotten side of your hometown; the record-breaking growth and prosperity are happening on the other side. You, of course, are going the other way.

Chestnut Expressway narrows back to two lanes and becomes Missouri 266, just past the exit for the big soulless Interstate. The two lanes are barely wide enough to accommodate the Hudsons and Cadillacs and DeSotos that prowled this road back in the '50s. The old fellow at the antique store in Halltown will tell you as much, explaining in his cigarette-stained voice that they called this stretch of road Bloody 66. "Head-on collisions all the time, every day, practically, especially when it rained," he'd say. "Cars coming off that curve tryin' to slow down for the speed zone here, get all sideways and boom! that was all she wrote."

About five miles past Halltown, you stop at a stop sign. Turn right to get on Missouri 96, which was the modernized section of the old Mother Road. Still two lanes, but wider, with an upturned lip on each shoulder. Highway engineers in the late 1940s thought that would be an ideal way to prevent a drowsy driver from drifting off the road and into oblivion. Instead, the usual result was a drowsy driver drifting off and his ghost later finding himself upside down in his '51 Chevy with no seat belts and a metal headliner.

Highway 96 is also dead-level straight for about 40 miles, with one stoplight near Mount Vernon. An old gas station and garage is on the left; the buildings are made of rock, the lot out front is gravel. The pumps are vintage late 1960s, rusting. The price on the pumps reads 49.9 cents per gallon; pre-oil embargo prices. Inside the garage are piles of used car parts, boxes, hoses; stuff that could sit there for hundreds of years before rotting away. And probably, it will.

Drive on down 96 and go through towns that aren't there anymore: Heatonville, Albatross, Rescue, Plew, Avilla. Towns that exist as little more than signs along a highway nobody drives.

The occasional farmhouse can be seen, usually out the passenger window. It's always the same layout: ranch-style house set back about 300 feet off the road; big garage/workshop-type building; barn; silo. Where 96 meets Missouri 97, however, is a different sight. A multi-story farmhouse, big wraparound front porch, majestic in its loneliness. The house is sagging in the middle. It hasn't been occupied for at least 20 years, probably more. At one time, however, it was very likely the jewel of far western Lawrence County.

Drive on through Avilla. About 10 miles later, the road takes a jog to the left and you're in Carthage, a town of about 14,000 that once was the seat of commerce for western Missouri. Stop for some fast food if you want. In the middle of town is a lake, stocked with fish that are all too willing to bite whatever bait you're carrying. Don't eat the fish, though; signs warn of the possible environmental hazards that the town dumped into the lake over the years.

Drive under the exit for Alternate U.S. 71 and continue west. You're back in a semi-industrial zone, which means the occasional small factory or feed mill bounded on either side by a junkyard, a tire shop, or a used-car lot. You'll enter Webb City at the statue of the Praying Hands. At the time the statue was conceived, the location was a very busy intersection of two major federal highways. When the statue was dedicated in 1974, however, the interstate, built several miles to the south, had long since supplanted U.S. 66.

Old 66 follows U.S. 71 going south through Webb City and into Joplin, a sad little city of about 40,000 on Missouri's western edge. In the heyday of Highway 66, Joplin was a reasonably prosperous lead-mining town. When the lead had all been mined, however, there wasn't much reason for the prosperous to stick around. They left behind many of the less fortunate. The percentage of Joplin residents who receive some sort of government assistance far exceeds the state average, and the town shows it. Joplin is neither proud nor ashamed; it is merely resigned to its fate.

You're now going west again on a road called 66; it's Missouri 66, renamed after the feds gave up maintenance of the road in the early '70s. You'll go past another few junkyards before the outline of Missouri on the road sign changes to a bright yellow sunflower. You're now in Galena, Kan., once a major stop on the St. Louis and San Francisco Railway, better known as the Frisco. A restored train depot highlights the otherwise nondescript downtown.

The highway crosses the pretty Spring River and heads south, through Baxter Springs, Kan. -- "The First Cow Town in Kansas!" -- and across the line into Oklahoma. You'll go through the tiny burg of Quapaw, curve around a bit and find yourself on Mickey Mantle Boulevard in Commerce, Okla. Mantle was born in Commerce; his dad was a lead miner. A New York Yankees scout from Willard, Mo., Tom Greenwade, discovered the teenage Mantle playing on the American Legion ballfields in Baxter Springs and Galena and Joplin. What an incredible sight he must have been, a man among boys, slamming balls past the hay haulers and skinny Army-bound kids and boys who were pretty sure their futures were in the lead mines.

South of Commerce, you're on a road that was once U.S. 66/69; the signs for SOUTH 69 are still there, on the right side of the pole. On the left is a sign that says WEST, then nothing. Any 66 sign that the Department of Transportation didn't get to first was long since stolen by a collector. It's probably in one of those "Antiques" stores selling junk that you just drove by.

Soon, you're in Miami, Okla., another town that has obviously seen better days. Closed-down tire factory, empty feed mill, teetering grain silo, silent railroad tracks, old folks sitting on their front porches and simultaneously wondering where the hell their town went and praising themselves for sending their own kids off to better places.

You stop at some off-brand convenience store that could use a good cleaning, buy some gas, a Cherry Coke and some beef jerky or Doritos, and pop in another tape. Head back toward home, only on the soulless interstate this time, a direct line back to a world that's moving forward, and wonder if you're heading the right direction.

Tired, wired and uninspired
Stuff has just been shaking all around me. I have neither the time nor the inclination to go into it in great depth. So, following some great advice I received when I was a young sportswriter -- "If you have nothing to say, at least keep it short" -- here, in short form, is what's going on in my head:

My hometown has been battered by tornadoes. Small towns surrounding Anytown have been shredded. I keep hearing residents of Pierce City, Mo., saying they might just abandon the place entirely. The little town of 1,400 is stuck in a no-town's land between U.S. 60 and Interstate 44. Neither major highway goes through the city, so there's not much reason to be there unless you had lived there all your life. In recent years, residents had tried to build the place into an antique haven, capitalizing on the town's historic buildings and rustic feel. Not a building in Pierce City was left untouched by Sunday night's storm. As a result, the town might join a long list of Ozarks ghost towns, wiped off the map by tornado, flood or simple lack of interest. Worse news: More storms are expected to arrive overnight tonight.

I can tell Ozarkers where the warm, moist air that's triggering those storms is coming from: Right outside my house. Florida summer has arrived about a month early. Florida humidity has its own character, especially at night, where you can practically smell the mildew growing.

Among my activities on Sunday: I got to spend a few minutes behind the wheel of a new Corvette. I somehow received an invitation to a General Motors marketing gimmick on Sunday, which allowed people to test drive the car of their choice in a large parking lot. The car of my choice, of course, was a bright yellow 2003 'Vette Z06 with a 6-speed transmission. It was tightly controlled, of course; you had to test drive some other car first, then stand in line and wait half an hour to drive the 'Vette between a bunch of cones. Drivers were timed, with the fastest time of the day receiving a stereo system. Sunday's time to beat was 13.0 seconds. I did it in 16.5; no guts, no glory. Most drivers ahead of me in line were hitting high 15s. Clearly, I didn't want to rush anything. The car is everything I thought it would be; even in a very limited experience, the car basically did whatever you told it to do. Too bad there's no place to install a child safety seat.

Update from Burnout Central: Now that the war's over, we're back to a much more calm pace at work. This is a good thing. The downside: I find myself still oddly uninspired. A couple of projects sit ignored on my hard drive. The paper isn't generating its own interesting stories, preferring instead to sit back and wait for news. I'm still trying to generate some mental traction.

Off to seek some inspiration. Or at least to earn to earn another day's pay.

Glad that's over
The Young Daughter came home on Saturday afternoon after three nights in the hospital. She's back up to full speed and now has to be re-taught that the world doesn't revolve around her. We were given a solid diagnosis of "your guess is as good as mine."

Thief stopped
This guy's 27 years old and he's writing for The New York Times -- or, at least he was, until he pulled this crap. Said he got his notes and his news clips mixed up, which is why he copied a big chunk of a story from a Texas newspaper instead of writing it himself. That's called plagiarism. Plagiarism is to the news business what gambling is to the sports world. It's the one unforgivable sin.

Journalism Tip No. 1: Your notes are in your handwriting. Your news clips are the items that were set in type. For most sighted folks, it's not easy to confuse the two.

I'm still shaking my head while trying to get my mind around the phrase he's 27 and he's writing for The New York Times. This fellow had somehow developed a reputation for being a newsroom golden boy despite having generated 50 corrections in four years. That's 12.5 "the Times regrets the error"s every year. In my shop, you're going to hear about it once you're past three or four in a 12-month period.

I'm stunned to hear something like that was going on at the Times. His editors should have scared him to the point that he was quadruple-checking everything about 40 corrections ago. They didn't. So he was probably justified in thinking that he could get away with damn near copying-and-pasting from another story. Hell, I haven't been fired yet ...

And had he still been writing for the Boston Globe, he might not have been fired.

The theft occurred in a story out of San Antonio, Texas. It was brought to the Times' attention by the editor of the newspaper in San Antone.

Which leads me to Journalism Tip No. 2: Dude, every editor in the country reads the f-ing New York Times. Most of them are relying on it to make their own news judgments. You're sure as hell not going to be able to steal from a paper and put your ill-gotten booty under your byline in The New York Times and not expect the editor of the paper in that town to see it.

He's 27 and he's pissed away the career opportunity of a lifetime, one that the rest of us would sell out our own mothers for. What a f---ing idiot.

'Her fever's up to 105. We're going to the hospital'
And so began another incursion by The Real World against the Daily Routine, two hours before the usual end of the work day. This aspirated pneumonia thing has the Young Daughter running the thermometer to redline. She and The Wife will spend another night in a hospital (admitted, this time, thank God.) I'll spend another night here with the other two children, not sleeping, idly surfing the Web with the TV on, trying not to worry.

High fevers are not uncommon in my house. This is a genetic thing, passed on from The Wife to our progeny. The house record so far is 106, hit by the Old Daughter when she was 2. I remember The Wife calling the pediatrician at 2 a.m., trying to convince her our kid really did have a fever of 106. "I think you're misreading the thermometer," said the doctor. The Wife restrained herself from saying I think you can kiss my ass. At least, she did while she was on the phone. We went to the hospital, the Old Daughter hit 106 on the officially calibrated measuring device, and the doctor was forced to apologize.

It's been a rough week for the Young Daughter, who's carrying a genetic abnormality despite the fact that neither of her parents actually has the gene. Which brings us to another irony of sorts: the actual disease has not caused the kid any problems at all. She has few visible symptoms of something called neurofibromatosis. She instead is hospitalized with pneumonia because of an infection caused when she aspirated vomit while under general anasthesia which sedated her so she'd sit still for an MRI so we could check the progress of something called neurofibromatosis.

I find myself reassuring The Wife by saying, "It's better to know." Now, I'm not so convinced of that.