Airwaves

I was in my car listening to the radio on the way back from lunch and I heard this song "I Can Only Imagine" by the band MercyMe (Mercy Me? Mercyme? have mercy). It's a fairly bland song--and a very Christian one. Christian power ballad, if you will. Jesus is invoked a lot.

Hearing the song struck me as strange--I'm Christian (well, Catholic, so depends which Protestant denomination you're talking to as to whether I'm legitimately Christian or not), but I cannot stand Christian pop/rock music. Makes me want to throw up. I'm familiar with the song, just because I've heard it in commercials before (Wow Worship CD boxed set or something), but on a mainstream radio station? Puh-leese.

It's not that I completely object to Christian or faith-based music ("Jesus Walks" by Kanye West is great on the radio, and I wish I heard more Matisyahu on Texas stations), but this song was blatantly Christian, sung softly and slowly so you can hear every crappily-written lyric. Moreover, the music was offensive to the ears.

(I use a fuck-load of parentheses, don't I? Holy shit.)

Anyway. Don't want to hear that song on the radio again. I did also hear "Yellow" by Coldplay, and then I remembered hearing the song my freshman year at TCU, and THEN I realized that was in 2001 and when the hell did I become an old person? That was seven years ago, which doesn't seem like a long time, but in music, it is. Seven years can be an entire musical era. That's almost one of those "best songs of the '90s" type things.

Today I got my second press kit in about three months that's on a flash drive. The first one I got was the annual report from a hospital system, and this one today had press releases, bios, photos and the history for this company. Is this perhaps a new trend? Is giving someone a flash drive with a company logo on it the new pen with a logo on it? Seems like it would be fairly pricey, but I've seen small drives at Target for $10 or so. My desk is cluttered with enough papers that I'm intrigued by this new format.

This weekend: drinks and music Friday night, Omni theater Saturday morning, TCU-OU game, possible party in Dallas and spending Sunday out there. I'm having major issues with logistics, these days, with "logistics" meaning "that effing long and expensive drive to Dallas."

A Pox Upon Them!

It's Wednesday, and should be my busy day, doing last-minute reporting and finishing things up to go to press on Thursday. Instead, I'm leisurely writing one more story today and tomorrow will be a busy day, since I had to nix one story and pick up another one.

It blows when people won't return phone calls. Almost everyone can return phone calls within two days unless they're out of town--or that's my opinion, anyway. The people who are "too busy" to call me for 2 minutes and 37 seconds and explain that it's a bad week, can we maybe reschedule the story are a bunch of jerks. No, you don't have to talk to me. And yeah, you can be busy and everything and tell me to get lost. But at least call me back and TELL me that.

I do a lot of griping, don't I?

Here's some more griping: Lance Armstrong will return to cycling in 2009, coming out of retirement to supposedly up awareness of cancer. Yeah, he's done a bunch of great things for cancer research and support and awareness (remember when everyone wore a yellow Livestrong bracelet? Sometimes I feel like the only one who still does, and then I go to a cancer center and see them everywhere again). But coming out of retirement?

This guy must be BFF with Brett Farve.

On the non-griping side, the Red Sox have at least a wild card berth to the post-season and eliminated the Yankees from playoff contention for the first time since something like 1993 or some time long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

That, and I have a Diet Coke with Lime in the fridge. I cannot express my love for this soda.

Three hours, 38 more minutes until America's Next Top Model. Four hours, 38 minutes until Project Runway. My week is always better once I get some Tim Gunn.

Home Work

Today at work I spent the whole afternoon procrastinating, dinking around, putting off work. About 4 p.m. I knew my chances of getting any work done were shot, and at 5 on the dot I grabbed my stuff and headed out for a short run (blah) and then to go ride Topper (our first really good ride since he tried to kill me, and it was wonderful). It was one of those days where I just couldn't focus, so I thought, Hey, no big deal, I'll just take my stories home with me.

And now here I am at home procrastinating, dinking around, putting off word. Ta-da! That was a wonderful magic trick, right? Of course, the night is still relatively young; I probably won't be in bed until about 11:30 and asleep until close to midnight, and so there's still time to work on stuff. Will I work on it tonight? Sure I will. Eventually. I mean, I worked on the story today at work. Granted, I only did like 150 words of about 750, but I worked on it.

The one interruption of my afternoon was some PR person in Canada calling to see if I got a book about leadership they sent me about two weeks ago. It was written by a woman from North Texas, and it's about leadership from the heart, and this PR person thought that it's health based since it was about the heart. It was a pretty entertaining stretch to hear her explain.

Sometimes when I'm on the phone I start listening to myself and it makes me tired. I have this total phone voice. I can't help it. It happens when I talk to people professionally; I talk louder, like I'm talking across a string between two tin cans, and I have this tone of voice that is completely different from the way I talk outside of work. Outside work, I say the word "dude" with alarming frequency. I curse a lot. My voice is deeper. On the phone, I'm loud and higher pitched and don't curse. I sound fake to myself, but I just hope it doesn't come across as fake on the phone. Who knows.

I'm hoping tomorrow at work will go better. I'll have some last-ditch efforts to track down this woman who will not freaking call me back, even though I'm supposed to write a story about her stable. And when I'm done with work, I get to go to Dallas and watch America's Next Top Model and Project Runway with Dan.

Someday I hope to have a job where I get paid extra for quality dinking off.

Signs Of Fall

TCU was playing Southern Methodist University on Saturday, and Dan bought tickets for us about a week ago so we could go. SMU is the big TCU rival, but it's never really a rivalry because SMU sucks at football--a lot, usually, and it's rare that the game is anything but an ass-stomping.

SMU also happens to be two miles from where Dan lives in Dallas. It's a pretty campus, all red brick faux-Ivy League looking, with big huge trees and every single student dressed to the nines. I have never seen so many dresses and heels at a football game, and I went to freaking TCU--where the girls wear their pearls and sorority T-shirts to games.

Since the stadium was so close and we knew we'd end up parking a half-mile away if we drove, Dan and I went to his parents' house and borrowed their clunker mountain bikes for the weekend. We dressed up in our purple shirts and then biked to the stadium, chaining them up across the street from the stadium. It was the best idea ever--the place was swarming with red and purple, and parking was a nightmare.

It was the first time I'd ever been to the SMU stadium (Dan had been with his best friend, Loren, before) and the first time Dan had ever gone to a TCU game that he wasn't covering from the press box. It was also the first football game we'd ever attended together. I love football games. I can yell at people and clap and be noisy, and it's all very cathartic. It didn't hurt that TCU won 48-7 and are now ranked No. 23 by USA Today and 24 by the Associated Press.

SMU, the Mustangs, also had a teeny tiny black mini horse that they had out on the field with them. They'd run this little black horse across the field when the team entered the field before the game and when they scored (we only saw him in action twice). It was one of the most hilarious things I'd ever seen--the little horse had a handler on either side, and he was wearing a red blanket and little red polo wraps, and they'd kinda walk him around the field and he pricked his ears around and looked really well-behaved. Every time they ran him, though, it was away from us (we were sitting in the end zone) and so all you saw were these furiously-working little hindquarters. Aah, SMU.

Dan made the good point that in terms of smack talking, there isn't a lot you can do with SMU. We were discussing what to yell at the team and its fans, and basically the only thing that sucks about SMU is its football team. It's a rich school, but it's also an academically prestigious one. That means we couldn't yell out "SMU is stupid" or anything like that. Bummer.

The bike ride back to Dan's apartment after the game was awesome--the neighborhoods around the school are very wide and smooth, and it was dark and cool (very few steet lights). It felt like flying. We also got home without any incidents, which is good. The last time I rode in the dark was my first day owning my road bike, and I ran my front wheel into a chain strung around a parking lot and crashed, spraining my elbow and gashing my arm up. Not so cool.

Today we went to see the afternoon Rangers game, where they got beat by the Angels (no surprise there). This time I planned ahead and took lots of bottled drinks and sunscreen. I still can't believe we're going into the end of baseball season and we're in football season. Where the hell did the summer go?

Fish & Bitch

Andrew, who works at the Star-Telegram, and I went out to get lunch today. I had a wicked sushi craving, and he'd never had it before, so we settled on a place where he could order other food just in case the sushi wasn't to his liking.

I've known Andrew for years, and we first met at the school paper, and I think he's been with the Star-Telegram for well over a year. We're good friends, and he comes out with Dan and me pretty frequently (when we're in Fort Worth, these days, which is always a toss-up) for drinks and food. I hadn't seen him in a few weeks, and the topic turned to what it always does when journalists get together--the pitiful state of the industry.

This happened a few weeks ago when I was at an event at a university in Dallas. I met a half-dozen public relations people for the schools involved, and half of them had been at the Dallas Morning News. We did all the small-talk thing, and then we all started talking about papers and how they're all going down the toilet. We talked about the great journalistic minds who took a buy-out or got fired because they had too much experience, too much seniority, required too much money on their paychecks. Who needs wisdom and experience when you can hire two cheap fairly recent grads for the same amount?

Andrew's also doing grad school right now, and he's in a sort of safe spot. The Star-Telegram and its parent company, McClatchy, have been in some really hard times lately. (Frankly, who isn't?) Andrew and I talked about the Star-Telegram and the Business Press, but the conversation could have been about any newspaper.

He also brought up this recent article about how girls bond by talking and whining to each other (cannot find the link, grr). We determined this is what journalists do, too, because there's this undercurrent of fear in every journalist's heart at the moment. But as LeVar Burton on Reading Rainbow said, you don't have to take my word for it. Just go ask any journalist.

Isn't This PR 101?

This is how journalism works: I get a story to write, I call the PR person to help me set up interviews, I do the interviews, I write my story, turn it over to my editors, and after some magical editing, it ends up in print.

It's my belief that most PR people know how journalism works. They know that they can ask me to fact-check or quote-check with them, and I'll gladly do it. They also know that I will never, ever give them a copy of the story before it goes to print so they can approve it.

Somehow I still get a lot of requests from PR people who want to see my stories before they go to print. Let me make it clear that people I work with on a regular basis don't do this--they know me and journalism too well to make sure a mistake. But I thought that all PR people knew not to ask for a story. Maybe they're all taught to ask for the story every time, though, on the off-chance that one of us journalists will slip up and send them the story.

It just drives me nuts when a PR person asks this. No self-respecting journalist would do such a thing. When I meet these PR people I automatically assume they must be new to the field or they don't know what they're doing. Sometimes I even run across PR people who used to be journalists who ask me to send them the story before it goes to press. Did they forget absolutely everything about their previous career? Are they just crazy?

If you want to see a story before it goes to press, think about hiring an ad person. Our ad team is fantastic. They will let you dictate what you want in print. If you ask a legitimate journalist to see their story before it goes to print, they'll just get insulted. Trust me.

Man, I sound like a self-righteous prick. But no, I won't send you the story. Go find an ad agent.

I Like Normal People

SafeHaven, a local shelter for domestic abuse victims and their children, is having this big luncheon in the beginning of October to recognize great women. I first learned about the event back in May or something, when my managing editor asked me if I wanted to interview the guest speaker. I asked who it was, and she said, Tim Gunn, and I said yes and got all giggley.

Well, that fell through, for one reason or another (I don't know why), and the new guest speaker is Patricia Heaton, known for her role in Everybody Loves Raymond. My editor set up the interview with the local SafeHaven PR person, and then gave me the time and date for the 15-minute phone interview.

I did the interview this morning, and I was very pleasantly surprised at the way it went. At the exact scheduled time, my phone rang, and after I picked it up and said, This is Liz, I heard the woman on the other end say, Hi, this is Patricia Heaton. No PR person lurking on another line, no comments about how this is only 15 minutes, no requests that certain topics be off limits. It was just a normal interview, and she was very pleasant, and that was that.

I've never interviewed someone quite like that before--I mean, I've interviewed people that are big in certain communities, like the medical community or cycling community or whatever, but never people that the general public knows about. I don't know that I'll ever do many interviews with well-known people such as Heaton, but if they're all as low-key as her, then I will happily do it whenever my editors need me.

Ballpark, Boston-Style

It's been almost a week, but let me take a dorky sports-moment to tell about the Red Sox-Rangers game Dan and I went to last Sunday.

That whole week had been cool and nice, so I thought we'd have good weather for the Sunday afternoon game. The tickets came from work--we had four season tickets to the Rangers, and when they were announced back in the spring, I asked for two tickets to some Red Sox game. This was the last game of a three-game series, and I have been looking forward to this for several months.

Dan and I got totally geeked out for the event. I went and bought baseballs on Friday, so we could go to batting practice before the game and hopefully get autographs. Dan bought a giant bag of roasted peanuts, and we picked up drinks. We each wore a Boston shirt, and I wore the hat I bought at Fenway. We arrived about 10 minutes before noon (game had a 2:05 start), and then stood outside the gates until 12:30 before they let us in. Don't trust everything you read on the Internet! We found a schedule that said we could get in at noon, but that didn't happen.

What did happen was at least half of the people going to the game showed up in Red Sox paraphernalia. Once we got in, the teams were doing some easy field work, and there were four times as many people near the visitors' dugout waiting for autographs as at the Rangers' side. We got spaces on the rail and had our baseballs and Sharpies in hand, but no one really came over except one player, David Pauley, who very graciously signed EVERYTHING that people handed him. He worked down the rail, then took a seat on the bumper and let people keep bringing him things.

After a while even Pauley disappeared, and the security guys urged us to take our seats. We did, and we were in great seats, just past first base, but right smack in the sun. I could feel my skin burning. Soooo thankful Dan convinced me to wear a T-shirt instead of the halter top I'd been planning on.

The game was good; the Sox won, 7-2, and I got to see everyone that I really loved. I didn't get the chance to confer with Ellsbury about our future nuptials, but I did get to see him, as well as Youkilis and Pedroia and Ortiz and Papelbon (who I call P-Bon). It was funny to see all the little tics in person, like Youkilis and his goofy batting stance, and Papelbon's pitching. (The pitching is hilarious. He takes this huge sign, rolling his shoulders down, then his head--while down--rolls around to look at the batter, he breathes out again, gives them the Look of Doom, and then pitches. Love it. It made me laugh.)

My knees got sunburned, and I ate way, way too many peanuts. We only got one signature. I was sweaty and gross afterward. But it was fun, and even if we had paid for those tickets, it was a helluva lot cheaper than if we'd gone to Fenway, which is where I last saw the Sox.

Flattery

A few weeks ago I wrote a story about doctors at the local children's hospital using Wii games and other things to induce seizures and diagnose them better. The story came out on Sept. 1, and I thought it was a decent little localized story--I wish I'd had more time to do more national research, but I work for a local paper, and any national info would have been just an add-on.

The local NBC station totally ripped the story and did a video that came out Sept. 4. I only found out about it after I saw a feed to it on the MSNBC homepage. I'm sorta impressed they ripped off my story so quickly.

Ahh, the life of a journalist.

Misc.

I still haven't posted about the Red Sox on Sunday . . . because CVS botched my photo CD, and I went to get it fixed, and I got a new one, and then I left it at Dan's apartment. Whoops. I have to wait until this weekend when he brings it back to me, provided he doesn't forget it too. We forget stuff a lot.

This is just a bunch of random things:

Adrian and I spent more than a year watching every single episode of the Sopranos, all in order, all of DVD. This happened because I didn't have TV for a long time, and we both had always wanted to see the show, but neither of us had. So we went about watching all of them, and then when the series finished, I felt sad. We joked about how our friendship would now end, since we had no Sopranos to hold us together.

Then I got the creeping crud, which lasted about a month and a half, where I was coughing up grody stuff but I couldn't tell if I was contagious or just gross. I finally recovered, and Adrian and I settled on a new show: Entourage. Whoo! We start tonight. I'm excited!

I'm also excited because it's Thursday, which means it's almost Friday. Thursday is press day, so as of noon I'm usually done with all my deadline stuff and can move on to more important things, like reading other people's blogs. Friday morning means I can sleep in, as long as I show up to work in time for story meeting.

This week I had a story that got held because it didn't have a news peg or a business angle. It was an interesting topic, but my editors wanted an obvious "why am I reading this?" angle. This is the part of working at a business newspaper that is hard for me--I want to geek out sometimes and write articles that say, "Oooh, this if nifty! Learn how nifty it is!" and my editors come over and say, "Show me the money."

It's not that all I want to do is write fluffy feature articles, but sometimes fluff is all you find after spending several days researching and interviewing. That's what happened in this case. I asked about the number of employees spent working on this project, the cost of doing it, and was getting fairly vague answers back. I just don't think they had the numbers or had ever thought of getting them.

What I do love, however, is being able to point to my editors and say it's all their fault that a story is being held, even when I know it needs to be as well. It means I can continue to be the good guy, out there finding stories and being all friendly with everyone and not taking any of the blame. Brilliant!

Fake Journalists

OK, so this is something that has been a pet peeve of mine since I was forced into slave labor at the student newspaper at TCU and was spending more hours in the newsroom than I was doing any other activity, except sleeping. (We all know how much I value my time spent unconscious.)

I cannot stand fake journalists. Fake journalists are the people who write columns for the student newspaper, get paid $5.50 or whatever the going rate happens to be per article and tell their friends they are journalists--when they are really just cocky political science majors with big egos who feel the need to do some public griping about some issue.

Fake journalists are the people who work as financial consultants and sometimes write articles for some specialty publication (which they hope will be read by the general public but never will be) about how to get through tax season.

Fake journalists are the people who get a journalism degree and then freelance two articles a year while sitting at home on their couch because they made the wise choice not to date or marry someone also in journalism, thus ensuring that you will both have to work your asses off forever to buy a house.

Fake journalists are the people who write for most blogs.

Fake journalists are scientists (or researchers in any field) who write essays for JAMA or NEJM or any other journal.

Fake journalists are people who do the majority of their work for free, because honestly: If you're a journalist, chances are you need all the cash you can get. Why on earth would you do something for free?

So yeah, if you're talking to me about your journalism career and at least 50 percent of your income DOESN'T come from a fairly mainstream media source**, then you are not a journalist. Seriously. Don't be ridiculous.

I don't tell people I'm an animal psychic because I spent a lot of time out at the barn with Topper trying to read his brainwaves and figure out when he's going to try to kill me. I don't tell people I'm a teacher because I happened to TA kids while I was in grad school. (About 70 percent of my income was coming from doing newspaper scut work, therefore I was a journalist at the time.)

Just because you're a lawyer who writes for the local bar association publication or you're a doc who submits stuff to the medical association magazine or because you cover stuff for some online blog . . . doesn't mean you're a journalist. Doesn't happen. There may be lawyers who turn into legit journalists, and lots of people who are journalists by training and experience who go to other professions, but it's hard to be a journalist and something else at the same time, in terms of careers.

Whew. I feel better. Like I said, this is something that's been a hot point for me for a while (in case you couldn't tell). But despite the fact we can almost all write something doesn't mean we are all journalists. Just sayin'. So if you see a fake journalist . . . call them out on it. Because goodness knows I usually don't. I just smile and nod and then scream about it to the Interwebs, because, you know, don't want to accidentally offend someone and squash a potential source or anything.

I'm unbiased here, people. I'm a journalist.

**Most magazines have some kind of specific niche they fill, so most magazine writers = journalists (if they meet the 50 percent rule). However, magazines do not equal journals, and the majority of material in journals comes from researchers, so if you are usually published in a journal, you may not actually be a journalist.

PR Etiquette

I have a problem with people touching me.

It's not a huge problem; I don't have an anxiety attack if someone touches my hand or something. It's just a professional problem. I find it comes up with PR people, because I work with them fairly regularly and I'm pretty friendly with most of them.

Friendly, but not friends, with the rare exception. (Very rare, like I knew them before I got a job or some such.) Here's the thing: I like shaking people's hands for work stuff. When I see a PR person, when I meet a source, when I see someone I see every month--shake the hand. Love it. A good, firm handshake, lots of smiling, lots of friendly remarks about how vacation was or whatnot.

The problem is when you get those PR people who want to hug everyone. That weirds me out. I recently ran into a PR person I'd only met once before and I got a hug from this person. There are some PR people who just do that--they meet you once and then hug you every time after.

I don't get it. It just doesn't seem professional at all. It seems like in business school they'd teach you not to hug people. They teach you how to interview and meet with clients, so surely they'd cover "hugging," too. I didn't go to business school, so maybe they don't cover this. Also, I bet a lot of PR people didn't go to business school either, so maybe they didn't get this fictional business etiquette class either. I'm not a particularly huggy person--I don't even really hug friends that I've known forever unless I haven't seen them in a long time and they live across the country. When PR people want to hug me, even if it's just a half hug, it makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Is this something that a human resources person at a company would cover? Under the same personal/business topics as dating within the office, spending company time on Facebook and sexual harassment at the office?

Is this in an episode of The Office?

(Also, I will post about the Red Sox game as soon as CVS fixes the photo CD I paid for. Cross your fingers.)

Two Stories Up

Saturday morning Dan and I got up early, pulled on cycling clothes, put on T-shirts and shorts over everything and loaded up our pedals, wrenches, helmets, shoes and a bike pump to drive out to the Superdrome to meet our doom.

Ok, so it wasn't mortal danger. Not entirely, anyway. I am here, still alive, no broken bones, all my skin intact, and Dan came out unscathed as well. The whole track cycling experience was really unnerving, though, and let me just take a moment to proclaim my love for brakes on bicycles.

When we showed up at the Superdrome, we stopped by a little concrete building outside it to pick up track bikes, which were study bikes with a single, fixed gear. That means that if your wheels are moving, your pedals are moving, and if your pedals are moving, your feet are moving. There are no brakes on track bikes--if you want to stop, you have to try to pedal backward. "Try" is the operative word, here, because the force it takes to stop the pedals is fairly ridiculous.

Walking our bikes and gear into the Superdrome was intimidating. The track is a quarter-kilometer around, and in the corners it's a 44-degree angle and the top of the track is two stories off the ground. It was like a giant wooden wall raising up, and you could see these splintery-looking parts where the wood was getting torn up at the end of the season.

There were two instructors who helped us through the next four and a half hours. We all got comfortable on our bikes, and then they lead us up and down the straightaways (only 17 degree angles), and then gradually worked us up onto the giant curves. They were good instructors, and I know that physics would keep me alive if I was cautious, but the whole thing was so strange.

It took a lot of pumping and leg strength to pick up the appropriate speed to stay up on the wall, but the biggest thing about Saturday was how much it effed with my head. We went up in groups of eight or nine, and so I'd be in the middle or toward the back of the pack, watching everyone in front of me also on this ginormous wall. It looked like they were floating in the air. They were being held to the surface by two tiny strips of rubber, and I could see that the flat ground was a story and a half below us. (I only went up to the very top once, to make sure I could. It was too weird to do it again.)

Not all velodromes are built the same way. A lot of them have curves in the 30s, and I feel like I could have been more confident on something like that. I am proud that I stayed on (and stayed upright) on such an extreme track, but it made me realize how grateful I am that I have a bike that has brakes. It was just scary at some times being up on a track with a pack of other people who were also new to it and knowing you couldn't really brake if something happened in front of you.

I will definitely go back to the Superdrome. I just think I'm going to go back as a spectator next time.

Special Pub, Part Two

So I never even thought about this, but evidently "special pub" means "dude, check out this awesome place that has 50 beers on tap and good potato chips."

Kate pointed this out to me this morning, and it never even dawned on me. I guess it's because Texas doesn't have a lot of pubs. There are bars of varying types, and some clubs, but "pub" only shows up once in a while, like "Shamrock Pub," some place trying to pawn itself off as a chummy neighborhood bar in Dorchester.

To make up for my last post, which consisted of bitching about special publications, I'm going to talk about random other stuff, including alcohol, which makes it sort of related to pubs, right?

There's this place in Fort Worth that opened up around December 2006 called the Ginger Man that holds a very special place in my heart--the place reserved for special pubs, even though it's more of a bar, I think. (There's another place in my heart reserved for special publication "special pubs," but that involves a lot of loathing.) It's a small chain--there's another one in Austin and one in Dallas, maybe Houston too--but it's got a bunch of beers, some gourmet salads and sandwiches, good bratwurst, friendly staff and a decent jukebox. Last July they went whole-hog with this Christmas in July stuff, getting tacky with tinsel and a light-up snowman at one end of the bar. The service is friendly if not always entirely prompt. (But that can be easily remedied by just ordering from the bar.)

The Ginger Man isn't the coolest place, or the hippest, or anything else. It's generally an upper-middle class clientele--hipsters, yuppies, etc--but I can still show up in shorts, a T-shirt and flipflops and be fine. (By the way, if "yuppie" = young professional, than I=yuppie, and you probably=yuppie too. Scary, huh?) The one bad thing is they don't list beer prices on their menu, so you can inadvertently order a beer than costs $12 a glass.

The reason I love the Ginger Man is because the Ginger Man made me love beer. I always did mixed drinks (hello, screwdriver!) and wine (hello, sauvignon blanc!) and liquor (hello, tequila!) before the Ginger Man. Occasionally I would drink beer--a plastic cup of PBR from the keg at a party, a can of Bud Light at a friend's cook-out--but I never really found anything I liked and would seek out.

Ginger Man does this thing on Tuesday night where you buy the featured beer and you get to keep the pint glass it comes in. The glasses have the brewery or beer logo, and it's all very nice. I started attending this faithfully, figuring that even if I got a beer I didn't like, I would get a glass. And before I knew it, I had dozens of glasses and beers I actually liked.

So that's how a special pub changed my life forever. Now I prefer beer, and I also have a cabinet full of cool glasses.

Tomorrow morning Dan and I are going to the Superdrome in Frisco, about a 45-minute drive outside Dallas. It's a velodrome for bicycle racing, and it's gonna be a track cyclist fiesta! Dan somehow got us two spaces in the development class, so I get to go out and try my hand at track cycling tomorrow morning. Here's hoping gravity keeps up its end of the bargain when I'm going around a track with slopes of 44 degrees.

Sunday we have tickets to the Rangers/Red Sox game, and we're going to show up early for batting practice to try to get some autographs. This is also where I'm going to ask Jacoby Ellsbury to marry me. His birthday is an exact 6 months after mine. I think it's a match made in heaven, and I don't think Dan will mind.

I'll let everyone know how I survive the weekend.

Special Pub

I work for a weekly business newspaper. Deadlines are usually on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and we go to press on Thursdays. Friday is a day to have story meetings, line things up for the next week, and then start cranking out the next three or four stories. It's a good cycle.

Most of our readers get everything on Monday, and we also post breaking news briefs and short stories on our website. (AP style says "Web site," but that's retarded. I think we can upgrade to one word now, Associated Press. This new-fangled technology of the Intertubes is awfully scary, I know, but seriously.)

So we have a nice little schedule going, but you knew there was a catch, right?

Special publications bring fear into my heart. I cannot express how much I hate these things. We do about two dozen special publications a year, and these are magazines that we insert into the normal newspaper or, rarely, special editions of the newspaper itself. These magazines--with focuses on scientific research, or energy, or real estate, or whatever--will take a good week and make it tailspin out of control.

The publications have their use, don't get me wrong. They let us do longer stories about things that we wouldn't normally cover in the weekly paper, and if managed correctly and set out into a good economy, they can provide additional revenue through ad sales.

The problem is that since the economy is fairly crappy (and REALLY crappy if you're in the newspaper world), special publications aren't as productive anymore. We used to have a decent stable of freelancers who would do the majority of the articles. Then our newspaper's budget started not being so great, and we have to make some cutbacks. Now those of us who are full-time reporters are having the handle the articles, on top of our usual weekly quota.

I shouldn't complain. I still have a job, which is more than I can say for a lot of reporters in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. All of the dailies are having buyouts and cuts. But now I have additional work to do in areas that I don't understand or sometimes even care about. Of course, I guess that's the problem with all newspapers right now. How do you put out just as much content with significantly fewer people?

I feel sorry for people at bigger papers, but I still hate the damn special pubs.